It's strange, but I've come across two rather fundamental (yet unrelated) problems with Google searches in the last half an hour.
First problem. if you use Linux or some other Open Source projects, you've probably had problems at something you want to do but isn't well explained in the documentation. So you go and look up the problem on Google, and get 350,000 results. Of these, most of the pages are from back in 2000 when everyone was coming across the issue and generating a lot of traffic on forums and mailing lists talking about how to fix the problem, what has to be implemented to get it to work, etc. This traffic is all very relevant to your search terms, but not very useful if all you want to know is how to do whatever it is. Usually, buried in the 32nd page of results is a page from a couple of months ago that answers your question in a concise way but, because of the way it is written, is not high up in the ranking.
This, in my eyes, is a major problem. Google doesn't seem to give much importance to how new a page is, and therefore the usefulness of the results is skewed in some cases. Ironically, the problem is worse when searching in Google Groups, but since it allows sorting of results by date, it can be overcome much more easily by just displaying the results in reverse chronological order.
Second problem. This isn't really a problem for me, but I was thinking about it as problem number one happened, and when I tried it my suspicions were confirmed.
Imagine yourself as a complete newbie. You've been told that the Internet is good for many things, and that everything you need can be found by searching Google. So far, so good, and many of us might actually give that kind of advice. Now, you've heard that the Internet can be used for sending email, so you search Google for "how to send email", or maybe just "sending email".
If you've clicked on the links above, you will have seen that there is absolutely nothing in that result list that might help you on your quest. To find some helpful results you'd need to search for something like "free email services" or "how to get an email account", search terms that betray decent knowledge about the subject area in the first place.
I think it's obvious from these examples that in order to find anything on Google, you need to have a fairly clear idea of what you're looking for, which defeats the point when you're looking something up because you have no idea what it's about. While not a bug per se, I think this is an unfortunate side-effect of the searching methods used.
These two issues can be serious hurdles standing in between you and the data you need. Basically, in order to narrow your search, you need to know more about what you're searching for. And you can't find out more until you've found what you're looking for. It's a vicious circle.
It just goes to show that Google is not the ultimate knowledge searching tool. And while this is unfortunate for you and me because sometimes we might not be able to find the data we need, it means that there is still room for improvement and maybe (gasp!) competition.
And given Google's recent spate of bad press, this may well be a Good Thing(tm).
Posted by Dave at October 20, 2003 08:45 PM