martinibuster - 6:48 am on Dec 5, 2011 (gmt 0)

1. I think we know what Google is doing and the logic for doing it (i.e. not enough relevant results, toss out a word and fill in with alternate results).

2. It's safe to say that most people in this discussion feel that what Google is doing is not working.

I've been doing personal searches all this weekend. Searching for a band that I forgot the name of. Searching for consumer products, for reviews of consumer products, searching for a restaurant by name, for computer related queries and other things. Google has not been giving me satisfying results for some of the searches. Some of the results have been odd in the same way the dermatologist search is odd.

I've turned to the Bing search box in the browser and have found more satisfying results there. Significantly more satisfying. I have been using Bing to break out of the Google habit but hadn't been totally satisfied with Bing. With this new way of presenting results where Google mixes in oddball irrelevant results I am now running to Bing for decent results and liking it.

Google needs to flip the switch back on this mix and match/sentence completion algo. It has bugs in it.