Forum Moderators: open
Also I've found that for some reason Google accepts kanji or hiragana searches, but won't recognize katakana. Isn't that a bit . . . odd?
Finally, I'd like to say, as an SE user, I think Google's ODP is great, and the format is so much better than what's on dmoz.org -- now, if only you could upload the most recent dump. Pretty please?
It would help users find new pages on the web about a particular subject. For example, I know of a disease that people who have it are very active in promoting research, awareness, etc. These same people are very interested in learning more about the illness. But a search for the disease name shows pretty much the same top 50 results all time. Which is fine, they are good sites. But it doesn't help someone who wants to find new information/perspectives out there.
It would help webmasters to get a little more exposure for new pages and sites too. If the new pages are truly good it would easier for them to get more, natural links to it.
With the old once a month update schedule, a page could have been 'new' its first month in the index. That would have to be changed somewhat now obviously.
How about displaying related Keywords (Like a keyword suggestion tool you have in Adwords) during a search so that user can try out these related search terms? This will help users get some idea of more specific keywords.
An example of google implementing feedback from WW is WW and Google Toolbar 2.0 Beta [webmasterworld.com]
[webmasterworld.com...]
I think it is worth considering sending UK visitors to www.google.co.uk and make the default search as UK and perhaps to consider a www.google.us
Traffic on my sites (all co.uk) is split between .com and co.uk about 50/50 - with calls that search results are diluted on .com with international results I wonder what attitude Google may take - I certainly dont think that .com should be just for US sites or give US sites an advantage but local targetting with a .us should be considered.
Given that example, I can guarantee that there will always be requests on suggestion threads that we won't be able to do. :)
Rather than dumping DMOZ, donate some money and skilled manpower to getting their antiquated infrastructure up to speed.
Market the toolbar to mainstream users by way of the empty index page and make the voting buttons do something.
Allow websites in all legal genres to show adwords as a source of revenue.
I'll probably tick off some other webmasters here, not to mention the large scope of this idea, but use your froogle technology to distinguish between e-commerce and pure informational sites, which can be filtered for in results if desired. You'd obviously have to check if the informational site has links or references to pay sites and filter those out.
Make an official statement that IP addresses and who-is data are in no way, shape or form applied to the google algorithm, now or in the future. Such an official statement would dramatically reduce the number of webmasters that have legitimate sites but still eat away at the IP address pool and spend lots of money unnecessarily on getting blocks of IP addresses and paying for an anonymous who-is listing.
Provide an online tool where a webmaster can enter his domain name and will be immediately informed of any penalty/ban on his site and the appropriate course of action to take - sort of a reverse-spam report. This would tremendously reduce the amount of webmaster panic-mail you receive during algorithm tweaks and updates.
As stated above:
make the guidelines re: seo more specific with regards to what's not acceptable practice, and perhaps a more clear definition of exactly what a link farm is, or what level of cross linking between two sites is unacceptable.
Can we have one for Guy Fawkes night please (November 5th)?
This is when a dutch revolutionary, Guido Faukes, attempted, as a member of an anti-government conspiracy, to blow up the English King and government in November 1605.
Sadly he failed, but we celebrate the Gunpowder Plot today as a jolly good attempt nevertheless and it's actually the closest thing we have to a national holiday in Britain.
(ie. no time off work, but lots of fireworks in the evening anyway...)
I'm not sure about the current status, with deepfreshbot and all that, but some threads from February and May suggests that you update very infrequently (or did, at least). This has/had the effect that sites in the process of shifting hosts/IP would run the risk of disappearing out of the index for a month or more until the next update.
Really, that frequency is far below anything reasonable, your tables should be updated with changes once a day or at least several times each week - i know there's probably some cost/efficiency/load considerations as well.
btw. thanks for the javascript indexing, hope it's not experimental :)
/claus
Oh and the IODP thing.
Oh and yes - indexing Flash would be nice too. Notice GoogleBot picks up the .swf files but really does not do much with them...
Thanks
"Tweaking colors on Adsense" - My G, I did not realise a webmaster forum could invoke such a profound change to the core workings of Google. Maybe we can help advise on which brand of coffee machines are used in the Googleplex next!
;-)
I'm afraid my suggestion is a bit vague and equally very difficult.
I would like to see a search engine system that does not distort the very structure of websites and activity on the web. For example a site that has lists classified widgets could be relatively simple with an effective search facility. However, due to the need to meet the requirements of SEs, it is better built as a site with pages for each individual type of widget, and maybe an offer of widgets for each state, country, province etc.
Then there is the need to build into the site link exchanges, so that you can achieve the PR necessary to get listed and a host of other strategies that get talked about here in this site...
It has already been suggested for Google to take on a directory service and there appears to be a widespread view that ODP is a write off. Perhaps a middle ground would be for Google to select (and publish) a large list of approved human reviewed directories. This would not just be Yahoo/ODP etc. but would include for example a directory of widget sites, the links from which will add significant/the majority of PR to a site. Google could then give these directories a very high PR, as (I believe) they do with Yahoo.
This might work on the principle of, if you are listed in x,y,z human edited directories you will be virtually guaranteed a high placement. It would help to kill spam and would allow people to build sites without the distortions that can result from SE.
This clearly involves a lot more from Google in terms of manpower, pushing up costs. However, it is less demanding to review and weight results of other human edited directories than building their own.
Maybe a daft idea, but I am guessing that I am not alone in being frustrated by the demands on site structure that are made by SE.
Another thread just made me aware of this: DNS updates...
Claus - I can't imagine that Google are caching IP addresses for any longer than your configured TTL (time to live) for those addresses - that would very silly of them.
In fact i'm 100% sure they don't because there are sites indexed in Google that hang off cable modems with dynamic IP addresses.
That said; it does have to be done correctly, but any competent network admin (particularly of a busy website) should know what to do - put simply you just have to make sure that TTL is brought down to zero with sufficient notice that by the time of your changeover, no DNS server should be caching your IP. Steps must be taken 2 weeks out if that is your current TTL value.
The suggestion is to not even consider this "new" stuff until you are doing a much better job at the "old" stuff than recently.
For instance, I was trying to see if pics from Google Dance 2003 were up, so I altered the listed 2002 URL to 2003... and got a boring, useless 404 page.
Since Google is so good at figuring out what people mean, I think it's not to much to have had it send back:
Did you mean Google Dance 2002? or
Perhaps you meant to access one of the following pages on the Google site: or, at minimum...
There's no page at the URL you entered. Below you'll find a sitemap of Google to help you find your way.
On a similar note, I wish Google would be internally consistent with URLs.
labs.google.com works, but google.com/labs does not.
google.com/jobs works, but jobs.google.com simply gives an ugly error (why no wildcard DNS, btw? ;)
I know, I know, maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but hey, you didn't say folks had to offer MAJOR suggestions :)
With that said, as was said by people I have great respect for: keep working at it, cuz it ain't perfect yet. :D
3) Get rid of the "allinurl".. it's only used for hacking.
um, no I use allinurl to see if my pages have been picked up, it's much more accurate than site:blah.com phrase
on the contrary i think it would be nice to see more tools - that's what a search engine is all about - finding things and finding answers and having as many tools at your disposal as possible to find what you're looking for.
re: tools, I love the tilde thingy (~word returns word, words, synonyms of word) - curious if this is an experiment related to stemming for all searches by default at some point?
another suggestion: I have the google searchbox installed on some pages of my site.
1) I had to hand edit the code as it did not produce the proper output using the online form
2) some sort of cookie is attached to the logo, and with certain browser settings I get the cookie blocked warning. i think it needs one of those dreaded p3p compact policies or something?
From the "features most people don't know exist" department. :)
Now, that sounds exactly like me before i discovered this forum. I will not turn this into a discussion, it's a G wishlist after all, but there are a significant amount of threads out there indicating something else [added: including the Google Knowledge base], and of course your post reflects the proper way to do it, so i just wish that G will adopt the proper way of doing things if they do not do so already. Or perhaps... a(n official) confirmation on the current state of affairs regarding this?
/claus
As I will not be there, I would like to suggest Google uses it's logo to educate people with more international personalities holidays, festivals etc from all over the world.
This is a great idea, although I love that 'neat' logos show up only once in while and not all of the time.
More...
You (GoogleGuy) had mentioned that you were impressed by some of the 'spam filters' that would be put in place post-Esmerelda, but so far I see nothing - if something has been put in place, maybe it helps for you to hear this type of stuff?
Thanks for this opportunity!
This is a big one for me as the quality of the sites in my category are largly related to the current dates they have for events. If site A ranks number 3 for a given event but is listing 2001 dates in 2003, it makes no difference to G. Sites that list event dates in the current year or the future should outrank sites that list dates in the past.
One of the biggest events I cover the guy that has the number two position is listing 2001 dates! I have heard it said that this is something that could be coming someday, but come on this is 2003, I thought we would all be driving flying cars and G could parse dates by now.
Comments and JavaScript specifically. I'd even pay for it. Doesn't matter if i have to use a separate "advanced" search interface.
/claus
