Reporting bad search results

speaking up as users of Google

[cherryo]

As we all know only too well, Google doesn’t have any obligation to us as webmasters, but they are certainly dependant upon their users. I think one of the most valuable things we can do right now is to start speaking up when we perform searches on Google and can’t find what we want. Next time that happens, let’s start using that little link down on the bottom of the search page “Dissatisfied with your search results? Help us improve.” I remember with the last update Google Guy mentioned that despite all our complaining in the forum, they weren’t really getting a lot of complaints from the actual searchers. So let’s start making some noise. Tell your friends, relatives, anybody who uses Google to speak up next time they get irrelevant search results. Perhaps if we use some other channels and cry out with enough voices we might be heard.

[Chndru]

claus, this search [google.com] says around 490K english pages have been crawled with the message as site not available. And yes, many have dmoz listings too.

[Hissingsid]

See below

[edited by: Hissingsid at 5:18 pm (utc) on Dec. 10, 2003]

[Hissingsid]

Tell your friends, relatives, anybody who uses Google to speak up next time they get irrelevant search results. Perhaps if we use some other channels and cry out with enough voices we might be heard.

It is clear that Google is going through a period of trial and error. IMHO at the moment its mostly error and unless they get feedback how are they supposed to learn by their mistakes? So I have to agree with those sentiments quoted above.

It seems pretty clear to me that the algo designers at Google have a habit of putting in some subjective variables into the calculations. These are put there in order to allow them to vary results based on trial and error and the reason that the calculation that creates the results has to be varied is because the web is not homogenous. In the academic world papers that are refered to by virtually all other papers become an authority and even competeing research groups frequently refer to their competitors work if only to disprove a theory. In the commercial area of the web direct linking to competitors in this way is done only very rarely. So how do you square that one with the same algo? The answer is you don't. Unless you aim for the lowest common denominator which means that all searchers get poor results you have to intervene to tweak the algorithm.

We need to encourage people to give Google feedback because whatever they have started to do seems to be producing excellent results in academic and governmental fields but really bad results in SOME commercial fields. I'd personally like them to turn those predetermined numbers off in my own market so that we go back to providing potential customers with the service that they really want.

Good luck everyone

Sid

[claus]

Chndru, wow, that was some search! Clearly that particular subset of the index could be filtered from SERPS automatically. However, for that particular search it would be the right results to display.

Hissingsid, i agree that it's only good for Google to get specific feedback - and as far as they use that feedback to improve things it's also good for the rest of us.

/claus

[zafile]

GoogleGuy wrote: "I'd be interested about feedback people have about www-in. If you want to send email to webmaster [at] google.com with the keyword "filey" (or fill out a spam report) with the keyword filey somewhere in the comments, I'd be happy to see any feedback (positive or negative) about www-in.google.com. Most users wouldn't notice much difference, but I'm happy to hear comments from folks."

If you have constructive feedback (negative of positive), I encourage you to write to [e-mail] with the keyword filey in the subject field according to GGs remarks.

GG wrote "Hey, I've been looking over the filey feedback. Most of the comments are about results in both normal data centers and www-in. Please use filey only to refer to results that are different between www-in.google.com and other data centers when giving feedback. The keyword floridaupdate is good for all other feedback."

The Google team is pretty good on responding back to constructive feedback.

GGs comments at
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[sparrow]

I could use a little help trying to send some "constuctive critism" to Google on a specific search term. Could some one sticky mail me on the best way to do this.

Thanks.