Alas, poor Google

[tahnan]

After q_pheevr posted a polite letter to Google asking them to please stop second-guessing him and suspecting that a page with "mid" in it is what he wants when searching with the term "midi", I poked at Google myself for a bit. Before looking at my comment over there, see if you can guess approximately how many results each of the following returns. As a baseline: {"blade runner"} gives over two million hits; {"blade runner" androids} gives 172,000 hits; {runner -runner} gives zero.

"blade runner" android -android
"blade runner" androids -androids
"blade runner" phil -phil
runner androids -androids

They return, respectively: zero hits; 47,000 hits; 330,000 hits; zero hits.

Oh, Google. You were such a good search engine once.

Comments

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

I miss AltaVista. ):

[bryant]

So do I, at that.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

It's rather puzzling, actually. For instance, in a quick check of about 10 random words, I didn't find any other X for which {"X" androids -androids} returns results.

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

Have you sent them a bug report?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I didn't, for the simple reason that I figured it was likely to be intentional, and not a bug at all.

To my surprise, though, there is a section in Google's Help Center (though it wasn't easy to find) called "How can I report poor quality search results?" Unfortunately, the link http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?user_type=user&contact_type=dissatisfied&submit=Continue (http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?user_type=user&contact_type=dissatisfied&submit=Continue) has, in spite of the URL's specificity about being contact for dissatisfaction, no real option for "I'm dissatisfied by the results".

I suppose I can report it anyway. Maybe I should just mail Tivol.