Interesting Links for 28-01-2012

[andrewducker]

• UK sight-loss charity sues airline for failing to fix their non-compliant website
  (tags: sight web blindness )
• Why Google is moving from showing links to providing answers
  (tags: google web search )
• Tom Watson reacts sensibly and graciously to having his intern play with his Twitter account when he was away.
  (tags: uk TomWatson twitter )

Comments

[ajr]

Why Google is moving from showing links to providing answers

I've been getting increasingly fucked off by Google 'autocorrecting' searches and showing you results for what they *think* you meant to search for rather than what you actually searched for. It's bad enough when they say "Showing you results for X, did you mean Y?" so you have an extra link to click to get to the right results. But yesterday, I was trying to remember which TV show had a joke about someone who thought "poloponies" was a word, because they'd misread "polo ponies". So I Googled it. And got results for "polo ponies". With nothing to click on to say "Oi! Google! NO! I typed it as one sodding word because I wanted to search for it as one sodding word, you useless c- [NO CARRIER]

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I get the same thing, I had to put quotes around it to get the exact word.

However, 99% of the time I get corrected it's because I've spelled something wrong, or Google has spotted a synonym that's what I want.

So if I search for "GAE Java OpenID" then the top hits all have "Google App Engine" in them, rather than "GAE" which is what I actually wanted.

[skington]

Also, Google is sodding useless for searching anything which has punctuation characters in it. Which, if you're a Perl programmer, is a medium-sized deal.

[andrewducker]

It works for things with full stops in it - string.isnullorempty happily finds the right manual page on the MS site for instance.

What kinds of punctuation are you using?

[theweaselking]

Google Search considers all punctuation to maybe be any other punctuation, except sometimes dots.

[skington]

I program in Perl, so: all of it ;-) .

[cartesiandaemon]

"And got results for "polo ponies". With nothing to click on to say "Oi! Google! NO! I typed it as one sodding word because I wanted to search for it as one sodding word"

Huh, you're right, it really doesn't :( I was always happy with the autocorrect, as it was helpful (for me) a lot more often than it wasn't, but I hate the idea you _can't_ do an accurate search. It seems odd they don't cater for both possibilities, by letting people turn off the guessing, or by showing the top couple of results for both possibilities (did they used to do that?)

I was also surprised, because I vividly remember the poloponies misunderstanding from Steptoe and Son, but google gives an apparently more famous example from the Honeymooners, which I didn't know of.

[andrewducker]

You can still do it by putting poloponies in quotes, but it would be nice if it told you what it was doing.

They seem to do two kinds of autocorrect - one where they change the search criteria, one where they search for something different than what you've typed in. The latter is frequently useful when it broadens your search, but not so useful when the searches for the similar things swap the thing you wanted.