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For a while I've been struggling to put my finger on it. It's blatantly obvious Google sucks, and it just seems to be going down the suckage chute lately. But why, exactly ? A friend of mine incidentally answered this one for me.
If you were to type in the words "fuck me" as a search string, what do you imagine google would return ? After all, it's what most people are trying to get, after food I suppose, but you need just walk to the corner store for some food. It would conceivably be way up there in the list of human requests, and certainly one would expect it makes a good chunk of all search engine queries. Well, here's what Google has to say on the matter, preserved for posterity. Search results 1. A site that does not load. 2. The fuck me harder entry in the hacker lexicon, a respectable source but not quite what we asked for, is it. Well, maybe marginally, at best. 3. Scarlet Letters, or the blabberings of a repressed yet ugly failure at being a butch dike. Impressive. Not quite what we'd expect, either, even if we all know dykeness is just their way at lashing back at the world, that world which matters, for ignoring them, sexually. Not updated since 2004, and not such a bad thing, that. 4. A best of craiglist entry. Not so bad, but the subject is Jesus freak chicks. Not really what we were looking for. 5. A dictionary entry for the word fuck. I guess you can't go wrong with a dictionary entry, unless it's UNRELATED. Thanks anyway google. Additionally, it's the oh so prestigious Urban Dictionary. Pfft. What's wrong with reference.com ? What's wrong with askoxford.com ? Is the otherwise unheard of urban dictionary the foremost authority on the subject nowadays ? I think not. Double Dumb Points on this one. 6. Fuck "DOn't you see that? I can't be pissed at you, you've done nothing wrong. I'm pissed at reality for smacking me so hard. Fuck, I need a cigarette. ..." Riiighty. Neat description there. Exactly what we were looking for. Pass. 7. Fuck me boots @ Everything.com Finally, I suppose we're getting to it. If it weren't a thinly disguised ploy to sell some shit merchandise that nobody really wants, I'd almost say it's a worthwhile entry in the list. Seven's enough, as they say. The conclusion being that Google manages to divert most of the traffic for what would conceivably be one of the more searched for queries towards sites that either 1. Don't actually exist. How the fuck is this possible ? What is the purpose of serving sites that don't actually respond as "results" for someone's query ? Dumb. 2. Are marginal, receive no traffic, conceivably get nobody to link to them, in short so called lottery winners. There's no good reason in heaven or earth they should be there, but they are nonetheless. This happens a lot, and even happening at all would be it happening a lot more than it should. Now, let it not be said that just because a site is marginal, or receives no traffic, it should be ignored. It shouldn't. But it shouldn't be on the top of the stack either. It can happily go on the 2nd page of results. Especially when, as it happened for our dyke friend, their content isn't all that relevant either. 3. Don't actually have anything to do with the query. They may be perfectly respectable, they may well be very useful. But not for the query as entered. "Fuck me harder" is quite a distance from "fuck me", and presumably most people asking for a fuck aren't necessarily using the strictly rhetorical meaning of fuck me harder. Presumably, a good fraction of users will be displeased, even if a few hardened readers will appreciate the serendipity of the situation. All this arises from a very simple fault. Google decided a while ago that instead of trying to solve the real problem, ie write an algorithm that will be able to decide, when looking at a page, who will be interested to see it, and how interested, which, in their defense really is an equivalent of the hard AI problem, they will just try and beg. So they came up with the brilliant scheme that it's not the page that matters, it's the link to it that matters. Someone invested human intelligence in making that link, and it shouldn't be wasted, Google proposes. In saying that, they also implicitly declare they have no purpose to exist. Anyone can write code that allows people to vote on links. A search engine that first asks you to rate all the Internet and then gives you the compiled ratings of everyone else as results isn't very useful. Someone could say "Fuck me, that's a hot car" and make it a link to a site about hot cars. The words fuck me will now be attached to the site about cars, as far as Google is concerned. Problem is, there's no connection. "Samantha's favorite dish" may point to Italian cuisine. There's no connection between the word "Samantha" and Italian cuisine. This fault of generalisation, implying that natural language is strict and scalable is enough to sink the entire idea. Sadly, words carry no meaning, as the engineers at Google might have found out, if they kept up with the real disciplines of semantics and linguistics, not their mathematical translations. An attempt to understand a page by looking at words is doomed to fail, which is why keywords didn't work very well, even outside of human tampering. An attempt to understand a page by looking at words that people use to describe it is also doomed to fail, and it doesn't even solve the problem of human tampering, not really, just moves the goalposts. But the entire profession of "SEO" as it stands today, which by the way is as much a profession as nosepicker or marketeer, resides firmly on tampering with the links. Now, add to this the fact the search engine crawls new material once a month or so, so your chances at fresh content are nil. Which is why blog-specific searches and user-edited link lists are so successful. Add to this the fact that lottery winners are in fact just that, lottery winners, so your chances to see fringe content on any given topic are governed by sheer chance and not any reasonable selection whatsoever. To a certain point, this would be unavoidable. To the degree it is unavoidable, we don't need a search engine to begin with. Add to this the very dubious stand of a search engine that also sells advertising services, so then it has a material interest that those sites that do use it's ad serving services would rate higher than those sites that don't, irrespective of the interest of the search engine user. Now this is not necessarily a moral problem, as much as a business issue. What the hell do you do, where do you cut the balance between making money and serving people for free ? The difficulty of day to day operations, just the simple logistics of looking, let alone reading, billions of pages and requests for pages, bad weather, broken switches, people that need to be paid, the need for investors etc etc can bring a company like Google down just by themselves. Add to that the simple fact that all this effort serves really no purpose, seeing how the company didn't solve the problem it exists to solve, nor does it move any closer, or for that matter expend any effort, towards solving it. All that's left to do is, I suppose, link to them. Enron. 1 Google presidents were enlightened by this article and sold their stock. |