Google Makes Its Search System Slightly More Transparent 50
Meshach writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about how Google has revealed some of the inner workings of the Google Search service. The main change is that sites that are not in English will be translated then included in the search results. Google said it has also improved the way it recognizes official Web sites, like those published by the government, and will give those sites higher ranking in search results. Google does not usually reveal such details but the article speculates governments have been pushing for more transparancy."
Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The main change is that sites that are not in English will be translated then included in the search results.
From the article:
One of the new changes will affect searches in languages for which there is little Web content available, including Afrikaans, Hindi and Icelandic. Google will now translate relevant Web pages written in English and show those results, too.
Complete opposite direction. Go Slashdot!
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No, but it's hard to believe that a machine generated translation should be high (or even included) in the results, for languages where there is very little content though, it kind-of does.
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Search is about finding and returning high-quality results. I don't want my first page to be polluted with confusing and hard to read results.
I'm skeptical that there is a good enough algorithm to determine translation quality, or even accuracy. I don't care the original language, I care about the quality, and if a search engine is giving me machine translated quality results, I will find a different search engine.
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Don't be so hard on him. Even Google Translate (to Hindi, and back again) makes the same mistake. If Google can't write a good bot for this, what makes you think Slashdot can do any better.
Afrikaans is a language for which there is little web content, including Hindi, and will affect the discovery of new changes in Icelandic. Google translation of the relevant web pages will be written in English and to show those results, too.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
They've actually been doing this for a while, and it is hurting my search experience. I prefer to read content in English, but I live in Germany, which means that if I want to buy something online, I want to buy it from a German (or at least European) company to avoid having to go in to the customs office to pay taxes on everything I buy (and so as to receive the products in 1-3 days instead of 2-4 weeks).
I used to be able to achieve this very easily by using the German name for what I needed, and if that name was the same as the English term, adding "kaufen" (buy) to the search. But with the translation technology, that means that I get all the first results in English, wanting to sell me products out of the U.S.A. I haven't found a really good way around this. Admittedly, I could change the settings for what language I want every time I do such a search, but that is a lot of trouble for me. If there were an option to turn this behavior off, I would do so.
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Re:What! (Score:5, Insightful)
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lol @ government doing its job.
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The whole concept revolves around gaming a system we'd all prefer worked properly.
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To be honest, a huge proportion of "review" sites in Google searches are not review sites at all, but online retailers that have managed to get their site indexed as a review site.
Just search for "productname review" and see what you get. In most cases you can skip the first 2-5 pages, since all results will be online sellers selling productname, with questionable "reviews" attached to the items. Reviews probably written by employees of the online seller.
Why not give the manufacturer of productname better r
Re:What! (Score:4, Interesting)
I feel so bad that you as an SEO guy are going to look bad.
Really I do.
I am not even giving a thought as to how most SEO is out there to ruin a perfectly good internet and I am also not taking into account
how on normal days I believe that people in the SEO field are complete scumbags.
You know, the kind of people that should be put out to sea in a small boat that is on fire.
SEO consultants, lawyers, spammers, politicians and union organizers.
Because of my ability to overlook all of that ... I feel really bad for you.
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No they do not.
What they do only needs to be done because of the shit they pulled earlier.
In the beginning Google could search.
Then came SEO.
Then came changes to the algorithm to make search work again.
Then came more SEOs.
More changes.
More SEO.
Now everything is a cluster fuck.
And it is the fault of those who originally sought to appear as if they had what you were looking for.
I shall say it more plainly this time.
Fuck SEO.
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That is a privacy setting you can turn on or off.
If you turn the tracking off- then offically* they are no longer tracking you.
* Disclaimer, they are probably still unofficially tracking you.
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Probably because thats been their business model for about a decade now?
Personally, Im more suspicious or wary of a service who does not seem to have a business model. How do you know DDG isnt logging your info? How do they fund their operations, if they dont get advertising revenue and its free?
At least Google is transparent about what they collect (and why), I have some reasonable expectation that theyre being truthful (due to their high visibility), and I can expect that their doors will still be open
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I do not care about the tracking itself, but I do care about the "search bubble" they create by trying to customize search results based on my past searches. Already I am getting better results at DDG for most technical, as well as non-technical queries, and I only get back to google (via awesome goosh.org) for image searches or quick translations.
Government Transparency (Score:3, Funny)
the article speculates governments have been pushing for more transparancy
Governments have been pushing Google for more transparency?? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Re:Government Transparency (Score:5, Funny)
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What information is the Chrome browser collecting that IE9 with google suggestions doesnt collect? Or that other browser's malicious page detection, or translation services dont collect?
As for "more secretive",...
Wrench -->Options --> under the hood. Uncheck the top several checkboxes, and turn off anything which offers a cloud-based service (cloud print). Grats, all of those "secretive" tracking features are now disabled.
The real question (Score:2)
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Yeah, that's ridiculously expensive. If you have several grocery stores around you, simply look in the weekly ads. It seems like ALMOST every week, one of the stores has Coke and/or Pepsi products on sale, for $1 per 2 liter or $3 per 12 pack, if not lower.
Stock up, and you'll never have to pay "regular" price for soda, even if you only buy name brand. (For some of the flavored versions, e.g. diet vanilla, I've never seen generic versions.)
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Oh good (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this mean they'll be bringing the + operator back some time soon? /wishful thinking
location based results (Score:1)