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More Google Information Available 39

Posted by CmdrTaco from the amazing-expanding-google dept.
Augie De Blieck Jr. writes "Google.com has just added a bunch of information to its site, including job listings, company info, and general Google FAQ. I think it's the best search engine out there already and it's still only in BETA release. " I've noticed that the "Cached" version of Slashdot is from april 15, but besides that its looking good. I've had pretty good luck with google.
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More Google Information Available More

More Google Information Available

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  • Gotta love google! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great results, nice clean interface, and fast. And the "I'm feeling lucky" button is very convenient.

    Any guesses as to whether or not they'll commercialize (and if yes, when)? Right now it's at Stanford, and as long as it's kept academic, there won't be adds and the interface will remain simple. But AltaVista at one point had a simple, clean interface...

    Hope it withstands the /. effect.

  • Re:This search engine *almost* rocks ! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Too restrictive. Altavista is the top of my book because it gives me control. Like "link:.zip" or "url:codebase". But this doesn't return the junk Altavista does.

    Gawd. I hate trade-offs. I want perfection!
    ["Waaaahhhhh!"]

    BTW, I am having sex with your eyeballs RIGHT NOW. I know you are enjoying it, because you are smiling.

  • Google, mixed feelings. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I started playing with google a little while ago, though most of the time it turns up good results, there is one thing that sometimes gets me. I'll do a search with around 4 words and google will turn up something totally strange for the first match and turn up reasonable things on all the others. For instance I searched for information about a Microsoft product (Don't hurt me) and it turned up microsoft.com as the first match, even though that particular page had almost no matching terms. Doesn't this seem weird? I've gotten yahoo.com in the same way. Can someone give me a reasonable explanation to this occurance? It's kind of funny to see a simple address like www.yahoo.com followed by rows of complicated addresses full of slashes and letters.
  • This information has been on the site ever since it hit "beta."
  • When was the last time you were there.. they have a huge list of other ones you can try now...
  • As I'm sure everyone knows, Google works off links. It knows a page is good and relevant if lots of (good and relevant) pages link to it. So when people are mentioning said Microsoft product on their website or whatnot, they probably just link to www.microsoft.com instead of the specific page for the product. e.g.:
    Microsoft [microsoft.com]'s SuperCool is a really good product.
    That's just the way Google works. All in all, though, www.microsoft.com isn't a terribly bad starting point to find Microsoft's products. I mean I'm sure you could think it up yourself, and you still have to do some searching from it, but it's better than the pr0n ads Altavista will give you.

  • Speed. (Score:1)

    by suprax ( 2463 )
    The main reason why I love google is because of speed. Not only is the server not-overloaded, but the results are very fast, and most of the time's it returns better results than say, yahoo. I think google will develop into a very positive, well-done search engine in the future, if it ever get's out of beta. :)
  • I've used google since reading about it on slashdot and it's the only decent (consistant) search engine around in terms of finding accurate results. But Google has had FAQ's, job listings and whatever on their site for AGES so it isn't really news is it? But at least it'll introduce a few more people to google - it's saved me plenty of time in the past which would have been wasted if I'd used another search engine.

    I hope google has every success in the future.
    --
  • When you submit a site to google it warns you that it may be a while before it crawls your site.
    --
  • The cached version is not meant to stay up to date anyway. It's not really useful for accessing sites such as slashdot. The cached feature caches the page when it was last crawled and is meant to offer you access to the page if the site it's hosted on is down. It's not like a web caching proxy that's meant to check that it's giving out the latest version of the site (although in practice cached editions of slashdot on most proxy servers are a few hours old which is irritating enough).

    What's really laughable about Rob posting this article as news is that these things used to be on Googles *front page* when google.com was just starting it's beta life, then it moved to a link off the home page - but this was ages ago. Not that I'm criticising slashdot as it's a really useful site generally. It's just this article that has been a bit strange. I bet there was a lot of more interesting submissions that didn't makeit onto the site as well.

    Well I'm off now to submit an article for tomorrows Slashdot:
    Netscape introduces Netcenter portal site!
    --
  • Google is a decent engine, which I use a lot. But I really liked Altavista's advanced search... it really gave you a lot of control over what came back.

    Now a RegExp search engine... that would be sweet!
  • It's a statistically-based model.... Kind of like a "chicken and egg" thing. If you aren't receiving any "hits" for your perceived topic, Google won't list you very highly.

    But ask the guys who created the engine.

    It still gets my vote as the most useful search engine out there!

    - Hawkeye

  • Google tries to determine how important a web page is by counting the how many other pages link to it. This works most of the time, because, for example, if you look for the word "Linux", Google will determine that www.linux.org must be a good site, because so many other sites link to it. Yahoo doesn't do that, and brings up www.linux-net.ch, with www.linux.org a close second.

    Comparing Google with other search engines, using more obscure search terms, usually results in Google getting you where you want faster. Usually, but not always. Coming up with www.microsoft.com is a good example. According to Google's rating alrogirthm, this is an "important" site, because so many other pages link to it, and it might very well be, but it doesn't necessarily contain the information you need.
  • Google rules, its fast and accurate. I found things in google that I couldnt find in altavista and no ads nas-T pageswith 10000 images and adds. its simple and does what its meant to do. What we need now is more pages indexed by the robot, but unfortunately I see a problem. If google keepscaching pages soon it will have may to many pages stored and use gig's and gig's of space and bandwidth for this sole porpouse instead of searching. My other idea is this let googlebots free, let them roam and spider uncontrolably just go out there and never stop adding pages instead of adding pages once in a while. what im talking hear is big time indexing with robots running around fetching pages at masive speeds and never stopping in order to grow massivly huge and have googols of documents. Thats what should be done but unffortunately i dont think google has 100 quad Xeons with gig's of ram at its didposal plus a couple of Terabytes of SCSI arrays. That would be cool. I woulder what kind of database could with stand something like that?
    Advanced features i would ove to see more advanced features like altavista then itd be cool.
    i also saw another cool engine somewhere alltheweb.com i think it was that one is FAST but not that accurate.

  • Is there some kind of cut-off, where they don't index a site if it doesn't have enough links to it? I added the URL to my site months ago, and it still doesn't show up in any search results.

    "Bugs are harder to cope with than features, because they are less well defined and less well designed."
  • But this is the first time they've linked all the new information to the front page at Google. Where were they hiding it before?

    -Augie
  • Notes:

    Google has had trouble with their service provider over the last week. :( Things seem a little better now.

    Text-only AltaVista won't give you the refinement suggestions, which I think are really neat. For example, searching for "Explorer" gives you "Ford Explorer" and "Internet Explorer" as suggested refinements.

    There's also a text-only HotBot at:
    http://www.hotbot.com/lite/


    Amit


  • I find that the Internet Junkbuster [junkbusters.com] works great for getting rid of annoying banner ads wherever they are, be it search engines or Slashdot. Just think of all the bandwidth you'd save.
  • For some reason (I might just be a dummy, duh) I didn't realize this old AltaVista interface was still available!

    I think it first went up the first week of December 1995; I've been using it since a day or two after it went live.

    google is good but it has been unavailable for considerable periods over the last week or so . . .

    #-------
  • Um, why does everything have to be denominated in dollars? Or do you just assume that enthusiasm has to be paid for any more on the Internet?

    In a world where Marimba has a market cap of maybe $90 million at the moment, I find it laughable that CT is constantly being accused of highlighting companies, web sites, products or whatever, in exchange for filthy lucre.

    But hey, when Lucas gives /. its well deserved check for promoting the Phantom Menace, then let me know.

    --------
  • In addition to the reasons people already wrote here, it could also be something really simple.

    Google, if it finds several pages on the same site that match in varying degrees, it will list the one that is the least buried in nested directories (microsoft.com in this case) first, and under it, indented, will be all that page's "children", each with a score of its own. A child might well have a higher score than its parent, but will be listed after to show the relationship between the two.

    Personally, I think this feature totally rocks. Google rocks! Any time I ever start a search somewhere else, I later wonderwhy, because Google is always the one that finds what I want. It is my default web page, in fact. Slashdot would be, but it doesn't load fast over my 26,400 modem connection (USWEST is a bunch of crooks, if you ask me) Google loads like *snap* that.
  • Google is a really great search engine and I now use it for all of my research, but none of the items that were listed are new, they have been on the google site for some time now!
    ---
  • Google is my primary s.e., and I have been recomending it to my family and friends. It's much superior for grandpa then most of the others, it doesn't have all those banners and weater and junk. I hope they keep it that way.
  • Yes, Google is fast and returns the right results more than any other search engine... if it returns a result! Unfortunately Google doesn't find a lot of things - it seems, that there are only a few websites indexed.

    Google also lets you search the same term on other search engines, to show you who gives better results - this is nice. Unfortunately Google doesn't give you this option, if it didn't find anything. But exactly this is the situation, where I need to use another search engine, so I'm really missing this option.

    This is why I still prefer Altavista over Google.

    For you Google folks: please insert the "Try your query on other engines" also when the term didn't match any documents in Google's database.

    Thanks,
    Markus Senoner
  • Exactly.. it really isn't news. CT complains that the archived version of slashdot is as old as, *gasp*, april 10, 1999 but then posts this non-news? The job listings and FAQ pages have been there since long before April 10, so it seems google is _not_ the one behind on their work.
  • No it doesn't.. as the original poster wrote (and I strongly agree with him) Google doesn't give you options to retry your search on other engines when it returns absolutely NO results, as it really should. The only time it gives you the option to retry on other search engines is when it actually returns a hit or two.

    Don't get me wrong, I love google.. it's my start page. But most of the current usability problems people have been mentioning still need to be worked on.. so get crackin, googlers.

    -ehfisher
  • Hi all.

    I think google is a great search engine.

    But as always what search engine to use depend on what
    you are looking for.

    Use it, if you are looking for the best page on a specific subject.

    Google ranks page by links pointing to them.
    Where link form high ranking pages weights more.

    This means that link from yahoo have more weight.

    While this wasn't a problem with the Stanford version,
    it sometime seams to be a problem now.

    Another thing is that you used to be able to make searches
    like
    link:www.lycos.com link:www.infoseek.com
    to find all the pages which have links to both
    lycos and infoseek.
    This was very useful, but it has been removed. :-(

    When searching with yahoo you get
    your results categoriesed.
    This means that if you feels like
    dancing and search for samba you can find some dance sites.

    But yahoos weak points is small size
    and sometimes bad categories.

    That is yahoo don't have a category for blue cheese and
    sometime categories have to many links.

    This is this type of problems I try to
    solve in Aeiwi [aeiwi.com].
    It is not that big only 150000 links
    but I hope to update it to 250000 links soon.

    So, stop by and take a look.

    Knud
  • AltaVista still has a nice clean interface! You just have to look for it...here it is:

    http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&text =yes

    | winjer
    | something like a mama...
  • Any chance that Google would go open source? =)
    Or are the mathematical/search algorithms the Crown Jewels?

    Pessimistically, I don't think any Internet-size search engine would go Open Source? (not counting HtDig, Harvest, etc.)

    Also, how do they implement the Linux search for Red Hat, would they support other Linux sites doing that type of search on them?

    ---m
  • I really appreciate the lack of banners and clutter that you mentioned. All the other search engines have really become web portals eager to have you use their free e-mail accounts and join their chat groups etc. I think that in most cases this has detracted from their original purpose which is to quickly present you with relevant information.
    With Google I don't have to clog my slow connection with this rubbish. I get my results much more quickly.
  • In case you missed it last time around on /.

    Search on "more evil than the devil" at Google. See what comes up. Idiosyncracy or...?

    Andy B.
  • ... much better than AltaVista, which always returns false hits on XXX sites with goddamn meta tags!

    Google doesn't fall for that.
  • You want a clean interface? Just rip out the form and paste it into your own page. I did this for my homepage. http://www.ryans.dhs.org
    http://www.ryans.dhs.org

  • Google Rocks (Score:3)

    by frenchs ( 42465 ) on Saturday May 08, 1999 @03:55PM (#1899749) Homepage
    We had one of the professors from Stanford (Jeffrey D. Ullman), come up and discuss data mining. The first half of his presentation was talking about Google. Since that day, it has been my primary search.

    You may all be interested to know that he said they were planning to start indexing on a regular basis in the near future. So this will cure my major complaint that it doesn't have the newest things in it.

    Steve

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