This is another example of why Google sucks (and DuckDuckGo rocks). My previous example of Google suckage was for a query that no one searches for. This time, however, there’s no excuse.
I stumbled across a nicely-presented article about CSS specificity (which, if you use Thesis, is definitely something you should know about), written by a guy named Neal Grosskopf. I’d never heard of this guy before, but his website and content seemed to be of unusually-high quality, so I clicked the link to follow Neal Grosskopf on Twitter and then added him to my list of followees.
Upon clicking the Follow button, I was presented with a recommendation from Twitter that said:
Since you followed Neal G, you might also want to follow: @perishable.
Anyone who reads as much as I do about customizing WordPress would probably associate that name with Perishable Press (a site which I’ve personally learned a LOT from over the years). The man behind @perishable is a guy named Jeff Starr, whom I immediately added to my followees.
Jeff’s Twitter bio says he’s the creator of CSSresetr. Having never heard of CSSresetr before, I copied the text from Jeff’s page, pasted it into Google, and ran a search.
And that’s when Google returned results that were 100% wrong. Not one single result was useful or relevant whatsoever.
Instead, Google assumed that by [CSSresetr], surely I must have really meant [CSS reset], so those were the only results I was shown–along with a link to the real results. So did I click the link that offered me the information I already f@#&ing asked for!? No. I left and went over to a much better search engine, DuckDuckGo, which returned exactly what I was looking for. See below for physical evidence that Google sucks and DuckDuckGo rocks.
[CSSresetr] : Google vs. DuckDuckGo
Click either of these for a full-size version of the search results:
Google Assumes You’re Retarded
Google does not currently offer any way for Users to disable this unwanted behavior:
DuckDuckGo Lets YOU Decide
DuckDuckGo has an incredible selection of customizable settings, including this one:
Comparison Using Corrected Google Results
Even if I click Google’s “I meant what I said” link, DuckDuckGo STILL has better results! Google returns Twitter lists for results 3, 4, and 5…WTF? (I highlighted the common results in blue and evened out the vertical spacing, to make it easier to compare.)
Need a Better
Search Engine?
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Clearly you are wrong and Google is right.
How could you possibly know better than their algorithms? I mean, the most intelligent people in the World are behind Google.
;)
Dude, you are SO right! After I got tired of listening to you write about this, so I finally took a tour of DuckDuckGo. I tested 5 or 6 searches and got hands down better results compared to G. No comparison. Holy crap! Tools>Options>General>Home Page=DuckDuckGo
Fair enough on the part about poor results when forcing a CSSresetr search, but I think Google was right to adjust the query originally as it thought you’d fucked up. Like a lot of things its a trade off, but it’s important to remember that most people (I imagine. Check volumes?) would have meant CSS Reset.
I agree there should be somewhere to switch the feature off though. Good idea.
Jon
It does look like Google returns results if you search “CSSresetr” in quotes. CSS resets have become pretty popular in the web developer niche so I can sort of empathize with Google for wanting to return CSS Reset rather than CSSresetr. On the other hand, you would think Google would return exact word matches with a little higher weight than non-match results.
Man u rule … I like your posts and I enjoy to F*CK Google too, it is the worst thing that happens to the Internet
f*ck google, go duckduckgo!!!
Great read! I noticed the same thing just a few weeks after launching CSSresetr. But to see this is still the case several months later is kinda sad. Something to keep an eye on for the next update.
Thanks for sharing DuckDuckGo. Do you know if they are they using other search indexes or are they indexing their own?
Awesome new site, btw. Nice to see you back in business!
DDG pulls in data from other search engines’ indices, but it also has its own crawler and index. So it’s a combination of both.
One of the handy features of DDG is their !bang syntax, which essentially gives you direct access to the search results of a huge list of search services.
For example, if you do a search in DDG for [cssresetr] and nothing looks appealing, you can simply add !g to the query ([cssresetr !g]) and it will take you to Google’s results.
The !bang feature works for 100′s of sites. As a web developer, you might want to try language-specific !bangs. For example, try searching DuckDuckGo for [echo !php].
Ever watched Blockhead? Go do it.
On the topic, I randomly (after watching the episode with it) inserted the string “mud hair and turtle eyes” (a quote). The first result in Google was a transcript of the episode. The first result in DuckDuckGo was something on Squidoo about turtles. The transcript was the fourth result.
Search for most anything that can be purchased — and Google’s results will be LOADED with links to Amazon.
With all the PhD’s working at Google, you would think that they would eventually “get it” that if an end-user is going to search for products to purchase, … they will eventually NOT visit Google first and foremost, … rather visit Amazon #1 and leave Google out of the loop.
That is the message that Google’s search results are leading to. Why search for products on Google when you can just go to Amazon?
So, Google should learn to include fewer Amazon results if they want to continue dominating search … and be funded by AdWords.
So what? Just click to get the more obscure results. That feature has been right for me due to typos etc. MANY more times than it has been wrong.
I totally agree with just about everything being written here – as a webmaster of some 6 years putting my faith in Google I have now seen the light – GOOGLE SUCKS BIG TIME – I have stripped out Google Adsense, Google Analytics, Google Chrome, and everything Google from my websites and computers (I also run an internet Cafe) and can now rest in peace – Google are manipulative thieving spies – they have been hiding on the internet since their conception to avoid litigation, they cheat big time for $$$, however times are changing.
More interesting, my wife has a crappy little website that has never had absolutely anything to do with Google – not registered, no Adsense, no Google Tools, No DMOZ, nothing – and yet she earns 500% more than my 9 registered Google websites combined…. like WTF?
As a result I have removed every aspect of Google from my websites, and my websites are now doing better than ever in Google Search Results?!?
Google Sucks – Give Google up and create your websites as you see fit – NOT as Google dictates – you will all do much better without the Google Nazis…
Ermmm… DuckDuckGo also sucks big time… not just their stupid lame name (are the owners a bunch of kids?), but also the fact that they have no image search….
There are better search engines out there…
One more point – Cool that we can post comments without all that registration/or register with Facebook,Hotmail,Twitter spying account crap….
You are doing well here at SEO mofo with open minds and open concepts, I salute you!
I got here from google because I typed “google, you suck!” in the search query after several failed attempts to get what I wanted.
I was after details about using Perl’s Imager module. What I got was anything that contained the word image. The query was “Perl Imager”.
Earlier I was looking for a perl script named PerlDiver. Every goddam search from google assumed I was a halfwit and really meant pearl divers. So I get lots of stuff about pearls and divers.
This happens all the time with google and shows no signs of improvement.
Like XTC, I have also started removing google products from my life.
Forgot to mention… have you noticed how often google will return stale, out-of-date pages instead of current information? I mean pages dated 2001 when you’re looking for code snippets for the latest versions of a scripting language. The snippets invariably do not work and contain deprecated functions because of the documents age.
Oh, and while I’m on the subject of google…. how many of you trust the results returned from products like analytics or adwords? There are huge discrepencies with those products. I’ve had adwords tell me that some keywords have no traffic, yet analytics shows that my site was already receiving thousands per month on those exact keywords. Thats another thing that isn’t right with google. Do they not want us to know which keywords are worthwhile?