Any chances of getting rid of the redirects in search results? It's so annoying that I can't simply copy the result link URL and paste without getting some crazy Google tracking URL instead. It's such an obvious fail that I can't see how it's possible to not have it fixed yesterday, it made me switch to a different search engine.
A very brief test indicates that search strings containing "Cocoa Webview" no longer return a bunch of useless crap* about Android webviews with the word "Cocoa" nowhere to be seen on the page. If that's the case: it's about time.<p>*"Useless crap" is context-sensitive, of course -- no disrespect toward Android intended, but I go to the trouble of including "Cocoa" in my search Google shouldn't be giving me pages that don't even contain that word. It might be different if it were smart enough to just give you Objective C or iOS-focused pages that included "Webview", but not Cocoa, since there's at least some probability that those pages would be of interest. However, it wasn't that smart.
> <i>Improvements to freshness. [launch codename "Abacus", project codename "Freshness"] We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries.</i><p>> <i>More precise detection of old pages. [launch codename "oldn23", project codename “Freshness"] This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users.</i><p>Hopefully this means fewer instances of searching for code help and seeing prominent results from 2005.
>Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing. ...we’ve now started to index the following heavily used symbols: “%”, “$”, “\”, “.”, “@”, “#”, and “+”. We’ll continue to index more symbols as usage warrants.<p>That, and the new "Verbatim' option, are really good news. There are also some five (10% of the entire list) timely tweaks to synonyms.<p>All in all, it seems Google listens and tries to improve its service, which has become rather paternalistic lately ("you wrote X, but actually mean Y", no I don't!). Well done.
With all the bashing around them stagnating in search, it's nice to see that they are continuously improving even if it's more incremental than revolutionnary.<p>I particularily like the indexing of symbols, it will make searching for C# results easier.
> “dog” may be incorrectly introduced as a synonym for
> “cat”. We’ve been working for some time to appropriately
> ferret out these<p>brilliant.<p>Also funny that they launched two Synonym features that appear to be be the same feature described in different words.
Click through to the video of their search meeting. It seems really strange to me that something like that would be made public. I mean, it is pretty content free, but why spend so much effort to show the world deliberations on how to change search?
The new additions of UEFA, KHL, and tennis scores would seem to indicate that each snippet type is manually built and added by Google.<p>I would have expected something a little bit broader; an algorithm that attempts to automatically parse score results for all major sports based on the pages they pull results from, or something to that effect. The former is way easier, and probably a whole lot more accurate, that the later, but it removes a little bit of the sex from the whole process. It also highlights how much work must be involved in building the snippet generators for a site like google.