(no subject)

[unicornduke]

 google has gotten much less helpful lately and I can't figure out why. I was trying to figure out ways to keep a pipe from twisting/turning like with my laser scarecrow but all I got results from was how to keep pipes from freezing. It's almost as if using the words "how to" and "pipe" will just bring up those results, instead of looking at all the words used. 

This isn't the first time it's happened lately, maybe in the past year or so it's gotten very unhelpful. 

Comments

[dragonlady7]

In Days of Yore I was an SEO specialist and knew a ton about how Google worked, but those were Yore Days and the Earth's crust hadn't cooled yet. At that point it was well-known that their algorithm was refined and then updated every month, and they called it the "Google Dance", because sites that had previously ranked high for competitive search terms would all swap around into different positions.
But while I was doing this work, in 2002, they changed it, and the adjustments to the algorithm became ongoing, and ever since then, we have lived in a perpetual state of Google Dance.

I have no advice, I just suddenly felt like the world needed my dozen-year-old wisdom on that.

[unicornduke]

that is good to know! fascinating honestly. It's just frustrating because it has become unhelpful recently.

[graydon]

A lot of terms -- like HOWTO -- are now hopelessly polluted.

You can stick the search in quotes, to get exactly that; if there is an exactly that, it might be helpful.

I tend to wind up chaining things together -- preventing pipe twist -drain -- until I feel like I'm getting in the vicinity. The minus removes a term; it's very helpful if you're getting a haze of pinterest links or the first six pages are otherwise amazon and alibaba. It feels a bit like search artillery; that one's over, that's one's left, under, ok, that's on target -- but it still mostly gets there.

[unicornduke]

I have used quotes a lot but even then, it doesn't always work because one or two terms are too common, so those will be ignored even in the quotes. I got some better results with this particular issue by searching "reducing pipe movement" which was much closer to what I wanted, but it was frustrating that the search just ignored half the terms I was using in the first place.

I was trying to find something for work recently as a literature review that I had no idea on what terms to use so I ended up continually frustrated that I couldn't find what terms even to use because the first three pages were garbage or it brought up the same result for every search term I tried, because those were the terms used but like, not super officially. Actually, the main issue was that all the words are common "beginning farmer knowledge affecting production" gets me a lot of junk. So much junk. So it was frustrating.

[graydon]

Sometimes giving DuckDuckGo a try will get you terms; it's coverage isn't as good but it's way less polluted.

And, yes, absolutely it's frustrating.