Showing posts with label Goolge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goolge. Show all posts
,

Artificial Google Suggestions

The suggestions that are diplayed when you type a Google search query are useful most of the time. Google tries to finish your query and suggests some popular queries that start with the keywords you've typed.

Sometimes Google also shows suggestions from web pages and many of them are pretty long and verbose. They look artificial because it's unlikely that many users typed them. Google compiles a list of popular n-grams from web pages and includes them in the list of Google Instant suggestions. You'll find page titles, excerpts from Wikipedia articles and press releases, but also incomplete suggestions that don't make any sense.

It's easy to spot these artificial suggestions: type a long query until Google no longer shows suggestions, type more keywords and Google will suddenly show long suggestions.

Here are some of them:









In the last example I've searched for ["the * why it's inaccurate"] and started to type a new word after "the", when I saw these absurdly detailed suggestions. If you search for [why would it be inaccurate], Google shows a single suggestion: [why would it be inaccurate to speak of an nacl molecule]. You need to type [why would it be inaccurate to call t] to see this suggestion: [why would it be inaccurate to call the pituitary gland the master gland of the body]. This long phrase can't be found in any web page, but it shows up because Google merges various word sequences.

Continue reading Artificial Google Suggestions
,

Google's Broken Search Provider for Internet Explorer

UpdateThis was fixed in less than 24 hours after posting this article. That was quick.

Adding Google as a search engine in Internet Explorer is quite complicated. Most browsers include Google in the list of search engines and Google is usually the default option, but IE ships with a single search engine: Bing. Adding Google involves visiting a Microsoft web page, finding Google and more clicks.

Google has a page that is supposed to make it easier to add Google as your search provider in IE. As Thomas P. noticed, it doesn't work. Google's XML file that includes the details about the search engine has the following address:http://67.223.228.48/google.xml and that IP has nothing to do with Google. Areverse IP domain check shows multiple domains hosted by the same web server, including orlandopozo.com, a site of a Google employee.

For some reason, that file requests the browser to send search requests tohttps://dhpdse.googlegoro.com/search?q=. Googlegoro.com is owned by Google (it was registered in 2011), but you won't get Google search results. Instead, you'll get a Google App Engine sign in form and then an error message.




It seems that Googlegoro.com is used by Google employees to host files related for various internal projects. For example, this Chromium bug page includes a comment that links to https://oreo-android.googlegoro.com/zindex-chrome-bug.html

So a file from a Google employee's site links to a Google domain only accessible to other Google employees. But why would an important Google page link to that file? It's probably a mistake. Maybe a link to this page would have been a better idea.
Continue reading Google's Broken Search Provider for Internet Explorer