Finding Technical Answers In Google

by Darren McLaughlin

Google does a great job, for the most part, with many classes of search queries. But one class they don’t seem to fair well with is technical queries. I’m not sure it’s really their fault either, because they truly can’t understand the context of most documents they index. If you look for a very specific technical error, you end up at many of the same sites, with no chance of finding an answer.

Now, I can see how this happens, and it points out the trouble with their algo. Google always puts a ton of emphasis on text-heavy, link heavy websites, giving them inflated “authority” to answer an entire class of queries. An example of this type of website is the typical “mail list” style website that pulls email from Usenet postings and posts them as HTML. Of course these websites have the correct titles and on-page elements, so they tend to rank for specific “long tail” search.

My main problem with these types of pages are they almost never have the right answer. This is one area where I feel Google could really be helped by human evaluation. If enough people “rated” a page negatively, in theory it could be dropped, and Google could do a better job of determining which documents actually get answers “right”, based on a consensus.

Of course this method also has its’ share of drawbacks.

Let me ask you, do you find answers to highly technical questions easily in Google? What method do you use to search?