Can Someone Please Beg Google to Make Their Search Engine Useful Again?

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This morning, James Joyner wanted to check up on Mitt Romney’s claim that he’s always forthrightly repudiated birther claims:

Alas, with Google, Bing, and Yahoo all having switched their algorithms to prioritize recent pages, all my searches for “Romney: Obama born in America” turned up page after pages of stories about the present controversy. That frankly makes no sense; if I wanted that, I’d search Google News rather than the main search engine.

I suppose that complaining about this does no good. The algorithms are tweaked to maximize advertising revenue, and returning lots of recent hits is what does that. But it sure does make Google nearly worthless for non-news searches.

Programmers almost unanimously seem to hate “switches,” the ability to turn features on and off. That goes double for complicated features, like the age weighting in a search algorithm. The reason for this dislike, generally speaking, is that switches are ugly and prone to proliferation. Marketing yahoos like me are always begging for them because some customer or another is bending our ear about it, and if you give in, then before long you have a UI that’s a mile-long collection of checkboxes and radio buttons. Designers prefer more elegant UI solutions, and I don’t blame them.

And yet….can someone please beg Google for a switch to turn off the preference for recent results? Hell, the Advanced Search page lets me choose things like reading level and file type. Why not add some kind of slider similar to the Safe Search option that allows me to weight results by how recent they are? Or maybe tweak the “Last Update” so you can exclude new results as well as old ones. As things stand now, Google becomes close to useless whenever a new event swamps their results.

As for Romney, who cares? Sure, he’s not a birther himself. He’s just willing to pander to them. Is anyone surprised?

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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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