joeware - never stop exploring... :)

Having written something good about Google, I must now write something not so good about Google so my MSFT friends don’t completely shun me. 🙂

So what is the bad thing? Well it seems Google did something to shift around priority of Microsoft hits on their search results. Why do I say that? Well because I ran smack into it.

On a fairly regular basis, I would say about 2-3 times a day I look up an LDAP function or a Windows API function by going to my Google Toolbar in IE and type the name of the function and hit “I feel lucky”. This has almost always worked to get me to where I wanted to go which is a location somewhere in MSDN.

Recently, the last few weeks or so (yeah I am way behind on things, almost hopelessy so) this stopped working. I started just looking at the hits I was getting back in many cases Microsoft wasn’t even on the first page of results even for API calls made by them. A perfect example is ldap_bind which I use as a keyword regularly to get to the ldap functions of MSDN. That is/was probably a once a day item I typed. Number 1 hit used to be

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ldap/ldap/ldap_bind.asp 

now it is

http://us3.php.net/ldap_bind

Ok so maybe that became a more popular request… so the previous first should be bumped down what… a few slots? No not even, it isn’t even on the first five pages.  It shows up now on page 9. That doesn’t just happen. Google is dorking with the weighting. Their own page rank icon doesn’t agree with the ordering of the returned hits. Do a search on ldap_bind and check it out yourself. That second page barely registers in the icon, the first page is over 50% green in the icon.

How about CreateProcessWithLogonW

Hit #1 used to be

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dllproc/base/createprocesswithlogonw.asp

it is now on page 2 and the #1 is

http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/55/275561.aspx

 

So Google, WTF? Just search the data.

   joe