Rare: Google Admits A Search Result Is Wrong

Oct 21, 2013 - 8:37 am 71 by

google bugIt is rare for Google to admit they are wrong, at least with search quality. Part of the complaints with the Google stock price and questioning if the stock price matches Google's quality product these days... Google's Ryan Moulton admitted Google has a bug with, at least, one of their search results.

Ryan Moulton has been with Google's search quality team for over seven years. He is big into Hacker News and has been responding to Google complaints there for years.

One such complaint was readdressed on the topic of ranking w3schools.com above MDN resources. This is when Ryan famously responded higher quality content not necessarily more useful content. The topic came back up at Hacker News and this time, he admitted there was a bug.

If you search for [html iframe element scripting] you get an MDN result first, but to the wrong answer. Then it is followed by three w3schools results, also with "wrong, or completely useless" results.

Google MDN w3schools bug

To which, Ryan responded:

Thanks for following up with this. There's a real bug here that I'm passing along. Unfortunately, I can't share any of the details, so this will be a bit unsatisfying, but your hunch was correct, there is something wrong going on there.

I wonder exactly what the bug is, of course. But let's see if it does get fixed soon.

Forum discussion at Hacker News.

 

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