On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

New Google LogoAs most people are aware, Google search results are constantly changing and evolving. In the past couple of years, there has been a conscious and very deliberate shift – and not just by Google – to go from showing you what you want to see to showing you what they want you to see. Be it social network integrations (Google+, Facebook connections, twitter feeds, etc), local results, results based off of previous queries (at least this one is in an attempt to show you “relevant” information), and more. This is all old news and has been hashed to death (and to no avail).

But in the past week or so, I’ve personally picked up on a rather annoying and dramatic uptick in incidences of Google’s penchant for – much like a three year old – understanding perfectly-well what it is that you want and pointedly doing anything but that.

I am speaking of course about the dreaded “Missing: important_search_term that seems to pop up in just about every search result, with an uncanny ability of picking the most relevant keywords and conveniently “forgetting” to include them in your search. Initially, this search feature was reserved for only the most esoteric of search queries that typically turn up only a handful of results (under a few pages total) with all search terms included. In an attempt to be helpful, Google would include additional search results with some keywords removed, so as to remove the burden of extra constraints and widen the search parameters somewhat. Now? It seems like Google’s either come down with a rather bad case of human-robot transmitted alzheimer’s or else we’ve reached an all-new high when it comes to dumbing down the web (newspeak, anyone?).

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Case-sensitive SEO URL redirects and routing for IIS and ASP.NET MVC

At NeoSmart Technologies, we have a special affinity for ecosystems running both Windows and *nix in unison, each doing things they excel at. Half of this website is running ASP.NET MVC under IIS 8.0, while the other half is running under nginx on FreeBSD, everything behind an nginx reverse proxy. Windows likes to make things easy for users by being a primarily case-insensitive platform, both when it comes to the local filesystem and the web. FreeBSD and Linux on the other hand, like most of the unix world1 are explicitly and unapologetically case-sensitive.

On the one-hand, IIS defaulting to case-insensitive URL routing means that your users are far less likely to a see a 404 “Page not found” error as a result of a fat-fingered or mangled URL (which as we all know can be the fault of either the user or the developer), but it also means that when Google’s spiders and ‘bots come around looking to index your content, you’re likely to wind up penalized for having duplicate content. The web itself is officially case-insensitive, and technically both example.com/something and example.com/Something are completely separate, unique, and independent URLs that despite all semantical similarities share nothing in common (though you’d be mad to actually host different content on URLs differing only in spelling).

Welcome SeoRedirect, part of NeoSmart Technologies’ open-sourced Web Toolkit library, which provides case-sensitive routing for ASP.NET on IIS. With the latest update (freshly pushed!), SeoRedirect also gives you control over which GET parameters are also preserved, because apparently worrying about case-sensitivity alone just isn’t enough.

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  1. Mac OS X is a notable exception here, as by default it uses HFS+ in a case-insensitive mode, though an HFS+ implementation w/ case-sensitivity is enabled (but rarely used). 

Google Hiding URIs for Certain Search Results

Google is now unfortunately hiding the URIs for certain search results far more often than they ever have done in the past… and it’s quite annoying. The Google search site is the pinnacle of function over form: it is sparse, plain, simple, and yet contains tons of information. But it seems that they’re taking it a bit too far now, hiding valuable data making the results pretty useless. Marissa Mayer, where art thou?

As an example, search Google for “libmhash” right now. The first result is the result you want, but you’d never know it from looking at the search result:

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