I had a few last night that went up in the top 50 when stuff rolled over but by this AM were up to the top 30.

The Google search engine is actually an improvement. I can't tell you how many times I've come up with nothing or next to nothing in searches. And it has the potential for more Squidoo income, which might be a point in our favor when we're arguing for not having ads on top of our lenses.

I don't even know if it works for my lenses. They weren't what I looked for. But your unschooling lens doesn't come up for me. You have plenty of tags, so I don't know what's going on.

I can't figure out why the search sometimes brings up a site and sometimes brings up a tag. If you click on the tag, you get a squidoo list like always. But what's weird is that my lens isn't listed on the google search, but if you click the homeschooling tag, it's #1. Isn't that weird?

Maybe the google search uses googles pagerank instead?

Angela

I appreciate the Squidoo team trying new things and soliciting our feedback. So here's my initial reaction to the Google search:

I know there are some bugs with the old search but at first glance the new Google search is worse. I search for "flyball" and my  Flyball! lens isn't one of the 3 returned (none of them have to do with flyball). There's only one other flyball lens in Squidoo and it has no content - and it doesn't show up in the search results either. In the old search my lens was the first one returned.
I know the Squidoo philosophy is that people will find lenses via search and not URLs. In this case, this particular lens would never be visited. I realize this is just one case, and maybe overall the Google search will work out better for more people. Just adding my $.02.

- Ed

Last edited by EdBurck (06/03/2006 8:21 am)

Seems like Squidoo isn't really out of Beta. At least I hope it's not finished.

Last edited by AngelaHarms (06/03/2006 10:07 am)

Our internal search engine was less than ideal. It wasn't finding the best lenses, and it wasn't working or displaying results consistently. So we're returning to it to improve how it works -- so it finds more relevant lenses for more people.

To date, the internal Google search seems to be finding more, better. Yes, it finds tag and other content pages -- but you can easily tell which pages are lenses (Their lens titles end "on Squidoo." This is a placeholding effort until we further refine our previous search tool -- or find a better search solution.

Per http://www.squidu.com/qanda/i-just-made … t-find-it, it can still take a day-plus for a new lens to be indexed for search. That hasn't changed and is pretty consistent with how long it can take for major search engines to spider and index new web sites. We'll continue to work on this!

As far as being out of beta is concerned. We are definitely out of beta. That doesn't mean that we won't continue to add new features, improve existing features -- and sometimes, make changes so we can concentrate on improvements without continuing to suffer inconsistencies brought about by those existing features.

We're still young; thanks for your patience and persistence!