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Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

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Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#341

Post by Volker_W »

willwhitney wrote: post #289

Would it be bad if we made advertising... illegal? In small part because it would reduce the principal-agent disparity between what you want to do and what Google wants you to do, but more importantly because it would remove the incentive to create blogspam and game the results. Advertising serves a positive purpose by informing people about products that they will like and otherwise would not find. It also serves a…

I want to be informed as good and as neutral as possible.

Ad spaces are sold to the highest bidder.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#342

Post by gambiting »

bserge wrote: post #299
gambiting wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a public repo on GitHub that just doesn't show up on Google. Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.

Actually, that might be because of their antispam filters. They were always fighting websites with countless subdirectories or subdomains, having completely wiped them off their SERPs in the past. GitHub does fit the "huge website with lots of duplicate content" description very well. Then again, Twitter seems to be doing fine. But I have a suspicion that they have some sort of agreement (and GitHub doesn't), because…

I mean, that's probably true, I just made this repo specifically to help people who are looking to control a DRV8830 chip from the raspberry Pico, and I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to find it if there is no combination of "raspberry pi" and "DRV8830" that would get you to that repo on Google.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#344

Post by dredmorbius »

Well, by one measure, the quesiton's been asked on HN for at least the past 12 years:

"google search quality" https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search+quality

"google search worse" https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search+worse

Notably, from 12 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999

(There are many other results.)

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#346

Post by hnaccount141 »

Reuzel wrote: post #180
wffurr wrote: post #43

The topic here says "quantitatively". Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results? All of these threads devolve into anecdotes and reminisces about the "good old days" and complaining about Pinterest. None of which is in the least quantitative. I'd be interested to see some actual data or research on the subject, if it exists. Or maybe it's not Google that's got…

> Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results? Google has. They use this data expertly to improve search. Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions. And likely, exactly because it has become better for all its users in aggregate, it has t…

This presumes that the metrics they optimize for are intended to represent usefulness to actual users and not, say, ad revenue. Even if they do intend to optimize for usefulness, this doesn't mean that they have metrics that accurately represent that.

I also think you're underestimating average users. Anecdotally I've heard my parents complain repeatedly about the incoherent, auto-generated, affiliate link spam that plagues product searches.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#347

Post by jareklupinski »

WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #86
micromacrofoot wrote: post #26

It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…

What's kind of funny is there was a time where Google used to stand for --literally anything-- and would punish a site like reddit on search results for having such a user hostile interface. For some reason though (probably because they used AMP) they basically allow them to do anything they want. Multiple popups, hijacking click events for login modals, and hiding the content with no impact to search results. So now…

--hobbyist-only makes sense

when i search for something specific, i usually include a random niche tangental hyper specific keyword about the thing i want in quotes (until it gets turned into the SEO-buzzword of the day)

"impedance" for analog electronics stuff, "ring-spun" for clothes stuff, etc

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#348

Post by sam0x17 »

Volker_W wrote: post #339
sam0x17 wrote: post #306

Not only that, the alternatives have vanished and have also become worse as they adopt the same algorithmic changes google has made over the years (or just outright scrape google behind the scenes). This is shocking given the existence (now) of publicly available, open source indexing databases. You can literally build a search engine without indexing infrastructure, but everything out there is still crap.

> publicly available, open source indexing databases Where?

https://commoncrawl.org/

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#349

Post by jccalhoun »

mmaunder wrote: post #74

The problem isn’t solvable by modifying search queries. The fundamental issue is that the web has filled up with content designed to trick Google into sending it visitors and to maximize ad revenue. So you have content that is thick with ranking signals and thin on useful and new data. You also have to scroll past many ads and filler to get to the answer to your search query. The fundamental problem is that Google an…

There has been a cat and mouse game between google and scammers for a long time. Results get scammy and Google updates to get rid of them. I just hope they update soon to get rid of the latest version. I'm sick of so many results for things like "how to fix a clogged sink" all being long pages with stuff like "first let's talk about what a clog is" then "how they get clogged" and then "history of sinks" and then after you have scrolled and scrolled and scrolled you get the answer.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#350

Post by der-ofenmeister »

mthoms wrote: post #319
nucleardog wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available. A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variatio…

This seems like an opportunity to build a "better" search engine for Amazon and reap the affiliate revenue. There's got to be a reason no-one (to my knowledge) has done this: They probably forbid affiliates from doing their own indexing and ranking. Does anyone know for sure?

> They probably forbid affiliates from doing their own indexing and ranking. Does anyone know for sure?

They do. I came across a reddit thread where a guy had built a simple php-based search indexer for Amazon and managed to pay for his college through it. After this incident they apparently put changed their developer terms of service!

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