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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?

#471

Post by astrange »

vankessel wrote: post #354
root_axis wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the appending reddit thing. I don't see why reddit is considered trustworthy, marketers have been planting "organic discussion" on reddit for years .

Yeah, I can't confirm it, but the weirdest I think I've seen is in r/science about research that was funded by the meat industry saying that a diet with meat is healthier than vegetarianism or veganism. The study was poorly done and there were tons of comments pushing the same message: "vegetarians/vegans are annoying hipsters who will lecture you for eating meat and they'll be so deservedly upset by this." Found it…

The /r/science mods are extremely strict and delete any subjective comments. Some of them like posting clickbait of their own though…

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

#472

Post by skinkestek »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #100
alangibson wrote: post #12

Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.

I did just that. Well not specifically aimed at research, but the types of websites I'm interested in, written by humans, blogs and such. It's got some quality issues right now because I fucked up some of the keyword extraction logic and it's taken a while to identify just what's gone wrong. Even though it's a bit broken, it has some lucid moments. Just compare: https://www.google.com/search?q=mechanical+keyboards ht…

Your project makes my life better both because it is already useful and because it gives me hope!

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

#473

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

barbazoo wrote: post #164
vgeek wrote: post #9

The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testi…

I've also completely switched over to DDG and I'm seeing similar things that infuriate me about Google. Most of all the fact that ignores my "literal" searches using double quotes. The documentation [0] says > Results for exact term [...]. If no results are found, we'll try to show related results. But very regularly it fails to find results I know exist in not so unpopular places. [0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duc…

This.

You'd think from the responses herein that using quotes was a panacea.

It isn't. I see what you see. I think it's ignoring the quotes.

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

#474

Post by astrange »

Reuzel wrote: post #312
willhinsa wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions. lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"? what if i told you that search is an adversarial problem,…

> lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"? Yes. If that sounds so unacceptable or strange to you, I suggest you try it. Works really well when reasoning about unavailable data, or researching a field with slow peer-review process. > what if i told you that search is an…

> We could compare to the available data on the quality of (HTML) e-mail spam filtering over the years, which all have kept up. Like pg said: Spam is solved, when skilled spammers start creating content which does not look, feel, or talk like spam. So webcontent-spammers still are on the first 2 pages of Google, but with content not classifiable as spam/content farm.

I've actually noticed Gmail spam detection doesn't work as well in the last year or two. I get an obvious spam message maybe every other day. Ads with all images and all.

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

#475

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

esyir wrote: post #125
vgeek wrote: post #9

The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testi…

I often see this line of thought come up whether topics like this float around and wonder: how can we demonstrate /quantify /prove this. Especially since I'm already partial to agreement.

Sundar Pichai knows we aren't Reddit script kiddies here at HN.

He's going to need a seatbelt for that CEO chair if this devolves further.

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

#476

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

systemBuilder wrote: post #441
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the consequence of arranging a society around infinite financial corporate growth; everything is optimized to squeeze out every dollar for the balance sheet. Ironically we’re watching this play out now with products and techs that market themselves as “decentralized.” Maybe after this phase the tech community will consider this isn’t something we can tech our way out of.

No. It's Google squeezing money out of search to subsidize the CEO's flavor of the month money-losing AI project, that's what it is ... Ex-Search-Engineer

I think so too. Recent results are clearly ML garbage.

The reason Google isn't explaining it is because they can't explain it. They don't know why the ML is returning the results it's returning. And whatever it's doing in that black box, it's making gobs of money—Google's sole purpose since Ruth Porat started squeezing every dime out of every orifice–so just keep on keeping on.

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

#477

Post by skinkestek »

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…

> It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results.

This always gets brought up but the problem is far deeper:

When I search for:

> "weirdly specific ab345"

and the results contains thousands of pages without "weirdly specific ab34" then the problem isn't spam sites.

It is Google not respecting my queries.

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

#478

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #276
flenserboy wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Eternal September always wins.

I get it, I almost included eternal september in my own post, but this feels like a reductive way to overlook an actual problem.

Google actually found a result for Eternal September. Call me amazed! I didn't even have to use quotes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#479

Post by skinkestek »

bagacrap wrote: post #456
rhines wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not going to find people doing unpaid work reviewing the best exercise bikes, or other expensive items. Very few people can afford to go out and buy 10-20 exercise bikes, and fewer still people can afford to do so every time a new bike is released. And yet fewer will then go and write up their experiences and keep their list updated over time. For stuff like this you will only get spec comparison articles or c…

it doesn't have to be a single person that reviews all bikes. We can crowdsource this a la IMDb. But it does seem like a myth that there was ever, in history, a good way to answer the question of "best exercise bike". Google's current inability to answer the question isn't new.

> Google's current inability to answer the question isn't new.

IMO this is true.

It used to be however that the search results contained the phrase you looked for. This was later I think revised to also include pages that had links with the text in question pointing to them.

This kind of made sense for some queries (opinion based?), but for other queries (looking for technical content) it is actively harmful as it drowns out every useful site.

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

#480

Post by skinkestek »

seniorivn wrote: post #451
ichydkrsrnae wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what infuriates me most about this? It's that Google hasn't addressed it when it's clear as fucking day that their search results have gone in the tank. But now that I've typed that, I can see exactly why they haven't responded: a search company telling the world that its search results are f**ed. That would do wonders for the stock

if they are so bad, why competitors don't get a bigger market share? And if you think there are no competitors, you should know that there are bing, duckduckgo, that are basically the same engine and foreign search engines that successfully compete with Google is their domestic markets(yandex in Russia, Baidu in China and a few less successful others) all of them would be able to get at least some US market share in…

> if they are so bad, why competitors don't get a bigger market share?

Two things:

1. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic DDG has seen exponential adoption(yes actually mathematical exponential it seems) until last year. Now its traffic just increases at steady rate that most growth hackers would envy.

2. this happens despite their search results being just as bad as Googles: they (pr probably Bing) also sends me tons of completely irrelevant results because they ignore what I write in favour of what they think I write or want me to search for.

DuckDuckGo.com is my go to not because it is better but because:

- it is equally good now

- moving from DDG to Google is faster (just add !g)

- they don't have a history of showing me irrelevant and insulting ads.

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