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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?

#491

Post by marginalia_nu »

skinkestek wrote: post #487
mda wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old algorithm with todays internet content would be utterly garbage.

People keep saying that and yet the one person project search.marginalia.nu keeps delighting us. I can't imagine they use Googles newest algorithm.

I'm actually using Google's original algorithm, with a modification suggested in the original PageRank paper called Personalized PageRank that allows using a specific segment of the internet as a tastemaker in creating the ranking.

It's a bit funny because the authors of the paper suggest this modification and explicitly states it makes the algorithm extremely resilient to manipulation from commercial interests.

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

#492

Post by mcovey »

Accujack wrote: post #195
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…

>Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available This is exactly it. Amazon isn't a shopping site, they're a corporation using third party sellers to offload the risk and cost of providing a wide array of goods. They let customers experiment with product offerings, find products that sell using their web site, then cherry pick the most lucrative ones to produce and stock to com…

I almost always filter for items shipped from and sold by Amazon. The only times I buy from third-party sellers are when the seller is clearly the manufacturer or a large distributor.

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

#493

Post by moffkalast »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #429
moffkalast wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hashbang Maybe it's just me but those always seem vastly gratuitous. Like shouldn't the engine figure that out automatically? It's like half its job.

The engine should automatically detect that I want to be booted to a third-party site? Err, no. That would be infuriating behaviour if it happened without explicit instruction.

It should detect if a query is very likely to be something that appears on say stackoverflow and then offer it as a first search result.

Does doing the hashbangs actually throw you directly onto the site? I'd assumed it just restricted results to that site.

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

#494

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

skinkestek wrote: post #480
seniorivn wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a fair characterization. I think DDG is almost the nostalgia play. What's the David Byrne lyric? You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had.

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

#495

Post by skinkestek »

ichydkrsrnae wrote: post #494
skinkestek wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's a fair characterization. I think DDG is almost the nostalgia play. What's the David Byrne lyric? You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had.

> I think DDG is almost the nostalgia play.

Good point. Also their main focus seems to be privacy, not quality.

The privacy problems of Google just recently (i.e. last 5 years) started to bother me, their complete inability to fix their broken search operators has bothered me for a decade.

My guess is if DDG provided the same quality as the old Google instead of just this nostalgia play it could possibly rise even faster.

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

#496

Post by cs702 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #400
cs702 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. The fundamental, unavoidable problem is that the cost of providing high-quality results on the long-tail of possible searches tends to grow faster than the revenues that can be earned from those increasingly rare, obscure, long-tail searches. Any search service seeking to maxim…

The fundamental, unavoidable problem is that the cost of providing high-quality results on the long-tail of possible searches tends to grow faster than the revenues that can be earned from those increasingly rare, obscure, long-tail searches. I think even two years ago, Google searches had far more depth and yet Google was quite profitable (then the searches were still biased but now stuff is simply gone). Sure, if s…

I agree. In all likelihood, the decisions were made gradually to improve overall efficiency without losing search volume, but the unintended consequence was to degrade search quality, at first gradually in subtle ways, and then suddenly in very noticeable ways.[a] It's possible no one in the company's executive team has noticed the loss of quality. In fact, they may not think anything's wrong even now.

[a] I'm paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/102579-how-did-you-go-bankr...

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

#497

Post by hedora »

skinkestek wrote: post #480
seniorivn wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find their results to be better than Google’s. With google, you need to scroll past ads, then the garbage they pull from RDF triples (the boxes with facts, logos, etc), related searches, news, etc, etc and then you get the results.

With Duck Duck Go, there’s much less stuff to scroll past to get the results.

Test query: Samsung Galaxy

Google has 3.5 cell phone screens of header to scroll through. DDG has two screens, then the results, then the remaining screen or so of stuff google jams in the header.

This is much better.

For instance, the list of suggested searches is after the search results. Why does Google think I want to refine my search or switch to a different Google product before I read the results my first attempt at searching yielded?!? Do search logs show that most searches are from people that are typing things they don’t care about into the incorrect website?

Ignoring that, let’s quantify the results by position on the page. DDG has the top result in position 4 (samsung) or 6 (wikipedia).

Google has the first two hits at positions 16 and 27. (And stutters a lot of similar looking Samsung pages for some reason.)

I’m counting horizontal rows of content, skipping headers and columns of additional content.

(Edit: typos)

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

#498

Post by hedora »

rileymat2 wrote: post #461
systemBuilder wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of you guys are too young to remember but I remember something called yellow pages and white pages. Google has certainly forgotten. White pages Were a search index that could never be monetized in the phone book! Google offers only yellow pages!

https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec00003/?s... I do not think this is true, some businesses got special stuff in the white pages.

In the pages you linked, they’ve mixed businesses and personal lines, and bolded the business lines. In some states, there was a separate section in the back (On blue pages? Wasn’t there a red section too?) with just the business listings. Still, not a big deal either way.

Even with the yellow pages, listings were alphabetical, and grouped by business type, and businesses could pay for bigger listings. I’d forgotten how information dense listings used to be (probably due to lack of filtering, but it still makes me want yelp to do better)

https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04924x/?...

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

#499

Post by hedora »

seoaeu wrote: post #409
superasn wrote: post #134

There was a very good thread on HN about this not long ago(1). Google search is getting worse because it is letting companies like Pinterest game it. Instead of fixing the spam they are instead encouraging companies to spend more and more time on SEO and coming up with their own shenanigans like better ranking for using AMP (defunct now). People who generally make great content (think a researcher or a great software…

I don't understand this narrative that Google is making the search results get worse or "letting" companies game it. Search result ranking is adversarial! If the results are worse than they once were, that just means that Google is less far ahead in the arms race than they used to be

I think this summarizes the argument that Google search is imploding:

- Many of the problems are self-inflicted (dropping search terms, pages of other stuff before first link).

- They’re getting worse faster than their competition.

- Google apparently helped at least one external SEO team game image search into relevance-oblivion.

(Also, “narrative” usually implies “fiction” or “concerted disinformation campaign”, and is either used as a weasel word by liars referring to their own writing/reporting, or it’s used as a pejorative. I don’t think you meant to imply either.)

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

#500

Post by hedora »

blindmute wrote: post #446
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…

But the search isn't profitable without the ads. What is the competitor's motivation to build a search engine?

1) They can run display ads (linked to search terms, not users) on the results page, and nowhere else.

This eliminates the conflict of interest where spammy results kick off ad auctions that the search engine profits from.

At this point, revenue would be proportional to: market-share * expected-number-of-searches-before-success

So, the dominant player (with market share near 100%) would be incentivized to make the first search or so produce crappy results.

2) This incentive can be eliminated by throttling the rate at which ads are delivered to a given user (such as by repeating the same ads for free on search refinements, or simply skipping ads on search refinements).

DDG is still in step 1, where the upside on market share is much greater than the upside from spamming low quality results to increase incremental ad display rates.

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