Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? • Hacker News Board

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

#501

Post by honkycat » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #424

honkycat wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Discord is the new reddit. When I want information about a product, I join the discord forum associated with that hobby and I ask for recommendations. Since Discord is a chat service like IRC, I get replies from humans instead of shady astro-turfed websites.

This is a decent solution, but not at scale. A big reason to even have all previous discussion archived is searchability and information availability. If the question has been answered it shouldn't be hard to find it. Having to have a human do the work of explaining something every time someone on the internet wonders about it is infeasible.

How often is information like: "What is the best quality X for this price point" evergreen to the point it is even worth writing down?

And the entire point of the discussion is that astro-turfing has papered over everything useful on the internet in order to sell low-quality crap.

The fact it doesn't scale is exactly why I use this method. Nobody is paying people to sit in a discord chat and recommend fishing poles. I know the information I am getting is from an enthusiast, if not a professional.

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

#502

Post by trulyme » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

rhines wrote: post #426

matheusmoreira wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either a webpage or a browser could do that. The browser should do it. Websites often do this intentionally in order to trick users into clicking ads. The only way to stop these abuses is for the browser itself to stop enabling them.

Unfortunately Google would make the Gmail team very grumpy if they did this - Gmail's by far the worst offender in my experience. Every single time I open my email I have to remind myself to wait for a moment before clicking on my newest emails, because most of the time there's going to be a couple ad "emails" popping in and shuffling everything else down a few seconds after all the real emails have loaded.

Maybe something that Firefox and Safari could implement then? :)

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

#503

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #111

These days, if I want to search on something highly controversial, Yandex usually gives the best results. Google has perfected the "twiddler"[1] so it's impossible to find anything off narrative for many topics. [1] https://youtubecensorship.com/2019-08-18-google-youtube-rigg...

Interesting site, wasn't aware of it until now. Will revisit.

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

#504

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

vgeek wrote: post #30

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've pondered this, too. Why not a DMOZ 2.0 type concept, where you seed the index with high quality sites and grow from there. Freshness won't matter as much for most topics, so crawling X times per day probably won't be necessary. Maybe have user defined flags to indicate the types of results they want (large sites, small sites, high authority, technical sites-- maybe different sort by features) with backlinks/doma…

That exists there: * https://curlie.org/

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

#505

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

rhines wrote: post #426

matheusmoreira wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either a webpage or a browser could do that. The browser should do it. Websites often do this intentionally in order to trick users into clicking ads. The only way to stop these abuses is for the browser itself to stop enabling them.

Unfortunately Google would make the Gmail team very grumpy if they did this - Gmail's by far the worst offender in my experience. Every single time I open my email I have to remind myself to wait for a moment before clicking on my newest emails, because most of the time there's going to be a couple ad "emails" popping in and shuffling everything else down a few seconds after all the real emails have loaded.

Google's grumpiness is an excellent measure for how much we need a feature. The grumpier, the better. Other browsers should do it. Firefox, Safari, Brave, everyone else.

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

#506

Post by breakfastduck » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 12:49 AM UTC

Reuzel wrote: post #427

breakfastduck wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, that's plausible. Should be measurable quantitively too. Can you cite some data on this? :) It's a bit bloody rich for you to come out with that attitude when your entire point revolves around your opinion of 'common sense' > Do you really think it is possible that Google runs an implementation test of a new ranking model, and deploys it, while all measurements, human labeling, and user tests show it is doing…

Of all things, I am sure that this discussion thread did not add value to this community conversation, and as such, serves as spam. Apologies, and let's hope Google bot finds ways to ignore low-information content in a threaded forum. Maybe they could even locate the exact post which caused the derail, and apply some authority penalty on its author.

Smartness system

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

#507

Post by betwixthewires » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 6:13 AM UTC

honkycat wrote: post #501

betwixthewires wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a decent solution, but not at scale. A big reason to even have all previous discussion archived is searchability and information availability. If the question has been answered it shouldn't be hard to find it. Having to have a human do the work of explaining something every time someone on the internet wonders about it is infeasible.

How often is information like: "What is the best quality X for this price point" evergreen to the point it is even worth writing down? And the entire point of the discussion is that astro-turfing has papered over everything useful on the internet in order to sell low-quality crap. The fact it doesn't scale is exactly why I use this method. Nobody is paying people to sit in a discord chat and recommend fishing poles.…

Yeah, the astroturfing is a huge problem. The entire internet has become a way for people to ruthlessly compete for your attention, it's like pulling up to a used car lot every time you try to find information.

What is needed is a way to archive actual useful information for lookup later.

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

#508

Post by otherotherchris » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

I can never be sure that Google and Bing (including DDG) are actually searching for what I tell them to, even after putting all my keywords in quotes, using intext:"keyword", or using "verbatim" mode. I strongly suspect Google is substituting synonyms and "near synonyms" with irrelevant garbage to maximize Adsense yield.

DDG and Bing are worse, as they ignore the quotes altogether rather than just most of the time. Yandex has a vastly smaller index and ignores quotes a lot of the time as well.

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

#509

Post by rhines » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 6:10 AM UTC

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.

The challenge with that is avoiding companies manipulating results. IMDB works reasonably well with thousands of people going on and rating any given movie - it's harder for a company to mess with those ratings because they'd need a lot of accounts. Plus there's no real incentive to - people don't just go and watch the highest rated movie, they watch multiple movies and often don't even care about the ratings if it has an actor they like or is in their favourite genre or whatever.

With something like exercise bikes, the calculus changes. You're going to have much fewer ratings, and people tend to only buy one bike every 10+ years, and they'll want to buy the best one they can afford. Now there's a real incentive for a company to manipulate the ratings, and it's also much easier to do so.

I totally agree though that the current inability to answer the question isn't new. And I don't think that will change - I don't really see a viable alternative to the current situation. But if someone comes up with one then I'll be very excited to see it, as the current approach of using lists from big sites to go find higher-quality reviews from smaller sites is not the most efficient. But maybe that's not the worst thing - I like that there's still value to small independent reviewers.

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

#510

Post by Siira » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

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…

I don’t see how Google benefits from SEO ad spam; part of the money is going to the spam site, while Google could always put any ads it wants on the search result pages without paying these spammers.