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It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

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Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#191

Post by fiter »

kickscondor wrote: post #126
gwern wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised you had trouble finding Fravia. When I was writing my own Internet search guide ( https://www.gwern.net/Search ) recently, I had no trouble finding Fravia. Unfortunately, his guide is obsolete at this point and I didn't get much out of it.

Thankyou for the link to your search guide - this looks tremendous! Especially when searching for a specific answer to something. I wonder what you think about discovery when you are looking for something unknown within certain parameters... Like, say you are looking for an "interesting film blog" - a search term like that will often lead to pages of "Top 10 Movie Blogs" lists that are all largely clickbait or not th…

It looks like Gwern's guide is for finding something which you know already exists, rather than looking for something which may not.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#192

Post by PopeDotNinja »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #74
omaranto wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, even though DuckDuckGo finds the post, Bing doesn't seem to.

It's on Yandex. https://www.yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=Metallica%20only%20pla...

This is reminding me of the meta search engines that consolidated results from multiple sources. I haven't used one of those in probably 15 years.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#193

Post by mda »

Liquix wrote: post #104
founderling wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example: http://www.gnoosic.com/discussion/metallica__5.html No matter how you search for the content on Google, nothing comes up: https://www.google.com/search?q="Metallica+only+played+2+son... DuckDuckGo has it: https://duckduckgo.com/?q="Metallica+only+played+2+songs+fro... I checked the wayback machine and the content has constantly been on that url for over 10 years. This is the first example of an ol…

Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months? They've had to have been utilizing ML to 'improve' searches for some time now, but the quality of the results has decreased suddenly and inexplicably (for me).

Can you give an example from your search history? How can you quantify that results got worse?

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#194

Post by mda »

wyck wrote: post #105
Liquix wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months? They've had to have been utilizing ML to 'improve' searches for some time now, but the quality of the results has decreased suddenly and inexplicably (for me).

Yes, i'm having to go several pages deep and even then not finding anything relevant, I've started to use other search engines and reddit to actually find useful info.

Maybe you had this problem before but your expectations grew faster than technology? Can you think of something from your search history and fins anything that other search engines found but Google failed?

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#196

Post by yorwba »

kickscondor wrote: post #126
gwern wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised you had trouble finding Fravia. When I was writing my own Internet search guide ( https://www.gwern.net/Search ) recently, I had no trouble finding Fravia. Unfortunately, his guide is obsolete at this point and I didn't get much out of it.

Thankyou for the link to your search guide - this looks tremendous! Especially when searching for a specific answer to something. I wonder what you think about discovery when you are looking for something unknown within certain parameters... Like, say you are looking for an "interesting film blog" - a search term like that will often lead to pages of "Top 10 Movie Blogs" lists that are all largely clickbait or not th…

I'm no gwern, but here's how I do discovery. To find a page on the internet, you need to hand a search engine something that can be reasonably expected to be on that page. So if you want to find an interesting film blog, you should not use that as a search term, because you'll find lists of blogs, not the blogs themselves. Rather, you should probably use the titles of interesting movies.

There are many ways you could seed that search, but as totally-not-a-movie-buff I decided to check IMDb's list of lowest rated movies [1] and chose a title further down the list (The Wicker Man), on the theory that only dedicated people would be talking about movies that are bad, but not bad enough to be the worst. Searching for blogs (as identified by inurl:blog) mentioning "The Wicker Man" [2] does turn up a few promising results, like [3].

[1] https://m.imdb.com/chart/bottom

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=inurl%3Ablog+%22The+Wicker+Man%22

[3] https://blog.vrv.co/kaiser/4826/the-wicker-man-was-almost-lo...

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#197

Post by lnanek2 »

syphilis2 wrote: post #127

It's not just the old web. I have a small website that does not show up in Google's results. When searching for the title of the site it's the 7th result on DDG yet does not appear on Google at all (Google runs out of results after 19 pages, which is also ridiculous considering the search is very common). When I search for the domain name (sans tld) on Google the associated YouTube page is the first result, also an u…

Google does have some webmaster tools where, after you prove you own the site, you can check if there's something you have to fix about it to get listed, can submit new URLs for them to scan, etc..

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#199

Post by rolph »

lelf wrote: post #184
Liquix wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google poured billions into their search engine for two decades to make it better . Now that have a ridiculous amount of money and power, the search results get.... objectively worse . Which brings us to the elephant in the room: what are Google's motives behind this (clearly intentional) change? Could something as innocent as training a new neural net or testing a buggy version of the algorithm on subsets of users.…

> Which brings us to the elephant in the room: what are Google's motives behind this (clearly intentional) change? They are maximising ad revenue, not the search relevance/usefulness.

I was looking forward to seeing someone else share this opinion. So the google behavior is driving some users away, im wondering why others are sticking with it? I propose that in the course of professional contact we should strive to avoid use of google as a verb. Yes i know its not slick to say, "Perform a search - using the search engine." instead of, "Google it."; but it starves a mentality, i think it would disconnect the G-word from the perceived face of the internet, The whole point is a monopoly eventually gets out of hand and starts screwing its users, to its own benefit, due to largesse of the users. If google is to improve itself, We the users have to force it to by ignoring it and going elsewhere, This i think starts by RE-Realizing, as a herd, that there is choice other than the Alaughabet search engine [aka google].

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#200

Post by [deleted] »

rsync wrote: post #100
degenerate wrote: post #13

This author is in his own little bubble and doesn't understand the vast amount of blog-repost spam that google has to deal with. The way their algorithm most likely deals with this is a mixture of domain rank + tenure... how long has this copy of this article existed on this domain, and can we be sure this is the original copy? The author says the article was removed in 2006 (" [...] posts, were not accessible anymor…

"Google is not forgetting the old web unless we see evidence of content disappearing from the index that have been consistently hosted at the same domain & URL since their original posts." I can, very loosely and anecdotally, confirm. My personal website has been online for about 20 years and I just picked some deep strings of text and searched for them and google has the whole thing indexed just fine ...

[deleted]
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