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Elevating original reporting in Search

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Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#41

Post by logicchains »

enlyth wrote: post #32

Has anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless? Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according to some weird NLP machine learning inference on what it thinks I'm actually trying to ask. Top results will include maybe 50-75% of the words I actually typed in, and it will treat the rest as mere hints or related words. My queries end up looking like this afte…

Twice in the last month I found Bing gave me a better search result than Google (thing I was looking for in the first couple answers, not even on the first page in Google). That never happened to me before.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#42

Post by danso »

dmg826 wrote: post #16
danso wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides algorithms, they have a team of raters who manually evaluate the results. The rating guidelines are specifically enumerated in this guide: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... For example, check out page 26 for their grid of "Examples of Highest Quality Pages" Algorithmic and signal-wise, there are common conventions in English-language journalism that signal "original reporting", o…

The human raters are used to assess the performance of the algorithms (i.e. do human opinions align with algorithmic ones), not to rank content directly. A recurring theme with Google is that they always want to solve problems algorithmically.

But leaning on automated algorithms seems like the only way to realistically scale for day-to-day needs? I was going to posit that Google seems like the company most open to mixing human and automated processes. But that's not necessarily fair to Facebook, for which moderating user content and interactions is a much different problem space than search rankings; and of course, YouTube seems to have the same issues as FB does.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#43

Post by AFascistWorld »

sverige wrote: post #3

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

Tech companies are being pushed to become judges on everything or face backlash.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#45

Post by wtallis »

enlyth wrote: post #32

Has anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless? Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according to some weird NLP machine learning inference on what it thinks I'm actually trying to ask. Top results will include maybe 50-75% of the words I actually typed in, and it will treat the rest as mere hints or related words. My queries end up looking like this afte…

I've noticed over the past year that a Google search for almost any medical term will bury the wikipedia article on the third or fourth page of search results. The first three pages are all sites with extremely watered-down content and little to none of the cross-referencing links that make wikipedia a good exploratory tool (and a natural fit to PageRank).

Google has obviously decided that anyone searching for a medical term should only be shown pages that are equivalent to what a doctor would tell a scared patient in the first three minutes after delivering a diagnosis. Sure, those WebMD pages are probably going to be a bit more accurate than the wikipedia article, but largely because they're saying much less and have fewer opportunities to be mistaken. It feels rather condescending and patronizing.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#46

Post by dunkelheit »

CDSlice wrote: post #38
brlewis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet googlers on HN who work on ranking would appreciate that. Here's a recent one from me: typical tcp packet size

What exactly do you mean by that? When I search it up I get a SO answer saying what the max packet size is and another (closed) SuperUser answer that says that their is no average tcp packet size because that depends on the specific application. Both of those seem pretty good to me, but I'm not a low level networking guy.

I think the problem is that google confidently and authoritatively displays (in a big and bold font) "65535 bytes" which is an answer to a different question.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#47

Post by codezero »

CDSlice wrote: post #44

For everyone who complains about Google having worse results, have you blocked or disabled Google's tracking? I haven't and haven't had any trouble finding things with Google and I wonder if the two are related in some way.

I aggressively block tracking and my google results are fine.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#49

Post by sseagull »

CDSlice wrote: post #44

For everyone who complains about Google having worse results, have you blocked or disabled Google's tracking? I haven't and haven't had any trouble finding things with Google and I wonder if the two are related in some way.

In some ways that might be true. But I also wonder if google is using tracking/profiling as kind of a crutch.

A while ago, I had google forget about all the things I had searched for. I then wanted to look up some features of C++17, but google kept coming up with info about the C-17 Globemaster instead. Rather than just searching for my terms explicitly, it tried to interpret what I wanted, and failed miserably without knowing I had previously been interested in programming.

This doesn't explain Google groups searches, though, where zero results come up even though you copied/pasted the title from an old post.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#50

Post by brlewis »

CDSlice wrote: post #38
brlewis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet googlers on HN who work on ranking would appreciate that. Here's a recent one from me: typical tcp packet size

What exactly do you mean by that? When I search it up I get a SO answer saying what the max packet size is and another (closed) SuperUser answer that says that their is no average tcp packet size because that depends on the specific application. Both of those seem pretty good to me, but I'm not a low level networking guy.

I definitely wasn't asking for maximum packet size, which a search feature showed in huge print as the answer to my question. I don't expect the search algorithm to know my precise intent, but I'd like it to weigh the word "typical" highly.

Between google, bing and duckduckgo, only duckduckgo presented this above the fold: https://etherealmind.com/average-ip-packet-size/

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