Elevating original reporting in Search • Hacker News Board

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#61

Post by Kique » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #50

CDSlice wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I'm seeing that etherealmind link as #4 on Google, and then #3 on DDG. And the results above it on DDG are also related to the maximum size, and the entire sidebar on DDG is the same stackoverflow link about the maximum size.

Not sure if DDG is really that much better than Google here.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#62

Post by kkarakk » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

This is cool, i'll have to dig less to see what the original source was for a news report. Also giving more weight to news sources with pulitzers and such is EXACTLY how search SHOULD be rather than ranking up Buzzfeed writers who rewrite news in clickbait worthy fashion

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#63

Post by charlesism » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

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…

    > Has anyone found that recently Google search 
    > is becoming more and more useless?

Absolutely. I use DDG now. Google spams me with ads, and ignores my search terms.

This 'search disease' seems to be spreading, too. Retailers like Amazon, NewEgg, Ebay, and others happily insert results that they want the user to buy, instead of putting the user in control. On Ebay, half the time they remove filters I want to use. Amazon haphazardly injects their off-brand products into my results, even if I sort by price. NewEgg and Walmart show me results of partner retailers whom I don't know whether to trust.

Maybe this state of affairs works for the average user. It doesn't work for me. It mainly causes me to wade through pages of useless results, trying to filtering them out by eye.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#64

Post by ryanianian » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

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…

It is basically impossible to find things with google anymore. Quotes don't work. You have to go to Tools on the results page, and change "All results" to "Verbatim". (You must do this for every search it's not a persistent setting.) Even then you'll often follow results and Control+F to find one of the key words as part of your query and it won't be on the page. Even DDG has been following similar patterns lately - it's a terrible time to be online anymore.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#65

Post by specialist » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

fareesh wrote: post #57

Okay let's give this a try news.google.com -> Democratic debate Websites: BBC, Vox, Guardian, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Slate (wow), The New Yorker, USA Today Absent: National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT So basically the news algorithm considers these kinds of stories high quality: 1) Stephen Colbert plays Democrat Drinking Game (NYT) No Greg Gutfeld sketch ? 2) Funniest one-liners at the Democrat…

I'd probably pay for a filter that distinquished editorial from reporting.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#66

Post by dunkelheit » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

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.

And what do they do with these human assessments then? Of course they feed them back to the algorithm so that it can improve. In effect it is still humans influencing the search rankings albeit indirectly. So it is a bit duplicitous to say that "it is the algorithm that decides" when there are humans providing learning data for it.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#67

Post by MiroF » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

outime wrote: post #58

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…

Almost every thread that's somehow related to Google Search has this same question (which often goes to the top) and the same answers. It's difficult to imagine that most of the people haven't seen this a bunch of times as well. And while I agree with this, I'd love to know why people keep asking and/or upvoting this same question over and over. Is it for the sole purpose of bashing Google or what is it? Honest quest…

1. This is a big community and I haven't noticed this in every thread.

2. Google hasn't changed - so until they do, I suspect they will continue to be criticized.

People generally will continuously criticize things that continuously screw them over.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#68

Post by charlesism » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 3:03 PM UTC

pyb wrote: post #53

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…

Recently ? This has been an issue for at least a few years, IME.

Imo, the shark-jumping moment for any search engine is the day when they deprecate the "0 results" page. I mean, when the user searches for "alice bob" and the search engine pretends the user searched only for "alice" to avoid showing an empty page. Google certainly started doing that earlier than one year ago.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#69

Post by helloguillecl » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

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 just noticed the same problem. Searching for "lithium" wont let me find the wikipedia article for the metal. News and youtube song from Nirvana are showed instead. PD: Google knows I'm very interested in renewable energy, they constantly suggesting me news regarding the said matter.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#70

Post by journalctl » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #21

aviraldg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the alternative? For lawyers to specify search algorithms?

Maybe a giant list of websites in alphabetical order? (joking - we don't need another DMOZ)

That would at least make SEO easy:

“How do we appear at the top of the results?” “We’ll call our website ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA - Wikipedia’”