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Elevating original reporting in Search

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Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#71

Post by bogdanoff_2 »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #33
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 see the same behavior. I think it's time to assemble a list of examples.

"thesaurus that organizes words by category" - gives a bunch of online dictionary pages. I was trying to find a specific physical book I remember using in high-school.

"techniques for interpreting statically typed languages" - gives a bunch of super basic articles/questions about statically vs dynamically typed and compiled vs interpreted languages. DuckDuckGo actually gave better results for this.

I feel what's happening is that google is looking at what people are clicking during searches and then using that data to calculate absolute ranks for pages and websites. Those ranks are then not necessarily appropriate for different, less common queries or searching behaviors. However, this algorithm probably performs better in 99% of cases for some internal metrics, so Google ends up keeping it.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#72

Post by jrumbut »

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 was having this problem more and more until I realized "hey, those sites all have search engines" and now for general questions I search directly on SO and for deeper dives I go to Github.

Github's search is, in general, very good at finding what you searched for, all of what you searched for, and nothing but what you searched for. The one thing I want, and it's vague and complex, is a way to filter out the several hundred or thousand very very similar repositories that come into being due to a popular tutorial, school lab assignment, or frequently forked and slightly modified repository using the rare function I'm looking into.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#73

Post by andrewvc »

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…

Yes, people have been switching to DDG for years now, yet still google is utterly dominant.

Candidly, I'm mystified by the complaints. Google's search works great, and has for years for myself and everyone I know IRL.

Any post about any product that isn't brand new on HN is going to get comments along the line of "Company X? Their product is garbage, it used to be great! I've been using and once I got it going it was amazing!"

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#74

Post by dreary_dugong »

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…

Interesting. When I Google just the word "debate" I get an opinion piece from Fox as the second result.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#75

Post by jedberg »

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…

Try using verbatim search. It’s under “Search tools -> All Results”. Sadly I can’t figure out how to direct link it.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#76

Post by ebg13 »

specialist wrote: post #65
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.

You'd end up with an empty reading list.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#77

Post by wtallis »

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…

> No Greg Gutfeld sketch ?

Who?

> I think there ought to be more representation from right-leaning organizations

For a search specifically about a left-leaning organization?

> National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT

Two of those publications have much stricter paywalls/adwalls than any of the other publications you mentioned. One is a foreign outlet that's decidedly not known for quality international reporting. One is downright obscure compared to all the others. One is actually present in the Google News results for this topic.

> Slate (wow)

Do you have something substantive to say about Slate or its inclusion in the news results?

I feel like you aren't trying to make the fairest or strongest arguments. I'm sure you could find some more valid ways to try to make a case for google news results being politically biased.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#78

Post by mises »

specialist wrote: post #59
oliveshell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely-— for a year or two now. These days, if I have success with even a mildly technical Google search, it’s because I’ve enclosed every single term in quotation marks and/or turned on verbatim search, which doesn’t even work that well. Google is trying so hard to think for you that they’re ruining their core product.

I had totally forgotten about "verbatim tool". Thanks. Further, I see there's now an option to disable "relevant" (personalized) searches. https://www.google.com/preferences "Private results Private results help find more relevant content for you, including content and connections that only you can see." Followed by checkbox. The linked explainer suggests the "relevant" (personalized) search is informed by your activ…

Does any one know how to erase "personalized search" information from being not logged-in?

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#79

Post by ser_tyrion »

wtallis wrote: post #45
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 medi…

Or decided to drive traffic to pages with ads from google.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#80

Post by hsod »

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 think there ought to be more representation from right-leaning organizations"

Can you expand a bit on the philosophy behind this? Is "centrality" a fundamental value of news aggregation?

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