Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
1–10 of 95 posts
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#2I was thinking this was going to be about human moderation in search filtering, but it actually is about engineers implementing manual input into the algorithm to force certain results to never appear or certain results to always appear.
I wonder what the consequences of no-filter algorithmic search results in. Google had to tweak its algorithm to avoid disinformation campaigns from spam in the past. Now we're dealing with another sort of disinformation campaign and I don't know a reasonable way for google to tackle it the way it is now.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#3I've heard that historically all the major search engines have used a lot of hand-tuned results (ordering, exclusions) across the highest frequency searches. IIRC Microsoft bought Powerset in '08 just before the launch of Bing specifically to shore up their human tuning. That said, I expected humans to play less of a role by 2020.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#4I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches.
For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.”
Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhaps I just search too many long tail queries?
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#5Somewhat click-baity. They are not implying runtime / live intervention (which isn’t possible anyways). Top bad results are tweaked. That is part of making the “algorithm”. Who says that is immoral or illegal?
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#6I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…
Halfway through your post you moved the goalposts from News to Search. When I search for the query you gave on google.com, I get a knowledge card about Richard Grenell. When I search on News, I do get articles about Ukraine. Are there any recent news articles about Richard Grenell or one of his predecessors though?
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#7I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…
So much this - you have to go from least popular to most popular terms to get accurate results - there is a weightage penalty of how further the word is from the start of the query.
if you search "Javascript issues Rshiny" (this is just an example not the actual query) - you only get javascript results for 4 to 5 pages of results.. when you reverse it to "Rshiny Javascript issues" - the results are better
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#8I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…
Having been on the fringes of the SEO industry for many years, my theory is that the spammers and algorithm gamers have slowly but surely won out. This has forced Google to de-emphasize keyword relevancy and instead prioritize content source--large and well known brands with high domain authority have captured increasingly larger numbers of queries over the years.
Someone at Google will probably disagree emphatically, but it seems to me like this represents a bit of an existential threat to web search. There's so much money in being #1 for popular queries that countless actors will throw enormous resources into getting there.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#9I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…
Halfway through your post you moved the goalposts from News to Search. When I search for the query you gave on google.com, I get a knowledge card about Richard Grenell. When I search on News, I do get articles about Ukraine. Are there any recent news articles about Richard Grenell or one of his predecessors though?
Good point. I see this behavior mostly on Search but the last example I documented is News.
Richard Grenell has been in the news: https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz...
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#10I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…
Halfway through your post you moved the goalposts from News to Search. When I search for the query you gave on google.com, I get a knowledge card about Richard Grenell. When I search on News, I do get articles about Ukraine. Are there any recent news articles about Richard Grenell or one of his predecessors though?
John Kornblum, former US ambassador in Germany, is often present in German media when they need somebody to "explain" the USA or stories from cold war era. So in Germany media he can be found, how much then finds the way back in English speaking media I haven't checked.