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Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#11

Post by spurgu »

danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’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…

It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my searches. In some cases it has even lead to queries looking like this:

"us" "ambassador" "germany"

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#12

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’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…

I'd agree with this assessment. Searching for anything technical seems to especially have terrible results. I'm getting to the point that "verbatim" and "this year" feel like they should be defaults. Oh, and it really, really needs a "filter out anything that looks even remotely like a top 10" switch.

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#15

Post by shrubble »

danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’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…

I have certainly been disappointed recently by Google search results when searching for certain information on microcontrollers and the Forth programming language. Forth gets corrected to fourth and/or is found in the idiom 'back and forth'

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#16

Post by shadowgovt »

danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’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…

Google search has moved away from keywords and towards queries.

"US ambassador Germany" makes it hard to comprehend what you intend. Do you get better results for "who is the US ambassador to Germany" or "news about us ambassador to Germany?"

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#17

Post by shadowgovt »

apatters wrote: post #8
danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’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…

Spammers and algorithmic gamers are / were also an existential threat to web search.

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#18

Post by shadowgovt »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #2

I 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 dealin…

What is the new sort of disinformation campaign?

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#19

Post by tyingq »

harikb wrote: post #5

Somewhat 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?

Not immoral or illegal, but using human raters to seed an algorithm can make the results worse. For example, it could skew to favoring websites where the rater is familiar with the brand. Which might rank mediocre branded content over less well known sites with much higher quality content.

That seems to match what I've seen over the last 10 years with Google.

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#20

Post by zerocrates »

spurgu wrote: post #11
danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’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…

It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my searches. In some cases it has even lead to queries looking like this: "us" "ambassador" "germany"

It frequently notifies you that it's ignoring a term in your search to give you a particular result: you see those "Doesn't contain: X" messages associated with a "must contain: X" link to override it... which I think just does the query over again but with that term in quotes.
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