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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

#21

Post by goatinaboat »

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…

the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings

Given what we know about the political leanings of Google it is very hard to see that as anything other than an attempt to direct the narrative.

Even if it isn’t, it’s still unclear how an algorithm would make that jump from those keywords. A completely different country, for example.

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

#22

Post by DoingIsLearning »

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"

The quote used to enforce "must include expression" but this is no longer true with google queries.

My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google.

For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.

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

#23

Post by Ozzie_osman »

There are three things going on here, one of which is probably bad and the others pretty normal. - humans ranking results: these are called evals and Google has been doing them for at least 15 years. It used to be that there were a sort of "golden" set of manually ranked queries and results, and any change in the search algo would run against them to make sure nothing broke. My guess is over time, as the algorithm became less heuristic and more AI-driven, these sets are instead used to train the models. - blacklisting of misinformation or spam: as a user, I appreciate this. As a citizen, I'd rather not trust Google as the arbiter of truth, but I generally think they've made good choices here (vs other tech companies). Until society has solved this problem (through regulation or otherwise) I'm OK with this. - giving advice or favors to advertisers: this is messed up. And will be hard to argue that if they do it for advertisers they don't also (anti-competitively) do it for their other internal properties.

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

#25

Post by MR4D »

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…

Interesting - DuckDuckGo gives similar results when you search from the news page.

Very weird.

[0] - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hx&iar=new...

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

#26

Post by shadowgovt »

tyingq wrote: post #19
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.

Can you give some examples of higher-quality-content sites that Google search is consistently missing?

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

#27

Post by shadowgovt »

shrubble wrote: post #15
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'

Out of curiosity, do you do your searches with JavaScript disabled or logged out of your Google account?

The engine should generally pick up relatively quickly that when you specifically search for "Forth," you usually mean the programming language and not a typo. Catching these differences in use case is why customized search is a feature.

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

#28

Post by shadowgovt »

MR4D wrote: post #25
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…

Interesting - DuckDuckGo gives similar results when you search from the news page. Very weird. [0] - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hx&iar=new...

I would hypothesize that "us ambassador germany" is actually a hard query to suss out the meaning of ("Does the user want to know about the US ambassador to Germany? The German ambassador to the US? Some news snippet involving Germany, the US, and any ambassador?")

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

#30

Post by calibas »

shadowgovt wrote: post #17
apatters wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google and SEO are a fundamental issue with the web itself. It's been a while since Google could simply search for websites, but that's no longer possible in the same manner it used to be. Google has become so dominant that the web itself changes to accommodate Google.

Google can no longer be an independent observer, as the act of observation changes the results!

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