61–70 of 95 posts
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…
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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.
Do you have any evidence to support that? The Google documentation indicates quotes are still the exact match operator https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
From memory I do recall the +/- and "" operator being overriden if there was a "popular" search query that contained broader results than my specific query.
Specifically for the "" operator was that the query would drop "" so instead of showing x results which must include that expression it would show broader results as if the expression was not contained in "".
I recommend to get off of their search engine, go to DDG
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 has "overfitted" because their A/B test told them messing up more queries gets them higher "engagement". They are masquerading engagement as satisfaction, clouded by their incentive to have people dwell on ads longer.
Memes:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/639/8ef...
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/608/619/bec...
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/641/517...
I mean, factually, there is 0 evidence vaccines cause autism, and it was shown that the guy who started this conspiracy theory did it basically as a scam to make money. So am I supposed to be upset or something that Google is tweaking their algorithm to not push falsehoods? Same thing as the suicide query. I say this as someone who has and still periodically suffers from deep depression, who has searched for suicide methods in the past: am I supposed to have a problem that Google is "pushing" results that try to keep me from killing myself?
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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.
> Not immoral or illegal, but using human raters to seed an algorithm can make the results worse ...versus asking an oracle what the "good" results are? It's not clear what you'd propose as an alternative.
At the moment it's a Frankenstein set up with a rules/algorithm based ranking subsequently shuffled around by several separate ML runs with different aims.
The FTC did once unearth a Google attempt to purposefully influence the human ratings: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/ (long read, but worth it). Find this section of the paper:
"Unable to get positive reviews from raters when Google demoted comparison shopping sites, Google changed the raters' criteria to try to get positive results."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah but what I meant was that this is becoming increasingly frequent. I mean you would think that Google would try to include pages matching your full query in the top results and then when you keep moving to subpages it could give some less related hits as well. Now I often see these in the top 3 results.
With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.
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…
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.
Searching for a topic that's recently become, er, topical, but I'm interested in earlier discussion.
DDG's very limited date-ranged search is especially frustrating here. Book search is often more useful.
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I think the first few are problematic too. Which conspiracy theories? Moon landing, pizzagate, Epstein? No idea where to draw a line there. Demonstrably inaccurate? I doubt they remove young earth creationists. It seems easy at first, but it doesn't take long to find a lot of gray areas.
This is going to be based on conventional wisdom. The evaluators are a biased representation of general public. What do most people think are conspiracy theories? Despite all the policy guidelines, in the end it's not just a legalistic decision but more like a survey to see what people think. If you're running a search engine, you need to track of what people think somehow, or you'll totally miss things like cultural…
Depending on what region of the world the publisher is in, and what region his/her readers are in.. and where the raters are from, can make some issues.
Some years ago I sat in a class at a college for building contractors when the subject of burying electrical lines came up, people scoffed at the cost, then the teacher did a survey and found that 90% of the class thought radon gas was a fairy tale conspiracy theory, not real, and not something they would ever consider when building.
Half of those in the class had already been in the building professions for years and some cases generations.
