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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

#71

Post by reificator »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #56
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 uses a metric called termination of search. Did the user visit a page and cease searching for a given query? Great, the page answered the users question. Did they visit a page, bounce, and keep on searching? Well that page didn't answer the users query. Maybe there has been an uptick in people googling "US ambassador Germany" and looking for news articles about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings.

Great, so when I get fed up with Google results and give up, it compounds the problem further.

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

#72

Post by Razengan »

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've been noticing a distinctive decline in the relevancy of Google Search results for several years.

Google just doesn't seem to care about search anymore. Maybe they don't need to?

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

#73

Post by curious_fella1 »

doublekill wrote: post #43
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…

I do not think it is the SEO, but Google adapting to its less-technical userbase (people who search for "facebook" and click the first result). It makes sense for this target audience to give broad results. They seem to be relying more on neural language models to accomplish this. Google also surfaces more authoritative results than Bing, Google thus favors bigger commercial sites. Google is suprisingly good on vague…

Google has been introducing a new parser for natural language queries

https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...

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

#74

Post by stevenicr »

The HN discussion on MSN's reporting of this report has many aspects to consider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544537

much less HN discussion on the wall st journal's thread.

There are important issues, especially lack of transparency and censorship that warrant more discussions imho.

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

#75

Post by keenmaster »

doublekill wrote: post #43
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…

I do not think it is the SEO, but Google adapting to its less-technical userbase (people who search for "facebook" and click the first result). It makes sense for this target audience to give broad results. They seem to be relying more on neural language models to accomplish this. Google also surfaces more authoritative results than Bing, Google thus favors bigger commercial sites. Google is suprisingly good on vague…

Then why not further personalize search? I know that search results already vary according to things like the user’s location, but the entire search algorithm should be tweaked according to the user. Machine learning could potentially do a good job of this.

Google can also allow users to self-select. The way to do this would be to have a survey with multiple sliders that allow the user to demonstrate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much they care about a certain parameter. There would be default profiles that automatically set the sliders for you, like “academic.”

Even if Google doesn’t take this route for global search, they can add more features to advanced search. Google Advanced Search is underpowered, given Google’s technological capabilities.

Finally, with regards to the Advanced Search approach, Google can allow the user to create several search buttons that always appear on the Google front page. For example, an Arab American researcher may have a default search button, an Academic search button, and an Arabic search button, all of which can be tweaked along multiple parameters, as described above.

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

#76

Post by amelius »

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…

Perhaps the answer is simply that you have disabled user-tracking (either explicitly in Google's settings or by disabling cookies), so Google doesn't know how to serve you best, and you end up with the best possible answer for the "average" person.

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

#77

Post by rahidz »

shadowgovt wrote: post #26
tyingq wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Examine.com is one, here's the prior HN thread. Had it not been for that HN thread I would never have known that site even existed, despite having frequently searched for queries where it would have been extremely relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755

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

#78

Post by oblib »

I spent some time rating search results for google just to get a feel for how they rate pages. Not much time though because the pay is low and the criteria just silly.

In essence, they give you search term, a url, and about 30 seconds (at most) to make about $10 an hour or less.

Now, I'm pretty savvy when it comes to understanding what to look for but I found it nearly impossible to provide both an accurate rating and making enough money to make it worth one's while.

The people I knew who were doing this for a living told me flat out told that they take a fast glance, check a rating, and moved on as quickly as possible because they pay for quantity, and quality of the rating isn't a concern for them. So what they're really rating more than anything is visual aesthetics.

If the page looked nice and seemed to fit the description of the search term they'd give it a good rating.

Based on that, Hacker News probably wouldn't be rated very high by most of those who rate for google.

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

#79

Post by Jtsummers »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #62
dsl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I stand corrected, I wanted to provide some examples but I cannot reproduce this anymore. 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…

There was a time, several years ago now, where that was happening pretty regularly to me. It's gotten better, but since 2009 or so Google search quality has been on the decline for me. It only works well when I use things like site:blah.blah or quoted searches, or something I happened to search for and click on before (but couldn't find in history or had found on another computer). Finding novel things is a pain.

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

#80

Post by turc1656 »

"...even though company leadership has said publicly, including to Congress, that the company does not use blacklists or whitelists to influence its results."

Ummm, isn't that providing false testimony and considered perjury? Why is this shit never, ever prosecuted against a large corporation? It's simple - you know who lied under oath an it's recorded. You know that person knew what the truth was because they were a high ranking person who's job it is would be to know stuff like that. So either they committed perjury or they are grossly incompetent. And it's not like they didn't know what was going to be asked of them, nor did they state they weren't sure. Can't stand this crap. The two standard requirements are that the person needs to have intent to deceive and that it must be material information to the proceeding. Since the discussion was entirely surround this aspect of search, there logically must have been intent to deceive. Furthermore, being the central topic, it was most certainly of material significance.

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