Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#82"...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…
Google definitely says that they blacklist dangerous and deceptive sites. I don't think anyone would have a problem with that, though.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
examine.com is the first organic search result I get for "supplemental vitamin d sleep". Maybe the results are hit-or-miss depending on the subtopic (or Google re-tuned the algorithm in the intervening 3 months).
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#84"...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…
Google definitely says that they blacklist dangerous and deceptive sites. I don't think anyone would have a problem with that, though.
Probably not, but those lists are more than just dangerous and deceptive sites. They also include things that individuals at Google manipulate based on their own opinions which can be one-offs or added to the lists.
From the article: "The engineer "didn't want a piece of human anatomy or the description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer's name," as the paper describes it. The unfiltered search results were "kind of horrible," he added."
That has nothing at all to do with web safety or anything fraudulent or deceptive.
Also, just because people wouldn't have a problem with that limited use (if it actually was limited to just those two things), that still doesn't make the statement not technically perjury. If you were in front of Congress and they asked you something like whether or not your business changed the design of the website the user sees based on metrics/tracking that an AI bot determines might generate more user engagement for that user, and you say "no, we don't do that" but later on you tell everyone that you're only doing it for people that opt-in, that's probably considered perjury. And I'm sure you could see why, especially if all users were set to "opt-in" by default.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's completely clear. "Germany" gets dropped as there are overwhelmingly more recent stories about the "US ambassador" testifying at the impeachment hearings.
Except, it isn't clear. The user didn't type the word "Germany" on accident.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I have nothing to point to, but my experience is that enclosing terms in quotes makes no actual difference.
Google search has been getting increasingly worse for me over the last five years or so. In terms of the quality of search results, it has no edge over DDG.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Even those messages are very unreliable, though.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#88I’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.
I've actually found that the search results get better when Google can't customize the search results for the particular user. It's still not great, though.
For a few years, I've been blaming the reduction in the quality of search results on this attempt to "know how to serve me best". I still think that's a huge part of the cause, but I'm not so sure it explains everything.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#89I’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?"
For a few years, I got better results with natural language queries. However, over at least the last two, I've been getting better results by just including key words. The order of the words matters, though.
Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There seem to be very few "sliders" in today's web. I suspect all kinds of advanced functionality would go directly against what those companies are all about.