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How is search so bad? A case study

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Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#221

Post by kccqzy »

rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

Not to totally detract from your point, but my previous experience with SEO people showed that some SEO strategies actually not only improve page ranking, but also actual usability.

The first, and the most important perhaps was page load speed. We adopted a slightly more complicated pipeline on the server side, reduced the amount of JS required by the page, and made page loading faster. That improved both the ranking and actual usability.

The second was that SEO people told us our homepage contained too many graphics and too few text, so search engines didn't quite extract as much content from our pages. We responded by adding more text in addition to the fancy eye-catching graphics. That improved both the ranking and actual accessibility of the site.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#222

Post by creato »

rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

> I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore.

> It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better.

It's hard for me to take this seriously when wikipedia exists, and almost always ranks very highly in search results for searches for "knowledge topics". Between wikipedia and sources cited on wikipedia, I find the depth of almost everything worth learning about to be far greater than I can remember in, say, the early 2000s, which is seems like the "peak" of google before SEO became so influential.

In general, I think there are a lot of people wearing rose tinted glasses looking at the "old internet" in this thread. The only thing that has maybe gotten worse is "commercial" queries like those for products and services. Everything else is leaps and bounds better.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#223

Post by drpixie »

rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

From my end, it looks like google search is very strongly prioritising paid clients and excluding references to everything else. Try a search or view from maps, it shows a world that only includes google ad purchasers.

Google has become a not very useful search - certainly not the first place I go when looking for anything except purchases. They've broken their "core business".

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#224

Post by erklik »

zackees wrote: post #219
rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

The real reason why search is so bad is that Google is downranking the internet. I should know - I blew the whistle on the whole censorship regime and walked 950 pages to the DOJ and media outlets. --> zachvorhies.com What did I disclose? That Google was using a project called "Machine Learning Faireness" to rerank the entire internet. Part of this beast has to do with a secret Page Rank score that Google's army of w…

> Despite the fact that I've had around 50 interviews and countless articles written about my disclosure, my website zachvorhies.com doesn't show up on Google's search index, even when using the exact url as a query!

I am not sure what is happening but I directly searched for your website : zachvorhies.com on Google (in Australia, if that matters), which returned the website as the first result:

https://i.imgur.com/Z7RTsuE.png

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#225

Post by mariushn »

drpixie wrote: post #223
rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

From my end, it looks like google search is very strongly prioritising paid clients and excluding references to everything else. Try a search or view from maps, it shows a world that only includes google ad purchasers. Google has become a not very useful search - certainly not the first place I go when looking for anything except purchases. They've broken their "core business".

It also favors itself. I searched for "work music". First 9 results are from youtube.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#226

Post by creato »

zackees wrote: post #219
rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

The real reason why search is so bad is that Google is downranking the internet. I should know - I blew the whistle on the whole censorship regime and walked 950 pages to the DOJ and media outlets. --> zachvorhies.com What did I disclose? That Google was using a project called "Machine Learning Faireness" to rerank the entire internet. Part of this beast has to do with a secret Page Rank score that Google's army of w…

> Despite the fact that I've had around 50 interviews and countless articles written about my disclosure, my website zachvorhies.com doesn't show up on Google's search index, even when using the exact url as a query!

I just tried it, it's just showing results for "zach vorhies" instead, which it thinks you meant. I just tried a few other random "people's names as URL" websites I could find, sometimes it does this, sometimes it doesn't.

Furthermore, the results that do appear are hardly unsympathetic to you. If google is censoring you/your opinions, they're doing a very poor job of it.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#228

Post by erklik »

avionicsguy wrote: post #102

This should probably be a separate submission but why is search so bad everywhere? - Confluence: Native search is horrible IME - Microsoft Help (Applications): .chm files Need I say more. - Microsoft Task Bar: Native search okay and then horrible beyond a few key words and then ... BING :-( - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SS…

> - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SSD. What's going on there?

I use this software utility called Search Everywhere, its surprisingly good, fast and fairly accurate most of the times :)

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#229

Post by kops »

A shoutout for duckduckgo here. I tried both qwant and duckduckgo about a couple of years ago but the quality of search results forced me back to google in a couple of days. But I gave it another shot a few weeks ago and I have been pretty happy with the search results from duckduckgo and the fact that the ads do not follow me around the web based on my searches is rather pleasant. I must admit that google hasn't done anything bad to me but their sheer size and scale is scary enough for me to look for alternatives.

Now back to the search quality, I wanted to find out when exactly world economic forum 2020 is happening and google won hands down (search term = world economic forum 2020 dates). But for now and for most of my day to day search terms duckduckgo is doing okay. I know this won't last for long as they also are looking at advertising dollars but I hope then someone else will stand up to challenge duckduckgo+google combined.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#230

Post by miket »

The article hardly supports its conclusion with these cherry-picked examples; however, the core reason these results don't meet the author's expectations is that Google's AI does not understand the content of webpages well enough to identify the publication date accurately (at least anywhere near as accurately as a human can). Google's publication date is based on whether it found changes to the HTML on its own crawl date (which is very noisy due to today's dynamically generated website) or based on schema.org/microdata, which as other commentators point it is game-able for purposes of SEO, or simply missing on most sites.

As a contrast, take a look at how Diffbot, an AI system that understands the content of the page by using computer vision and NLP techniques on it, interprets the page in question:

https://www.diffbot.com/testdrive/?url=https://www.reddit.co...

It can reliably extract the publication date on each post, without resorting to using site-specific rules. (You can try it on other discussion threads and article pages, that have a visible publication date).

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