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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

#271

Post by aaron695 »

Everyone can make a better search engine in the comments, but strangely, barley no one is actually commenting on the actual case study. Search based around time of publishing.

I guess another committee to paint the whole garden shed is easy, talking about what paint to use is hard.

I suspect Reddit needs to add meta data of the publishing date.

It is complicated in a forum, is it publish date or last comment date. But Google is still getting the basics wrong ie Every comment date is a year ago, still less than a month in search.

It still doesn't help many time based issues (News always displays new headlines on old articles. So you'll see Iran funeral crowd crush on 'old' news articles in search) but it's a start.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#272

Post by overgard »

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…

For what it's worth, when I search for your site it's the first result. You have to click past the "did you mean", which searches on your name originally, but then it's there.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#273

Post by Swizec »

CriticalCathed wrote: post #248
Swizec wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it possible that there is no site providing non fluffy content on your query? For a lot of niche subjects, there really are very few if any substantial content on that topic. “Very few if any substantial” The problem is that google won’t even show me the very few anymore. It’s just fluff upon fluff and depth (or real insight at least) is buried in twitter threads and reddit/hn comments, and github issue discussi…

I mirror your sentiment. It used to be that you could use your google fu and you'd be able to find a dozen relevant forum posts or mail chains in plain text. It's much, much, harder to get the same standard of results. "Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore." Yeah, if I know where I'm looking (the sites) then google is useful since I ca…

The devil is in this detail: Regular users don’t want those “weird looking” results. Normies prefer the fluff.

And guess what: most users are normal. Us here on HN are weird:

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#274

Post by cjbillington »

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…

FWIW I see your website as the first results when I google it:

https://imgur.com/a/jhx7N9D

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#276

Post by labombeatomique »

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…

Ahh, Zachary Vorhies. I remember your bizarre internal posts literally claiming that Obama's birth certificate was fake. I wasn't surprised at all when you leaked a pile of confidential information to a far right conspiracy theorist group (Project Veritas), and were subsequently fired.

I wouldn't trust a single word that comes out of this guy's mouth.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#277

Post by leereeves »

CriticalCathed wrote: post #241
DenisM wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the US and Google does not display zachvorhies.com when searching for "zachvorhies.com".

Does for me. USA. [0] https://i.imgur.com/S2rPywz.png Also, is this guy a Q follower or something? The favicon is a Q.

> Also, is this guy a Q follower or something? The favicon is a Q.

Actually the favicon is a headshot.

https://www.zachvorhies.com/favicon.ico

And that's also the icon in the page source:

I wonder why Google shows a Q.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#278

Post by overgard »

echelon wrote: post #23
MrEldritch wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.

Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with ` `, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely…

I don't think there's any reason to think google was responsible for the semantic web not taking off. People just didn't care that much. It may have been a generally useful idea, but it didn't solve anyone's problem directly enough to matter.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#279

Post by JamesBarney »

leereeves wrote: post #261
preommr wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's search rankings are based on opinions held by other credible sources. This isn't really blowing the whistle when, as you admitted, Google admits this openly. And maybe your site doesn't get ranked well because it's directly tied to project veritas. I don't like being too political, especially on hn and on an account tied to my real identity, but project veritas and it's associates exhibit appalling behavior…

In a political context, "credible" is often a synonym for "agrees with me". Anyone ranking "page quality" should be conscious of and try to avoid that, and yet the word "bias" doesn't even appear in the linked guidelines for Search Quality Raters. Of course Google's own bias (and involvement in particular political campaigns) is well known, and opposed to Project Veritas, so it's quite possible that you are right and…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas

I doubt this affected search rankings but Project Veritas does have a ton of credibility issues.

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