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How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

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Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#71

Post by xyzzyz »

president wrote: post #39
jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

> what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective Did anyone besides Google sales and marketing people actually believe that?

Indeed, who are all those people giving Google $100B a year, with 20% growth YoY, to run their ads? They must all be fools to believe that Google is giving them anything of value.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#73

Post by jiveturkey »

JohnFen wrote: post #52
jiveturkey wrote: post #42

I'm done with Google as of today. The evil genius of making links look like ads, is not just the straw that broke the camel's back; it's the entire bale. There is mass hysteria about Google in general. They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. That said, they inspire others that are indeed nightmares. The entire third party tracking industry is a nightmare. And it was alre…

> They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. Wait, so they aren't collecting as much information about me and my use of my machines as they can anymore? When did that change?

No they aren't and never did. They don't, for example, install a supercookie (like AT&T has done) so that they can track you the person vs "you" some uniquely identified user. Where are the pitchforks for AT&T?

To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person. In the cases they necessarily identify you the person (e.g. Google Pay where they know who you are), they firewall that data and do not make the connection to you, some anonymous but unique user. They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme. They "quickly" aggregate and anonymize the data so that they can sell their customers (ad buyers) demographics, not individual people.

They could collect much more information than they do.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#74

Post by gshdg »

javiercr wrote: post #20
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as…

To get the old behaviour for literal search using quotes enable the "Verbatim mode" (Tools > All results > Verbatim) It's a must if you're a developer searching for some obscure error message, yet still most people don't know about it.

I tend to get zero results in verbatim and then find what I'm looking for after following a rabbit hole from some other search. It's like Google's given up on indexing more than 5% of the web any more.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#75

Post by Retric »

skrowl wrote: post #58
blackearl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

Most people can choose only phone company or cable company for internet (some people only get 1 or the other). There are LOTS of search engines to choose from that are freely available. DuckDuckGo is pretty great these days. Microsoft is even is making a search engine now, I've heard! /s

Google has a near monopoly on search which is unrelated to their competence serving adds.

So, Google could theoretically be terrible at advertising and yet still make insane profits from it. Just as Comcast’s internal IT systems might be a mess. This is why monopolies tend to be less efficient over time, nothing is forcing efficient operations.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#76

Post by smichel17 »

reaperducer wrote: post #51
lanstin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I should give DDG another try, it was not that great last time I tried (few years ago?)

Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is t…

I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#77

Post by ogre_codes »

monadic2 wrote: post #22
ogre_codes wrote: post #19

I have to disagree fundamentally with the author on this point: > but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. There is nothing ugly about getting people exactly what they need instantly. As for the main thrust of the article, I’ve already found Google’s results mostly untrustworthy. For some time search results have been so d…

> Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. What, no ads?

Originally no. Then the first rev with ads had ads that were unobtrusive, obviously adverts, and often relevant.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#78

Post by nerdkid93 »

thirdtry wrote: post #15

I miss the days when I could search with AND, OR, +word and -word. Now if I search google with more than one word it no longer searches the internet. Instead it searches for ads that are somewhat similar to my query and features those. Any useful links on the first page are accidental.

The -word syntax still tends to work for me on subsequent searches (when I searched for a similar query but without the -word).

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#79

Post by Reedx »

blackearl wrote: post #34
jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual?

Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#80

Post by gtirloni »

caymanjim wrote: post #29

I've seen various stories about this for a week, and I kept wondering when they were going to roll the change out so that I could see. It turns out that I just don't see any of the ads/sponsored links at all normally, presumably because uBlock is hiding them. I guess I'm surprised that enough HN users would even notice this.

The search results were changed to add a favicon and hide the URL. Adblockers wouldn't help with that.
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