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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?

#171

Post by Semaphor »

rurp wrote: post #16
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…

Google ignoring what I had actually typed and instead showing results to a more popular query that was similar, but distinctly different, is what finally got me to switch over to DuckDuckGo. Now that I've gotten used to DDG I find Google unpleasant to use. The amount of ads and clutter on the page is distracting, and the organic results seemed ever more skewed towards ecommerce results.

DDG only just recently added the feature that they show you which terms they ignored… most of the time. This is actually my main problem with DDG (which is my default search engine), that they like to ignore even quotation mark-forced words. My impression is that Google sees "" as an important signal for what you want while DDG sees it as something you probably did by mistake and decides to show you a ton of unrelated results (with the word not even showing up at all), even on the first page. It’s the one thing that annoys me about the otherwise superior search of DDG.

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

#172

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jborichevskiy wrote: post #151
winternett wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that we'll arrive soon at StatGate... The point where we find that many companies have been providing erroneous and/or outright false web stats, recommendations, reviews and other metrics to users in order to steer and increase profit. Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, an…

I suspect the same. And it wouldn't be unprecedented: WSJ: Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years (2016) https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...

Well even a company of exemplary moral character like Facebook might make a simple mistake every now and then.

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

#173

Post by oehpr »

ineedasername wrote: post #87

I think a better question that isn't asked is the following: Has Google created a market for ads where non would exist if they simply provided only organic results? By this I mean that it's possible the main reason Google Ads are useful for companies is because Google has reinforced a sort of negative Nash equilibrium by allowing competitors to squat on organic results by purchasing ads against those better results.…

If you put the question to people "Would you have an easier time finding good products and services if there were no advertisements?" I think the majority of people would answer "no".

It's sad state of affairs we're in if we can't even imagine finding out about something without that knowledge being forced down our throats.

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

#174

Post by rowathray »

bordercases wrote: post #9

You can remove some bias by using startpage.com but it won't eliminate SEO. Maybe Yandex?

Switch to OneSearch. It's just an anonymizing wrapper around Bing like DuckDuckGo, but since it's run by a public utility (Verizon) rather than a private fly by night outfit like DDG, I trust it slightly more.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

kerkeslager wrote: post #97
Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.

I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.

He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does.

As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.

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

#177

Post by SolaceQuantum »

scarejunba wrote: post #116
hunter-gatherer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google trying to guess everything I was doing before me is what finally broke me from them. The day (not terrible long ago) I started typing an email in gmail and they were auto-typing entire sentences for me I lost it. I don't need an algorithm to help dictate my sentence structure. I can do that on me own.

That one showed up as a pop-up box for me and asked me if I wanted to turn on suggestions. I don't think they changed that.

If you ignore/x/adblock the popup it'll assume yes.

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

#178

Post by earthboundkid »

thebean11 wrote: post #130
bluGill wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good? I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.

Because a newspaper does not have enough user targeting data; their ads would not be as valuable since they would not be as well targeted.

Newspapers used to be relatively well targeted. You know people reading the Podunk Times are probably in the Podunk region. But now the competition has surged ahead, and you can target on Facebook "people who run as a hobby and are African American and live in a metro with great than >500K population" or whatever.

But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms?

I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.

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

#179

Post by xp84 »

bplot wrote: post #54

I'm surprised nobody has been talking about the fact that muddying the distinction between ads and organic results is illegal. Google, Amazon, and others have been moving this way for a while, despite the FTC sending a warning a few years ago: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2013/06/...

Wow. I actually didn't know that there was any law or regulation that even in theory could make Google do this at least in the USA.

But then again, this is the same FTC that has proven unable for decades to rein in the MLM industry, whose blatant scamminess makes Google look like a Boy Scout. So I am over here not holding my breath at all that they will ever draw a line. Google will just keep making that "Ad" label smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, and the FTC will do nothing other than maybe extracting a tiny fine in a settlement every 10 years or something.

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

#180

Post by xp84 »

rowathray wrote: post #174
bordercases wrote: post #9

You can remove some bias by using startpage.com but it won't eliminate SEO. Maybe Yandex?

Switch to OneSearch. It's just an anonymizing wrapper around Bing like DuckDuckGo, but since it's run by a public utility (Verizon) rather than a private fly by night outfit like DDG, I trust it slightly more.

This seems fine and I'm not anti-onesearch or anti-Verizon in particular, but why do you feel that DDG is "fly by night"? Because they're small?

I think more Americans have been scammed by Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T than have ever even heard of DuckDuckGo! I have plenty of tiny class-action settlement checks to prove it.

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