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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

superhighway98.com

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#11

Post by tomaszs »

Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only concern was to guess how it may be written dont on a page, so Google can find it for me.

I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better results.

But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same result.

Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is not.

You could write an article and Google indexed it and showed it if people searched for it. Now it does not work that way. If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours.

And also Patelisms. Once, a short post was enought for Google to index it. Now it has to be essencially a book. It does not need to answer any question, as long as it has a length of a book and thousands of illustrations.

I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Giving the freedom to explore rather than giving cheap crappy answers.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#12

Post by zozbot234 »

CM30 wrote: post #5

Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO. That gets a lot of blame for ruining the internet, especially on tech sites. But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.

SEO is behind many of these dynamics, though. The "more accurate"/"better quality" signal is getting so noisy that rewarding freshness and hoping the user meant to search a very current topic is perhaps the best you can do. Quite disappointing of course (since we'd rather have good-quality content be easily reachable) but not entirely unexpected.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#13

Post by hombre_fatal »

basch wrote: post #7
hombre_fatal wrote: post #3

> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. What does this even mean? The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work. Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how ma…

I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find. Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside fi…

> google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions.

Can you explain what this means?

I see people saying this wrt to Duck Duck Go: "No, the results aren't worse, you just have to re-learn how to search with it" and all they really mean is that you need to stack more context into the search input which is strictly worse since you can already do that in Google if you need to put a finer point on your search.

And they mean that since DDG doesn't know "Elm" is a programming language most of the time, by "re-learning search" they seem to mean adding "lang" to the input. Where "re-learn" seems like a romantic way to phrase this obvious problem of the search engine needing more context. In the same way I had to "re-learn how to use a keyboard" when my crappy 2017 Macbook Pro keys started coming off.

How does your complaint differ from this?

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#15

Post by zozbot234 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #8
CM30 wrote: post #5

Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO. That gets a lot of blame for ruining the internet, especially on tech sites. But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.

If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat. Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and would want to chat.

> If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat.

Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#16

Post by ehsankia »

basch wrote: post #7
hombre_fatal wrote: post #3

> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. What does this even mean? The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work. Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how ma…

I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find. Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside fi…

> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas

Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.

The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree that it's hard to find for anyone looking for it. The issue is that most people aren't looking for it, and you can't force them.

A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and that's perfectly fine. They spent their whole day working hard, come home, and now you want to force them to spend their night studying and discovering new ideas? That may be the internet you want but it's not what people want. The internet can be for more than one thing.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#20

Post by ehsankia »

maps7 wrote: post #14
bovermyer wrote: post #2

Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

Does searching articles on wikipedia count?

I would say that using a website's own internal search is fair game, but good luck trying to find, for example, the link to a blog you forgot the name to. You can try Wikipedia, Youtube, StackOverflow, WaPo's article, but I doubt you'll ever make your way to that blog without the URL to it.
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