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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#151

Post by basch »

ajmurmann wrote: post #123
Aeolun wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much it would increase/decrease if we filtered out all blogging software.

I haven't found individual blogs to typically be the problem but commercial websites that focus on things like how-tos. This is especially true if I'm just looking for an answer to a question. I frequently just end up searching Reddit or better a specific subreddit.

Even reviews. Searching best TV brings CNET, techradar, digitaltrends, Tom's hardware rank above rtings. Almost every one of those sites has the same paragraph of mumbo jumbo next to a TV name. It's become an art. There's nothing wrong with the CNET or digitaltrends roundups, but they also don't really add to the conversation or offer any unique insight, do they cut clutter better than their competitors? Hell 3 of my top 10 are futureplc results (Tom's hardware, techradar, whathifi.) The same company has seod its way to 3/10 results for that search.

There's obviously a level of notoriety beyond just quality. I don't need the same article 3 times under 3 logos.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#152

Post by btilly »

chrisco255 wrote: post #43

In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructi…

The book Trust Me, I'm Lying expands on this point greatly.

It is well worth a read.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#153

Post by nkurz »

cosmodisk wrote: post #110
abruzzi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about the “politically correct” comment, but the one thing I would ask of google if I could ask for something that they would deliver is to ALWAYS return results where ALL of my search terms are included. It doesn’t have to be verbatim, I’m good with them doing conjugations and maybe synonym matching, but if I add a qualifier to my search query, I didn’t add it because I don’t need it. This is my biggest…

Just add '+' sign before each keyword- seems to be working. I tried a sequence of 10 or so random and made-up words to see if it will find anything.while it returns results, it does it on a shorter search and it also says at the top that no results were found for this query.Then I started removing one keyword at the time and return the search. Eventually it found a matching result and it contains all four words from…

Are you sure this is on Google? I just tried with a three word query, and it failed for me.[1]

If true, this would be big news, as the "+" qualifier on search terms stopped being obeyed about a decade ago with the launch of... whatever that now-forgotten Facebook competitor Google used to have. The workaround was to use quotes around individual words, which mostly worked, unless it didn't. But the combination of using quotes and "verbatim" (under Tools/All Results") almost always worked.

[1] The way it failed is sort of interesting. I randomly tried "+rhino +cereal +gm", and the first result didn't include the word "rhino", and considered "gm" to be a synonym for General Mills. Quotes around the individual terms seems to work for this query, even without verbatim.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#154

Post by userbinator »

chrisco255 wrote: post #43

In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructi…

the herd mentality

Ever since the first time I heard that word, I've always imagined animals on a farm feeding happily at a trough, unaware of their impending doom. It turns out, that's closer to reality than I thought.

Edit: I mean the word "feed".

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#155

Post by userbinator »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #32

Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title makes no sense whatsoever. "Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any up…

Unfortunately it's the only way a lot of people find information on the Internet.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#156

Post by ssss11 »

notacoward wrote: post #75
chrisco255 wrote: post #43

In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructi…

A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anyw…

Its the capitalism of it.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#157

Post by mc32 »

userbinator wrote: post #154
chrisco255 wrote: post #43

In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructi…

the herd mentality Ever since the first time I heard that word, I've always imagined animals on a farm feeding happily at a trough, unaware of their impending doom. It turns out, that's closer to reality than I thought. Edit: I mean the word "feed".

it's also when predators go after prey and the heard of whatevers blindly follow the direction of a peer, sometimes into peril.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#158

Post by airstrike »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #32

Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title makes no sense whatsoever. "Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any up…

Agreed, but even "Google sometimes gets things wrong" isn't entirely accurate.

So it favors popularity over accuracy. So what? Google is not in the business of providing the most accurate search results. It's in the business of generating ad revenue. If popular links make Google more valuable, then favoring them is "getting things right" from the perspective of a private company.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#159

Post by jonas21 »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #109
jrockway wrote: post #47

> Search for "GM" and the Gmail homepage ranks prominently. Is Google pushing its own products on people? Well, yes, but not here. This is an example of a query refinement algorithm at work. Google is altering its results in recognition of the fact that many people who search "gm" subsequently search for "gmail." I tried this and there are three news articles about General Motors, an infobox for General Motors, 4 sea…

Just tried this. GMail was the first link, validating "the Gmail homepage ranks prominently." Also, all the suggestions were gmail (before the search.) The rest of the results were GM related news/Twitter/links.

Are you sure you're not confusing Google and DuckDuckGo? (I know I do from time to time)

For me, a Google search returned only General Motors results in the top spots, while a DuckDuckGo search had Gmail as the first result after the news stories.

https://i.imgur.com/m2iXSN9.jpg

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#160

Post by chris_f »

l0b0 wrote: post #150

I really wish there still existed a search engine which would absolutely, without reservation of any sort, simply respect the quote and minus operators. I searched both DDG and Google this morning for something with a minus operator, and the search results for both included the unwanted keyword in the bloody page title. And no, quotes never ever meant "search for similar terms", but the big players now just ignore al…

Check out Runnaroo. It will respect those operators better than most.

Disclosure, this is my side project. It aggregates results from about 30 different vertical search engines based on the query. Google is actually the source for the web results.

Here's an example search for "GM" (saw that discussed earlier in this thread):

https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=GM

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