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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#181

Post by perl4ever »

takeda wrote: post #21
jbritton wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?

I miss the time when Internet was so small that a curated list was possible (Yahoo was priding itself to be biggest curated list[1]) [1] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/

I still have a paperback book that claimed to be a comprehensive, not curated list of internet sites. It didn't even come with electronic media as became customary with computer books later on.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#182

Post by [deleted] »

midef wrote: post #71
voz_ wrote: post #59

The author had a few bad queries and chalks the whole thing up to "Google Ruined the Internet". This is akin to having a bad experience with airline food and declaring that flying has ruined travel. It is absurd, it reeks of the stallman-esque style of negative, borderline luddite spew. Instead of offering a solution, this person just rants. Google has been a pivotal center of the internet - information has never bee…

"information has never been easier to find!" I think it depends what you're looking for. I realize this is obscure, but I can't find any reference online to a big Facebook Platform developers' conference that happened in 2007. It drives me nuts because I was there at Chelsea Piers with 1,000 people, but it's like it never existed.

[deleted]

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#183

Post by bcrosby95 »

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…

Or even youtube. The site gives you zero ability to manage your subscriptions in a reasonable fashion so you're best off just watching whatever it thinks you should watch. I've resorted to bookmarks over subscriptions because it's a better user interface than what the site gives me.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#184

Post by twomoretime »

airstrike wrote: post #158
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.

>So it favors popularity over accuracy. So what?

As the defacto front page to the internet, it is aeguably in society's best interest for search results to return more than SEO spam and ads.

I think the modern state of Google is a huge disservice to civilization, compared to what it was and could be. By prioritizing popularity it reduces the majority of search queries to the lowest common denominator and encourages shallow, non-technical culture.

I think what we're seeing in the refinement algorithm is a regression to the layman's mean, so to speak, as they tune (train?) The algorithm to work better for the majority of their users, who happen to be non-technical.

But when you excessively dumb down technology you reduce incentive for people to learn anything and, more importantly here, the dumbing down means showing entertainment and SEO results over possibly more technical content.

Personally I find it disheartening when I search for technical words and the only results are celebrities or media.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#185

Post by not2b »

Google was designed to prioritize popularity from the very beginning: that's what their original PageRank algorithm did. Their algorithm has no way of knowing a concept like "accurate". If almost all of the links on a given topic go to BlatantlyWrong.com, and when everyone clicks on the BlatantlyWrong.com link and not the AccurateButBoring.org result that is #2 on the page, the users will reinforce the wrong answer.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#186

Post by userbinator »

perl4ever wrote: post #176
userbinator wrote: post #161

IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherw…

"do not even contain all the words in the query" You may be overlooking where Google found the missing words or concepts in a page that linked to the hit, just not within the hit itself. That can actually be useful sometimes.

found the missing words or concepts in a page that linked to the hit, just not within the hit itself.

Then why not just show that as the result.

That can actually be useful sometimes.

...hence why the related: operator exists, it's just not the behaviour that most people expect by default.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#187

Post by not2b »

redwall_hp wrote: post #177
Someone1234 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just glad I'm not alone, sometimes I second guess if I am the problem. Currently just to get basically workable results I'm finding myself putting "every" "keyword" "in" "quotes" (to make sure they're actually in the result pages at all), the site: modifier to restrict it to real sites, and negative modifiers (-"keyword") to remove some SEO results. Google used to be "magic" in that it knew what you were thinking…

I think it has to do with shifting expectations. All of us who use the Web seriously, and have been for years, want a full text search engine. The average user wants what Ask Jeeves promised to be: something that takes vaguely question-shaped queries and spits back a fast answer. Or a glorified URL bar to outsource memory and effort.

No, you don't want a full text search engine. If you think you do, you don't remember the pre-Google world. It was impossible to use the older search engines to find a reasonable explanation of a common topic, because to Alta Vista and other search engines of that era, every page that contained a given term was considered equal to every other page, and it would give you all of them in a random order. You could add lots of AND and OR to try to exclude what you didn't want, and this might cut you down to 40 or 50 pages to go through to maybe find what you want.

But when Google first came out, it was a shock. You could just search for something like "Linux", and the most authoritative sites all showed up on the first page.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#188

Post by jkaptur »

redwall_hp wrote: post #177
Someone1234 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just glad I'm not alone, sometimes I second guess if I am the problem. Currently just to get basically workable results I'm finding myself putting "every" "keyword" "in" "quotes" (to make sure they're actually in the result pages at all), the site: modifier to restrict it to real sites, and negative modifiers (-"keyword") to remove some SEO results. Google used to be "magic" in that it knew what you were thinking…

I think it has to do with shifting expectations. All of us who use the Web seriously, and have been for years, want a full text search engine. The average user wants what Ask Jeeves promised to be: something that takes vaguely question-shaped queries and spits back a fast answer. Or a glorified URL bar to outsource memory and effort.

Yeah, I'm sort of surprised that there isn't a semi-popular "web grep" tool for people who would rather use regex, some understandable ranking algorithm with knobs to tweak, etc.

Of course, you'd have to read a manual to use it and it would have a ton of spam, but some people just want lower-level control - they still sell stick-shift cars.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#189

Post by userbinator »

not2b wrote: post #187
redwall_hp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has to do with shifting expectations. All of us who use the Web seriously, and have been for years, want a full text search engine. The average user wants what Ask Jeeves promised to be: something that takes vaguely question-shaped queries and spits back a fast answer. Or a glorified URL bar to outsource memory and effort.

No, you don't want a full text search engine. If you think you do, you don't remember the pre-Google world. It was impossible to use the older search engines to find a reasonable explanation of a common topic, because to Alta Vista and other search engines of that era, every page that contained a given term was considered equal to every other page, and it would give you all of them in a random order. You could add lo…

and this might cut you down to 40 or 50 pages to go through to maybe find what you want.

At least those search engines gave you that many results to go through... now Google gives you less than that, full of spam (despite the index probably containing far more), and you'll be in CAPTCHA hellban if you try harder to get to the rest.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#190

Post by lonelappde »

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.

Why? Where is the money in providing high quality information to the general public? The public wants cheap candy.

High quality data exists, but it's not much of the ad supported web and not much of what users what to read.

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