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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#191

Post by lonelappde »

blahedo wrote: post #135
cmckn wrote: post #64

> Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google successful. I don't disagree…

> founded on ... the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" I started grad school at Brown in 1997 and I remember a talk there, by someone from Google or connected to it, about PageRank. PageRank was still new, Google was still in beta. Free swag from dotcoms was literally growing on trees. But I digress. I remember that the narrative about PageRank at the time was not about popularity, but about expertise. I re…

PageRank is not how Google tanks pages now. It's not the reason Google serves so much junk.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#192

Post by adelHBN »

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…

I couldn't agree more. I research a lot of history and get junk... so much junk on Google. I also research technical info for our website and get junk. What do you use? What do you recommend?

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#194

Post by _trampeltier »

I tryed to search an article / press release, I saw about Corona in january. But it seems I can't search for "just from january" there is now so much news about Corona out there, there is no chance to find this article. And much worse, even I know some key words, Google does present most of the search results by totaly ignoring the half of my keywords.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#195

Post by m463 »

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…

I think this applies to many large companies.

The ones that do best, the ones that are the greatest public benefit, seem to be governed by a strong leader who stays at the helm.

As soon as the people at the top change, you get jostling and unclear leadership, and power gets diffused.

You get emergent behavior - lots of internal and external competing for power and interests - and the ability to say "no" or "this sucks" or "we will do this" happens less frequently.

Normally competition would take care of all this, but with big gorillas that dominate a market, it might take a while.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#196

Post by combatentropy »

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…

> Google has been in decline since ~2010

I would agree. The quality of the company seems inversely proportional to the number of employees, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-...

In the early 2000s, it was the one search engine that returned relevant results. All the old ones returned a hodge-podge of key-word matches. Google used the number of citations as a strong signal of relevance (the number of pages that linked to a page meant something).

In the age of GMail beta, Google was my hero and I wanted to work for them. They were doing new things with the browser. First was Google Pack, which included necessary software like Firefox. Then Google introduced Chrome, which was even better.

Both began to descend. I don't know, they became slower and clunkier, as if they were designed by the denizens of any number of companies. Google had about 50,000 people at this point.

Recently, I can't stand even to read Google's documentation, because of its (1) bureaucratic wordiness, and (2) cluttered layout that reminds me of that video about Microsoft redesigning the iPod box. In the early 2000s, Google was a maverick. Nowadays, Google is hard to distinguish from any other corporate giant.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#197

Post by jessriedel »

_trampeltier wrote: post #194

I tryed to search an article / press release, I saw about Corona in january. But it seems I can't search for "just from january" there is now so much news about Corona out there, there is no chance to find this article. And much worse, even I know some key words, Google does present most of the search results by totaly ignoring the half of my keywords.

I don't understand. Are you filtering by date? This is one of the search tools from Google.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#198

Post by realusername »

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…

For me the line was the Panda update, that update just completely destroyed the quality of the search results. They did try to improve the quality since that update (with moderate success) but it never came back to the level they had before it.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#199

Post by int_19h »

Someone1234 wrote: post #163
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…

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…

The problem isn't just SEO, it's that Google itself aggressively rewrites queries to produce more results (which I suspect they want to do to show more "relevant" ads).

On the most extreme end of this, I've seen four-word queries produce results, in which three of the words were stricken out. More often, it's just one word, but it's usually exactly the one that makes the difference between a very specific query, and a very generic one.

Worse yet is that they try to do synonym substitution, but their algorithm has a ridiculously low bar for that. Like, you might be searching for "FreeBSD", and it will substitute that for "Linux", or even "Ubuntu". Or search for a specific firearm model, and it finds "gun".

Quoting keywords suppresses all of that, but synonyms are actually useful - if it did them accurately...

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#200

Post by dang »

armitron wrote: post #167
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…

Fully agree with you, Google -as a lot of us expected- has turned into a corporate scourge. Which makes their mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" come across like a bad joke. They really should update it since they don't even bother to keep up appearances anymore.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Denunciatory rhetoric isn't substantive and worse, tends to be repetitive.

Thoughtful critique that adds information (like userbinator's GP comment) is of course welcome.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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