Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

superhighway98.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 280 posts

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#221

Post by luckylion »

lonelappde wrote: post #191
blahedo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Links are still the super-major-almost-100% factor in determining ranking though, whether you call it PageRank or some other algorithm.

It's why buying expired domains and throwing your totally unrelated content on them works great.

It's why subdomain/folder leasing is a thing where affiliate sites will pay "high PR" sites to reverse proxy a subdomain or folder to them and (that's the important part) link to it from their main site. And boy, does that work. The same content that would be > page 100 suddenly is in the top 3.

There are other factors, but they don't matter nearly as much as Google's "we have 200 factors that contribute to the ranking" stuff makes it seem. You can throw the most atrocious low quality content on a site with lots of incoming links and it will rank at the top.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#222

Post by distdev89 »

Rubbish! I just searched for `gm` no capitalization, nothing and got a page full of results for General Motors, from news articles to the wikipedia page.

I searched for `dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth`

You do see the excerpt, but right underneath that you see the Snopes link.

I don't think Google should be in the business of debunking articles written years ago. As long as it's relevance algorithms can brings up contrasting sources, in this case the ABC news article and the Snopes stories. It's bad journalism from ABC that they haven't marked that article as redacted even though it's been proven false.

Recently I remember, seeing that the google card UI for the news marked an article as Satire, because in-fact it was a Satire article. I'm not sure if that's because the original article embedded some information that helped Google discover this.

They do a pretty good job at organizing information and making it available.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#223

Post by kd5bjo »

artificial wrote: post #220
zo1 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that, but the sheer scale of such an index. The size of the web now just makes anything small next to impossible without a lot of funding. And none of the existing search engines will probably allow you programmatic/data access to their index without a metric ton of cash

How is it that spiders/bots are able to "index" copyrighted content? Is it just one of those things where the ends justify the means or a holdover/tradition or some such?

It’s some combination of fair use and raw data not being copyrightable. My understanding is that only the creative expression that’s copyrighted, and not the actual words. So, if you distill out all of the creativity into something that’s purely information about the work, you’re probably fine copyright-wise.

There’s a long tradition of compiling and publishing concordances, which are just indices of every place each word appears in the original text. They’re generally not useful without access to the original, so noboy seems to mind them very much. Google’s index is just a modern form of the same thing.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#224

Post by josefx »

jonas21 wrote: post #159
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I also get gmail as first result for gm. However I also get a GM.com entry to the side of the search results.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#225

Post by rob74 »

One example I came across recently: if you search for "Amiga floppy disk capacity" (https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity), you get "1.76 MB", which is completely wrong. Of course, the Wikipedia article which Google's algorithm chose to extract this information from doesn't mention the actual capacity of "standard" Amiga floppies (880 KB): "Most Amiga programs were distributed on double-density floppy disks. There are also 3.5-inch high-density floppy disks, which hold up to 1.76 MB of data, but these are uncommon." - so Google picked the first number it found (the "uncommon" one) and ran with it. I'm just wondering which executive thought having this "feature" would be a good idea?!

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#226

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

I don't know, chronological formats have been there even before the WWW, namely Usenet, IRC and even E-Mail in a way. So this stuff also rarely made its way to web searches.

But probably there is a higher percentage hosted on proprietary platforms (Reddit, FB, ...) that replaces services mentioned above but personal websites as well.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#227

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

AltaVista's killer feature was the NEAR operator.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#228

Post by teraku »

fxtentacle wrote: post #211
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 see the same issue on GitHub too. Recently searched for a Windows API call and neither Google nor DuckDuckGo nor GitHub returned any result. Cloned a git repo where I thought I remembered seeing the function and 500 MB of downloading later grep confirms that I remembered correctly and that the exact keyword I had been searching for is present multiple times in the source code. My hunch is that since coders use an a…

I had this exact thing happen to me yesterday. I copied a function header from GitHub and searched in GitHub search for it to find the declaration. No results. Clonsed the repo, and clicked "Go to declaration" in my IDE bum "you have reached your destination". Wtf?

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#229

Post by CM30 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #15
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issues with the DMOZ approach were basically speed and corruption:

1. It was slow to add categories/sites, which especially hurt categories where things change pretty quickly (gaming, tech and media are good examples, since new systems and frameworks need to have categories added ASAP).

2. Editors were often drawn into corruption, and either judged submissions based on how much they were paid elsewhere or prioritised their own/friends/family's websites.

Both of these issues could potentially be fixed with some more resources and better oversight, but it may mean any future DMOZ equivalent would need a lot more funding than the previous one.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#230

Post by abdullahkhalids »

LoveMortuus wrote: post #217
userbinator wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's probably because Google is still good enough for most people, that there hasn't yet been a need to change the search engine. If Google becomes useless people will organically move to something else, of course it will first start with the tech savvy people, but as with all things it will trickle down to others. If the alternative isn't better then Google then, of course, nothing will change. I don't really see…

> If Google becomes useless people will organically move to something else,

This is not what happens easily. In a near monopoly, the monopoly product can be significantly worse than other options, or what is reasonably possible, but people will continue using it for a long time because of various economic, network, psychological lock-in effects.

Post reply on HN