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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#231

Post by s5ma6n »

basch wrote: post #208
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.

It's obviously a harder problem than I want to believe it is, but considering the terrible quality of results as of late, I don't think this would be worse. First, start with a whitelist. Hand pick high quality publications, and rank them towards the top. This may tilt results back towards institutions, and away from blogs. Second, punish similarity. If everybody is reposting AP or Reuters without any additional info…

How would you pick the options by hand? This way you would introduce the thought and point of view bias of the people working at Google to the results. Additionally how would you pick who is the winner? For example how would you compare a technology article is more correct coming from various sources? They also have their own bias introduced to their content.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#232

Post by aembleton »

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 get the same as you for DuckDuckGo, but my Google does look different. I guess Google is customising the results: https://imgur.com/dccAZBg

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#233

Post by koonsolo »

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 agree with you on the SEO spam.

But I perceive this as Google losing the battle with SEO. On one hand Google writes the algorithms, and on the other SEO tries to exploit these algorithms to rank as high as possible.

I was thinking that a solution would be instead of page rank, have an author rank. This rank keeps track of authors that are experts at certain topics. When you search for certain keywords, the articles of these known experts are ranked higher.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#234

Post by h91wka »

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…

Very true. Two years ago I fully switched to qwant and DDG, and never looked back. It's not because these two engines are great, it's because Google's output is as good as random.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#235

Post by zozbot234 »

CM30 wrote: post #229
zozbot234 wrote: post #15

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. 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 priorit…

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

Federation would help with both factors, though. A workable "right to fork" is a powerful incentive against corruption. Notably DMOZ was not federated or "forkable" in any real sense, even though it did have a reasonable amount of sites mirroring it.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#236

Post by TeMPOraL »

Speaking of popularity over accuracy:

> Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need.

I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently, and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is not showing that message. It's actually explained quite explicitly in the movie that the fatness of people is the side effect of prolonged stay in space, and not of their dependence on technology.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#237

Post by TeMPOraL »

teraku wrote: post #228
fxtentacle wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, GitHub's search is next to useless to me because I can't trust it. I search for a string, maybe get some results, but I can't be confident that those are all the occurences of the string I searched for.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#238

Post by TeMPOraL »

koonsolo wrote: post #233
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 agree with you on the SEO spam. But I perceive this as Google losing the battle with SEO. On one hand Google writes the algorithms, and on the other SEO tries to exploit these algorithms to rank as high as possible. I was thinking that a solution would be instead of page rank, have an author rank. This rank keeps track of authors that are experts at certain topics. When you search for certain keywords, the articles…

I think it's more than that. If you also consider AMP and various Chrome redesigns, there is this feeling that Google wants to take control of the web. URLs and site's actual locations are being de-emphasized, and searching is becoming more "ask question, get an answer" instead of "enter query, get documents best matching it".

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#239

Post by miracle2k »

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…

A full text search with a good ranking is still a full text search. The point here is that Google used to do the job just fine, but no longer is.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#240

Post by gempir »

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…

Some buzzword recipes are impossible to google.

Overnight Oats as an Example. You just find pages upon pages of blogspam. And almost every page has the same useless information. No normal recipe site is somehow in the top 10 pages.

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