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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#241

Post by TeMPOraL »

m463 wrote: post #195
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 suck…

> Normally competition would take care of all this,

Not necessarily. When you find yourself with beancounters and MBAs at the helm, they for sure will optimize the company to outcompete others. Such companies will eventually die from the rot, but not before they drag down the entire industry they're operating in.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#242

Post by [deleted] »

nkurz wrote: post #153
cosmodisk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usin…

[deleted]

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#243

Post by TeMPOraL »

aembleton wrote: post #232
jonas21 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To add another data point, my Google results for "gm" look like those on your screenshot, with a market summary card and then GMail being the first result, and General Motors second - with one extra difference that "Top Stories" card in my case is above, not below the GMail result.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#244

Post by TeMPOraL »

lonelappde wrote: post #190
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.

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.

The public doesn't have much say in things, it consumes what it's given. Cheap candy is the cheapest to produce, so that's what gets delivered.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#245

Post by anoncake »

anovikov wrote: post #205
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…

Maybe it's just that now there's whole lot more money in the game of tricking Google? In 2010, people too dumb to use a computer were just getting on the Internet, as smartphones only started to become a thing. Now these people are in and there is lot of money to make on them. SEO spam instead of car repair manuals is a joke. It has a lot bigger and scarier implications. Just try imagining someone like Obama winning…

That does not explain why Google "finds" results that don't even match the query.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#246

Post by anoncake »

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 you're saying that for-profit companies by nature don't provide value?

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#247

Post by bborud »

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…

Normally you would be right. Service X is not the Internet.

But this doesn't really apply anymore once service X dominates the way a large proportion of the western population are trying to locate something - as opposed to clicking on links or bookmarks.

Reality is what actually matters. Not what people think or what they wish. It is what people do and what actually happens.

The reality is that Google not only holds a vastly dominant market position in search - but its search is the default way a majority of people interact with the Internet.

The address bar in your browser is not just an address bar. It is both a search bar and an address bar. And that makes a real difference when the search engine behind it is most often one search engine.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#249

Post by toto444 »

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.

> 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.

I spent a few days thinking about it not so long ago and I have thought of something rarely mentioned. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I have completely solved the problem, just noticed it changes the perspective.

If I remember well, from my user perspective, the biggest change Google introduced was the ranking by page. Yahoo used to rank by site not by page. Maybe going back to a ranking by site would help creating a good index.

A site would be associated to a number of keywords, say 20 and that's it. That would give incentive to pick the keywords you want to rank for carefully and really be an expert about them instead of having SEO experts deciding which keywords they want to rank for this week and write empty TF-IDF optimized blog posts.

This sort of search engine would not give you the answer to everything but it would give back power to the websites. The information retrieval process would then be 2 steps :

- find a good website

- find the information within the website

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#250

Post by titzer »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #236

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 explaine…

Not sure I got that message, considering the bulk of the population motors around on their little cushy chairs, drinks slurpies all day, and is endlessly served by robots, never doing any strenuous work at all, and only interacts with their screens. The spaceship has artificial gravity, artificial sun, artificial everything.

The movie is one huge anti-consumerism screed.

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