Who cares whether you return accurate results if you can send the user down a rabbit-hole of some completely irrelevant topic?
Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
261–270 of 280 posts
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. Algorithmic "timelines" (which aren't timelines at all) are one of the biggest mass scams ever perpetrated. It allows giant companies to sit and mediate personal friendships, and extract rent for anyone who wants more reach (even within their existing, opt-in audience). I think daily about ways to get peop…
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. This would imply HN "censors" the front page. Of course that's nonsense. Sometimes sorting by an algorithm is just sorting. In the case of HN it's up votes, and in the case of Google it's a basket of hundreds of criteria (including up votes if you think of clicks on results as voting). Google probably does…
> I'd be surprised if they're not impartial about everything else.
Assuming impartiality seems awfully optimistic, given both human nature and the fact that Google admits that it is committed to maximizing profit.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
They provide value in a specific form, which is aligned to their goals, and it may or may not overlap with what's optimal for society. But they're not in the business of providing what's best for society. That's a byproduct of competition, not a goal from the outset.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#264Earlier 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
I wonder how many pages would be worth indexing for such a tool though.
Probably a tiny subset. But the problem is finding that small subset!
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#265Earlier 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…
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…
I left Google in 2010, so it's just a wild guess, but I suspect a big part of the issue is learn-to-rank is probably being trained on everyone's searches. I think it would probably do much better if they used the presence or absence of search operators as a simple heuristic to separate power user searches from common searches, and trained a separate ranking model on power user searches.
Maybe they're already doing this, but it sure acts like learn-to-rank is always ranking pages as if the query were very sloppy.
It's been a long time, and I certainly never read the code, but I vaguely remember a Google colleague mentioning something (before learn-to-rank) about a back-end query optimizer branch that would intentionally disable much of the query munging if there were any search operators in the query. There was some mention about using cookies / user account information to do the same if the same browser/user had used any search operators in the past N days, but I'm not sure if that was implemented or just being floated as a useful optimization.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#266IMHO 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…
I think there are few things to consider here,
1) Google CANNOT provide you with technical search, because choice of index/query filters is always limited (ie. Do I prefer exact matches over multiple matches?)
2) Google has shareholder & public responsibility. It means that service is adjusted (and it's 'algorithms') towards biggest type of queries performed.
All of this is a constant battle between precision and recall for given query. Adding to complexity, Google needs to account for
* Extraordinary amount of users using their search
* Extraordinary amount of data on webpages
* Importance of authority
In smaller search engines (ie. shop full-text search) you usually adjust towards one use case. This in itself is already hard.
Google does that for all possible use cases, for all possible queries while still fighting same precision/recall battle.
To be clear. I think google is terrible, but I also think that there is no other option for them at this point.
All of this became clear for me the moment I've got interested in build search and relevance engines.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#267IMHO 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 n…
https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k
For those interested in the video
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#268What a bizarre piece. We have low-quality content generation not because of Google but because of the low cost of publishing (which the author even mentions). It's exactly why we have email spam: it costs nothing to send. To repurpose a Chris Rock bit, "if sending an email cost $5,000 you'd have no more spam email". What's the alternative being touted here? No Google? Making things harder to find? Seriously? I'd say…
Over last decade or so google is becoming less and less helpful. Results are not user-oriented and they can be far removed from original search queries. This is google's fault, they are for-profit organization with own agenda. Google's usage of your personal data to custom-tailor results to your bubble also contributes to echo chamber.
There are also other factors. There is a vast decrease of internet's signal-to-noise ratio due to low-cost content you mentioned. For a while we could rely on google to get us through the jungle to useful information. Now every SEO is targeting google search. Most other search engines use google's results, so no help there.
Blaming google doesn't help, their interests are not aligned with user interests. Author is actually criticizing us and our dependence on this one-size-fits-all source of information. The alternative is building and adopting better alternatives to google search.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#269IMHO 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…
The SEO toxic sludge has become so pervasive that I can't trust any search these days. Here's an example from just last week. I was searching for the official AWS security certificates (namely, for ISO27001), which AWS neatly publishes on their site. Even for something that specific, the real AWS certification page was at the bottom of the first Google result page. Everything above it was from various random consulti…
Thanks for adding an actual example to this thread. I haven't personally noticed search get worse, so I appreciate it.
Anyway, I typed in your query " IS027001", and you're right, the AWS result is at the very bottom of the first page on mobile. But if you search "AWS IS027001" it's at the very top.
But IS027001 is not an AWS-specific thing, and the results above it are about the standard. It would seem equally bad to return AWS's product pages to somebody looking for information about the standard.
There's definitely an argument that there are too many results from random websites satisfying the "general information about this standard" intent and it would be good if google could guess what everyone wanted simultaneously, but the query is pretty ambiguous...
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#270Earlier 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…
Presumably google are in an arms race with the spammers, like all search engines are. Is there a superior alternative to Google?
DuckDuckGo does something fancy with smooshing together Google and Microsoft databases with their own to create a half-decent search engine.
Cliqz has hardly anything indexed at the moment, but it actually gets relevant results from those. (e.g. "zoom privacy" brings up the Zoom privacy policy first, then three news headlines from the last 12 hours, then a news article from yesterday, then an IT@Cornell guide for making Zoom meetings private, then some more news articles, some stuff about HIPPA…) I really like it, even if it isn't great for programming at the moment.
[DuckDuckGo]: https://duckduckgo.com/ [Cliqz]: https://beta.cliqz.com/