31–40 of 433 posts
I believe the theory that Google is optimizing for ad revenue. Sites without ads get ranked lower. The biggest example I can think of is Wikipedia. When I search a proper noun with a Wikipedia article, I almost want to go look at that article. Recently, I feel like I really have to dig for it.
When I search for "databricks series b valuation" in Google (from Argentina, using Google.com in English) result #6 is: "Python get value from database - Büro Jorge Schmidt", which judging by title and preview seems to be a Python + MySQL tutorial. It returns a 403 error and might be a hacked site, since the home page is for a graphic design studio in Munich. Result #8 is something similar: "Intellij flatten packages…
Just tried that search in English. First result is "The data- and AI-focused company has secured a $1.6 billion round at a $38 billion". And if you click the search box you get the first search option as databricks valuation history where the first result is funding every round. Google has been so much better for search for me than other search engines. Atleast for what I search for programming, news etc.
Also, results are personalized. Not everyone sees the same.
If I do an incognito search (not logged in) I get results without trash.
One theory is that Google has made a substantial change to a neural network based search, and they are still working out the kinks in getting it to work. How could it not be A/B tested such that we wouldn't notice the bad searches? The answer to that I am not sure. I read their research publications, and the NLP research coming out of Google is far beyond any other company. I can only imagine what they aren't publish…
Do you have references for the theory?
Basic explanation of how one of these systems works:
(offline computation) user query comes in -> algorithm runs across all the text on the page and computes the distance between the query and the meaning of the text (as represented by word embeddings called BERT).
Maybe the SEO spam has a good distance metric there, causing flaws, but the search works very well for a large number of users when trying to actually extract an answer to a search.
I work in NLP, but could easily be 100% wrong. References to my knowledge of their NLP is literally just reading all of googles most recent research
I just tried to find this article on google by searching "Can cats eat blueberries bad search results" (Can Cats eat blueberries is very relevant to the article) and it showed up on the first page of results, albeit at the end.
On Bing I wasn't able to find it
I've been gone from G for 4 1/2 years now. When I was there, the weekly meetings often featured "search quality" measurements that were rigorous in their objectivity (I thought). They bent over backwards to be non-self-deluding. I distinctly remember Udi Manber saying "if the web is slow, it's our fault" (actually, the speech was that everything is "our fault"), meaning, really, "take responsibility for problems and…
One theory is that Google has made a substantial change to a neural network based search, and they are still working out the kinks in getting it to work. How could it not be A/B tested such that we wouldn't notice the bad searches? The answer to that I am not sure. I read their research publications, and the NLP research coming out of Google is far beyond any other company. I can only imagine what they aren't publish…
Do you have references for the theory?
But the quality issues I've seen (useless results unless you add "reddit") are a lot newer than that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just tried that search in English. First result is "The data- and AI-focused company has secured a $1.6 billion round at a $38 billion". And if you click the search box you get the first search option as databricks valuation history where the first result is funding every round. Google has been so much better for search for me than other search engines. Atleast for what I search for programming, news etc.
I start seeing trash from result #6 on. First are relevants. Also, results are personalized. Not everyone sees the same. If I do an incognito search (not logged in) I get results without trash.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just tried that search, all of the results look relevant and I definitely don't get any of the results you are getting. I wonder if you have some malware that is hijacking the results? I once had some malware (chrome extension) that was corrupting my search results. It was surprisingly difficult to remove (given that it was a chrome extension...).
No, I get the same results on Safari on iOS (iPhone) so I have to eliminate the possibility of malware. Google results are personalized, based on location, search history, etc. The fact that I'm in Argentina has been adding a lot of noise to results on searches where my location is not relevant at all. In this case, I suspect that Google thinks these hacked sites with developer target content are relevant to me, beca…
This seems to be a common theme in the industry. Recommenders heavily overweight location - an incredibly general factor, even in the presence of troves of specific, individual level data. Goes to show how little basic reasoning really goes into how these systems work.
I've been gone from G for 4 1/2 years now. When I was there, the weekly meetings often featured "search quality" measurements that were rigorous in their objectivity (I thought). They bent over backwards to be non-self-deluding. I distinctly remember Udi Manber saying "if the web is slow, it's our fault" (actually, the speech was that everything is "our fault"), meaning, really, "take responsibility for problems and…
It seems weird to me that Google would take "search quality" seriously for 15+ years (including nearly a decade as one of the biggest companies in the world) and then suddenly stop. Are you able to share any of those objective measures of quality? Because it seems to me that most of the discussions around the declining quality of Google search amount to anecdata backed up by reasoning that doesn't really make a lot o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems weird to me that Google would take "search quality" seriously for 15+ years (including nearly a decade as one of the biggest companies in the world) and then suddenly stop. Are you able to share any of those objective measures of quality? Because it seems to me that most of the discussions around the declining quality of Google search amount to anecdata backed up by reasoning that doesn't really make a lot o…
Could just be that sundar pichai wants a bigger paycheck and tunes the knob on more ads money but less good search results