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Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

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Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#51

Post by flenserboy »

twofornone wrote: post #18

Incidentally, I noticed very recently (in the last month or so) that searches in google maps (at least on mobile) are also starting to return completely irrelevant results. Something is seriously wrong at google.

The real question about G is this: who is really in charge there? Answer that, and the explanations for the whys of their behavior will fall into place. I'm not pretending to know the answer, but this question has helped me figure out what's going on with other companies and their strange directions taken.

Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#52

Post by flenserboy »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #20
echen wrote: post #2

There's been a lot of HN discussion [1][2][3] about Google Search recently, and whether it’s gone downhill. I used to work on Search and Search Measurement at YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft, so I thought it would be fun to move beyond anecdotes, grab some data, and do a quantitative analysis. tl;dr I didn't have historical data, to see how Google Search has trended over time. But compared to Bing, Google still gener…

The experiment I want to see is one where (1) the same set of test queries is run on multiple search engines (2) for each query result, the result links from all engines are combined into a single document (without including information about the search engine from which they came) (3) the links are ranked blindly for fitness in relation to the search query (4) the fitness rank of the results is then reunited to the…

Good list. To add to it: I'd like to see the same queries run from a) multiple IP addresses (where you search from seems to affect results), and b) what the differences in results are for those with Google accounts and those doing history-/accountless searches.

Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#54

Post by klondike_ »

I think that Google is optimizing for the "average user" to the detriment of power users such as the HN crowd. Most people treat Google as an internet oracle and send queries like "how do I do X" while power users will search for keywords. One example of this optimization is the automatic answer boxes that show up for certain questions, which are wrong disturbingly often or don't include important details.

Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#55

Post by JimDabell »

whakim wrote: post #35
AlbertCory wrote: post #14

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…

> 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.

Is anybody claiming that it’s sudden? Everybody I’ve seen complain about Google search results has seemed to think that it’s been getting slowly worse over a long period of time.

Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#56

Post by colordrops »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
ramoz wrote: post #25

When I search “tim lee food blogger age” Google actually shows results with “age” striked out (so it shows top results as if age wasn’t part of the queried string). Trying to think why/how it’d conclude that age wasn’t necessary for good results.

Censoring terms of the search vector to find relevant results is a legitimate approach that works well. In this example, the article author gives a Wikipedia page as the desired top result. That document does not include the term "age" anywhere. Therefore you can see how the term is not necessary to the search.

It works like trash when searching for obscure technical problems, e.g. debugging some little used tool in linux. It seems more often than not the most important word in the search is omitted, making the results completely irrelevant.

Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#57

Post by seventytwo »

halpert wrote: post #16

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.

This seems accurate to me too. And it also seems the most likely - a profit maximizing corporation doing profit maximizing things? Not really a huge surprise.

Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#58

Post by why_only_15 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #34

This article from HN a while back was great: How SEO is Gentrifying the internet. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/12/how-seo-is-gentrifyin... 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'm very confused by this article. They seem to just assume that breaking up Google would fix the problem, but they don't explain why. To me it seems that a fundamental problem of search on the internet is that it's adversarial, which means Google needs to make these ranking changes to try to make things better in the SEO war. How does breaking Google up fix this? Wouldn't all the new search engines just be worse at fighting SEO spam, leading to even more spam?

disclaimer: i work at Google, though not on search.

Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#59

Post by colordrops »

RandyRanderson wrote: post #8

One reason it might deteriorated is that goog is constantly battling ppl 'optimizing' their content for Google while competitors likely see less than 1/1000 of this.

That would make sense if so many easy to detect low hanging fruit like blog spam, scraped stack overflow pirates, and listicles didn't make it to the top. Those are easy for google to de-rank and yet they don't.

Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

#60

Post by pseudalopex »

umeshunni wrote: post #6
echen wrote: post #2

There's been a lot of HN discussion [1][2][3] about Google Search recently, and whether it’s gone downhill. I used to work on Search and Search Measurement at YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft, so I thought it would be fun to move beyond anecdotes, grab some data, and do a quantitative analysis. tl;dr I didn't have historical data, to see how Google Search has trended over time. But compared to Bing, Google still gener…

I think the broader theme that these outrage bait posts miss is that the web itself is rotting / deteriorating. Most interesting content isn't on the web anymore and is definitely not in text. Content that would be have been on an open web forum 10 years ago, are now hidden behind various data silos/walled gardens - whether it's Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or Discord. Each of these walled gardens have…

You're right walled gardens and video make search harder than it used to be. That doesn't make discussing the problem outrage bait.
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