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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

#101

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Gigachad wrote: post #66
JimDabell wrote: post #55

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. 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.

I don’t think google search has gotten worse, I think the SEO abusers have just started winning. So much content on the web is automatically generated and made to look just like real hand crafted content. So much of it has titles and headings which have little relation to the search. I was recently searching for a piece of ceramic cookware, specifically looking to avoid non stick coatings. And google search showed me…

>I don’t think google search has gotten worse, I think the SEO abusers have just started winning. So much content on the web is automatically generated and made to look just like real hand crafted content. So much of it has titles and headings which have little relation to the search.

right, I mean we have nearly daily posts here about almost human level quality texts you can generate with various machine learning solutions.

Add to that sites who serve users needs must focus on doing that, the sites that just game Google search rankings can focus on that.

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

#102

Post by bryanrasmussen »

whakim wrote: post #49
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happens all the time though. Look at amazon, they flood their marketplace with cheap knockoff products that hurt the credibility of their ecommerce offerings, but the money generated is too much to shut off. So in the short run, amazon makes more money for a worse reputation, and in the long run ??? its unclear

I don't think that's analogous: you'd have to argue that Amazon spent a ton of time and effort on keeping cheap knockoff products off their marketplace and then did a sudden u-turn and decided not to do that anymore. Even then, I don't think the analogy holds, because the quality of Amazon's marketplace listings isn't anywhere near as synonymous with Amazon as the quality of Google's search results is with Google.

>Even then, I don't think the analogy holds, because the quality of Amazon's marketplace listings isn't anywhere near as synonymous with Amazon as the quality of Google's search results is with Google.

What? Why not, and anyway Amazon I'm giving money. I'd think that quality there would be more deeply linked than anywhere I'm just giving some time.

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by MiddleEndian »

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.

Consider adding a search shortcut for wikipedia directly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special...

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

#105

Post by bryanrasmussen »

gbh444g wrote: post #97
kingcharles wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;ds: white people -> images of mostly blacks black people -> images of mostly blacks white couple -> mostly white couples with a decent percentage of mixed ethnicity couples black couple -> black couples

Try green people, blue people, yellow people. Even 'transparent people' returns relevant results.

I'd say 90% of the blue people are men!

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

#106

Post by memer »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #92
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.

It no longer does this because now your comment is the only result for the query. Before, it could not find a single result, said as much, and gave you the wikipedia page that included the age. What's wrong with that, again?

No post body was provided.

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

#107

Post by pictur »

klondike_ wrote: post #54

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.

I think it's the opposite of what you said. non-expert users search more precisely with longer sentences.

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

#108

Post by bhawks »

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…

I think just attributing this to the right people not being in charge over simplifies the problem.

Search is a complexity beast and simply continued to grow in complexity during the several years I worked directly on it. Folks were proud of the fact no one could even enumerate all the features in the system (attempts were made and abandoned).

The tools to change search safely werent keeping up with the complexity of the system. Understanding impact with evals and experiments became much harder. Gwsdiff and friends grew flakier. Debugging had so many different entry points depending on what you needed to do.

The search stack deserves some really deep cleanups and refactoring, the eval and devtools are similarly in need of a ton of love.

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

#110

Post by exikyut »

elondaits wrote: post #13

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…

For me this only shows one spam result in the 20th position: https://imgur.com/a/s8ETiNl (tallish image)

That being said, I have issued queries in the past that I have just found absolute walls of malicious results. I haven't really invested much attention span in entertaining this sort of thing so I just move on and modify my query, but I'll keep an eye out for it going forward.

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