For tech stuff Google is usually pretty good, sometimes I have to change a little my query, but it works.
For non tech stuff is a disaster. I recently looked for a specific brand and model car tyre datasheet, I know it may be a nich, but still I got ONLY ads. Not a single result was about data, let alone datasheet, all were ads.
Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
141–150 of 433 posts
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It sounds like their location based targeting sucks. Spotify has the same problem for me - it spams my playlists & recommendations with songs that I have never, ever shown the slightest interest in purely based on location. 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…
How about spamming me with artists I have taken the time to mark as 'Do not play'? The FIRST recommended album in Album Picks is such an artist. Good reminder that I should get rid of my premium subscription, thanks!
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 so…
I mean maybe the problem is that the SEO abusers are only 35% of the way towards being constructive, a la XKCD https://xkcd.com/810/ - so the thing that wasn't considered is as your spammers get closer and closer to being constructive the more stress is placed on the systems that have to deal with fighting non-constructive spam and the worse it is for the users.
But maybe at some point there will be a breakthrough with SEO abusers being able to be as constructive as the actually useful sites, at which point there will be a short time when the SEO abusers are the only sites returning results, causing all other sites to go out of business, causing the downfall of the SEO sites which rely on actually useful sites for a great deal of their stolen content / content seeding corpora.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be "fair", instant answers have been useless misinformation in every instance I've triggered them. And they've been broken for years. No one at Google is responsible for these half baked and largely irrelevant widgets or wants to stake their career fixing them.
> No one at Google is responsible for these half baked and largely irrelevant widgets or wants to stake their career fixing them. You're just ... wrong about this. There's an entire team of dozens of people (maybe hundreds now) focusing on this specific web answer feature. I personally worked on the team (not this feature, though). I don't understand why people say things they know nothing about.
I think people say this because some problems stick out like a sore thumb and stay that way for months if not years. The line of inference is that there must be no incentive inside the company to fix them.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#145I 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 this is overall a good thing. Power users have trained their behaviour to work in the way that simple systems can deal with. While average users ask the question exactly how they would ask another human. Google has now reached a level where it works best when you deal with it in a natural and human level. There is nothing actually better about the way we originally used search engines, it was just required at…
No, I disagree. With keyword search, I am confident that eventually, with enough included and excluded terms, I will find what I’m looking for.
With natural language search, sometimes it works great, but it’s a crapshoot and when you don’t get the results you need you’re stuck.
Several times in recent memory Google has returned results so bad, I completely gave up searching. Most recently was when i was trying to look up a Windows 11 BSOD error code (where even pasting the error code verbatim only brought up pages of garbage sites with no useful technical information).
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#146I 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.
The average use absolutely does this. I see this with family members and friends. Most just type in full questions.
From my experience the best way to get good results is to start typing keywords for yourr question and then creating the query based on the autocomplete results. If I notice I don't get autocompletion for a certain query I'll restructure it until I do. This has proven very useful in providing good results.
For technical stuff, using the quotation marks is almost essential.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be "fair", instant answers have been useless misinformation in every instance I've triggered them. And they've been broken for years. No one at Google is responsible for these half baked and largely irrelevant widgets or wants to stake their career fixing them.
> No one at Google is responsible for these half baked and largely irrelevant widgets or wants to stake their career fixing them. You're just ... wrong about this. There's an entire team of dozens of people (maybe hundreds now) focusing on this specific web answer feature. I personally worked on the team (not this feature, though). I don't understand why people say things they know nothing about.
Instant answers is terrible, its someone’s interpretation of something rather then letter me decide.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#148The article mostly talks about IA (instant answers) which are notoriously hard. The recent advances in machine learning have made the technology more approachable, so startups like Kagi Search (disclaimer: founder) can also leverage latest advances in NLP and compete on this ground. To give just a few examples: Query 1: how many stars in the usa flag Google: https://cln.sh/63sVzh Kagi: https://cln.sh/bFEHsD Pretty su…
Don't be "fair", instant answers have been useless misinformation in every instance I've triggered them. And they've been broken for years. No one at Google is responsible for these half baked and largely irrelevant widgets or wants to stake their career fixing them.
Every instance? Come on, instant answers are bad but let's not exaggerate things.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is anybody claiming that it’s sudden? I mean, there are two ex-Googlers in this thread claiming firsthand that search quality was considered sacrosanct as of a few years ago, so it seems like it'd have to have been sudden if indeed it has happened at all.
Four and a half years is quite enough time for search results to get worse that I wouldn't call it "sudden".
I didn't notice a rapid decline until early 2019, when the search results stopped containing the keywords I used. Before then there was a blend of synonyms and actual keyword matches.
This was roughly when Google's new AI began "interpreting" the "meaning" of the specific jargon and product serial numbers I was inputting, and then decided what I actually needed was song lyrics.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite is, given that I have a baby and I am a trained scientist and I live in the US, I find myself converting milliliters to fluid ounces a lot. Right now the Google Assistant will correctly transcribe the request to a Google search... Only for the search to interpret “ml” as “miles” and, faced with the discrepancy between the length and a volume, cube the miles. So I am expecting an amount that is like 1 oz b…
Ten years ago Google Calculator used to work perfectly. I don't understand how they've broken it and why no one is responsible for fixing it. Perhaps everyone who understood the codebase has left?
No one is going to get promoted for maintaining a calculator, so it rotted.
Clearly they should have put a chat app in it.