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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

#151

Post by mmis1000 »

seattle_spring wrote: post #99
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.

This drives me nuts when I'm trying to navigate somewhere, no pun intended. For example, I'll tell it I want to go to a trailhead for a lake but it will switch it to the literal middle of the lake itself.

That also happened to me. I once want to drive to a port. And google decides to direct me to drive straight into the port. (The residents even make a sign that says 'If google direct you to here, you are on the wrong way', It seems it had gone wrong for many years and never got fixed.) Who on the earth think list port/lake/ocean into driving target is a good idea???

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

#152

Post by onion2k »

rryan wrote: post #135
otherotherchris wrote: post #127

Earlier 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 it largely stems from this very popular comment from a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553840 From an external point of view certainly seems to explain a lot of Google's issues with the stagnation and death of many of it's products.

The fact that there have been plenty of other comments from Googlers to back it up since shows that, in some parts of Google at least, there's a grain of truth there. It might not be the whole story, many teams might be proud of their part, and many Googlers may not be focusing on promition and shiny new things, but that doesn't really matter to Google's users. What we see has been plenty of Google products being killed off, or left to rot. Now even Search has people complaining about it. Startups are getting traction competing against it. A decade ago that would have been unthinkable.

If you're right and teams in Google do actually care about the older, less shiny things they build then Google has a significant brand and reputation problem. If you're wrong then Google has a massive engineering culture problem. Either way, Google has a problem.

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

#153

Post by colordrops »

caconym_ wrote: post #76
colordrops wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the source for it being easy? It seems easy, from the perspective of a human looking at results, but I'm not sure how much that's worth given the scale and complexity of the problem.

Captchas are way harder to solve than it is to detect these sorts of poor results. Google should have absolutely no problem building a classifier that could scale to solve the problem. But as you said, it's not worth it to them, but for the reasons of losing revenue rather than scale and complexity.

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

#154

Post by prox »

Const-me wrote: post #130
Gigachad wrote: post #66

Earlier 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 know another possible explanation, way simpler. Vast majority of these SEO abusers are monetized through google ads. For every advertisement dollar spent through google, google takes 30-50%. And 80% of Google's income is from internet ads. I would be surprised if google's search quality would not deteriorate - they have very strong incentive for that.

I still get strange results from flaky websites that have strange TLDs and the content is literal garbage. Like just words mangled together. Ads on there are the worst and reach into malware territory. Results like these are on the first page. I have no explanation for it, but 100% of my searches for personal use are DDG or Bing now.

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

#156

Post by marginalia_nu »

wolpoli wrote: post #117

The web itself is deteriorating. Instant answers (IA) caused a shift in the way contents are written. Content optimized for IA tend to be repetitive and shallow. Viewing content written for IA is a frustrating experience and these tend to dominant the result page now.

The reason you are seeing a lot of that sort of content is because Google is looking for that sort of content, in point because of Google's peculiarities, but also because of how refined the art of black hat SEO has become.

Meaningful websites still exist. The bulk of the content on the Internet is older than IA, and it's still out there (not that you can find it with Google).

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

#157

Post by wolpoli »

dehrmann wrote: post #136
wolpoli wrote: post #117

The web itself is deteriorating. Instant answers (IA) caused a shift in the way contents are written. Content optimized for IA tend to be repetitive and shallow. Viewing content written for IA is a frustrating experience and these tend to dominant the result page now.

No idea if you're right or not, but I think it's an interesting take. It might be because of SEO, it might be more information in walled gardens, it might be the death of the personal web page. Both Google search and the internet are changing, as are our perceptions, so it's really hard to say why search quality is better or worse.

Whether search quality is deteriorating really depends what we expect from a search engine. Many of us on HN use search engine as a way to look for web pages with specific words. Search engines did start out performing word searches, but somewhere along the way, they started trying to answer questions. Many of the complaints such as Google dropping search terms are actually the result of the search engine trying to answer questions instead of performing keyword searches. Search engines these days are doing well for the easy questions, but of course they completely misunderstand questions with more nuances.

A bit off topic: Some of the search queries in the article used Google like a keyword matching tool, while other queries in the article were using Google to answer questions. That's because we only have one search box trying to do everything. Would we be better served if we have a checkbox to tell the search engine that we just want to perform word searches?

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

#158

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

What if someone wanted to get a large number of results, more than 300, for a common term found on the web. Is Google suitable for such a task.

How could this be proven. Search for the term "example" and see how many results can be accessed. Is it greater than 300.

By limiting the number of results that can be accessed, Google is "hiding" a portion of the web from the user. How do we explain this practice. Perhaps that portion is not deemed useful for user data collection or advertising purposes hence it is excluded. Perhaps Google wishes to prevent users from accessing large chunks of its index. Who knows.

We need a search engine that exposes the full web and does not try to guess what someone is searching for. If the user requests all pages with the term example, then that is what the search engine returns. Google is far too limited.

If one goes to a library and searches an academic database, she is never precluded from viewing all results. Even though she may only access the first few pages, she is always allowed to see all the results. She can view results that were low on the relevance scale to understand why they scored low. She can then subsequenty narrow her search. I have seen this implemented in non-academic databases as well. First a broad search is performed. It returns all results, not just a portion. These results are stored. Every single result is accessible by the user. (Not possible with Google. User only sees 200-300 max.) Then the user can narrow her search and search within those results. The user repeats using different searches until she has what she wants. The user controls the number of database items she wishes to search, based on the initial broad search. With Google, the user has no such access to all results from a broad search, nor the ability to search exclusively within that set. Google is extremely limited. Everything is geared toward user data collection and online advertising. It truly detracts from any search functionality they may have to offer. The user is the product, not the database.

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

#159

Post by zmachinaz »

The article totally misses the point. Yes, for the digital morons (their turks) google may work perfectly fine. However, for people who actually look for real content google gets worse and worse. All the good material gets far lower ranking than the repetitive low quality medium posts with identical and non-existing content.

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

#160

Post by marginalia_nu »

otherotherchris wrote: post #140
User23 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss Altavista. I could generally either find exactly what I was looking for inside of three iterations of refining the search, or find that it wasn't to be found. I still just want a blazing fast full text search of the reachable WWW that understands regexes and a basic predicate calculus. Unfortunately the overhead and small potential user base means that under the current regime such a thing will never be made.…

Common crawl already exists and is nearly as good as Google's index.

Common crawl is just a dataset, not an index. The difficulty is not finding a sufficiently large haystack, it's getting at the needles.
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