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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

#171

Post by nickff »

inshadows wrote: post #169

Google search is OK for me in English. In my native language (central Europe), it's almost impossible to find content that is not eshop or someone selling something. I'm looking for HTML4 articles, phpbb forum discussion, etc. where people actually share knowledge, but I only get super-SEO optimized crap. The best I get is a blog spam from an eshop.

Does the content you're looking for exist in your language, and if so, can you find it on some other search engine? It seems like a lot of 'knowledge forums' are in English.

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

#172

Post by greyman »

I don't know if search is deteriorating as a whole, but certain searches seems to be manipulated for political reasons. The famous example is an Image search of "white couple" - really, try it, it is like only 50% correct. But I don't believe the image search itself would be that bad, rather certain queries are given manipulated results.

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

#173

Post by marginalia_nu »

psyc wrote: post #168
marginalia_nu wrote: post #163

Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google's problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways. I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering…

I've taken this possibility into account after the numerous recent threads about this, but I don't think it holds up. I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines. The reason it feels like search has gone to hell, for me, is that for 20 years I took for granted that I could type the first terms that came into my mind into one searc…

> I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines.

If you are adjusting your query, then you are going to get different results, possibly including ones that contain the information you want (but not your original search terms).

We've been tweaking search terms to find what we were looking for since day one, what's changed the most it's that it's gotten far less likely that you'll realize you need to do this.

I think this is one of the real drawbacks of ML-algorithms, their failure modes are completely incomprehensible. Dumb algorithms we can grok, and learn to help along the way when it doesn't work. There is really no point where it will always work.

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

#174

Post by Kavelach »

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.

Just block the domain. At first, you can block manually, but we know Google doesn't like doing things that way. Fortunately, they have a lot of heuristics to find sites like that; usually the content is just copied from another source. And since they scrape the web all the time, they should know which content has appeared first where.

But the issue isn't that they can't; the issue is that they don't want that. Why the sites with copied content exists? To earn money through ads. What earns Google money? Ads!

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

#175

Post by nottorp »

albertopv wrote: post #141

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.

Pasted any error messages in the search box recently?

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

#176

Post by xwolfi »

psyc wrote: post #168
marginalia_nu wrote: post #163

Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google's problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways. I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering…

I've taken this possibility into account after the numerous recent threads about this, but I don't think it holds up. I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines. The reason it feels like search has gone to hell, for me, is that for 20 years I took for granted that I could type the first terms that came into my mind into one searc…

Either google failed, or the pop science listicles have won ... they're not passively being indexed, sorry you found them by mistake. They actively and aggressively create completely artificial content, tailored not at humans but at google, so that they can push the latest stupid ad for some telephone company on you.

It's like bitcoin if you want - they compete for something so useless the entire concept becomes a huge waste of time. Search engine SEO is like hashrate-dependent token mining: the only people who win are the farmers at the cost of burning their entire ecosystem.

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

#177

Post by WalterBright »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #163

Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google's problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways. I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering…

On Amazon I searched in "CDs & Vinyl" for the band "The Birdstones". It showed me results in books.

Criminy. Amazon does this all the time. If I wanted a book, I'd have searched under "Books". I am not confused about the difference between "CDs" and "Books".

What's the good of having categories if they're completely ignored?

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

#178

Post by pja »

psyc wrote: post #168
marginalia_nu wrote: post #163

Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google's problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways. I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering…

I've taken this possibility into account after the numerous recent threads about this, but I don't think it holds up. I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines. The reason it feels like search has gone to hell, for me, is that for 20 years I took for granted that I could type the first terms that came into my mind into one searc…

Even programming related topics now return heavily SEOd sites with instead of high quality programming content. Often the SEOd content is not completely awful for these searches, but it’s usually not great & never as good as the best sites.

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

#179

Post by pjc50 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #163

Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google's problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways. I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering…

> There is so much stuff on the Internet it's easy to start thinking there is guaranteed to be good results for any search, and that just doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that Google (the advertising engine) has destroyed Google (the search engine), by the two step process of making it profitable to produce blogspam then forcing search to remove blogspam - and a lot of the useful content has gone out with that bathwater.

Not to mention the rise of unsearchable platforms. Google can't search inside Discord.

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

#180

Post by danieljacksonno »

greyman wrote: post #172

I don't know if search is deteriorating as a whole, but certain searches seems to be manipulated for political reasons. The famous example is an Image search of "white couple" - really, try it, it is like only 50% correct. But I don't believe the image search itself would be that bad, rather certain queries are given manipulated results.

I'm not convinced "white couple" showing interracial couples is a political move, or even on purpose.

I think it simply is because very few people would describe in text a white couple as a "white couple" and not just as a "couple". In a majority white culture there is no reason to specify skin colour when both are white. It's just a couple.

On the contrary, I think it would be very normal to write "black and white couple" for an interracial couple, and because "black and white" also contains "white" thus those images would show up when you search for "white couple".

This is easy to verify by looking for the word "white" around the images Google returns for "white couple", and they are definitely there - often in the image title itself.

However, if you just search for "couple" then you'll find what you are looking for. At least on my google 9 out of 10 results are a white couple.

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