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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

#201

Post by kreeben »

pjc50 wrote: post #179
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 h…

>> Google can't search inside Discord.

Can anyone, even in theory? Are there open APIs to all systems of discord? Does Discord have one? Wouldn't that open up all of these systems to systematic classification of all users? Also, is there a web link you can construct that will open up e.g. Discord's desktop app when you click it?

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

#202

Post by DOsinga »

zmachinaz wrote: post #159

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.

Not sure if the article misses the point then. If Google satisfies your "digital morons" by making it slightly harder for the more advanced users to get the results they want, couldn't that be the right thing to do? For example, over time, Google has been using synonyms more so that often the word you searched for doesn't appear in the page. This works for most people very well, but makes the self proclaimed experts complain

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

#203

Post by lbriner »

One thing I find annoying is that they still return results that are those sites that seem to register a load of terms that all point to the same page. You see this with telephone numbers, song lyrics etc. where the result looks like "Lyrics for Stairway to Heaven" but you click through and there is no content, just a page that says "Upload some lyrics to this song".. etc.

These sites should be heavily penalised for click-baiting and they have been doing it for years.

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

#204

Post by andriesm »

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 agree with your experience - to me it also seems I used to enter a search phrase and get back a page of results that exactly match it, these days, I often get things that only vaguely thematically relate to my search phrase instead. Sometimes I would change a word in my search phrase or add an extra word to make the intent much more specific and still get essentially the same search results!!! Terrible, just terrible.

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

#205

Post by foxfluff »

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…

> the weekly meetings often featured "search quality" measurements that were rigorous in their objectivity (I thought).

I wish this part got discussed, but every time I've attempted it, the discussion has been shut down by "lol they're experts at search and you're not and you don't know what they know."

I wouldn't put it past Google to be blindsided thinking their own metrics are objective (perhaps they are objective measurements of something but not of what they actually want to measure). If anything, the battle with SEO just shows how hard it is to do something right and avoid getting gamed. If they can't rank SEO spam off the front page, why would I believe their measurements are any better than the rankings?

There's also always a small possibility that metrics are worse than wrong; they could actually say everything is fine, keep serving these long form SEO spam articles that people click and read for far too long before realizing it doesn't have have the answers they seek.

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

#206

Post by tempestn »

While Google results may well be deteriorating, this example strikes me as a poor one. Unless you're trying to demonstrate poor results, why wouldn't you put quotation marks around "series b"? There's no point in making the algorithm guess what you mean when you can be explicit.

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

#207

Post by Der_Einzige »

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.

And yet despite all of those people, the quality is bad and seems to get worse. A startup seems to be outcompeting them.

Sometimes industries or teams have effectively negative value, or their preconceived notions about how something works based on teachings from their field is wrong. This is the case for chiropractors (the whole field is useless / a net negative), vs back doctors.

We see this happening today with Google moving away from traditional and high quality techniques like direct keyword ranking, bm25, and pagerank and move towards lower quality methods based on hype such as BERT/other "semantic search" based on LMs, query rewriting, and using these dense vectors directly in pagerank (and this degrading it).

The amazing power of language models in certain domains (text generation) has unfortunately caused a proliferation of them in a place where they are still pretty bad (information retrieval and search).

Google is full of search chiropractors when they need search back doctors.

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

#208

Post by narrator »

kebman wrote: post #90

If you search for anything political on Google, you'll notice that the results are clearly slanted in one direction, towards the opinion of a handful of pre-approved news outlets. This leads me to seek alternatives whenever I need neutral sources, for instance Yahoo search.

Try "what countries are using ivermectin" in google.com and then try Yandex.com. For me, the third site on Google (the kitchen sisters) appears broken and the rest are all some variation of "why ivermectin is bad" articles. Yandex actually answers the question.

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

#209

Post by visarga »

wolpoli wrote: post #157
dehrmann wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

It's easy to tell if it's a natural language question or keywordese. They can classify that.

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

#210

Post by Der_Einzige »

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.

Query rewriting, a useless and use-hostile technique, strikes again! (No I am not talking about trying to fix spelling mistakes with "did you mean". I mean straight up removal or rewriting of correct English words)

I am embarrassed by the whole field of NLP for making such a big deal out of a task that is fundamentally bad.

Google optimizing for the "average user" comes at the expense of the whole world, because the "power users" who are optimized against literally build the internet for the normies. Cater to the normies for too long, and we see the status quo.

Force the normies to get better at writing their queries. NLP will unironically have a large number of people with the title "query engineer" soon anyway due to the rise of increasingly large foundation language models proliferating. Welcome to the brace new world of botched semantic search!

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