Live data from Hacker News

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

surgehq.ai

211–220 of 433 posts

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

#211
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?

I would prefer that they just returned 0 results and had a list of links for alternative queries.

No doubt that’s bad for some opaque internal metric though.

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

#214

One theory is that Google has made a substantial change to a neural network based search, and they are still working out the kinks in getting it to work. How could it not be A/B tested such that we wouldn't notice the bad searches? The answer to that I am not sure. I read their research publications, and the NLP research coming out of Google is far beyond any other company. I can only imagine what they aren't publish…

Google is not meaningfully ahead of other megacorps in NLP like facebook, and likely based on this thread and other starting to backslide.

Google may publish more than others, but only because if you write "we trained our models on 24 specialized TPUs for 1 month" than the reviewers instantly know you work for deep-mind despite "double blind anonymity" and thus you are much more likely to be accepted.

Pedigree is not the same as quality.

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

#215
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Searching Discord externally is not possible AFAIK. It's an actively user-hostile platform, which is doubly irritating because most community efforts (e.g. modding of games) mandate Discord and allow for nothing else. Frequently they don't even accept communication from another space, such as bug reports via email or GitHub.

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

#217
post #186

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.

You're overestimating the smarts of google: Image search does not classify image contents. It uses the site text for ranking of the images on that site. It finds lots of "Black And White Couple Stock Photo" images - the image description in fact contains the string "white couple".

While that's certainly possible, this feels like a mistake AltaVista would make 20 years ago, it seems weirdly out of place for Google doing that in 2022. They used to be a bit more context aware and not just present you results due to some bit of text matching.

If I try the search on flickr.com, "white people" returns black&white pictures of people, while "white couple" returns swans. Meanwhile shutterstock.com returns mostly correct results.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in 10+ years of targeted advertising, i still have yet to see a single ad for something that is actually relevant to what i want to buy. i'm actually baffled that these companies that have my entire purchasing history and metadata still cannot do a better job at making me spend money than absolute randos on the internet.

This is a fundamental issue with the ad business - the ads are selected from those who bid, not from those that are relevant. For example - if I'm listening to a podcast with a captivating guest, the relevant links would point to their books or blogs. But since they didn't bid for ads, I'm shown some crypto drivel or date-Thai girls scams

Exactly. What they want is to sell ads, what they have is crap ads we don't like, so ... what are they to do?

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

#219

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.

[deleted]

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

#220

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 th…

They never let you past the 1000 mark, not even on paid API. It's frustrating when you want to do more advanced searches.
Post reply on HN