Lately Google has been giving me results that ignore my operators like quotation marks and - signs. I knew it was all downhill from here when Image Search became 50% video results.
Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
221–230 of 433 posts
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#222One 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…
Yes, give me a downvote button on Google results.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CEO and upper management might simply not care about the long-term viability of the company. Cashing out in the short-term sounds more like what these executives generally do.
> Cashing out in the short-term sounds more like what these executives generally do. It only sounds like what they do because you only ever read stuff written by people who believe that without any evidence. Sundar Pichai has been with Google since 2004.
Sundar Pichai is probably the weakest of the FAANG executives - if not one of the weakest Fortune 100 executives. Google's search result quality, reduction in overall prestige and lack of new major products are just a few indicators of that.
But speaking in general, there is limited correlation between executive compensation and company performance. You can DuckDuckGo it if you want to find the evidence for this statement.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#224If 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.
Sounds like you want non-factual answers.
Non-factual answers are especially interesting, because otherwise reasonable and intelligent people believe in them. Everyone would be better off studying those things and see how they've drawn those conclusions we don't subscribe to, so that we can figure out what we are wrong about.
It's absolutely catastrophic if you are not allowed to draw your own conclusions about things. This is your inalienable prerogative as an adult in a free country. Even at the risk of some people being wrong sometimes, you simply cannot have authorities distributing doctrine and call yourself a democracy.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#225Ironically, 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?
I was curious and tried it myself. The search results page explains -- right at the top -- what is happening:
Showing results from All Departments
No results for The Birdstones in Music, CDs & Vinyl
I think this widening of search scope is not unreasonable.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#226I'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…
But slow/fast isn't quality. What were the rigorous measurements? Latency of results to click? User clicked above the fold? I have wondered about this now for several years, because from my point of view Google search has steadily degraded since around 2010. The specific degradation isn't that it returns nothing, or irrelevant pages, but that it returns mostly _recent_ content, and returns very little _older_ content…
> But slow/fast isn't quality. What were the rigorous measurements? Latency of results to click? User clicked above the fold?
Slow and fast is what we experience. We live in a phenomenological world, not a world of millisecond metrics. While it isn't rigorous, for humans, numbers are pointless. We can't experience them. What matters is whether it feels fast.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#227I cannot rate any of the results anymore as being good.
I want my search engine to search for the keywords i typed in, not what the search engine thinks I want to search for.
If Google shows me a different person then the one I'm looking for, I am at fault, not the search engine. I should be more specific.
So yes, Google's search quality sucks big time, but not in the way the author thinks. He think Google should know what you are searching for. Which is for me, a really bad factor.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#228One 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…
I've found my result quality has gone up dramatically now that I use extensions allowing me to block domains from google search results. It seems silly that I ought have to do this, but Google has finally become useful again as a result.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#229One 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…
Yes, give me a downvote button on Google results.
The lack of an ability to vote on search results seems like a baffling omission. Normally Google loves to crowdsource their work, but for this one area where we would actually want it, they decide that they know better when they clearly don't.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just tried that search, all of the results look relevant and I definitely don't get any of the results you are getting. I wonder if you have some malware that is hijacking the results? I once had some malware (chrome extension) that was corrupting my search results. It was surprisingly difficult to remove (given that it was a chrome extension...).
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…
I too tried this (geolocated to Argentina) and cannot reproduce the behaviour. All the results I am seeing on the first couple of pages are relevant.
P.S. Chrome, incognito window.