Article forgot to mention censorship. All kinds of results are censored/banned from Google. This detoriation is just as bad, maybe worse, than the one caused by paid for results or simply inaccurate results.
Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
251–260 of 433 posts
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be abused into the ground by the same people who set up these scam sites in the first place. For most things on the internet, the crappiness of the average person is the limiting factor.
What if they took only votes from people that pay and have account for X time? Also what’s the problem with adding revert per user? With some events architekture it should be trivial. They could even train AI on this data to automatically sugest suspects.
It's totally fine if they only use my own votes to modify my results. In fact, if we're going to do that, I'd really like to block some sites from my search results entirely. Though ideally, I would also like to include the votes from people I trust.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#253Lately 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.
It was downhill when they allowed that cancer site Pinterest to rank so high up for both text and image search.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#254If 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.
I find these responses fascinating as the "clearly slanted" results tend to change direction depending on the political affiliation of the person making the claim! Having said that, I'd love to be proved wrong if you have any evidence to show a particular bias one way or the other?
Search "mass formation psychosis" on Google and DuckDuckGo. This is a trending phrase popularized by a doctor that has been canceled and banned from the mainstream due to his criticism of the world's COVID response.
DDG shows the author's substack as #1 result and is neutral otherwise. The other doesn't even have it on the first SERP, and is overwhelmingly critical.
If you argue that covid response is not politics, I will disagrer strongly.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#255Earlier 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…
> 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. If you're looking for someone to blame google seems like the wrong party here. Surely the people abusing the system (i.e. blog spam)…
Sure, but emergent bad actors exploiting features of a system that pay them are kind of inevitable, faceless, and there's an endless supply of them. The internet would be a very different place if it wasn't for this phenomenon of human behavior.
Google are just the most powerful and most visible actor in this, and replacing the early less profit orientated web with a dark forest of advertising and tracking is to a great extent on them.
(I don't think the web3 people have realised how important it is that the cost/benefit ratio of "ham" (good content) needs to be above the cost/benefit ratio of spam, by quite a large margin, or spam drives out ham)
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#256Earlier 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.
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Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is good for privacy though.
No - anonymous accounts are good for privacy. If you're contributing information about something, having that information index-able is just common sense.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#258Earlier 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.
Every instance? Come on, instant answers are bad but let's not exaggerate things.
Let me phrase it this way:
I'll happily say bye bye to instant answers across all search engines just to get my working search engine back (preferably with a blacklist).
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#259No post body was provided.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#260The 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).
Hey, free advertising for you and your search engine:
Marginalia search, by punishing ad- and tracking-heavy pages and by being strict in how it interprets my queries sometimes surfaces better results than Google and DDG.
In particular I have found great resources about Linux partitioning and git usage after giving up mainstream search engines and trying them in marginalia.
That says quite something about how badly broken the situation is given that marginalia is one person and a tower pc in a living room.
I keep getting reminded about a Linux quote on how they managed to go forward by studying the latest 20 years of OS research and throwing it all away :-)