>> Is Google Search Deteriorating?
To answer this, Google's search results need to be compared as before and after. The OP is talking only about the current search quality and a comparison to Bing.
Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
261–270 of 433 posts
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#262Ironically, 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 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 what you entered. This is probably part of it but not the whole explanation: Try to search on Google for: slack ngrok When I and others did earlier today there were a number of pa…
> underestimate me.
Given the term "ngrok", I can't say I blame them/it. It looks like a typo to me. I imagine for well over 90% of people searching, it would be a typo. Perhaps, it is a common typo?
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#263What's galling is that they've actively gone out of their way to make it worse, instead of just letting it regress through neglect.
For example, a few weeks ago, I image searched for a meme that I created years ago on 4chan. A dozen or so results were returned, none of them relevant. But if you tack on the name of a 4chan archive, for example "4plebs" (not even "site:4plebs..."), all of the sudden it turns up.
Google in general seems to penalize 4chan and its archives, which is ironic since it's one of the few places where actual humans post OC. Meanwhile Pinterest spam, AI-generated blog posts, and reddit threads full of bots and shills abound in its results.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 what you entered. This is probably part of it but not the whole explanation: Try to search on Google for: slack ngrok When I and others did earlier today there were a number of pa…
> underestimate me. Given the term "ngrok", I can't say I blame them/it. It looks like a typo to me. I imagine for well over 90% of people searching, it would be a typo. Perhaps, it is a common typo?
Well, it is a well known tool for temporary tunneling of http.
Google knows and the rest of the results confirm it.
Now, if your explanation was the entire explanation it would be kind of ok if they did like Kagi do and Google did themselves at some point, ask nicely:
did you mean ?
or
we included results for . Please use doublequotes if you want exact matches.
Of course with Google this would be pointless as as far as I can see they ignore doublequotes anyway these days...
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Could you provide name of this extension?
I use Personal Blocklist (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...). Works wonders
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#266Earlier 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.
It's practically mandatory to "verify" your account with a phone number for many servers. Discord is incredibly anti-privacy, the fact that it is not transparent to people that aren't currently using it is a vendor lock-in measure.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#267If 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 think it is related to the fight against "fake news", "hate speech", etc... People don't tolerate a truly neutral search engine, because it will reflect human nature and human nature is not always pretty. I remember the time when Google returned antisemitic websites when searching for "jew", they refused to do anything about it because "jew" is used mostly by antisemites and therefore, an antisemitic website is what people searching for that term most likely want, the search engine did its job. I don't think it will fly today.
So search engines now have to get the "truth", preferably the politically correct one, and since you can't rely on the crowd for that, you have to introduce bias, and "pre-approved news outlets" are the most obvious choice.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#268Article 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.
Yes, this is the reason I resorted to bing a few times in the past week. Google seems to penalize certain news sources to such an extent that vaguely remembering the content of the article does not suffice any more to find it again, whereas the article I have in mind usually shows up in the top results on bing with the same query.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#269Lately 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.
You had working doublequotes until recently?
For me those disappeared years ago :-/
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#270What's galling is that they've actively gone out of their way to make it worse, instead of just letting it regress through neglect. For example, a few weeks ago, I image searched for a meme that I created years ago on 4chan. A dozen or so results were returned, none of them relevant. But if you tack on the name of a 4chan archive, for example "4plebs" (not even "site:4plebs..."), all of the sudden it turns up. Google…
Speaking of 4chan and google's declining result relevancy, a particular instance of the latter was discussed there (one of the few places it could be discussed, given the amount of censorship that prevails everywhere else these days):
https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/76372135/
This is still the case today, at least in the US (I just checked). Instead of emphasizing the painting of Beethoven we all know, the one that was actually done during his lifetime, the one featured in the infobox of his Wikipedia page (which is also the top link result), it instead emphasizes a much more obscure painting that was done posthumously, for no obvious reason other than it giving him a noticeably darker skin tone. I'm not even offended by it, I just find it ridiculous that Google actually went out of its way (probably for pc reasons) to train their algorithm to return less relevant results.