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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

#281

Post by wruza »

djohnston wrote: post #233
mcv wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

They don't have to make it a public vote. I'm fine to do this work myself for a week or so, and then enjoy crap-free searches. Or link my votes account to someone who I trust and use their opinion.

Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.

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

#282

Post by dpacmittal »

caconym_ wrote: post #76
colordrops wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make sense if so many easy to detect low hanging fruit like blog spam, scraped stack overflow pirates, and listicles didn't make it to the top. Those are easy for google to de-rank and yet they don't.

What's the source for it being easy? It seems easy, from the perspective of a human looking at results, but I'm not sure how much that's worth given the scale and complexity of the problem.

Kagi filters all of that out. If an upstart can do it, Google with its unlimited resources can do it too

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

#283

Post by mprovost »

amelius wrote: post #222
lbriner wrote: post #203

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…

Yes, give me a downvote button on Google results.

I worked on a search engine at a startup that did exactly this, you could up and downvote each result. The main feature was that we essentially "sharded" the search engine so it could be embedded on different sites and give different results based on each community. So a search for "casting" on a fishing website would give different results than the same search on a metallurgy site, as voted by each community. We could also learn passively by watching which links users clicked on and where they "disappeared" from the search engine - presumably the last clicked link was the result they were looking for.

Google did copy the voting feature on their results page briefly but abandoned it. [0] This was back in 2006-7. We learned the hard way that it's pretty much impossible to compete with Google in search even when you're innovating. They either copy you, or can just blackhole you out of existence.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/straight-out-of-left-field...

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

#284

Post by rendall »

With sincere respect to the author, I stopped reading the article. Even though I found the topic interesting and am definitely inclined to believe that Google's search results are declining in quality, I felt that the search terms and criticisms were distractingly unfair.

If someone were evaluating hammers and handed a bunch of hammers to beginners and judged the hammers by those results, I'd tune out there, too, for the same reason.

A suggestion for improvement would be to have the users RTFM (read the fine manual) first, and then take a reading a week later on their everyday search results. Google is a tool, like an other. Know your tools.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/134479?hl=en

And: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

Always put a quote around "exact search" terms that must be grouped together, especially if the term includes something common like the letter b.

Indeed `databricks "series b" valuation` does a lot better: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=databricks%20%22series...

The 4th result is exactly about Databrick's series B valuation. https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/databricks-series-b...

Always search for a multi-word proper name, especially a common name like tim lee, with quotes. Put "tim lee" into quotes, and wikipedia shows up on the first page:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22tim%20lee%22%20vlog...

Is vlogger really a common search term? Personally, I'm okay with Google suggesting blogger because I don't think vlogger is all that common. But maybe? Perhaps a better search term would yield better results?

In fact, "tim lee blogger age" gives better results than with vlogger! Google was correct to suggest that change. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tim%20lee%20blogger%20...

Anyway, this kind of criticism works best for me when the critic gives the subject the most reasonably charitable chance and then talks about the bad. Expecting great results out of bad search terms isn't reasonable, in my opinion.

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

#285

Post by Quindecillion »

On a slightly different tangent, has anyone noticed that predictive text while typing on a phone (iPhone for me) seems to be getting progressively worse? Like it predicts the most random words that have little connection to what I typed on the screen.

I don't know if all my mistakes over the years are being remembered and so the prediction algorithm is accumulating more errors and performing worse, or if something else is at play (clumsy fingers as I get older?).

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

#286

Post by robin_reala »

cromwellian wrote: post #280

I’m shocked that the original author didn’t think to put “series b” in quotes instead of as separate words. Doing that returns a table format of every databricks round as the second result. In general, “term” is like the old +term format which we all used to use back when we thought search was good until google killed the +. In reality the Web has gotten worse with far more bad spam actors and our search habits have…

On the other hand, Bing got it right. I’m the sort of person that would happily see AND and OR back as search operators, but most people aren’t, and they shouldn’t have to be trained to put things in quotes just because.

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

#287

Post by dewey »

orangepurple wrote: post #274
fifnir wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use uBlacklist, it puts a little "block this domain from results" button next to google results

I just installed this! Thanks for the suggestion! Don't forget to use ungoogled chromium if possible The only downside is you will have to load unpacked extensions instead of using the Chrome "store" and you will have to manually install Chromium updates from the same site: https://chromium.woolyss.com/

> you will have to manually install Chromium updates from the same site

That sounds like a bad idea for something like a browser that should get security updates as fast as possible.

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

#288

Post by pjmlp »

Definitly, I just cannot anything.

Worse, when one is polyglot and it will just automatically translate search results or nicely return local results (after automatic translation) when I want the original stuff I am looking for.

Then all the shitty url redirects for any kind of document returned by it for analytics.

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

#289

Post by Jenk »

cik wrote: post #228
lbriner wrote: post #203

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…

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.

Are these client-side only extensions that are manipulating the DOM, or are they somehow feeding parameters to google to exclude domains (by e.g., automatically suffixing a series of "-site:blah.com"s to the query)?

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

#290

Post by michaelt »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #4
CLLD wrote: post #3

It's definitely deteriorating, and the worst part is that it completely ignores quotes if it thinks you meant something else, and shows the results for what it thinks you want. Completely useless in a lot of cases

Google corrects spelling in the way you mention, but removes quotes only if there are zero results for the search with quotes. Example, finding one result; https://www.google.de/search?q=%22but+when+therefore+is+an+a... Getting this wrong is probably why people think we need more than definitive assertions from people operating from subjective impression. Changing a letter in the query, it says, right at the top: Sho…

I have an Intel Realsense camera, which sometimes reports the error "Failed to recconect" (there being a typo in the drivers) [1] - that's a pretty unique error, so in combination with the product name that should be a very easy keyword search, right?

But no, when I search for realsense "failed to recconect" Google returns pages that contain neither realsense nor recconect [2]. They offer me a supreme court opinion, a review of a car dealership, and a facebook church service.

Correcting the spelling of a query is one thing - but also completely ignoring other keywords? I can see why there are so many people posting about the poor quality of Google's search results.

[1] https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/blob/5ff27fca... [2] https://imgur.com/a/okYV5V2

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