Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022 • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by ramoz » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

IAmEveryone wrote: post #92

ramoz wrote: 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 realized after testing some more, that the query might not have had many relevant search results. It’s still a strange tactic. Age is contextually important in my query - Google didn’t recognize this

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

#302

Post by achairapart » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

klondike_ wrote: post #54

I think that Google is optimizing for the "average user" to the detriment of power users such as the HN crowd. Most people treat Google as an internet oracle and send queries like "how do I do X" while power users will search for keywords. One example of this optimization is the automatic answer boxes that show up for certain questions, which are wrong disturbingly often or don't include important details.

This. And let's not forget that is the "average user" that mostly naively clicks on ads, not the power user. And selling ads is still Google core business.

Looks like Google is slowly turning into a big nigerian scam.

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

#303

Post by acdha » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:28 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #264

meragrin_ wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That’s the key part: a decade ago, that search would have worked perfectly well. They removed the tools for fixing the problem so they own it.

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

#304

Post by bombcar » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #38

elondaits wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like their location based targeting sucks. Spotify has the same problem for me - it spams my playlists & recommendations with songs that I have never, ever shown the slightest interest in purely based on location. This seems to be a common theme in the industry. Recommenders heavily overweight location - an incredibly general factor, even in the presence of troves of specific, individual level data. Goes to…

All online tools should have a “pretend I’m in Silicon Valley” toggle so you can get the same results the engineers get.

Localized search is useful at times (restaurants for example, I like getting the local McDonald’s or China Wok rather than the biggest one in New York) but it’s completely useless for many terms. But maybe not the ones Google makes the most money on.

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

#305

Post by michaelt » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

whakim wrote: post #87

JimDabell wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems weird to me that Google would take "search quality" seriously for 15+ years (including nearly a decade as one of the biggest companies in the world) and then suddenly stop. Is anybody claiming that it’s sudden? Everybody I’ve seen complain about Google search results has seemed to think that it’s been getting slowly worse over a long period of time.

> Is anybody claiming that it’s sudden? I mean, there are two ex-Googlers in this thread claiming firsthand that search quality was considered sacrosanct as of a few years ago, so it seems like it'd have to have been sudden if indeed it has happened at all.

Well, it's possible they attempted to keep search quality high, and they were unsuccessful but they thought they were successful.

After all, if me, my team and my boss are rewarded when an imperfect measure of search quality goes up and it's going up, why would I fight to switch to a different measure that wasn't rising?

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

#306

Post by rendall » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

TrailMixRaisin wrote: post #296

rendall wrote: post #284

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…

I understand your point but I find it reasonable to expect google to do some of this stuff on its own by now. I assume that only a small portion of its users know how to use "advanced" searches such as using quotes or ~ etc. In the same way that google uses search completion, they could try to group important parts together. But I agree with you that the example search strings seems somewhat fabricated or at least es…

> I assume that only a small portion of its users know how to use "advanced" searches such as using quotes or ~ etc

That's true, and I'm not doubling down here when I say:

I tune out when I'm watching a horror movie, and the characters behave in a way that's designed to bring themselves sorrow. As soon as the characters know they're in a horror movie but decide to split up or go down to the basement alone anyway, I stop watching.

I had the same feeling reading that article.

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

#307

Post by tremon » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #209

wolpoli wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether search quality is deteriorating really depends what we expect from a search engine. Many of us on HN use search engine as a way to look for web pages with specific words. Search engines did start out performing word searches, but somewhere along the way, they started trying to answer questions. Many of the complaints such as Google dropping search terms are actually the result of the search engine trying to a…

It's easy to tell if it's a natural language question or keywordese. They can classify that.

I sometimes try to translate my keywordese to English when I'm confronted with a clueless response. It hardly ever improves the results.

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

#308

Post by darkerside » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

kreeben wrote: post #201

pjc50 wrote: 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?

The world wide web is not the world. If it exists you can search it. Even if you need to open a client, run Discord search, and execute OCR to interpret the results.

In tech, it's never what's possible, it's just what costs area reasonable.

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

#309

Post by tedivm » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

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/

Why not just use firefox?

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

#310

Post by myhikesorg » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

This reply is based on my own biased experience, but I run a small website to share public trail data and I've found that Google (in my opinion) artificially suppresses my site's results on really basic searches. Within Google's search console you can easily check if a page has been indexed. For example, I've published new trails/hikes in the past where Google's index claims it includes the page.. but when I search "myhikes ", it sometimes doesn't show up - even after clicking through multiple pages! If I change my search to "site:myhikes.org " it'll show up... weird? I think so.

I understand how keywords can be confused by search engines and "myhikes" is fairly generic as many people might post a blog with the string "my hikes", etc. Now if I search a popular trail that Google likes to serve up regularly (i.e. "myhikes ") it comes up as 1st in the list.

Additionally, what pisses me off even more, is that I've searched for "myhikes " and have been served Google's own map / shitty trail tiles ranked as #1, then my site is ranked #2. Doesn't that last bit feel a bit anti-competitive? It does to me, but maybe I'm biased.