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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

#311

Post by AmericanBlarney »

darkerside wrote: post #308
kreeben wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Or what's legally allowed by the ToS...

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

#312

Post by nspattak »

Googles search's results are often wrong because of corporate choices. In Greece there is a completely independent news web site which for some reason just isn't registered as a news web site with google. As a result not only is this web site less shown than others (in google feed or in search results) but in the past there have been cases where this web site was the first to publish a story but google search only returned other news sites which reproduced this story even using the original material!

In my opinion, google has become too big and has lost focus on actual quality/engineering.

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

#313

Post by acdha »

cromwellian wrote: post #276
pjc50 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gr…

I’ve been on the internet since the 80s and the bad actors were still around back then. USENET was made unusable at one point by people spamming, mass cross posting, and playing cancel wars. This was well before ads or profit existed on the net.

This is all true but Google and later Facebook made it easier to monetize spam and were clearly unconcerned about the impact on communities unless advertisers stopped buying. An unethical immigration law firm still needed to sign up clients but a teenager in Moldova could scrape someone else’s content, SEO it, and make a decent income without knowing who the money came from.

I think pjc’s point is extremely important: micropayments could dramatically change things but it’s quite hard to set values which will deter enough spam to be effective without excluding innocent people or simply increasing the damages when someone is compromised. That was what killed proof-of-work email spam concepts decades ago: even if you could get adoption, it wouldn’t have hurt the people using botnets to spam as much as many legitimate users.

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

#314

Post by mcv »

lbriner wrote: post #292
machiaweliczny wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People sell good accounts for lots of money to the spammers.

And when those accounts suddenly start behaving like bad accounts, their votes get treated as such. There will be a window of confusion, but it might not be that big. And there would be an economic incentive for people to establish trusted accounts with high-quality voting behaviour.

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

#315

Post by mcv »

aqme28 wrote: post #300
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.

But you do vote on search results. Google knows if you stay on a page or leave it quickly for another result. That's an implicit vote that they definitely take into account. Having that explicit button might not really add any additional value.

How? I don't use Chrome.

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

#317

Post by hooande »

The methodology in this article is terrible. It makes me doubt that the people at Surge HQ understand even the most basic scientific concepts.

This is like doing a taste test between two sodas where one is clearly labeled "Coke" and the other labeled "Pepsi". It will end up measuring branding and public perception instead of anything empirical or even objective.

This isn't a measurement of search quality, it's a public opinion poll with a sample size of 250. In fact the whole thing is a poorly disguised advertisement, and I don't think it serves them well.

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

#318

Post by Hayarotle »

otherotherchris wrote: post #132
crdrost wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is, given that I have a baby and I am a trained scientist and I live in the US, I find myself converting milliliters to fluid ounces a lot. Right now the Google Assistant will correctly transcribe the request to a Google search... Only for the search to interpret “ml” as “miles” and, faced with the discrepancy between the length and a volume, cube the miles. So I am expecting an amount that is like 1 oz b…

Ten years ago Google Calculator used to work perfectly. I don't understand how they've broken it and why no one is responsible for fixing it. Perhaps everyone who understood the codebase has left?

At least we can still use duckduckgo and use the !wa bang (wolfram alpha)

Sometimes even without the !wa, as duckduckgo itself often provides the result

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

#320

Post by mda »

freediver wrote: post #83

The article mostly talks about IA (instant answers) which are notoriously hard. The recent advances in machine learning have made the technology more approachable, so startups like Kagi Search (disclaimer: founder) can also leverage latest advances in NLP and compete on this ground. To give just a few examples: Query 1: how many stars in the usa flag Google: https://cln.sh/63sVzh Kagi: https://cln.sh/bFEHsD Pretty su…

Fwiw, for "how many stars in the usa flag" Google gives the correct answer for both logged in and not.
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