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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

#331

Post by myhikesorg »

IndexPointer wrote: post #328
myhikesorg wrote: post #310

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 "…

Unrelated, but your website is down right now.

Thanks for the reply! It's actually up and running, but if the response says "forbidden" it's likely because I blanket-block a lot of non-US IPs, AWS IP ranges, etc. because of annoying crawlers. This is bad practice, but I do it for several reasons. I've turned off some blanket-blocking for now.

If you see this comment, would you mind sharing if you were making a request from a US-based IP, VPN, or outside the US? Just curious - it'll help me understand things a bit better.

Try again if you wish :)

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

#333

Post by IndexPointer »

colordrops wrote: post #59
RandyRanderson wrote: post #8

One reason it might deteriorated is that goog is constantly battling ppl 'optimizing' their content for Google while competitors likely see less than 1/1000 of this.

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.

There are billions of dollars on stake from both sides, search engines and spammers, in an endless arms race that has been going on for more than 20 years. Trust me, it's beyond naive to say fighting webspam is a low hanging fruit problem.

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

#334

Post by rexreed »

I've been saying this since 2016! So what can be done about it? There are certainly better search engine alternatives out there. But the market doesn't seem to want it? The average Joe and Jane still go right to Google for search and Chrome for browser. And the truth is that as soon as a solid alternative comes out, the entrenched incumbents will squash it like a bug through acquisition or other means.

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

#335

Post by notreallyserio »

Hermel wrote: post #268
erikbye wrote: post #251

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.

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.

I actually want this in my search engine. I want it to exclude low quality news sources and sites with cloned content. But I want to control the exclusion list myself, like I used to be able to do.

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

#336

Post by IndexPointer »

Kavelach wrote: post #174
caconym_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just block the domain. At first, you can block manually, but we know Google doesn't like doing things that way. Fortunately, they have a lot of heuristics to find sites like that; usually the content is just copied from another source. And since they scrape the web all the time, they should know which content has appeared first where. But the issue isn't that they can't; the issue is that they don't want that. Why th…

Any simple heuristic has false positives, meaning they'll end up taking down legitimate sites that had repeated content for a good reason. Say, for example two sites quoting text from the us constitution. The second one to be crawled would be considered to be spam copying the first one and removed from web results. Then you'll get comments on hacker news complaining that Google is censoring it for political reasons.

And any simple heuristic is quickly reverse engineered by SEOs, who will find a way to mask it as legitimate.

tl;dr it's a hard problem.

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

#337

Post by nojvek »

Yesterday I was googling for “rub fingers genie magic”. I was looking whether it was a cup, kettle or a vase you “rub fingers” to invoke the magic genie.

But google would automatically change to “jenie” and bring up Amazon crap. I tried adding “alladin” and it changed query to bring up alibaba crap.

Google had no idea about the famous alladin and genie story.

Google not only misunderstood me, they thought I was an idiot for asking a non e-commerce query.

The top 5 results above the fold were all ads. It was truly frustrating. I called a friend to ask them that question and get an answer.

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

#338

Post by jspiral »

djohnston wrote: post #297
kgonza wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is web3? What exactly is it? And how could it be used in this case?

The idea is you'd have an email client but all data is stored encrypted on chain and you'd have to pay tx costs to send things. By having this sort of stamp tax spammer wouldn't be able to scale mass messaging as it would bankrupt them.

in meatspace though, my real mailbox is mostly filled with spam that the sender paid to have delivered. granted, it would at least act as a limiting factor.

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

#339

Post by mcv »

tommek4077 wrote: post #323
mcv wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? I don't use Chrome.

Browserfingerprinting, they see you again on ther resultspage after x seconds -> bad result. They don't see you again -> good result.

That's not how I use the results page, though. I open the top x number of results in separate tabs, and then check those pages. I only go back to the tab with the results page after I've checked them all, so that might be a while, even if they all suck.

So if they look at my behaviour the way you say, then the feedback they'd get from me would be that the top x-1 results are always bad, while the xth result is always good. That sounds like a poor algorithm for them, but it might explain why my Google results always suck.

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

#340

Post by dcminter »

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.

Google used to let you do this itself when you were logged in. I never understood why they removed that; surely the information on what domains were deemed unwanted was valuable!?
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