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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

#341

Post by mcv »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #322
mcv wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual sponsored links end up at the top anyway. I don't see how bad regular results would contribute to their revenue; it would just drive people away.

>I don't see how bad regular results would contribute to their revenue Let's say you run a good song-lyrics site that has the correct lyrics for everyone's favorite songs. You happen to be on page 2 of google results for common queries; all of page 1 is taken up by spammers, fake pages, etc. How can you possibly drive traffic to your site? Maybe you can invest in SEO but no promises there. You'd be competing against…

Yeah, but so can the spammers and fake pages.

And it all works together to make Google worse.

I agree that it would work as long as Google has an absolute monopoly on search. Google wouldn't care how bad their search results are, because there's nowhere else to go. But if there are alternatives, users should stop using Google and use the alternatives instead, and then Google has an incentive to improve their search results for users again.

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

#342

Post by nikanj »

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?

Even Discord can’t search inside Discord

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

#343

Post by neutronicus »

krageon wrote: post #266
ciphol wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're probably much less likely to leak PII to non-community members through Discord than a forum.

I also think ephemeral-by-default seems to result in much fewer long-running fights than you would have in public-record-by-default communities like forums.

Like when a thread gets heated in a forum, it keeps getting bumped and none of the people involved can resist picking at the sore.

On Discord it seems like someone steps away, the channel moves on, and the fight actually dies

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

#345

Post by mcv »

mprovost wrote: post #283
amelius wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cou…

> presumably the last clicked link was the result they were looking for.

This is a risky assumption. I tend to click all the links first, and only then check if they're the results I'm looking for.

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

#347

Post by the_doctah »

nojvek wrote: post #337

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 id…

It might be because it's spelled "Aladdin", it's a lamp, and you don't necessarily rub it with your fingers, you just rub it. Your queries were way off.

If you had just Googled "Aladdin Genie" you would have every single result in the first page be relevant.

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

#350

Post by eitland »

tethys wrote: post #326
eitland wrote: post #246

Earlier 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…

You're probably talking about this site? https://api.slack.com/tutorials/tracks/responding-to-app-men... It is the top result on Bing as well. It probably shows up in this spot on both search engines because it's prominently linked on https://ngrok.com/ .

So it seems this is an understandable case. Google not only rank but also filter pages based on text of links pointing to them.

This has been going on for a while, at one point before Obama, searching for a "a miserable failure" got the White House as first result.

But this cannot be the entire explanation for why so many results are useless?

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