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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

#361

Post by Schroedingersat »

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.

Which heavily penalizes sites that make information easy to find.

Especially for use cases like reviews where you are looking for multiple opinions.

The hard to navigate site full of waffle, and SEO duckspeak nonsense gets a positive while the site with clear concise information the user can absorb in 2s gets penalized.

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

#362

Post by lacksconfidence »

acdha wrote: post #299
junon wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge vector for abuse. The signal:noise ratio wouldn't improve at all.

The signal:noise ratio would certainly improve for anyone voting even if they didn’t use it to adjust other people’s search results. I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. What seems far more plausible is that they’ve decided it isn’t costing them more in ad sales than it brings in. There are individua…

> I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns.

Isn't that exactly what people are complaining about here though? At least part o the problem with search results is that google seems powerless to recognize and remove useless bad actors (stack overflow copies, etc.) from their index.

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

#363

Post by Schroedingersat »

junon wrote: post #291
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's a huge vector for abuse. The signal:noise ratio wouldn't improve at all.

If I can block the 5 word soup gpt2 fake support sites that make up the top 20 results for obscure debugging messages from my own personal account, then my signal to noise ratio went from 0 to some number above 0. This is an infinite improvement for the first page.

Noone ever wants to go to xypdf.com for any reason unless they want to feel like they just had a stroke, how is (was? it made me stop using google except as a last resort in 2019) it often 3 of the top 5 results?

I wish I could just invert their SEO quality metric (there was a golden window around 2018 where you could just type -best into search engines that still respected subtraction to get only good reviews but sadly quality sites have fallen into line with the duck speak). I feel it's a pretty reliable indicator of garbage.

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

#364

Post by acdha »

lacksconfidence wrote: post #362
acdha wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signal:noise ratio would certainly improve for anyone voting even if they didn’t use it to adjust other people’s search results. I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. What seems far more plausible is that they’ve decided it isn’t costing them more in ad sales than it brings in. There are individua…

> I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. Isn't that exactly what people are complaining about here though? At least part o the problem with search results is that google seems powerless to recognize and remove useless bad actors (stack overflow copies, etc.) from their index.

My position is that they could do far more if they cared - simply blocking spam domains like it’s the previous century would make my experience better – but that they have made a business decision not to devote more resources to the problem.

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

#365

Post by aantix »

I think it's complete BS that when I search for something like Basecamp, they show the paid advertisement before the organic result, even though they're the same.

Feels so slimy. The organic result would have sufficed.

Nothing but a glorified 1997 Yahoo Index at this point.

I never click the advert. I know I'm probably in the minority, but I won't give them the infinitesimal revenue.

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

#366

Post by JohnWhigham »

halpert wrote: post #16

I believe the theory that Google is optimizing for ad revenue. Sites without ads get ranked lower. The biggest example I can think of is Wikipedia. When I search a proper noun with a Wikipedia article, I almost want to go look at that article. Recently, I feel like I really have to dig for it.

Yup. I've noticed recently that when I search for a public figure (whether it be a politican or businessperson or celebrity), their Wikipedia is now at the bottom of page 1, or not at all anymore. Never used to be the case 5 years ago.

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

#367

Post by foobiekr »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #226
foobiekr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But slow/fast isn't quality. What were the rigorous measurements? Latency of results to click? User clicked above the fold? I have wondered about this now for several years, because from my point of view Google search has steadily degraded since around 2010. The specific degradation isn't that it returns nothing, or irrelevant pages, but that it returns mostly _recent_ content, and returns very little _older_ content…

> But slow/fast isn't quality. What were the rigorous measurements? Latency of results to click? User clicked above the fold? Slow and fast is what we experience. We live in a phenomenological world, not a world of millisecond metrics. While it isn't rigorous, for humans, numbers are pointless. We can't experience them. What matters is whether it feels fast.

That isn’t quality. That’s like saying a crappy textbook full of errors that ships prime same day is better than a good textbook that takes a week to arrive.

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

#368

Post by leokennis »

Personally I'm at full scale war with ads on the internet and I make sure I see almost none (nowadays this can be achieved in a lot of ways - Pi-hole, NextDNS, uBlock etc.)

So when recently my wife and I were searching for a holiday destination online on her laptop (with no blocking as she gets very annoyed if blocking makes even one page unusable - she'd rather drown in ads all day) I was pretty shocked that for almost all search queries, on a 13" laptop with 1280x800 resolution and the browser running full screen at 100% zoom, the >>entire visible Google results page is all ads!So, Google could improve their search engine dramatically and the typical searcher would not even see the results of it...

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

#369

Post by Mezzie »

Gigachad wrote: post #70
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.

I think this is overall a good thing. Power users have trained their behaviour to work in the way that simple systems can deal with. While average users ask the question exactly how they would ask another human. Google has now reached a level where it works best when you deal with it in a natural and human level. There is nothing actually better about the way we originally used search engines, it was just required at…

I think it's somewhere in the middle.

For some queries, being able to ask off the top of your head without thinking is good. Think 'what day of the week was June 14th, 2002?' or 'Who is the mayor of Los Angeles?' For quick questions with clear answers, the current system is a huge advantage over what we had before.

For other, more complicated queries, the act of composing your search and considering your keywords, etc. is a step in the process that helps a searcher mentally understand the results they're going to receive along with what they mean. Having to stop and consider makes you aware that you're working within a system and its constraints, which makes it more suitable for questions that are complex or not socially settled.

Not all information is the same.

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

#370

Post by AnyTimeTraveler »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #351
Jenk wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

I don't know if I'm secretly being A/B tested, but Google seems to ignore - and "" terms in my queries from time to time.

I have also noticed that and it has been really difficult to search for obscure error messages now.
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