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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

#371

Post by baxtr »

leokennis wrote: post #368

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 alm…

Would you agree that every business needs to find ways to earn money?

If we agree on that, could you agree that using a "free" service might be free only in the sense that you don't pay any money but instead they use your attention to sell ad space which in turn pays for their bills?

Me personally, I don't see anything wrong with that.

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

#372

Post by sct202 »

elondaits wrote: post #21
creato wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried that search, all of the results look relevant and I definitely don't get any of the results you are getting. I wonder if you have some malware that is hijacking the results? I once had some malware (chrome extension) that was corrupting my search results. It was surprisingly difficult to remove (given that it was a chrome extension...).

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…

I see some people are having trouble replicating the results, and I wonder if you some how got thrown into a really bad user test group--if they do that.

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

#373

Post by jcranberry »

ibdf wrote: post #346

If we could only give feedback on search results, things would improve. I am tired of finding the same articles over and over again that just update the year every year and gives you a top list of product "reviews" with a link to amazon.

Clicking on a link I'm sure is feedback.

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

#374

Post by mcv »

amelius wrote: post #357
wruza wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to make it a public vote. I'm fine to do this work myself for a week or so, and then enjoy crap-free searches. Or link my votes account to someone who I trust and use their opinion. Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.

I wish there was some standardized way to say "I trust you" on the internet, and share part of their information bubble (e.g. reviews, up/downvoted websites, youtube recommendations, etc.), and this bubble could have some transitive properties (if I trust X and X trusts Y, then to some extent I trust Y too). But it's probably too privacy sensitive (if I see which sites you upvoted, then I have some information about…

Well, every social media network tries to capture and monetize this, of course.

But yes, it would be nice to have this in a less proprietary way. But I fear it's either going to be a privacy issue (because the person you trust has to publish every page they like and dislike), or it's going to be anonymous and therefore easily gamed by bad actors.

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

#375

Post by ouid »

dcminter wrote: post #340
cik wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!?

Google's customers want access to the product, this would be denying them that access.

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

#376

Post by nicbou »

baxtr wrote: post #371
leokennis wrote: post #368

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 alm…

Would you agree that every business needs to find ways to earn money? If we agree on that, could you agree that using a "free" service might be free only in the sense that you don't pay any money but instead they use your attention to sell ad space which in turn pays for their bills? Me personally, I don't see anything wrong with that.

It depends on how it makes the money.

For instance, I'm perfectly fine with a website earning a commission on the products it reviews. I go out of my way to make sure the website that convinced me gets their commission.

However, a lot of the content is now written specifically for the commission, with zero effort spent on the content itself. That's how you get "best products of 2022" lists on January 1 2022, which contain zero useful research about the products. They add no value.

This is good: https://tomsbiketrip.com/whats-the-best-camping-cookware-for...

This is not good: https://www.thespruceeats.com/best-camping-cookware-5184274

I also see more and more websites that just rephrase other websites' content, and replace the affiliate links with their own. In the end, you get a dozens of websites feeding off the same 2-3 original articles.

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

#377

Post by wruza »

amelius wrote: post #357
wruza wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to make it a public vote. I'm fine to do this work myself for a week or so, and then enjoy crap-free searches. Or link my votes account to someone who I trust and use their opinion. Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.

I wish there was some standardized way to say "I trust you" on the internet, and share part of their information bubble (e.g. reviews, up/downvoted websites, youtube recommendations, etc.), and this bubble could have some transitive properties (if I trust X and X trusts Y, then to some extent I trust Y too). But it's probably too privacy sensitive (if I see which sites you upvoted, then I have some information about…

Click up/downvote.

Click/dismiss "make it private/public" bubble.

Set default vote visibility in settings.

Enable/disable the bubble.

List/add/remove sites in a privacy list.

But the common notion is that it's probably too hard for "regular" users, so we have the internet of nonsense instead. Few more years and we won't find anything good.

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

#378

Post by iggldiggl »

planb wrote: post #186
greyman wrote: post #172

I don't know if search is deteriorating as a whole, but certain searches seems to be manipulated for political reasons. The famous example is an Image search of "white couple" - really, try it, it is like only 50% correct. But I don't believe the image search itself would be that bad, rather certain queries are given manipulated results.

You're overestimating the smarts of google: Image search does not classify image contents. It uses the site text for ranking of the images on that site. It finds lots of "Black And White Couple Stock Photo" images - the image description in fact contains the string "white couple".

I'm fairly certain it actually is classifying image contents since at least a year or two ago (or maybe a little bit even longer – I can't remember when exactly I first noticed this), because I've noticed getting image search results that can't be explained otherwise (the keyword I've been searching for most certainly doesn't appear anywhere on the page containing the image in question). It can be turned off by doing a verbatim search (i.e. surrounding the search term with quotes), but otherwise it definitively happens, and it's occasionally been quite useful actually.

Likewise, since at least around the same time (if not somewhat earlier), Google has also been running OCR on all images it indexes.

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

#379

Post by gruez »

mcv wrote: post #345
mprovost wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can work around that by using javascript (checking for tab losing focus) and checking how quickly the links are being clicked. If you middle-click a bunch of links, then don't click any more links, then it can be inferred that one of the links that you clicked was "good".

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

#380

Post by Mezzie »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #210
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.

Query rewriting, a useless and use-hostile technique, strikes again! (No I am not talking about trying to fix spelling mistakes with "did you mean". I mean straight up removal or rewriting of correct English words) I am embarrassed by the whole field of NLP for making such a big deal out of a task that is fundamentally bad. Google optimizing for the "average user" comes at the expense of the whole world, because the…

> Google optimizing for the "average user" comes at the expense of the whole world, because the "power users" who are optimized against literally build the internet for the normies. Cater to the normies for too long, and we see the status quo.

If I were feeling cynical, I would point out that catering to us was a great idea for early Google, but not so much now. The problem with power users is that the more control you give them, the more they learn about how your product works and what decisions you're making. Power users can pick out dark UI and other user-hostile patterns more easily.

Early Google needed the power users, because we were an essential component of building Google's early dominance: It was us gesturing the normies over and saying "as the computer person (TM) in your life, you should be using Google. They're cleaner and their results are better." We were needed to both scale their user base and plug gaps since at the time there weren't dozens of engineers working on issues and search + web indexing was still in its infancy.

Now, though? There's no benefit to Google in engaging with power users. They have the numbers of normies they need for profit, and all engaging power users would do now is lead to more conversations like this in the real world, which is not what they want.

"Oh, you're still using Google? They suck now. Use X, Y, and Z." = conversations Google doesn't want.

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