I hate when I search for tech issues and I get doc pages but the deprecated docs get top billing. Ironically this often happens when looking up google documentation of their own products. Also sometimes I am looking up a term out of curiousity / intellectual interest but the results are dominated by people selling products for that term. I agree that search could use an overhaul, maybe even niche search designed around certain domains could be a target for producing something better.
Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
381–390 of 433 posts
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#382Yesterday 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.
There's one context I am aware of that "rub" and "genie" go together, and I would certainly expect Google to suggest something with Aladdin pretty high. There is that song with the lyrics "I'm a genie in a bottle, you have to rub me the right way", but I expect Aladdin to overwhelm the results. Not getting Aladdin seems to be a big failure.
I tried the query in Firefox icognito, logged in, and in Safari on iOS using the cell network not my wifi, and got identical results:
1: Youtube video from the "Aladdin" movie (didn't watch, so not sure)
2: Quora question about genie not giving three wishes
3: Movie Quotes - Aladdin
4: Etsy lamp product
5: Stock photo of man hand rubbing lamp
6: Amazon product
7: Genies in popular culture - Wikipedia
8: Iconfinder result
9: Genie - Disney Wiki
This seems rather different than the poster. It's got way more commercial stuff than I'd like (but how does Google know I'm not looking to buy a stuffed lamp toy or something), but the answer to their question would be in the Wikipedia entry, I expect. It might be hard to find the original story, though, since the search term "Aladdin" is probably overwhelmed by the movie.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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".
How can that be inferred? Maybe the results were all bad and I'm refining my search query. Or trying a different search engine.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a user, I can’t think of a time when censoring a term has given me relevant results. It just serves to frustrate me. If Google doesn’t want to return a blank page, they ought to have a small section at the top that says something like, “No results found for [search terms]” and then another section following that clearly states it is excluding a term. FaceBook Marketplace and Craigslist do something similar when th…
Could you all stop misusing the word "censoring" like that? It's almost worse than the way it's usually misused. Also, at least for me, Google does exactly what you describe at the right approach.
I'm not misusing it. Dropping dimensions from a document term vector for similarity computation is called censoring.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#385If you search for anything political on Google, you'll notice that the results are clearly slanted in one direction, towards the opinion of a handful of pre-approved news outlets. This leads me to seek alternatives whenever I need neutral sources, for instance Yahoo search.
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Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, when I was at Google, the SERP (and caring about users) was a shrine at all levels. Here's an example of one of the weekly Search meetings AlbertCory is talking about: https://search.googleblog.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-m... For example, my first week at Google/YouTube, I was in a New Hire meeting with our VP. Someone asked about profitability, and he responded that Larry said we didn't have to worry abo…
in 10+ years of targeted advertising, i still have yet to see a single ad for something that is actually relevant to what i want to buy. i'm actually baffled that these companies that have my entire purchasing history and metadata still cannot do a better job at making me spend money than absolute randos on the internet.
I was in Ads (the first time) from 2008 - 2010. At that time, there was a "user-specific" (I forget the name) group that specialized in modifying ads based on the user themself. They were VERY very restricted by the lawyers in what personal data they could use. I imagine it's been considerably loosened by now, but I don't know that.
To someone else's point: yes, they are restricted by who bid for the keywords, but honestly, that's the whole magic of Google Ads. You have a "motivated buyer", someone who actually wants to send flowers or stay in Duluth. How do you know that? They searched for "flowers" or "duluth hotels", duh.
Is an advertiser willing to throw money at people who probably want to send flowers, based on their past behavior? Well, maybe, but not on the Search Results page. There are lots of other web venues where they can place creepy ads like that.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Sure it is, what it isn't is quantity. Quality and quantity isn't the same thing.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#388Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google's problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways. 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…
Some funny example is "Eclipse": Do you mean Eclipse the IDE? Or the vampire movies? Maybe you mean the astronomical event? or the Nissan Eclipse car? Or you wrote wrong ellipse?
I'm fine with Google not reading my mind at the first try, but at least offer me alternatives and exact text matching. For example since a couple of years looking for phones or symbols is completelly broken.
And I really admire how Google is able to guess the encoding of the websites, detect what is text, do language detection and dropping all the porn. Writting a crawler that actually works is HARD.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#389Earlier 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.
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)?
They manipulate the search result DOM. uBlacklist is the one I use and it'll manipulate the search result page telling you when something has been blocked, allows you to unlbock that site, etc.
Re: Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So I assume by customer you mean advertisers and by product you mean the users carrying out searches.
For their commercial search results I'll grant you that there's an incentive. But for their non-commercial search results why would they care? That's how it used to work, you couldn't delete a domain from the paid results, but you could make it disappear from the unpaid ones.