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

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421–430 of 433 posts

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

#421
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree this isn't technically "censorship" from one perspective, I do think it's important to consider this: by forcibly omitting search terms against your wishes, it is actively and deliberately preventing you from searching from what you wanted to search for. This is both frustrating for the user, and has a detrimental effect upon the quality of the search results.

When most people search, they're generally looking for information that matches a topic, not necessarily every single word in a query. You can imagine the number of misses that would happen if we didn't compensate for misspellings, for example. Or for synonyms or plural forms. But in no way are people prevented from searching for exactly the words indicated, if they feel that's best. Use Tools > All Results > Verbatim from the search toolbar. Or put quotes around the word or words you want exactly sought.

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

#422

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…

Yes, give me a downvote button on Google results.

Come try Kagi Search and get both upvote and downvote!

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We cater to power users. If you absolutely, positively need a word or phrase to be on a page, use quotes. "age" or "tim lee" would tell us that exact word or that exact phrase has to be on the page. Which still doesn't help with this query, given that his age doesn't appear to be known, but you can do it for others.

Even quotes don't actually work. I've witnessed google query rewrite even with full quotes. I've also seen other posts on HN from others who've had this happen to them.

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

#424
post #239
post #90

If 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.

I find these responses fascinating as the "clearly slanted" results tend to change direction depending on the political affiliation of the person making the claim! Having said that, I'd love to be proved wrong if you have any evidence to show a particular bias one way or the other?

My experience is that it's slanted whichever side of the easel you're one. The evidence is really clear when you measure results between various search providers, and especially when searching up contentious or controversial topics. So it doesn't really change direction so much as it confirms one particular set of beliefs depending on which search engine you're on. I think this is clearly in Google's disfavour, because people have started to notice and they're actively searching for alternatives to Google in order to avoid it.

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

#425
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.

We show this to indicate to you that we found a page that might be relevant but which doesn't contain that exact word. And why we would conclude that is explained better if you search for ["tim lee" food vlogger "age"]. That's telling us to find only pages that have "tim lee" on it in that order, as well as the word "age" and food vlogger are nice to have but not required. And it turns out -- there's not a lot of pag…

Thanks for the follow up, I realized all of your points afterwards.

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

#426
disclaimer: I started you.com, a private search engine with summarization.

I've seen many users complain about Google's quality and wanting to have some control over their sources. That's why we added source preferences as a feature (you have to log in). You can also change the order for a query and similar queries directly within the search results page so that you eg see StackOverflow or Code Completion higher than web results.

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

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cater to power users. If you absolutely, positively need a word or phrase to be on a page, use quotes. "age" or "tim lee" would tell us that exact word or that exact phrase has to be on the page. Which still doesn't help with this query, given that his age doesn't appear to be known, but you can do it for others.

Even quotes don't actually work. I've witnessed google query rewrite even with full quotes. I've also seen other posts on HN from others who've had this happen to them.

Quotes do work. They really, really do. Every time I look into a complaint about this, I find that the text really is on the page. It just might not be readily visible. Twitter link is in my bio here. If you ever get an example where you find quotes don't seem to be working, do pass it on.

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

#428
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Google's monetization for Search results the primary reason for not allowing crowd funded quality metrics? If only good results get to the top how do they make money? Google's Search business model appears to be predicated on poor results getting disproportionately prominent listing.

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.

Let's say we have three search results, good, average and bad, displayed on one result per page in that order. The user is happy, Google is unhappy as there is no motivation for the site owner of the best search result to pay Google for their listing. The only way Google gets money is if it enables the result order to be modified, i.e. the owners of the average or poor sites to disproportionately effect their listing prominence by appearing on page 1. Google do this by allowing paid adverts. Bad or average search results thus get disproportionately high prominence in the listing with the knock on effect that the owner of the best search result now has motivation to pay Google to regain their primary listing. And even further, if the site owner of the best search results now has to pay Google for the prominence of their listing why waste money on continuing to provide the best results? The user is unhappy, Google is happy.

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

They could use the heuristics to build a list of domains to block and then have someone review it. After doing it for a long time, they could build a neural model on top of that, and automate it.

As I have said, the reason they don't do it is not because they don't have the skills and know-how.

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

#430
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just installed this! Thanks for the suggestion! Don't forget to use ungoogled chromium if possible The only downside is you will have to load unpacked extensions instead of using the Chrome "store" and you will have to manually install Chromium updates from the same site: https://chromium.woolyss.com/

Why not just use firefox?

Some people might still prefer Chromium for other reasons?

Eg there are performance and memory differences between the two browsers, and different extensions are available.

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