Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#1

Post by coffeemug » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:06 PM UTC

Yesterday I was surprised to find myself trying Yahoo search because I couldn't get satisfactory search results in Google. It was the first time in years. I started thinking about this, and I realized that in the past few months I haven't been getting particularly good results from Google. I don't get spam or anything, but a lot of times I don't get useful results.

The thing is, I'm not sure if it's because I do a lot of very specialized stuff these days, or because the search quality really has gone down. Consider these two examples:

Search for "Linux asynchronous IO". You'll get a lot of articles, but most are four years old (which is an eternity in the Linux world). These results aren't very good - posix AIO is implemented in userspace threads, and io_submit and friends don't work in many cases. Which cases? Hard to tell - I couldn't find any information in the results no matter how long I searched. I couldn't find any benchmarks either.

Perhaps it's because there is no good info on this on the web (hard to believe). So let's try something else - search for "concurrent hashmap in C". After hours of searching and playing with keywords, I got almost no useful results (other than Intel's libs, but not too much info on that either). It's difficult to believe that there are no good implementations out there.

So, is it the specialized nature of my searches, or is it Google? What do you think?

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#2

Post by mahmud » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:11 PM UTC

Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and other regexy stuff.

Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member" was the personal MySpace page of some guy.

I think they're optimizing for "social" results now.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#3

Post by Erf » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:13 PM UTC

Yes.

One thing I noticed is that searches no longer require that all words in the query be present in the search results. Adding a + before a word is now required to ensure that it's present in results. That frequently results in me having to do 2-3 searches to find something that could previously be found with one.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#4

Post by codyrobbins » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:24 PM UTC

See also the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803201.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#5

Post by Skeuomorph » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:24 PM UTC

mahmud wrote: post #2

Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and other regexy stuff. Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member" was the personal M…

It's also aggravating that quotes don't allow matching of specific symbols within the quotes.

And, yes, the results are different. I'd agree with you they seem enhanced (eg., classified results) and fresher for popular culture, but somewhat worse for domain specific queries.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#6

Post by asyazwan » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:27 PM UTC

mahmud wrote: post #2

Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and other regexy stuff. Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member" was the personal M…

Can't agree more. Let's hope in the future we can choose to search for tech-specific results.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#7

Post by tamas » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:27 PM UTC

I have always had the habit of quickly editing the query if the top 5 results aren't what I was looking for, up to the point where I don't even really think about it, just adding some more keywords or sprinking a couple pluses, minuses or quotes. So I can't really tell if it has deteriorated in the past years.

However, I do think it could be possible that the pagerank algorithm does not scales good enough for the growth of Web pages, and especially with the "SEOs" out there always trying to come up with new ways to game the system.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#8

Post by NikkiA » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:36 PM UTC

It has certainly gone waaaay south since day 1, that much is undeniable. Of course, a large part of that is that the internet has gotten a lot more useless filler in those years, and this has of course made 'relevant search' an astronomically harder problem than it was in 1998.

On the more important metric of 'has quality gotten worse in the last couple of years', I would say 'sort of'. The direct quality of results HAS suffered, but on the other hand, google have implemented the user-wiki thing that allows you to modify, to a degree, which sites are less relevant.

I will add that I think google needs to rethink it's keyword fuzziness, in the past it used to be acceptable if the results didn't exactly match what you were searching for, but these days that is becoming more of a problem. If I search for a bunch of words, I typically know I want those words, by all means suggest 'did you mean ... ?' but the fuzziness in the results needs to be pulled back.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#9

Post by NikkiA » Mon, Oct 26, 2009, 12:39 PM UTC

mahmud wrote: post #2

Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and other regexy stuff. Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member" was the personal M…

They'd probably do well to have a seperate 'technical search' for searching for things related to technical matters, eg programming languages, physics, chemistry, medicine, engineering, etc. And remove the casual stuff (facebook, myspace, pages that are clearly not about a technical subject, etc) from that index.

It would probably be a highly praised feature to seperate off a second index like that, as specifically searching for programming language concepts and documentation can be difficult (the C# and .NET problem).