Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy • Hacker News Board

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#171

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 2:43 AM UTC

airstrike wrote: post #158

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #32

Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title makes no sense whatsoever. "Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any up…

Agreed, but even "Google sometimes gets things wrong" isn't entirely accurate. So it favors popularity over accuracy. So what? Google is not in the business of providing the most accurate search results. It's in the business of generating ad revenue. If popular links make Google more valuable, then favoring them is "getting things right" from the perspective of a private company.

I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy. Actually I think that is a seriously editorialized take as well, not in keeping with the spirit of HN. I think it would be more correct to say that much of the time popularity is accuracy, in that it's what the searcher is looking for. When there are a variety of interpretations of a query, the most popular interpretation is the rational prior expectation. When not -- for example, when I search for "go" with a history of searching for programming related topics -- Google tries to give me what I'm looking for.

But it's also just a hard problem. That featured snippet about the dentist for example: Google's computers aren't investigative journalists. The purpose of the featured snippet is actually to favor accuracy over popularity by deferring to journalists when Google senses that the searcher is looking for information about an event that was covered in the news. However, if the journalists get it wrong, how is Google going to know? Dollars to donuts, if Google actually knew the right answer, that's what they would surface.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#172

Post by techslave » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 2:48 AM UTC

jbritton wrote: post #10

bovermyer wrote: post #2

Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?

yup. use gopher instead

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#173

Post by jandrese » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 3:01 AM UTC

blahedo wrote: post #135

cmckn wrote: post #64

> Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google successful. I don't disagree…

> founded on ... the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" I started grad school at Brown in 1997 and I remember a talk there, by someone from Google or connected to it, about PageRank. PageRank was still new, Google was still in beta. Free swag from dotcoms was literally growing on trees. But I digress. I remember that the narrative about PageRank at the time was not about popularity, but about expertise. I re…

I wonder if in the fight against SEOs Google didn't accidentally punish actual experts. SEO organizations will relentlessly hound changes to Google's algorithm in ways that regular users do not.

In the old days it was cost prohibitive to setup a massive network of interconnected fake hosts to boost your rank, but these days with cheap VPSes this is entirely possible and probably even profitable. I'm certainly not the only person who has searched for something and found a ton of differently styled blogs all hosting exactly the same content stolen from some legitimate website and clogging up pages of Google results.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#174

Post by blondin » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 3:01 AM UTC

neutronicus wrote: post #98

chrisco255 wrote: post #43

In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructi…

I think Podcasts are mainly popular because you can consume them in the car on the way to work.

omg same here...

with the current confinement situation in the world, my podcast episodes list has been growing. i caught up with some of it over last weekend but i feel like i don't have a dedicated time for podcast anymore.

twitter & the web have replaced that time.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#175

Post by gumby » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 3:08 AM UTC

devinplatt wrote: post #94

gumby wrote: post #60

Google’s mission is/was “to organize the world’s information”. There was no adjective on “organize”. “Worse is better” wins again.

Google's mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."[1] According to a Wikipedia citation (The Guardian) this was the original mission statement.[2] [1] https://about.google [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-pag... Disclaimer: I work at Google.

Useful to whom is the question of course. I stopped using google a while ago because it gave me a useful response less and less frequently and I had to scroll over a lot of cruft to find a good answer if any. When google started it had the best results and no cruft.

Like people who complain that the latest macs are “terrible”, perhaps I’m simply not google’s audience any more. That doesn’t make google, or me, wrong.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#176

Post by perl4ever » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 3:19 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #161

IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherw…

"do not even contain all the words in the query"

You may be overlooking where Google found the missing words or concepts in a page that linked to the hit, just not within the hit itself. That can actually be useful sometimes.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#177

Post by redwall_hp » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #163

userbinator wrote: post #161

IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherw…

I'm just glad I'm not alone, sometimes I second guess if I am the problem. Currently just to get basically workable results I'm finding myself putting "every" "keyword" "in" "quotes" (to make sure they're actually in the result pages at all), the site: modifier to restrict it to real sites, and negative modifiers (-"keyword") to remove some SEO results. Google used to be "magic" in that it knew what you were thinking…

I think it has to do with shifting expectations. All of us who use the Web seriously, and have been for years, want a full text search engine. The average user wants what Ask Jeeves promised to be: something that takes vaguely question-shaped queries and spits back a fast answer. Or a glorified URL bar to outsource memory and effort.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#178

Post by basch » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 3:22 AM UTC

patcon wrote: post #170

ehsankia wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree that it's hard to find for anyone looking for it. The issue is that most people aren't looking for it, and you can't force them. A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and that's perfectly…

I feel for you in empathizing for people's ability to just have what they want, but... I worry about it too. (I say all this with compassion and a non-confrontational tone.) > The issue is that most people aren't looking for [a marketplace of ideas], and you can't force them No? We can't? Or we shouldn't? Might that be our hyper-individualist culture constraining our imagination of what the right path (survival) migh…

Are you contemplating compulsory education? What we already do to kids so they don't resort to hedonism?

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#179

Post by ehsankia » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 3:24 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #23

ehsankia wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas. The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree that it's hard to find for anyone looking for it. The issue is that most people aren't looking for it, and you can't force them. A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and that's perfectly…

> Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct. This happens quite often on Hacker News. One of the fastest and easiest ways to accumulate karma is to be the first to post something like "$hated_company has always been doing $horrible_thing, they need to change", which most people agree with, every time a popular story about t…

Filter bubbles aren't inherently bad. For example, Google bubbling up news from my city makes sense, but if it were to show me small news from every single city on the planet, that would be insane. Similarly, I enjoy it when it gives me some article about Animal Crossing that I've been playing lately, but doesn't show me any sports news that I have zero interest in. There are just so many different interests out there that it's simply impossible to follow every single one, so having news bubbles absolutely makes sense.

When people talk negatively about bubbles, they generally focus on the couple cases where being in a bubble is harmful, such as when it comes to science, politics and so on, but ignore all the other times where a bubble is good.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#180

Post by perl4ever » Wed, Apr 01, 2020, 3:24 AM UTC

jbritton wrote: post #10

bovermyer wrote: post #2

Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?

I've idly wondered what would happen if you made a search engine based on a custom crawler that only logged sites without any references to Google.