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It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

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Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#181

Post by vagab0nd »

mathnmusic wrote: post #16

When web directories like Yahoo lost out to web search engines like Google, we lost something crucial. While search is good for answering questions you know how to ask, browsing was exploratory and led us to know what we didn't know. When it comes to learning a complex topic like mathematics, this kind of serendipity was very useful. There are some amazing resources on the web, but googling won't let you discover tho…

Adding to that, I sometimes fear that my Google search results are biased towards my own search history.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#182

Post by qwerty456127 »

It should better develop an algorithm to forget (deprioritize) old posts on subjects in which old posts actually are irrelevant. I.e. tutorials on old versions of actively-evolving technologies, top-10-best-mobile-apps-for-something posts from past years etc.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#183

Post by YayamiOmate »

stcredzero wrote: post #168

Bray writes that: “I think Google has stopped in­dex­ing the old­er parts of the We­b. I think I can prove it. Google’s com­pe­ti­tion is do­ing bet­ter.” Those who forget the past are doomed...to be marketed to again. As Vernor Vinge noted (he popularized the notion of "The Singularity") not indexing something basically amounts to erasing it from the awareness of the majority. If you can control the past, you can co…

It's literally impossible, and it was never true in humankind history.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#184

Post by lelf »

Liquix wrote: post #148
wyck wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, i'm having to go several pages deep and even then not finding anything relevant, I've started to use other search engines and reddit to actually find useful info.

Google poured billions into their search engine for two decades to make it better . Now that have a ridiculous amount of money and power, the search results get.... objectively worse . Which brings us to the elephant in the room: what are Google's motives behind this (clearly intentional) change? Could something as innocent as training a new neural net or testing a buggy version of the algorithm on subsets of users.…

> Which brings us to the elephant in the room: what are Google's motives behind this (clearly intentional) change?

They are maximising ad revenue, not the search relevance/usefulness.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#185

Post by dredmorbius »

kickscondor wrote: post #17

While it's become impossible to browse the wider Web with Google, it's getting a bit easier elsewhere. A few helpful search engines: * https://millionshort.com/ * https://wiby.me/ * https://pinboard.in/search/ A recent movement to build personal Yahoo!-style directories: * https://href.cool/ (my own project) * https://indieseek.xyz/ * https://districts.neocities.org/ * https://the.dailywebthing.com/ The above resourc…

DuckDuckGo's "lite" search: https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q=

My DDG-from-shell Bash function:

    ddg () 
    { 
        w3m https://duckduckgo.com/lite?q="$*"
    }

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#186

Post by Funes- »

revvx wrote: post #133
kickscondor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that their algorithm has become weighted against blogs and personal websites. > Rumors spread that large link pages (for surfing) might be considered “link farms” (and yes on SEO sites they were but these things eventually trickle down to little personal site webmasters too) so these started to be phased out. Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to…

It's not Google's fault this time. The problem is that Blogspam is now a (legitimate) industry much bigger than Google can manage. Google Search became a playground for marketing firms to dump content made by low-paid freelancers with algorithmically chosen keywords, links and headers. It's SEO on large scale. Everything is monitored via analytics and automatically posted to Wordpress. Every time Google tweaks its al…

>It's not Google's fault this time.

Isn't Google responsible for making Internet advertising accessible and widespread? They developed and launched AdWords (2000) and AdSense (2003).

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#187

Post by puzzle »

bshipp wrote: post #64
puzzle wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interview questions: How would a search engine distinguish between the two kinds of queries, tens of thousands of times a second? And how would one architect such a two-tiered system, particularly with an eye toward cascading failures?

I don't work at Google so I'm probably way off base, but if I was designing it I wouldn't bother telling the difference between the two types of queries. I'd break up the indices into digestible chunks, perhaps chronologically by year/month crawled, and then run all queries simultaneously (in parallel) against all those index chunks and combine the results at the end. Infinitely scalable and can be tweaked to ensure…

That's kind of how Google works, with multiple index tiers. Look up patents by Anna Paterson to get a few clues, assuming your lawyers won't bark at you.

Still, you can't keep partial results around forever, unless you want to make searches a lot more expensive, having to add a lot of capacity just to deal with the buffer bloat. Each query touches at least a thousand machines. Adding "a few more virtual machines" isn't going to cut it, especially if you have to handle tens of thousands of requests per second.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#188

Post by andybak »

Holy shit. With all the other reasons to consider abandoning Google the one thing I've held on to is the depth and reliability of their search results. I just assumed they would never abandon their core strength in this area.

This might be the straw for my personal camel's back.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#189

Post by inetknght »

Tolyo wrote: post #62
inetknght wrote: post #7

I have noticed that searching for exact quotes seems to have been broken on Google for a few years. But only minimally broken. And I've had no idea how to reason with it. This article completely corresponds with problems I've encountered with searching for results on StackOverflow or software documentation sites; it's especially perplexing that "site:..." combined with exact quotes does not work for many cases. Googl…

Ive noticed lately some of the search operators(intitle, inurl) have more limited results. Feels like a step backwards in functionality, but I suppose its a step forwards in getting the user on Amazon or whatever

Amazon is even worse.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#190

Post by jimnotgym »

arbol wrote: post #171
JohnFen wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months Yes. Not just over the past 2-4 months, but over the past five years or so. It's become so bad that Google is no longer the most useful search engine for me.

What would you recommend instead?

DuckDuckGo.com is my daily driver.
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