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

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

#181

Post by sshine »

psyc wrote: post #168
marginalia_nu wrote: post #163

Ironically, 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…

I've taken this possibility into account after the numerous recent threads about this, but I don't think it holds up. I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines. The reason it feels like search has gone to hell, for me, is that for 20 years I took for granted that I could type the first terms that came into my mind into one searc…

Yes, the more popular terms you search for, the more muddy the waters get.

If you search for anything related to sexuality and psychology, the results are littered with sites that were squatted for serving ads (i.e. no relevant content, just ads), poor quality articles with very low quality content (e.g. poorly formed Quora questions with no expert answers).

As with anything, you have to know what search terms for a given subject are good. For example, you'll get more objective answers the more academic sounding you are, because the fewer people have tried to occupy those search terms.

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

#182

Post by planb »

literallyaduck wrote: post #72
AlbertCory wrote: post #14

I've been gone from G for 4 1/2 years now. When I was there, the weekly meetings often featured "search quality" measurements that were rigorous in their objectivity (I thought). They bent over backwards to be non-self-deluding. I distinctly remember Udi Manber saying "if the web is slow, it's our fault" (actually, the speech was that everything is "our fault"), meaning, really, "take responsibility for problems and…

Go to image search and type in "white people" without quotes. Now repeat the search but with "black people" without quotes. Try the same for "white couple" without quotes. Try the same for "black couple" without quotes. Do you have any insight to this phenomenon?

Image search does not classify image contents. It uses the site text for ranking of the images on that site. Do a google (not image) search for "white people" and you'll see that this phrase is mostly used in pages that are in fact about racism and therefore likely to contain images of black people.

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

#183

Post by Sander_Marechal »

pja wrote: post #178
psyc wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've taken this possibility into account after the numerous recent threads about this, but I don't think it holds up. I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines. The reason it feels like search has gone to hell, for me, is that for 20 years I took for granted that I could type the first terms that came into my mind into one searc…

Even programming related topics now return heavily SEOd sites with instead of high quality programming content. Often the SEOd content is not completely awful for these searches, but it’s usually not great & never as good as the best sites.

Most often it's a rip of StackOverflow surrounded by spammy ads

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

#184

Post by mhitza »

psyc wrote: post #168
marginalia_nu wrote: post #163

Ironically, 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…

I've taken this possibility into account after the numerous recent threads about this, but I don't think it holds up. I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines. The reason it feels like search has gone to hell, for me, is that for 20 years I took for granted that I could type the first terms that came into my mind into one searc…

If I'm searching for a development issue, and my first results page contains 2-3 sites that 1-1 copy stackoverflow/github issues, then Google has failed. I doubt those can be more authorative than the original sources

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

#185

Post by isolli »

elondaits wrote: post #21
creato wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried that search, all of the results look relevant and I definitely don't get any of the results you are getting. I wonder if you have some malware that is hijacking the results? I once had some malware (chrome extension) that was corrupting my search results. It was surprisingly difficult to remove (given that it was a chrome extension...).

No, I get the same results on Safari on iOS (iPhone) so I have to eliminate the possibility of malware. Google results are personalized, based on location, search history, etc. The fact that I'm in Argentina has been adding a lot of noise to results on searches where my location is not relevant at all. In this case, I suspect that Google thinks these hacked sites with developer target content are relevant to me, beca…

It's why I love the possibility of deliberately activating or de-activating localization in DuckDuckGo.

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

#186

Post by planb »

greyman wrote: post #172

I don't know if search is deteriorating as a whole, but certain searches seems to be manipulated for political reasons. The famous example is an Image search of "white couple" - really, try it, it is like only 50% correct. But I don't believe the image search itself would be that bad, rather certain queries are given manipulated results.

You're overestimating the smarts of google: Image search does not classify image contents. It uses the site text for ranking of the images on that site. It finds lots of "Black And White Couple Stock Photo" images - the image description in fact contains the string "white couple".

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

#187

Post by rasz »

literallyaduck wrote: post #72
AlbertCory wrote: post #14

I've been gone from G for 4 1/2 years now. When I was there, the weekly meetings often featured "search quality" measurements that were rigorous in their objectivity (I thought). They bent over backwards to be non-self-deluding. I distinctly remember Udi Manber saying "if the web is slow, it's our fault" (actually, the speech was that everything is "our fault"), meaning, really, "take responsibility for problems and…

Go to image search and type in "white people" without quotes. Now repeat the search but with "black people" without quotes. Try the same for "white couple" without quotes. Try the same for "black couple" without quotes. Do you have any insight to this phenomenon?

all I see is pinterest spam

/s

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

#188

Post by ghosty141 »

whakim wrote: post #40
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could just be that sundar pichai wants a bigger paycheck and tunes the knob on more ads money but less good search results

To me, it seems crazy that a company would actively try to self-sabotage their bread-and-butter product in search of a bit of extra revenue when they're already making record profits. Not to mention that, as the author of the article points out, Google published a well-known quantitative paper on why that's a bad tradeoff.

Key word: "would". We don't know and I highly doubt this is the case.

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

#189

Post by thow-58d4e8b »

odessacubbage wrote: post #118
echen wrote: post #62

Earlier 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.

This is a fundamental issue with the ad business - the ads are selected from those who bid, not from those that are relevant. For example - if I'm listening to a podcast with a captivating guest, the relevant links would point to their books or blogs. But since they didn't bid for ads, I'm shown some crypto drivel or date-Thai girls scams

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

#190

Post by DaedPsyker »

otherotherchris wrote: post #138
photochemsyn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they're getting cash kickbacks from established corporate media outlets for pushing their material to the top of the search results. That would actually be less creepy than if its being done as some kind of information manipulation program. It's high time Google and other search engines were forced to expose the inner workings of their ranking algorithms to the public, particularly now that they have near…

In Australia, Google is being blackmailed into boosting Fairfax, Newscorp and Seven West Media content higher up in their index. It's reached a point where most queries are useless if they contain a word or even a synonym for that word that has been recently used in a major media site owned by those three. I use Google through a VPN to avoid it. That breaks maps integration.

I'm curious, why go through the hassle of a VPN rather than another search engine? Are the other results so poor or do the others do the same as Google?
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