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Google Memory Loss

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Re: Google Memory Loss

#191

Post by ericmcer »

userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

I think part of this has to do with googles actual customer base: Adwords users. The goal of Adwords is to have every single search be worth the maximum possible value in an advertising sense. So if one person a month searches for "Office desk drawer repairman Concord California" they do not want to service that very detailed long tail search, that would minimize value for themselves and maximize it for the advertiser. They want to treat that search in a vague sense so they can display more ads for their customers and charge for each display and click.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#192

Post by red75prime »

copx wrote: post #188
userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

What annoys me the most is that Google seemingly no longer allows searching for phrases at all. In the past I could search for a specific phrase like this.. "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire" ..and Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works. Nowadays parentheses are largely ignored as far as I can tell. This is super annoying because quite often I am really looking for a…

> Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works.

Er, what? No search engine finds "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire". Results for "It never rains on a Wednesday" with exact matches

Google - 6 pages

Bing - 3 pages

Yandex - 0 pages

Duck Duck Go - 3 pages

Re: Google Memory Loss

#193

Post by Houshalter »

Google drank too much of their own koolaid. They were always seen as an "AI company", but they really weren't. As late as 2008, Google's head of AI said they used very little machine learning in search. And actually tried to avoid using it as much as possible. Because they found it very unreliable and it gave weird an unpredictable edge cases. Everything was painstakingly hand engineered.

But now we are at peak AI hype cycle. No wonder it's gone downhill. I'm sure the AI does better on whatever metrics they tell it to maximize. But AIs game the hell out of metrics. And we are still nowhere near human level intelligence. It doesn't understand your query or the content of the websites. All it has to go by is simple keyword matching and meta indicators like the size of the website.

So now basically all searches return the same handful of large websites. When was the last time you got a search that went to some niche forum? Or some small little homemade website by someone passionate about that specific subject? No, it's always a wikipedia link, followed by a bunch of contentless news articles. And there's never any point of going past page 1, because every other page is like that too.

And now the web has become this: https://www.ncta.com/sites/default/files/platform-images/wp-...

Re: Google Memory Loss

#195

Post by swvjeff »

TekMol wrote: post #29
swvjeff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not relevant to this article. The author is not talking about crawling and indexing the entire web (although he mentions the "whole web" once, that's clearly not what he means). He is wondering why old pages -- pages that used to be in Google's index -- are no longer showing up in SERPs even when using appropriately-targeted long-tail queries.

For the same reason 'Joe Infinity page 1234567' would not be found anymore. Google thinks its not relevant enough to keep it indexed. Yes, it is debatable what is relevant enough and what isn't. But everyone who indexes 'the web' has to decide what to keep and what not. Nobody can store 'everything'. Also it's not as easy as just keeping everything that ever was in the index in there. Then searchengines would link to…

I completely agree with you, but your initial argument was that "Joe Infinity page ∞" wouldn't be indexed because Google cannot index every viable page on the internet. That is true, and Google will certainly set limits on what pages is crawls and what pages it indexes. However, in this instance the articles were crawled and they were indexed and they were relevant at one point in time. But google decided to remove them from SERPs for some reason or another (age, lack of traffic, etc).

Re: Google Memory Loss

#196

Post by aikinai »

fyfy18 wrote: post #124
Puer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile their image recognition gets better and better. For those of you who use Google Photos backup, try a keyword image search in Google Drive sometime of your untagged photos ("beach", "face," etc.) You'll be creepily surprised on what Google is indexing, even against what they claim they don't (try some sketchier words).

I can one up that: I was living in Dubai a few years ago and have a number of photos of fancy cars I could never even dream of affording. If I search for “Lamborghini” or “Rolls Royce” it gives me the photos of those cars. I’ve never tagged them and I’m not an Android user, so they aren’t reading my messages. https://imgur.com/caz8D2Y I even have four photos I took at night, in burst mode, as a Bughatti Veyron zoomed…

That's not a sneaky feature; it was the primary selling point when Google launched the new Photos product in 2015.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#197

Post by philipov »

ReverseCold wrote: post #175
Mystrl wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ccse.lbl.gov/BoxLib/ Is it this thing at the very top of the search results?

Fwiw my first page had nothing to do with anything computer related, except for the last result, which was how to make dialog boxes in Windows. First result: https://littlefreelibrary.org Search: Box library

Moreover, it was neither of the 2 Box libraries I was referring to. So that makes 3.

https://www.box.com/

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-box/

Re: Google Memory Loss

#198

Post by kenning »

copx wrote: post #188
userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

What annoys me the most is that Google seemingly no longer allows searching for phrases at all. In the past I could search for a specific phrase like this.. "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire" ..and Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works. Nowadays parentheses are largely ignored as far as I can tell. This is super annoying because quite often I am really looking for a…

Quote marks still work.

Google tries to find your phrase, and fails, then tries to give you results with some of your words missing without telling you.

If you search for "It never rains on a" with quotes it will only show you pages with that exact phrase. If you search for that without quotes it will show you a messy group of results based on what it thought you meant.

Re: Google Memory Loss

#199

Post by mcguire »

userbinator wrote: post #93

I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded…

Aren't DDG and Yahoo using Bing?

Re: Google Memory Loss

#200

Post by hyperpallium »

Theory: Because google has local data-centers all over the world (that's why it's much faster than the competition, and google suggest works so well), indexes must be maintained at all of them. Because google has so many, this is a significant expense, and to keep costs down, they reduce the indexes to what is profitable.
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