Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

superhighway98.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 280 posts

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#211

Post by fxtentacle »

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 see the same issue on GitHub too. Recently searched for a Windows API call and neither Google nor DuckDuckGo nor GitHub returned any result.

Cloned a git repo where I thought I remembered seeing the function and 500 MB of downloading later grep confirms that I remembered correctly and that the exact keyword I had been searching for is present multiple times in the source code.

My hunch is that since coders use an ad blocker anyway, it's not financially viable to operate source code search on the public internet.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#212

Post by dbuder »

basch wrote: post #113
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people don't like to admit is that Google, YouTube, Reddit and Facebook all prioritize market share above some odd gatekeeping ideal that people have decided an idealized internet should be. They've turned it into a MacDonald's instead of a Tavern on the Green, because that's what most people find accessable even though it's worse in almost every way. But, Tavern on the Green could not serve the same number of p…

Personally I just think google is losing to seo because google is playing it too neutral and not opinionated enough. Like facebook, they want decisions to look like math chose the answer, and not people, because they want to deflect accusations of bias. Google would be better if it were more opinionated. I go there because I WANT them to rank results and tell me what they think are the best quality answers. Google ma…

Except that Google is quite happy to manually adjust things for their own ends, they just lie about it. They arrange search to make them money, not to help us find what we want.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#214

Post by catalogia »

cosmodisk wrote: post #102
huffmsa wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They usually are, they're just not what the Europeans like hearing.

Amd what are those things Europeans don't really want to hear?

Are you trying to bait that user into starting such an argument in this thread as well?

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#215

Post by zo1 »

jkaptur wrote: post #188
redwall_hp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I'm sort of surprised that there isn't a semi-popular "web grep" tool for people who would rather use regex, some understandable ranking algorithm with knobs to tweak, etc. Of course, you'd have to read a manual to use it and it would have a ton of spam, but some people just want lower-level control - they still sell stick-shift cars.

Not just that, but the sheer scale of such an index. The size of the web now just makes anything small next to impossible without a lot of funding. And none of the existing search engines will probably allow you programmatic/data access to their index without a metric ton of cash

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#216

Post by sefrost »

zo1 wrote: post #215
jkaptur wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm sort of surprised that there isn't a semi-popular "web grep" tool for people who would rather use regex, some understandable ranking algorithm with knobs to tweak, etc. Of course, you'd have to read a manual to use it and it would have a ton of spam, but some people just want lower-level control - they still sell stick-shift cars.

Not just that, but the sheer scale of such an index. The size of the web now just makes anything small next to impossible without a lot of funding. And none of the existing search engines will probably allow you programmatic/data access to their index without a metric ton of cash

I wonder how many pages would be worth indexing for such a tool though.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#217

Post by LoveMortuus »

userbinator wrote: post #155
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…

Unfortunately it's the only way a lot of people find information on the Internet.

That's probably because Google is still good enough for most people, that there hasn't yet been a need to change the search engine. If Google becomes useless people will organically move to something else, of course it will first start with the tech savvy people, but as with all things it will trickle down to others. If the alternative isn't better then Google then, of course, nothing will change. I don't really see a reason why people feel the need to be so negative about pretty much everything, same goes with every aspect of life.

Example: if(Donald_Trump.as(President) == Bad){ Election.vote = !Donald_Trump; }else{ Election.vote = Donald_Trump; }

I am aware that this comment is more or less useless to many, but I still wanted to write it, because I have the power and the freedom to express my _opinion_, and because I still hope that there are people that will understand what I'm trying to say.

Let Google be Google.

If Google's vision sings the same song as the song of the people, then the people will use it. If it doesn't then people will find another search engine that will sing a song that people will like.

Or in other words, I don't see a reason for us to try to change Google, if Google will want to be the primary search engine, then Google will have to change on it's own.

Am I completly wrong? I Google strong enough to be able to shape the song of creation (strong enough to be able to prevent any other search engine from rising up even though the other search engine could be better)?

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#218

Post by sneak »

onion2k wrote: post #209
sneak wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. Algorithmic "timelines" (which aren't timelines at all) are one of the biggest mass scams ever perpetrated. It allows giant companies to sit and mediate personal friendships, and extract rent for anyone who wants more reach (even within their existing, opt-in audience). I think daily about ways to get peop…

You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. This would imply HN "censors" the front page. Of course that's nonsense. Sometimes sorting by an algorithm is just sorting. In the case of HN it's up votes, and in the case of Google it's a basket of hundreds of criteria (including up votes if you think of clicks on results as voting). Google probably does…

> This would imply HN "censors" the front page.

That’s precisely what they do. Everyone’s allowed to censor what they wish on their own webpage. I, for example, censor from my own webpage (which otherwise contains a lot of information about me) anything someone could use to physically harm me.

The issue comes up when the censorship is used, for example, in DMs or timeline posts between friends (as it is on Facebook and Instagram and Discord), versus one’s own content on a webpage.

There’s a difference between moderation and rent-seeking.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#219

Post by tomaszs »

Avamander wrote: post #125
tomaszs wrote: post #11

Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only concern was to guess how it may be written dont on a page, so Google can find it for me. I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better results. But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same result. Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is not. You could write an arti…

> If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours. I empirically disagree. For me Google often shows small sites with perfect matches before big sites with vague matches and a few of my small sites also rank very well next to giants. > I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Why not use…

It only proves Google is unpredictable. And this is also a sad reality. I often see "my" Google is better adjusted to find some answers but extremely lame at 90% of other queries.

Ps. Quotation marks help in some degree. But the response pool is often very small. Also sometimes quotation marks return broader results than expected to

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#220

Post by artificial »

zo1 wrote: post #215
jkaptur wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm sort of surprised that there isn't a semi-popular "web grep" tool for people who would rather use regex, some understandable ranking algorithm with knobs to tweak, etc. Of course, you'd have to read a manual to use it and it would have a ton of spam, but some people just want lower-level control - they still sell stick-shift cars.

Not just that, but the sheer scale of such an index. The size of the web now just makes anything small next to impossible without a lot of funding. And none of the existing search engines will probably allow you programmatic/data access to their index without a metric ton of cash

How is it that spiders/bots are able to "index" copyrighted content? Is it just one of those things where the ends justify the means or a holdover/tradition or some such?
Post reply on HN