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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#251

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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…

Presumably google are in an arms race with the spammers, like all search engines are.

Is there a superior alternative to Google?

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#252

Post by pteraspidomorph »

l0b0 wrote: post #150

I really wish there still existed a search engine which would absolutely, without reservation of any sort, simply respect the quote and minus operators. I searched both DDG and Google this morning for something with a minus operator, and the search results for both included the unwanted keyword in the bloody page title. And no, quotes never ever meant "search for similar terms", but the big players now just ignore al…

I've been starting to get worse results for DDG in the last few months. What's with that? Why??? Talk about not knowing your audience.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#253

Post by amelius »

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…

Yes, for example when I'm looking for a datasheet of an electronic component, I often get SEO spam instead of just redirecting me to the pdf which usually is readily available at the manufacturer's website.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#254

Post by caspper69 »

combatentropy wrote: post #196
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…

> Google has been in decline since ~2010 I would agree. The quality of the company seems inversely proportional to the number of employees, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-... In the early 2000s, it was the one search engine that returned relevant results. All the old ones returned a hodge-podge of key-word matches. Google used the number of citations as a strong signal of relevance (the n…

To put things in perspective, Google was founded in 1998, making them 22 years old in September. The "Halloween Documents" were released in August 1998, when Microsoft was 23.

Google is indistinguishable from any other corporate giant because they now are any other corporate giant.

Did anyone seriously think an Ad company would go any other way? It's the scummiest of industries. It was always just a matter of time.

And now we've given (allowed, stood by, whatever) them ALL the data for >50% of our cellular users for the last 10+ years. I'm an Android user too. Oof.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#255

Post by bostik »

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…

The SEO toxic sludge has become so pervasive that I can't trust any search these days. Here's an example from just last week.

I was searching for the official AWS security certificates (namely, for ISO27001), which AWS neatly publishes on their site. Even for something that specific, the real AWS certification page was at the bottom of the first Google result page. Everything above it was from various random consulting outfits, all trying to sell their "expertise".

When search terms for a company's official security certificate are poisoned with SEO, we know the well has been thoroughly poisoned.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#256

Post by lowdose »

int_19h wrote: post #199
Someone1234 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem isn't just SEO, it's that Google itself aggressively rewrites queries to produce more results (which I suspect they want to do to show more "relevant" ads). On the most extreme end of this, I've seen four-word queries produce results, in which three of the words were stricken out. More often, it's just one word, but it's usually exactly the one that makes the difference between a very specific query, and…

Google image search is also not searching for a duplicate but what object the ml recognized on the picture. For image search I switched to Yandex.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#257

Post by rathel »

int_19h wrote: post #199
Someone1234 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem isn't just SEO, it's that Google itself aggressively rewrites queries to produce more results (which I suspect they want to do to show more "relevant" ads). On the most extreme end of this, I've seen four-word queries produce results, in which three of the words were stricken out. More often, it's just one word, but it's usually exactly the one that makes the difference between a very specific query, and…

I wonder if this synonym substitution was their use case leading to invention of word2vec.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#259

Post by TeMPOraL »

titzer wrote: post #250
TeMPOraL wrote: post #236

Speaking of popularity over accuracy: > Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need. I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently, and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is not showing that message. It's actually explaine…

Not sure I got that message, considering the bulk of the population motors around on their little cushy chairs, drinks slurpies all day, and is endlessly served by robots, never doing any strenuous work at all, and only interacts with their screens. The spaceship has artificial gravity, artificial sun, artificial everything. The movie is one huge anti-consumerism screed.

It was a cruise ship converted to an ark. It was meant to stay in space for a short time, precisely because of (as one scene in the movie explained) long-term exposure leading people to grow fat and weak.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#260

Post by notahacker »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #238
koonsolo wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on the SEO spam. But I perceive this as Google losing the battle with SEO. On one hand Google writes the algorithms, and on the other SEO tries to exploit these algorithms to rank as high as possible. I was thinking that a solution would be instead of page rank, have an author rank. This rank keeps track of authors that are experts at certain topics. When you search for certain keywords, the articles…

I think it's more than that. If you also consider AMP and various Chrome redesigns, there is this feeling that Google wants to take control of the web. URLs and site's actual locations are being de-emphasized, and searching is becoming more "ask question, get an answer" instead of "enter query, get documents best matching it".

Yeah. AMP is the intentional promotion of content whose creators care a lot about SEO over content which is more reputable, relevant and established and sometimes even with lower page weight. If they're losing a battle with spammers on mobile, it's because they gave them a loaded gun and lined up their search results in its crosshairs.
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