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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

#301

Post by bopbop »

randomsearch wrote: post #249
marttt wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also Kenneth Goldsmith's UbuWeb, a curated directory of (hard or impossible-to-find) avant-garde art, music, writing, video. Launched in 1996. http://ubu.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb

Possible contrarian insight: in the era of recommendation systems, hand-curation is due a big comeback. I’ve been listening to the BBC’s Introducing Mixtape podcast for a while. I also use Spotify and really enjoy its recommendation but the 6 Music podcast is just stellar. As paywalls restore quality journalism, I believe a renaissance for curated content is possible.

Interesting - what would the evidence that current paywalls are/have restored quality journalism be?

As in, do you believe this uptick in quality journalism has already happened/is happening? And what associates it with paywalls? Presumably you'd have to be seeing quality journalism behind paywalls for this to be case?

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#302

Post by JohnFen »

friendzis wrote: post #292
therein wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all started going downhill since Google's "Hummingbird" switch to be honest. Interviewing for Google, I actually brought this up with an engineer in the search team during the lunch. He said they haven't noticed any regressions. I said I figured that would be the case but I can definitely feel the difference as a daily user.

This is indicative of a larger issue - testing is probably as difficult as solving the halting problem i.e. code could be generated from proper tests, yet teams tend to trust their tests completely. I see high profile websites having severe usability issues or being outright broken in ways that would be immediately caught by "interns randomly click here and there" usability tests. But these version got deployed proba…

> yet teams tend to trust their tests completely.

Well said. This is a big problem. We see a similar problem with the use of telemetry data as well.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#303

Post by JohnFen »

taneq wrote: post #263
JohnFen wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's "Hummingbird" I had assumed that Google search had gone downhill because it started trying to "personalize" my search results. That wasn't a great explanation though, as I don't use a Google account. Hummingbird seems a much more likely explanation.

Oh, they still "personalize" your search results. I do a full clear on my web browser (cookies / offline storage / history, everything) and then open YouTube in a private browsing window and it asks me which of my two Gmail accounts I want to log in with. I'd guess it's just a combo of external IP and browser fingerprint, but it's creepy.

I know they do, and I consider this a real problem. I was just saying that personalization isn't a completely satisfactory explanation for the decline in Google search result quality. It is likely to be a factor in that, though.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#304

Post by JohnFen »

addicted wrote: post #99
andrewprock wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is fine, and search is fine. It's specifically Google search that's being destroyed by spam. It's odd to put forward the hypothesis that DuckDuckGo is now better at search (aggregation) than Google is at search. But that seems to be where we have landed.

I think it may be a simple consequence of the fact that Google Search is increasingly less of a searching engine and more of an answering engine. I think Google has been explicit about this (I may be wrong, but I seem to remember thinking about this because Google themselves said it). Essentially, I believe, they are no longer concerned about being a way to navigate all the material found on the internet. Instead, th…

> I think it may be a simple consequence of the fact that Google Search is increasingly less of a searching engine and more of an answering engine.

I've been thinking about this, and it seems very plausible to me. Which means that Google Search isn't really "search" anymore -- which explains why it's become so bad at that!

Too bad. I remember when Google had the best search engine going. It was a real game-changer. Those days are long gone.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#305

Post by JohnFen »

appleflaxen wrote: post #246
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…

you have to go to the options at the bottom more >> settings >> or whatever. Fiddle around until you find "verbatim" and choose it.

Verbatim certainly fixes certain kinds of searches, but it is insufficient.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#306

Post by JohnFen »

wyck wrote: post #278
WalterGR wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?

Matt did an incredible job at Google search and left in 2016, since then it's been downhill, not entirely because of him, but it's certainly a noticeable effect, especially if you followed Matt's google search related Q&A's, videos, etc when he was at Google.

I don't know. It seems to me that Google started going downhill before 2016.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#307

Post by hnick »

kickscondor wrote: post #25
degenerate wrote: post #13

This author is in his own little bubble and doesn't understand the vast amount of blog-repost spam that google has to deal with. The way their algorithm most likely deals with this is a mixture of domain rank + tenure... how long has this copy of this article existed on this domain, and can we be sure this is the original copy? The author says the article was removed in 2006 (" [...] posts, were not accessible anymor…

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…

A friend spoke to an SEO analyst just yesterday and it seems the counterplay is to add "recency" to your posts.

If you have an older post that's great but not changed, it'll become less prominent. So go in, edit in some changes, and now it's fresh and ready to be indexed prominently again.

If this is how it goes, I guess it helps in a way. The articles we care about get attention and don't drop off. But there's so much of the old web we might lose in the haystack.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#308

Post by jhloa2 »

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…

Wow. Thank you. I've had the feeling that Google's search has gone to shit recently and this helps a lot.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#309

Post by anticensor »

ghaff wrote: post #6

For better or worse, Google is very explicitly not a card catalog though. One might disagree about how Google determines relevance--and the criteria are opaque. But, in any case, it's quite different from a card catalog which, with the caveat that the work in question must be part of the library's curated collection, is completely non-judgmental about the relative importance of a given item.

Relevance criteria is deliberately kept opaque. It would otherwise be too easy to game.

Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

#310

Post by qnsi »

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…

What's the point of saying "We have collected links for [...], relationships, [...]. When there are 0 links collected under relationships? Seems weird for me
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