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Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

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Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#41

Post by mirimir »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #16
tiew9Vii wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this. It has a bias towards large commercial news/ecommerce sites/daily fresh content. Great for the majority of browsers but for programming and other hobbies of mine the real content I want are in niche small blogs/forums that don’t get up ranked liked they used to so drop off the index.

Consider, though, that a lot of those big sites are there because of various tricks to push theselves up in ranking because they have money that the small, niche sites don’t. The little guys don’t really have a chance, unless you have a search engine specifically biased toward them.

See https://uk.pcmag.com/news-analysis/120580/how-a-vpn-review-s... for discussion of major trickage.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#42

Post by mirimir »

caprese wrote: post #38
colechristensen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google got where it was by being the best at finding what you wanted. I remember those days. Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)

Their A/B test told them to do it, without wondering if they should do it Basically their engagement numbers were better for a larger amount of people by making search engines counterintuitive for early adopters. We personally need a good robotic search engine that indexes like a robot. Everyone else needs a semi-sentient thing that makes many assumptions about what they want to see.

It seems like DDG is getting lots better :)

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#43

Post by rapht »

With all the talk about Google results not being satisfying anymore to a growing number of users, I'm surprised we haven't seen more sites pop up that would allow users to display the results of multiple search engines of their choosing either by mixing (eg all 1st results then all 2nd, etc) or by seeing them side by side... while stripping ads and cards and the like.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#44

Post by jacquesm »

alister wrote: post #13

Why does Google deeply index those useless telephone directory sites? Try searching for the impossible U.S. phone number "307-139-2345" and you'll see a bunch of "who called me?" or "reverse phone number lookup" sites. Virtually all of those sites are complete garbage. They make no attempt to collect numbers from telephone directories or from the web. They won't identify a number as being the main phone number for Di…

Some of these are worse than useless: they hijack real businesses support phone numbers by presenting a high cost number that gets routed to a call center, that then connects you to the business. It's a huge scam.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#45

Post by lrem »

tholman wrote: post #23

Google will also happily surface a stackoverflow article from 2010 about how to solve a js problem... frustrating the top 3 answers will be with jquery, when its not the approach someone would take in the last 5 years. Definitely frustrating, but also showing some need to retire specific pieces of the past away from the top recommendations.

So, what should I use instead of jQuery these days? The task at hand: set up PhotoSwipe for a completely static list of images.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#46

Post by rightbyte »

speedplane wrote: post #30
sytelus wrote: post #29

According to Google Inside Search, only 1 in 3000 pages gets indexed. As content on Internet grows, the whole idea of downloading every single page to create an index of entire Internet in one place becomes unworkable. So we should see this ratio continue to degrade until this fundamental architecture is improved.

> only 1 in 3000 pages gets indexed ... we should see this ratio continue to degrade until this fundamental architecture is replaced. Content on the internet is growing exponentially. Processing power is not. Losing access to information is just one of the many sad implications of the death of Moore's law.

Is text non-spam growing exponentially? I have a hard time believing so.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#47

Post by berkes »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #20
jfoutz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is an easy heuristic, bias against ads. Google can’t do this. Original sources very likely don’t have ads, scrapes will have tons. But good results are good results. Big g has done an admirable job. They can’t exploit the best metric for quality.

No they don't do an admirable job if they send you to scraped rather than original content. They're ruining the web. While Google still has fantastic, one-of-a-kind services such as Translate, Search isn't one of them anymore, and we should stop cheering at it and relying on it.

I've switched to deepl.com recently for my translations.

It has far fewer languages, but the translations of those it has, are far better in my opinion. Allthough I am also no linguist, just an average non-English speaker.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#48

Post by luckylion »

jfoutz wrote: post #27
tannhaeuser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't do an admirable job if they send you to scraped rather than original content. They're ruining the web. While Google still has fantastic, one-of-a-kind services such as Translate, Search isn't one of them anymore, and we should stop cheering at it and relying on it.

Hmm. I keep getting warnings about responding to quickly. Perhaps my account is under attack. Setting that aside, google has done good things. Today, not so much. It’s never too late to turn the ship around. Google can still be awesome. Our opinions aren’t that different. I don’t think big g can turn it around, but I’m rooting for them.

> I don’t think big g can turn it around, but I’m rooting for them.

I believe they can, but I don't know if they care to - they're highly profitable after all. What I really dislike about search is that, by treating links as currency, they have broken links. Lots of people won't put plain old links on their site because they fear it would hurt their rankings.

Their overreliance on links as the sole quality indicator has, at least in my country, lead to the large media companies just renting out folders or subdomains - and whatever low quality content is published there ranks at the top.

They still build good stuff, and I'm sure their engineers could "solve" search again, but it appears that their management doesn't want to.

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#49

Post by antpls »

alister wrote: post #13

Why does Google deeply index those useless telephone directory sites? Try searching for the impossible U.S. phone number "307-139-2345" and you'll see a bunch of "who called me?" or "reverse phone number lookup" sites. Virtually all of those sites are complete garbage. They make no attempt to collect numbers from telephone directories or from the web. They won't identify a number as being the main phone number for Di…

Actually it does a good job. When there is some data (like crowd sourced number reporting) on internet about the specific phone number you searched for, Google will show it in the top results

You get a full page of non-sense results and ads/spams when the phone number you searched for is not known from any website (I guess)

Re: Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

#50

Post by tambourine_man »

tholman wrote: post #23

Google will also happily surface a stackoverflow article from 2010 about how to solve a js problem... frustrating the top 3 answers will be with jquery, when its not the approach someone would take in the last 5 years. Definitely frustrating, but also showing some need to retire specific pieces of the past away from the top recommendations.

jQuery is still the right tool for a lot of tasks, HN bouble hype notwithstanding.
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