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

Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

mattcutts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 65 posts

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#41

Post by ilamont »

There weren't any content farms in 2000, and SEO wasn't as sophisticated.

Now both are quite pervasive, and having a marked impact on the qualitative assessments of Google search results.

On the quantitative side, Cutts has recently claimed:

... according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.

How does the increase in SEO, content farms, and other questionable results (scraped content, etc.) figure into Google's evaluation metrics?

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#42

Post by msg »

Google's spam filter is training the internet to produce better and better content. Over time a rising tide lifts all boats.

In 2000 they were working on not returning results from various subdomains off the same base domain.

This year they're working on content farms.

Next year we won't be talking about plagiarized or duplicated content. We'll be talking about Google giving us content that is superficially different but not unique enough.

Five years from now we'll be talking about how Google is giving us unique, relevant content in the first ten results, but it's not personalized enough. Et cetera.

Just like in the AI world, every time a computer does something we thought only a human could ever do, instead of admitting defeat, you say, "This just proves that chess|poetry|music composition|playing Jeopardy doesn't take real intelligence." The truth is that you're not defining intelligence, you're moving goal posts. And if there's one thing Matt's post shows, it's that we moved the goal posts.

I think Matt likes the criticism. When Google's critics have to move to more and more sophisticated attacks, it shows that Google's facility is growing.

Google is not just raising the bar on the whole internet. You are raising the bar on Google.

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#43

Post by wmf »

Someone wrote: post #22
blehn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what Matt is trying to say is that your memory of what Google was like in 2000 could be inaccurate. So he's demonstrating what Google was actually like in 2000. Of course you were impressed and satisfied with Google back then — it was so much better than the alternatives. I'm sure you would have been just as (perhaps more) satisfied if 2011 Google existed in 2000. We've had 11 years to pinpoint the deficienci…

A reason could be that it would slow down searches too much. Firstly, all your searches would have to hit a server storing your blacklist. Secondly, it makes caching results of popular queries neigh impossible. Finally, some people will build blacklists so large and convoluted that the top hit on some of their searches would only be on Google's page 20.

One might think that personalized domain blacklisting is simpler than social search. http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#44

Post by redstripe »

blehn wrote: post #19
redstripe wrote: post #13

I think Groucho Marx could sum up this article as "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" I didn't keep a record of my searches from 2000, but I do remember that I was extremely impressed and satisfied with google back then. That is no longer the case. I am frustrated on daily basis by the results of many searches. It's not really your fault though. I blame it on mono culture. Google has such a huge hold…

I think what Matt is trying to say is that your memory of what Google was like in 2000 could be inaccurate. So he's demonstrating what Google was actually like in 2000. Of course you were impressed and satisfied with Google back then — it was so much better than the alternatives. I'm sure you would have been just as (perhaps more) satisfied if 2011 Google existed in 2000. We've had 11 years to pinpoint the deficienci…

Sure they could use other ranking methods like user black lists, white lists (bookmarks/favorites), timing the number of seconds until someone back buttons, etc... But as long as google garners the majority of the search market it will all be manipulated.

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#45

Post by citricsquid »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #38
citricsquid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hybrid search engine" is just worthless words, what does it even mean? If you want people to stop saying you're just syndicating others data publish the amount of others data you do use, but when I've compared bing.com searches with yours they're very similar whereas google is different, which would imply you're heavily taking from bing, whether or not you crawl yourself...

So I'm required to divulge information to stop you from spreading false claims? You said " they're just a prettier bing. " I have ~100K lines of code in front of me right now that has nothing to do with UI, although I think UI is tremendously important and has been a primary focus as well. Nevertheless, I've talked about all of this at length numerous times -- in videos, on HN, my blog, etc. Bottom line though is you…

False claims? It's what you've said[1][2], albeit a long time ago, but because I can't find any up to date information that you've published (care to link to it?) I can't suddenly know something else.

You're not required to do anything, you can tell me to piss off if you like, but if you want people to claim things and for them to be factually accurate you should publish this information, and if you have then please link to it because I'm struggling to find it.

If you want people to stop spreading misinformation (intentional or mistaken) then spread the correct information, otherwise learn to accept that when you say you use the bing api but refuse to explain to what extent, people will assume your site is entirely powered by it.

[1] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/02/thoughts-on-yaho... [2] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#46

Post by listic »

cryptoz wrote: post #14
redstripe wrote: post #13

I think Groucho Marx could sum up this article as "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" I didn't keep a record of my searches from 2000, but I do remember that I was extremely impressed and satisfied with google back then. That is no longer the case. I am frustrated on daily basis by the results of many searches. It's not really your fault though. I blame it on mono culture. Google has such a huge hold…

> I am frustrated on daily basis by the results of many searches. I have some speculation on this. Are you sure that your frustration comes from unusually poor results? Could it be that we're so used to things being perfect now, that a page of mediocre results looks like the end of the world? Look at 2000. No Shazam. If you heard a song on the radio, that was the end of the story. There were some services you could c…

> Very tough to keep the S/N going strong.

I think there's also a problem that the quality of content that Google has to index is steadily declining. In the 90's, many people were keeping lists of links to good stuff they found on the internet. Google could crawl the links and make conclusions. Now, people hardly do that anymore because they can just google it.

So Google has to employ ever more powerful algorithms to maintain even the same level of search quality. I think here lies an existential threat to the search engines.

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#47

Post by [deleted] »

nhebb wrote: post #4

I can't speak for others, but my disappointment is with the margin of improvement. I know that results often sucked back in 2001, but with 10 years of progress I would hope to get better results. In the case of "buy domain name" ( http://www.google.com/search?q=buy+domain+name ), 4 of the top 6 results I get are How To articles, not sources to buy domains. Google is trying to solve a hard problem, and I appreciate th…

[deleted]

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#48

Post by ElbertF »

maxklein wrote: post #39

For me personally, google is much, much worse than before. I don't find what I need. What I think is sad is that alternative search engines still work almost the same as google. Of course he's going to find spam if he searches for the most spamable content. But that's now what I usually search for - mostly I search for programming related topics or trouble shooting. The old google would give me the right result strai…

Google isn't strict enough for programming queries anymore, for example this query yields no results:

    "hello-world" -"hello world"
It ignores the dash even though I'm using quotes.

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#49

Post by lwat »

maxklein wrote: post #39

For me personally, google is much, much worse than before. I don't find what I need. What I think is sad is that alternative search engines still work almost the same as google. Of course he's going to find spam if he searches for the most spamable content. But that's now what I usually search for - mostly I search for programming related topics or trouble shooting. The old google would give me the right result strai…

Could you give us an example or two?

Re: Google 2000 vs. Google 2011

#50

Post by barista »

bad_user wrote: post #37
barista wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for 10 years I think the search results have only marginally gotten better. Besides, 10 years ago, what google was doing was revolutionary. No other search engine had such vast coverage or better intent determination. Now the competitionn is intense, Bing is almost as good as Google if not better in some scenarios, other guys are blekko are coming up with different approach (and have a better way to handle spam…

Bing is almost as good as Google It's easier to be a follower (or ahem, copy search results). Also if I'm going to switch away from Google it must be something truly better (like the difference I experienced when trying out Google after using Altavista). and have a better way to handle spam by avoiding it completely I like Blekko, but avoiding spam is an impossible dream. If there are search engines (or any filtering…

Re: bing copying Google, it has already been profusely discussed all over the internet and has been shown as nothing more than a PR stunt by Google folks to avoid discussing spam

Re: fighting spam, its a tough problem indeed but so was indexing the ever expanding web. Both Bing and Google seem to have solved the indexing problem fairly well by now.

The issue with the the spam problem is not so much of how difficult it is to solve but the motivation. Clearly the spam generates a lot of cash for Google (and some for bing too) so they are less likely to be motivated to solve it.

Smartest of the minds are at work at Google so I find it hard to believe that they cannot solve it (or even make a very good attempt at it). It's their intent to not solve it and that's the reason I think they are trying to avoid discussing it.

Post reply on HN