A person using google search is not google’s customer, there is no money is building a good search engine itself.
How is search so bad? A case study
61–70 of 416 posts
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#62I always wondered why a search engine can't use SEO tactics as a kind of anti-signal. What comes to the top of a google search if you filter out anyone gaming SEO?
"The site you're after" will also try SEO tactics, because they also want to be seen. And if not using SEO gave you a better rank, then that would also become an SEO tactic.
Turtles all the way down.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#63In my opinion, Google is getting worse constantly, which boils down to basically the following aspects for me: 1. I don’t like the UI anymore. I preferred the condensed view, with more information and less whitespace. 2. Popping up some kind of menu when you return from a search results page shifts down the rest of the items resulting in me clicking search links I am not interested in. 3. It tries to be smarter than…
Yeah, number 3 really pisses me off recently. If I type in 3 words I would like to search by those 3 words. What ends up happening is Google just decides that it's too much of a hassle or that I've made a mistake and just searches using 2. So now I have to input all the words in quotes so that it works like it supposed to in the first place.
This functionallity literaly never helped me during search. Not once.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#64I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…
> A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming. I wonder how much of this could be obtained back by penalizing: 1. The number of javascript dependencies 2. The number of ads on the page, or the depth of the ad network This might start a virtuous circle, but in the end, this is just a game of cat-and-mouse, and website might optimize fo…
You could even have all this under one roof: one common search spider that feeds this ensemble of different ranking algorithms to produce a set of indices, and then a search engine front end that round-robins queries out between the different indices. (Don’t like your query? Spin the algorithm wheel! “I’m Feeling Lucky” indeed.)
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#65Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for Google but not on search. I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam. There are currently multiple competing microdata formats out there than enable you to specify any kind of metadata but they still won't help if spammers fill those too. Maybe some sort of webring of trust where trusted people can endorse other sites and the chain breaks if somebody is fou…
> I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam. That's not so hard. It's one of the first problems Google solved. PageRank, web of trust, pubkey signing articles... I'd much rather tackle this problem in isolation than the search problem we have now. The trust graph is different from the core problem of extracting meaning from documents. Semantic tags make it easy to de…
>Semantic tags make it easy to derive this from structure
HTML has a lot of structure already (for example all levels of heading are easy to pick out, lists are easy to pick out), and Google does encourage use of semantic tags (for example for review scores, or author details, or hotel details). For most searches I don't think the problem lies with being able to read meaning - the problem is you can't trust the page author to tell you what the page is about, or link to the right pages, because spammers lie. Semantic tags don't help with that at all and it's a hard problem to differentiate spam and good content for a given reader - the reader might not even know the difference.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#67I find I agree with the article, but mainly on queries that are purchase related, or those that overlap with some kind of business. If I'm looking for some coding question, usually the right SO question comes up on the first page.
Makes sense that it is so. Clearly there's incentives to show up first on a "where to buy phone" search. The actual answer without vested interests has nobody to pay for it. I bet there's some street in Berlin where there's a number of phone shops, but without coordination (eg a shopping centre) there's no way any of them will tell you that the selection is best if you just show up somewhere on that street.
Also on a deeper note, I fear the internet is being flooded with terrible authority sites. Superficial articles that sound right and have lots of affilicate links. But the incentive is not to be informative and correct, rather to look right to people who don't know better - that's why they're there! - in order to funnel them to certain shops. I can just imagine there's an anti-vaxx site somewhere that purports to have real evidence and sells vaginal anti-cancer eggs.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#68Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?
I've been using DDG as a good enough search engine for most things, but when I sometimes fall back to Google, it blows me away how many ads are on the page pretending to be results!
'if not ddg(search) { ddg("!g " + search) }' has been my go-to method for awhile now; but as time has progressed, the results from DuckDuckGo have either been getting better, or the Google results have been getting worse; because usually if I can't find it on DDG now, I can't find it on Google either.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#69I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…
> A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming. I wonder how much of this could be obtained back by penalizing: 1. The number of javascript dependencies 2. The number of ads on the page, or the depth of the ad network This might start a virtuous circle, but in the end, this is just a game of cat-and-mouse, and website might optimize fo…
Merging js deps into one big resource isn't difficult. The number of ads point is interesting though. How would one determine what is an ad and what is an image? I have my ideas, but optimizing on this boundary sounds like it would lead to weird outcomes.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#70Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?
Did you try putting them in quotes? EDIT: I don't know why this being downvoted. This is a genuine question to understand if the problem is the size of the index or the fuzzing matching that search engines do.
Google blatantly disregard quotes.