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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

alexskra.com

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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#61

Post by jhoechtl »

fny wrote: post #24

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

Searching in Google has become all about shopping. Pure and relevant content is hard to find.

Even today here are bloggers outside who do not have a commercial affiliation with the goods/items/things they are blogging about. Such content is practically impossible to find in comparison to all the Amazon-affiliated pseudo-information conveying spoof-sites.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#62

Post by infogulch »

estebarb wrote: post #26
fny wrote: post #24

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result. I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are…

Search engines seem to be stuck between serving two roles: 1. An easily accessible directory of mainstream information, and 2. A specialized tool to find the diamond in the rough. It seems like it has to be a tradeoff, it can't serve both roles equally well.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#64

Post by soheil »

adventured wrote: post #28
soheil wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why Yandex opens every link in a new window. How can they track bounceback?

You could do a slightly more difficult, less direct sequence check on the specific user. If they circle back around to Yandex in N time and go hunting for the same query or similar query, then you can rank the prior attempts as not having been ideally helpful (downrank the result/s they clicked through to when they last searched for that query two minutes ago).

Makes sense, does DDG do the same? If yes isn't that against their "We don't track users" mantra? If no how do they improve their results while missing such a powerful signal?

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#68

Post by [deleted] »

mdolon wrote: post #53
fny wrote: post #24

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

I wrote a blog post complaining about this early last year: http://mdolon.com/essays/amazon-has-ruined-search-and-google... The Amazon affiliate program is definitely contributing to this problem.

[deleted]

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#69

Post by alfiedotwtf »

fny wrote: post #24

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

I'm just sick of seeing pintrest and quora as the top 8 results :/

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#70

Post by sunshineforever »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #27
fny wrote: post #24

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

Atleast you get the results you are looking for... I search for three keywords, and it chooses to ignore the two specific one, and show only the one general one (while puting a line under the search result, that the result does not contain some keywords). Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showi…

I play a game with google search: I take something very mainstream like a movie title, let's say 'Reservoir Dogs' And change something in it, to say 'Reservoir Cats' for example.

Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'!

Even putting something opposite or unrelated to the highly mainstream result will have no effect.

Its completely entirely ridiculous and makes the search engine seem like a facade.

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