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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#701

Post by [deleted] »

mrkeen wrote: post #695
gregw134 wrote: post #250

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…

> There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. There's a lot of ML hate here, and I simply don't see the alternative. To rank documents, you need to score them. Google uses hundreds of scoring factor…

[deleted]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#702

Post by rob74 »

underdeserver wrote: post #696
barbariangrunge wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

I've heard this argument again and again, but I never see any explanation as to why SEO is suddenly in the lead in this cat-and-mouse game. They were trying ever since Google got 90%+ market share. I think it's more likely that Google stopped really caring.

Well yeah, it's in the article - at some point, they switched completely to metrics (i.e. revenue) driven management and forgot that it's the quality of results that actually made Google what it is. And, with a largely captive audience (Google being the default-search-engine-that-most-people-don't-bother-or-don't-know-how-to-change in Chrome, Android, on Chromebooks etc.), they arguably don't have to care anymore...

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#703

Post by somenameforme »

freetinker wrote: post #640
barbariangrunge wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

A bit chicken-and-egg. Another perspective: Google’s system incentivizes SEO spam. Search for a while hasn’t been about searching the web as much as it has been about commerce. It taps commercial intent and serves ads. It is now an ad engine; no longer a search engine.

Absolutely this. I don't think many people consider how odd it is that the largest internet advertising company in the world and the largest search engine company in the world are one and the same, and just how overt a conflict of interest that is, so far as providing quality service goes. It would be akin to if the largest telephone service company in the world was also the largest phone maker in the world. Oh wait, that did happen [1] - and we broke them up because it's obviously extremely detrimental to the functioning of a healthy market.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#704

Post by datadeft »

mrkeen wrote: post #695
gregw134 wrote: post #250

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…

> There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. There's a lot of ML hate here, and I simply don't see the alternative. To rank documents, you need to score them. Google uses hundreds of scoring factor…

You do not need to. Counting how many links are pointing to each document is sufficient if you know how long that link existed (spammers link creation time distribution is widely differnt to natural link creation times, and many other details that you can use to filter out spammers)

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#705

Post by snickerer »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #679
Narishma wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Or when they would show more than 3 results before spamming irrelevant videos. Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. Or when they had a dislike button so you would know to avoid wasting time on low quality videos.

> Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. On desktop Chrome, a modern ad-blocking browser extension will block 100% of YouTube adverts. I haven't watched one, literally, in years. I don't watch YouTube from a mobile phone, but I think the situation is different. (Can anyone else comment about the mobile experience?)

On Android devices I use the app PipePipe to avoid the YouTube ad hell. I recommend it.

I also use Firefox for Android, which has Addon support. Ublock Origin works on the phone and disables a a lot of the ad horror.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#706

Post by raincole »

oblio wrote: post #364
jokoon wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not something ML people would like to hear

Is ML the new SOAP? Looks like a silver bullet and 5 years later you're drowning in complexity for no discernible reason?

ML is a quite well adopted technology. iPhones has ML bulit in since about 2017. It has been more than 5 years.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#708

Post by willvarfar »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #611
gregw134 wrote: post #250

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at leas…

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

I think a case can be made that the spam problem can be traced all the way back to Google buying Doubleclick.

Its really easy to spot the crap websites that are scaping content-creating websites ... because they monetize by adding ads.

If Google was _only_ selling ads on the search results page, then it could promote websites that are sans ads.

Instead, it is incentivised to push users to websites that contain ads, because it also makes money there.

And that means scraping other sites to slap your ads onto them can be very profitable for the scammers.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#709

Post by arromatic »

choppaface wrote: post #668
barbariangrunge wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

SEO Spam didn't kill search so much as Google failed to retain Matt Cutts or replicate his community involvement https://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-resigns-googl...

What did he used to do ? Your comment seems contradictory cutts seem to be on anti spam but your comment implies seo did not kill search . Is seo not part of spam?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#710

Post by raincole »

datadeft wrote: post #704
mrkeen wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. There's a lot of ML hate here, and I simply don't see the alternative. To rank documents, you need to score them. Google uses hundreds of scoring factor…

You do not need to. Counting how many links are pointing to each document is sufficient if you know how long that link existed (spammers link creation time distribution is widely differnt to natural link creation times, and many other details that you can use to filter out spammers)

> spammers link creation time distribution is widely differnt to natural link creation times

Yes, this is a statistical method. Guess what machine learning is and what it actually excels?

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