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Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#91

Post by pprplt »

danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…

The worst part is the corporatized results. For example, if you search for a movie, google search returns the reviews of corporate newspapers first and in the results it also lists the corporate newspapers news reviews first so that you need to scroll down to see useful aggregators and go to the 2nd or 3rd page to see pertinent forum reviews or independent reviews.

Google properties have been skewing to less relevant news and corporate results ( search, news, maps and even youtube ).

It's a shell of it's former useful self. Hopefully ddg and other search providers step up their game to put pressure on google.

Google is just another example of a monopoly gone bad.

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#92

Post by nbanks »

danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…

I switched my browser to use verbatim by default when doing google searches for a few months. It still came up with false positives like this.

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#93

Post by rasz »

spurgu wrote: post #11
danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…

It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my searches. In some cases it has even lead to queries looking like this: "us" "ambassador" "germany"

Did you really mean "us" "ambassador" "germany"?

Here are some results for Taylor Swift instead:

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#94

Post by gundmc »

rolltiide wrote: post #64
danielfoster wrote: post #4

I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhap…

Its not just you, there are memes that compare Google search results and Bing results now, with Bing giving more mechanically specific responses Google has "overfitted" because their A/B test told them messing up more queries gets them higher "engagement". They are masquerading engagement as satisfaction, clouded by their incentive to have people dwell on ads longer. Memes: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfee…

I think you're missing the idea of those memes if you think those are favoring Bing results...

Re: Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds

#95

Post by rolltiide »

gundmc wrote: post #94
rolltiide wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not just you, there are memes that compare Google search results and Bing results now, with Bing giving more mechanically specific responses Google has "overfitted" because their A/B test told them messing up more queries gets them higher "engagement". They are masquerading engagement as satisfaction, clouded by their incentive to have people dwell on ads longer. Memes: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfee…

I think you're missing the idea of those memes if you think those are favoring Bing results...

They are now though

The bing memes go back ten years when it was giving unexpected worse results

The same memes are being repurposed because the same experience is giving better results than google’s differently worse results

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