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Comment by theprop | Hacker News Reader

If Google's AI is so great, why is it that Google search results seem to get worse and worse every year?

So many searches I do are so "SEO'ed", I feel like it's 1999 again.

In my experience, Google is getting better at finding more general information and worse in finding specific information.

It also tries to "help" too much with fuzzy matching which starts to make it useless if you are looking for less common thing. For example, if you search for "nmake tabs vs spaces" it returns a bunch of results for GNU make and flame wars about tabs vs spaces instead of nmake specific info regarding usage of tabs or spaces in nmake makefiles.

Yes, they seem to be dropping keywords that overly restrict results which is ironic since those keywords are oftentimes the most important due to their specificity.

I find myself preemptively using quotes more and more with Google. I kind of which their logic was segmented by user-type.

Isn't that something we should expect as a result of using statistical methods (ML or otherwise) and focusing on masses?

In my experience search is better. I pretty much always have what I want as the top I guess your mileage may vary

From my experience, it depends on the type of things you're searching for. If you're doing a search for a local restaurant or something in the news, you don't even realize how good Google's become because it basically gets you exactly what you want in your first result. However, if you're trying to find something more obscure, older, less contextually relevant, or using keywords, Google can get very frustrating because it's trying to contextualize something that shouldn't be contextualized.

Let's see: is it to Google's benefit that you'll find what you want in no time ? Or that you'll spend more time in their engine and see ads ?

If it's ads for things you dont want, the ads are worthless.

It's 100% of their interest to find exactly what you're looking for as quickly as possible. Oldie but goodie article, about when Mayer was experimenting with search results, and the conclusion was that minimal, accurate choices wins. People actually spent LESS time when there was too many results.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-marissa-mayer-speed-win...

from the link you sent all i get is that Google optimized for "time on site". Nowhere it mentions optimizing for rapidly finding what you want.

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