Google search results have more human help than you think, report finds
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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. Perhaps I just search too many long tail queries?
Richard Grenell has been in the news: https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz...
if you search "Javascript issues Rshiny" (this is just an example not the actual query) - you only get javascript results for 4 to 5 pages of results.. when you reverse it to "Rshiny Javascript issues" - the results are better
i.e. "how do I change a ford taurus headlight" vs "taurus service manual headlight"
Someone at Google will probably disagree emphatically, but it seems to me like this represents a bit of an existential threat to web search. There's so much money in being #1 for popular queries that countless actors will throw enormous resources into getting there.
Google can no longer be an independent observer, as the act of observation changes the results!
It makes sense for this target audience to give broad results. They seem to be relying more on neural language models to accomplish this.
Google also surfaces more authoritative results than Bing, Google thus favors bigger commercial sites.
Google is suprisingly good on vague searches (for instance, describing a singer's appearance and song themes will return the name), but getting worse on "conspiracy"-type searches (you will not find many amateur sites discussing the high-class escort past of the First Lady, because these lack authority, all results focus instead on the massive fine for posting allegations).
https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...
Google can also allow users to self-select. The way to do this would be to have a survey with multiple sliders that allow the user to demonstrate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much they care about a certain parameter. There would be default profiles that automatically set the sliders for you, like “academic.”
Even if Google doesn’t take this route for global search, they can add more features to advanced search. Google Advanced Search is underpowered, given Google’s technological capabilities.
Finally, with regards to the Advanced Search approach, Google can allow the user to create several search buttons that always appear on the Google front page. For example, an Arab American researcher may have a default search button, an Academic search button, and an Arabic search button, all of which can be tweaked along multiple parameters, as described above.
"us" "ambassador" "germany"
With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.
My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google.
For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.
From memory I do recall the +/- and "" operator being overriden if there was a "popular" search query that contained broader results than my specific query.
Specifically for the "" operator was that the query would drop "" so instead of showing x results which must include that expression it would show broader results as if the expression was not contained in "".
Google search has been getting increasingly worse for me over the last five years or so. In terms of the quality of search results, it has no edge over DDG.
Here are some results for Taylor Swift instead:
Searching for a topic that's recently become, er, topical, but I'm interested in earlier discussion.
DDG's very limited date-ranged search is especially frustrating here. Book search is often more useful.
The engine should generally pick up relatively quickly that when you specifically search for "Forth," you usually mean the programming language and not a typo. Catching these differences in use case is why customized search is a feature.
FWIW I will use "Forth language" or "Forth programming language" instead of "Forth" to delineate more precisely what I'm seeking.
"US ambassador Germany" makes it hard to comprehend what you intend. Do you get better results for "who is the US ambassador to Germany" or "news about us ambassador to Germany?"
Given what we know about the political leanings of Google it is very hard to see that as anything other than an attempt to direct the narrative.
Even if it isn’t, it’s still unclear how an algorithm would make that jump from those keywords. A completely different country, for example.
Very weird.
[0] - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hx&iar=new...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&ia=web
Them training you to have low expectations isn't the right way I don't think.
https://www.google.com/?q=US+Ambassador+Germany
And when you search DDG in their news section, most of the results are about the impeachment hearing, just like Google.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&iar=new...
I've been noticing it for the past 3 or 4 weeks. I've been thinking my google-fu has been weakening. Glad to know I'm not the only one.
I belief this is an effect of Google News emphasising recency in its ranking algorithm.
Interestingly, your complaint is almost the opposite of the one often made on HN, namely that people would prefer a somewhat dumber but very literal search interface. It also shows why that wish's fulfilment might end up disappointing people: In the snippets I get, "Germany" gets included in these articles in all sorts of irrelevant ways, including navigational links that really aren't part of the story ec.
Did the user visit a page and cease searching for a given query? Great, the page answered the users question.
Did they visit a page, bounce, and keep on searching?
Well that page didn't answer the users query.
Maybe there has been an uptick in people googling "US ambassador Germany" and looking for news articles about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings.
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/newsfeed/001/608/639/8ef...
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/608/619/bec...
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/641/517...
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
Google just doesn't seem to care about search anymore. Maybe they don't need to?
For a few years, I've been blaming the reduction in the quality of search results on this attempt to "know how to serve me best". I still think that's a huge part of the cause, but I'm not so sure it explains everything.
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.
I could see some potential risks here but it still seems reasonable to me:
> Demonstrably inaccurate content
> YMYL content that contradicts well-established expert consensus
> Debunked or unsubstantiated conspiracy theories
This part, I imagine, is a bit more controversial:
> pages that potentially spread hate, cause harm, or misinform or deceive users, should receive the Lowest rating.
Demonstrably inaccurate? I doubt they remove young earth creationists. It seems easy at first, but it doesn't take long to find a lot of gray areas.
Despite all the policy guidelines, in the end it's not just a legalistic decision but more like a survey to see what people think.
If you're running a search engine, you need to track of what people think somehow, or you'll totally miss things like cultural issues.
Depending on what region of the world the publisher is in, and what region his/her readers are in.. and where the raters are from, can make some issues.
Some years ago I sat in a class at a college for building contractors when the subject of burying electrical lines came up, people scoffed at the cost, then the teacher did a survey and found that 90% of the class thought radon gas was a fairy tale conspiracy theory, not real, and not something they would ever consider when building.
Half of those in the class had already been in the building professions for years and some cases generations.
Ummm, isn't that providing false testimony and considered perjury? Why is this shit never, ever prosecuted against a large corporation? It's simple - you know who lied under oath an it's recorded. You know that person knew what the truth was because they were a high ranking person who's job it is would be to know stuff like that. So either they committed perjury or they are grossly incompetent. And it's not like they didn't know what was going to be asked of them, nor did they state they weren't sure. Can't stand this crap. The two standard requirements are that the person needs to have intent to deceive and that it must be material information to the proceeding. Since the discussion was entirely surround this aspect of search, there logically must have been intent to deceive. Furthermore, being the central topic, it was most certainly of material significance.
From the article: "The engineer "didn't want a piece of human anatomy or the description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer's name," as the paper describes it. The unfiltered search results were "kind of horrible," he added."
That has nothing at all to do with web safety or anything fraudulent or deceptive.
Also, just because people wouldn't have a problem with that limited use (if it actually was limited to just those two things), that still doesn't make the statement not technically perjury. If you were in front of Congress and they asked you something like whether or not your business changed the design of the website the user sees based on metrics/tracking that an AI bot determines might generate more user engagement for that user, and you say "no, we don't do that" but later on you tell everyone that you're only doing it for people that opt-in, that's probably considered perjury. And I'm sure you could see why, especially if all users were set to "opt-in" by default.
In essence, they give you search term, a url, and about 30 seconds (at most) to make about $10 an hour or less.
Now, I'm pretty savvy when it comes to understanding what to look for but I found it nearly impossible to provide both an accurate rating and making enough money to make it worth one's while.
The people I knew who were doing this for a living told me flat out told that they take a fast glance, check a rating, and moved on as quickly as possible because they pay for quantity, and quality of the rating isn't a concern for them. So what they're really rating more than anything is visual aesthetics.
If the page looked nice and seemed to fit the description of the search term they'd give it a good rating.
Based on that, Hacker News probably wouldn't be rated very high by most of those who rate for google.
That seems to match what I've seen over the last 10 years with Google.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
If you're doing something that would skew the results to favour a certain brand, you'd be going against Google's guidelines and your contract would be terminated quickly. I found the review process of my results to be fairly stringent; they were reviewed frequently to ensure I was staying within the guidelines, and I was told even about slight deviatiations.
...versus asking an oracle what the "good" results are? It's not clear what you'd propose as an alternative.
At the moment it's a Frankenstein set up with a rules/algorithm based ranking subsequently shuffled around by several separate ML runs with different aims.
The FTC did once unearth a Google attempt to purposefully influence the human ratings: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/ (long read, but worth it). Find this section of the paper:
"Unable to get positive reviews from raters when Google demoted comparison shopping sites, Google changed the raters' criteria to try to get positive results."
I wonder what the consequences of no-filter algorithmic search results in. Google had to tweak its algorithm to avoid disinformation campaigns from spam in the past. Now we're dealing with another sort of disinformation campaign and I don't know a reasonable way for google to tackle it the way it is now.
much less HN discussion on the wall st journal's thread.
There are important issues, especially lack of transparency and censorship that warrant more discussions imho.
I mean, factually, there is 0 evidence vaccines cause autism, and it was shown that the guy who started this conspiracy theory did it basically as a scam to make money. So am I supposed to be upset or something that Google is tweaking their algorithm to not push falsehoods? Same thing as the suicide query. I say this as someone who has and still periodically suffers from deep depression, who has searched for suicide methods in the past: am I supposed to have a problem that Google is "pushing" results that try to keep me from killing myself?
I recommend to get off of their search engine, go to DDG