Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
surgehq.ai
surgehq.ai
These sites should be heavily penalised for click-baiting and they have been doing it for years.
If you spend 5 minutes on it, can you think of a way? If you can, congratulations, now imagine millions of other people thought about the same tricks and you get the reason why Google can't ever really win against SEO.
Eg if they can get to a place where SEO efforts point in the same direction as making your website genuinely more useful to people, then that's good enough for Google.
Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.
But it's probably too privacy sensitive (if I see which sites you upvoted, then I have some information about you). Hence, that's probably why this has to be either completely private or completely public.
But yes, it would be nice to have this in a less proprietary way. But I fear it's either going to be a privacy issue (because the person you trust has to publish every page they like and dislike), or it's going to be anonymous and therefore easily gamed by bad actors.
For example, I wouldn't mind sharing my upvoted websites/videos/products with everyone on HN, as long as it is anonymized. Bad actors can be distrusted by the community, I suppose (though moderation seems to be largely an unsolved problem still).
Click/dismiss "make it private/public" bubble.
Set default vote visibility in settings.
Enable/disable the bubble.
List/add/remove sites in a privacy list.
But the common notion is that it's probably too hard for "regular" users, so we have the internet of nonsense instead. Few more years and we won't find anything good.
Just cluster people by downvotes and whatever other thousand metrics are already being tracked, and allow them to see results given by other clusters by showing which areas are dense on a PCA or something or saying 'I want my results to only be influenced by people who have downvoted github.org' or whatever.
Let's say you run a good song-lyrics site that has the correct lyrics for everyone's favorite songs. You happen to be on page 2 of google results for common queries; all of page 1 is taken up by spammers, fake pages, etc.
How can you possibly drive traffic to your site? Maybe you can invest in SEO but no promises there. You'd be competing against people whose whole focus is SEO and nothing else. The only option left is to buy ads.
And it all works together to make Google worse.
I agree that it would work as long as Google has an absolute monopoly on search. Google wouldn't care how bad their search results are, because there's nowhere else to go. But if there are alternatives, users should stop using Google and use the alternatives instead, and then Google has an incentive to improve their search results for users again.
I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. What seems far more plausible is that they’ve decided it isn’t costing them more in ad sales than it brings in. There are individual domains which would improve results by being blocked but they also pay for search ads so … unsolved grand challenge of computer science it is!
Isn't that exactly what people are complaining about here though? At least part o the problem with search results is that google seems powerless to recognize and remove useless bad actors (stack overflow copies, etc.) from their index.
Noone ever wants to go to xypdf.com for any reason unless they want to feel like they just had a stroke, how is (was? it made me stop using google except as a last resort in 2019) it often 3 of the top 5 results?
I wish I could just invert their SEO quality metric (there was a golden window around 2018 where you could just type -best into search engines that still respected subtraction to get only good reviews but sadly quality sites have fallen into line with the duck speak). I feel it's a pretty reliable indicator of garbage.
Having that explicit button might not really add any additional value.
So if they look at my behaviour the way you say, then the feedback they'd get from me would be that the top x-1 results are always bad, while the xth result is always good. That sounds like a poor algorithm for them, but it might explain why my Google results always suck.
Especially for use cases like reviews where you are looking for multiple opinions.
The hard to navigate site full of waffle, and SEO duckspeak nonsense gets a positive while the site with clear concise information the user can absorb in 2s gets penalized.
Google did copy the voting feature on their results page briefly but abandoned it. [0] This was back in 2006-7. We learned the hard way that it's pretty much impossible to compete with Google in search even when you're innovating. They either copy you, or can just blackhole you out of existence.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/straight-out-of-left-field...
This is a risky assumption. I tend to click all the links first, and only then check if they're the results I'm looking for.
that can be detected, by checking further searches are made using the same session.
>Or trying a different search engine.
Maybe if your audience is mainly HN users it might cause an issue, but I think most people don't bother with that so you can count it as noise.
Don't forget to use ungoogled chromium if possible
The only downside is you will have to load unpacked extensions instead of using the Chrome "store" and you will have to manually install Chromium updates from the same site:
That sounds like a bad idea for something like a browser that should get security updates as fast as possible.
Eg there are performance and memory differences between the two browsers, and different extensions are available.
"GHHbD" is a precursor to uBlacklist; and was for many years THE replacement to blocking sites on Google Search after Google removed the built-in function.
It also has a 'Block' button next to the search results (remember, the script existed long before uBlacklist), which allows to grey-out or hide results, based on subdomains down to the base domain.
The disadvantage of GHHbD is that it doesn't handled regex filtering. However one of its many advantages is that it does block TLDs: https://greasyfork.org/en/forum/discussion/comment/55821/#Co...
For their commercial search results I'll grant you that there's an incentive. But for their non-commercial search results why would they care? That's how it used to work, you couldn't delete a domain from the paid results, but you could make it disappear from the unpaid ones.
If SEO works and a result appears closer to result #1 in the SERPs, then the "true", non SEO-assisted result it is displacing would appear further from result #1. Apply this across the board and what we have are many, many non-SEO results that are pushed down in Google's ranking. No one is "penalising" these pages, however they suffer visibility problems because they have not engaegd in SEO. The incentives created by Google's secretive ranking system and online advertising commercial focus are perverse or at least in conflict with the user's goals. Google discourages and even prevents any user from looking at results that were hits but were not ranked high. Pages that may not succombed to the the influence of such incentives may "disappear".
What if a user understands this and wants ignore the Google ranking system. What if the user wants to see the true, non-SEO results. Google actively limits the user's ability to see those displaced results. For example if a user searches for a common term, such as "example", she will not be able to view more than 200-300 results. Elsewhere in this thread someone also noted even with a paid API, Google limits users to 1000 results. If the user wants to the see the full range of pages that have hits for the word "example", she cannot do so. If the user would like to perform a single search for all pages containing the term "example" and then sort by some other objective criteria such as alphabetical by domainname, date, page size, etc., she cannot do so.
Under Google's model of the web, pages that do not acquiesce to an online advertising company's secretive ranking system may become nondiscoverable, despite the fact that they may indeed match the user's query. Computers assist us in searching through data but "relevance" is ultimately decided by the user. That is why we can have HN threads that claim search result quality is declining. Though they may be slower, humans can determine relevance better than any computer. From the disclosures of Matt Cutts and others we know that humans are involved in Google's ranking implementation. Penalties are used. The search process is not 100% math/computer-based. However, in Google's model of the web, filtering results is the exclusive domain of the online advertising company and only the humans on its payroll, not the user performing the search. There is no option to disable the online advertising company's "assistance" in filtering.
I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering what you entered. It may even be "better" in the sense that it's more likely to return at least something relevant, but in practice it's bad UX because it's so unintuitive what's happening. It's probably one of those unfortunate optimizations that are invisible when they work and frustrating when they don't.
There is so much stuff on the Internet it's easy to start thinking there is guaranteed to be good results for any search, and that just doesn't seem to be the case. Especially with highly specified searches with 6-8 terms, you quickly enter the domain where you're reasonably unlikely to find an exact match.
Outside of programming-related topics, anything I search returns pages of pop psychology listicles or news articles. Since I am literally never looking for pop psych listicles, Google (and, to be fair, the other search engines as well) has become a lot less usable.
I agree that the open web has deteriorated, with crap drowning out real content. But I maintain that Google et al have failed, or been beat. The content is there, they just can't find it and/or rank it anymore.
If you are adjusting your query, then you are going to get different results, possibly including ones that contain the information you want (but not your original search terms).
We've been tweaking search terms to find what we were looking for since day one, what's changed the most it's that it's gotten far less likely that you'll realize you need to do this.
I think this is one of the real drawbacks of ML-algorithms, their failure modes are completely incomprehensible. Dumb algorithms we can grok, and learn to help along the way when it doesn't work. There is really no point where it will always work.
I think the major difference is that the algorithm used to highly weight matching of specific words and phrases from the search terms, so adding a word, re-ordering, and swapping for synonyms would drastically change the results. Now it seems they're using ML and natural language processing to try to actually understand what you're looking for and give it to you. You can change your search terms, but the language embedding doesn't change much, so the system is actually working as intended. I could see that this might actually be desirable for a large segment of the population who wants their search engine to "just work" in response to natural language queries. If the corpus being indexed was high quality, maybe this would be a good experience. But due to the ads, affiliate marketing, and blogspam that make up a large part of modern internet content, it's simply frustrating.
I wouldn't be surprised if they've done user testing that validates their approach. Programmers tend to be comfortable with the concept that a computer will do what you ask, even if it's not what you meant, but most people want to get the right results on the first try. The natural language/ML approach may be much more intuitive and forgiving in that regard. It's just not an approach that's compatible with the low average quality of the content being indexed, in that it takes away the authority of the user to improve their search results.
I think there's somewhat of a tradeoff in search performance between quality of results on the first try and ability to improve the results on subsequent tries, and google is now optimizing for the former at great cost to the latter. And honestly they're failing at both.
It's like bitcoin if you want - they compete for something so useless the entire concept becomes a huge waste of time. Search engine SEO is like hashrate-dependent token mining: the only people who win are the farmers at the cost of burning their entire ecosystem.
If you search for anything related to sexuality and psychology, the results are littered with sites that were squatted for serving ads (i.e. no relevant content, just ads), poor quality articles with very low quality content (e.g. poorly formed Quora questions with no expert answers).
As with anything, you have to know what search terms for a given subject are good. For example, you'll get more objective answers the more academic sounding you are, because the fewer people have tried to occupy those search terms.
Criminy. Amazon does this all the time. If I wanted a book, I'd have searched under "Books". I am not confused about the difference between "CDs" and "Books".
What's the good of having categories if they're completely ignored?
Showing results from All Departments
No results for The Birdstones in Music, CDs & Vinyl
I think this widening of search scope is not unreasonable.
Realistically neither of the above were the concern. It's an attempt to boost engagement in the hopes that you'll find a product for eventual purchase, nothing more.
However, more charitable interpretations could be:
1. perhaps the user has accidentally chosen the wrong category?
2. perhaps the product they're looking for is miscategorised? (I've definitely seen these.)
If WalterBright didn't see it it probably wasn't loud and clear enough.
I don't often come to Amazon's defence, but here it's IMO a bit of a stretch to infer malicious intent.
Same with any sort of requirement like "plastic" a colour...
It just wastes my time so I shop elsewhere.
I think a much better UX would be saying: No results but consider searching for "4k capture card" or "HDMI capture card".
I'm increasingly of the opinion that Google (the advertising engine) has destroyed Google (the search engine), by the two step process of making it profitable to produce blogspam then forcing search to remove blogspam - and a lot of the useful content has gone out with that bathwater.
Not to mention the rise of unsearchable platforms. Google can't search inside Discord.
Can anyone, even in theory? Are there open APIs to all systems of discord? Does Discord have one? Wouldn't that open up all of these systems to systematic classification of all users? Also, is there a web link you can construct that will open up e.g. Discord's desktop app when you click it?
I also think ephemeral-by-default seems to result in much fewer long-running fights than you would have in public-record-by-default communities like forums.
Like when a thread gets heated in a forum, it keeps getting bumped and none of the people involved can resist picking at the sore.
On Discord it seems like someone steps away, the channel moves on, and the fight actually dies
In tech, it's never what's possible, it's just what costs area reasonable.
If you're looking for someone to blame google seems like the wrong party here. Surely the people abusing the system (i.e. blog spam) should at least share a good chunk of the blame.
Google are just the most powerful and most visible actor in this, and replacing the early less profit orientated web with a dark forest of advertising and tracking is to a great extent on them.
(I don't think the web3 people have realised how important it is that the cost/benefit ratio of "ham" (good content) needs to be above the cost/benefit ratio of spam, by quite a large margin, or spam drives out ham)
I think pjc’s point is extremely important: micropayments could dramatically change things but it’s quite hard to set values which will deter enough spam to be effective without excluding innocent people or simply increasing the damages when someone is compromised. That was what killed proof-of-work email spam concepts decades ago: even if you could get adoption, it wouldn’t have hurt the people using botnets to spam as much as many legitimate users.
The only way to have prevented something like that would have been to make the internet a giant closed-garden AOL like system with total control over users, identity, and content.
Fundamentally, if you make something frictionless to join, you end up with parasites. If you impose a cost to join, you end up hurting average users, because it's hard to raise the price high enough to keep out bad actors, especially if the expected value is positive and high. (If I need to spend $5000 in order to get one sucker for a MAKE MONEY FAST scheme, it's still worth it)
Part of Apple's value proposition is a tightly controlled walled garden with a high cost to entry. If you're willing to pay those costs, you're protected from a lot of spam, at the cost of a lot of friction to enter the ecosystem, and the lost of full autonomy over your devices.
This is probably part of it but not the whole explanation:
Try to search on Google for:
slack ngrok
The top result however was a page that didn't contain ngrok at all.
I saw a specialist at another search engine comment that it was because it was a very popular result (at least thats what I read into it).
Here's my problem with Google: they are either just really bad at QA or they don't care or they consistently overestimate their dumb AI and underestimate me.
I'm fed up.
Not including pages that doesn't contain the search terms or anything similar isn't hard when there are multiple good results at the exact same domain / pagerank, is it?
Given the term "ngrok", I can't say I blame them/it. It looks like a typo to me. I imagine for well over 90% of people searching, it would be a typo. Perhaps, it is a common typo?
Google knows and the rest of the results confirm it.
Now, if your explanation was the entire explanation it would be kind of ok if they did like Kagi do and Google did themselves at some point, ask nicely:
did you mean <something else>?
or
we included results for <something else>. Please use doublequotes if you want exact matches.
Of course with Google this would be pointless as as far as I can see they ignore doublequotes anyway these days...
It is the top result on Bing as well. It probably shows up in this spot on both search engines because it's prominently linked on https://ngrok.com/.
This has been going on for a while, at one point before Obama, searching for a "a miserable failure" got the White House as first result.
But this cannot be the entire explanation for why so many results are useless?
I'm fine with Google not reading my mind at the first try, but at least offer me alternatives and exact text matching. For example since a couple of years looking for phones or symbols is completelly broken.
And I really admire how Google is able to guess the encoding of the websites, detect what is text, do language detection and dropping all the porn. Writting a crawler that actually works is HARD.
"Python get value from database - Büro Jorge Schmidt", which judging by title and preview seems to be a Python + MySQL tutorial. It returns a 403 error and might be a hacked site, since the home page is for a graphic design studio in Munich.
Result #8 is something similar:
"Intellij flatten packages - Músicos de Viaje". This is definitely a hacked site (from Spain, apparently) that redirects me somewhere else.
Result #10:
"How to calculate tax percentage in sql query". Another hacked site, this time for an evangelical church from Brazil.
Now... how can Google think that any of these sites are relevant? Even if it doesn't realize the pages are hacked... even its crawler has been fed content that included the keywords... :
A - The sites themselves don't match the query at all.
B - No legit site about the subject would link to these sites.
C - The results themselves (title, url, preview), as Google shows them, have nothing to do with the search!
I wonder if you have some malware that is hijacking the results? I once had some malware (chrome extension) that was corrupting my search results. It was surprisingly difficult to remove (given that it was a chrome extension...).
Google results are personalized, based on location, search history, etc. The fact that I'm in Argentina has been adding a lot of noise to results on searches where my location is not relevant at all.
In this case, I suspect that Google thinks these hacked sites with developer target content are relevant to me, because of my regular search history.
This seems to be a common theme in the industry. Recommenders heavily overweight location - an incredibly general factor, even in the presence of troves of specific, individual level data. Goes to show how little basic reasoning really goes into how these systems work.
Localized search is useful at times (restaurants for example, I like getting the local McDonald’s or China Wok rather than the biggest one in New York) but it’s completely useless for many terms. But maybe not the ones Google makes the most money on.
Copied from another answer:
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My feeling is that since that query is SO unusual for me, based on my search history (I can't even say what it means) it raises the "likelyhood" that the hacked spam sites with programming terms that also include those keywords are good results for me.
If I search for something more typical, like "Spider-Man No Way Home" or "Ruby rails tutorial" the results don't include hacked sites.
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P.S. Chrome, incognito window.
My feeling is that since that query is SO unusual for me, based on my search history (I can't even say what it means) it raises the "likelyhood" that the hacked spam sites with programming terms that also include those keywords are good results for me.
If I search for something more typical, like "Spider-Man No Way Home" or "Ruby rails tutorial" the results don't include hacked sites.
They're so obviously unrelated hacked sites that they shouldn't even be listed.
Do you geolocate in Argentina?
Google has been so much better for search for me than other search engines. Atleast for what I search for programming, news etc.
Also, results are personalized. Not everyone sees the same.
If I do an incognito search (not logged in) I get results without trash.
That being said, I have issued queries in the past that I have just found absolute walls of malicious results. I haven't really invested much attention span in entertaining this sort of thing so I just move on and modify my query, but I'll keep an eye out for it going forward.
- I checked the cached (by Google) copies of the hacked pages and they include mentions of a "Databricks SQL Connector". So if I search for "Databricks" Google thinks "it must be a programming thing".
- If I now search for "databricks series a valuation" I don't get the spam results, for some reason. I think that if I repeat the search Google produces the exact same results... but internally, since I first searched, it might have realized that those sites were not good.
To give just a few examples:
Query 1: how many stars in the usa flag
Google: https://cln.sh/63sVzh
Kagi: https://cln.sh/bFEHsD
Pretty surprising that Google would get something like this wrong.
Query 2: when did moon explode
Google https://cln.sh/fUhdJS
Both engines feature the same article but for some reason Google decides this is not fiction, and gives a (wrong) answer.
Query 3: do most rabbits have short or long ears
Google: https://cln.sh/JuOeqq
Kagi: https://cln.sh/BkZi6O
Both engines use the same article for source, but Google completely misses the context.
These examples show that a search startup has a chance to go neck-to-neck with Google and compete even in technology as sophisticated as instant answers. We invested considerable resources in the Kagi Search AI capabilities, discussed in some detail here https://kagi.ai/last-mile-for-web-search.html
What is mind boggling though from a product management perspective is that Google had nearly a decade head start and a cash purse of hundreds of billions of dollars to get this right.
To be fair, it is likely that the vast majority of queries are answered correctly, but only the outliers get the public attention. Also Kagi is not without its own share of silly mistakes too, but just being able to be considered in the same basket as Google is already a huge thing for us.
Right now the Google Assistant will correctly transcribe the request to a Google search... Only for the search to interpret “ml” as “miles” and, faced with the discrepancy between the length and a volume, cube the miles. So I am expecting an amount that is like 1 oz because I am converting like 30 mL... and I instead get 4 quadrillion ounces (exact number is 1 mi³ = 140,942,994,870,857 + 1/7 oz because of course it's got that extra 7th in there what were you expecting from our ridiculous US system, haha).
Perhaps everyone who understood the codebase has left?
Clearly they should have put a chat app in it.
Sometimes even without the !wa, as duckduckgo itself often provides the result
Not really. TFA is discussing the search results. If google/bing want to put instant answers then that is what will get judged. If your ML/AI is not good enough yet to provide natural language answers, don't make it the most prominent part of the search results.
The third query is wrong for me too, though.
No one at Google is responsible for these half baked and largely irrelevant widgets or wants to stake their career fixing them.
You're just ... wrong about this. There's an entire team of dozens of people (maybe hundreds now) focusing on this specific web answer feature. I personally worked on the team (not this feature, though).
I don't understand why people say things they know nothing about.
The fact that there have been plenty of other comments from Googlers to back it up since shows that, in some parts of Google at least, there's a grain of truth there. It might not be the whole story, many teams might be proud of their part, and many Googlers may not be focusing on promition and shiny new things, but that doesn't really matter to Google's users. What we see has been plenty of Google products being killed off, or left to rot. Now even Search has people complaining about it. Startups are getting traction competing against it. A decade ago that would have been unthinkable.
If you're right and teams in Google do actually care about the older, less shiny things they build then Google has a significant brand and reputation problem. If you're wrong then Google has a massive engineering culture problem. Either way, Google has a problem.
Well, in all honesty I wonder how this exact same thing when reading the "answers".
I'm having visuals of someone repeatedly trying to throw something and missing the wall entirely.
Lets examine the original product implemented in wetware:
http://answers.google.com/answers/index.html
> "At the bottom of every question page we provide a link to answers-support@google.com. We encourage you to use this link whenever you see questionable content posted to the site. In your email, please provide information about the question, its ID number, and the reason you find the content questionable."
This one went through the wall!
You have no further questions.
Sometimes industries or teams have effectively negative value, or their preconceived notions about how something works based on teachings from their field is wrong. This is the case for chiropractors (the whole field is useless / a net negative), vs back doctors.
We see this happening today with Google moving away from traditional and high quality techniques like direct keyword ranking, bm25, and pagerank and move towards lower quality methods based on hype such as BERT/other "semantic search" based on LMs, query rewriting, and using these dense vectors directly in pagerank (and this degrading it).
The amazing power of language models in certain domains (text generation) has unfortunately caused a proliferation of them in a place where they are still pretty bad (information retrieval and search).
Google is full of search chiropractors when they need search back doctors.
I'll happily say bye bye to instant answers across all search engines just to get my working search engine back (preferably with a blacklist).
Same results as you on the third one though.
I still just want a blazing fast full text search of the reachable WWW that understands regexes and a basic predicate calculus. Unfortunately the overhead and small potential user base means that under the current regime such a thing will never be made.
Speaking of, if any government actually wants competition, they don't need to break up Google, they just need to force them to offer full access to their cache and compute at some reasonable rate, much like how the ILECs were made to carry the CLECs' traffic.
There is nothing actually better about the way we originally used search engines, it was just required at the time.
With natural language search, sometimes it works great, but it’s a crapshoot and when you don’t get the results you need you’re stuck.
Several times in recent memory Google has returned results so bad, I completely gave up searching. Most recently was when i was trying to look up a Windows 11 BSOD error code (where even pasting the error code verbatim only brought up pages of garbage sites with no useful technical information).
P: "Pfft. So, what? You think the current state of search is good?! Having to type in keywords instead of just asking a question in normal language?"
Me: "... is this a trick question?"
For some queries, being able to ask off the top of your head without thinking is good. Think 'what day of the week was June 14th, 2002?' or 'Who is the mayor of Los Angeles?' For quick questions with clear answers, the current system is a huge advantage over what we had before.
For other, more complicated queries, the act of composing your search and considering your keywords, etc. is a step in the process that helps a searcher mentally understand the results they're going to receive along with what they mean. Having to stop and consider makes you aware that you're working within a system and its constraints, which makes it more suitable for questions that are complex or not socially settled.
Not all information is the same.
From my experience the best way to get good results is to start typing keywords for yourr question and then creating the query based on the autocomplete results. If I notice I don't get autocompletion for a certain query I'll restructure it until I do. This has proven very useful in providing good results.
For technical stuff, using the quotation marks is almost essential.
Looks like Google is slowly turning into a big nigerian scam.
Instant answers (IA) caused a shift in the way contents are written. Content optimized for IA tend to be repetitive and shallow. Viewing content written for IA is a frustrating experience and these tend to dominant the result page now.
Both Google search and the internet are changing, as are our perceptions, so it's really hard to say why search quality is better or worse.
A bit off topic: Some of the search queries in the article used Google like a keyword matching tool, while other queries in the article were using Google to answer questions. That's because we only have one search box trying to do everything. Would we be better served if we have a checkbox to tell the search engine that we just want to perform word searches?
Poor Jeeves. He was before his time.
Meaningful websites still exist. The bulk of the content on the Internet is older than IA, and it's still out there (not that you can find it with Google).
Marginalia search, by punishing ad- and tracking-heavy pages and by being strict in how it interprets my queries sometimes surfaces better results than Google and DDG.
In particular I have found great resources about Linux partitioning and git usage after giving up mainstream search engines and trying them in marginalia.
That says quite something about how badly broken the situation is given that marginalia is one person and a tower pc in a living room.
I keep getting reminded about a Linux quote on how they managed to go forward by studying the latest 20 years of OS research and throwing it all away :-)
Getting this wrong is probably why people think we need more than definitive assertions from people operating from subjective impression.
Changing a letter in the query, it says, right at the top:
Showing results for "but when therefore is an adverb"
No results found for "but when therefore is tan adverb"I rarely see "No results found".
That is a completely valid result in my opinion.
I often see pages that doesn't contain my search string.
Sometimes is is something trivial like
query: "something about x y and z"
result contains: "... something about x. Y and Z however..."
which is understandable.
Often though I have no clue how a result got there. Maybe it is linked to using a certain text (link bombing)? I don't know.
But no, when I search for realsense "failed to recconect" Google returns pages that contain neither realsense nor recconect [2]. They offer me a supreme court opinion, a review of a car dealership, and a facebook church service.
Correcting the spelling of a query is one thing - but also completely ignoring other keywords? I can see why there are so many people posting about the poor quality of Google's search results.
[1] https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/blob/5ff27fca... [2] https://imgur.com/a/okYV5V2
It's high time Google and other search engines were forced to expose the inner workings of their ranking algorithms to the public, particularly now that they have near-monopoly power in the sector. People should also be able to adjust the dials on the algorithm themselves.
I use Google through a VPN to avoid it. That breaks maps integration.
It's absolutely catastrophic if you are not allowed to draw your own conclusions about things. This is your inalienable prerogative as an adult in a free country. Even at the risk of some people being wrong sometimes, you simply cannot have authorities distributing doctrine and call yourself a democracy.
DDG shows the author's substack as #1 result and is neutral otherwise. The other doesn't even have it on the first SERP, and is overwhelmingly critical.
If you argue that covid response is not politics, I will disagrer strongly.
So search engines now have to get the "truth", preferably the politically correct one, and since you can't rely on the crowd for that, you have to introduce bias, and "pre-approved news outlets" are the most obvious choice.
"gamakatsu octopus hooks"
I expect to only receive results for that. Instead I get bombarded by results that match a portion, or when Google thinks I tangentially might have meant something else. There was a time when it respected the quote characters, but those days have long since passed.
For example, a few weeks ago, I image searched for a meme that I created years ago on 4chan. A dozen or so results were returned, none of them relevant. But if you tack on the name of a 4chan archive, for example "4plebs" (not even "site:4plebs..."), all of the sudden it turns up.
Google in general seems to penalize 4chan and its archives, which is ironic since it's one of the few places where actual humans post OC. Meanwhile Pinterest spam, AI-generated blog posts, and reddit threads full of bots and shills abound in its results.
https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/76372135/
This is still the case today, at least in the US (I just checked). Instead of emphasizing the painting of Beethoven we all know, the one that was actually done during his lifetime, the one featured in the infobox of his Wikipedia page (which is also the top link result), it instead emphasizes a much more obscure painting that was done posthumously, for no obvious reason other than it giving him a noticeably darker skin tone. I'm not even offended by it, I just find it ridiculous that Google actually went out of its way (probably for pc reasons) to train their algorithm to return less relevant results.
Trying to think why/how it’d conclude that age wasn’t necessary for good results.
FaceBook Marketplace and Craigslist do something similar when there are no local results. They show results from outside your area but clearly call it out.
Also, at least for me, Google does exactly what you describe at the right approach.
No doubt that’s bad for some opaque internal metric though.
I am embarrassed by the whole field of NLP for making such a big deal out of a task that is fundamentally bad.
Google optimizing for the "average user" comes at the expense of the whole world, because the "power users" who are optimized against literally build the internet for the normies. Cater to the normies for too long, and we see the status quo.
Force the normies to get better at writing their queries. NLP will unironically have a large number of people with the title "query engineer" soon anyway due to the rise of increasingly large foundation language models proliferating. Welcome to the brace new world of botched semantic search!
If I were feeling cynical, I would point out that catering to us was a great idea for early Google, but not so much now. The problem with power users is that the more control you give them, the more they learn about how your product works and what decisions you're making. Power users can pick out dark UI and other user-hostile patterns more easily.
Early Google needed the power users, because we were an essential component of building Google's early dominance: It was us gesturing the normies over and saying "as the computer person (TM) in your life, you should be using Google. They're cleaner and their results are better." We were needed to both scale their user base and plug gaps since at the time there weren't dozens of engineers working on issues and search + web indexing was still in its infancy.
Now, though? There's no benefit to Google in engaging with power users. They have the numbers of normies they need for profit, and all engaging power users would do now is lead to more conversations like this in the real world, which is not what they want.
"Oh, you're still using Google? They suck now. Use X, Y, and Z." = conversations Google doesn't want.
That's telling us to find only pages that have "tim lee" on it in that order, as well as the word "age" and food vlogger are nice to have but not required. And it turns out -- there's not a lot of pages. Certainly not many pages, it seems, about the Tim Lee you're looking for with his age. And that's because not everything we want is actually out there. There might not be a page that has his age.
So back to why we dropped it. By showing you some pages that don't have the word age on it, we're able to show some other pages that are generally about him, which might get you closer to the answer.
BTW, there is a Wikipedia page I've seen suggested as having the right answer for his age. But that's for a different Tim Lee -- not the food vlogger, and it also only lists his birth year, so knowing the exact age is hard
In my opinion, google has become too big and has lost focus on actual quality/engineering.
One of my biggest side projects for many years was a student tool centered around test scores. It was a niche use case with a huge amount of students using the tool on one day per year (1m+). There was exactly one competitor. I had a better domain but a much worse site in terms of design, speed etc. We were nearly the same in traffic, until I decided to monetize the site with a lot of Google ads. Immediately, Google shot my site up in the rankings, and actually seemed to penalize the competitive site. My traffic went up 10x and the competitive site remained flat. This happened for 3 years, then the niche use of both of our tools was “patched”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special...
Perhaps that's my biased opinion on their motivations as I've recently launched https://grizzlybulls.com and yet even though Bing has tiny market share, I'm getting 10x more organic traffic from Bing rather than Google...
But the issue isn't that they can't; the issue is that they don't want that. Why the sites with copied content exists? To earn money through ads. What earns Google money? Ads!
And any simple heuristic is quickly reverse engineered by SEOs, who will find a way to mask it as legitimate.
tl;dr it's a hard problem.
As I have said, the reason they don't do it is not because they don't have the skills and know-how.
I think it simply is because very few people would describe in text a white couple as a "white couple" and not just as a "couple". In a majority white culture there is no reason to specify skin colour when both are white. It's just a couple.
On the contrary, I think it would be very normal to write "black and white couple" for an interracial couple, and because "black and white" also contains "white" thus those images would show up when you search for "white couple".
This is easy to verify by looking for the word "white" around the images Google returns for "white couple", and they are definitely there - often in the image title itself.
However, if you just search for "couple" then you'll find what you are looking for. At least on my google 9 out of 10 results are a white couple.
If I try the search on flickr.com, "white people" returns black&white pictures of people, while "white couple" returns swans. Meanwhile shutterstock.com returns mostly correct results.
Likewise, since at least around the same time (if not somewhat earlier), Google has also been running OCR on all images it indexes.
Either your theory is wrong, or the other search engines are also manipulating results for political reasons, or they are copying the results from Google.
Basic explanation of how one of these systems works:
(offline computation) user query comes in -> algorithm runs across all the text on the page and computes the distance between the query and the meaning of the text (as represented by word embeddings called BERT).
Maybe the SEO spam has a good distance metric there, causing flaws, but the search works very well for a large number of users when trying to actually extract an answer to a search.
I work in NLP, but could easily be 100% wrong. References to my knowledge of their NLP is literally just reading all of googles most recent research
But the quality issues I've seen (useless results unless you add "reddit") are a lot newer than that.
Google may publish more than others, but only because if you write "we trained our models on 24 specialized TPUs for 1 month" than the reviewers instantly know you work for deep-mind despite "double blind anonymity" and thus you are much more likely to be accepted.
Pedigree is not the same as quality.
This is like doing a taste test between two sodas where one is clearly labeled "Coke" and the other labeled "Pepsi". It will end up measuring branding and public perception instead of anything empirical or even objective.
This isn't a measurement of search quality, it's a public opinion poll with a sample size of 250. In fact the whole thing is a poorly disguised advertisement, and I don't think it serves them well.
I distinctly remember Udi Manber saying "if the web is slow, it's our fault" (actually, the speech was that everything is "our fault"), meaning, really, "take responsibility for problems and don't throw up your hands."
However, the natural tendency of any organization is to reward the suckups and promote mediocre people who just get along with everyone. It wouldn't surprise me if that's what's happened with Google, too.
What? Why not, and anyway Amazon I'm giving money. I'd think that quality there would be more deeply linked than anywhere I'm just giving some time.
It only sounds like what they do because you only ever read stuff written by people who believe that without any evidence.
Sundar Pichai has been with Google since 2004.
But speaking in general, there is limited correlation between executive compensation and company performance. You can DuckDuckGo it if you want to find the evidence for this statement.
Having everyone you've worked with love you and find you brilliant is not at all the same thing as being brilliant.
Google Search has 86% market share in the US.
GM tried in the 80s
Is anybody claiming that it’s sudden? Everybody I’ve seen complain about Google search results has seemed to think that it’s been getting slowly worse over a long period of time.
Nowadays all those tweaks to the algorithms, specially search and gmail spam filters, are like a desperate attempt to make the ship move faster by removing parts of the hull while keeping the water out. It will just sink at some point.
I was recently searching for a piece of ceramic cookware, specifically looking to avoid non stick coatings. And google search showed me lots of listings with my exact search terms, but when I click the page it shows their generic product range which has nothing to do with ceramic despite the title saying so.
right, I mean we have nearly daily posts here about almost human level quality texts you can generate with various machine learning solutions.
Add to that sites who serve users needs must focus on doing that, the sites that just game Google search rankings can focus on that.
But maybe at some point there will be a breakthrough with SEO abusers being able to be as constructive as the actually useful sites, at which point there will be a short time when the SEO abusers are the only sites returning results, causing all other sites to go out of business, causing the downfall of the SEO sites which rely on actually useful sites for a great deal of their stolen content / content seeding corpora.
Vast majority of these SEO abusers are monetized through google ads. For every advertisement dollar spent through google, google takes 30-50%. And 80% of Google's income is from internet ads.
I would be surprised if google's search quality would not deteriorate - they have very strong incentive for that.
Searching today is not as bad as it was during the Altavista/Netscape/56k modem era, but it is getting dangerously close, from my personal and anecdotal experience.
I mean, there are two ex-Googlers in this thread claiming firsthand that search quality was considered sacrosanct as of a few years ago, so it seems like it'd have to have been sudden if indeed it has happened at all.
This was roughly when Google's new AI began "interpreting" the "meaning" of the specific jargon and product serial numbers I was inputting, and then decided what I actually needed was song lyrics.
> decided what I actually needed was song lyrics
Or random gossip about media celebs. I'm searching for SCSI cable stuff and getting Kim Kardashian (whoever the #@$%@ that is).
The process might have started before, or indeed after I left. And I wasn't in Search, anyway.
After all, if me, my team and my boss are rewarded when an imperfect measure of search quality goes up and it's going up, why would I fight to switch to a different measure that wasn't rising?
For example, my first week at Google/YouTube, I was in a New Hire meeting with our VP. Someone asked about profitability, and he responded that Larry said we didn't have to worry about revenue yet, since the main goal was user growth/happiness, and revenue could come later. Which I thought was fascinating, considering how big YouTube already was at the time (in 2013)!
Though I think this changed a year later, and I find YouTube ads a poor experience compared to Instagram and TikTok -- which aren't merely "better than the rest", but stuff I actually enjoy watching.
The company should be smart enough to know I only buy certain brands of dog food. It should know I need a gift for my mum (and what she likes). It knows I need new trainers but will only buy the cheapest. Etc.
The opportunity for this has pretty much closed with the era of data privacy coming in, but I think it is both surprising and a shame that this didn't happen in the last decade.
To someone else's point: yes, they are restricted by who bid for the keywords, but honestly, that's the whole magic of Google Ads. You have a "motivated buyer", someone who actually wants to send flowers or stay in Duluth. How do you know that? They searched for "flowers" or "duluth hotels", duh.
Is an advertiser willing to throw money at people who probably want to send flowers, based on their past behavior? Well, maybe, but not on the Search Results page. There are lots of other web venues where they can place creepy ads like that.
I can't square that change with the claimed commitment to search engine quality.
Now repeat the search but with "black people" without quotes.
Try the same for "white couple" without quotes.
Try the same for "black couple" without quotes.
Do you have any insight to this phenomenon?
Don’t disagree with the main theory that search quality is deteriorating. I have to use increasingly contrived queries to get anything but bullshit blog spam, and indexing seems really odd at times.
white people -> images of mostly blacks
black people -> images of mostly blacks
white couple -> mostly white couples with a decent percentage of mixed ethnicity couples
black couple -> black couples
on edit: grammatical correction
You can e.g. do a search along the lines of site:<domain of online clothing store> <hair style/hair colour/…>, and at least for the most common and recognisable kinds of hair styles, it will actually return relatively reasonable image results, even though online shops most certainly don't have the habit of annotating the hair styles worn by their models on their product pages.
Along the same lines, Google is now also in the habit of OCRing any text content it can find in images and indexing that for search, too.
It's true that it'll still also take the text surrounding the image into account, but it's no longer true that image search is only based on that.
/s
I have wondered about this now for several years, because from my point of view Google search has steadily degraded since around 2010. The specific degradation isn't that it returns nothing, or irrelevant pages, but that it returns mostly _recent_ content, and returns very little _older_ content which is still assuredly on the web.
I can see how Google's approach will work for the average search query - after all, the average query is probably about something happening now - but that doesn't equate to _quality_.
Slow and fast is what we experience. We live in a phenomenological world, not a world of millisecond metrics. While it isn't rigorous, for humans, numbers are pointless. We can't experience them. What matters is whether it feels fast.
Search is a complexity beast and simply continued to grow in complexity during the several years I worked directly on it. Folks were proud of the fact no one could even enumerate all the features in the system (attempts were made and abandoned).
The tools to change search safely werent keeping up with the complexity of the system. Understanding impact with evals and experiments became much harder. Gwsdiff and friends grew flakier. Debugging had so many different entry points depending on what you needed to do.
The search stack deserves some really deep cleanups and refactoring, the eval and devtools are similarly in need of a ton of love.
I wish this part got discussed, but every time I've attempted it, the discussion has been shut down by "lol they're experts at search and you're not and you don't know what they know."
I wouldn't put it past Google to be blindsided thinking their own metrics are objective (perhaps they are objective measurements of something but not of what they actually want to measure). If anything, the battle with SEO just shows how hard it is to do something right and avoid getting gamed. If they can't rank SEO spam off the front page, why would I believe their measurements are any better than the rankings?
There's also always a small possibility that metrics are worse than wrong; they could actually say everything is fine, keep serving these long form SEO spam articles that people click and read for far too long before realizing it doesn't have have the answers they seek.
1. Databricks Funding Rounds, Valuation and Investors (https://craft.co/databricks/funding-rounds) - not directly to the point but does include information about all rounds.
2. Databricks Raises $1B at $28B Valuation, Plans Massive - not answering the question at all.
3. *Databricks Closes $33M Series B Funding - FinSMEs* (https://www.finsmes.com/2014/07/databricks-closes-33m-series-b-funding.html) - Direct hit! didn't even have to click into the page.
How could this be proven. Search for the term "example" and see how many results can be accessed. Is it greater than 300.
By limiting the number of results that can be accessed, Google is "hiding" a portion of the web from the user. How do we explain this practice. Perhaps that portion is not deemed useful for user data collection or advertising purposes hence it is excluded. Perhaps Google wishes to prevent users from accessing large chunks of its index. Who knows.
We need a search engine that exposes the full web and does not try to guess what someone is searching for. If the user requests all pages with the term example, then that is what the search engine returns. Google is far too limited.
If one goes to a library and searches an academic database, she is never precluded from viewing all results. Even though she may only access the first few pages, she is always allowed to see all the results. She can view results that were low on the relevance scale to understand why they scored low. She can then subsequenty narrow her search. I have seen this implemented in non-academic databases as well. First a broad search is performed. It returns all results, not just a portion. These results are stored. Every single result is accessible by the user. (Not possible with Google. User only sees 200-300 max.) Then the user can narrow her search and search within those results. The user repeats using different searches until she has what she wants. The user controls the number of database items she wishes to search, based on the initial broad search. With Google, the user has no such access to all results from a broad search, nor the ability to search exclusively within that set. Google is extremely limited. Everything is geared toward user data collection and online advertising. It truly detracts from any search functionality they may have to offer. The user is the product, not the database.
It's baffling.
But google would automatically change to “jenie” and bring up Amazon crap. I tried adding “alladin” and it changed query to bring up alibaba crap.
Google had no idea about the famous alladin and genie story.
Google not only misunderstood me, they thought I was an idiot for asking a non e-commerce query.
The top 5 results above the fold were all ads. It was truly frustrating. I called a friend to ask them that question and get an answer.
If you had just Googled "Aladdin Genie" you would have every single result in the first page be relevant.
I tried the query in Firefox icognito, logged in, and in Safari on iOS using the cell network not my wifi, and got identical results:
1: Youtube video from the "Aladdin" movie (didn't watch, so not sure)
2: Quora question about genie not giving three wishes
3: Movie Quotes - Aladdin
4: Etsy lamp product
5: Stock photo of man hand rubbing lamp
6: Amazon product
7: Genies in popular culture - Wikipedia
8: Iconfinder result
9: Genie - Disney Wiki
This seems rather different than the poster. It's got way more commercial stuff than I'd like (but how does Google know I'm not looking to buy a stuffed lamp toy or something), but the answer to their question would be in the Wikipedia entry, I expect. It might be hard to find the original story, though, since the search term "Aladdin" is probably overwhelmed by the movie.
For me those disappeared years ago :-/
I rarely search programming topics nowadays. However anything related to electronics/mechanics/disassembly - tear downs/etc. is pretty a rather futile experience.
I just tried to find this article on google by searching "Can cats eat blueberries bad search results" (Can Cats eat blueberries is very relevant to the article) and it showed up on the first page of results, albeit at the end.
On Bing I wasn't able to find it
disclaimer: i work at Google, though not on search.
I don't know if all my mistakes over the years are being remembered and so the prediction algorithm is accumulating more errors and performing worse, or if something else is at play (clumsy fingers as I get older?).
Let me search what I want to search the way pagerank trained me to. Keywords over sentences.
But if you want to start pushing in that direction why not just add a "you may find better results when phrased as" section which these models appear to be preferential towards.
From the examples, ngrok for example, search didn't even care to include the keyword in all searches, even if the page is more "popular" the fact you'd (and I have repeatedly had to) quote the term to insist it be included is nuts for a search engine.
Finding obscure bug solutions was already barely possible, but has become impossible when even explicit error messages are "interpreted" to 'why won't <unrelated program> do <unrelated keywords>' on StackOverflow because it noticed that the program uses the same library and has had some searches with the same process name in the error line.
It's seems like Google wants to prioritize the commercialized web, though, by boosting BuzzFeed-like online publications that post ad-laden articles full of referral links in their search results, along with social media. Even in the development space, Google will prioritize w3schools and content farms that constantly churn out how to guides. Blogs and forums seem to get deprioritized in search results these days.
Feels so slimy. The organic result would have sufficed.
Nothing but a glorified 1997 Yahoo Index at this point.
I never click the advert. I know I'm probably in the minority, but I won't give them the infinitesimal revenue.
So when recently my wife and I were searching for a holiday destination online on her laptop (with no blocking as she gets very annoyed if blocking makes even one page unusable - she'd rather drown in ads all day) I was pretty shocked that for almost all search queries, on a 13" laptop with 1280x800 resolution and the browser running full screen at 100% zoom, the >>entire visible Google results page is all ads!<< There is literally no organic search result visible "above the fold"!
So, Google could improve their search engine dramatically and the typical searcher would not even see the results of it...
If we agree on that, could you agree that using a "free" service might be free only in the sense that you don't pay any money but instead they use your attention to sell ad space which in turn pays for their bills?
Me personally, I don't see anything wrong with that.
For instance, I'm perfectly fine with a website earning a commission on the products it reviews. I go out of my way to make sure the website that convinced me gets their commission.
However, a lot of the content is now written specifically for the commission, with zero effort spent on the content itself. That's how you get "best products of 2022" lists on January 1 2022, which contain zero useful research about the products. They add no value.
This is good: https://tomsbiketrip.com/whats-the-best-camping-cookware-for...
This is not good: https://www.thespruceeats.com/best-camping-cookware-5184274
I also see more and more websites that just rephrase other websites' content, and replace the affiliate links with their own. In the end, you get a dozens of websites feeding off the same 2-3 original articles.
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
My personal philosophy is: if Google wants my money they should ask for it. Put their search engine behind a paywall. If they try to coerce me to give them money by selling my personality, needs and wants to advertisers I’ll try to prevent them any way I can.
In general, “term” is like the old +term format which we all used to use back when we thought search was good until google killed the +.
In reality the Web has gotten worse with far more bad spam actors and our search habits have changed partially because google steered us towards more natural language style queries away from the old style queries many people used to use in this community.
In other words, we got used the convenient of free form text without special operators, and when the webspam increased we feel that having to go back and futz with the query using these operators means search has degraded.
I've seen many users complain about Google's quality and wanting to have some control over their sources. That's why we added source preferences as a feature (you have to log in). You can also change the order for a query and similar queries directly within the search results page so that you eg see StackOverflow or Code Completion higher than web results.
But isn't that the goal of google? I mean, it's an advertisement company after all. Despite common assumptions, google is not a search company.
1. Android
2. Chrome
3. A deal with Apple
Even if a much better search engine were to emerge, without an extremely large delta in search quality, they may struggle to compete against Google because Google controls the entry points.
Apple & Microsoft still control the platforms (OSes) upon which Google reaches the majority of consumers, though. Seems likely that Apple will try to displace Google eventually.
I want my search engine to search for the keywords i typed in, not what the search engine thinks I want to search for.
If Google shows me a different person then the one I'm looking for, I am at fault, not the search engine. I should be more specific.
So yes, Google's search quality sucks big time, but not in the way the author thinks. He think Google should know what you are searching for. Which is for me, a really bad factor.
Worse, when one is polyglot and it will just automatically translate search results or nicely return local results (after automatic translation) when I want the original stuff I am looking for.
Then all the shitty url redirects for any kind of document returned by it for analytics.
Sure it is worse for us but it is so much better for them. And it will get even worse since revenue growth has to go from somewhere.
And it will take decades for some other company to displace Google.
I used to work on Search and Search Measurement at YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft, so I thought it would be fun to move beyond anecdotes, grab some data, and do a quantitative analysis.
tl;dr I didn't have historical data, to see how Google Search has trended over time. But compared to Bing, Google still generally outperforms -- although some of its failures are pretty surprising!
If there are particular areas of Google Search that people are interested in digging into, give a shout -- I love running these kinds of search / human eval analyses.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417061 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702
Content that would be have been on an open web forum 10 years ago, are now hidden behind various data silos/walled gardens - whether it's Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or Discord. Each of these walled gardens have different levels of tolerance for the open web, from using it as an SEO channel (e.g. Reddit) to completely opaque to it (e.g Discord).
Some car and photography forums I was on ~10 years ago are all barren now as the old users have moved on and new users prefer to communicate in a Facebook group or something like that.
Interesting self-published blogs and recipes aren't on the web anymore, they're on YouTube channels or on someone's Instagram channel (or whatever its called).
what are some of the decisions that go into this ? is it just cost savings ?
Any new search engine is going to need a niche with lots of users.
I haven't seen a comprehensive list of actual failed queries that new search engines could focus on solving.
To answer this, Google's search results need to be compared as before and after. The OP is talking only about the current search quality and a comparison to Bing.
You’re not getting good search results because the information you want doesn’t make money for Google.
Google first link: https://alternativeto.net/software/clam-antivirus/
DuckDuckGo first link: http://www.clamav.net/
i don't understand why the search result, first link is alternativeto instead of clamav home page
I'm not sure if you you people are trolling or what.
even with my search history, cookies, whatever search "clam antivirus" should give me clam av home page for the first link
Tried this search on Google myself, got clamav.net as the first link and alternativeto.net at #20
If someone were evaluating hammers and handed a bunch of hammers to beginners and judged the hammers by those results, I'd tune out there, too, for the same reason.
A suggestion for improvement would be to have the users RTFM (read the fine manual) first, and then take a reading a week later on their everyday search results. Google is a tool, like an other. Know your tools.
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/134479?hl=en
And: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433
Always put a quote around "exact search" terms that must be grouped together, especially if the term includes something common like the letter b.
Indeed `databricks "series b" valuation` does a lot better: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=databricks%20%22series...
The 4th result is exactly about Databrick's series B valuation. https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/databricks-series-b...
Always search for a multi-word proper name, especially a common name like tim lee, with quotes. Put "tim lee" into quotes, and wikipedia shows up on the first page:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22tim%20lee%22%20vlog...
Is vlogger really a common search term? Personally, I'm okay with Google suggesting blogger because I don't think vlogger is all that common. But maybe? Perhaps a better search term would yield better results?
In fact, "tim lee blogger age" gives better results than with vlogger! Google was correct to suggest that change. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tim%20lee%20blogger%20...
Anyway, this kind of criticism works best for me when the critic gives the subject the most reasonably charitable chance and then talks about the bad. Expecting great results out of bad search terms isn't reasonable, in my opinion.
But I agree with you that the example search strings seems somewhat fabricated or at least especially selected to produce bad results. In my experience the best way to get good results is to use as little relevant search strings as possible. "databricks series b" has the right answer at position 1.
That's true, and I'm not doubling down here when I say:
I tune out when I'm watching a horror movie, and the characters behave in a way that's designed to bring themselves sorrow. As soon as the characters know they're in a horror movie but decide to split up or go down to the basement alone anyway, I stop watching.
I had the same feeling reading that article.
especially in the images and news sections
Every review (and almost every site now) has to have the word 'best' wedged in 1000 times and text descriptions of what would be far better communicated by graphs or diagrams. The vocabulary and grammar has to he reduced to duck speak (which becomes more verbose, less clear, harder to read, and more ambiguous). There need to be a hundred repetitions of whatever key words are popular. And there needs to be 50MB of javascript and anti-responsive nonsense for what would more legible, more attractive, more accessible, and actually usable on a phone if it were plain HTML with no styling.
Then you need further 20MB js libraries to progressively or dynamically load 100kB images.
It's not just highlighting terrible content, it's actively destroying good content.
I understand how keywords can be confused by search engines and "myhikes" is fairly generic as many people might post a blog with the string "my hikes", etc. Now if I search a popular trail that Google likes to serve up regularly (i.e. "myhikes <name of popular-indexed-trail>") it comes up as 1st in the list.
Additionally, what pisses me off even more, is that I've searched for "myhikes <name of trail>" and have been served Google's own map / shitty trail tiles ranked as #1, then my site is ranked #2. Doesn't that last bit feel a bit anti-competitive? It does to me, but maybe I'm biased.
If you see this comment, would you mind sharing if you were making a request from a US-based IP, VPN, or outside the US? Just curious - it'll help me understand things a bit better.
Try again if you wish :)