Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

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Google's attempt to introduce zero-click results has been nothing short of catastrophic. The sheer volume of bullshit they are spreading rivals anything that ChatGPT could ever hope to generate.

A couple of weeks ago, I was debating with someone about what "LMR" stood for in the context of cable specifications, such as LMR-240, LMR-400 and so on. I thought it meant "Land Mobile Radio" while the other person disagreed that it stood for anything. A Google search on LMR coax cable acronym returned a helpful info blurb stating that LMR stood for "Last Minute Resistance" as a means of fending off sexual assault.

Needless to say there was no way to tell exactly what site Google had copied that definition from, and no useful way to provide feedback to them. Sometimes there's a "Feedback" link, this time there wasn't. Sometimes the feedback link is present but only offers the option of reporting illegal activity. That option wasn't present either.

For whatever reason, Google clearly does not give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about search quality anymore. With the right leadership, Bing could own that entire line of business, in a manner reminiscent of IE's original dominance over Netscape. I'm not holding my breath, but at this point I'm cheering for anyone who can offer Google some competition.

We care quite a bit about search quality. We've made a bunch of changes over the past year to address some concerns that have been raised our Perspective feature which is part of that recent rolled out on mobile https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1673382545730457605 and we have further ranking changes coming soon, as we described here https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-perspectiv...

I tried the example you cited. The "blurb" is called a snippet; the snippet comes from the web page itself. One of the pages had that actual text, which is why it appeared. Why it had it on a page that's primarily about coaxial cable isn't clear, but we'll look into how to improve.

As for sending feedback, each link in the results has a little three dot icon next to it that brings up our "About This Results" panel, and you can send feedback that way.

Also, to belatedly introduce myself, I'm the public liaison for search at Google. It's a position we have within the actual search engineering team to help us gather feedback to improve search quality. Feel free for you or anyone comfortable sharing examples of unhelpful results to flag me about it:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison https://mastodon.social/@searchliaison

> As for sending feedback, each link in the results has a little three dot icon next to it that brings up our "About This Results" panel, and you can send feedback that way.

Surely you don't expect us to believe this ever gets read, much less acted upon? Don't insult the intelligence of your audience.

I asked ChatGPT 4.0 what LMR meant as applied to coaxial cable. It gave me an excellent response, including that LMR is a trademark of Times Microwave Systems.

I rarely use search engines anymore. I'll bet the same is true for many people.

I tend to ask ChatGPT first these days, but then follow up with a DDG search because I don't fully trust ChatGPT.

Phind.com uses the same engine but provides sources.

So does Bing, but somehow giving it network access made it worse than ChatGPT at everything.

Bard also gives an excellent response.

In fact when I used regular Google, the results are good enough for me to deduce that on my own.

So I consider GP's search skills inadequate. I mean it's not exactly wrong to desire a tool that handholds you and feeds you the answer; but if you are willing to do a little bit of deduction Google is fine.

Regular Google itself tells you that. At least for me, when I tried this search right now, the first snippet says "These letters indicate the brand. LMR is a trademark of Times Microwave, whereas RFC is made by Shireen." It's the second snippet that says the last minute resistance thing, and it appears to be from someone's personal blog that blocks IPs from the United States, so without logging into a VPN, I can't open the site to figure out why it thinks this.

I would assume the best actual source is the USPTO trademark registration database, which has this entry: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4805:pw...

It appears to indeed mean nothing, but of course, it took me a whole two minutes or so to find an actually authoritative source. Everyone knows no real user will ever do that and just wants a search engine or chatbot to dictate reality to them.

I don't trust the zero-click results at all any more. I recently had to fill out a form for the DMV that required my county code. To find out, I of course googled it, and wrote down the knowledge box result. This turned out to be the wrong number, and thanks to Google, this happens so frequently the clerk knew where I got it, and knew to check it and fix it.

People are building workarounds in real life due to how bad Google's results have gotten.

Similar experience for me. One that I do a fair amount is searching for specs on various car makes & models. The zero click results are typically quite bad. To be fair, a lot of it just ends up being bad source data, but their primary source for automotive specifications is the same shitty site.

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