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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Google is attempting to define and thus strongly normalise what is human behaviour is definitely a big red flag to me.

...But this is their core search competency and exactly what makes their search so powerful. Page rank is basically distributed wisdom of crowds, aka algorithm of how people behave (build their websites) based on a search term/imbedded link.

This seems like a perfect extension of this. Remember the vision of google: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Human behavior falls squarely into a large segment of the "world's information."

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>Remember the vision of google: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

I'm sure that's why they got rid of the ability to search what people are saying on forum and blogs. Google still indexes everything, they just got rid of the filter.

Their results now give preference to SEO'd pages & adverts.

The old discussion filter returns an illegal request error https://www.google.com/?tbm=dsc

Their search is only "powerful" for finding the more mundane and widely disseminated information; I've noticed that it's increasingly difficult to find very specific information with it as it basically misunderstands the query and returns completely useless results. Maybe that's why I look like a bot, as I try to tell it exactly what I want...

Well this is exactly the point. Obscure information has a very low social/viral index and as a result a lot of people don't interact with it so it is hard to find with Google - which is why I don't think it is a particularly robust search engine on it's own in the grand scale of knowledge development.

Google seems robust because humans generally think pretty similarly, and generally look for the things that the people around them are talking about or also looking for. That breaks down considerably though across cultures and time.

When trying to use Google to find something obscure, I'm not so much bothered by the difficulty of doing so as I am by the implication that "real humans" don't use complex search queries. They used to teach in computer literacy courses how to use search engines, complete with complex multi-term boolean queries, to find exactly what you're looking for. Now try the same with Google and you're a bot? WTF? They're basically saying "humans are too stupid to do that - humans are supposed to be stupid."

Or that a lot of their target demographic has never been taught that, and so they've optimised their delivery to be accessible to the majority?

Well to be fair most of their users probably are too "stupid" (aka were never taught) to do that.

Their search IS powerful, even for obscure things. But when you disable JS and cookies, as you have done, you are taking a huge amount of that power away from the system. Of course you are going to get bad results for anything which is specific to you -- you have disabled their ability to make a better judgement!

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