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> At one point, Google ran a test that pitted its search engineers against RankBrain. Both were asked to look at various web pages and predict which would rank

by rifung 11y ago

> At one point, Google ran a test that pitted its search engineers against RankBrain. Both were asked to look at various web pages and predict which would rank highest on a Google search results page. RankBrain was right 80 percent of the time. The engineers were right 70 percent of the time. I don't really understand the point of this metric. Why are they predicting what ranks highest on Google search? Wouldn't a better metric be who predicts the correct place a user was looking for? Is the thinking that if they are using machine learning, than whatever the user is looking for should have bubbled up to the top?

speeder 11y ago
I am in the recent days having the impression that Google whatever it is doing is focused more and more in presenting to the user google biggest clients, and hoping that it will be useful. Because I am having more and more trouble finding what I want, people used to consider me a master of google fu, finding whatever random stuff they wanted, now I am struggling, specially after google changed the + and "" meaning (+ went from "mandatory" to mean "google plus search" and " went to mean "literal string" to mean "a sort of mandatory thing") If I need to find some obscure term, I know now that google won't find it, despite finding that same term in the past, finding pages with a certain information on it never happen anymore, even using the "" thing. For example I own a ASUS N46VM laptop with nVidia Optimus... this laptop is terrible, and I am always having to look online how to make it behave properly, before the "+" change, I could type +N46VM and be guaranteed I only would get relevant ifnormation... recently I was desperately searching for some stuff, and found out no matter what I input on google, it returned completely bogus results, where the string N46VM was nowhere in the page, not even in the "time" dimension (ie: if I load the page on archive.org for example and scan every version of it, N46VM never had been on it, google just heuristically decided the page was relevant and gave it to me wrongly). EDIT: I am having some success with DuckDuckGo although their research system is clearly cruder than google, having much less heuristics and whatnot, frequently I find the stuff I want easier on DuckDuckGo anyway, after some pages of browsing results... while on google I browse 40 pages and all of it is completely irrelevant and unrelated (while on DuckDuckGo it shows me 40 pages with the term I want, but in the wrong context).
- bobajeff 11y ago
  I feel the same way I used to be able to find very hard to find things on Google. Now it's hard to find relativity common things using Google. I don't know if it's because they've deprecated some search operators or the index is nurfed by some invisible changes or I'm just remembering things better than they were.
  - colordrops 11y ago
    It is definitely worse. My intuition is that it's driven both by a conscious decision to care more about the masses rather than power users, and to drive users to partner/customer sites. There is a conflict of interest here - it's in Google's interest to push users to sites that drive the most revenue for google, whether through advertising or otherwise.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- ashark 11y ago
  Same experience. Changing the special characters' meanings ruined my google-fu, and starting around ~'08-'09 they seemed to give up fighting linkfarm sites and just stopped ever ranking small sites highly unless you search for something so specific that only one small site could possibly match. It's made the web feel way, way smaller than it used to, and probably has made it smaller by starving small-but-relevant sites of traffic. Meanwhile any content site (news sites and such) that appears on the first page of results is now virtually indistinguishable from the horrible old link farms, in terms of screen real estate devoted to scummy ads. The Old Web had popups and such, but even so the modern web feels way dirtier, somehow.
  - zo1 11y ago
    >"It's made the web feel way, way smaller than it used to, and probably has made it smaller by starving small-but-relevant sites of traffic. " That's the beauty of it (For Google, anyways). Now those small, traffic-starved sites are dependant on getting traffic via paid adwords. Either that, or they have to rely on "organic" social-media cruft in order to get anywhere meaningful.
michaelmcmillan 11y ago
If they are interested ranking results based on the profile they have on you (search history, interests, demographic++), trying to predict the ranks is understandable.
tim333 11y ago
>I don't really understand the point of this metric I'm guessing it could be a test of whether the neural net could replace the existing algorithm and give similar results.

by rifung 11y ago

speeder 11y ago

I am in the recent days having the impression that Google whatever it is doing is focused more and more in presenting to the user google biggest clients, and hoping that it will be useful. Because I am having more and more trouble finding what I want, people used to consider me a master of google fu, finding whatever random stuff they wanted, now I am struggling, specially after google changed the + and "" meaning (+ went from "mandatory" to mean "google plus search" and " went to mean "literal string" to mean "a sort of mandatory thing") If I need to find some obscure term, I know now that google won't find it, despite finding that same term in the past, finding pages with a certain information on it never happen anymore, even using the "" thing. For example I own a ASUS N46VM laptop with nVidia Optimus... this laptop is terrible, and I am always having to look online how to make it behave properly, before the "+" change, I could type +N46VM and be guaranteed I only would get relevant ifnormation... recently I was desperately searching for some stuff, and found out no matter what I input on google, it returned completely bogus results, where the string N46VM was nowhere in the page, not even in the "time" dimension (ie: if I load the page on archive.org for example and scan every version of it, N46VM never had been on it, google just heuristically decided the page was relevant and gave it to me wrongly). EDIT: I am having some success with DuckDuckGo although their research system is clearly cruder than google, having much less heuristics and whatnot, frequently I find the stuff I want easier on DuckDuckGo anyway, after some pages of browsing results... while on google I browse 40 pages and all of it is completely irrelevant and unrelated (while on DuckDuckGo it shows me 40 pages with the term I want, but in the wrong context).

bobajeff 11y ago
I feel the same way I used to be able to find very hard to find things on Google. Now it's hard to find relativity common things using Google. I don't know if it's because they've deprecated some search operators or the index is nurfed by some invisible changes or I'm just remembering things better than they were.
- colordrops 11y ago
  It is definitely worse. My intuition is that it's driven both by a conscious decision to care more about the masses rather than power users, and to drive users to partner/customer sites. There is a conflict of interest here - it's in Google's interest to push users to sites that drive the most revenue for google, whether through advertising or otherwise.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
ashark 11y ago
Same experience. Changing the special characters' meanings ruined my google-fu, and starting around ~'08-'09 they seemed to give up fighting linkfarm sites and just stopped ever ranking small sites highly unless you search for something so specific that only one small site could possibly match. It's made the web feel way, way smaller than it used to, and probably has made it smaller by starving small-but-relevant sites of traffic. Meanwhile any content site (news sites and such) that appears on the first page of results is now virtually indistinguishable from the horrible old link farms, in terms of screen real estate devoted to scummy ads. The Old Web had popups and such, but even so the modern web feels way dirtier, somehow.
- zo1 11y ago
  >"It's made the web feel way, way smaller than it used to, and probably has made it smaller by starving small-but-relevant sites of traffic. " That's the beauty of it (For Google, anyways). Now those small, traffic-starved sites are dependant on getting traffic via paid adwords. Either that, or they have to rely on "organic" social-media cruft in order to get anywhere meaningful.

michaelmcmillan 11y ago

If they are interested ranking results based on the profile they have on you (search history, interests, demographic++), trying to predict the ranks is understandable.

tim333 11y ago

>I don't really understand the point of this metric I'm guessing it could be a test of whether the neural net could replace the existing algorithm and give similar results.