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>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each recei

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results. If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport; if a British person makes the same search, the odds are reversed. Google's "broken" email service came to dominate the market because it offered a vastly better user experience than the realistic alternatives at the time - Hotmail, AOL or some crappy POP3 server with no real spam filtering. The things that people hate about Gmail are all rational, defensible design decisions that serve the majority of users well. The internet is a big place. Most statistics suggest that there are about 3.5bn people regularly using the internet. If you're optimising your service for the median user, there will be millions of outliers who hate your service with every fibre of their being. If you hate something, it might be irredeemably awful, or it might just not be for you. It's all too rare that people entertain the latter possibility.

qualitytime 9y ago
While I sympathise with your vote-for-mediocrity, it's clear you don't understand Google et al. with their army of A* engineers and $uit$. You sir are the product. By constantly telling you are the median, you shall become the median. More Median People === More Profit$ Great article. "You Will Not Understand This." how appropiate.
- hokus 9y ago
  I'm shaking my head as to say yes.
KozmoNau7 9y ago
I can't find any sources for why Gmail has supposedly "broken" e-mail for "everyone in the world". Do you know what he's referring to?
- aethr 9y ago
  If Google's spam filters block an IP or subnet that happens to be where you host your self-hosted mail server, it will be almost impossible for your mail server reputation to ever recover. Your emails to gmail users (a vast percentage of all email users in many places) will never be delivered and maintaining your own mail server will become a nightmare. Google has very good spam filtering, but their lack of human controls or support make it impossible for the little guy to get resolution in many cases where a spam score may be undeserved.
  - mato 9y ago
    I've been hosting my own mail server since 1997, at its current colo since 2007 or so. I've never had any issues with delivering email to gmail users. So, I'm curious, am I just extremely lucky to have competent sysadmins as neighbours on the colo subnet, or is my IP address' reputation so good that it never gets affected by collateral damage?
    - leephillips 9y ago
      Me too, for almost as long. Never a problem with gmail, although I do suppose that's partly luck. If my IP block ever got blacklisted, I would move the mail server to another IP - I'm sure that would be easier than trying to reason with Google. I do get a bounce from Hotmail every couple of years, but my attitude has become "your fault for using Hotmail".
nludd 9y ago
>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, the odds are reversed. Google "cricket sport". "We will track your every query, movement, voice command, and whatever other behavioural data we can get our hands on, put it in a gargantuan centralized database, store it for as long as we can (practically forever) and have trillion-dollar artificial intelligence munch on it so you can avoid using accurate search queries" is a ridiculous value proposition.
- sweezyjeezy 9y ago
  For you. Maybe not for the median user though.
  - nludd 9y ago
    Maybe we, as technologists that are well positioned to think about the effects our technologies have on their users, should consider whether those effects are of net benefit to them or not. The short-term consequence of using cocaine is euphoria, but we do not encourage cocaine use because for most users the long-term negative consequences vastly outweigh the short term benefits. Likewise, we may want to consider what the long-term consequences of relieving our users of certain cognitive labors are. If we will guess for them what information they want, if we tell them what to read, if we tell them what news is fake, if we decide for them what they might like, are we empowering them to make their own choices, or are we increasingly (whether intentionally or unintentionally) directing their lives?
- netsharc 9y ago
  Your queries would work, but Google wants to be like the secretary in the office. If you ask your secretary "I want some pizza", he would not say "Well this pizza place is the most popular in the world, it's located in Rome.", he would tell you options close to your area.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
another-dave 9y ago
Google started out with "objective" results, but now shows "subjective" results and I think the argument here is how much that is highlighted to the user. People parse, trust and communicate with supposedly objective sources differently from supposedly subjective ones (e.g. the BBC v Breitbart) and dislike when the latter is presented like the former. (You can change location on the bottom of the desktop page, and you may be able to unset some other targetting settings, but these are buried somewhere and not clear to the average user. Changes in T&C's also seems like a constantly moving target)
myfonj 9y ago
> Of course Google serves different results to different users (…) And still, you can peek at the "not personalized" and "not local" results with `Tools > Verbatim` (as opposed to default `All results`) option: https://www.google.com/search?q=takeaway+pizza&source=lnt&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=takeaway+pizza&source=lnt&tb...
hzay 9y ago
Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation of it. An unpersonalized search engine is much better than this thing that simply hides any interesting content from you in favor of showing you something related to your previous search or to whatever nonsense your neighbors look up. Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration.
- Ice_cream_suit 9y ago
  Using Baidu and Yandex for searches is instructive.
- oblio 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure you're part of the millions the parent poster was talking about, Google doesn't really "care" that much about your use case.
- amelius 9y ago
  > It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Personalized sales strategies can also lead to the reverse: [1] [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-strategy-online-retailers-michelle-ewoldt https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-st...
- piker 9y ago
  > Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.
abrezas 9y ago
> Yes, I am aware that this is likewise no accident.
nurettin 9y ago
You indeed did not understand this. (Error lies partly in author's lack of specifics) The problem is; we taught Google how to look for whatever information we seek by seeking it. We taught it that we are too stupid to include location information in our searches. We taught it what is spam and what is not. That's our "not spam" choices accumulating as a service over time. That's our own translation suggestions. We gave them away freely. And now that we would like to back off and reclaim our knowledge and our mutual effort to make Google the giant it is, we can't. We are already anonymized and productized. We can't reclaim the spam filter we helped create and run it on a private server. We can't take back the combined translation efforts. Our own places and exploration data is Google's forever, with no way for us to learn from it.
- datenwolf 9y ago
  All more the reason, to reimplement these things, this time with strict copyleft licenses applied and rebuild the datasets.
- rootlocus 9y ago
  Not to mention all the captchas we solved to train their OCR and self driving cars. https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/
akerro 9y ago
>Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results yea, yea yea... I moved to DDG when Google stopped returning me relevant results. Not because I'm afraid of Google knowing too much, I mostly search for code/configuration problems. DDG proved to me that it has more relevant and more helpful information than Google for problems I search for. Plenty of times Google returns me THE SAME results for different, but similar query, I change 3 from 6 words (to synonyms), and I get the same very results, that are irrelevant to my problem and query. I see them because they have best SEO and meta keywords and 5 stars under the title, or because they are similar to what I searched for 15minutes ago. I found a bug in Android UI. I spent almost a day looking for a solution or tips how to do that thing. Google was literally useless, it could just show me links from SO that people had the same problem, google-based mailing lists, but no fix. I searched for the same thing in DDG - BANG - first result was from some crappy blog that author couldn't spell words properly, it was looking like websites from early 00's. I had a source code solution for my problem. Google shows me what Google wants me to see, well optimized websites, nice looking, fast loading on mobile, sites that cooperate with google big data plan, sites that use GA, Google Ads and AMP. I don't want magic personalized results based on suggestion of a vibrator I was searching for 2 days ago, I want most relevant results to what I search for now.
- moultano 9y ago
  Do you happen to remember the query so I can debug? (Check your search history if you have it turned on.)
  - akerro 9y ago
    No, sorry I was something with icon styling on TabActivity, I was adding some shadows and animations. It was over 1.5year ago.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  It used to be that when I don't find something with DDG, I would go into Google and find it. But currently my impression is that any remotely useful page that Google would show is also there in DDG results, the "!g" switch just adds a bunch of spam and unrelated stuff.
crdoconnor 9y ago
>The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results. Their job is to make money. When the user is searching with an intent to buy it doesn't pay to return the most relevant results, it pays to return the most profitable results. It only pays to return relevant results (because it builds the brand), when it is clear that there is no intent to buy.
ordu 9y ago
The problem is I don't want to find relevant results. If results I looking for are relevant, than I need not a great search engine to find them. If I know what I want to find it would be pretty simple to find them with grep over internet. If I want to find local takeaway pizza, than all I need is to find where am I, and then to add my location to a request. Probably I wish to use not the text prompt search engine, but maps.google.com or some other tool dedicated to searching for local things. But if I'm trying to find basic information on topic not common for me, than I would have troubles with personalized search. And the worst case happens when I don't realize than I'm looking for information that is not common for me: when I know this fact I can do something with search query to make it uncommon and to hope that it will break personalization, but if I don't know I would do nothing special, and I will risk to miss a whole segment of Internet which contains heaps of information relevant to my needs. It is the same story as with FB and political views of users but at wider scale. It is really hard to find something new for me. I use DDG for several years for this single reason. I have no strong emotions to ads, because I use NoScript and uBlock: ads are not a problem. But narrow results space is a problem.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  What I would prefer is context sensitive filtering options to let you refine your search after you have performed it. For example, if I search for "ruby", there will be results related to the programming language, the gemstone and for people named Ruby, and Google is guessing which one I want based on what it knows about me, so why not give me visibility into which one it is picking and let me switch to the others?
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    > and Google is guessing which one I want based on what it knows about me That's a bit of an empty statement. I assume it also looks at the other terms, or your previous searches (from your IP or Google Account). Because there might be a time where you are searching for a person Ruby (the capital letter gives it away) or a gem called ruby.
mathattack 9y ago
Exactly - this is a feature that is a sign of better search quality. Perhaps Google could allow a keyword like +Standard or +LowQuality to take out any personalization based on identity, location, language, etc.
OzzyB 9y ago
> takeaway pizza I searched for "takeaway pizza" but didn't get a local match for pizza delivery, so I changed my search query by adding more keyword qualifiers > takeaway pizza in san jose Works! > cricket I actually _wanted_ to search for the sport so I added additional keyword qualifiers to bypass all the Cricket brand results > cricket sport Works! It's like how I know I must use "Golang" or even "Golang Stackoverflow" to find relevant results to my query -- I didn't need all the "personalization help" that Google likes to offer -- I'm actually capable of crafting decent search terms.
chakalakasp 9y ago
Yep. The way I remember it is Google saved email. Email was great until there was money in gaming it, and it went to hell shortly thereafter. Gmail was the first consumer facing service I ever found that just magically made SPAM go away while retaining all the emails you wanted to see. Everything before that was just a blackholing with a list maintained by a hodgepodge of RBL maintainers hanging out on news.admin.net-abuse.email and shaking your impotent fists at that 20 or so daily SPAMS that snuck through anyway. You literally threw away email addresses because they were on too many SPAM lists and became impossible to use any more. Google has made some missteps, but they've arguably done more to change the world and society than almost any other company in the last 50 years. They made the internet accessible to the masses.
MarinReiter 9y ago
I dunno buddy, I still seem to search "workshop 3d printer" in and get top results from countries I dont live in. Not to mention, I often search for full phrases that have two keywords way separated from another, but because google is used to seeing them together, it will still display pretty irrelevant results. Last week I had a copyright discussion, so I looked up "Do I own the copyrights to my art?. First link was "creator or buyer: who owns the art?", second link was "does deviantart own my art?", the third link was a website called "desiring god" about copyright and the scripture...Sure, you can say the first link is relevant, but I never mentioned "buying" in my query, and the fifth link is the one that truly answers my question. It says that artists in the US have automatic copyrights to their work as soon as it is completed. Same things have happened where I search up a more complex query, and google throws me buzzfeed links and other stuff that have nothing to do with it, in its attempt of simplifying what I'm looking for.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
beefield 9y ago
>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google There should be some "wiki/stackoverflow" type search engine, where would be no other algorithm but users voting the goodness or badness of a link for a given search term. (and of course, some housekeeping) Maybe also a way to indicate that hey, you are using an ambiguous search term. Do you maybe mean washington the state, dc or president?

qualitytime 9y ago

While I sympathise with your vote-for-mediocrity, it's clear you don't understand Google et al. with their army of A* engineers and $uit$. You sir are the product. By constantly telling you are the median, you shall become the median. More Median People === More Profit$ Great article. "You Will Not Understand This." how appropiate.

hokus 9y ago
I'm shaking my head as to say yes.

KozmoNau7 9y ago

I can't find any sources for why Gmail has supposedly "broken" e-mail for "everyone in the world". Do you know what he's referring to?

aethr 9y ago
If Google's spam filters block an IP or subnet that happens to be where you host your self-hosted mail server, it will be almost impossible for your mail server reputation to ever recover. Your emails to gmail users (a vast percentage of all email users in many places) will never be delivered and maintaining your own mail server will become a nightmare. Google has very good spam filtering, but their lack of human controls or support make it impossible for the little guy to get resolution in many cases where a spam score may be undeserved.
- mato 9y ago
  I've been hosting my own mail server since 1997, at its current colo since 2007 or so. I've never had any issues with delivering email to gmail users. So, I'm curious, am I just extremely lucky to have competent sysadmins as neighbours on the colo subnet, or is my IP address' reputation so good that it never gets affected by collateral damage?
  - leephillips 9y ago
    Me too, for almost as long. Never a problem with gmail, although I do suppose that's partly luck. If my IP block ever got blacklisted, I would move the mail server to another IP - I'm sure that would be easier than trying to reason with Google. I do get a bounce from Hotmail every couple of years, but my attitude has become "your fault for using Hotmail".

nludd 9y ago

>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, the odds are reversed. Google "cricket sport". "We will track your every query, movement, voice command, and whatever other behavioural data we can get our hands on, put it in a gargantuan centralized database, store it for as long as we can (practically forever) and have trillion-dollar artificial intelligence munch on it so you can avoid using accurate search queries" is a ridiculous value proposition.

sweezyjeezy 9y ago
For you. Maybe not for the median user though.
- nludd 9y ago
  Maybe we, as technologists that are well positioned to think about the effects our technologies have on their users, should consider whether those effects are of net benefit to them or not. The short-term consequence of using cocaine is euphoria, but we do not encourage cocaine use because for most users the long-term negative consequences vastly outweigh the short term benefits. Likewise, we may want to consider what the long-term consequences of relieving our users of certain cognitive labors are. If we will guess for them what information they want, if we tell them what to read, if we tell them what news is fake, if we decide for them what they might like, are we empowering them to make their own choices, or are we increasingly (whether intentionally or unintentionally) directing their lives?
netsharc 9y ago
Your queries would work, but Google wants to be like the secretary in the office. If you ask your secretary "I want some pizza", he would not say "Well this pizza place is the most popular in the world, it's located in Rome.", he would tell you options close to your area.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

another-dave 9y ago

Google started out with "objective" results, but now shows "subjective" results and I think the argument here is how much that is highlighted to the user. People parse, trust and communicate with supposedly objective sources differently from supposedly subjective ones (e.g. the BBC v Breitbart) and dislike when the latter is presented like the former. (You can change location on the bottom of the desktop page, and you may be able to unset some other targetting settings, but these are buried somewhere and not clear to the average user. Changes in T&C's also seems like a constantly moving target)

myfonj 9y ago

> Of course Google serves different results to different users (…) And still, you can peek at the "not personalized" and "not local" results with `Tools > Verbatim` (as opposed to default `All results`) option: https://www.google.com/search?q=takeaway+pizza&source=lnt&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=takeaway+pizza&source=lnt&tb...

hzay 9y ago

Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation of it. An unpersonalized search engine is much better than this thing that simply hides any interesting content from you in favor of showing you something related to your previous search or to whatever nonsense your neighbors look up. Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Search is not always about looking up something already connected to you. It used to be about unfettered exploration.

Ice_cream_suit 9y ago
Using Baidu and Yandex for searches is instructive.
oblio 9y ago
I'm pretty sure you're part of the millions the parent poster was talking about, Google doesn't really "care" that much about your use case.
amelius 9y ago
> It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Personalized sales strategies can also lead to the reverse: [1] [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-strategy-online-retailers-michelle-ewoldt https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/personalized-pricing-smart-st...
piker 9y ago
> Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.

abrezas 9y ago

> Yes, I am aware that this is likewise no accident.

nurettin 9y ago

You indeed did not understand this. (Error lies partly in author's lack of specifics) The problem is; we taught Google how to look for whatever information we seek by seeking it. We taught it that we are too stupid to include location information in our searches. We taught it what is spam and what is not. That's our "not spam" choices accumulating as a service over time. That's our own translation suggestions. We gave them away freely. And now that we would like to back off and reclaim our knowledge and our mutual effort to make Google the giant it is, we can't. We are already anonymized and productized. We can't reclaim the spam filter we helped create and run it on a private server. We can't take back the combined translation efforts. Our own places and exploration data is Google's forever, with no way for us to learn from it.

datenwolf 9y ago
All more the reason, to reimplement these things, this time with strict copyleft licenses applied and rebuild the datasets.
rootlocus 9y ago
Not to mention all the captchas we solved to train their OCR and self driving cars. https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/

akerro 9y ago

>Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results yea, yea yea... I moved to DDG when Google stopped returning me relevant results. Not because I'm afraid of Google knowing too much, I mostly search for code/configuration problems. DDG proved to me that it has more relevant and more helpful information than Google for problems I search for. Plenty of times Google returns me THE SAME results for different, but similar query, I change 3 from 6 words (to synonyms), and I get the same very results, that are irrelevant to my problem and query. I see them because they have best SEO and meta keywords and 5 stars under the title, or because they are similar to what I searched for 15minutes ago. I found a bug in Android UI. I spent almost a day looking for a solution or tips how to do that thing. Google was literally useless, it could just show me links from SO that people had the same problem, google-based mailing lists, but no fix. I searched for the same thing in DDG - BANG - first result was from some crappy blog that author couldn't spell words properly, it was looking like websites from early 00's. I had a source code solution for my problem. Google shows me what Google wants me to see, well optimized websites, nice looking, fast loading on mobile, sites that cooperate with google big data plan, sites that use GA, Google Ads and AMP. I don't want magic personalized results based on suggestion of a vibrator I was searching for 2 days ago, I want most relevant results to what I search for now.

moultano 9y ago
Do you happen to remember the query so I can debug? (Check your search history if you have it turned on.)
- akerro 9y ago
  No, sorry I was something with icon styling on TabActivity, I was adding some shadows and animations. It was over 1.5year ago.
marcosdumay 9y ago
It used to be that when I don't find something with DDG, I would go into Google and find it. But currently my impression is that any remotely useful page that Google would show is also there in DDG results, the "!g" switch just adds a bunch of spam and unrelated stuff.

crdoconnor 9y ago

>The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results. Their job is to make money. When the user is searching with an intent to buy it doesn't pay to return the most relevant results, it pays to return the most profitable results. It only pays to return relevant results (because it builds the brand), when it is clear that there is no intent to buy.

ordu 9y ago

The problem is I don't want to find relevant results. If results I looking for are relevant, than I need not a great search engine to find them. If I know what I want to find it would be pretty simple to find them with grep over internet. If I want to find local takeaway pizza, than all I need is to find where am I, and then to add my location to a request. Probably I wish to use not the text prompt search engine, but maps.google.com or some other tool dedicated to searching for local things. But if I'm trying to find basic information on topic not common for me, than I would have troubles with personalized search. And the worst case happens when I don't realize than I'm looking for information that is not common for me: when I know this fact I can do something with search query to make it uncommon and to hope that it will break personalization, but if I don't know I would do nothing special, and I will risk to miss a whole segment of Internet which contains heaps of information relevant to my needs. It is the same story as with FB and political views of users but at wider scale. It is really hard to find something new for me. I use DDG for several years for this single reason. I have no strong emotions to ads, because I use NoScript and uBlock: ads are not a problem. But narrow results space is a problem.

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
What I would prefer is context sensitive filtering options to let you refine your search after you have performed it. For example, if I search for "ruby", there will be results related to the programming language, the gemstone and for people named Ruby, and Google is guessing which one I want based on what it knows about me, so why not give me visibility into which one it is picking and let me switch to the others?
- Fnoord 9y ago
  > and Google is guessing which one I want based on what it knows about me That's a bit of an empty statement. I assume it also looks at the other terms, or your previous searches (from your IP or Google Account). Because there might be a time where you are searching for a person Ruby (the capital letter gives it away) or a gem called ruby.

mathattack 9y ago

Exactly - this is a feature that is a sign of better search quality. Perhaps Google could allow a keyword like +Standard or +LowQuality to take out any personalization based on identity, location, language, etc.

OzzyB 9y ago

> takeaway pizza I searched for "takeaway pizza" but didn't get a local match for pizza delivery, so I changed my search query by adding more keyword qualifiers > takeaway pizza in san jose Works! > cricket I actually _wanted_ to search for the sport so I added additional keyword qualifiers to bypass all the Cricket brand results > cricket sport Works! It's like how I know I must use "Golang" or even "Golang Stackoverflow" to find relevant results to my query -- I didn't need all the "personalization help" that Google likes to offer -- I'm actually capable of crafting decent search terms.

chakalakasp 9y ago

Yep. The way I remember it is Google saved email. Email was great until there was money in gaming it, and it went to hell shortly thereafter. Gmail was the first consumer facing service I ever found that just magically made SPAM go away while retaining all the emails you wanted to see. Everything before that was just a blackholing with a list maintained by a hodgepodge of RBL maintainers hanging out on news.admin.net-abuse.email and shaking your impotent fists at that 20 or so daily SPAMS that snuck through anyway. You literally threw away email addresses because they were on too many SPAM lists and became impossible to use any more. Google has made some missteps, but they've arguably done more to change the world and society than almost any other company in the last 50 years. They made the internet accessible to the masses.

MarinReiter 9y ago

I dunno buddy, I still seem to search "workshop 3d printer" in and get top results from countries I dont live in. Not to mention, I often search for full phrases that have two keywords way separated from another, but because google is used to seeing them together, it will still display pretty irrelevant results. Last week I had a copyright discussion, so I looked up "Do I own the copyrights to my art?. First link was "creator or buyer: who owns the art?", second link was "does deviantart own my art?", the third link was a website called "desiring god" about copyright and the scripture...Sure, you can say the first link is relevant, but I never mentioned "buying" in my query, and the fifth link is the one that truly answers my question. It says that artists in the US have automatic copyrights to their work as soon as it is completed. Same things have happened where I search up a more complex query, and google throws me buzzfeed links and other stuff that have nothing to do with it, in its attempt of simplifying what I'm looking for.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

beefield 9y ago

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google There should be some "wiki/stackoverflow" type search engine, where would be no other algorithm but users voting the goodness or badness of a link for a given search term. (and of course, some housekeeping) Maybe also a way to indicate that hey, you are using an ambiguous search term. Do you maybe mean washington the state, dc or president?