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I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking this way. I wish I could use the Google of 10 years ago. Pre-personalization, pre-deep-learning RankBrain, just the reliable

by dannyw 9y ago

I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking this way. I wish I could use the Google of 10 years ago. Pre-personalization, pre-deep-learning RankBrain, just the reliable and consistent search engine where complex queries will return the result I want, if it is there. Today, if I'm searching for something unpopular or specific, I usually get frustrated. You would expect the opposite to happen as the size of the web should increase over time.

rectang 9y ago
I wish I could go back to the Google of 1999. PageRank was magic before people learned to game it. The results were incredibly good.
- userbinator 9y ago
  PageRank was magic before people learned to game it Even then, before Google started going after them by filtering results, the SEO spam sites were pretty easily recognisable and ignorable as you scrolled through the results. Now, they still show up in droves (try searching for service manual PDFs and you'll instantly see what I mean) but you hit the end of the viewable results far too soon to find the useful stuff buried in later pages. In other words, Google's ranking now seems to be "good SEO'd sites > spammy SEO'd sites > everything else", and cuts off results before getting to that third category, when that third category should ideally switch places with the second and maybe even the first.
userbinator 9y ago
RankBrain Amusingly enough one of the definitions of "rank" is, according to Wiktionary, "having a very strong and bad taste or odor"... as in the smell of a decaying brain. How fitting. I almost wonder if it's deliberate. If they called it BrainRank (like PageRank), the adjectival meaning seems to be emphasised less.
- duggan 9y ago
  The emphasis would be incorrect if the term were reversed - RankBrain is a Brain for Ranking like PageRank is a Rank for Pages. No doubt there is someone in Google, however, who has a project for ranking AIs called BrainRank for their own amusement. Anyway, your observation is also an amusing interpretation.
  - andyjpb 9y ago
    PageRank is called after its inventor Larry Page. It's just another case of Nominitive Determinism!
    - duggan 9y ago
      An excellent point, had totally forgotten :)
derefr 9y ago
Using the Google of 10-years-ago on the Internet of 10-years-ago, or using the Google of 10-years-ago on the Internet of today? Because I imagine doing the latter would just result in an endless wasteland of SEO-optimized content leadgen pages.
- dannyw 9y ago
  The good thing is SEO optimized content is relatively trivial to distinguish from the snippet, and other search engines like DuckDuckGo feel far more reliable and consistent without being overrun by SEO junk. You do have a point however.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    Not really, not for most people, especially for farm sites like eHow. If you ask how to make a tequila, you'd get an SEO-optimized eHow site instead of say, an authoritative page of the world's top tequila expert. If DDG was so good, people wouldn't need to use !g for tail queries so much. Too much anecdotal claims every time these issues come up and no objective quality evaluation.
    - ryanianian 9y ago
      I'd venture that most people are happy with the eHow results. Those wanting more depth may have to look through 1-2 pages of results, but I don't think most people want/need "tequila expert" level depth when searching for that. I'm not saying this is correct or "desirable," just saying that's one justifiable explanation for this behavior.
    - tripzilch 9y ago
      I mainly use !g for the "stupid" queries, actually. The ones where I would actually prefer Google's AI second-guessing me. Also "local"-type searches. I don't voluntarily give Google my location[0] but if I type the city name too, it works fine. Actually I just tried and DDG does it just as well and gives a map and address too, so I may go for that next time. Except for lyrics, DDG is quite good at that and often even presents the proper "zero click result" straight away (though usually the lyrics are cut off at a point and I still need to click). On the other hand, the vast majority of my DDG queries are !bangs for other sites, because I know what site will have the page I'm looking for. Usually !w for Wikipedia (and the other wikipedia stuff like !wnl and !wt), after that probably one of the image searches !gi/!yi/!bi, then !imdb, !discogs and !whosampled. Oh and occasionally !hn, of course :) I believe that DDG would have had a lot harder time getting as successful as it is today if Google had retained its old "AND" search engine behaviour (as explained above, keywords used to have an implied "AND" between them). [0] I only log in to these types of big "social" things using a private tab, for GMail and to get my personal YouTube suggestions and subscriptions. It's a bit of a hassle to use the 2FA Authenticator code every time after I closed my browser, but it's worth Google not tying everything I search to my account, or getting "bubbled".

by dannyw 9y ago

rectang 9y ago

I wish I could go back to the Google of 1999. PageRank was magic before people learned to game it. The results were incredibly good.

userbinator 9y ago
PageRank was magic before people learned to game it Even then, before Google started going after them by filtering results, the SEO spam sites were pretty easily recognisable and ignorable as you scrolled through the results. Now, they still show up in droves (try searching for service manual PDFs and you'll instantly see what I mean) but you hit the end of the viewable results far too soon to find the useful stuff buried in later pages. In other words, Google's ranking now seems to be "good SEO'd sites > spammy SEO'd sites > everything else", and cuts off results before getting to that third category, when that third category should ideally switch places with the second and maybe even the first.

userbinator 9y ago

RankBrain Amusingly enough one of the definitions of "rank" is, according to Wiktionary, "having a very strong and bad taste or odor"... as in the smell of a decaying brain. How fitting. I almost wonder if it's deliberate. If they called it BrainRank (like PageRank), the adjectival meaning seems to be emphasised less.

duggan 9y ago
The emphasis would be incorrect if the term were reversed - RankBrain is a Brain for Ranking like PageRank is a Rank for Pages. No doubt there is someone in Google, however, who has a project for ranking AIs called BrainRank for their own amusement. Anyway, your observation is also an amusing interpretation.
- andyjpb 9y ago
  PageRank is called after its inventor Larry Page. It's just another case of Nominitive Determinism!
  - duggan 9y ago
    An excellent point, had totally forgotten :)

derefr 9y ago

Using the Google of 10-years-ago on the Internet of 10-years-ago, or using the Google of 10-years-ago on the Internet of today? Because I imagine doing the latter would just result in an endless wasteland of SEO-optimized content leadgen pages.

dannyw 9y ago
The good thing is SEO optimized content is relatively trivial to distinguish from the snippet, and other search engines like DuckDuckGo feel far more reliable and consistent without being overrun by SEO junk. You do have a point however.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Not really, not for most people, especially for farm sites like eHow. If you ask how to make a tequila, you'd get an SEO-optimized eHow site instead of say, an authoritative page of the world's top tequila expert. If DDG was so good, people wouldn't need to use !g for tail queries so much. Too much anecdotal claims every time these issues come up and no objective quality evaluation.
  - ryanianian 9y ago
    I'd venture that most people are happy with the eHow results. Those wanting more depth may have to look through 1-2 pages of results, but I don't think most people want/need "tequila expert" level depth when searching for that. I'm not saying this is correct or "desirable," just saying that's one justifiable explanation for this behavior.
  - tripzilch 9y ago
    I mainly use !g for the "stupid" queries, actually. The ones where I would actually prefer Google's AI second-guessing me. Also "local"-type searches. I don't voluntarily give Google my location[0] but if I type the city name too, it works fine. Actually I just tried and DDG does it just as well and gives a map and address too, so I may go for that next time. Except for lyrics, DDG is quite good at that and often even presents the proper "zero click result" straight away (though usually the lyrics are cut off at a point and I still need to click). On the other hand, the vast majority of my DDG queries are !bangs for other sites, because I know what site will have the page I'm looking for. Usually !w for Wikipedia (and the other wikipedia stuff like !wnl and !wt), after that probably one of the image searches !gi/!yi/!bi, then !imdb, !discogs and !whosampled. Oh and occasionally !hn, of course :) I believe that DDG would have had a lot harder time getting as successful as it is today if Google had retained its old "AND" search engine behaviour (as explained above, keywords used to have an implied "AND" between them). [0] I only log in to these types of big "social" things using a private tab, for GMail and to get my personal YouTube suggestions and subscriptions. It's a bit of a hassle to use the 2FA Authenticator code every time after I closed my browser, but it's worth Google not tying everything I search to my account, or getting "bubbled".