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Google Groups was great when they first acquired all those archives! It just got progressively worse and worse over time, and I've never understood why. (Stagna
by Steuard 9y ago
Google Groups was great when they first acquired all those archives! It just got progressively worse and worse over time, and I've never understood why. (Stagnation I could understand, but how did the same searches get less effective?)
- naasking 9y agoGoogle search in general has become less effective, so perhaps it simply carried over.
- mmanfrin 9y agoSearch is abysmal these days. I'll look for a term with 3 words and it almost always throws out one word, giving me useless results.
- nikanj 9y ago”You searched for Stockholm Syndrome Research. Here’s a bunch of Stockholm travel blogs! They’re just missing two of your keywords, but they’re really popular with other visitors”
- ccozan 9y agoI think is possible to have the verbatim option active all the time, but I don't remember how.
- forgotmypw 9y agoDisclaimer: I have not tested these add-ons myself. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/occcfdnjdbgjglcbpolkmjnjillkgbcm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...
- pasbesoin 9y agoAnd the people who simply accept this have...
- smoyer 9y ago... gone to Sweden on vacation. More seriously, I think a better analogy is putting a frog in cold water and turning on the stove's burner. Things are much worse but because it happened so slowly, we simply have a "new normal". The change from one day to the next on this time-scale is undiscernable.
- cge 9y agoIf you put a frog in cold water and gradually heat the water, the frog will jump out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog). The premise of that analogy is widely considered to be completely false.
- smoyer 9y agoHmm ... that completely makes sense when they reminded me that amphibians have to regulate their temperatures via ambient conditions. Unfortunately it also completely ruins my analogy (though not my point). Perhaps the analogy should be a free citizen of a democratic society gradually allows corporations to (after being deemed a living entity) slowly distribute all wealth creation to the plutocrats as they go from being solid middle class to a virtual slave in another corporation's giant warehouses.
- asaph 9y agoThis underscores the importance of independently reproducing experimental results of others. It's not done often enough.
- IAmEveryone 9y agoI just did this search, and at least the first page only had results perfectly matching the query. Try yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=Stockholm+Syndrome+Research https://www.google.com/search?q=Stockholm+Syndrome+Research
- mirimir 9y agoSame for me. But then, no Google account or cookies for me, so ...
- xvf22 9y agoQuotes still force the word to be included don't they? Though I suppose that still doesn't do much if the algorithm has tossed out the matches you want.
- ghaff 9y agoI get that Google essentially walked back from an at least implied role as an information archivist. But I still don't really get why they so completely abandoned things like Google Groups given the truly minuscule resources to maintain them at some low level.
- cultureleak_ta0 9y agoNobody can get promoted for improvements like that. It would only garner goodwill with a tiny customer base and it’s not clear how that would translate to revenue or user growth on other products
- wmf 9y agoBut there do seem to be quite a few people at Google already working on random stuff that won't get them promoted.
- petercooper 9y agoTotally agree, but I kinda feel (and this is solely my opinion) that much as it's our collective responsibility to donate to worthwhile causes, gigantic tech companies should spend rounding-error money on good digital causes like this.
- digi_owl 9y agoWhat seems to have happened was that Google shifted focus from sorting the web to delivering the "zeitgeist" of the present. Perhaps because more people were likely to search for whatever was on the news cycle than some arbitrary piece of info. Never mind that Google's earnings comes from ads, not search results.
- ghaff 9y agoGoogle's original mission statement from 1998 was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Things like Usenet archives are clearly part of that. That is still apparently their mission statement but I agree the reality seems more along the lines of "deliver the best search results for users' immediate needs" [while making as much money from that as humanly possible]
- giancarlostoro 9y agoI wish Google would donate those logs to archive.org and maybe even some servers. Idk why some of these tech giants never donate to projects that care about the internet the very thing which drives their profits.
- erik_seaberg 9y agoGoogle has a continual Red Queen's race between everyone's dependencies. I'm guessing they were lucky to keep it mostly working and avoid Reader's fate. "We're deprecating X, please migrate to Y by this date." "Y doesn't support all our use cases!" "Neither will X when we turn it off, sorry."
- JoshMnem 9y agoGoogle Groups was always terrible. It almost immediately started ruining Usenet.