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>> I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways t

>> I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. I think that this is a case where we were comparing Google to what existing before (Yahoo, etc), and thought "this is great". Now we compare Google only to what we think it 'should' be.

birken 16y ago
And we never imagine what the internet would be like without Google. You think spam is bad now? It's possible that in a world without Google web search just wouldn't work because Bing or Yahoo (or altavista, cuil, powerset, or whoever) just couldn't deal with the spam. Certainly Google isn't perfect, but they do a pretty good job combating web spam that is explicitly targeted at them.
thaumaturgy 16y ago
For me, I remember how great Google was when I started using it around 1999, compared to AltaVista or Metacrawler; it was great because it was able to find results that the other two just couldn't, and it did it quickly. Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  > Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again. You're spoiled then.
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    "It could be worse" is always a valid rebuttal to any complaint. But it doesn't actually move the conversation forward at all.
    - patrickaljord 16y ago
      But I didn't mean "It could be worse", I meant google search is actually amazing and I find what I'm looking for 99% of the time.
  - habith 16y ago
    > You're spoiled then. Spoiled? I remember search being horrendous back in those days. It was almost exact word matching and it took hours to find relevant results. Google was a breath of fresh air back then (especially since they didn't run all those X10 ads and popups ala Yahoo!). I've switched to Bing a few months ago for tin-foil-haty reasons, and also being disappointed in the way Google interpreted some of my queries (for some reason the plus sign doesn't mean anything anymore). I occasionally use Google when I give up on finding something on Bing, but 99% of the time 4-5 results of the first page are pages I already found on Bing, with the rest being irrelevant results. I too wasn't aware of the search tools that Matt Cutts mentioned above, I'll give it a try the next time I'm having a hard time finding something with a date restriction.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  thaumaturgy, if it makes you feel better, search is much better than in was in 1999-2000. When I joined Google in 2000, one thing I did was run a bunch of searches and save the results. When I went back and looked at the data, Google2000 can't compare to Google2010. Google2000 still had lots of spam--it was much, much better than Altavista or other competitors at the time, but the results weren't nearly as good as they are now. I keep meaning to do a blog post and show some examples.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Those examples would definitely be interesting to read. I'm one of the many people who feels search results have gotten worse, but since I don't have any actual saved search results from 10 years ago it's really hard to say if I'm right or misremembering. Some concrete examples of what Google2000 looked like might be good for jogging the memory. One example category does come to mind, which is a frequent pet peeve: lyrics searches. They definitely return sort of crappy results currently, but I can't say for sure what they returned in 2000, since I didn't save any results. Examples: Imo [joy division walked in line lyrics] should return a page like http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/walkedline.html http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/walkedline.html. Instead it returns a bunch of sites like lyricsfreak.com, sing365.com, lyricsdepot.com, metrolyrics.com, etc. The case is even stronger if there's actually an official site for the musician with official lyrics. An example of that: [vnv nation fragments lyrics] should return http://www.vnvnation.com/Webfiles/lyrics/fragments.htm http://www.vnvnation.com/Webfiles/lyrics/fragments.htm, but instead it again returns the usual lyrics-site suspects. I think my recollection is that I used to get fan sites more than lyrics aggregators in 2000. That might be more due to web changes than Google changes, admittedly, since many of these lyrics aggregators didn't exist in 2000, and hobbyist fan sites may have been more vibrant. The fact that the same lyrics-aggregator sites dominate for almost all the searches seems weird, though; it seems that basically all lyrics searches return "big lyrics site", rather than trying to retrieve a site specializing in the band I searched for.

birken 16y ago

And we never imagine what the internet would be like without Google. You think spam is bad now? It's possible that in a world without Google web search just wouldn't work because Bing or Yahoo (or altavista, cuil, powerset, or whoever) just couldn't deal with the spam. Certainly Google isn't perfect, but they do a pretty good job combating web spam that is explicitly targeted at them.

thaumaturgy 16y ago

For me, I remember how great Google was when I started using it around 1999, compared to AltaVista or Metacrawler; it was great because it was able to find results that the other two just couldn't, and it did it quickly. Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.

patrickaljord 16y ago
> Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again. You're spoiled then.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  "It could be worse" is always a valid rebuttal to any complaint. But it doesn't actually move the conversation forward at all.
  - patrickaljord 16y ago
    But I didn't mean "It could be worse", I meant google search is actually amazing and I find what I'm looking for 99% of the time.
- habith 16y ago
  > You're spoiled then. Spoiled? I remember search being horrendous back in those days. It was almost exact word matching and it took hours to find relevant results. Google was a breath of fresh air back then (especially since they didn't run all those X10 ads and popups ala Yahoo!). I've switched to Bing a few months ago for tin-foil-haty reasons, and also being disappointed in the way Google interpreted some of my queries (for some reason the plus sign doesn't mean anything anymore). I occasionally use Google when I give up on finding something on Bing, but 99% of the time 4-5 results of the first page are pages I already found on Bing, with the rest being irrelevant results. I too wasn't aware of the search tools that Matt Cutts mentioned above, I'll give it a try the next time I'm having a hard time finding something with a date restriction.
Matt_Cutts 16y ago
thaumaturgy, if it makes you feel better, search is much better than in was in 1999-2000. When I joined Google in 2000, one thing I did was run a bunch of searches and save the results. When I went back and looked at the data, Google2000 can't compare to Google2010. Google2000 still had lots of spam--it was much, much better than Altavista or other competitors at the time, but the results weren't nearly as good as they are now. I keep meaning to do a blog post and show some examples.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Those examples would definitely be interesting to read. I'm one of the many people who feels search results have gotten worse, but since I don't have any actual saved search results from 10 years ago it's really hard to say if I'm right or misremembering. Some concrete examples of what Google2000 looked like might be good for jogging the memory. One example category does come to mind, which is a frequent pet peeve: lyrics searches. They definitely return sort of crappy results currently, but I can't say for sure what they returned in 2000, since I didn't save any results. Examples: Imo [joy division walked in line lyrics] should return a page like http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/walkedline.html http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/walkedline.html. Instead it returns a bunch of sites like lyricsfreak.com, sing365.com, lyricsdepot.com, metrolyrics.com, etc. The case is even stronger if there's actually an official site for the musician with official lyrics. An example of that: [vnv nation fragments lyrics] should return http://www.vnvnation.com/Webfiles/lyrics/fragments.htm http://www.vnvnation.com/Webfiles/lyrics/fragments.htm, but instead it again returns the usual lyrics-site suspects. I think my recollection is that I used to get fan sites more than lyrics aggregators in 2000. That might be more due to web changes than Google changes, admittedly, since many of these lyrics aggregators didn't exist in 2000, and hobbyist fan sites may have been more vibrant. The fact that the same lyrics-aggregator sites dominate for almost all the searches seems weird, though; it seems that basically all lyrics searches return "big lyrics site", rather than trying to retrieve a site specializing in the band I searched for.