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Yup. Google has been pretty awful for the past, oh, 5-10 years or so. They used to be a high quality search engine, a way to index the depth of material on the

Yup. Google has been pretty awful for the past, oh, 5-10 years or so. They used to be a high quality search engine, a way to index the depth of material on the internet. Now they are just a semantic front-end for the most popular content on the internet. Do you want to find something from wikipedia, youtube, medium, the new york times, amazon, etc? Google does great. Do you want to search for something that thousands of other people also search for routinely? Google does great. This role is also the easiest to monetize for google (through promoted links). But if you want to search for something highly technical or very specific, google is now terrible, in fact it's worse than it used to be 10 years ago.

mda 8y ago
Maybe problem is you do not have records of your answers 10 years ago, how do you compare the quality? Gut feeling?
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Experience, and being able to see directly the different behavior of the search engine. I watched as it happened. Google used to be optimized for producing the minimum number of results for your query, biasing towards specificity. This worked great for tech savvy folks who knew how to craft searches with a high degree of specificity. Then they switched to biasing towards a higher number of search results, biasing towards correcting your search to match some other popular search. It's so bad now that google will just completely drop words from your search as terms in order to present the results it "thinks" you want, and then you have to go out of your way to force it to actually care about those search terms (and this isn't because the more specific / restrictive search has no results, it just has results that google doesn't "like" as much). You can craft a google search with greater specificity but it's very difficult to obtain the sort of search behavior that google used to have. Now google treats your search terms as sort of a grab bag, it mutates them into a cloud of synonyms and related words, then it picks a subset of the grab bag that it decides is valuable and gives you results that are tuned by about a zillion arcane heuristics. This works great for giving you "magically" accurate answers for the most common search queries. It works terribly for giving you highly specific answers to highly specific queries. The way google used to work was by providing results that matched all of your search terms, and being smart enough to include different variations of each word but not vaguely related words. That sometimes made it hard to find the right thing if you didn't get the right words but now we're in a state where you can't find the right thing even if you do have all the right words.
wruza 8y ago
I’m attributing the reason for this to the mass of mobile/social users who changed the search market. Most people from these groups search for naturally popular things like Saylor Twift [legs] or whatever it is in the trends right now. I wish we had unpopular search engines that suck at pop. I also miss directories – while not fully complete, they gave a good overview on technology sections and many more that you cannot just google since you don’t know it exists. Before the internet my family had a big encyclopedia collection that I as a kid occasionally opened/skimmed and read about something new. It is not possible with wikipedia and the internet since it is now overwhelming and has no good place to start anymore. Our average attention volume is so narrow (relative to amount of information) that it became a product. Also, I miss the days when you had to investigate a topic, make yourself fluent in it and enter ‘the club’ of highly interested people. Now anyone can google a shallow pop-info on anything and pretend to be educated in it in minutes. That degraded many good groups as a result.
- bryogenic 8y ago
  Technical topic directories are alive and well! https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

mda 8y ago

Maybe problem is you do not have records of your answers 10 years ago, how do you compare the quality? Gut feeling?

InclinedPlane 8y ago
Experience, and being able to see directly the different behavior of the search engine. I watched as it happened. Google used to be optimized for producing the minimum number of results for your query, biasing towards specificity. This worked great for tech savvy folks who knew how to craft searches with a high degree of specificity. Then they switched to biasing towards a higher number of search results, biasing towards correcting your search to match some other popular search. It's so bad now that google will just completely drop words from your search as terms in order to present the results it "thinks" you want, and then you have to go out of your way to force it to actually care about those search terms (and this isn't because the more specific / restrictive search has no results, it just has results that google doesn't "like" as much). You can craft a google search with greater specificity but it's very difficult to obtain the sort of search behavior that google used to have. Now google treats your search terms as sort of a grab bag, it mutates them into a cloud of synonyms and related words, then it picks a subset of the grab bag that it decides is valuable and gives you results that are tuned by about a zillion arcane heuristics. This works great for giving you "magically" accurate answers for the most common search queries. It works terribly for giving you highly specific answers to highly specific queries. The way google used to work was by providing results that matched all of your search terms, and being smart enough to include different variations of each word but not vaguely related words. That sometimes made it hard to find the right thing if you didn't get the right words but now we're in a state where you can't find the right thing even if you do have all the right words.

wruza 8y ago

I’m attributing the reason for this to the mass of mobile/social users who changed the search market. Most people from these groups search for naturally popular things like Saylor Twift [legs] or whatever it is in the trends right now. I wish we had unpopular search engines that suck at pop. I also miss directories – while not fully complete, they gave a good overview on technology sections and many more that you cannot just google since you don’t know it exists. Before the internet my family had a big encyclopedia collection that I as a kid occasionally opened/skimmed and read about something new. It is not possible with wikipedia and the internet since it is now overwhelming and has no good place to start anymore. Our average attention volume is so narrow (relative to amount of information) that it became a product. Also, I miss the days when you had to investigate a topic, make yourself fluent in it and enter ‘the club’ of highly interested people. Now anyone can google a shallow pop-info on anything and pretend to be educated in it in minutes. That degraded many good groups as a result.

bryogenic 8y ago
Technical topic directories are alive and well! https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome