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

by mda 8y ago

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.

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

by 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?

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.