4 ms·

Perhaps the fault isn't so much with Google itself, but with its user base. Mainstream is mainstream and if you're making a search engine for the masses, you're

by ThJ 8y ago

Perhaps the fault isn't so much with Google itself, but with its user base. Mainstream is mainstream and if you're making a search engine for the masses, you're going to get results for the masses. Garbage in, garbage out. Maybe we should build a search engine that produces results similar to those that Google used to produce when it was less popular. To to that today, it would have to be opinionated.

luckylion 8y ago
I believe a lot of the problems with Google's results is that they still (heavily) overemphasize links as quality votes. That works fine if people do actually use links to say "look at this", but it doesn't work any more when links just mean "I'm doing this to manipulate google".
notacoward 8y ago
> To do that today, it would have to be opinionated. Aye, there's the rub. It's a good example of Goodhart's Law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." The value of a link has changed since Google was invented. In the early days, a link's value was informational. Some human with at least half a clue believed that the destination of a link would be useful to someone reading its source. Now, thanks to Google themselves, the value of a link is mostly reputational. It increases the prominence of one or both pages, even if it's completely useless or even counterproductive for users. That violates one of the fundamental assumptions behind PageRank. Google has no choice but to become opinionated about the value of each link (e.g. detecting/ignoring link farms), but that's almost the same as trying to be opinionated about the content itself. It's hard, and it's subject to its own kinds of bias/manipulation. I don't think there's really a way for generalized search to recover. I also think that at some level most people realize that, so they resort to more specialized search. For commerce they search on Amazon. For news they turn to Facebook, or to some more purpose- or ideology-specific aggregator. (The latter are even worse IMO, but disclosure: I'm a Facebook employee.) For specific topics they pick one or more "anchors" and search there, or start with Wikipedia if they're totally lost. Everything else has become interconnected enough that the whole value proposition of a general search engine is weakened, and then their effectiveness has also been weakened ... all because of the incentives Google more than anyone created. Kind of a self-defeating system, in the long term. Some day I suspect we'll have our own agents doing our own crawling to find the information we ask for, instead of relying on a centralized authority to do it for us.

by ThJ 8y ago

luckylion 8y ago

I believe a lot of the problems with Google's results is that they still (heavily) overemphasize links as quality votes. That works fine if people do actually use links to say "look at this", but it doesn't work any more when links just mean "I'm doing this to manipulate google".

notacoward 8y ago

> To do that today, it would have to be opinionated. Aye, there's the rub. It's a good example of Goodhart's Law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." The value of a link has changed since Google was invented. In the early days, a link's value was informational. Some human with at least half a clue believed that the destination of a link would be useful to someone reading its source. Now, thanks to Google themselves, the value of a link is mostly reputational. It increases the prominence of one or both pages, even if it's completely useless or even counterproductive for users. That violates one of the fundamental assumptions behind PageRank. Google has no choice but to become opinionated about the value of each link (e.g. detecting/ignoring link farms), but that's almost the same as trying to be opinionated about the content itself. It's hard, and it's subject to its own kinds of bias/manipulation. I don't think there's really a way for generalized search to recover. I also think that at some level most people realize that, so they resort to more specialized search. For commerce they search on Amazon. For news they turn to Facebook, or to some more purpose- or ideology-specific aggregator. (The latter are even worse IMO, but disclosure: I'm a Facebook employee.) For specific topics they pick one or more "anchors" and search there, or start with Wikipedia if they're totally lost. Everything else has become interconnected enough that the whole value proposition of a general search engine is weakened, and then their effectiveness has also been weakened ... all because of the incentives Google more than anyone created. Kind of a self-defeating system, in the long term. Some day I suspect we'll have our own agents doing our own crawling to find the information we ask for, instead of relying on a centralized authority to do it for us.