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I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad mat

I’ve been pretty frustrated with Google lately. Maybe it’s me, but they seem to keep skewing their algorithm to ignore precise queries and always show broad matches. For example I recently searched “US ambassador Germany” on Google News and the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings. Google completely ignored “Germany.” Similar things happen to me all the time on Google Search. Perhaps I just search too many long tail queries?

bagacrap 7y ago
Halfway through your post you moved the goalposts from News to Search. When I search for the query you gave on google.com, I get a knowledge card about Richard Grenell. When I search on News, I do get articles about Ukraine. Are there any recent news articles about Richard Grenell or one of his predecessors though?
- danielfoster 7y ago
  Good point. I see this behavior mostly on Search but the last example I documented is News. Richard Grenell has been in the news: https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS620US621&hl=de&prmd=ivmn&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiD3tjFiPTlAhVVoFsKHTs6BCEQ_AUoBHoECGgQBA&biw=414&bih=722 https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz...
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  John Kornblum, former US ambassador in Germany, is often present in German media when they need somebody to "explain" the USA or stories from cold war era. So in Germany media he can be found, how much then finds the way back in English speaking media I haven't checked.
machbio 7y ago
So much this - you have to go from least popular to most popular terms to get accurate results - there is a weightage penalty of how further the word is from the start of the query. if you search "Javascript issues Rshiny" (this is just an example not the actual query) - you only get javascript results for 4 to 5 pages of results.. when you reverse it to "Rshiny Javascript issues" - the results are better
- frandroid 7y ago
  This is really useful advice, thank you.
- dsl 7y ago
  I have found as of late that using natural language search terms works much better over the old keyword soup you'd have to feed in to AltaVista or something. i.e. "how do I change a ford taurus headlight" vs "taurus service manual headlight"
apatters 7y ago
Having been on the fringes of the SEO industry for many years, my theory is that the spammers and algorithm gamers have slowly but surely won out. This has forced Google to de-emphasize keyword relevancy and instead prioritize content source--large and well known brands with high domain authority have captured increasingly larger numbers of queries over the years. Someone at Google will probably disagree emphatically, but it seems to me like this represents a bit of an existential threat to web search. There's so much money in being #1 for popular queries that countless actors will throw enormous resources into getting there.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Spammers and algorithmic gamers are / were also an existential threat to web search.
  - calibas 7y ago
    Google and SEO are a fundamental issue with the web itself. It's been a while since Google could simply search for websites, but that's no longer possible in the same manner it used to be. Google has become so dominant that the web itself changes to accommodate Google. Google can no longer be an independent observer, as the act of observation changes the results!
- doublekill 7y ago
  I do not think it is the SEO, but Google adapting to its less-technical userbase (people who search for "facebook" and click the first result). It makes sense for this target audience to give broad results. They seem to be relying more on neural language models to accomplish this. Google also surfaces more authoritative results than Bing, Google thus favors bigger commercial sites. Google is suprisingly good on vague searches (for instance, describing a singer's appearance and song themes will return the name), but getting worse on "conspiracy"-type searches (you will not find many amateur sites discussing the high-class escort past of the First Lady, because these lack authority, all results focus instead on the massive fine for posting allegations).
  - 7y ago
spurgu 7y ago
It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my searches. In some cases it has even lead to queries looking like this: "us" "ambassador" "germany"
- zerocrates 7y ago
  It frequently notifies you that it's ignoring a term in your search to give you a particular result: you see those "Doesn't contain: X" messages associated with a "must contain: X" link to override it... which I think just does the query over again but with that term in quotes.
  - spurgu 7y ago
    Yeah but what I meant was that this is becoming increasingly frequent. I mean you would think that Google would try to include pages matching your full query in the top results and then when you keep moving to subpages it could give some less related hits as well. Now I often see these in the top 3 results.
    - zerocrates 7y ago
      Yes, in general I'd agree with the sentiment that Google trends more toward trying to show you "popular" content and changing your search to fit that, rather than the other way around. With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Even those messages are very unreliable, though.
- DoingIsLearning 7y ago
  The quote used to enforce "must include expression" but this is no longer true with google queries. My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google. For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
I'd agree with this assessment. Searching for anything technical seems to especially have terrible results. I'm getting to the point that "verbatim" and "this year" feel like they should be defaults. Oh, and it really, really needs a "filter out anything that looks even remotely like a top 10" switch.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Inverse of "this year" is also very frequently desired. Searching for a topic that's recently become, er, topical, but I'm interested in earlier discussion. DDG's very limited date-ranged search is especially frustrating here. Book search is often more useful.
shrubble 7y ago
I have certainly been disappointed recently by Google search results when searching for certain information on microcontrollers and the Forth programming language. Forth gets corrected to fourth and/or is found in the idiom 'back and forth'
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you do your searches with JavaScript disabled or logged out of your Google account? The engine should generally pick up relatively quickly that when you specifically search for "Forth," you usually mean the programming language and not a typo. Catching these differences in use case is why customized search is a feature.
- giardini 7y ago
  This. FWIW I will use "Forth language" or "Forth programming language" instead of "Forth" to delineate more precisely what I'm seeking.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Google search has moved away from keywords and towards queries. "US ambassador Germany" makes it hard to comprehend what you intend. Do you get better results for "who is the US ambassador to Germany" or "news about us ambassador to Germany?"
- JohnFen 7y ago
  For a few years, I got better results with natural language queries. However, over at least the last two, I've been getting better results by just including key words. The order of the words matters, though.
goatinaboat 7y ago
the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings Given what we know about the political leanings of Google it is very hard to see that as anything other than an attempt to direct the narrative. Even if it isn’t, it’s still unclear how an algorithm would make that jump from those keywords. A completely different country, for example.
- mintplant 7y ago
  It's completely clear. "Germany" gets dropped as there are overwhelmingly more recent stories about the "US ambassador" testifying at the impeachment hearings.
  - RonanTheGrey 7y ago
    Except, it isn't clear. The user didn't type the word "Germany" on accident.
MR4D 7y ago
Interesting - DuckDuckGo gives similar results when you search from the news page. Very weird. [0] - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hx&iar=news&ia=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hx&iar=new...
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  I would hypothesize that "us ambassador germany" is actually a hard query to suss out the meaning of ("Does the user want to know about the US ambassador to Germany? The German ambassador to the US? Some news snippet involving Germany, the US, and any ambassador?")
justinmchase 7y ago
Just contrast the results with a different engine and you decide who's fault the poor results are: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&ia=web Them training you to have low expectations isn't the right way I don't think.
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  You're comparing a web search to a news search. If you do the same search on google.com (not news!), you get good results. Including a picture of the US ambassador to Germany. https://www.google.com/?q=US+Ambassador+Germany https://www.google.com/?q=US+Ambassador+Germany And when you search DDG in their news section, most of the results are about the impeachment hearing, just like Google. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&iar=news&ia=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&iar=new...
corodra 7y ago
I'm going to second this for web searches. My results lately for either geopolitical or tech have been oddly broad as well. Even though I try to find specific information on a topic, the website results (I don't do their news searches often, can't speak to that one) always have a "trendy" vibe to them. Even if I'm looking for tutorial or technical info, there's been more search-result attention devoted to puff-piece blog articles roughly related to what I want. Like they are more focused on the political aspect of what I want instead of giving me what I want. I've been noticing it for the past 3 or 4 weeks. I've been thinking my google-fu has been weakening. Glad to know I'm not the only one.
NoodleIncident 7y ago
I've been pretty frustrated with HN lately. Every time Google search is discussed, someone comments with a Google News search that fails for them, despite it being almost completely irrelevant to the conversation.
matt4077 7y ago
In my attempt right now, I do get many articles about Ukraine, but every single one of them includes the word "Germany" in some form. I belief this is an effect of Google News emphasising recency in its ranking algorithm. Interestingly, your complaint is almost the opposite of the one often made on HN, namely that people would prefer a somewhat dumber but very literal search interface. It also shows why that wish's fulfilment might end up disappointing people: In the snippets I get, "Germany" gets included in these articles in all sorts of irrelevant ways, including navigational links that really aren't part of the story ec.
nickfromseattle 7y ago
Google uses a metric called termination of search. Did the user visit a page and cease searching for a given query? Great, the page answered the users question. Did they visit a page, bounce, and keep on searching? Well that page didn't answer the users query. Maybe there has been an uptick in people googling "US ambassador Germany" and looking for news articles about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings.
- reificator 7y ago
  Great, so when I get fed up with Google results and give up, it compounds the problem further.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rolltiide 7y ago
Its not just you, there are memes that compare Google search results and Bing results now, with Bing giving more mechanically specific responses Google has "overfitted" because their A/B test told them messing up more queries gets them higher "engagement". They are masquerading engagement as satisfaction, clouded by their incentive to have people dwell on ads longer. Memes: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/639/8ef.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/639/8ef... https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/608/619/bec.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/608/619/bec... https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/641/517.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/641/517...
- gundmc 7y ago
  I think you're missing the idea of those memes if you think those are favoring Bing results...
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    They are now though The bing memes go back ten years when it was giving unexpected worse results The same memes are being repurposed because the same experience is giving better results than google’s differently worse results
Razengan 7y ago
I've been noticing a distinctive decline in the relevancy of Google Search results for several years. Google just doesn't seem to care about search anymore. Maybe they don't need to?
amelius 7y ago
Perhaps the answer is simply that you have disabled user-tracking (either explicitly in Google's settings or by disabling cookies), so Google doesn't know how to serve you best, and you end up with the best possible answer for the "average" person.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I've actually found that the search results get better when Google can't customize the search results for the particular user. It's still not great, though. For a few years, I've been blaming the reduction in the quality of search results on this attempt to "know how to serve me best". I still think that's a huge part of the cause, but I'm not so sure it explains everything.
pprplt 7y ago
The worst part is the corporatized results. For example, if you search for a movie, google search returns the reviews of corporate newspapers first and in the results it also lists the corporate newspapers news reviews first so that you need to scroll down to see useful aggregators and go to the 2nd or 3rd page to see pertinent forum reviews or independent reviews. Google properties have been skewing to less relevant news and corporate results ( search, news, maps and even youtube ). It's a shell of it's former useful self. Hopefully ddg and other search providers step up their game to put pressure on google. Google is just another example of a monopoly gone bad.
nbanks 7y ago
I switched my browser to use verbatim by default when doing google searches for a few months. It still came up with false positives like this.

bagacrap 7y ago

Halfway through your post you moved the goalposts from News to Search. When I search for the query you gave on google.com, I get a knowledge card about Richard Grenell. When I search on News, I do get articles about Ukraine. Are there any recent news articles about Richard Grenell or one of his predecessors though?

danielfoster 7y ago
Good point. I see this behavior mostly on Search but the last example I documented is News. Richard Grenell has been in the news: https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS620US621&hl=de&prmd=ivmn&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiD3tjFiPTlAhVVoFsKHTs6BCEQ_AUoBHoECGgQBA&biw=414&bih=722 https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+grenell&safe=off&rlz...
johannes1234321 7y ago
John Kornblum, former US ambassador in Germany, is often present in German media when they need somebody to "explain" the USA or stories from cold war era. So in Germany media he can be found, how much then finds the way back in English speaking media I haven't checked.

machbio 7y ago

So much this - you have to go from least popular to most popular terms to get accurate results - there is a weightage penalty of how further the word is from the start of the query. if you search "Javascript issues Rshiny" (this is just an example not the actual query) - you only get javascript results for 4 to 5 pages of results.. when you reverse it to "Rshiny Javascript issues" - the results are better

frandroid 7y ago
This is really useful advice, thank you.
dsl 7y ago
I have found as of late that using natural language search terms works much better over the old keyword soup you'd have to feed in to AltaVista or something. i.e. "how do I change a ford taurus headlight" vs "taurus service manual headlight"

apatters 7y ago

Having been on the fringes of the SEO industry for many years, my theory is that the spammers and algorithm gamers have slowly but surely won out. This has forced Google to de-emphasize keyword relevancy and instead prioritize content source--large and well known brands with high domain authority have captured increasingly larger numbers of queries over the years. Someone at Google will probably disagree emphatically, but it seems to me like this represents a bit of an existential threat to web search. There's so much money in being #1 for popular queries that countless actors will throw enormous resources into getting there.

shadowgovt 7y ago
Spammers and algorithmic gamers are / were also an existential threat to web search.
- calibas 7y ago
  Google and SEO are a fundamental issue with the web itself. It's been a while since Google could simply search for websites, but that's no longer possible in the same manner it used to be. Google has become so dominant that the web itself changes to accommodate Google. Google can no longer be an independent observer, as the act of observation changes the results!
doublekill 7y ago
I do not think it is the SEO, but Google adapting to its less-technical userbase (people who search for "facebook" and click the first result). It makes sense for this target audience to give broad results. They seem to be relying more on neural language models to accomplish this. Google also surfaces more authoritative results than Bing, Google thus favors bigger commercial sites. Google is suprisingly good on vague searches (for instance, describing a singer's appearance and song themes will return the name), but getting worse on "conspiracy"-type searches (you will not find many amateur sites discussing the high-class escort past of the First Lady, because these lack authority, all results focus instead on the massive fine for posting allegations).
- 7y ago

spurgu 7y ago

It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my searches. In some cases it has even lead to queries looking like this: "us" "ambassador" "germany"

zerocrates 7y ago
It frequently notifies you that it's ignoring a term in your search to give you a particular result: you see those "Doesn't contain: X" messages associated with a "must contain: X" link to override it... which I think just does the query over again but with that term in quotes.
- spurgu 7y ago
  Yeah but what I meant was that this is becoming increasingly frequent. I mean you would think that Google would try to include pages matching your full query in the top results and then when you keep moving to subpages it could give some less related hits as well. Now I often see these in the top 3 results.
  - zerocrates 7y ago
    Yes, in general I'd agree with the sentiment that Google trends more toward trying to show you "popular" content and changing your search to fit that, rather than the other way around. With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Even those messages are very unreliable, though.
DoingIsLearning 7y ago
The quote used to enforce "must include expression" but this is no longer true with google queries. My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google. For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

I'd agree with this assessment. Searching for anything technical seems to especially have terrible results. I'm getting to the point that "verbatim" and "this year" feel like they should be defaults. Oh, and it really, really needs a "filter out anything that looks even remotely like a top 10" switch.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Inverse of "this year" is also very frequently desired. Searching for a topic that's recently become, er, topical, but I'm interested in earlier discussion. DDG's very limited date-ranged search is especially frustrating here. Book search is often more useful.

shrubble 7y ago

I have certainly been disappointed recently by Google search results when searching for certain information on microcontrollers and the Forth programming language. Forth gets corrected to fourth and/or is found in the idiom 'back and forth'

shadowgovt 7y ago
Out of curiosity, do you do your searches with JavaScript disabled or logged out of your Google account? The engine should generally pick up relatively quickly that when you specifically search for "Forth," you usually mean the programming language and not a typo. Catching these differences in use case is why customized search is a feature.
giardini 7y ago
This. FWIW I will use "Forth language" or "Forth programming language" instead of "Forth" to delineate more precisely what I'm seeking.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Google search has moved away from keywords and towards queries. "US ambassador Germany" makes it hard to comprehend what you intend. Do you get better results for "who is the US ambassador to Germany" or "news about us ambassador to Germany?"

JohnFen 7y ago
For a few years, I got better results with natural language queries. However, over at least the last two, I've been getting better results by just including key words. The order of the words matters, though.

goatinaboat 7y ago

the top results were all stories about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings Given what we know about the political leanings of Google it is very hard to see that as anything other than an attempt to direct the narrative. Even if it isn’t, it’s still unclear how an algorithm would make that jump from those keywords. A completely different country, for example.

mintplant 7y ago
It's completely clear. "Germany" gets dropped as there are overwhelmingly more recent stories about the "US ambassador" testifying at the impeachment hearings.
- RonanTheGrey 7y ago
  Except, it isn't clear. The user didn't type the word "Germany" on accident.

MR4D 7y ago

Interesting - DuckDuckGo gives similar results when you search from the news page. Very weird. [0] - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hx&iar=news&ia=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hx&iar=new...

shadowgovt 7y ago
I would hypothesize that "us ambassador germany" is actually a hard query to suss out the meaning of ("Does the user want to know about the US ambassador to Germany? The German ambassador to the US? Some news snippet involving Germany, the US, and any ambassador?")

justinmchase 7y ago

Just contrast the results with a different engine and you decide who's fault the poor results are: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&ia=web Them training you to have low expectations isn't the right way I don't think.

jonny_eh 7y ago
You're comparing a web search to a news search. If you do the same search on google.com (not news!), you get good results. Including a picture of the US ambassador to Germany. https://www.google.com/?q=US+Ambassador+Germany https://www.google.com/?q=US+Ambassador+Germany And when you search DDG in their news section, most of the results are about the impeachment hearing, just like Google. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&iar=news&ia=news https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+ambassador+Germany&t=hk&iar=new...

corodra 7y ago

I'm going to second this for web searches. My results lately for either geopolitical or tech have been oddly broad as well. Even though I try to find specific information on a topic, the website results (I don't do their news searches often, can't speak to that one) always have a "trendy" vibe to them. Even if I'm looking for tutorial or technical info, there's been more search-result attention devoted to puff-piece blog articles roughly related to what I want. Like they are more focused on the political aspect of what I want instead of giving me what I want. I've been noticing it for the past 3 or 4 weeks. I've been thinking my google-fu has been weakening. Glad to know I'm not the only one.

NoodleIncident 7y ago

I've been pretty frustrated with HN lately. Every time Google search is discussed, someone comments with a Google News search that fails for them, despite it being almost completely irrelevant to the conversation.

matt4077 7y ago

In my attempt right now, I do get many articles about Ukraine, but every single one of them includes the word "Germany" in some form. I belief this is an effect of Google News emphasising recency in its ranking algorithm. Interestingly, your complaint is almost the opposite of the one often made on HN, namely that people would prefer a somewhat dumber but very literal search interface. It also shows why that wish's fulfilment might end up disappointing people: In the snippets I get, "Germany" gets included in these articles in all sorts of irrelevant ways, including navigational links that really aren't part of the story ec.

nickfromseattle 7y ago

Google uses a metric called termination of search. Did the user visit a page and cease searching for a given query? Great, the page answered the users question. Did they visit a page, bounce, and keep on searching? Well that page didn't answer the users query. Maybe there has been an uptick in people googling "US ambassador Germany" and looking for news articles about Ukraine and the impeachment hearings.

reificator 7y ago
Great, so when I get fed up with Google results and give up, it compounds the problem further.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rolltiide 7y ago

Its not just you, there are memes that compare Google search results and Bing results now, with Bing giving more mechanically specific responses Google has "overfitted" because their A/B test told them messing up more queries gets them higher "engagement". They are masquerading engagement as satisfaction, clouded by their incentive to have people dwell on ads longer. Memes: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/639/8ef.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/639/8ef... https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/608/619/bec.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/608/619/bec... https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/641/517.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/608/641/517...

gundmc 7y ago
I think you're missing the idea of those memes if you think those are favoring Bing results...
- rolltiide 7y ago
  They are now though The bing memes go back ten years when it was giving unexpected worse results The same memes are being repurposed because the same experience is giving better results than google’s differently worse results

Razengan 7y ago

I've been noticing a distinctive decline in the relevancy of Google Search results for several years. Google just doesn't seem to care about search anymore. Maybe they don't need to?

amelius 7y ago

Perhaps the answer is simply that you have disabled user-tracking (either explicitly in Google's settings or by disabling cookies), so Google doesn't know how to serve you best, and you end up with the best possible answer for the "average" person.

JohnFen 7y ago
I've actually found that the search results get better when Google can't customize the search results for the particular user. It's still not great, though. For a few years, I've been blaming the reduction in the quality of search results on this attempt to "know how to serve me best". I still think that's a huge part of the cause, but I'm not so sure it explains everything.

pprplt 7y ago

The worst part is the corporatized results. For example, if you search for a movie, google search returns the reviews of corporate newspapers first and in the results it also lists the corporate newspapers news reviews first so that you need to scroll down to see useful aggregators and go to the 2nd or 3rd page to see pertinent forum reviews or independent reviews. Google properties have been skewing to less relevant news and corporate results ( search, news, maps and even youtube ). It's a shell of it's former useful self. Hopefully ddg and other search providers step up their game to put pressure on google. Google is just another example of a monopoly gone bad.

nbanks 7y ago

I switched my browser to use verbatim by default when doing google searches for a few months. It still came up with false positives like this.