5 ms·

Google search results have definitely gotten worse over time. I can think of a few reasons. * Search is now optimising to direct users to where Google wants us

Google search results have definitely gotten worse over time. I can think of a few reasons. * Search is now optimising to direct users to where Google wants users to go rather than where users want to go (i.e. to sell shit) * Search is now heavily censored to be 'mainstream' * Google disproportionately biases search towards ideologies and political leanings that Google prefers (remember that time they arbitrarily decided to remove all results for guns and inadvertently also made it impossible to search for water guns?) Switching up to foreign search engines like baidu and yandex really opened my eyes to how heavily Google manipulates what I get to see. Google search in the 2000s was significantly more useful than it is today, but most of it has nothing to do with collecting personal data and more to do with Google transitioning from a search company to a pseudo internet hegemony. A better example of personal data collection leading to worse results is Youtube. Youtube puts people into weird tiny bubbles of content that the algorithm thinks will get viewing time from that particular individual, and prevents that individual from easily discovering vast swaths of other content they may find interesting. Anyone else have a Youtube home page full of videos from 3-10 years ago that they've already seen? Google is starting to feel like the paperclip optimiser. I'm sure the way its products work is currently optimal for whatever metrics they set, but it's certainly not optimal for me as a user. Google makes me feel exploited.

summerlight 7y ago
Or Google simply could not keep up with the pace of web growth. The web is already 100x bigger than it used to be 10 years ago and the external environment is actively gaming with Google (SEO, Spam, etc...) while the information available from a user query is still effectively same. Personalization may add more implicit information to a query (e.g. If you're tech-savy, then a keyword "Rust" more likely means PL than game), but most of the time it lacks the actual context so its usefulness is somehow bounded. Most of the useful information still comes from a query itself. Hopefully, advancement in the field of NLP may allow a longer query to be more effective but I don't see any straightforward way to keep the search quality with a 1~3 words query.
chetanbhasin 7y ago
Did you get a chance to use Duckduckgo? I tried it a few times, but ended up going back to Google for day-to-day use because in practical use it still fells better than the competition. I have been thinking, however, of ditching Google for something like Duckduckgo or Startpage.
oriel 7y ago
> Google is starting to feel like the paperclip optimiser. I'm sure the way its products work is currently optimal for whatever metrics they set, but it's certainly not optimal for me as a user This makes me think of Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) > "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[

summerlight 7y ago

Or Google simply could not keep up with the pace of web growth. The web is already 100x bigger than it used to be 10 years ago and the external environment is actively gaming with Google (SEO, Spam, etc...) while the information available from a user query is still effectively same. Personalization may add more implicit information to a query (e.g. If you're tech-savy, then a keyword "Rust" more likely means PL than game), but most of the time it lacks the actual context so its usefulness is somehow bounded. Most of the useful information still comes from a query itself. Hopefully, advancement in the field of NLP may allow a longer query to be more effective but I don't see any straightforward way to keep the search quality with a 1~3 words query.

chetanbhasin 7y ago

Did you get a chance to use Duckduckgo? I tried it a few times, but ended up going back to Google for day-to-day use because in practical use it still fells better than the competition. I have been thinking, however, of ditching Google for something like Duckduckgo or Startpage.

oriel 7y ago

> Google is starting to feel like the paperclip optimiser. I'm sure the way its products work is currently optimal for whatever metrics they set, but it's certainly not optimal for me as a user This makes me think of Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) > "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[