18 ms·

Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

443 points by midef 7y ago

techmaster7b 7y ago
google has never been good. Sheeple just jumped on the band wagon and started using it despite it never being any better than the compition. People are dumb and instead of trying to learn they would rather just follow.
- chance_state 7y ago
  /s ?
bovermyer 7y ago
Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.
- jbritton 7y ago
  Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?
  - takeda 7y ago
    I miss the time when Internet was so small that a curated list was possible (Yahoo was priding itself to be biggest curated list[1]) [1] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/
    - ntsplnkv2 7y ago
      There was a post a month or two ago that talked about the design of the Yahoo homepage back then, and looking at the link again, it's striking how much more pleasurable an experience it is.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      I still have a paperback book that claimed to be a comprehensive, not curated list of internet sites. It didn't even come with electronic media as became customary with computer books later on.
  - bovermyer 7y ago
    There are multiple ways that I know of to approach this problem, but part of the experiment is to explore for yourself.
  - 101404 7y ago
    There was the Open Directory Project. Then AOL bought it and killed it. This is the archived remains: https://www.dmoz-odp.org/ https://www.dmoz-odp.org/
  - jaredsohn 7y ago
    Just open up the Internet Yellow Pages book. :) https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/1562057847 https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/15620... My family actually had a book like and I learned about a bunch of the net culture sites through it.
  - blondin 7y ago
    i might be wrong but i didn't think OP was suggesting to re-index the web. that's a totally different beast from finding an answer to a question/problem or learning a new topic. depending on what i am looking for there are a few avenues i would explore if google wasn't available. github, gitlab, & stackoverflow/stackexchange for code related stuff. wikipedia for general topics. youtube for how-tos. twitter for the news. newsletters and podcasts for links to new articles. &c.
  - techslave 7y ago
    yup. use gopher instead
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I've idly wondered what would happen if you made a search engine based on a custom crawler that only logged sites without any references to Google.
- maps7 7y ago
  Does searching articles on wikipedia count?
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    I would say that using a website's own internal search is fair game, but good luck trying to find, for example, the link to a blog you forgot the name to. You can try Wikipedia, Youtube, StackOverflow, WaPo's article, but I doubt you'll ever make your way to that blog without the URL to it.
    - abruzzi 7y ago
      The funny thing is I never book mark. Most of the sites I visit I just remember the URL. On rare occasions when I can’t remember the URL, I’ll search for in on Google. Like most people, I use Google a lot when I’m looking for things I don’t already know, but not when going to my commonly used sites. In the early 2000s I developed a website for a local public radio station. One thing it thought me was the usefulness of “speakable URLs”. Since most pages I built would require someone on the air speaking the url, they had to be short and distinctive, easy to say, and easy to remember (since the listener wouldn’t be taking notes, they had to remember it long enough to get to a computer and type it in). That got me in the habit of just remembering the URL, which I still do to this day.
- asjw 7y ago
  That could be true to some extent, but the best information I've found on the internet since 1995 have been tematic forums. Still nowadays the best use of Google for me is to find those tematic forums And I must say search result quality has declined a lot over the years with the past 3 being worse of the sum of the past 20.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ? must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)
  - walshemj 7y ago
    Back in 93/94 you could quickly scan what's new on the internet on mosaic
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      heh, that's true, the whole web graph could fit on a floppy
  - rv-de 7y ago
    Printed magazines recommending the best websites.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Web rings were common. If you visited a webpage on a particular topic, they would usually contain links to other related sites on a side bar. Dmoz was an old registry and I think Yahoo had a registry at one time as well.
    - jaredsohn 7y ago
      Yahoo was a registry back in the day.
      - projektfu 7y ago
        Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle
  - projektfu 7y ago
    Altavista was early. If you were on in 1996, that was only 5 years after the “birth” of the web. Before spiders, things were organized like Gopher. There were directories you could look up. Some pages kept archives of links. Web crawlers were introduced in 1993. At that point, gopher probably had more content. Remember WAIS? All the libraries liked that protocol. Encarta was still selling like hot cakes.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 7y ago
  Looks like the OP domain itself is a version of that. https://www.superhighway98.com/ https://www.superhighway98.com/
hombre_fatal 7y ago
> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. What does this even mean? The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work. Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how many people will write up an entire comment online or bicker IRL instead of doing a cursory search. I don't think it's the internet creating human stupidity / laziness. Unfortunately we had that long before, and search engines simply try to show the best results with minimal context. Also, I think discussion around tech would be much improved if we tried to come up with a better idea whenever we go through the trouble of complaining about something. Anyone can enumerate why things are suboptimal, and usually when you try to come up with alternatives, you find out it's just trade-offs with no ideal solution. Trying to pitch an alternative solution (like how a search engine should work) helps drill down into real conversational bedrock that's much more interesting.
- basch 7y ago
  I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find. Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside filter bubbles. Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct. Google's results are considerably worse than they were and part of that is google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    > google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions. Can you explain what this means? I see people saying this wrt to Duck Duck Go: "No, the results aren't worse, you just have to re-learn how to search with it" and all they really mean is that you need to stack more context into the search input which is strictly worse since you can already do that in Google if you need to put a finer point on your search. And they mean that since DDG doesn't know "Elm" is a programming language most of the time, by "re-learning search" they seem to mean adding "lang" to the input. Where "re-learn" seems like a romantic way to phrase this obvious problem of the search engine needing more context. In the same way I had to "re-learn how to use a keyboard" when my crappy 2017 Macbook Pro keys started coming off. How does your complaint differ from this?
tcbasche 7y ago
The irony of the big 'gmail' address at the bottom of the blog post...
- miked85 7y ago
  It always seems odd to me when owners of a domain don't use their own domain for email.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Not everyone knows how to set up forwarding.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Why bother?
    - miked85 7y ago
      1. portability, you are not locked into a provider like gmail 2. especially for businesses, it comes off as unprofessional if you are using gmail, yahoo, etc as your contact address
      - tcbasche 7y ago
        It's not overly expensive either to get a custom G Suite domain if you enjoy gmail, but don't want the domain name.
CM30 7y ago
Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO. That gets a lot of blame for ruining the internet, especially on tech sites. But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.
- CobrastanJorji 7y ago
  If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat. Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and would want to chat.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat. Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.
    - anticsapp 7y ago
      DMOZ, really? Yes, at the beginning, yes. But 5-6 years later I know plenty of companies and even bloggers who would locate a "volunteer" and ply him with hundreds or thousands of dollars to get them in, get free traffic, and that beast of a PageRank 7 link.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        Yes, but this only ever impacted categories where for-profit links are common (and over time, people learn to disregard these links). And Google Search still does a pretty good job of searching for relevant businesses, since it's one of the main things that people use it for.
    - 7y ago
gscott 7y ago
When I first starting making websites in 1996 I would market them by going to other similar websites and we would link to each other. Also, there were webrings and directories. Now if you link to each other Google thinks you are gaming their search engine and will demote your link and possibly your entire site.
fancyfredbot 7y ago
ITYM Google ruined Google?
tomaszs 7y ago
Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only concern was to guess how it may be written dont on a page, so Google can find it for me. I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better results. But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same result. Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is not. You could write an article and Google indexed it and showed it if people searched for it. Now it does not work that way. If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours. And also Patelisms. Once, a short post was enought for Google to index it. Now it has to be essencially a book. It does not need to answer any question, as long as it has a length of a book and thousands of illustrations. I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Giving the freedom to explore rather than giving cheap crappy answers.
- Avamander 7y ago
  > If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours. I empirically disagree. For me Google often shows small sites with perfect matches before big sites with vague matches and a few of my small sites also rank very well next to giants. > I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Why not use quotation marks?
  - tomaszs 7y ago
    It only proves Google is unpredictable. And this is also a sad reality. I often see "my" Google is better adjusted to find some answers but extremely lame at 90% of other queries. Ps. Quotation marks help in some degree. But the response pool is often very small. Also sometimes quotation marks return broader results than expected to
qeternity 7y ago
A lesson in optimizing the wrong cost function. The internet set information free. And like the millennia before, the masses congregated to gossip, laugh, fight, and whatever else helps pass the time.
manigandham 7y ago
Seems like the hidden complaint is that online news media is mostly bullshit.
dzonga 7y ago
which are some interesting search engines, do ya folks recommend. I recently ran into dogpile.com. really relevant results. please don't recommend ddg | bing as ddg simply mirrors bing.
- JJMcJ 7y ago
  No they use other search engines and have their own web crawler as well.
  - JJMcJ 7y ago
    That is, they use other engines besides Bing. They are not simply repackaging Bing.
remir 7y ago
It's all perspective. Google didn't ruined the internet. In fact, the internet isn't in ruin. Perhaps the author should reconsider treating Google, or any search engine, as sources of truth. And if Google ruined the internet, then why give them more power by using Gmail?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title makes no sense whatsoever. "Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any upvotes, nor deserve any (surely it's obvious that a website trying to be as many things as Google does will sometimes be inaccurate). But it would be more truthful.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Unfortunately it's the only way a lot of people find information on the Internet.
  - LoveMortuus 7y ago
    That's probably because Google is still good enough for most people, that there hasn't yet been a need to change the search engine. If Google becomes useless people will organically move to something else, of course it will first start with the tech savvy people, but as with all things it will trickle down to others. If the alternative isn't better then Google then, of course, nothing will change. I don't really see a reason why people feel the need to be so negative about pretty much everything, same goes with every aspect of life. Example: if(Donald_Trump.as(President) == Bad){ Election.vote = !Donald_Trump; }else{ Election.vote = Donald_Trump; } I am aware that this comment is more or less useless to many, but I still wanted to write it, because I have the power and the freedom to express my _opinion_, and because I still hope that there are people that will understand what I'm trying to say. Let Google be Google. If Google's vision sings the same song as the song of the people, then the people will use it. If it doesn't then people will find another search engine that will sing a song that people will like. Or in other words, I don't see a reason for us to try to change Google, if Google will want to be the primary search engine, then Google will have to change on it's own. Am I completly wrong? I Google strong enough to be able to shape the song of creation (strong enough to be able to prevent any other search engine from rising up even though the other search engine could be better)?
p2t2p 7y ago
Complains about Google ruining the Internet, has no RSS link on the website. Stop wining and be the change you seek.
madrox 7y ago
This person's argument is arguably weaker with their gmail address written out inside a H2 tag at the bottom of the page
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Actually, it isn't. It makes it immeasurably stronger. You see, you just can't get around google. They've poisoned the well in so many ways that you just have to use their products or you will end up being cut out. Email is the best example of that. Google determines who can and who can't email and the best defense against that is to make the problem worse: use a gmail address.
antirez 7y ago
Google didn't stop there. It ruined the internet even at protocols level. Google engineers didn't understand the beauty and simplicity of the original internet protocols, and were in a position to trace the evolution path of such algorithms without any of the elegance and equilibrium the original designers had. Now if you want to make an HTTP query you have to understand an incredible amount of details. Before that with adsense Google forced the web to evolve into a clickbait arena. Google is the worst thing that ever happened to the internet.
chrisco255 7y ago
In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructive, complex discussion. This is one reason I like podcasts and why, for example, Joe Rogan has become popular. The demand for long form, complex discussion is higher than the supply the internet currently provides.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  The feed competes against all the learning resources on the internet. Perhaps people in general are just tired and looking for banter, because the non-banter, however a minority, is completely discoverable.
- notacoward 7y ago
  A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anywhere. Meanwhile, content from my actual friends or people who I have demonstrated interest in is pushed way down or all the way out. All because of popularity and some very misguided notions of engagement. Bad feeds ruined the internet. I actually do think likes, stars, upvotes, whatever you want to call them are valuable forms of feedback. I like specific reactions - love, laughter, anger - even better. But I do wonder what it would be like if those only went to the poster. If they weren't shown to anyone else, and didn't affect what was shown to anyone else. I suspect that it would make "the feed" a usable model again, instead of the abomination it has become.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    On your last point, that's more or less how HN works for comments. You can't tell if a comment has been upvoted 20 times or -5 times (until it reaches the negative threshold for fading out). But I agree, that would help.
majkinetor 7y ago
The real problem that happened to Internet and is more or less predestined to happen to anything popular enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- airstrike 7y ago
  Gives a whole new meaning to that Green Day song
jrockway 7y ago
> Search for "GM" and the Gmail homepage ranks prominently. Is Google pushing its own products on people? Well, yes, but not here. This is an example of a query refinement algorithm at work. Google is altering its results in recognition of the fact that many people who search "gm" subsequently search for "gmail." I tried this and there are three news articles about General Motors, an infobox for General Motors, 4 search results for General Motors (their web page, another of their pages, a New York Times article about them, and the Wikipedia article about them), a box containing tweets from General Motors, two more news articles about General motors, and finally a link to GMail. Then the other "GMs" start, including GraphicsMagick for node.js. I think they did a pretty good job interpreting "GM" here, and I don't think the Internet is exactly ruined.
- MivLives 7y ago
  Even as a Gmail user, my results align with yours. If I type it into the browser search bar however it is the first result. This is not Google's fault, as I'm on Firefox, which is smartly trying to look for sites I frequently visit.
  - cadmuxe 7y ago
    Yeah, same here, gmail is the last result in my try. Oh, as a gmail user, why not it ranked as number 1? I don't care the GM news : ) I think people have different standard for a good/bad search result.
- midef 7y ago
  GM is in the news because of its respirator production and the search results are dynamic. I've seen Gmail rank #2 or #3 for that search.
- ntsplnkv2 7y ago
  Just tried this. GMail was the first link, validating "the Gmail homepage ranks prominently." Also, all the suggestions were gmail (before the search.) The rest of the results were GM related news/Twitter/links.
sabujp 7y ago
tldr; (don't shoot me i'm just the messenger): if google says it's true it must be. This is bad because people are dumb so they will just look at what one search engine says without checking sources and believe that to be the truth.
voz_ 7y ago
The author had a few bad queries and chalks the whole thing up to "Google Ruined the Internet". This is akin to having a bad experience with airline food and declaring that flying has ruined travel. It is absurd, it reeks of the stallman-esque style of negative, borderline luddite spew. Instead of offering a solution, this person just rants. Google has been a pivotal center of the internet - information has never been easier to find! Ease of access to information does not, however, alleviate the need placed upon the reader to sift out fact from fiction. As a thought experiment, would our luddite-esque author friend prefer that Google was the arbiter of truth, rather than trends? I certainly would not.
- midef 7y ago
  "information has never been easier to find!" I think it depends what you're looking for. I realize this is obscure, but I can't find any reference online to a big Facebook Platform developers' conference that happened in 2007. It drives me nuts because I was there at Chelsea Piers with 1,000 people, but it's like it never existed.
  - voz_ 7y ago
    Maybe I can help? Let's 1:1
  - kmstout 7y ago
    Was it this? https://web.archive.org/web/20080808121324/http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9171 https://web.archive.org/web/20080808121324/http://www.facebo...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
gumby 7y ago
Google’s mission is/was “to organize the world’s information”. There was no adjective on “organize”. “Worse is better” wins again.
- devinplatt 7y ago
  Google's mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."[1] According to a Wikipedia citation (The Guardian) this was the original mission statement.[2] [1] https://about.google https://about.google [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-page-google-dont-be-evil-sergey-brin https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-pag... Disclaimer: I work at Google.
  - gumby 7y ago
    Useful to whom is the question of course. I stopped using google a while ago because it gave me a useful response less and less frequently and I had to scroll over a lot of cruft to find a good answer if any. When google started it had the best results and no cruft. Like people who complain that the latest macs are “terrible”, perhaps I’m simply not google’s audience any more. That doesn’t make google, or me, wrong.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  By becoming so dominant they shifted from organization to inspiration, and not the good kind of inspiration, the kind where you have to spend lots of time shaping yourself to please the algorithm so that what you do and how you look is dominated by Google, whatever you're trying to do/share/sell is secondary to that.
cmckn 7y ago
> Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google successful. I don't disagree with the general point that the amount of content in today's Web makes the job of a search engine much harder. Perhaps some of Google's techniques lower the result quality for some users, for some queries. That's a much more boring title for a blog post, I guess.
- midef 7y ago
  The web wasn't mob-like at all in the beginning. Most of the content was created by reasonably educated people who were publishing because of passion, not profit or other motives.
- blahedo 7y ago
  > founded on ... the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" I started grad school at Brown in 1997 and I remember a talk there, by someone from Google or connected to it, about PageRank. PageRank was still new, Google was still in beta. Free swag from dotcoms was literally growing on trees. But I digress. I remember that the narrative about PageRank at the time was not about popularity, but about expertise. I really remember that the presenter brought up a possible threat to validity—what about gaming the system?—and pointed out that if you wanted to persuade the system that you were an expert on a thing, you could get lots of people who talk about the thing a lot to point a link at your site. BUT, he says: that shows the system works! If you can get that many people who are at least mini-experts on the thing to point to you, the only way to do that would be if you, too, were persuasively an expert on the thing. (These were... naïve times in many ways.) Twenty years ago this was highly persuasive. It was an un-game-able system, because "gaming the system" meant the system changed you. I can be pretty cynical about a lot of things, including and especially Google, but I really do think that even Google itself believed this. The company was founded on an algorithm that rewarded expertise. It turned out that the algorithm also rewarded angry, misinformed mobs, so cmckn isn't exactly wrong here. But I think it's important to be clear that to the extent that Google's algorithms have always done this, they a) weren't meant to, and b) actually didn't in the very earliest days, because the WWW link structure really did, in the 90s, work like they thought it did. (Then the measure became the target, etc etc)
schoen 7y ago
There's actually a person named Henry Beard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard (I have several of his humorous Latin phrasebooks.)
cletus 7y ago
What a bizarre piece. We have low-quality content generation not because of Google but because of the low cost of publishing (which the author even mentions). It's exactly why we have email spam: it costs nothing to send. To repurpose a Chris Rock bit, "if sending an email cost $5,000 you'd have no more spam email". What's the alternative being touted here? No Google? Making things harder to find? Seriously? I'd say a far bigger issue is people sharing content from and to people who think the same, creating these myopic echo chambers of self-reinforcing beliefs. Google may do a questionable job at filtering out provably false content but people are way worse at that. Within such a system it's too easy to foster fear, anger and hate and to propagate provably false information. Anti-vaxxers are just one such group that seem to thrive in this informationless world.
- jmiskovic 7y ago
  Over last decade or so google is becoming less and less helpful. Results are not user-oriented and they can be far removed from original search queries. This is google's fault, they are for-profit organization with own agenda. Google's usage of your personal data to custom-tailor results to your bubble also contributes to echo chamber. There are also other factors. There is a vast decrease of internet's signal-to-noise ratio due to low-cost content you mentioned. For a while we could rely on google to get us through the jungle to useful information. Now every SEO is targeting google search. Most other search engines use google's results, so no help there. Blaming google doesn't help, their interests are not aligned with user interests. Author is actually criticizing us and our dependence on this one-size-fits-all source of information. The alternative is building and adopting better alternatives to google search.
soneca 7y ago
I think I am much more likely to find the truth about a question I have with Google than asking on a BBS forum or browsing through a curated list of links on Yahoo. That's like saying Gutenberg ruined books because now I can find books full of BS.
longtimegoogler 7y ago
My thesis is that smart phones ruined the internet with the rise of Apps and a different, less text-based interaction with the internet. In general, I think we would all be better off if phones just supported calling and texting.
bravoetch 7y ago
The internet is not ruined just because Google sucks.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  More like Google is the mascot for the Internet sucking. Or at least a certain part of the transition.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  How does Google suck here? Do people actually expect Google to hire millions of extra employees or develop hard AI to rank every single webpage in their index by accuracy? I don't see any practical alternative to how it already works.
beastman82 7y ago
Happily no one is required to use their services
wslh 7y ago
100% correct. I am right now doing an experiment and observing that posting everyday some low quality text spinned articles amplified the high quality articles at the point where some obscure high quality articles with ZERO organic traffic for months suddenly received organic traffic.
dang 7y ago
We've rewritten the linkbait title, as the site guidelines ask. I used what seems to be the first netural and representative phrase from the article itself. If someone can suggest language that's more neutral and representative, we can change it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
colechristensen 7y ago
Alternative thread: Google shapes the Internet and that shape leaves many things in ruins. Google shapes the Internet by motivating so many people to produce content to make money through advertising. Most people make virtually nothing, a few people make a lot. There is an enormous amount of content on the internet whose driving purpose of making money is secondary to that of sharing something with the world. Google shapes the Internet through it's algorithm. Ever read or angrily scroll through pages of BS when trying to find a recipe? The only reason anyone does that is for google. My grandmother's recipe for deviled eggs was stored on an index card in a box on the stove. I bet it didn't have 200 bytes of data. A search algorithm can't do much with that so everybody has to add a grand story about their grandmother, her toenails, and how nice a vacation to the Balkans was which nobody ever actually took. It also has to be on top to force people to spend more time on the site, so they're more "engaged". I just want to know a good amount of time to hard boil eggs in an instant pot, but fuck me for wanting to know the number of minutes. "Organizing information" became being as much of an impediment as possible and directing me to the winner of the SEO race. Before Internet advertising was so popular people would put things out there much more just because they wanted to, not for some profit motive. Now everybody doing that is doing it on somebody else's platform, making somebody else money, and often tracking everybody who comes past. Much of the ruins are "caused" by Google, because Google won the race, next in line would have done the same thing. Probably. It occasionally brings up the question of how to fix it. That probably requires new transport layers, new browsers, and well chosen limitations. Doubtful it would get off the ground. Decentralized solutions tend to get overwhelmed with extremely unsavory things. A new "browser" based on an entirely different stack would be hard to compete, especially if your goal was eliminating ads and tracking and general money-grubbing.
l0b0 7y ago
I really wish there still existed a search engine which would absolutely, without reservation of any sort, simply respect the quote and minus operators. I searched both DDG and Google this morning for something with a minus operator, and the search results for both included the unwanted keyword in the bloody page title. And no, quotes never ever meant "search for similar terms", but the big players now just ignore all the syntax the power users have been used to for decades. Luckily the "site:" prefix still seems to work, but for how long?
- chris_f 7y ago
  Check out Runnaroo. It will respect those operators better than most. Disclosure, this is my side project. It aggregates results from about 30 different vertical search engines based on the query. Google is actually the source for the web results. Here's an example search for "GM" (saw that discussed earlier in this thread): https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=GM https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=GM
- pteraspidomorph 7y ago
  I've been starting to get worse results for DDG in the last few months. What's with that? Why??? Talk about not knowing your audience.
userbinator 7y ago
IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherwise mostly relevant; but now you get only sites claiming to sell it to you, and more SEO spam. Two more examples are error messages and IC part markings --- searches are flooded with results that do not even contain all the words in the query. I didn't put those words there for no reason, ignoring them is absolutely unacceptable. This becomes ridiculous when you search for error numbers, where a search containing the exact number and the word "error" gets flooded with plenty of useless results about other errors.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  I'm just glad I'm not alone, sometimes I second guess if I am the problem. Currently just to get basically workable results I'm finding myself putting "every" "keyword" "in" "quotes" (to make sure they're actually in the result pages at all), the site: modifier to restrict it to real sites, and negative modifiers (-"keyword") to remove some SEO results. Google used to be "magic" in that it knew what you were thinking, and gave you what you wanted instead of what you asked for. These days it is just page after page of auto-generated results, pages that don't contain anything relevant to your query, or just low quality results. I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in Google's search, and I'm sure they're meeting some metric or another, but from my perspective things have gone seriously downhill to the point where I am looking elsewhere. It used to be THE technical search engine de jure. Now it feels like a search engine you have to hack to get it to work well. Not a good place to be. PS - I have read, in HN comments (so pure rumor) from self-proclaimed ex-Googlers, that Google's internal culture punishes people for improvements/maintenance to existing products, and that promotions come from developing new products/features. If even semi-accurate might go a long way to explaining why Google Search feels neglected aside from changes which seem to exist to improve their button line/promote sister products.
  - nradov 7y ago
malandrew 7y ago
It also emphasizes liberal media over conservative media. It's often more challenging then it needs to be to find conservative content even when you know what you're looking for and you're trying to find it again.
not2b 7y ago
Google was designed to prioritize popularity from the very beginning: that's what their original PageRank algorithm did. Their algorithm has no way of knowing a concept like "accurate". If almost all of the links on a given topic go to BlatantlyWrong.com, and when everyone clicks on the BlatantlyWrong.com link and not the AccurateButBoring.org result that is #2 on the page, the users will reinforce the wrong answer.
adelHBN 7y ago
Can anyone suggest alternative search engines, please? I research the following two areas (1) history and (2) website maintenance and SEO info. Thanks in advance.
_trampeltier 7y ago
I tryed to search an article / press release, I saw about Corona in january. But it seems I can't search for "just from january" there is now so much news about Corona out there, there is no chance to find this article. And much worse, even I know some key words, Google does present most of the search results by totaly ignoring the half of my keywords.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  I don't understand. Are you filtering by date? This is one of the search tools from Google.
snowsilence 7y ago
Oh, is it just Google? I thought it was ... everything.
wildpeaks 7y ago
As an experiment, I have taken the habit in the past year to write down search queries I'm making along with a short explanation of what I expect to find (and sometimes even comments on the results) as I was also starting to wonder if I'm the problem given results seemed to get less and less relevant for a while. With the benefit of hindsight, I'd highly recommend it and confirmed my suspicion that my queries weren't the problem, unfortunately. It also showed queries are usually only advanced topics as one of my other habits (writing down summarized information in my wiki) lets me usually skip searching online for low-hanging fruits or information I already encountered.
justlexi93 7y ago
Google search is not working anymore. Google abandoned Google search altogether. It’s defunct. Google started with search engine innovation and now, like many other businesses in capitalism, abandoned the very essence of its business for short gain reasons. Google, Microsoft, Apple, they all failed customers miserably.
distdev89 7y ago
Rubbish! I just searched for `gm` no capitalization, nothing and got a page full of results for General Motors, from news articles to the wikipedia page. I searched for `dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth` You do see the excerpt, but right underneath that you see the Snopes link. I don't think Google should be in the business of debunking articles written years ago. As long as it's relevance algorithms can brings up contrasting sources, in this case the ABC news article and the Snopes stories. It's bad journalism from ABC that they haven't marked that article as redacted even though it's been proven false. Recently I remember, seeing that the google card UI for the news marked an article as Satire, because in-fact it was a Satire article. I'm not sure if that's because the original article embedded some information that helped Google discover this. They do a pretty good job at organizing information and making it available.
rob74 7y ago
One example I came across recently: if you search for "Amiga floppy disk capacity" (https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity), you get "1.76 MB", which is completely wrong. Of course, the Wikipedia article which Google's algorithm chose to extract this information from doesn't mention the actual capacity of "standard" Amiga floppies (880 KB): "Most Amiga programs were distributed on double-density floppy disks. There are also 3.5-inch high-density floppy disks, which hold up to 1.76 MB of data, but these are uncommon." - so Google picked the first number it found (the "uncommon" one) and ran with it. I'm just wondering which executive thought having this "feature" would be a good idea?!
- devinplatt 7y ago
  You can provide feedback on the answer card. I've had a few answer cards fixed after providing feedback. Notably "https port" used to yield the http port. Edit: I think you've actually managed to find a really terrific example of a case where modern ML systems are going to have trouble, because of how that Wikipedia page is worded in relation to the query. * There isn't a single phrase that answers the query directly, so the ML model would need to make very good use of context (attention), both within multiclause sentences and between paragraphs. * There are many different numbers on the page, so the model has to determine the right one. It can't just get lucky by guessing here. * A wrong number (1.7MB) has close proximity to literal keywords in the query (floppy, disk). (The right number [880KB] does too.) * The model has to understand and properly make use of "most" vs "unusual" in its decision.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Speaking of popularity over accuracy: > Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need. I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently, and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is not showing that message. It's actually explained quite explicitly in the movie that the fatness of people is the side effect of prolonged stay in space, and not of their dependence on technology.
- titzer 7y ago
  Not sure I got that message, considering the bulk of the population motors around on their little cushy chairs, drinks slurpies all day, and is endlessly served by robots, never doing any strenuous work at all, and only interacts with their screens. The spaceship has artificial gravity, artificial sun, artificial everything. The movie is one huge anti-consumerism screed.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It was a cruise ship converted to an ark. It was meant to stay in space for a short time, precisely because of (as one scene in the movie explained) long-term exposure leading people to grow fat and weak.
toto444 7y ago
The worst is when you search for important information and you get flooded with SEO crap. Try searching for 'retirement for French people leaving in the UK'... It is close to impossible to find anything relevant.
oytis 7y ago
Well, if you can solve Google's deficiencies, you can become the next internet billionaire.
amelius 7y ago
Who cares whether you return accurate results if you can send the user down a rabbit-hole of some completely irrelevant topic?
Razengan 7y ago
Google has been emphasizing click-baity results for years now. A moderately complex query for X will usually be filled with "Top 10 X" or ignores the context. Their results (on web search as well as YouTube) also seem to be biased against Apple and Microsoft which feels a bit scummy.

443 points by midef 7y ago

google has never been good. Sheeple just jumped on the band wagon and started using it despite it never being any better than the compition. People are dumb and instead of trying to learn they would rather just follow.

chance_state 7y ago
/s ?

bovermyer 7y ago

Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

jbritton 7y ago
Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?
- takeda 7y ago
  I miss the time when Internet was so small that a curated list was possible (Yahoo was priding itself to be biggest curated list[1]) [1] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/
  - ntsplnkv2 7y ago
    There was a post a month or two ago that talked about the design of the Yahoo homepage back then, and looking at the link again, it's striking how much more pleasurable an experience it is.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I still have a paperback book that claimed to be a comprehensive, not curated list of internet sites. It didn't even come with electronic media as became customary with computer books later on.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  There are multiple ways that I know of to approach this problem, but part of the experiment is to explore for yourself.
- 101404 7y ago
  There was the Open Directory Project. Then AOL bought it and killed it. This is the archived remains: https://www.dmoz-odp.org/ https://www.dmoz-odp.org/
- jaredsohn 7y ago
  Just open up the Internet Yellow Pages book. :) https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/1562057847 https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/15620... My family actually had a book like and I learned about a bunch of the net culture sites through it.
- blondin 7y ago
  i might be wrong but i didn't think OP was suggesting to re-index the web. that's a totally different beast from finding an answer to a question/problem or learning a new topic. depending on what i am looking for there are a few avenues i would explore if google wasn't available. github, gitlab, & stackoverflow/stackexchange for code related stuff. wikipedia for general topics. youtube for how-tos. twitter for the news. newsletters and podcasts for links to new articles. &c.
- techslave 7y ago
  yup. use gopher instead
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I've idly wondered what would happen if you made a search engine based on a custom crawler that only logged sites without any references to Google.
maps7 7y ago
Does searching articles on wikipedia count?
- ehsankia 7y ago
  I would say that using a website's own internal search is fair game, but good luck trying to find, for example, the link to a blog you forgot the name to. You can try Wikipedia, Youtube, StackOverflow, WaPo's article, but I doubt you'll ever make your way to that blog without the URL to it.
  - abruzzi 7y ago
    The funny thing is I never book mark. Most of the sites I visit I just remember the URL. On rare occasions when I can’t remember the URL, I’ll search for in on Google. Like most people, I use Google a lot when I’m looking for things I don’t already know, but not when going to my commonly used sites. In the early 2000s I developed a website for a local public radio station. One thing it thought me was the usefulness of “speakable URLs”. Since most pages I built would require someone on the air speaking the url, they had to be short and distinctive, easy to say, and easy to remember (since the listener wouldn’t be taking notes, they had to remember it long enough to get to a computer and type it in). That got me in the habit of just remembering the URL, which I still do to this day.
asjw 7y ago
That could be true to some extent, but the best information I've found on the internet since 1995 have been tematic forums. Still nowadays the best use of Google for me is to find those tematic forums And I must say search result quality has declined a lot over the years with the past 3 being worse of the sum of the past 20.
agumonkey 7y ago
I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ? must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)
- walshemj 7y ago
  Back in 93/94 you could quickly scan what's new on the internet on mosaic
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    heh, that's true, the whole web graph could fit on a floppy
- rv-de 7y ago
  Printed magazines recommending the best websites.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Web rings were common. If you visited a webpage on a particular topic, they would usually contain links to other related sites on a side bar. Dmoz was an old registry and I think Yahoo had a registry at one time as well.
  - jaredsohn 7y ago
    Yahoo was a registry back in the day.
    - projektfu 7y ago
      Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle
- projektfu 7y ago
  Altavista was early. If you were on in 1996, that was only 5 years after the “birth” of the web. Before spiders, things were organized like Gopher. There were directories you could look up. Some pages kept archives of links. Web crawlers were introduced in 1993. At that point, gopher probably had more content. Remember WAIS? All the libraries liked that protocol. Encarta was still selling like hot cakes.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dang 7y ago
Looks like the OP domain itself is a version of that. https://www.superhighway98.com/ https://www.superhighway98.com/

hombre_fatal 7y ago

> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. What does this even mean? The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work. Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how many people will write up an entire comment online or bicker IRL instead of doing a cursory search. I don't think it's the internet creating human stupidity / laziness. Unfortunately we had that long before, and search engines simply try to show the best results with minimal context. Also, I think discussion around tech would be much improved if we tried to come up with a better idea whenever we go through the trouble of complaining about something. Anyone can enumerate why things are suboptimal, and usually when you try to come up with alternatives, you find out it's just trade-offs with no ideal solution. Trying to pitch an alternative solution (like how a search engine should work) helps drill down into real conversational bedrock that's much more interesting.

basch 7y ago
I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find. Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside filter bubbles. Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct. Google's results are considerably worse than they were and part of that is google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  > google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions. Can you explain what this means? I see people saying this wrt to Duck Duck Go: "No, the results aren't worse, you just have to re-learn how to search with it" and all they really mean is that you need to stack more context into the search input which is strictly worse since you can already do that in Google if you need to put a finer point on your search. And they mean that since DDG doesn't know "Elm" is a programming language most of the time, by "re-learning search" they seem to mean adding "lang" to the input. Where "re-learn" seems like a romantic way to phrase this obvious problem of the search engine needing more context. In the same way I had to "re-learn how to use a keyboard" when my crappy 2017 Macbook Pro keys started coming off. How does your complaint differ from this?

tcbasche 7y ago

The irony of the big 'gmail' address at the bottom of the blog post...

miked85 7y ago
It always seems odd to me when owners of a domain don't use their own domain for email.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Not everyone knows how to set up forwarding.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Why bother?
  - miked85 7y ago
    1. portability, you are not locked into a provider like gmail 2. especially for businesses, it comes off as unprofessional if you are using gmail, yahoo, etc as your contact address
    - tcbasche 7y ago
      It's not overly expensive either to get a custom G Suite domain if you enjoy gmail, but don't want the domain name.

CM30 7y ago

Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO. That gets a lot of blame for ruining the internet, especially on tech sites. But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.

CobrastanJorji 7y ago
If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat. Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and would want to chat.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat. Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.
  - anticsapp 7y ago
    DMOZ, really? Yes, at the beginning, yes. But 5-6 years later I know plenty of companies and even bloggers who would locate a "volunteer" and ply him with hundreds or thousands of dollars to get them in, get free traffic, and that beast of a PageRank 7 link.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      Yes, but this only ever impacted categories where for-profit links are common (and over time, people learn to disregard these links). And Google Search still does a pretty good job of searching for relevant businesses, since it's one of the main things that people use it for.
  - 7y ago

gscott 7y ago

When I first starting making websites in 1996 I would market them by going to other similar websites and we would link to each other. Also, there were webrings and directories. Now if you link to each other Google thinks you are gaming their search engine and will demote your link and possibly your entire site.

fancyfredbot 7y ago

ITYM Google ruined Google?

tomaszs 7y ago

Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only concern was to guess how it may be written dont on a page, so Google can find it for me. I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better results. But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same result. Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is not. You could write an article and Google indexed it and showed it if people searched for it. Now it does not work that way. If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours. And also Patelisms. Once, a short post was enought for Google to index it. Now it has to be essencially a book. It does not need to answer any question, as long as it has a length of a book and thousands of illustrations. I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Giving the freedom to explore rather than giving cheap crappy answers.

Avamander 7y ago
> If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours. I empirically disagree. For me Google often shows small sites with perfect matches before big sites with vague matches and a few of my small sites also rank very well next to giants. > I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Why not use quotation marks?
- tomaszs 7y ago
  It only proves Google is unpredictable. And this is also a sad reality. I often see "my" Google is better adjusted to find some answers but extremely lame at 90% of other queries. Ps. Quotation marks help in some degree. But the response pool is often very small. Also sometimes quotation marks return broader results than expected to

qeternity 7y ago

A lesson in optimizing the wrong cost function. The internet set information free. And like the millennia before, the masses congregated to gossip, laugh, fight, and whatever else helps pass the time.

manigandham 7y ago

Seems like the hidden complaint is that online news media is mostly bullshit.

dzonga 7y ago

which are some interesting search engines, do ya folks recommend. I recently ran into dogpile.com. really relevant results. please don't recommend ddg | bing as ddg simply mirrors bing.

JJMcJ 7y ago
No they use other search engines and have their own web crawler as well.
- JJMcJ 7y ago
  That is, they use other engines besides Bing. They are not simply repackaging Bing.

remir 7y ago

It's all perspective. Google didn't ruined the internet. In fact, the internet isn't in ruin. Perhaps the author should reconsider treating Google, or any search engine, as sources of truth. And if Google ruined the internet, then why give them more power by using Gmail?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title makes no sense whatsoever. "Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any upvotes, nor deserve any (surely it's obvious that a website trying to be as many things as Google does will sometimes be inaccurate). But it would be more truthful.

userbinator 7y ago
Unfortunately it's the only way a lot of people find information on the Internet.
- LoveMortuus 7y ago
  That's probably because Google is still good enough for most people, that there hasn't yet been a need to change the search engine. If Google becomes useless people will organically move to something else, of course it will first start with the tech savvy people, but as with all things it will trickle down to others. If the alternative isn't better then Google then, of course, nothing will change. I don't really see a reason why people feel the need to be so negative about pretty much everything, same goes with every aspect of life. Example: if(Donald_Trump.as(President) == Bad){ Election.vote = !Donald_Trump; }else{ Election.vote = Donald_Trump; } I am aware that this comment is more or less useless to many, but I still wanted to write it, because I have the power and the freedom to express my _opinion_, and because I still hope that there are people that will understand what I'm trying to say. Let Google be Google. If Google's vision sings the same song as the song of the people, then the people will use it. If it doesn't then people will find another search engine that will sing a song that people will like. Or in other words, I don't see a reason for us to try to change Google, if Google will want to be the primary search engine, then Google will have to change on it's own. Am I completly wrong? I Google strong enough to be able to shape the song of creation (strong enough to be able to prevent any other search engine from rising up even though the other search engine could be better)?

p2t2p 7y ago

Complains about Google ruining the Internet, has no RSS link on the website. Stop wining and be the change you seek.

madrox 7y ago

This person's argument is arguably weaker with their gmail address written out inside a H2 tag at the bottom of the page

jacquesm 7y ago
Actually, it isn't. It makes it immeasurably stronger. You see, you just can't get around google. They've poisoned the well in so many ways that you just have to use their products or you will end up being cut out. Email is the best example of that. Google determines who can and who can't email and the best defense against that is to make the problem worse: use a gmail address.

antirez 7y ago

Google didn't stop there. It ruined the internet even at protocols level. Google engineers didn't understand the beauty and simplicity of the original internet protocols, and were in a position to trace the evolution path of such algorithms without any of the elegance and equilibrium the original designers had. Now if you want to make an HTTP query you have to understand an incredible amount of details. Before that with adsense Google forced the web to evolve into a clickbait arena. Google is the worst thing that ever happened to the internet.

chrisco255 7y ago

In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructive, complex discussion. This is one reason I like podcasts and why, for example, Joe Rogan has become popular. The demand for long form, complex discussion is higher than the supply the internet currently provides.

threatofrain 7y ago
The feed competes against all the learning resources on the internet. Perhaps people in general are just tired and looking for banter, because the non-banter, however a minority, is completely discoverable.
notacoward 7y ago
A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anywhere. Meanwhile, content from my actual friends or people who I have demonstrated interest in is pushed way down or all the way out. All because of popularity and some very misguided notions of engagement. Bad feeds ruined the internet. I actually do think likes, stars, upvotes, whatever you want to call them are valuable forms of feedback. I like specific reactions - love, laughter, anger - even better. But I do wonder what it would be like if those only went to the poster. If they weren't shown to anyone else, and didn't affect what was shown to anyone else. I suspect that it would make "the feed" a usable model again, instead of the abomination it has become.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  On your last point, that's more or less how HN works for comments. You can't tell if a comment has been upvoted 20 times or -5 times (until it reaches the negative threshold for fading out). But I agree, that would help.

majkinetor 7y ago

The real problem that happened to Internet and is more or less predestined to happen to anything popular enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

airstrike 7y ago
Gives a whole new meaning to that Green Day song

jrockway 7y ago

> Search for "GM" and the Gmail homepage ranks prominently. Is Google pushing its own products on people? Well, yes, but not here. This is an example of a query refinement algorithm at work. Google is altering its results in recognition of the fact that many people who search "gm" subsequently search for "gmail." I tried this and there are three news articles about General Motors, an infobox for General Motors, 4 search results for General Motors (their web page, another of their pages, a New York Times article about them, and the Wikipedia article about them), a box containing tweets from General Motors, two more news articles about General motors, and finally a link to GMail. Then the other "GMs" start, including GraphicsMagick for node.js. I think they did a pretty good job interpreting "GM" here, and I don't think the Internet is exactly ruined.

MivLives 7y ago
Even as a Gmail user, my results align with yours. If I type it into the browser search bar however it is the first result. This is not Google's fault, as I'm on Firefox, which is smartly trying to look for sites I frequently visit.
- cadmuxe 7y ago
  Yeah, same here, gmail is the last result in my try. Oh, as a gmail user, why not it ranked as number 1? I don't care the GM news : ) I think people have different standard for a good/bad search result.
midef 7y ago
GM is in the news because of its respirator production and the search results are dynamic. I've seen Gmail rank #2 or #3 for that search.
ntsplnkv2 7y ago
Just tried this. GMail was the first link, validating "the Gmail homepage ranks prominently." Also, all the suggestions were gmail (before the search.) The rest of the results were GM related news/Twitter/links.

sabujp 7y ago

tldr; (don't shoot me i'm just the messenger): if google says it's true it must be. This is bad because people are dumb so they will just look at what one search engine says without checking sources and believe that to be the truth.

voz_ 7y ago

The author had a few bad queries and chalks the whole thing up to "Google Ruined the Internet". This is akin to having a bad experience with airline food and declaring that flying has ruined travel. It is absurd, it reeks of the stallman-esque style of negative, borderline luddite spew. Instead of offering a solution, this person just rants. Google has been a pivotal center of the internet - information has never been easier to find! Ease of access to information does not, however, alleviate the need placed upon the reader to sift out fact from fiction. As a thought experiment, would our luddite-esque author friend prefer that Google was the arbiter of truth, rather than trends? I certainly would not.

midef 7y ago
"information has never been easier to find!" I think it depends what you're looking for. I realize this is obscure, but I can't find any reference online to a big Facebook Platform developers' conference that happened in 2007. It drives me nuts because I was there at Chelsea Piers with 1,000 people, but it's like it never existed.
- voz_ 7y ago
  Maybe I can help? Let's 1:1
- kmstout 7y ago
  Was it this? https://web.archive.org/web/20080808121324/http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9171 https://web.archive.org/web/20080808121324/http://www.facebo...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

gumby 7y ago

Google’s mission is/was “to organize the world’s information”. There was no adjective on “organize”. “Worse is better” wins again.

devinplatt 7y ago
Google's mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."[1] According to a Wikipedia citation (The Guardian) this was the original mission statement.[2] [1] https://about.google https://about.google [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-page-google-dont-be-evil-sergey-brin https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-pag... Disclaimer: I work at Google.
- gumby 7y ago
  Useful to whom is the question of course. I stopped using google a while ago because it gave me a useful response less and less frequently and I had to scroll over a lot of cruft to find a good answer if any. When google started it had the best results and no cruft. Like people who complain that the latest macs are “terrible”, perhaps I’m simply not google’s audience any more. That doesn’t make google, or me, wrong.
colechristensen 7y ago
By becoming so dominant they shifted from organization to inspiration, and not the good kind of inspiration, the kind where you have to spend lots of time shaping yourself to please the algorithm so that what you do and how you look is dominated by Google, whatever you're trying to do/share/sell is secondary to that.

cmckn 7y ago

> Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google successful. I don't disagree with the general point that the amount of content in today's Web makes the job of a search engine much harder. Perhaps some of Google's techniques lower the result quality for some users, for some queries. That's a much more boring title for a blog post, I guess.

midef 7y ago
The web wasn't mob-like at all in the beginning. Most of the content was created by reasonably educated people who were publishing because of passion, not profit or other motives.
blahedo 7y ago
> founded on ... the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" I started grad school at Brown in 1997 and I remember a talk there, by someone from Google or connected to it, about PageRank. PageRank was still new, Google was still in beta. Free swag from dotcoms was literally growing on trees. But I digress. I remember that the narrative about PageRank at the time was not about popularity, but about expertise. I really remember that the presenter brought up a possible threat to validity—what about gaming the system?—and pointed out that if you wanted to persuade the system that you were an expert on a thing, you could get lots of people who talk about the thing a lot to point a link at your site. BUT, he says: that shows the system works! If you can get that many people who are at least mini-experts on the thing to point to you, the only way to do that would be if you, too, were persuasively an expert on the thing. (These were... naïve times in many ways.) Twenty years ago this was highly persuasive. It was an un-game-able system, because "gaming the system" meant the system changed you. I can be pretty cynical about a lot of things, including and especially Google, but I really do think that even Google itself believed this. The company was founded on an algorithm that rewarded expertise. It turned out that the algorithm also rewarded angry, misinformed mobs, so cmckn isn't exactly wrong here. But I think it's important to be clear that to the extent that Google's algorithms have always done this, they a) weren't meant to, and b) actually didn't in the very earliest days, because the WWW link structure really did, in the 90s, work like they thought it did. (Then the measure became the target, etc etc)

schoen 7y ago

There's actually a person named Henry Beard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard (I have several of his humorous Latin phrasebooks.)

cletus 7y ago

What a bizarre piece. We have low-quality content generation not because of Google but because of the low cost of publishing (which the author even mentions). It's exactly why we have email spam: it costs nothing to send. To repurpose a Chris Rock bit, "if sending an email cost $5,000 you'd have no more spam email". What's the alternative being touted here? No Google? Making things harder to find? Seriously? I'd say a far bigger issue is people sharing content from and to people who think the same, creating these myopic echo chambers of self-reinforcing beliefs. Google may do a questionable job at filtering out provably false content but people are way worse at that. Within such a system it's too easy to foster fear, anger and hate and to propagate provably false information. Anti-vaxxers are just one such group that seem to thrive in this informationless world.

jmiskovic 7y ago
Over last decade or so google is becoming less and less helpful. Results are not user-oriented and they can be far removed from original search queries. This is google's fault, they are for-profit organization with own agenda. Google's usage of your personal data to custom-tailor results to your bubble also contributes to echo chamber. There are also other factors. There is a vast decrease of internet's signal-to-noise ratio due to low-cost content you mentioned. For a while we could rely on google to get us through the jungle to useful information. Now every SEO is targeting google search. Most other search engines use google's results, so no help there. Blaming google doesn't help, their interests are not aligned with user interests. Author is actually criticizing us and our dependence on this one-size-fits-all source of information. The alternative is building and adopting better alternatives to google search.

soneca 7y ago

I think I am much more likely to find the truth about a question I have with Google than asking on a BBS forum or browsing through a curated list of links on Yahoo. That's like saying Gutenberg ruined books because now I can find books full of BS.

longtimegoogler 7y ago

My thesis is that smart phones ruined the internet with the rise of Apps and a different, less text-based interaction with the internet. In general, I think we would all be better off if phones just supported calling and texting.

bravoetch 7y ago

The internet is not ruined just because Google sucks.

colechristensen 7y ago
More like Google is the mascot for the Internet sucking. Or at least a certain part of the transition.
jimmaswell 7y ago
How does Google suck here? Do people actually expect Google to hire millions of extra employees or develop hard AI to rank every single webpage in their index by accuracy? I don't see any practical alternative to how it already works.

beastman82 7y ago

Happily no one is required to use their services

wslh 7y ago

100% correct. I am right now doing an experiment and observing that posting everyday some low quality text spinned articles amplified the high quality articles at the point where some obscure high quality articles with ZERO organic traffic for months suddenly received organic traffic.

dang 7y ago

We've rewritten the linkbait title, as the site guidelines ask. I used what seems to be the first netural and representative phrase from the article itself. If someone can suggest language that's more neutral and representative, we can change it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

colechristensen 7y ago

Alternative thread: Google shapes the Internet and that shape leaves many things in ruins. Google shapes the Internet by motivating so many people to produce content to make money through advertising. Most people make virtually nothing, a few people make a lot. There is an enormous amount of content on the internet whose driving purpose of making money is secondary to that of sharing something with the world. Google shapes the Internet through it's algorithm. Ever read or angrily scroll through pages of BS when trying to find a recipe? The only reason anyone does that is for google. My grandmother's recipe for deviled eggs was stored on an index card in a box on the stove. I bet it didn't have 200 bytes of data. A search algorithm can't do much with that so everybody has to add a grand story about their grandmother, her toenails, and how nice a vacation to the Balkans was which nobody ever actually took. It also has to be on top to force people to spend more time on the site, so they're more "engaged". I just want to know a good amount of time to hard boil eggs in an instant pot, but fuck me for wanting to know the number of minutes. "Organizing information" became being as much of an impediment as possible and directing me to the winner of the SEO race. Before Internet advertising was so popular people would put things out there much more just because they wanted to, not for some profit motive. Now everybody doing that is doing it on somebody else's platform, making somebody else money, and often tracking everybody who comes past. Much of the ruins are "caused" by Google, because Google won the race, next in line would have done the same thing. Probably. It occasionally brings up the question of how to fix it. That probably requires new transport layers, new browsers, and well chosen limitations. Doubtful it would get off the ground. Decentralized solutions tend to get overwhelmed with extremely unsavory things. A new "browser" based on an entirely different stack would be hard to compete, especially if your goal was eliminating ads and tracking and general money-grubbing.

l0b0 7y ago

I really wish there still existed a search engine which would absolutely, without reservation of any sort, simply respect the quote and minus operators. I searched both DDG and Google this morning for something with a minus operator, and the search results for both included the unwanted keyword in the bloody page title. And no, quotes never ever meant "search for similar terms", but the big players now just ignore all the syntax the power users have been used to for decades. Luckily the "site:" prefix still seems to work, but for how long?

chris_f 7y ago
Check out Runnaroo. It will respect those operators better than most. Disclosure, this is my side project. It aggregates results from about 30 different vertical search engines based on the query. Google is actually the source for the web results. Here's an example search for "GM" (saw that discussed earlier in this thread): https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=GM https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=GM
pteraspidomorph 7y ago
I've been starting to get worse results for DDG in the last few months. What's with that? Why??? Talk about not knowing your audience.

userbinator 7y ago

IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherwise mostly relevant; but now you get only sites claiming to sell it to you, and more SEO spam. Two more examples are error messages and IC part markings --- searches are flooded with results that do not even contain all the words in the query. I didn't put those words there for no reason, ignoring them is absolutely unacceptable. This becomes ridiculous when you search for error numbers, where a search containing the exact number and the word "error" gets flooded with plenty of useless results about other errors.

Someone1234 7y ago
I'm just glad I'm not alone, sometimes I second guess if I am the problem. Currently just to get basically workable results I'm finding myself putting "every" "keyword" "in" "quotes" (to make sure they're actually in the result pages at all), the site: modifier to restrict it to real sites, and negative modifiers (-"keyword") to remove some SEO results. Google used to be "magic" in that it knew what you were thinking, and gave you what you wanted instead of what you asked for. These days it is just page after page of auto-generated results, pages that don't contain anything relevant to your query, or just low quality results. I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in Google's search, and I'm sure they're meeting some metric or another, but from my perspective things have gone seriously downhill to the point where I am looking elsewhere. It used to be THE technical search engine de jure. Now it feels like a search engine you have to hack to get it to work well. Not a good place to be. PS - I have read, in HN comments (so pure rumor) from self-proclaimed ex-Googlers, that Google's internal culture punishes people for improvements/maintenance to existing products, and that promotions come from developing new products/features. If even semi-accurate might go a long way to explaining why Google Search feels neglected aside from changes which seem to exist to improve their button line/promote sister products.
- nradov 7y ago

malandrew 7y ago

It also emphasizes liberal media over conservative media. It's often more challenging then it needs to be to find conservative content even when you know what you're looking for and you're trying to find it again.

not2b 7y ago

Google was designed to prioritize popularity from the very beginning: that's what their original PageRank algorithm did. Their algorithm has no way of knowing a concept like "accurate". If almost all of the links on a given topic go to BlatantlyWrong.com, and when everyone clicks on the BlatantlyWrong.com link and not the AccurateButBoring.org result that is #2 on the page, the users will reinforce the wrong answer.

adelHBN 7y ago

Can anyone suggest alternative search engines, please? I research the following two areas (1) history and (2) website maintenance and SEO info. Thanks in advance.

_trampeltier 7y ago

I tryed to search an article / press release, I saw about Corona in january. But it seems I can't search for "just from january" there is now so much news about Corona out there, there is no chance to find this article. And much worse, even I know some key words, Google does present most of the search results by totaly ignoring the half of my keywords.

jessriedel 7y ago
I don't understand. Are you filtering by date? This is one of the search tools from Google.

snowsilence 7y ago

Oh, is it just Google? I thought it was ... everything.

wildpeaks 7y ago

As an experiment, I have taken the habit in the past year to write down search queries I'm making along with a short explanation of what I expect to find (and sometimes even comments on the results) as I was also starting to wonder if I'm the problem given results seemed to get less and less relevant for a while. With the benefit of hindsight, I'd highly recommend it and confirmed my suspicion that my queries weren't the problem, unfortunately. It also showed queries are usually only advanced topics as one of my other habits (writing down summarized information in my wiki) lets me usually skip searching online for low-hanging fruits or information I already encountered.

justlexi93 7y ago

Google search is not working anymore. Google abandoned Google search altogether. It’s defunct. Google started with search engine innovation and now, like many other businesses in capitalism, abandoned the very essence of its business for short gain reasons. Google, Microsoft, Apple, they all failed customers miserably.

distdev89 7y ago

Rubbish! I just searched for `gm` no capitalization, nothing and got a page full of results for General Motors, from news articles to the wikipedia page. I searched for `dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth` You do see the excerpt, but right underneath that you see the Snopes link. I don't think Google should be in the business of debunking articles written years ago. As long as it's relevance algorithms can brings up contrasting sources, in this case the ABC news article and the Snopes stories. It's bad journalism from ABC that they haven't marked that article as redacted even though it's been proven false. Recently I remember, seeing that the google card UI for the news marked an article as Satire, because in-fact it was a Satire article. I'm not sure if that's because the original article embedded some information that helped Google discover this. They do a pretty good job at organizing information and making it available.

rob74 7y ago

One example I came across recently: if you search for "Amiga floppy disk capacity" (https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity), you get "1.76 MB", which is completely wrong. Of course, the Wikipedia article which Google's algorithm chose to extract this information from doesn't mention the actual capacity of "standard" Amiga floppies (880 KB): "Most Amiga programs were distributed on double-density floppy disks. There are also 3.5-inch high-density floppy disks, which hold up to 1.76 MB of data, but these are uncommon." - so Google picked the first number it found (the "uncommon" one) and ran with it. I'm just wondering which executive thought having this "feature" would be a good idea?!

devinplatt 7y ago
You can provide feedback on the answer card. I've had a few answer cards fixed after providing feedback. Notably "https port" used to yield the http port. Edit: I think you've actually managed to find a really terrific example of a case where modern ML systems are going to have trouble, because of how that Wikipedia page is worded in relation to the query. * There isn't a single phrase that answers the query directly, so the ML model would need to make very good use of context (attention), both within multiclause sentences and between paragraphs. * There are many different numbers on the page, so the model has to determine the right one. It can't just get lucky by guessing here. * A wrong number (1.7MB) has close proximity to literal keywords in the query (floppy, disk). (The right number [880KB] does too.) * The model has to understand and properly make use of "most" vs "unusual" in its decision.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Speaking of popularity over accuracy: > Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need. I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently, and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is not showing that message. It's actually explained quite explicitly in the movie that the fatness of people is the side effect of prolonged stay in space, and not of their dependence on technology.

titzer 7y ago
Not sure I got that message, considering the bulk of the population motors around on their little cushy chairs, drinks slurpies all day, and is endlessly served by robots, never doing any strenuous work at all, and only interacts with their screens. The spaceship has artificial gravity, artificial sun, artificial everything. The movie is one huge anti-consumerism screed.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It was a cruise ship converted to an ark. It was meant to stay in space for a short time, precisely because of (as one scene in the movie explained) long-term exposure leading people to grow fat and weak.

toto444 7y ago

The worst is when you search for important information and you get flooded with SEO crap. Try searching for 'retirement for French people leaving in the UK'... It is close to impossible to find anything relevant.

oytis 7y ago

Well, if you can solve Google's deficiencies, you can become the next internet billionaire.

amelius 7y ago

Who cares whether you return accurate results if you can send the user down a rabbit-hole of some completely irrelevant topic?

Razengan 7y ago

Google has been emphasizing click-baity results for years now. A moderately complex query for X will usually be filled with "Top 10 X" or ignores the context. Their results (on web search as well as YouTube) also seem to be biased against Apple and Microsoft which feels a bit scummy.