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You're telling me that google makes $30 for every financial service ad I click but are cheaping out on the signal processing? Is the decline search result quali
by zippy5 6y ago
You're telling me that google makes $30 for every financial service ad I click but are cheaping out on the signal processing? Is the decline search result quality in the last couple years the result of a business analyst arbitraging sensitivity to result quality vs compute costs?
- jeffbee 6y agoOnly randos on HN think search quality is declining. If the search quality metrics that they use internally suffered a sustained decline, everyone from Sundar down would be fired.
- nwienert 6y agoThey are declining, and I’ve met many non HN randos who agree. Quality doesn’t correlate with their metrics; likely some sort of mix of “engagement” and mostly how much they make from ads.
- mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y agoConfirm that. A lot of spam and SEO recently.
- emerongi 6y agoA whole ton of SEO. Any keyword from which you can make reasonable amounts of money will be cluttered with sites made by SEO people, who are really good at gaming the index, but really bad at anything else (i.e. actually giving proper information on the keyword you're searching for). Spam has become an issue again in my native language. For a couple of years Google did a great job at removing spam, but somehow in the past 2 years it has resurfaced.
- keeganpoppen 6y agowell i guess that's unfalsifiable, since you're saying this on hn. i have been saying that the search result quality has been getting worse for years... not on every single query, just the long-tail queries that comprise the majority of my searches (guess i'm just an hn weirdo xd).
- type0 6y agoRando here, subjectively it has been declining for my searches. In aggregate it might have become better so that my aunts' lousy searches are smartly reinterpreted, since el goog manages to "know the person" better than they know themselves. Not everyone wants that! edit: this is surveillance capitalism at it's finest
- RamshackleJ 6y agoOnly randos on HN think that businesses don't have a fiduciary responsibility to share holders. Search quality and profit are not always correlated.
- CarbyAu 6y agoI believe they do have that responsibility. But I also believe that shouldn't be their overriding responsibility.
- greenyoda 6y agoI don't think that "search quality" as perceived by end users is the metric that Google is trying to optimize - my guess is that their real goal is to maximize revenue from ads. Now if Google's ad revenue were to start declining, that would make their executives fear for their jobs.
- jeffbee 6y agoEvery public statement made on the record by Google search quality people, from Matt Cutts to Udi Manber to low-level engineers' tweets and blogs says that search quality never uses revenue as a metric and they don't generally even speak to the ads side of the business.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y agoSubjectively, my search results have become more cluttered by loosely fitting results than what I'm actually searching for. Even when I'm trying to find a page I've been to before I often need to play keyword roulette and add half a dozen site bans for the likes of Pinterest, bit, quota, and the unpronouncable malware sites Google hasn't purged yet. This is a daily affair. When I'm searching for (generic consumer junk) the result is always available from Amazon,best buy,Wal-Mart,target,and the like. As soon as I stop searching for generic crap Google is worse today than they were years ago because these retailers, review spam sites, etc get boosted to the top of the results despite parameters in the query that should have filtered out these bad results. In other words. The Google I see has gotten worse at product discovery, and finding relevant debug discussions.
- jeffbee 6y agoIf you feel that the results for your personal subset of queries are getting worse because Google is losing the fight against spam, that is a defensible position and we could discuss it. The idea that Google intentionally trades away search quality to gain revenue is absurd and pretty much a loonie conspiracy theory. I just looked at my Google search history and just judging from the last few searches it has been dead accurate. In particular, the result for "mass of a single nitrile glove" is amazing. The top result is an info box of glove mass by size. I don't even know how they do that. Compare the results of the same query on DDG. Those results are garbage. That is, by the way, how Google defines "search quality". Thousands of paid analysts run searches on Google and Bing and rate the outcome.
- hk__2 6y ago> the decline search result quality in the last couple years [citation needed]