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Subjectively, 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

Subjectively, 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 ago
If 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.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  Google's losing fight to spammers is a part of the problem. I'm not arguing that Google is sacrificing quality for revenue. Though I'm sure Google has the run the numbers on such practices. Instead, I'm arguing that Google search has lost some ability to differentiate between generic and specific. I'm thinking of any of countless cases where I give up on keyword bingo and make a phone call or post in a chat app to get the information I couldn't squeeze out of a Google search. Google often chops and screws keywords that should not be. Quoting does not yield expected results, even when I can ultimately find the exact quote on an eventually discovered result. Fuzzy matches often pollute results for similar but distinct searches. Differentiation is not always easy or even possible. Fuzzy matches regularly fuzz the wrong words for my searches. Results often outdated by years or even over a decade. Limiting by time often returns results outside the range. Mostly in the 'results' before the results. I often find myself thinking some searches would be easier with a hand written regex.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    You touched on what I was driving at in my original comment. There is no doubt whatsoever that if you were able to make a full pass over the corpus with a regular expression you could find docs you can't find on Google's search. But that's obviously not how their search works. They have to make it work at their scale, which dictates the format of the index, which in turn limits the possibilities for query operators. They have to make these design choices so that their product can exist at all. "Grep the world" is a fine strategy for corpora up to a certain size, and I do wish there was a product that just stored everything I've ever seen and let me run expensive searches on that.
  - creato 6y ago
    I think this fuzzy logic of search pisses off people like us (the HN demographic) but makes most users happy. Have you seen how tech illiterate people use Google? They type in questions and phrases with words like "a" and "the" in them. This is who google is optimizing for, because there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like this for every one of us.

jeffbee 6y ago

If 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.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
Google's losing fight to spammers is a part of the problem. I'm not arguing that Google is sacrificing quality for revenue. Though I'm sure Google has the run the numbers on such practices. Instead, I'm arguing that Google search has lost some ability to differentiate between generic and specific. I'm thinking of any of countless cases where I give up on keyword bingo and make a phone call or post in a chat app to get the information I couldn't squeeze out of a Google search. Google often chops and screws keywords that should not be. Quoting does not yield expected results, even when I can ultimately find the exact quote on an eventually discovered result. Fuzzy matches often pollute results for similar but distinct searches. Differentiation is not always easy or even possible. Fuzzy matches regularly fuzz the wrong words for my searches. Results often outdated by years or even over a decade. Limiting by time often returns results outside the range. Mostly in the 'results' before the results. I often find myself thinking some searches would be easier with a hand written regex.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  You touched on what I was driving at in my original comment. There is no doubt whatsoever that if you were able to make a full pass over the corpus with a regular expression you could find docs you can't find on Google's search. But that's obviously not how their search works. They have to make it work at their scale, which dictates the format of the index, which in turn limits the possibilities for query operators. They have to make these design choices so that their product can exist at all. "Grep the world" is a fine strategy for corpora up to a certain size, and I do wish there was a product that just stored everything I've ever seen and let me run expensive searches on that.
- creato 6y ago
  I think this fuzzy logic of search pisses off people like us (the HN demographic) but makes most users happy. Have you seen how tech illiterate people use Google? They type in questions and phrases with words like "a" and "the" in them. This is who google is optimizing for, because there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like this for every one of us.