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Google Search today is repeating the same mistakes I remember from the late 90s. For the first decade of the web, there were a handful of search engines compet

Google Search today is repeating the same mistakes I remember from the late 90s. For the first decade of the web, there were a handful of search engines competing, rising and falling in popularity. The best were altavista, and fast. One thing that was noticeable back then was that bad search engines (and search engines that 'jumped the shark' and became bad) generally did so in similar ways: a) they included paid results, or devoted too much real-estate to advertising b) when they failed to find results, they tried to trick the user by showing related results (eg: omitting or substituting terms) c) they avoided 'logical and' for search terms, in favor of 'logical or', making it difficult for users to search with precision. The people at Google surely believe their recent changes have nothing to do with all that. Far as I'm concerned, aside from the extra millions of dollars they've spent on AI research, it's the same old story. Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves.

freedomben 6y ago
I mostly agreed with you until: > Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves. That's exactly what I need. It's not right for everything, but asking questions is the natural form of information seeking for a human. Being able to do that well is a huge value add.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Yes. I didn't want to be nuanced there, though, because the nuanced version is: nobody wants the kind of 'smarter AskJeeves' that technology is currently capable of producing. Had I written that, the next thing you know, someone would be calling me an idiot and informing me about the wonders of GPT3 and Tesla autopilot :)
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Heh, good point :-) Yeah the current state of the tech is (in my opinion) just a voice command line. You have to know the right keywords to say, and in the right order, to get it to do what you want. It's largely an exercise in guess, test, and revise.
- derefr 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) was a “better AskJeeves” — it routed around the natural-language problem by feeding your question to real people. Interestingly, it didn’t just boil down to a Quora/StackOverflow model; it wasn’t a “wisdom of crowds” thing. Instead, your question really was used as a search query — but instead of searching a pool of documents, it would search a pool of experts, matching you with an expert who knows about similar things†, then facilitating contact with them (and forwarding them your initial query/question to start off the conversation, like a Helpdesk system.) † Not sure how they did this part — for academic experts, they could “just” fulltext-index their corpus of published journal papers, to build up a “knowledge fingerprint” of the expert. Not sure what they would do for people in industry without a stream of publications, though. Sadly, Google bought them, shut down the Aardvark product, and probably just put the engineers on regular SRE code-slinging tasks. It almost seems like Google felt threatened. And — hint hint — nothing’s stopping anyone from building something like this again :)
yowlingcat 6y ago
> Far as I'm concerned, aside from the extra millions of dollars they've spent on AI research, it's the same old story. It's interesting because it seems like the UX equivalent of "burning down furniture to heat the house" -- how does this kind of thing become so institutionalized at companies? Is this merely the natural end season of the corporate life cycle where after innovation and growth the now engorged and dying corpse must be parted off and sold by the pound? There's something so uncomfortably Darwinian to me about that. But I suppose that's also why it's common -- it works.
- toast0 6y ago
  > It's interesting because it seems like the UX equivalent of "burning down furniture to heat the house" -- how does this kind of thing become so institutionalized at companies? You're in charge of revenue for a division. You give an estimate of $X for the current quarter and $Y for the next quarter; your boss changes your estimate to $1.5X and pushes it up the chain. Now there's two weeks left in the quarter and projections are that you'll only reach $1.1X, so your boss pushes you to stick more ads and make them bigger 'just for two weeks', but also reminds you that your revenue target for next quarter is $1.5Y, so maybe you should keep the big ads.
prox 6y ago
Google 2010 : Here is the most relevant webpage on this topic. Google 2020 : Here is the most SEO-gamed review site from 2015
- philipkglass 6y ago
  Google is a victim of its own success and of the increasing global accessibility of networked communications. If 90% of the American search market were split between 5 companies of roughly equal popularity, the ROI of gaming ranking to trick any one of those implementations would be much lower. There would be fewer people who could make a living by faking relevance/quality signals for junk. Right now the best paying job many people with unspecialized skills can get is "tricking people into clicking things they shouldn't." Google is sorely taxed trying to keep up with the antics of a million people whose career is trying to game Google. Early Google was better because the people really desperate for money couldn't even afford to get online. That was a glaring inequity that doubled as a crude spam filter [1]. I think about this every time a real live person telephones me on behalf of "Windows Support." [1] This is a large part of what I miss when I'm pining for the early Web. Practically everyone publishing online then had to be either more affluent than average or cleverer than average to get into Club Web. People contributing on the early Web were almost all financially situated independent of what they were contributing, so Web participation was almost all done out of passion rather than financial desperation. Authors didn't worry about how to get paid for what they wrote online and readers didn't worry about how to support their favorite sites either. People in the club were understood to have other means of sustenance. If you didn't, you wouldn't be in the club in the first place!
  - eitland 6y ago
    This is quite far from being the whole truth IMO. First: the problem isn't websites made by poor people. My biggest waste of time is ordinary quality but utterly irrelevant results. Second: very often the problem isn't like before where websites included valuable search terms in white text on white background but rather that Google includes results that never included the search terms at all. These are entirely Googles fault I think for over-optimizing for quantity instead of quality, not the fault of black hat SEO.
petters 6y ago
A version of Google for power users would be so nice. I'm sure the changes in search over the last decades helped the majority of users, but sometimes a "Google for developers" would have been nice.
- dumbfounder 6y ago
  Yes, it would be. But if they charge for it people would not want to be served ads, and they would need to charge a lot of money for that to make sense for them.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Maybe, but that probably just underscore what has been mentioned before: There's a good chance Google is fleecing advertisers by shoehorning people into to more valuable groups. Case in point: I haven't seen a single relevant ad from Google in years. I guess this can only work as long as they sell impressions, not clicks?
mellosouls 6y ago
I think you are missing the quantum leap in search results that came with Google; it blew everything else away pretty much immediately. There is nothing else on the contemporary horizon challenging Google in the same way in that regard on the open web, whatever bloat it now carries.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  it blew everything else away pretty much immediately. Right, I forgot people actually believe that. Um, they were a little better, maybe noticeably so by one out of a thousand people. But wow, that's not why people switch search engines in droves. The real reason, aside from their gift for self-promotion (I first heard about them in a science glossy, which was rare for a web 'company'), is that they had a cute, zany name, and didn't do the three things I mentioned. Google was far more popular because of its spartan design, than its quality, regardless of how people mythologize the company now.
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    Yeah, the thing that set Google apart was that its web page had only: the logo, the search field, and the go button. It was clean. It was lean.
    - guytv 6y ago
      ... they also had the "I'm feeling lucky" button which took you the the first search result. Hinting it was intelligent, but still not fully so.
  - colanderman 6y ago
    Agreed. The first search I made on Google (~1999?), probably for something tech-related, turned up several porn results on the first page. Back to AltaVista, DMOZ, and webrings for at least another year…
  - avian 6y ago
    Google's results were significantly better than other search engines, but only for a while. Soon SEO caught up with it using link farms and other forms of link spam. Then it was basically the same as old engines which were already spammed to death using other methods. That period of better result quality, combined with other factors you mention, was long enough that most of Google's competition went away. So when the quality went down there was no-one to switch back to.
kazinator 6y ago
> Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves. I find the Google Assistant useful. I use it in Japanese, which is a huge plus, too. You can boost your language learning and practice.

freedomben 6y ago

I mostly agreed with you until: > Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves. That's exactly what I need. It's not right for everything, but asking questions is the natural form of information seeking for a human. Being able to do that well is a huge value add.

uniqueid 6y ago
Yes. I didn't want to be nuanced there, though, because the nuanced version is: nobody wants the kind of 'smarter AskJeeves' that technology is currently capable of producing. Had I written that, the next thing you know, someone would be calling me an idiot and informing me about the wonders of GPT3 and Tesla autopilot :)
- freedomben 6y ago
  Heh, good point :-) Yeah the current state of the tech is (in my opinion) just a voice command line. You have to know the right keywords to say, and in the right order, to get it to do what you want. It's largely an exercise in guess, test, and revise.
derefr 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine) was a “better AskJeeves” — it routed around the natural-language problem by feeding your question to real people. Interestingly, it didn’t just boil down to a Quora/StackOverflow model; it wasn’t a “wisdom of crowds” thing. Instead, your question really was used as a search query — but instead of searching a pool of documents, it would search a pool of experts, matching you with an expert who knows about similar things†, then facilitating contact with them (and forwarding them your initial query/question to start off the conversation, like a Helpdesk system.) † Not sure how they did this part — for academic experts, they could “just” fulltext-index their corpus of published journal papers, to build up a “knowledge fingerprint” of the expert. Not sure what they would do for people in industry without a stream of publications, though. Sadly, Google bought them, shut down the Aardvark product, and probably just put the engineers on regular SRE code-slinging tasks. It almost seems like Google felt threatened. And — hint hint — nothing’s stopping anyone from building something like this again :)

yowlingcat 6y ago

> Far as I'm concerned, aside from the extra millions of dollars they've spent on AI research, it's the same old story. It's interesting because it seems like the UX equivalent of "burning down furniture to heat the house" -- how does this kind of thing become so institutionalized at companies? Is this merely the natural end season of the corporate life cycle where after innovation and growth the now engorged and dying corpse must be parted off and sold by the pound? There's something so uncomfortably Darwinian to me about that. But I suppose that's also why it's common -- it works.

toast0 6y ago
> It's interesting because it seems like the UX equivalent of "burning down furniture to heat the house" -- how does this kind of thing become so institutionalized at companies? You're in charge of revenue for a division. You give an estimate of $X for the current quarter and $Y for the next quarter; your boss changes your estimate to $1.5X and pushes it up the chain. Now there's two weeks left in the quarter and projections are that you'll only reach $1.1X, so your boss pushes you to stick more ads and make them bigger 'just for two weeks', but also reminds you that your revenue target for next quarter is $1.5Y, so maybe you should keep the big ads.

prox 6y ago

Google 2010 : Here is the most relevant webpage on this topic. Google 2020 : Here is the most SEO-gamed review site from 2015

philipkglass 6y ago
Google is a victim of its own success and of the increasing global accessibility of networked communications. If 90% of the American search market were split between 5 companies of roughly equal popularity, the ROI of gaming ranking to trick any one of those implementations would be much lower. There would be fewer people who could make a living by faking relevance/quality signals for junk. Right now the best paying job many people with unspecialized skills can get is "tricking people into clicking things they shouldn't." Google is sorely taxed trying to keep up with the antics of a million people whose career is trying to game Google. Early Google was better because the people really desperate for money couldn't even afford to get online. That was a glaring inequity that doubled as a crude spam filter [1]. I think about this every time a real live person telephones me on behalf of "Windows Support." [1] This is a large part of what I miss when I'm pining for the early Web. Practically everyone publishing online then had to be either more affluent than average or cleverer than average to get into Club Web. People contributing on the early Web were almost all financially situated independent of what they were contributing, so Web participation was almost all done out of passion rather than financial desperation. Authors didn't worry about how to get paid for what they wrote online and readers didn't worry about how to support their favorite sites either. People in the club were understood to have other means of sustenance. If you didn't, you wouldn't be in the club in the first place!
- eitland 6y ago
  This is quite far from being the whole truth IMO. First: the problem isn't websites made by poor people. My biggest waste of time is ordinary quality but utterly irrelevant results. Second: very often the problem isn't like before where websites included valuable search terms in white text on white background but rather that Google includes results that never included the search terms at all. These are entirely Googles fault I think for over-optimizing for quantity instead of quality, not the fault of black hat SEO.

petters 6y ago

A version of Google for power users would be so nice. I'm sure the changes in search over the last decades helped the majority of users, but sometimes a "Google for developers" would have been nice.

dumbfounder 6y ago
Yes, it would be. But if they charge for it people would not want to be served ads, and they would need to charge a lot of money for that to make sense for them.
- eitland 6y ago
  Maybe, but that probably just underscore what has been mentioned before: There's a good chance Google is fleecing advertisers by shoehorning people into to more valuable groups. Case in point: I haven't seen a single relevant ad from Google in years. I guess this can only work as long as they sell impressions, not clicks?

mellosouls 6y ago

I think you are missing the quantum leap in search results that came with Google; it blew everything else away pretty much immediately. There is nothing else on the contemporary horizon challenging Google in the same way in that regard on the open web, whatever bloat it now carries.

uniqueid 6y ago
it blew everything else away pretty much immediately. Right, I forgot people actually believe that. Um, they were a little better, maybe noticeably so by one out of a thousand people. But wow, that's not why people switch search engines in droves. The real reason, aside from their gift for self-promotion (I first heard about them in a science glossy, which was rare for a web 'company'), is that they had a cute, zany name, and didn't do the three things I mentioned. Google was far more popular because of its spartan design, than its quality, regardless of how people mythologize the company now.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  Yeah, the thing that set Google apart was that its web page had only: the logo, the search field, and the go button. It was clean. It was lean.
  - guytv 6y ago
    ... they also had the "I'm feeling lucky" button which took you the the first search result. Hinting it was intelligent, but still not fully so.
- colanderman 6y ago
  Agreed. The first search I made on Google (~1999?), probably for something tech-related, turned up several porn results on the first page. Back to AltaVista, DMOZ, and webrings for at least another year…
- avian 6y ago
  Google's results were significantly better than other search engines, but only for a while. Soon SEO caught up with it using link farms and other forms of link spam. Then it was basically the same as old engines which were already spammed to death using other methods. That period of better result quality, combined with other factors you mention, was long enough that most of Google's competition went away. So when the quality went down there was no-one to switch back to.

kazinator 6y ago

> Nobody needs a somewhat smarter version of AskJeeves. I find the Google Assistant useful. I use it in Japanese, which is a huge plus, too. You can boost your language learning and practice.