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Search quality at Google has been decaying over the past decade. Accuracy and quality of search results is compromised to optimize advertising revenue, penalize

Search quality at Google has been decaying over the past decade. Accuracy and quality of search results is compromised to optimize advertising revenue, penalize competitors or neutralize threats, and cater to the various needs of political or regulatory authorities. Google's search was at its peak in 2008 when advertising hadn't fully compromised search quality. Google is an advertising business that supports its otherwise money losing properties. Why will things change in the future because you can synthesize data from multiple sources only to compromise that quality with the realities of Google's business model?

Der_Einzige 5y ago
Yeah - seems to jive with my experiences. It's a tough pill to swallow, but bm-25 and tf-idf along side pagerank continue to be superior to dense vector methods for search. Even dense-vectors with re-ranking models afterwards don't perform as well. I've been sad to see that models like BERT are becoming more prolific in search as they are a significant portion of why googles search has gotten worse...
- rexreed 5y ago
  They key here is that transformer-based "search" isn't actually providing links to the sources of information such as how search works now, but rather synthesizing information as a result of being trained on the corpus of Internet data. In this way, Google gets all the value from Internet properties they don't own without having to push any traffic to those sources. So, they get their cake and eat it too. They create a way to regurgitate information from the vast trove of info on the Internet without ever having to share traffic with those sources by moving traffic from their search engines to those sites, like they do now. They get to sell advertising to those who want to capture eyeballs for search results, without having to share any ad revenue with the content providers that are powering that transformer-based search. Ain't it grand?
  - wokwokwok 5y ago
    This has been coming for some time now, to be fair. Now that it's pretty close to actually being here, the grim reality is that anyone who was expecting the status quo to just march on like always is going to get screwed over; and the a new wave of successful businesses will adapt to it and thrive. It's called 'disruption', and it's a bit disappointing to see people here of all places complaining about it. Sure, I get it, it's google, and if it was some nippy unicorn doing it people would be more enthusiastic, but ML is hard to do right, and having someone who's actually pushing the boundaries of whats possible is, in my opinion, pretty cool. BERT made a huge contribution, and if this eventually flows out to everyone else to use, that's great news. ...and, if google stops sending traffic to some websites, well, too bad. We'll adapt; so will others. The ones that can't will disappear.
    - jonnycomputer 5y ago
      Disruption is a descriptor, not a moral imperative.
  - visarga 5y ago
    > They get to sell advertising to those who want to capture eyeballs for search results, without having to share any ad revenue with the content providers that are powering that transformer based search. Ain't it grand? Reminds me of spammers making spinned articles.
- mrfox321 5y ago
  Source? I am quite intrigued by this anecdote for information retrieval.
pradn 5y ago
How much of it is Google getting worse and how much of it is garbage websites hyperoptimizing for SEO? Practically all news websites are chock full of ads. There's tons of filler websites that just copy/paste text from Wikipedia, etc. Of course, Google could do a better job, but it's codependent evolution.
- rexreed 5y ago
  It's Google's prioritization with ads and preferred sites taking priority even over those SEO-optimized sites. Google would much prefer to be the sole source of your traffic instead of pushing you to other sites. Google's business is advertising. Why would they want to lose that traffic? Check this article about the Google MUM announcement, which basically says the same thing: "MUM is part of Google’s long-term shift away from ranked search results and toward the creation of AI algorithms that can answer user questions faster—often without ever clicking a link or leaving Google’s results page. (Think, for example, of the “knowledge panels” that now appear at the top of many search results pages and display an answer from a website so you don’t have to visit the site yourself.) This shift promises to reduce the amount of work it takes to find information through Google. But it’s not clear that this is a problem in need of a solution." [0] The Google of today is not the Google of 2008. Google in 2008 was a search engine. Today it's an advertising business that would much prefer you not leave Google properties. [0] https://qz.com/2010802/googles-mum-is-making-search-worse-by-making-it-easier/ https://qz.com/2010802/googles-mum-is-making-search-worse-by...
  - fastball 5y ago
    Is this just speculation on your part or do you have a source for this claim?
    - rexreed 5y ago
      What speculation? I quoted the above article stating that, and there's more on this topic. There's a reason for those Infocards.
mxcrossr 5y ago
> Search quality at Google has been decaying over the past decade. Is there any empirical evidence to back this up? If we’re talking anecdote, I swear as soon as google started labeling ads more clearly people complained more about ads. And if google really is getting worse, I would expect that I would get frustrated with DuckDuckGo bit getting the job done less often. I do share your concerns though. Just look at YouTube as an example. You search for something, and half way down the page are completely unrelated videos that you watched before. This is because YouTube just wants you to click, they don’t care about you finding what you were after.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  > Is there any empirical evidence to back this up? No. This is the same HN post as "Facebook is dying, pretty soon all their users will be gone and they'll collapse".
- techbio 5y ago
  Not likely to find empirical evidence of search results quality, but I think there might be for an overall lowering of content quality. It is so much cheaper to mass produce unimpressive content than ever before.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Yes the number of ads at the top of the page has increased. The colors have blended ads into content. The number of sites shown is reduced. The amount of content indexed available has been reduced.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  How about image search? In 2008 there weren't product images and shopping campaign ads inline with the rest of the results. Also reverse image search is now being supplanted by Google lens search, which again serves up products and ads bases on what can tag in your photo.
  - marderfarker2 5y ago
    Huh. Just ublock all those annoyances away. Didn’t know Google search is so ad ridden.
hackinthebochs 5y ago
I would have agreed with you a few weeks ago. I recently switched my browser to the new Edge and I stuck with Microsoft's default Bing search because fuck Google and all that. I had two occasions in two days where Bing's search frustrated me with their results despite many efforts to tweak the query. I switched over to Google and its first result was exactly what I needed. These were cases where the page didn't contain the phrase I was looking for so it had to interpret/translate it to find the correct information and it did a great job. A few years ago I felt that Bing and Google search were basically on par. Google has definitely upped the ante regarding search in the last couple of years. It may just be that it does more interpretation than you've come to expect so you need to retrain yourself how to query it. There are also occasions where verbatim search is required for technical topics. But Google's search quality has shown real improvements.
superasn 5y ago
> Search quality at Google has been decaying over the past decade. This one line is echoed again and again on HN and yet in my experience all its competitors still pale in comparison. I hate Google now as much as the next HNer for its evil shenanigans but their search is still superior and if a browser comes with a default like Bing or Ddg (like ff on linux mint) the first I do is change it back to Google since the results are truly aweful otherwise.
- 1024core 5y ago
  Just look at the number and size of ads. Quite often, the entire first page of results is ads, and you have to scroll down to find the organic results.
- basch 5y ago
  But it is worse than it was a decade ago. Across the board. There's more pollution than ever on the internet, and search engines are doing a worse job of separating the diamonds out.

Der_Einzige 5y ago

Yeah - seems to jive with my experiences. It's a tough pill to swallow, but bm-25 and tf-idf along side pagerank continue to be superior to dense vector methods for search. Even dense-vectors with re-ranking models afterwards don't perform as well. I've been sad to see that models like BERT are becoming more prolific in search as they are a significant portion of why googles search has gotten worse...

rexreed 5y ago
They key here is that transformer-based "search" isn't actually providing links to the sources of information such as how search works now, but rather synthesizing information as a result of being trained on the corpus of Internet data. In this way, Google gets all the value from Internet properties they don't own without having to push any traffic to those sources. So, they get their cake and eat it too. They create a way to regurgitate information from the vast trove of info on the Internet without ever having to share traffic with those sources by moving traffic from their search engines to those sites, like they do now. They get to sell advertising to those who want to capture eyeballs for search results, without having to share any ad revenue with the content providers that are powering that transformer-based search. Ain't it grand?
- wokwokwok 5y ago
  This has been coming for some time now, to be fair. Now that it's pretty close to actually being here, the grim reality is that anyone who was expecting the status quo to just march on like always is going to get screwed over; and the a new wave of successful businesses will adapt to it and thrive. It's called 'disruption', and it's a bit disappointing to see people here of all places complaining about it. Sure, I get it, it's google, and if it was some nippy unicorn doing it people would be more enthusiastic, but ML is hard to do right, and having someone who's actually pushing the boundaries of whats possible is, in my opinion, pretty cool. BERT made a huge contribution, and if this eventually flows out to everyone else to use, that's great news. ...and, if google stops sending traffic to some websites, well, too bad. We'll adapt; so will others. The ones that can't will disappear.
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    Disruption is a descriptor, not a moral imperative.
- visarga 5y ago
  > They get to sell advertising to those who want to capture eyeballs for search results, without having to share any ad revenue with the content providers that are powering that transformer based search. Ain't it grand? Reminds me of spammers making spinned articles.
mrfox321 5y ago
Source? I am quite intrigued by this anecdote for information retrieval.

pradn 5y ago

How much of it is Google getting worse and how much of it is garbage websites hyperoptimizing for SEO? Practically all news websites are chock full of ads. There's tons of filler websites that just copy/paste text from Wikipedia, etc. Of course, Google could do a better job, but it's codependent evolution.

rexreed 5y ago
It's Google's prioritization with ads and preferred sites taking priority even over those SEO-optimized sites. Google would much prefer to be the sole source of your traffic instead of pushing you to other sites. Google's business is advertising. Why would they want to lose that traffic? Check this article about the Google MUM announcement, which basically says the same thing: "MUM is part of Google’s long-term shift away from ranked search results and toward the creation of AI algorithms that can answer user questions faster—often without ever clicking a link or leaving Google’s results page. (Think, for example, of the “knowledge panels” that now appear at the top of many search results pages and display an answer from a website so you don’t have to visit the site yourself.) This shift promises to reduce the amount of work it takes to find information through Google. But it’s not clear that this is a problem in need of a solution." [0] The Google of today is not the Google of 2008. Google in 2008 was a search engine. Today it's an advertising business that would much prefer you not leave Google properties. [0] https://qz.com/2010802/googles-mum-is-making-search-worse-by-making-it-easier/ https://qz.com/2010802/googles-mum-is-making-search-worse-by...
- fastball 5y ago
  Is this just speculation on your part or do you have a source for this claim?
  - rexreed 5y ago
    What speculation? I quoted the above article stating that, and there's more on this topic. There's a reason for those Infocards.

mxcrossr 5y ago

> Search quality at Google has been decaying over the past decade. Is there any empirical evidence to back this up? If we’re talking anecdote, I swear as soon as google started labeling ads more clearly people complained more about ads. And if google really is getting worse, I would expect that I would get frustrated with DuckDuckGo bit getting the job done less often. I do share your concerns though. Just look at YouTube as an example. You search for something, and half way down the page are completely unrelated videos that you watched before. This is because YouTube just wants you to click, they don’t care about you finding what you were after.

UncleMeat 5y ago
> Is there any empirical evidence to back this up? No. This is the same HN post as "Facebook is dying, pretty soon all their users will be gone and they'll collapse".
techbio 5y ago
Not likely to find empirical evidence of search results quality, but I think there might be for an overall lowering of content quality. It is so much cheaper to mass produce unimpressive content than ever before.
ipaddr 5y ago
Yes the number of ads at the top of the page has increased. The colors have blended ads into content. The number of sites shown is reduced. The amount of content indexed available has been reduced.
monkeybutton 5y ago
How about image search? In 2008 there weren't product images and shopping campaign ads inline with the rest of the results. Also reverse image search is now being supplanted by Google lens search, which again serves up products and ads bases on what can tag in your photo.
- marderfarker2 5y ago
  Huh. Just ublock all those annoyances away. Didn’t know Google search is so ad ridden.

hackinthebochs 5y ago

I would have agreed with you a few weeks ago. I recently switched my browser to the new Edge and I stuck with Microsoft's default Bing search because fuck Google and all that. I had two occasions in two days where Bing's search frustrated me with their results despite many efforts to tweak the query. I switched over to Google and its first result was exactly what I needed. These were cases where the page didn't contain the phrase I was looking for so it had to interpret/translate it to find the correct information and it did a great job. A few years ago I felt that Bing and Google search were basically on par. Google has definitely upped the ante regarding search in the last couple of years. It may just be that it does more interpretation than you've come to expect so you need to retrain yourself how to query it. There are also occasions where verbatim search is required for technical topics. But Google's search quality has shown real improvements.

superasn 5y ago

> Search quality at Google has been decaying over the past decade. This one line is echoed again and again on HN and yet in my experience all its competitors still pale in comparison. I hate Google now as much as the next HNer for its evil shenanigans but their search is still superior and if a browser comes with a default like Bing or Ddg (like ff on linux mint) the first I do is change it back to Google since the results are truly aweful otherwise.

1024core 5y ago
Just look at the number and size of ads. Quite often, the entire first page of results is ads, and you have to scroll down to find the organic results.
basch 5y ago
But it is worse than it was a decade ago. Across the board. There's more pollution than ever on the internet, and search engines are doing a worse job of separating the diamonds out.