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The reason for that is actually rational: when Amit Singhal was in charge the search rules were written by hand. Once he was fired, the Search Quality team swit

The reason for that is actually rational: when Amit Singhal was in charge the search rules were written by hand. Once he was fired, the Search Quality team switched to machine learning. The ML was better in many ways: it produced higher quality results with a lot less effort. It just had one possibly fatal flaw: if some result was wrong there was no recourse. And that's what you are observing now: search quality is good or excellent most of the time while sometimes it's very bad and G can't fix it.

robbrown451 5y ago
I wouldn't call that rational. There is no reason you can't apply human weighting on top of ML. Honestly, I don't believe for a minute they "can't fix it." They do this sort of thing all the time, for instance when ML shows dark skinned people for a search for gorilla, they obviously have recourse.
- htrp 5y ago
  You do know that Google basically slapped a patch on that one right? https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
  - brigandish 5y ago
    I’m confused. I read that article and it has this: > But, as a new report from Wired shows, nearly three years on and Google hasn’t really fixed anything. The company has simply blocked its image recognition algorithms from identifying gorillas altogether — preferring, presumably, to limit the service rather than risk another miscategorization. Is that not an example of human intervention in ML?
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    Yes but then they fixed it right.
    - htrp 5y ago
      Fixing it right would be re-training the ML algo.... they basically told the algo to never ID anything as a gorilla (even actual gorillas)
coliveira 5y ago
My impression is that the ML algorithms at Google have the goal of increasing profitability from search. If that is the case, the quality of search will tend to be secondary to displaying pages that bring more revenue.
humaniania 5y ago
"Request manual review of search results" button?
- bhartzer 5y ago
  Since this is now the top spot here on H/N I suspect it just got the attention of some Googlers who I’m sure will review it. They may not give the site a manual action, though. They’d rather tweak the algorithm so it naturally doesn’t rank. Google’s algo should be able to see stuff like this. I know that I’ve seen sites tank in the rankings because they got too many links too quickly. It could be that the link part of the algorithm hasn’t fully analyzed the links yet. I’d be interested in seeing what the Majestic link graph says about this site, ahrefs doesn’t have tier 2 and tier 3 link data.
jeromegv 5y ago
Blatantly false that Google has "no recourse", Google can put on penalty and bring domains down.
cookiengineer 5y ago
> G can't fix it. Yes, they can. They should simply stop measuring only positives, and start measuring negatives - e.g. people that press the back button of their browser, or click the second, third, fourth result afterwards...which should hint the ML classifiers that the first result was total crap in the first place. But I guess this is exactly what happens if you have a business model where leads to sites where you provide ads give you a weird ethics, as your company profits from those scammers more than from legit websites. From an ML point of view google's search results are the perfect example of overfitting. Kinda ironic that they lead the data science research field and don't realize this in their own product, but teach this flaw everywhere.
- quantumofalpha 5y ago
  They have been already doing this for a loooong time, it's a low hanging fruit. Take a look sometime at the wealth of data google serp sends back about your interactions with it
  - cookiengineer 5y ago
    Please provide proof for this theory that google measures this also.
    - quantumofalpha 5y ago
      I worked in ranking for two major search engines. They all measure this, this is a really low hanging fruit - how much time it took you to come up with this idea? Why do you think so lowly of people who put decades of life into their systems that they didn't think of it? Technically just open google serp in developer tools, network tab, set preserve/persist logs option, and watch the requests flowing back - all your clicks and back navigations are reported back for analysis. Same on other search engines. Only DDG doesn't collect your clicks/dwell time - but that's a distinguishing feature of their brand, they stripped themselves of this valuable data on purpose.
      - 5y ago

robbrown451 5y ago

I wouldn't call that rational. There is no reason you can't apply human weighting on top of ML. Honestly, I don't believe for a minute they "can't fix it." They do this sort of thing all the time, for instance when ML shows dark skinned people for a search for gorilla, they obviously have recourse.

htrp 5y ago
You do know that Google basically slapped a patch on that one right? https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
- brigandish 5y ago
  I’m confused. I read that article and it has this: > But, as a new report from Wired shows, nearly three years on and Google hasn’t really fixed anything. The company has simply blocked its image recognition algorithms from identifying gorillas altogether — preferring, presumably, to limit the service rather than risk another miscategorization. Is that not an example of human intervention in ML?
- robbrown451 5y ago
  Yes but then they fixed it right.
  - htrp 5y ago
    Fixing it right would be re-training the ML algo.... they basically told the algo to never ID anything as a gorilla (even actual gorillas)

coliveira 5y ago

My impression is that the ML algorithms at Google have the goal of increasing profitability from search. If that is the case, the quality of search will tend to be secondary to displaying pages that bring more revenue.

humaniania 5y ago

"Request manual review of search results" button?

bhartzer 5y ago
Since this is now the top spot here on H/N I suspect it just got the attention of some Googlers who I’m sure will review it. They may not give the site a manual action, though. They’d rather tweak the algorithm so it naturally doesn’t rank. Google’s algo should be able to see stuff like this. I know that I’ve seen sites tank in the rankings because they got too many links too quickly. It could be that the link part of the algorithm hasn’t fully analyzed the links yet. I’d be interested in seeing what the Majestic link graph says about this site, ahrefs doesn’t have tier 2 and tier 3 link data.

jeromegv 5y ago

Blatantly false that Google has "no recourse", Google can put on penalty and bring domains down.

cookiengineer 5y ago

> G can't fix it. Yes, they can. They should simply stop measuring only positives, and start measuring negatives - e.g. people that press the back button of their browser, or click the second, third, fourth result afterwards...which should hint the ML classifiers that the first result was total crap in the first place. But I guess this is exactly what happens if you have a business model where leads to sites where you provide ads give you a weird ethics, as your company profits from those scammers more than from legit websites. From an ML point of view google's search results are the perfect example of overfitting. Kinda ironic that they lead the data science research field and don't realize this in their own product, but teach this flaw everywhere.

quantumofalpha 5y ago
They have been already doing this for a loooong time, it's a low hanging fruit. Take a look sometime at the wealth of data google serp sends back about your interactions with it
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  Please provide proof for this theory that google measures this also.
  - quantumofalpha 5y ago
    I worked in ranking for two major search engines. They all measure this, this is a really low hanging fruit - how much time it took you to come up with this idea? Why do you think so lowly of people who put decades of life into their systems that they didn't think of it? Technically just open google serp in developer tools, network tab, set preserve/persist logs option, and watch the requests flowing back - all your clicks and back navigations are reported back for analysis. Same on other search engines. Only DDG doesn't collect your clicks/dwell time - but that's a distinguishing feature of their brand, they stripped themselves of this valuable data on purpose.
    - 5y ago