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Google now shows why it ranked a specific search result
- Ueland 5y agoLooking forward to testing this on all the searches I do that gives me heaps of spam results. Seems that Google's focus on search spam has more or less disappeared. What I've seen a alot of the last few years is sites with simply copied content republished on new domains. And I don't mean just some text, I mean the whole website. Take this search for example: https://www.google.no/search?q=nrk+site%3A.it https://www.google.no/search?q=nrk+site%3A.it It show's a bunch of Italian domains with mostly spam based on Norwegian content. This content regularly ranks high when searching for Norwegian cotent.
- nisa 5y agogitmemory or these translated stackeroverflow clones are a pain - the original result doesn't even appear anywhere in the results - it's the same in german. Overall google result quality declined a lot from my perspective (and colleagues also agree) in the past years. the info-boxes and sidebars are often just plain wrong (wrong product, wrong answers) - have to add quotes to every other query but these also don't seem to work - websites that used to be indexed disappear and I get lot's of noise and outright spam websites with redirection spam (I've tested on Linux with different browsers, unlikely that it's hijacked). Not sure what's going on - I guess they made a lot of progress in NLP with BERT and other models and nobody internally want to see the drawbacks?
- Akronymus 5y ago> it's the same in german. reminds me of msdn, where I always search in english through some search engine, then get the german version presented with a SMALL button to turn it to english.
- lolinder 5y agoGitmemory et al are awful. They've made me think seriously about the plausibility of building a custom search engine. From what I've heard, the biggest problem with building a general-purpose search engine seems to be the index—indexing the entire web requires data centers many times larger than most can afford, and deciding what is relevant in such an index requires excessive training data. But while working, I typically only want my search engines to search the same 200-odd sites (GitHub issues, Stack Overflow, MDN, language docs, high-quality technical blogs, etc.) It's too many to know which "site:" query to use, but it's a small enough set that it should be a manageable problem for an upstart search engine. It also seems like this is likely true in many domains. Taking on Google directly by trying to build a general purpose search engine seems to be a non-starter (most competitors just crib off of an existing player, and don't do much better). But a bunch of sharded search engines for specific domains could theoretically outperform Google/DDG/Bing within their respective domains, because the human using them has already narrowed the domain down dramatically. They wouldn't dethrone Google (general search is always going to be needed) but they could compete for a segment of traffic.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoThis is the real information apocalypse. Machines cloning knowledge ad infinitum with increasing amounts of real content drowning in an endless ocean of... ads; Economic propaganda. Until content itself is cryptographically signed, there's no verifying where it come from or how true it is, if it ever were.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago> Until content itself is cryptographically signed At which point you have to determine which signatories to trust. Which is the same issue we currently have - which publishers (ie websites) should the search engine trust (ie rank highly)? So really what we need is a more robust method of attributing publisher quality. Except that perception of quality varies drastically between different consumers. Also, most solutions you might propose quickly start looking an awful lot like a distributed web of trust but no one has ever managed to pull that off at scale so far.
- blackcat201 5y agoSame in chinese search results for programming related question, most of the time I get was some bad translation from stackoverflow or github issue. Now I had to rely on browser plugins to automatically remove these domains from search results.
- vodkapump 5y agoThis shows me almost exclusively pinterest results. A website I've never in my life used, but for some reason always get recommended to go to by google. Sad to see NRK being abused like this tho
- raxxorrax 5y agoThey certainly promotes established newspapers. If you search for a term that is in any capacity part of a prominent news cycle, you can forget the results.
- lgats 5y agoSo glad I'm not the only one experiencing the abundance of .it TLD spam. I've seen this rotating around different country-level TLDs, .de & .bg spam domains were filling the results previously. I suspect some big-name spammer rents domains for a short period while they're pending expiration.
- lgats 5y agoSeveral of the .it spam results are provisioned by 'Hosting Concepts B.V.' A company perhaps also involved in some shady prescription med domains: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openprovider-www4rxmedorg-and-more https://www.fda.gov/consumers/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openpr... https://www.fda.gov/consumers/health-fraud-scams/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openprovider-wwwchemists-shopcom https://www.fda.gov/consumers/health-fraud-scams/hosting-con...
- kaliali 5y agoBecause they're an authoritarian piece of shit.
- corentin88 5y agoGoogle's Blogpost: https://blog.google/products/search/learn-more-and-get-more-from-search/ https://blog.google/products/search/learn-more-and-get-more-... Hacker News Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27928454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27928454
- hbcondo714 5y agoThanks for posting the original source
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sssilver 5y agoWhat’s a lot more interesting is why certain matching results were not shown.
- zwkrt 5y agoTo paraphrase Ummon in the Hyperion book series, “science tells us that giraffes evolved long necks to eat leaves at the top of trees. What it doesn’t tell us is why no other animals evolved long necks” Whenever we try to simplify AI decision into an “explanation” we throw out 99.9% of the information. In fact, all we did was make the AI more complicated by requiring that it spit out a “reason” alongside its result.
- kennyadam 5y agoWe can make an educated guess though, right? They didn't evolve them quick enough, so were out competed by the giraffes, for example. I know you were making a more general point, but I just wanted to throw that in.
- snovv_crash 5y agoWhat about all the places where there aren't giraffes?
- Akronymus 5y agoMuch faster conversion to savanahs, which resulted in not being able to adapt fast enough; no evolutionary pressures to evolve to be that tall; evolutionary pressures exists/ed but there were stronger pressures to not evolve to be tall, and similar reasons are what come to my mind.
- z3t4 5y agoOr giraffes find long necks (and other body parts) very attractive.
- Smaug123 5y agoThat is a glib answer which misses the point entirely. Why do they find long necks attractive? The answer to that sort of question usually turns out to be "because animals who randomly happened to be a little more attracted to long necks were more likely to breed with the long-necked animals, so their genes became better represented in the gene pool thanks to the long-necked animals' better survival power".
- speedgoose 5y agoCould a search engine improve its results with upvote and downvote buttons? It would of course be a lot of work to prevent SEO people to destroy the technology again, but it may be a simple solution to remove the scams and spams.
- ricardo81 5y agoIndeed any metric that can be influenced will end up being gamed. Voting would likely require being logged in which is not so good for the more privacy orientated search engines. Could flip the idea on its head and look at ways to verify the owner of a site/page (again, with privacy issues associated), and use that as a quality metric.
- pharmakom 5y agoGoogle already has great spam control and bot detection for serving ads though. They dont care about privacy (except in so far as it hurts the brand).
- z3t4 5y agoDetecting bots is very hard, and there are a lot of bots on Google Adsense. They could however add "captcha codes" for clicking on ads/links search results which would prevent bots, but users would likely find it annoying.
- speedgoose 5y agoGoogle knows already which link you click and can estimate how long you visit a website when you click another link or do a new search.
- quantumofalpha 5y agoExactly. Click = upvote. Returning to SERP after a short dwell time = downvote. It's noisy but because you can mine such things implicitly by just logging user's behavior, the volume of data is way bigger than what an explicit feedback system can provide.
- bb123 5y agoI wonder if it will show when Google has manually edited the ranking of results to suit their agenda (US election, COVID?). Another interesting example of this is the image result for “European art”. The image results have been modified to the increase diversity of the skin colours of people portrayed. I don’t have a problem with it, but they definitely surface specific results to fit their political/ideological leanings. It would be nice if they were at least transparent about it.
- semiconduction 5y agoEuropean art query: nice spot! Agree with the edition of news results. It becomes very hard to find information about specific topics. Most often you find articles with "theory X has ben deboonked!" at the top
- ecommerceguy 5y agoMore fun ones to compare Google with Bing/DDG/Yandex/Baidu: White Family image search (hilarious) Hillary + anything autocomplete - Google shows nothing negative various certain outlets article titles verbatim don't appear Google bias has been on display for quite some time. And Yes Dang, I'd be honored to show evidence if you give me a forum.
- nairboon 5y agointeresting query when compared to yandex.com image results
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI think they would avoid doing that at all costs - their defense in court has always been "it's our algorithms", because if they had to admit "it was one of our employees" they would be liable. There's ongoing antitrust lawsuits about them pushing their own services (e.g. Docs) in front of competitors, and some fuckery with Shopping. Their defense leans heavily on the statement that they didn't do it on purpose or manually, but that their algorithm considers their services the best. For that they need to lift the veil a bit on their algorithms (and iirc there is an outstanding court order for that one already).
- JohnFen 5y agoInteresting. That box does explain some of why I get consistently poor results from Google search.
- prophesi 5y agoCould they also display the "personalized" aspect of results? If I do use !g on DuckDuckGo, my results for Java or Apache are vastly different than various friends/family.
- menrris 5y agoThis feature might help a lot of businesses that struggle in the search results. This will help them get the SEO performance that they deserve.
- hbcondo714 5y agoYeah, it would be nice if this was integrated with Google Search Console so webmasters can this better.
- 83 5y agoI would pay good money for a search engine where each result had a button next to it that would add that domain to my personal blacklist for future searches. (goodbye pinterest)
- chrisshroba 5y agoIf you can deal with the aesthetics of every search query containing your blacklist, try creating a custom search engine in your browser with a keyword like "g" (for google) that searches for your query plus "-site:pinterest.com -site:example.com"
- EastSmith 5y agoHow many domains will you be able to remove this way? There is probably some low limit like 50?
- bagomips 5y agoNot sure if Google does anything to restrict plug-ins from tampering with its results, but domains in DDG results are canonicalized making it trivial to use them as keys in localStorage. So filtering after the fact, while slightly awkward, can work for a list of thousands or millions?
- Beached 5y agoone of the reasons I borderline hate google now is that the search results do not honor double quoted text, or subtract text like you mentioned. I have tried searched with -site: and google just ignores it and gives me results form there anyways
- chrisshroba 5y agoIt's always worked for me. Would you happen to have an example query that doesn't respect those things?
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- thiht 5y agoI read this as Google admitting they failed as an efficient search engine. They have to explain people why their results are good because the results themselves don't convey that anymore. It's over, Google is now useless. For the life of me, I just can't find anything on Google anymore without adding explicitly "reddit", "stackoverflow" or "github" in my query. I've abandoned the idea to find new user blogs using Google, it's over. It's all click farms and paywalls. And I don't care that their results match what I searched for, these results are useless if the spams are not filtered out.