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Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and
by fny 5y ago
Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
- estebarb 5y agoI feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result. I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are using the same algorithms that are only useful for mainstream results.
- fy20 5y agoI noticed this in my country when searching for somewhat less common parts (electronics, car parts, tools, etc). The first few results are for online retailers in my country, and then after that it's full of domains with paths such as /sale_12345678. The domain sounds somewhat promising, and the description sounds good - other than it often being a quantity of 10 - but when you click the link it just redirects to AliExpress.
- ffffwe3rq352y3 5y agoI find that using another search engine in that kind of situation is extremely useful! If I'm searching for more mainstream stuff google usually is great but when I'm going for more specialized topics duck duck go will usually bring up some different links!
- foobarian 5y agoWelp, time to dust off that HotBot codebase and get it running again! /s
- HideousKojima 5y agoPretty much the only alternative to Google Search is Bing. That's even what DuckDuckGo uses behind the scenes.
- ffffwe3rq352y3 5y agoYeah thats why I said to use it!
- slacktide 5y agoI’ve been using Yandex more and more. Better search results, less censorship. Thanks, Rooskies!
- Cipater 5y agoYandex reminds me of what Google was like in the early 2010s. It just gives me the results of the search term I put in. Google increasingly thinks it knows better than me what I'm looking for.
- lordnacho 5y agoDoes this actually work though? Wouldn't the major search engines more or less look at the same information? Or is there some thing that causes Bing to show different results? Perhaps the scammers build a network that targets google because it's bigger?
- infogulch 5y agoSearch engines seem to be stuck between serving two roles: 1. An easily accessible directory of mainstream information, and 2. A specialized tool to find the diamond in the rough. It seems like it has to be a tradeoff, it can't serve both roles equally well.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoThis happens for unpopular events too. Memory Hole "The alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive. Its origin comes from George Orwell's "1984", in which the memory hole was a small incinerator chute used for censoring, (through destroying), things Big Brother deemed necessary to censor." https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Memory%20Hole https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Memory%20Hol...
- visarga 5y ago> I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking Tools are not to blame here, it's like blaming the compiler for the behaviour of an application. Starting with the training data and ending with how the model is used in deployment it's the blame of people who made it, not of the neural architecture. The architecture itself can learn anything you throw at it, good or bad.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoAtleast you get the results you are looking for... I search for three keywords, and it chooses to ignore the two specific one, and show only the one general one (while puting a line under the search result, that the result does not contain some keywords). Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showing me results for diving.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoWe ignored your search query and showed you results our highest paying customers / advertisers paid us to show you instead. I don't know of a good general internet search engine, so I tend to stick to the sites I know will provide answers that'll work for me, which is a shame for discovering new content.
- donkeybeer 5y agoIn cases like that, it often ignores words even after double quoting them.
- sunshineforever 5y agoI play a game with google search: I take something very mainstream like a movie title, let's say 'Reservoir Dogs' And change something in it, to say 'Reservoir Cats' for example. Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'! Even putting something opposite or unrelated to the highly mainstream result will have no effect. Its completely entirely ridiculous and makes the search engine seem like a facade.
- darwingr 5y agoThere is an actual term defined for this. Not search high-jacking...I can't remember.
- leucineleprec0n 5y agoI’ve noticed this but only recently began to feel like the behavior was different, I wonder how strong the correction is now relative to the past
- yojo 5y agoThis exactly. I’ve been researching specific house repair issues and just get nothing but content spam. Whenever I want specific information I find myself adding “reddit” to the query string, which will usually turn up a thread with links out to the actual answer.
- zadler 5y agoSaid it before and I’ll say it again, when Reddit finally becomes inaccesible via searches we will have lost a huge and very useful database of succinct information.
- nullc 5y agoYou haven't noticed that reddit has become substantially search inaccessible a number of months back? Every reddit page while not logged in is full of hidden content from other unrelated pages. When you search, you'll get hits in these unrelated pages-- but when you follow the link it's not there (because it's on the unrelated pages). Worse, the pages with the correct content aren't necessarily in the results at all because it was low enough in the thread that it was collapsed and wasn't visible to the search indexer. It's not a total loss, but I'd say about 80% of my own comments are now difficult-to-impossible to find via search when they were easy previously.
- xerox13ster 5y ago> I'd say about 80% of my own comments are now difficult-to-impossible to find via search when they were easy previously. https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/
- zadler 5y agoWe seem to be approaching a point where it could be worthwhile to get a distributed index involved even if it is very slow and inefficient to update.
- tesseract 5y agoProbably even more information of that nature is hidden in Facebook Groups where it was never searchable in the first place.
- mdolon 5y agoI wrote a blog post complaining about this early last year: http://mdolon.com/essays/amazon-has-ruined-search-and-google-is-in-on-it http://mdolon.com/essays/amazon-has-ruined-search-and-google... The Amazon affiliate program is definitely contributing to this problem.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jhoechtl 5y agoSearching in Google has become all about shopping. Pure and relevant content is hard to find. Even today here are bloggers outside who do not have a commercial affiliation with the goods/items/things they are blogging about. Such content is practically impossible to find in comparison to all the Amazon-affiliated pseudo-information conveying spoof-sites.
- alfiedotwtf 5y agoI'm just sick of seeing pintrest and quora as the top 8 results :/
- YeBanKo 5y agoI have been struggling with the same issue recently. Results are much more narrower and they seemed to be leaning towards consumer goods items. Though I don’t remember when I ever bought something coming from Google search.
- juskrey 5y agoSimply, Google have lost the battle against SEO long ago, and, being in a trap of own cash flow, can't do anything radical to change that.
- gomox 5y agoI couldn't agree more. More and more lately I've felt like the Altavista days. I know the information I'm looking for is out there, it's just not in the Google results page, which is plastered with unreadable stuff (paywalls, content farms), crap "content cards" in the results page, and sneakier and sneakier ads. I'm not sure what the beginning of the end was for Google Search, but I think the day where they changed the ad background to white is a good candidate. Google Search used to be like Chrome or Gmail - we know its wrong in the long term, but it's hard to stop using it because it just works so well. But these days, not anymore. Search is a lot less sticky, and it is their golden goose they are messing with here.
- pjmlp 5y agoSame here, I no longer can find anything sensible on Google, regardless how much I try to customize the search expression. Additionally as polyglot it is very irritanting that Google tries to helpfully translate queries for me, thus I have to go to other search engines to actually find the article on the language I want.