10 ms·

It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an a

by seoaeu 5y ago

It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an adversarial process where marketers spend billions of dollars trying to distort the rankings

squeaky-clean 5y ago
It's a bit of both. The company I work at has a pretty big SEO department, and it's definitely frustrating how they're able to game web search. But also last week I was trying to Google something about earbuds (I don't even remember what exactly), and searching for ("earbuds" -headphones) still brings up headphones as a bolded result because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms. Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.
- oblio 5y ago
  > because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms That's a double edged sword. One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example). They needed to help the less educated, too.
  - mwigdahl 5y ago
    Does it help the less educated to flat out ignore exclusion terms that are _explicitly_ provided?
    - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
      Doesn't seem to ignore it for me -- on the first page I only see "headphones" word in the search string itself, in "related searches" and in google maps listing shops that sell them.
    - getcrunk 5y ago
      Thank you. The rebuttals were good but fail to address this main point. Which was explicitly stated.
  - pb7 5y ago
    Bingo. In the past, you needed “Google-fu” to find what you were looking for. People that didn’t understand how the search was done under the hood (non-techies) would search with poor terms and get poor results. Nowadays, you can’t “game” the system with precise keywords but millions more people find what they’re looking for. Overall, it’s an improvement.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    Even educated people don't have the ability to hold every possible taxonomic schema in their heads. Don't even get me started on multi-lingual, cross-culture, jargon, creole, and dialect differences. A cool example I read recently noted that the English word "son" has two different meanings in Spanish: son, a conjugation of the verb ser, to be, and son, relating to sound and music. Edit: as an aside, I just did a search for son and the first page was almost entirely about the recent horror movie, with one hit for the Korean footballer Heung-min Son
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    > They needed to help the less educated, too. Like squeaky-clean trying to read up on a paradox? Google could have an advanced mode for search or something. Instead they put other information aggregators out off business but did nothing to replace their value. We were better off with the paper version of Yellow Pages for some queries -- at least it was moderated and effort was put into compiling it. I don't think it is a good business move for Google in the long turn to be a search engine for Wikipedia and Stack overflow and for people that are to lazy to type to top domain for the URL. Forwarding non URLs to Google search in Chrome might be the smartest dark pattern from Google ever.
bradleyjg 5y ago
Google makes an annualized $71 billion in profit after paying tens of thousands of software engineers. I’m not saying I think they should win outright but they should at least be holding their own if they are giving it their all.
- bittercynic 5y ago
  They have a reputation for not motivating their best people to maintain and improve existing products. Maybe search is affected. Also, it's a huge company. Maybe there are internal structures that when you work hard to advance your career within the company it doesn't align with advancing the overall company.
habibur 5y ago
That had been the case for long. And google periodically reset their search algorithm purging billions of pages to clean up the junk. After which the results got better. But sometime back, it stopped doing it. Or can't do it anymore. Web-search is now up for disruption, when that happens.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Is it not a consequence of deliberate choices made by Google?
- jcranberry 5y ago
  People would be doing this no matter what choices Google make because of how universally used it is. What choice do you think Google could make which would avoid that?
  - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
    They could punish the rankings of review pages using affiliate links. Clearly the use of these links creates a worse experience for users. Not sure why you're carrying water for Google but I'm confident in their ability to filter obvious spam from their search results.
tomrod 5y ago
Regardless of actor causing the issue, Google is the party that serves the search results and thus are responsible for what they display.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Right. Google is the stage the actor gets to perform. Google built the stage. It's like the phrase "if you build, they will come" came to fruition. The thing to remember as a Dev, no matter how well intended your project is, users will always find a way to use it in a manner you never thought about that is the most advantageous way for the user.
makeitdouble 5y ago
Isn't the fuzzying of the query and expansion of the results, including prioritizing "natural language" querying a deliberate UX choice ? I don't get what the marketers have to do with that part ?
- seoaeu 5y ago
  Is it? SEO spammers seem like they'd have an easier time making a page with every permutation of the search string compared to legitimate authors who would likely have only a single variation
enumjorge 5y ago
IMHO it’s both. Obviously people spend a lot of effort reverse engineering Google’s ranking algorithms because it’s profitable but some of it, at least from the outside, seems self-inflicted. Image search has been useless for me for a long time because of Pinterest. Many times Pinterest will show you an image but when you click on it it takes you to a page with completely different content. Maybe Google has a good reason for not penalizing Pinterest, but it’s weird to me that they are not more aggressive in sanitizing the quality of their searches.
caskstrength 5y ago
I understand that google is constantly at war with SEO-people who are motivated to abuse the hell out of search, but why can't they un-fuck verbatim search and give me back the ability to completely remove particular domains from search results?
acdha 5y ago
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this but Google is an enormously profitable company which also is a world-leader in software development and ML, which you would not know from looking at search results. It also seems relevant that Google has actively removed features like the ability to report SEO spam or block domains — if they cared about the user experience, you'd think there'd be an easy menu with advanced 1990s technology like “Never show results from this domain” or “Report this result as spam”. Yes, there are lots of SEO spambots out there but there are also millions of people who would zealously report spam sites for the many queries which are basically useless now. As a simple example, on the weekend I was searching for manuals for my discontinued refrigerator. There are a ton of bottom-feeder sites which will list any part number imaginable and some which are even using fake forum sites with templated exchanges between users where someone gives a link to a malware/phishing/porn page followed by several other fake users thanking them. Google has chosen to make reporting things like that almost impossible, so unsurprisingly they remain common. I suspect that's due to their desire to avoid paying humans to distinguish between valid complaints and fake complaints from competing SEOs but either way from my perspective the results are unambiguously worse than they were a decade ago and I have no reason to believe anyone will care about this unless revenue slips.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  I wish there were a way to tell Google that I never, EVER want to see an image result from pinterest.
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    You may not be able to tell Google directly, but uBlacklist works reasonably well and has regular expression support so you can block all TLDs. I added /pinterest\..*/ and here's the (lack of) results when I google image search "pinterest fish": https://i.imgur.com/pMQ2JQK.png https://i.imgur.com/pMQ2JQK.png https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
ricardo81 5y ago
As others mentioned, definitely both. One curious example for a non-commercial term the other day was a search for 'population nairn'. It returned a "people also ask of": "What is the fastest town in Scotland"? Answer: walkwithdinosaurs Nonsensical question and answer.

by seoaeu 5y ago

squeaky-clean 5y ago

It's a bit of both. The company I work at has a pretty big SEO department, and it's definitely frustrating how they're able to game web search. But also last week I was trying to Google something about earbuds (I don't even remember what exactly), and searching for ("earbuds" -headphones) still brings up headphones as a bolded result because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms. Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.

oblio 5y ago
> because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms That's a double edged sword. One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example). They needed to help the less educated, too.
- mwigdahl 5y ago
  Does it help the less educated to flat out ignore exclusion terms that are _explicitly_ provided?
  - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
    Doesn't seem to ignore it for me -- on the first page I only see "headphones" word in the search string itself, in "related searches" and in google maps listing shops that sell them.
  - getcrunk 5y ago
    Thank you. The rebuttals were good but fail to address this main point. Which was explicitly stated.
- pb7 5y ago
  Bingo. In the past, you needed “Google-fu” to find what you were looking for. People that didn’t understand how the search was done under the hood (non-techies) would search with poor terms and get poor results. Nowadays, you can’t “game” the system with precise keywords but millions more people find what they’re looking for. Overall, it’s an improvement.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Even educated people don't have the ability to hold every possible taxonomic schema in their heads. Don't even get me started on multi-lingual, cross-culture, jargon, creole, and dialect differences. A cool example I read recently noted that the English word "son" has two different meanings in Spanish: son, a conjugation of the verb ser, to be, and son, relating to sound and music. Edit: as an aside, I just did a search for son and the first page was almost entirely about the recent horror movie, with one hit for the Korean footballer Heung-min Son
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > They needed to help the less educated, too. Like squeaky-clean trying to read up on a paradox? Google could have an advanced mode for search or something. Instead they put other information aggregators out off business but did nothing to replace their value. We were better off with the paper version of Yellow Pages for some queries -- at least it was moderated and effort was put into compiling it. I don't think it is a good business move for Google in the long turn to be a search engine for Wikipedia and Stack overflow and for people that are to lazy to type to top domain for the URL. Forwarding non URLs to Google search in Chrome might be the smartest dark pattern from Google ever.

bradleyjg 5y ago

Google makes an annualized $71 billion in profit after paying tens of thousands of software engineers. I’m not saying I think they should win outright but they should at least be holding their own if they are giving it their all.

bittercynic 5y ago
They have a reputation for not motivating their best people to maintain and improve existing products. Maybe search is affected. Also, it's a huge company. Maybe there are internal structures that when you work hard to advance your career within the company it doesn't align with advancing the overall company.

habibur 5y ago

That had been the case for long. And google periodically reset their search algorithm purging billions of pages to clean up the junk. After which the results got better. But sometime back, it stopped doing it. Or can't do it anymore. Web-search is now up for disruption, when that happens.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago

Is it not a consequence of deliberate choices made by Google?

jcranberry 5y ago
People would be doing this no matter what choices Google make because of how universally used it is. What choice do you think Google could make which would avoid that?
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  They could punish the rankings of review pages using affiliate links. Clearly the use of these links creates a worse experience for users. Not sure why you're carrying water for Google but I'm confident in their ability to filter obvious spam from their search results.

tomrod 5y ago

Regardless of actor causing the issue, Google is the party that serves the search results and thus are responsible for what they display.

dylan604 5y ago
Right. Google is the stage the actor gets to perform. Google built the stage. It's like the phrase "if you build, they will come" came to fruition. The thing to remember as a Dev, no matter how well intended your project is, users will always find a way to use it in a manner you never thought about that is the most advantageous way for the user.

makeitdouble 5y ago

Isn't the fuzzying of the query and expansion of the results, including prioritizing "natural language" querying a deliberate UX choice ? I don't get what the marketers have to do with that part ?

seoaeu 5y ago
Is it? SEO spammers seem like they'd have an easier time making a page with every permutation of the search string compared to legitimate authors who would likely have only a single variation

enumjorge 5y ago

IMHO it’s both. Obviously people spend a lot of effort reverse engineering Google’s ranking algorithms because it’s profitable but some of it, at least from the outside, seems self-inflicted. Image search has been useless for me for a long time because of Pinterest. Many times Pinterest will show you an image but when you click on it it takes you to a page with completely different content. Maybe Google has a good reason for not penalizing Pinterest, but it’s weird to me that they are not more aggressive in sanitizing the quality of their searches.

caskstrength 5y ago

I understand that google is constantly at war with SEO-people who are motivated to abuse the hell out of search, but why can't they un-fuck verbatim search and give me back the ability to completely remove particular domains from search results?

acdha 5y ago

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this but Google is an enormously profitable company which also is a world-leader in software development and ML, which you would not know from looking at search results. It also seems relevant that Google has actively removed features like the ability to report SEO spam or block domains — if they cared about the user experience, you'd think there'd be an easy menu with advanced 1990s technology like “Never show results from this domain” or “Report this result as spam”. Yes, there are lots of SEO spambots out there but there are also millions of people who would zealously report spam sites for the many queries which are basically useless now. As a simple example, on the weekend I was searching for manuals for my discontinued refrigerator. There are a ton of bottom-feeder sites which will list any part number imaginable and some which are even using fake forum sites with templated exchanges between users where someone gives a link to a malware/phishing/porn page followed by several other fake users thanking them. Google has chosen to make reporting things like that almost impossible, so unsurprisingly they remain common. I suspect that's due to their desire to avoid paying humans to distinguish between valid complaints and fake complaints from competing SEOs but either way from my perspective the results are unambiguously worse than they were a decade ago and I have no reason to believe anyone will care about this unless revenue slips.

cratermoon 5y ago
I wish there were a way to tell Google that I never, EVER want to see an image result from pinterest.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  You may not be able to tell Google directly, but uBlacklist works reasonably well and has regular expression support so you can block all TLDs. I added /pinterest\..*/ and here's the (lack of) results when I google image search "pinterest fish": https://i.imgur.com/pMQ2JQK.png https://i.imgur.com/pMQ2JQK.png https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/

ricardo81 5y ago

As others mentioned, definitely both. One curious example for a non-commercial term the other day was a search for 'population nairn'. It returned a "people also ask of": "What is the fastest town in Scotland"? Answer: walkwithdinosaurs Nonsensical question and answer.