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I've gotten into a habit of instinctively searching for queries in multiple major search engines as I've often found that many useful results are found by one b
by mgdlbp 5y ago
I've gotten into a habit of instinctively searching for queries in multiple major search engines as I've often found that many useful results are found by one but not another. Most of the time, notable differences seem to be in NLP or 'Oh, I know what you're looking for!' algorithms or are the result of DMCA or other requests, but I've noticed a few situations like this where results differ or seem special-cased, sometimes amusingly, for mysterious reasons (edit: another comment points out possible copyright issues with Wikivoyage).
Here are a couple cases where I archived results pages from Bing, Google, and Yandex with the Wayback Machine and archive.is.
A particularly puzzling case as to why the result might be filtered: one particular Wikipedia page. Searching by its title, using the queries:
victorian erotica wikipedia
or
"victorian erotica" site:en.wikipedia.org
Bing refuses to present the page, while Google and Yandex offer it with no qualms. Interestingly, when I discovered this, the article's talk page was the first result in Bing, but now even that no longer appears.
Another query, where the issue is likely that it borders on one of a diverse variety of sensitive and/or politically controversial topics where results sometimes seem deliberately tuned in one index or another (in my anecdata: mostly by Google), is the title of one of the hoax papers submitted in the grievance studies affair, which appears verbatim in many pages about it:
my struggle to dismantle my whiteness a critical race examination of whiteness from within whiteness
Bing and Yandex exhibit expected behavior. Google, however (which is usually the best at determining the subject of a query consisting of an out-of-context quote) seems to only focus on a small fraction of keywords and finds no results that are remotely related to the grievance studies affair itself.
I've seen discussions about the decreasing relevancy of search results in general where some have suggested that some sort of central repository be started for archiving interesting search results. I wonder if there have been any efforts toward such a project?
Note: when archiving search pages, I stripped all unnecessary parameters from the URLs. For example,
https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.google.com/search?q=my+struggle+to+dismantle+my+whiteness+a+critical+race+examination+of+whiteness+from+within+whiteness https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.google.com/search?...
- Igelau 5y ago> central repository be started for archiving interesting search results. I wonder if there have been any efforts toward such a project? What you want is a "directory". Like Yahoo! of old. Search killed these during the window where search was useful.
- kymaz 5y agoExcept a new internet directory probably wouldn't be very useful without some kind of search. If those old directories were big enough and didn't have a search worth using, the directory wasn't very useful. If you need to develop one to have the other....
- mgdlbp 5y agoOh, I didn't word that very well! What I meant was a repository of search results pages that are themselves interesting, especially as the results change over time... Edit: ...and when they highlight the differences between search engines. For example, Google's NLP allows it to just barely identify the video referenced by the query: microsoft ceo repeating a word And with this query, all three major engines return a jumble of results from amusingly diverse contexts: split to left or right
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alisonkisk 5y agoPut quotes around it and Google finds greivance studies. Without quotes, it's a hodgepodge of generic CRT words, and you get a bunch of CRT results.
- will4274 5y agoI agree with Google doing more "controversial topic guiding" than others - though perhaps this is just their superior language model. Interesting, Google seems to have fixed my go-to example. The query "<college newspaper name> sexual assault false report <year>" (for my college and sophomore year) used to return the expected article on Bing but fail to return it entirely on Google, unless the exact headline was used. Somebody seems to have fixed this bug though - shows up as first for both today.
- herendin2 5y agoTry changing your search region? It may be relevant