5 ms·

> You do a search on Gigablast and say, well, why didn't it get this result that Google got. And that's because the index isn't big enough I wionder how much t

by SamBam 5y ago

> You do a search on Gigablast and say, well, why didn't it get this result that Google got. And that's because the index isn't big enough I wionder how much this is true, and how much (despite all our rhetoric to the contrary) it's because we have actually come to expect Google's modern proprietary page ranking, which counts more than just inbound links but all sorts of other signals (freshness, relevance to our previous queries, etc.). We dislike the additional signals when it feels like Google is trying to second-guess our intentions, but we probably don't notice how well they work when they give us the result we expect in the first three links.

JacobThreeThree 5y ago
I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. Back then Google was only going up against indexes and link-rings, not 2021 Google/Bing/DDG/etc.
- more_corn 5y ago
  I hate google now. Every time I use it by accident I’m reminded how infuriating it is. I know DuckDuckGo is just bing in a Halloween mask, but I’ll gladly use something that’s not awesome as long as it’s also not infuriating. I’d take 2005 google any day.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  2005? There were loads of other search engines (SE), and many meta-SE: hotbot, dogpile, metacrawler, ... (IIRC), plenty more. There was also indexes, which Yahoo, AOL (remember them!) had but there was, what was it called, dmoz?, the open web directory. When Google started, being in the right web directory gave you a boost in SERPs as it was used as a domain trust indicator, and the categories were used for keywords. Of course it got gamed hard. Google was good, but I used it as an alt for maybe 6 months before it won over my main SE at the time. I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something?? One of the main things Google had was all the extra operators like link: inurl:, etc., but they had Boolean logic operators too at one point I think.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something?? Google replaced Altavista in my usage, who in turn were usually better than their predecessors.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      I used them all and kept using the ones that gave me unique results. Google was hands down better because of pagerank and boosts to dmoz listed sites and because they scanned the whole page ignoring keywords.
- pronik 5y ago
  I've been using Altavista at that time, every now and then switching to Northern Light. Everything else was abysmal. Google blew them out of the water in terms of speed, quality, simplicity, unclutterdness and everything else. I can't remember ever retraining muscle memory so fast when switching to Google. So, no, Google has been great then and apart from people actively working against the algorithm is still good now, but obviously a completely different beast.
  - remus 5y ago
    I think the parent's point was that people say Google 2005 >> Google 2021, but it's pretty hard to make this comparison in an objective way. No doubt Google 2005 was way better than other offerings around at the time.
- selcuka 5y ago
  Google was good, actually very good back in 2000s. Their PageRank algorithm practically eliminated spam pages that were simply a list of keywords. Before Google, those pages came up on the first page of Altavista. I don't specifically remember 2005, but the quality went down with more modern but still shady SEO practices.
  - more_corn 5y ago
    No, quality went down because google shat the bed. All the changes have been deliberate.
- eitland 5y ago
  > I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. I've been pointing this out for at least close to a decade. I know since I bothered to screenshot and blog about it in 2012. I'll admit mistakes happened back then too, but they were more forgivable like keyword stuffing on unrelated pages. Back then Google were on our side and removed those as fast as possible. Today however the problem isn't that someone hss stuffed the keyword into an unrelated page but that Google themselves mix a whole lot of completely irrelevant pages into the results, probably because some metrics go up when they do that. Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. Note that I'm not necessarily suggesting an grand evil master plan here, only that end-to-end metrics will improve as long as there is no realistic competition.
  - remus 5y ago
    > Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. This would mean that google were measuring the quality of their search results by the number of ad impressions which seems unlikely to me. Maybe in some big, wooly sense this is sort of true but it seems pretty unlikely that anyone interested in search quality (i.e. the search team at google) is looking at ad impressions.
romwell 5y ago
Well if the result didn't appear in the first 5-10 pages, it's probably not in the index. You can see it with other search engines. I challenge you to come up with a Google query for which a first-page result won't be seen within the first 10 pages of Bing results for the same query. (Bonus points if that result is relevant). There's only so much tweaking that personalization and other heuristic can do. But if something is missing from them index, that's it.
- jefftk 5y ago
  It sounds to me like your challenge includes anything which is in Google's index but not Bing's? Is that intentional?
- salawat 5y ago
  I would like to see the least relevant search result Google comes up with. :) Yes, I realize this is probably trivial with an API call, but I always found it interesting there isn't a way to see what the site with the lowest pagerank in the index is.
jldugger 5y ago
I assume the author has the ability to search the index to see if your preferred Google result is even indexed.
eitland 5y ago
>but we probably don't notice how well they work when they give us the result we expect in the first three links. For me the experienced quality of Google search results gave have dropped massively since 2008, despite (and maybe even because of) all their new parameters. When someone says this someone else usually immediately says it is because of web spam and black hat SEO. But black hat SEO doesn't explain why verbatim doesn't work for many of us. Black hat SEO doesn't explain why double quotes doesn't work. Black hat SEO doesn't explain why there is no personal blacklists so all those who hate pintrest can blacklist them. Black hat SEO probably also doesn't explain why I cannot find a unique strings in open source repos and instead get pages of not exactly webspam but answers to questions I didn't ask.

by SamBam 5y ago

JacobThreeThree 5y ago

I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. Back then Google was only going up against indexes and link-rings, not 2021 Google/Bing/DDG/etc.

more_corn 5y ago
I hate google now. Every time I use it by accident I’m reminded how infuriating it is. I know DuckDuckGo is just bing in a Halloween mask, but I’ll gladly use something that’s not awesome as long as it’s also not infuriating. I’d take 2005 google any day.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
2005? There were loads of other search engines (SE), and many meta-SE: hotbot, dogpile, metacrawler, ... (IIRC), plenty more. There was also indexes, which Yahoo, AOL (remember them!) had but there was, what was it called, dmoz?, the open web directory. When Google started, being in the right web directory gave you a boost in SERPs as it was used as a domain trust indicator, and the categories were used for keywords. Of course it got gamed hard. Google was good, but I used it as an alt for maybe 6 months before it won over my main SE at the time. I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something?? One of the main things Google had was all the extra operators like link: inurl:, etc., but they had Boolean logic operators too at one point I think.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something?? Google replaced Altavista in my usage, who in turn were usually better than their predecessors.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I used them all and kept using the ones that gave me unique results. Google was hands down better because of pagerank and boosts to dmoz listed sites and because they scanned the whole page ignoring keywords.
pronik 5y ago
I've been using Altavista at that time, every now and then switching to Northern Light. Everything else was abysmal. Google blew them out of the water in terms of speed, quality, simplicity, unclutterdness and everything else. I can't remember ever retraining muscle memory so fast when switching to Google. So, no, Google has been great then and apart from people actively working against the algorithm is still good now, but obviously a completely different beast.
- remus 5y ago
  I think the parent's point was that people say Google 2005 >> Google 2021, but it's pretty hard to make this comparison in an objective way. No doubt Google 2005 was way better than other offerings around at the time.
selcuka 5y ago
Google was good, actually very good back in 2000s. Their PageRank algorithm practically eliminated spam pages that were simply a list of keywords. Before Google, those pages came up on the first page of Altavista. I don't specifically remember 2005, but the quality went down with more modern but still shady SEO practices.
- more_corn 5y ago
  No, quality went down because google shat the bed. All the changes have been deliberate.
eitland 5y ago
> I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. I've been pointing this out for at least close to a decade. I know since I bothered to screenshot and blog about it in 2012. I'll admit mistakes happened back then too, but they were more forgivable like keyword stuffing on unrelated pages. Back then Google were on our side and removed those as fast as possible. Today however the problem isn't that someone hss stuffed the keyword into an unrelated page but that Google themselves mix a whole lot of completely irrelevant pages into the results, probably because some metrics go up when they do that. Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. Note that I'm not necessarily suggesting an grand evil master plan here, only that end-to-end metrics will improve as long as there is no realistic competition.
- remus 5y ago
  > Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. This would mean that google were measuring the quality of their search results by the number of ad impressions which seems unlikely to me. Maybe in some big, wooly sense this is sort of true but it seems pretty unlikely that anyone interested in search quality (i.e. the search team at google) is looking at ad impressions.

romwell 5y ago

Well if the result didn't appear in the first 5-10 pages, it's probably not in the index. You can see it with other search engines. I challenge you to come up with a Google query for which a first-page result won't be seen within the first 10 pages of Bing results for the same query. (Bonus points if that result is relevant). There's only so much tweaking that personalization and other heuristic can do. But if something is missing from them index, that's it.

jefftk 5y ago
It sounds to me like your challenge includes anything which is in Google's index but not Bing's? Is that intentional?
salawat 5y ago
I would like to see the least relevant search result Google comes up with. :) Yes, I realize this is probably trivial with an API call, but I always found it interesting there isn't a way to see what the site with the lowest pagerank in the index is.

jldugger 5y ago

I assume the author has the ability to search the index to see if your preferred Google result is even indexed.

eitland 5y ago

>but we probably don't notice how well they work when they give us the result we expect in the first three links. For me the experienced quality of Google search results gave have dropped massively since 2008, despite (and maybe even because of) all their new parameters. When someone says this someone else usually immediately says it is because of web spam and black hat SEO. But black hat SEO doesn't explain why verbatim doesn't work for many of us. Black hat SEO doesn't explain why double quotes doesn't work. Black hat SEO doesn't explain why there is no personal blacklists so all those who hate pintrest can blacklist them. Black hat SEO probably also doesn't explain why I cannot find a unique strings in open source repos and instead get pages of not exactly webspam but answers to questions I didn't ask.