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There's been a lot of HN discussion [1][2][3] about Google Search recently, and whether it’s gone downhill. I used to work on Search and Search Measurement at

by echen 5y ago

There's been a lot of HN discussion [1][2][3] about Google Search recently, and whether it’s gone downhill. I used to work on Search and Search Measurement at YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft, so I thought it would be fun to move beyond anecdotes, grab some data, and do a quantitative analysis. tl;dr I didn't have historical data, to see how Google Search has trended over time. But compared to Bing, Google still generally outperforms -- although some of its failures are pretty surprising! If there are particular areas of Google Search that people are interested in digging into, give a shout -- I love running these kinds of search / human eval analyses. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417061 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702

umeshunni 5y ago
I think the broader theme that these outrage bait posts miss is that the web itself is rotting / deteriorating. Most interesting content isn't on the web anymore and is definitely not in text. Content that would be have been on an open web forum 10 years ago, are now hidden behind various data silos/walled gardens - whether it's Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or Discord. Each of these walled gardens have different levels of tolerance for the open web, from using it as an SEO channel (e.g. Reddit) to completely opaque to it (e.g Discord). Some car and photography forums I was on ~10 years ago are all barren now as the old users have moved on and new users prefer to communicate in a Facebook group or something like that. Interesting self-published blogs and recipes aren't on the web anymore, they're on YouTube channels or on someone's Instagram channel (or whatever its called).
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  You're right walled gardens and video make search harder than it used to be. That doesn't make discussing the problem outrage bait.
  - philistine 5y ago
    Considering Google basically owns online video, they should be ashamed they haven't been able to give incredible Google Search results inside videos.
- mdoms 5y ago
  There's no less interesting information on the internet than there was a few years ago - to the contrary there's much more. I agree that the ratio of good to trash content has plummeted but it's the job of Google and its competitors to find the good stuff. If they're failing at their core competency then it's worth discussing.
denlekke 5y ago
youtube now seems to provide me only ~10 relevant results and then random other videos i might like with no way to delve further into results based on my search term. this results in it being almost impossible for me to find certain things, especially videos without a lot of views, unless i know the exact title of the video ahead of time. what are some of the decisions that go into this ? is it just cost savings ?
jeffbee 5y ago
I'm pretty sure the term of art for submitting a headline in the form of a question when the article does not and cannot answer the question is "clickbait".
thomassmith65 5y ago
The experiment I want to see is one where (1) the same set of test queries is run on multiple search engines (2) for each query result, the result links from all engines are combined into a single document (without including information about the search engine from which they came) (3) the links are ranked blindly for fitness in relation to the search query (4) the fitness rank of the results is then reunited to the source search engines.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  Good list. To add to it: I'd like to see the same queries run from a) multiple IP addresses (where you search from seems to affect results), and b) what the differences in results are for those with Google accounts and those doing history-/accountless searches.

by echen 5y ago

umeshunni 5y ago

I think the broader theme that these outrage bait posts miss is that the web itself is rotting / deteriorating. Most interesting content isn't on the web anymore and is definitely not in text. Content that would be have been on an open web forum 10 years ago, are now hidden behind various data silos/walled gardens - whether it's Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or Discord. Each of these walled gardens have different levels of tolerance for the open web, from using it as an SEO channel (e.g. Reddit) to completely opaque to it (e.g Discord). Some car and photography forums I was on ~10 years ago are all barren now as the old users have moved on and new users prefer to communicate in a Facebook group or something like that. Interesting self-published blogs and recipes aren't on the web anymore, they're on YouTube channels or on someone's Instagram channel (or whatever its called).

pseudalopex 5y ago
You're right walled gardens and video make search harder than it used to be. That doesn't make discussing the problem outrage bait.
- philistine 5y ago
  Considering Google basically owns online video, they should be ashamed they haven't been able to give incredible Google Search results inside videos.
mdoms 5y ago
There's no less interesting information on the internet than there was a few years ago - to the contrary there's much more. I agree that the ratio of good to trash content has plummeted but it's the job of Google and its competitors to find the good stuff. If they're failing at their core competency then it's worth discussing.

denlekke 5y ago

youtube now seems to provide me only ~10 relevant results and then random other videos i might like with no way to delve further into results based on my search term. this results in it being almost impossible for me to find certain things, especially videos without a lot of views, unless i know the exact title of the video ahead of time. what are some of the decisions that go into this ? is it just cost savings ?

jeffbee 5y ago

I'm pretty sure the term of art for submitting a headline in the form of a question when the article does not and cannot answer the question is "clickbait".

thomassmith65 5y ago

The experiment I want to see is one where (1) the same set of test queries is run on multiple search engines (2) for each query result, the result links from all engines are combined into a single document (without including information about the search engine from which they came) (3) the links are ranked blindly for fitness in relation to the search query (4) the fitness rank of the results is then reunited to the source search engines.

flenserboy 5y ago
Good list. To add to it: I'd like to see the same queries run from a) multiple IP addresses (where you search from seems to affect results), and b) what the differences in results are for those with Google accounts and those doing history-/accountless searches.