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The web itself is deteriorating. Instant answers (IA) caused a shift in the way contents are written. Content optimized for IA tend to be repetitive and shallo

The web itself is deteriorating. Instant answers (IA) caused a shift in the way contents are written. Content optimized for IA tend to be repetitive and shallow. Viewing content written for IA is a frustrating experience and these tend to dominant the result page now.

dehrmann 5y ago
No idea if you're right or not, but I think it's an interesting take. It might be because of SEO, it might be more information in walled gardens, it might be the death of the personal web page. Both Google search and the internet are changing, as are our perceptions, so it's really hard to say why search quality is better or worse.
- wolpoli 5y ago
  Whether search quality is deteriorating really depends what we expect from a search engine. Many of us on HN use search engine as a way to look for web pages with specific words. Search engines did start out performing word searches, but somewhere along the way, they started trying to answer questions. Many of the complaints such as Google dropping search terms are actually the result of the search engine trying to answer questions instead of performing keyword searches. Search engines these days are doing well for the easy questions, but of course they completely misunderstand questions with more nuances. A bit off topic: Some of the search queries in the article used Google like a keyword matching tool, while other queries in the article were using Google to answer questions. That's because we only have one search box trying to do everything. Would we be better served if we have a checkbox to tell the search engine that we just want to perform word searches?
  - visarga 5y ago
    It's easy to tell if it's a natural language question or keywordese. They can classify that.
    - tremon 5y ago
      I sometimes try to translate my keywordese to English when I'm confronted with a clueless response. It hardly ever improves the results.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    > trying to answer questions Poor Jeeves. He was before his time.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
The reason you are seeing a lot of that sort of content is because Google is looking for that sort of content, in point because of Google's peculiarities, but also because of how refined the art of black hat SEO has become. Meaningful websites still exist. The bulk of the content on the Internet is older than IA, and it's still out there (not that you can find it with Google).
- eitland 5y ago
  Hey, free advertising for you and your search engine: Marginalia search, by punishing ad- and tracking-heavy pages and by being strict in how it interprets my queries sometimes surfaces better results than Google and DDG. In particular I have found great resources about Linux partitioning and git usage after giving up mainstream search engines and trying them in marginalia. That says quite something about how badly broken the situation is given that marginalia is one person and a tower pc in a living room. I keep getting reminded about a Linux quote on how they managed to go forward by studying the latest 20 years of OS research and throwing it all away :-)

dehrmann 5y ago

No idea if you're right or not, but I think it's an interesting take. It might be because of SEO, it might be more information in walled gardens, it might be the death of the personal web page. Both Google search and the internet are changing, as are our perceptions, so it's really hard to say why search quality is better or worse.

wolpoli 5y ago
Whether search quality is deteriorating really depends what we expect from a search engine. Many of us on HN use search engine as a way to look for web pages with specific words. Search engines did start out performing word searches, but somewhere along the way, they started trying to answer questions. Many of the complaints such as Google dropping search terms are actually the result of the search engine trying to answer questions instead of performing keyword searches. Search engines these days are doing well for the easy questions, but of course they completely misunderstand questions with more nuances. A bit off topic: Some of the search queries in the article used Google like a keyword matching tool, while other queries in the article were using Google to answer questions. That's because we only have one search box trying to do everything. Would we be better served if we have a checkbox to tell the search engine that we just want to perform word searches?
- visarga 5y ago
  It's easy to tell if it's a natural language question or keywordese. They can classify that.
  - tremon 5y ago
    I sometimes try to translate my keywordese to English when I'm confronted with a clueless response. It hardly ever improves the results.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > trying to answer questions Poor Jeeves. He was before his time.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

The reason you are seeing a lot of that sort of content is because Google is looking for that sort of content, in point because of Google's peculiarities, but also because of how refined the art of black hat SEO has become. Meaningful websites still exist. The bulk of the content on the Internet is older than IA, and it's still out there (not that you can find it with Google).

eitland 5y ago
Hey, free advertising for you and your search engine: Marginalia search, by punishing ad- and tracking-heavy pages and by being strict in how it interprets my queries sometimes surfaces better results than Google and DDG. In particular I have found great resources about Linux partitioning and git usage after giving up mainstream search engines and trying them in marginalia. That says quite something about how badly broken the situation is given that marginalia is one person and a tower pc in a living room. I keep getting reminded about a Linux quote on how they managed to go forward by studying the latest 20 years of OS research and throwing it all away :-)