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I don't know if search is deteriorating as a whole, but certain searches seems to be manipulated for political reasons. The famous example is an Image search of

I don't know if search is deteriorating as a whole, but certain searches seems to be manipulated for political reasons. The famous example is an Image search of "white couple" - really, try it, it is like only 50% correct. But I don't believe the image search itself would be that bad, rather certain queries are given manipulated results.

Jyaif 5y ago
FWIW I did the same search on Bing and Yandex and got similar results: https://imgur.com/a/Nd9QCH2 https://imgur.com/a/Nd9QCH2 Either your theory is wrong, or the other search engines are also manipulating results for political reasons, or they are copying the results from Google.
danieljacksonno 5y ago
I'm not convinced "white couple" showing interracial couples is a political move, or even on purpose. I think it simply is because very few people would describe in text a white couple as a "white couple" and not just as a "couple". In a majority white culture there is no reason to specify skin colour when both are white. It's just a couple. On the contrary, I think it would be very normal to write "black and white couple" for an interracial couple, and because "black and white" also contains "white" thus those images would show up when you search for "white couple". This is easy to verify by looking for the word "white" around the images Google returns for "white couple", and they are definitely there - often in the image title itself. However, if you just search for "couple" then you'll find what you are looking for. At least on my google 9 out of 10 results are a white couple.
planb 5y ago
You're overestimating the smarts of google: Image search does not classify image contents. It uses the site text for ranking of the images on that site. It finds lots of "Black And White Couple Stock Photo" images - the image description in fact contains the string "white couple".
- grumbel 5y ago
  While that's certainly possible, this feels like a mistake AltaVista would make 20 years ago, it seems weirdly out of place for Google doing that in 2022. They used to be a bit more context aware and not just present you results due to some bit of text matching. If I try the search on flickr.com, "white people" returns black&white pictures of people, while "white couple" returns swans. Meanwhile shutterstock.com returns mostly correct results.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  I'm fairly certain it actually is classifying image contents since at least a year or two ago (or maybe a little bit even longer – I can't remember when exactly I first noticed this), because I've noticed getting image search results that can't be explained otherwise (the keyword I've been searching for most certainly doesn't appear anywhere on the page containing the image in question). It can be turned off by doing a verbatim search (i.e. surrounding the search term with quotes), but otherwise it definitively happens, and it's occasionally been quite useful actually. Likewise, since at least around the same time (if not somewhat earlier), Google has also been running OCR on all images it indexes.

Jyaif 5y ago

FWIW I did the same search on Bing and Yandex and got similar results: https://imgur.com/a/Nd9QCH2 https://imgur.com/a/Nd9QCH2 Either your theory is wrong, or the other search engines are also manipulating results for political reasons, or they are copying the results from Google.

danieljacksonno 5y ago

I'm not convinced "white couple" showing interracial couples is a political move, or even on purpose. I think it simply is because very few people would describe in text a white couple as a "white couple" and not just as a "couple". In a majority white culture there is no reason to specify skin colour when both are white. It's just a couple. On the contrary, I think it would be very normal to write "black and white couple" for an interracial couple, and because "black and white" also contains "white" thus those images would show up when you search for "white couple". This is easy to verify by looking for the word "white" around the images Google returns for "white couple", and they are definitely there - often in the image title itself. However, if you just search for "couple" then you'll find what you are looking for. At least on my google 9 out of 10 results are a white couple.

planb 5y ago

You're overestimating the smarts of google: Image search does not classify image contents. It uses the site text for ranking of the images on that site. It finds lots of "Black And White Couple Stock Photo" images - the image description in fact contains the string "white couple".

grumbel 5y ago
While that's certainly possible, this feels like a mistake AltaVista would make 20 years ago, it seems weirdly out of place for Google doing that in 2022. They used to be a bit more context aware and not just present you results due to some bit of text matching. If I try the search on flickr.com, "white people" returns black&white pictures of people, while "white couple" returns swans. Meanwhile shutterstock.com returns mostly correct results.
iggldiggl 5y ago
I'm fairly certain it actually is classifying image contents since at least a year or two ago (or maybe a little bit even longer – I can't remember when exactly I first noticed this), because I've noticed getting image search results that can't be explained otherwise (the keyword I've been searching for most certainly doesn't appear anywhere on the page containing the image in question). It can be turned off by doing a verbatim search (i.e. surrounding the search term with quotes), but otherwise it definitively happens, and it's occasionally been quite useful actually. Likewise, since at least around the same time (if not somewhat earlier), Google has also been running OCR on all images it indexes.