5 ms·

> I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results. I'm old

> I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results. I'm old enough to remember when Google came, and the main difference was this: With Google you did not have to flip through 3 pages of completely unrelated search results; that were paid for. Google used to display advertisements on the right as well, i.e. not among the regular search results. This made Google so much better (and more popular) then their competition.

300bps 5y ago
And now the majority of the first page of results on Google are ads.
- alphabetting 5y ago
  80% of queries have no ads
  - adventured 5y ago
    Which makes sense, that means they can't fill the inventory for those searches. The majority of queries likely yield garbage these days and or are just searches for things like conversions, definition look-ups, searches for the homepage of gmail or facebook (which is how many older people get back to those places), or people wanting to go directly to a specific page on Wikipedia (knowing that's half of what Google is good for now) and countless other similar searches. It's quite amusing that so much of Google's value is now in being a glorified link generator for Wikipedia and Reddit.
alkonaut 5y ago
The early search engines (Webcrawler, Lycos, ...) ranked "relevance" based on some silly metric like "the more times the search term appears on the page, the more relevant the page must be". So the result was that the first pages were full spam sites that just used search terms as hidden text. Then Altavista came and it was a huge change for the better. They at least made some effort of trying to rank actual relevance. Of course, Page/Brin's invention that made Google what it is today is PageRank, and none of the competition were close to an idea that good. So PageRank'ed pages, good spam detection filters and ads on the side = Good Google. A search engine that stood out against the competition. Now Googlee has horrible site spam detection, shows ads in the main result list (some times it's all you see). Google now has very little edge against the competition. Even just 1-2 years ago DDG and Bing were a lot worse than even the modern day Google. But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. Google search has never had peers at any point since it was launched.
- bjarneh 5y ago
  > made Google what it is today is PageRank Yes, but it was no secret that Google's page ranking was based on counting links from different web-pages; I think Page/Brin even wrote a paper about this when Google was in its infancy. But Google clearly had better ranking at first, but it would not help the others if their ranking was better than Google's, since the "paid results" polluted their search results so much they became a joke. A lot of the paid results was "adult content" as well, creating a somewhat strange atmosphere during presentations if the lecturer had to preform an internet search. Although a large part of the www was adult content in the late 90's :-) The competition doomed their own business by selling search results; they really did not play the long-game, but went for the quick cash. I guess most people would have...
- foxfluff 5y ago
  > But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. I'd say it's both, but the force that has been driving me to use DDG more and more recently is not that it's gotten so much better but that G has gotten so much worse.
- bduerst 5y ago
  >but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par Worth noting that these are essentially the same. DDG scrapes a handful of sites but they lean heavily on Bing's search API (or Yandex, if you search in russian). It would be interesting if there could be some independent consumer group that would be able to grade search engine results and compare them regularly. To not only hold them accountable but give credit where it's due too.
kvetching 5y ago
redwall_hp 5y ago
The competition at the time was relying on HTML meta tags' keywords. It was purely based on faith that the web developer would be honest and help classify pages. Which was reasonable at the time, before the Web was so commercial, but that ship has long since sailed. Keyword-stuffing was already a thing that was happening, and other sites simply neglected to tag pages. Some search engines were starting to read the page content and count keyword frequency, so a page that had "apple" many times on it would be deemed relevant to a search for "apple." Google's whole thing was it did something smart, and treated the Web as the big graph it is and more or less measured the in and out degrees of the vertices to rank their popularity. The idea that something relevant would be linked frequently. This was the subject of an academic paper and had associated patents for awhile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank It was a big deal at the time, but once again the Web has changed. Google's search relevance is a function of the changing Web and how it's now highly commercial and populated by everyone instead of being the world's largest community of nerds. Links aren't a measure of popularity, because gulf between the average user and people who operate web sites has widened...and the common denominator has dropped to the point that optimizing for popularity is questionable in the first place.

300bps 5y ago

And now the majority of the first page of results on Google are ads.

alphabetting 5y ago
80% of queries have no ads
- adventured 5y ago
  Which makes sense, that means they can't fill the inventory for those searches. The majority of queries likely yield garbage these days and or are just searches for things like conversions, definition look-ups, searches for the homepage of gmail or facebook (which is how many older people get back to those places), or people wanting to go directly to a specific page on Wikipedia (knowing that's half of what Google is good for now) and countless other similar searches. It's quite amusing that so much of Google's value is now in being a glorified link generator for Wikipedia and Reddit.

alkonaut 5y ago

The early search engines (Webcrawler, Lycos, ...) ranked "relevance" based on some silly metric like "the more times the search term appears on the page, the more relevant the page must be". So the result was that the first pages were full spam sites that just used search terms as hidden text. Then Altavista came and it was a huge change for the better. They at least made some effort of trying to rank actual relevance. Of course, Page/Brin's invention that made Google what it is today is PageRank, and none of the competition were close to an idea that good. So PageRank'ed pages, good spam detection filters and ads on the side = Good Google. A search engine that stood out against the competition. Now Googlee has horrible site spam detection, shows ads in the main result list (some times it's all you see). Google now has very little edge against the competition. Even just 1-2 years ago DDG and Bing were a lot worse than even the modern day Google. But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. Google search has never had peers at any point since it was launched.

bjarneh 5y ago
> made Google what it is today is PageRank Yes, but it was no secret that Google's page ranking was based on counting links from different web-pages; I think Page/Brin even wrote a paper about this when Google was in its infancy. But Google clearly had better ranking at first, but it would not help the others if their ranking was better than Google's, since the "paid results" polluted their search results so much they became a joke. A lot of the paid results was "adult content" as well, creating a somewhat strange atmosphere during presentations if the lecturer had to preform an internet search. Although a large part of the www was adult content in the late 90's :-) The competition doomed their own business by selling search results; they really did not play the long-game, but went for the quick cash. I guess most people would have...
foxfluff 5y ago
> But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. I'd say it's both, but the force that has been driving me to use DDG more and more recently is not that it's gotten so much better but that G has gotten so much worse.
bduerst 5y ago
>but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par Worth noting that these are essentially the same. DDG scrapes a handful of sites but they lean heavily on Bing's search API (or Yandex, if you search in russian). It would be interesting if there could be some independent consumer group that would be able to grade search engine results and compare them regularly. To not only hold them accountable but give credit where it's due too.

kvetching 5y ago

redwall_hp 5y ago

The competition at the time was relying on HTML meta tags' keywords. It was purely based on faith that the web developer would be honest and help classify pages. Which was reasonable at the time, before the Web was so commercial, but that ship has long since sailed. Keyword-stuffing was already a thing that was happening, and other sites simply neglected to tag pages. Some search engines were starting to read the page content and count keyword frequency, so a page that had "apple" many times on it would be deemed relevant to a search for "apple." Google's whole thing was it did something smart, and treated the Web as the big graph it is and more or less measured the in and out degrees of the vertices to rank their popularity. The idea that something relevant would be linked frequently. This was the subject of an academic paper and had associated patents for awhile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank It was a big deal at the time, but once again the Web has changed. Google's search relevance is a function of the changing Web and how it's now highly commercial and populated by everyone instead of being the world's largest community of nerds. Links aren't a measure of popularity, because gulf between the average user and people who operate web sites has widened...and the common denominator has dropped to the point that optimizing for popularity is questionable in the first place.