8 ms·

My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines...

chrisseaton 4y ago
I don't understand how you're comparing the two. You think the results were better in 2006, but the corpus was also different.
tyingq 4y ago
My view of it is that they basically lost the SEO spam wars. Without the ML pipelines, the top results would all be dominated by the smaller, highly skilled, SEO manipulators. They didn't find a way to cleanly excise that spam, so they resorted to a very imperfect hammer...giving a lot of SEO weight to large corporate entities. So basically, a different kind of spam dominates now.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  A different, more profitable kind of spam dominates now.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    A kind of spam from which Google profits because it often embeds its ads and/or analytics.
- ricardo81 4y ago
  >smaller Perhaps in other words, market forces (I'm thinking ROI) and economies of scale will win.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    What I was talking about is that there was once a pretty large community of smaller SEO manipulators that did a lot of experimentation on what really worked. Especially in the "black hat" realm. Finding things like areas on big-brand sites that would accept user-generated content, comments, etc, where you could bypass some checks and insert links to sites. They would experiment in a pretty deep way, varying things like the rate of new links, type of new links, variations of anchor text / bare links, and so on. It USED to be very effective. The larger entities don't really have to be that detailed. If you have that brand power, you can just cut partnership/cross-link deals and pay a little attention to things like anchor text in links, contextual text around the link, etc. Edit: Ah, yeah, agreed. What got lost in all this was good content that had no big brand behind it. The indiscriminate hammer Google used to kill off small-guy SEO spam also pushed a lot of actually good stuff, stuff that never did any SEO at all, off the first page.
    - ricardo81 4y ago
      For sure. Way back any high Pagerank page linking to another would unequivocally boost the target site, whatever niche, but it's became more nuanced as you say. What I was meaning was, the players who can manipulate the link graph most cost effectively tend to rank better and it favours those with deeper pockets. Not so bad for competitive niches and high volume terms, but muddies the waters for many other things.
- ge96 4y ago
  Minor rant: I can't seem to contact an actual towing company directly, it's usually some external entity that ranks top in Google then they charge you more to find the actual local towing company. It says "Towing company in city name" but it's not local.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Yeah, their "local search" stuff seems to use yet a different set of criteria. You'll see similar complaints for other niches like locksmiths. Some set of SEO spammers has figured out how to use services like UPS-Store virtual addresses to fool Google.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    The same is true for me for contractors of any sort. Top links are frequently referral farms. For local search, I almost always use google maps instead. Maps search isn't perfect, but it beats web search hands down.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It's really annoying - you have to dig around, and many business do not have a web presence at all so unless you can find something local with ads, you find nothing. Some tricks I've used in the past include local church bulletins (most parishes have some sort of a website and a weekly bulletin with advertising on the back), or local sport team sponsors, or local bars. For towing, you can also try calling a local dealership or auto repair.
    - elliekelly 4y ago
      Or their only web presence at all is a facebook page. I don't have a facebook account so this used to be mildly annoying but lately I've noticed it won't let me see at the page at all. I click the link to visit the business's "website" and I'm greeted with a full-page prompt to sign in to facebook.
- b112 4y ago
  There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. "But wait!", you say, "there are some legit reviewers out there." Yes, there sure are, by my starement is accurate, because for every legit review site with aws referrals, there are tens of thousands of ml created spam referral sites. And so the real review sites are often lost in the mix regardless, which makss arguments to keep those results pointless. But google leaves them there, and this is the same sort of site which, if it were an email, would immediately end up in a spam folder. And beyond this, the other part of the problem is their ridiculous aliasing of search terms, which helps spammy sites come back as a response. You say google lost? It's not losing, if you just don't care. Frankly, it's just a return on investment thing. As long as only a few people per tens of thousands bolt, why spend the r&d?
  - gfd 4y ago
    I put Amazon referral links on my technical blog whenever it's a hardware project. So far I have made < $5 on it so I should probably remove them. But for others I think it helps justify the time I spent writing up the blog and doing the project.
  - blowski 4y ago
    > There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. This is the root of the problem. If Google targets the low-hanging fruit, the spammers will very quickly find a workaround. Google is trying - and failing - to use more sophisticated signals. Spam is a virus. Google beneffited from the network effect, eradicating all opposition. But, like a European medieval monarch, it now has a poor immune system because of its lack of genetic diversity. The many, many SEO spammers are constantly experimenting, and they only have to find one flaw in Google's algorithm for it to win and spread quickly. Google's monoculture cannot save us, however hard they try.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      If you target the spam business model, it won't route around it. But yeah, a healthy set of search engines will get us better results.
- FinalBriefing 4y ago
  Blog farms are way too popular now, too. People have figured out how Google recognizes "meaningful content", and they generate blog posts and pages with AI and ghost writers to pump out vaguely helpful articles.
- narrator 4y ago
  They downranked pirated content results in 2018[1] so someone could just use pagerank and include those sites and have a better search engine for that sort of content. There's also the "controversial twiddler"[2] which makes Google only present mainstream opinions on various topics. I had to search yandex.com to even find a good article on it. There's some weird stuff on the Youtube blacklist, like the Las Vegas mass shooting from a few years ago that everyone forgot about that they never figured out the motive for. See the leaked "YouTube Blacklist" under the "Censorship" link in the project veritas article.[2] [1]https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-industrys-fight-against-piracy-continues/amp/ https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-i... [2]https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-fairness-whistleblower-goes-public-says-burden-lifted-off-of-my-soul/ https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-...
KptMarchewa 4y ago
There was way less SEO back then. If they continued to use the old algorithm, your results would be worse than what you have now.
- Retric 4y ago
  Page rank wasn’t a pure algorithmic solution in 2006 either. So, while the problem changed I am not sure if it got harder or Google’s priorities shifted.
- jotm 4y ago
  Doubt it. Even today, obvious spammy content aggregators show up for many keywords with stuff taken directly from Reddit/Stackoverflow/Superuser/etc. All of Google's fancy ML could've been replaced with a simple report button - enough people report a site and either trigger a manual review (best option) or just ban them (could be used against competitors... but negative SEO was already a thing and is still widely used).
- b112 4y ago
  What are you saying?! There was loads of SEO back in 2000 even! It brought alta vista to its knees, the number one search engine of the day. Google got started, grew, because it filtered all that SEO spammy junk. Do you have specific stats to back this up? Number of SEO pages vs good ones? Or are you just presuming?
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    You're both right. There was loads back then but there was also way less than now.
blip54321 4y ago
Indeed. It's an arms race. Search engines versus SEO.
- shockeychap 4y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree, but with an important caveat - Google is no longer fighting for the best interest of it's users, it's fighting for the best interests of it's advertisers. How useful the results are is now secondary to "how much can this search be monetized". The former was important in the early days when Google needed to be competitive on search.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Most directly, if the search results were perfect you would never need to click on an ad. The most evil thing Google is doing now is pushing brands to buy ads on their own name so that they appear above the organic #1 search result. It's like the time Facebook decided it wouldn't send messages to followers who like you unless you paid up.
    - magicalist 4y ago
      > The most evil thing Google is doing now is pushing brands to buy ads on their own name It's not like this is a new thing. The court cases about it are almost 20 years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton
losvedir 4y ago
> My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines... That's like an old person complaining that their body felt a lot better back in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have to use their walker and glasses all the time...
- raunak 4y ago
  Search is objectively worse today than it used to be, it's not just that "it's harder to use for old people", it's just worse.
  - ivanbakel 4y ago
    >Search is objectively worse today than it used to be How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? And how would you then show that it's a result of Google's algorithms, and not a consequence of the content of the Internet changing significantly?
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? How would you demonstrate that being 50 years old is worse than being 25 years old? You ask people that are 50 years old or older because they have been on both sides. > it's a result of Google's algorithms Well, it's simply in front of your eyes: this [1] was not possible in 2006. Anyway, the fact that you cannot easily find on Google why Google search results are worse, proves that Google search results are worse today than in the past. https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-ad-desktop-design-change-favicon-icon-ftc-guidelines https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-ad-d...
    - tyingq 4y ago
      >How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? There's a few ways to do that. The easiest is to point out that almost any lucrative search query has -0- organic results above the page fold on a typical monitor today. It's all ads unless you scroll down. Then, it's not proof, but how much time do you think Google spends on things that sit below the fold and aren't clicked on much? What would the financial incentive be?
subsubzero 4y ago
I feel the same way, I think one of the biggest startup opportunities now is to create a decent search engine. Google is absolute rubbish and a new player needs to step in and take away that market share that google is throwing away by means of a terrible user experience.
- NateEag 4y ago
  I strongly disagree that there's a startup opportunity in Google's relatively poor search performance. Obsessive programmers like myself really want a search engine that does better and helps us find the weird corners of the web. Most people do not care. They can type a question into Google and get an answer, and that's all they're looking for.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    People love to say that Google has "relatively poor" performance. Relative to what? Google has better performance than any other search engine. It's relatively poor compared to the imaginary ideal search engine that gives you exactly the result you want for any query regardless of whether the information even exists or not.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    And we have add a variety of competing search-engines that still aren't as good. It isn't like the idea hasn't been tried. For example DuckDuckGo, or even Bing, but there have been half-dozen others too.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    I think your startup plan should not be: "Step one: Displace Google Search." Instead, you find the underserved niche, people who care about quality search results (maybe in a specific domain), and you address that. As you conquer the small market you expand. Google really does seem to be frustratingly bad these days.
s17n 4y ago
That's because the web was better in 2006. I think Google has made one change for the worse, though, which is strongly favoring more recent content. Increasingly, I think that change has been a big contributor to the decay of the web since.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Part of the problem is, I think, many searches strongly benefit from up to date content- programming tools, fashion, celebrities, things to do in X area, etc. It seems that Google has decided that most people want the most updated information when they look for something, which I don't think is entirely unreasonable. What I would love, however, is a way to turn that off for particular searches. Researching past events, as a trivial example, benefits far more from exact results rather than most recent tangentially related blogspam.
  - BarryMilo 4y ago
    You mention options in passing, but it is to me the root of the problem: Google hates giving up control. Control means ad revenue. So we could have options that would make search extremely efficient for most users, but that would presumably be very hard to monetize in comparison. So we have no options, and everyone gets mediocre to bad results. Since everyone I know in tech laments Google's decline into uselessness, I'm assuming this is not a sustainable strategy.
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      > everyone gets mediocre to bad results Everything I've heard from people I know at Google suggests otherwise. Most searches for most people ... work. I too struggle to have google work in specific research cases, and I would like more power-user toggles, but basic searches like "$celeberty_name photos" or "$my_kids_school calendar" or "pizza places near me" just sorta work.
      - BarryMilo 4y ago
        Hard to know anything for sure since results are "tailored". But Google used to be excellent for technical searches, whereas now it is unhelpful at the best of times. I'm guessing this isn't counted in "most searches gor most people".
tonmoy 4y ago
That doesn’t mean with present day’s internet content and the terms you search for in present day would have returned better results using google from 2006
unity1001 4y ago
Ditto.
vikingerik 4y ago
Your search results were a lot better in 2006 when there wasn't yet a huge population of sites cranking out SEOed garbage. Google is trying, they're just losing the arms race of detecting crap content vs generating it.
- hajile 4y ago
  Why not crowd-source it? All Google needs is an obvious, one-click "spam" button for logged-in users. Clicking should add a site to the user's spam blacklist (which they should be able to review). They know about what users search for and how those searches overlap and separate users into groups (not to mention all the individual details they have access to). When sites are marked as spam by enough different types of users, those sites can then be manually reviewed and their content blacklisted by Google preventing the same or very similar sites with a different URL from appearing. Unfortunately, Google makes a lot of money from these ad/spam sites, so they have a perverse incentive to keep allowing them.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    It is great effort to make a high ranking spam site and trivial to destroy it for Google. It would be a winning battle. I think that Google just don't care and are happy to be a search motor for Reddit and Wikipedia and to answer questions like "How old is Lady Gaga?".
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I think advanced SEO tactics would destroy the results in 2006 though.
motoxpro 4y ago
Man I have such a different search experience than everyone on HN. Google is amazing for me. Can someone give me a search query they think gives "objectively" bad results and maybe some links they would expect to see who up in the top that aren't there? Or is it that you search for something and you don't find anything? Or is it just that people don't like that there are ads? I genuinely don't understand.

I don't understand how you're comparing the two. You think the results were better in 2006, but the corpus was also different.

tyingq 4y ago

My view of it is that they basically lost the SEO spam wars. Without the ML pipelines, the top results would all be dominated by the smaller, highly skilled, SEO manipulators. They didn't find a way to cleanly excise that spam, so they resorted to a very imperfect hammer...giving a lot of SEO weight to large corporate entities. So basically, a different kind of spam dominates now.

jjoonathan 4y ago
A different, more profitable kind of spam dominates now.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  A kind of spam from which Google profits because it often embeds its ads and/or analytics.
ricardo81 4y ago
>smaller Perhaps in other words, market forces (I'm thinking ROI) and economies of scale will win.
- tyingq 4y ago
  What I was talking about is that there was once a pretty large community of smaller SEO manipulators that did a lot of experimentation on what really worked. Especially in the "black hat" realm. Finding things like areas on big-brand sites that would accept user-generated content, comments, etc, where you could bypass some checks and insert links to sites. They would experiment in a pretty deep way, varying things like the rate of new links, type of new links, variations of anchor text / bare links, and so on. It USED to be very effective. The larger entities don't really have to be that detailed. If you have that brand power, you can just cut partnership/cross-link deals and pay a little attention to things like anchor text in links, contextual text around the link, etc. Edit: Ah, yeah, agreed. What got lost in all this was good content that had no big brand behind it. The indiscriminate hammer Google used to kill off small-guy SEO spam also pushed a lot of actually good stuff, stuff that never did any SEO at all, off the first page.
  - ricardo81 4y ago
    For sure. Way back any high Pagerank page linking to another would unequivocally boost the target site, whatever niche, but it's became more nuanced as you say. What I was meaning was, the players who can manipulate the link graph most cost effectively tend to rank better and it favours those with deeper pockets. Not so bad for competitive niches and high volume terms, but muddies the waters for many other things.
ge96 4y ago
Minor rant: I can't seem to contact an actual towing company directly, it's usually some external entity that ranks top in Google then they charge you more to find the actual local towing company. It says "Towing company in city name" but it's not local.
- tyingq 4y ago
  Yeah, their "local search" stuff seems to use yet a different set of criteria. You'll see similar complaints for other niches like locksmiths. Some set of SEO spammers has figured out how to use services like UPS-Store virtual addresses to fool Google.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  The same is true for me for contractors of any sort. Top links are frequently referral farms. For local search, I almost always use google maps instead. Maps search isn't perfect, but it beats web search hands down.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's really annoying - you have to dig around, and many business do not have a web presence at all so unless you can find something local with ads, you find nothing. Some tricks I've used in the past include local church bulletins (most parishes have some sort of a website and a weekly bulletin with advertising on the back), or local sport team sponsors, or local bars. For towing, you can also try calling a local dealership or auto repair.
  - elliekelly 4y ago
    Or their only web presence at all is a facebook page. I don't have a facebook account so this used to be mildly annoying but lately I've noticed it won't let me see at the page at all. I click the link to visit the business's "website" and I'm greeted with a full-page prompt to sign in to facebook.
b112 4y ago
There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. "But wait!", you say, "there are some legit reviewers out there." Yes, there sure are, by my starement is accurate, because for every legit review site with aws referrals, there are tens of thousands of ml created spam referral sites. And so the real review sites are often lost in the mix regardless, which makss arguments to keep those results pointless. But google leaves them there, and this is the same sort of site which, if it were an email, would immediately end up in a spam folder. And beyond this, the other part of the problem is their ridiculous aliasing of search terms, which helps spammy sites come back as a response. You say google lost? It's not losing, if you just don't care. Frankly, it's just a return on investment thing. As long as only a few people per tens of thousands bolt, why spend the r&d?
- gfd 4y ago
  I put Amazon referral links on my technical blog whenever it's a hardware project. So far I have made < $5 on it so I should probably remove them. But for others I think it helps justify the time I spent writing up the blog and doing the project.
- blowski 4y ago
  > There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. This is the root of the problem. If Google targets the low-hanging fruit, the spammers will very quickly find a workaround. Google is trying - and failing - to use more sophisticated signals. Spam is a virus. Google beneffited from the network effect, eradicating all opposition. But, like a European medieval monarch, it now has a poor immune system because of its lack of genetic diversity. The many, many SEO spammers are constantly experimenting, and they only have to find one flaw in Google's algorithm for it to win and spread quickly. Google's monoculture cannot save us, however hard they try.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    If you target the spam business model, it won't route around it. But yeah, a healthy set of search engines will get us better results.
FinalBriefing 4y ago
Blog farms are way too popular now, too. People have figured out how Google recognizes "meaningful content", and they generate blog posts and pages with AI and ghost writers to pump out vaguely helpful articles.
narrator 4y ago
They downranked pirated content results in 2018[1] so someone could just use pagerank and include those sites and have a better search engine for that sort of content. There's also the "controversial twiddler"[2] which makes Google only present mainstream opinions on various topics. I had to search yandex.com to even find a good article on it. There's some weird stuff on the Youtube blacklist, like the Las Vegas mass shooting from a few years ago that everyone forgot about that they never figured out the motive for. See the leaked "YouTube Blacklist" under the "Censorship" link in the project veritas article.[2] [1]https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-industrys-fight-against-piracy-continues/amp/ https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-i... [2]https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-fairness-whistleblower-goes-public-says-burden-lifted-off-of-my-soul/ https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-...

KptMarchewa 4y ago

There was way less SEO back then. If they continued to use the old algorithm, your results would be worse than what you have now.

Retric 4y ago
Page rank wasn’t a pure algorithmic solution in 2006 either. So, while the problem changed I am not sure if it got harder or Google’s priorities shifted.
jotm 4y ago
Doubt it. Even today, obvious spammy content aggregators show up for many keywords with stuff taken directly from Reddit/Stackoverflow/Superuser/etc. All of Google's fancy ML could've been replaced with a simple report button - enough people report a site and either trigger a manual review (best option) or just ban them (could be used against competitors... but negative SEO was already a thing and is still widely used).
b112 4y ago
What are you saying?! There was loads of SEO back in 2000 even! It brought alta vista to its knees, the number one search engine of the day. Google got started, grew, because it filtered all that SEO spammy junk. Do you have specific stats to back this up? Number of SEO pages vs good ones? Or are you just presuming?
- IshKebab 4y ago
  You're both right. There was loads back then but there was also way less than now.

blip54321 4y ago

Indeed. It's an arms race. Search engines versus SEO.

shockeychap 4y ago
Wholeheartedly agree, but with an important caveat - Google is no longer fighting for the best interest of it's users, it's fighting for the best interests of it's advertisers. How useful the results are is now secondary to "how much can this search be monetized". The former was important in the early days when Google needed to be competitive on search.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Most directly, if the search results were perfect you would never need to click on an ad. The most evil thing Google is doing now is pushing brands to buy ads on their own name so that they appear above the organic #1 search result. It's like the time Facebook decided it wouldn't send messages to followers who like you unless you paid up.
  - magicalist 4y ago
    > The most evil thing Google is doing now is pushing brands to buy ads on their own name It's not like this is a new thing. The court cases about it are almost 20 years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton

losvedir 4y ago

> My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines... That's like an old person complaining that their body felt a lot better back in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have to use their walker and glasses all the time...

raunak 4y ago
Search is objectively worse today than it used to be, it's not just that "it's harder to use for old people", it's just worse.
- ivanbakel 4y ago
  >Search is objectively worse today than it used to be How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? And how would you then show that it's a result of Google's algorithms, and not a consequence of the content of the Internet changing significantly?
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? How would you demonstrate that being 50 years old is worse than being 25 years old? You ask people that are 50 years old or older because they have been on both sides. > it's a result of Google's algorithms Well, it's simply in front of your eyes: this [1] was not possible in 2006. Anyway, the fact that you cannot easily find on Google why Google search results are worse, proves that Google search results are worse today than in the past. https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-ad-desktop-design-change-favicon-icon-ftc-guidelines https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-ad-d...
  - tyingq 4y ago
    >How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? There's a few ways to do that. The easiest is to point out that almost any lucrative search query has -0- organic results above the page fold on a typical monitor today. It's all ads unless you scroll down. Then, it's not proof, but how much time do you think Google spends on things that sit below the fold and aren't clicked on much? What would the financial incentive be?

subsubzero 4y ago

I feel the same way, I think one of the biggest startup opportunities now is to create a decent search engine. Google is absolute rubbish and a new player needs to step in and take away that market share that google is throwing away by means of a terrible user experience.

NateEag 4y ago
I strongly disagree that there's a startup opportunity in Google's relatively poor search performance. Obsessive programmers like myself really want a search engine that does better and helps us find the weird corners of the web. Most people do not care. They can type a question into Google and get an answer, and that's all they're looking for.
- notatoad 4y ago
  People love to say that Google has "relatively poor" performance. Relative to what? Google has better performance than any other search engine. It's relatively poor compared to the imaginary ideal search engine that gives you exactly the result you want for any query regardless of whether the information even exists or not.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  And we have add a variety of competing search-engines that still aren't as good. It isn't like the idea hasn't been tried. For example DuckDuckGo, or even Bing, but there have been half-dozen others too.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I think your startup plan should not be: "Step one: Displace Google Search." Instead, you find the underserved niche, people who care about quality search results (maybe in a specific domain), and you address that. As you conquer the small market you expand. Google really does seem to be frustratingly bad these days.

s17n 4y ago

That's because the web was better in 2006. I think Google has made one change for the worse, though, which is strongly favoring more recent content. Increasingly, I think that change has been a big contributor to the decay of the web since.

zdragnar 4y ago
Part of the problem is, I think, many searches strongly benefit from up to date content- programming tools, fashion, celebrities, things to do in X area, etc. It seems that Google has decided that most people want the most updated information when they look for something, which I don't think is entirely unreasonable. What I would love, however, is a way to turn that off for particular searches. Researching past events, as a trivial example, benefits far more from exact results rather than most recent tangentially related blogspam.
- BarryMilo 4y ago
  You mention options in passing, but it is to me the root of the problem: Google hates giving up control. Control means ad revenue. So we could have options that would make search extremely efficient for most users, but that would presumably be very hard to monetize in comparison. So we have no options, and everyone gets mediocre to bad results. Since everyone I know in tech laments Google's decline into uselessness, I'm assuming this is not a sustainable strategy.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    > everyone gets mediocre to bad results Everything I've heard from people I know at Google suggests otherwise. Most searches for most people ... work. I too struggle to have google work in specific research cases, and I would like more power-user toggles, but basic searches like "$celeberty_name photos" or "$my_kids_school calendar" or "pizza places near me" just sorta work.
    - BarryMilo 4y ago
      Hard to know anything for sure since results are "tailored". But Google used to be excellent for technical searches, whereas now it is unhelpful at the best of times. I'm guessing this isn't counted in "most searches gor most people".

tonmoy 4y ago

That doesn’t mean with present day’s internet content and the terms you search for in present day would have returned better results using google from 2006

unity1001 4y ago

Ditto.

vikingerik 4y ago

Your search results were a lot better in 2006 when there wasn't yet a huge population of sites cranking out SEOed garbage. Google is trying, they're just losing the arms race of detecting crap content vs generating it.

hajile 4y ago
Why not crowd-source it? All Google needs is an obvious, one-click "spam" button for logged-in users. Clicking should add a site to the user's spam blacklist (which they should be able to review). They know about what users search for and how those searches overlap and separate users into groups (not to mention all the individual details they have access to). When sites are marked as spam by enough different types of users, those sites can then be manually reviewed and their content blacklisted by Google preventing the same or very similar sites with a different URL from appearing. Unfortunately, Google makes a lot of money from these ad/spam sites, so they have a perverse incentive to keep allowing them.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  It is great effort to make a high ranking spam site and trivial to destroy it for Google. It would be a winning battle. I think that Google just don't care and are happy to be a search motor for Reddit and Wikipedia and to answer questions like "How old is Lady Gaga?".

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I think advanced SEO tactics would destroy the results in 2006 though.

motoxpro 4y ago

Man I have such a different search experience than everyone on HN. Google is amazing for me. Can someone give me a search query they think gives "objectively" bad results and maybe some links they would expect to see who up in the top that aren't there? Or is it that you search for something and you don't find anything? Or is it just that people don't like that there are ads? I genuinely don't understand.