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Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the proble

Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There may not be great ways to filter this. GPT3/etc will exacerbate horrifically.

cft 4y ago
Bing is much more useful. yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations. I suspect it's the new focus on content policing versus search quality and corresponding resource allocation, that did Google search in
- ergonaught 4y ago
  I almost never get relevant searches out of Bing. It's bad enough I have (seriously) wondered how much Google pays them to operate in order to avoid antitrust prosecution.
- kurisufag 4y ago
  >yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations unless, of course, the politics are .ru ;^)
- sho_hn 4y ago
  What types of political content policing is Google engaged in on the search engine?
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    None on their search engine. The claim is likely specious.
phpisthebest 4y ago
Google bet the farm on their ability to do just that though. PageRank and other technologies where suppose to suppress content farms that just aggregate the same content over multiple sites for ad revenue, I have not done SEO in a long time but back in the day (early 00's) that was a sure fire way to get your site demoted in the google ranking was to have content 90+% similar to another site. It was a big problem for ecommerce sites that sold the same products as the larger sites because often they would just use the same product description from the manufacturer
- bin_bash 4y ago
  they didn't "bet the farm" on that at all, they've been desperately trying to diversify out of search advertising for basically the life of the company. Of course, they haven't succeeded but not because they're relying on search ads.
meltyness 4y ago
This is how inflation effects media. Publishers want to be "growthy", Google hasn't gone full-bore in making new print ad-supported, hence the proliferation of paywalls.
dwighttk 4y ago
Not sure there is a bright line between scam and advertising
super256 4y ago
> Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [1] 8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers They just did not know how destructive this conflict of interests would later be. P.S. I'm a happy user of https://kagi.com https://kagi.com! Definitely worth a Netflix sub per month, at least for programmers. :) [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
- Nicksil 4y ago
  >Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [...] Doing a Google search for "cellular phone" now returns those poor-quality results. Google's just... not good.
- iamthepieman 4y ago
  I really wish Kagi had family plans. I would love to have my whole family using Kagi but with 7 people in the household, it makes it rather expensive.
  - QuantumGood 4y ago
basch 4y ago
Part of it is trying to intake everything. Maybe google needs a "search the entire web" mode and a "search not garbage." As naïve as it may be, I believe that crowd sourcing and metamoderation is probably the answer. Instead of full time employees, they should be offering some kind of kickbacks to their couple hundred thousand most trusted users, in exchange for upvotes and downvotes of content quality.
- MattDemers 4y ago
  I mean, that just introduces another level of crap as sites clamour to be on the "not garbage" list; it'll end up like the issues Twitter has/had with verification.
  - basch 4y ago
    That's why you need the right screeners, and the right metamoderation tools that when people start making a mistake, a more authoritative trusted person can invalidate the lower bad input.

cft 4y ago

Bing is much more useful. yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations. I suspect it's the new focus on content policing versus search quality and corresponding resource allocation, that did Google search in

ergonaught 4y ago
I almost never get relevant searches out of Bing. It's bad enough I have (seriously) wondered how much Google pays them to operate in order to avoid antitrust prosecution.
kurisufag 4y ago
>yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations unless, of course, the politics are .ru ;^)
sho_hn 4y ago
What types of political content policing is Google engaged in on the search engine?
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  None on their search engine. The claim is likely specious.

phpisthebest 4y ago

Google bet the farm on their ability to do just that though. PageRank and other technologies where suppose to suppress content farms that just aggregate the same content over multiple sites for ad revenue, I have not done SEO in a long time but back in the day (early 00's) that was a sure fire way to get your site demoted in the google ranking was to have content 90+% similar to another site. It was a big problem for ecommerce sites that sold the same products as the larger sites because often they would just use the same product description from the manufacturer

bin_bash 4y ago
they didn't "bet the farm" on that at all, they've been desperately trying to diversify out of search advertising for basically the life of the company. Of course, they haven't succeeded but not because they're relying on search ads.

meltyness 4y ago

This is how inflation effects media. Publishers want to be "growthy", Google hasn't gone full-bore in making new print ad-supported, hence the proliferation of paywalls.

dwighttk 4y ago

Not sure there is a bright line between scam and advertising

super256 4y ago

> Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [1] 8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers They just did not know how destructive this conflict of interests would later be. P.S. I'm a happy user of https://kagi.com https://kagi.com! Definitely worth a Netflix sub per month, at least for programmers. :) [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Nicksil 4y ago
>Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [...] Doing a Google search for "cellular phone" now returns those poor-quality results. Google's just... not good.
iamthepieman 4y ago
I really wish Kagi had family plans. I would love to have my whole family using Kagi but with 7 people in the household, it makes it rather expensive.
- QuantumGood 4y ago

basch 4y ago

Part of it is trying to intake everything. Maybe google needs a "search the entire web" mode and a "search not garbage." As naïve as it may be, I believe that crowd sourcing and metamoderation is probably the answer. Instead of full time employees, they should be offering some kind of kickbacks to their couple hundred thousand most trusted users, in exchange for upvotes and downvotes of content quality.

MattDemers 4y ago
I mean, that just introduces another level of crap as sites clamour to be on the "not garbage" list; it'll end up like the issues Twitter has/had with verification.
- basch 4y ago
  That's why you need the right screeners, and the right metamoderation tools that when people start making a mistake, a more authoritative trusted person can invalidate the lower bad input.