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Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine... I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like. For
by zbuf 4y ago
Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine...
I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like.
For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.
- Sakos 4y agoOh, that reminds me. How long has Youtube's search been so utterly useless and downright terrible? Whatever I enter, it interrupts the search results with recommendations THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY QUERY every 5 results. What the fuck, Google. Are you doing this on purpose? Did somebody piss in your cereal and you decided to collectively punish all of us? If that's not the case, who's responsible so I can go over to him and piss in his cereal?
- uni_rule 4y agoBUT HOW ELSE WILL YOU KNOW WHAT "PEOPLE ALSO WATCHED"?
- 0xcde4c3db 4y agoI feel like most major media companies (and this probably generalizes somehow to a larger subset of capitalist enterprises) go through a lifecycle that starts with fulfilling real demand and ends with increasingly desperate attempts to generate fake demand. The exact mechanisms and motivations seem to vary (e.g. TV networks deciding which shows are worthy of "prime time" vs. YouTube trying to goose its engagement metrics), but the overall arc is strikingly similar.
- islon 4y agoDisclaimer: this is just my opinion, I have no idea what the actual reason is. I think the problem is not malice nor stupidity. Most youtube users are non-technical/layman people who don't really know what they want. They type "fun cat videos" or "minecraft" or whatever and want suggestions of popular things to see. The technical people who know what they want are the minority so it's not profitable to create a separate search mode just for them, because they are tech-literate enough to figure out the idiosyncrasies.
- blikdak 4y agoTrue, it's not malice or stupidity, it's just "making money".
- Sakos 4y agoNSFL example when I tried to search for "reply girl" videos because I wanted to know what they were: (seriously NSFW and definitely not appropriate for HN) https://i.imgur.com/gaOSfbd.png https://i.imgur.com/gaOSfbd.png Google. I want compensation for emotional damage. What is this crap? Those aren't even the worst recommendations in those results. IT GETS WORSE.
- 0xcde4c3db 4y agoI've been putting it exactly this way ("recommendation engine") for years. Whatever algorithms Google is using, they're absolutely terrible at distinguishing the considerations of relevance to a specific query on one hand and broader tranches of popularity on the other hand. Unfortunately, nobody else seems to be doing much better. I've found that DuckDuckGo's results suddenly got drastically worse a few months ago: markedly fewer results overall, and the results that do show up have worse relevance (in particular, generic pages about the closest major city, e.g. its official homepage or Wikipedia article, tend to show up for no obvious reason).
- zbuf 4y agoI'm also finding the same difficulties with DuckDuckGo. I don't think Google is "terrible" at anything; they know their stuff. But they have created peverse incentives around advertising which lead to this. They're paid by the advert clicks, so if you actually find a search result you're not clicking on an advert. The definition of an advert is "I want to push something at you that's only indirectly relevant to what you are looking for, and I'm willing to pay for that" -- that's what an advert _is_. In my simple brain, I'd happily see Google paid per-display (not click) of adverts. Then my incentives (to find a search result) have a fighting chance of aligning with theirs. Show me the advert, in a separate column marked "adverts". But I appreciate this is a vast over-simplification their broader business.
- ipaddr 4y agoThen they try to keep you using the system longer
- kbrkbr 4y agoYes! I hate this so much. The only search engine that respects what I type in seems startpage these days. Other search engines give me results that are useless most of the time, because they do not contain all my carefully chosen search terms.
- Wazako 4y agoI also use Google in the same way. Google is really amazing as a recommendation engine for finding keywords. Then you just have to get those keywords and put them in a real search engine.