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I've been putting it exactly this way ("recommendation engine") for years. Whatever algorithms Google is using, they're absolutely terrible at distinguishing th
by 0xcde4c3db 4y ago
I'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