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How about Google focus on actually making their search results good again. I have gotten increasingly frustrated with the results that even 6 years ago were mo

by geuis 4y ago

How about Google focus on actually making their search results good again. I have gotten increasingly frustrated with the results that even 6 years ago were more relevant. When I put quotes around a specific phrase, I only want direct matches to those words first, before showing me anything else. Yesterday an uncle was asking me if there are RV parks in SF or nearby. Google proceeds to show me a list of every dog park near my zip code instead. I quote "RV parks" and get similar. When I finally spelled out recreational vehicle parks, I got better results. And every result literally has "RV park" in the title. (Turns out there are 2 in SF. Candlestick park has bad reviews, and the link to the one in the Presidio is 404.) In a year or two all of this AI stuff is going to calm back down when people finally realize that for other than a few product types, sprinkling "AI" onto everything like cheap MSG isn't going to make the core products any better. I don't want a "personalized" search experience. I want accurate results for the damned thing I'm searching for. Those should be exactly the same results everyone else gets when looking for the same thing.

jonas21 4y ago
Huh? When I search for "rv parks" san francisco [1], I get the two you mentioned as the top results, and another in South San Francisco as the third result. And then after that, the top web results are articles that list about a dozen more RV parks in the bay area. Are you seeing dramatically different results? [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco
- mistrial9 4y ago
  with this year's google search, your results are not the same as your distant neighbor's results
  - codeflo 4y ago
    You're basically fucked if you want search results for a different location, and increasingly more fucked if you want them in a language that's not the dominant language of the region you happen to log in from. All of that used to be easy.
- geuis 4y ago
  That is weird and kind of what I'm talking about. I did that search yesterday from chrome on my windows machine. Just followed your link on Safari on iOS and got the expected results. This is why "personalized" search is a terrible garbage idea.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Part of it is the web in general kind of sucks in an overtly user hostile way. But I think the main draw of Phind and similar alternatives isn't necessarily that it's that much better at getting the necessary information, it's just so much less annoying to use because it cuts out all the newsletter popovers, bait and switch blogspam, cookie consent popups, SEO dark patterns etc. You don't have to mentally filter out a bunch of nonsense. Search engines are annoying. I say this as I spend time and effort developing one.
- disqard 4y ago
  I was hoping you'd share your thoughts in this thread! Have you incorporated any embedding model in your search engine? FWIW, I personally enjoy using marginalia and like its current spartan + fast design.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    I'd like to experiment with it for topic detection but I just don't have the compute. Closest thing is explore2.marginalia.nu and similarity pagerank, but it's all very basic and unga bunga.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Google really messed up by prioritizing "authority" and "speed + mobile experience". Just a complete misreading of the content landscape. People who are actually passionate about a topic and write about it for the sake of sharing often don't have the resources or even the desire to invest in SEO and great mobile experience. Crappy commercial sites, meanwhile, can just throw money at SEO and developers to ace all of Google's technical metrics. Google forgot that at the end of the day, it's the content that matters, not how the site looks or its domain authority.
cush 4y ago
More than any other company, Google has influenced the modern web we have today. They created the search -> ads -> SEO flywheel that all websites and their revenue feeds off of. The reason the search results suck is because the web sucks. #1 search results for recipes crash iOS safari while scrolling past hundreds of ads to get to the ingredients. This is the result of Google's design. Google got us all into this mess, and they realistically have no way out with search as we know it. While not perfectly accurate today, LLMs are able to troll through Google's mess and pull out the information people are actually looking for. Over time, Google will be forced to conform and will do the only thing they know how - use your personal information to tune an LLM just for you. It's sad, but the data Google has on people will likely give them a massive edge over Bing and other competitors in the long term
- codeflo 4y ago
  That's a bit of a non sequitur. Quotes no longer working doesn't have anything to do with the JavaScript on the website. My theory about this is that Google has slowly and steadily A/B tested every useful feature out of their product, and I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group They probably assume the same, but the problem with this assumption is that it's self-fulfilling. The reason power users are so small a group is, in part, because software and UI/UX design trends actively prevent it. Especially with SaaS, we live in the era of perpetual MVPs - features get offered the moment they clear the "demo" bar, and hardly ever improved afterwards, except to cut them down further. There is no space for mastery - what you learn to do in first 30 seconds is... all there is to do. More powerful functionality, if it existed, is already removed, after being first hidden away in a non-discoverable "advanced" menu, and then removed, citing low usage. Well, no shit, people won't be using things you go out of your way to hide from them. And then there's the "attention economy", to which power users are anathema, as the attention economy's core idea is to make things as hard and as annoying as possible, and then make money on friction. So honestly, I wouldn't trust such A/B tests alone - they generally cannot distinguish between something people like, vs. something people hate and have no chocice but to make do.
trts 4y ago
There is endogeneity between the results and the product. Sites have been gaming SEO for so long that some terms have become their own recursive universe of ad-based search promoting ad-monetized content. Long-winded recipe pages are the canonical example, but last week I was just looking for info about a place I'd be traveling too, and had to scroll through pages of useless fluff to just get the info I was looking for. It was surprising to realize how much I have stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT will just tell me the answer or provide additional context, all from the safe, ad-free interface where I already am. It's my hope that technologies like this will finally kill the ad-driven internet paradigm. More than social media, it really seems to be the root cause of all of the undesirable things we have seen sprouting like weeds across our relationships, media, and political institutions for the past 15 years.
smitty1e 4y ago
Foe example, I wanted to see results pertaining to Clarence Thomas allegations. There was a blatant "port list" to the results. To find some commentary by a nominally centrist voice, I had to search on a blog. More pure mechanism, less bias, please.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Have you considered that you might just be frankly right wing and intentionally misplacing the center? Conveniently that would also explain why you feel obligated to write “port side” like there was some kind of conspiracy against saying left leaning.
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    > why you feel obligated to write “port side” I mean, the post is directly in front of you. Might you quote accurately? Or were you too busy condescending?
nullc 4y ago
I guess no one at google ever got promoted for making search return what the user was actually asking for. The fact that it'll hardly return slow loading or older HTTPS-less (non-commercial) pages has essentially memory-holed a huge part of the internet, containing a lot of valuable and historically important litigation. I'm constantly frustrated in research in looking for material which is out there but which even knowing exact strings from it is difficult to get google (or Bing, which was bad in this way first and is often no better than google) to return.
xnx 4y ago
I do not understand how I get good results for all the examples people give in these threads. Do you have a malicious extension installed that is taking over the results?
- KMag 4y ago
  Google takes information from the database of personal information it knows about you (called "Kansas" when I worked at Google 15 years ago) as some of the inputs to its ranking system. These days, the score for a page is the output of an ML model that takes in hundreds of scoring signals, both related to the page and to you, and then you get shown the highest score pages. So, unless you and someone else are both searching over Tor (maybe you even need exit nodes in the same country), you're probably not going to get identical results for identical queries. This is what people are complaining about when they complain about Google "personalizing" search results.

by geuis 4y ago

jonas21 4y ago

Huh? When I search for "rv parks" san francisco [1], I get the two you mentioned as the top results, and another in South San Francisco as the third result. And then after that, the top web results are articles that list about a dozen more RV parks in the bay area. Are you seeing dramatically different results? [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rv+parks%22+san+francisco

mistrial9 4y ago
with this year's google search, your results are not the same as your distant neighbor's results
- codeflo 4y ago
  You're basically fucked if you want search results for a different location, and increasingly more fucked if you want them in a language that's not the dominant language of the region you happen to log in from. All of that used to be easy.
geuis 4y ago
That is weird and kind of what I'm talking about. I did that search yesterday from chrome on my windows machine. Just followed your link on Safari on iOS and got the expected results. This is why "personalized" search is a terrible garbage idea.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

marginalia_nu 4y ago

Part of it is the web in general kind of sucks in an overtly user hostile way. But I think the main draw of Phind and similar alternatives isn't necessarily that it's that much better at getting the necessary information, it's just so much less annoying to use because it cuts out all the newsletter popovers, bait and switch blogspam, cookie consent popups, SEO dark patterns etc. You don't have to mentally filter out a bunch of nonsense. Search engines are annoying. I say this as I spend time and effort developing one.

disqard 4y ago
I was hoping you'd share your thoughts in this thread! Have you incorporated any embedding model in your search engine? FWIW, I personally enjoy using marginalia and like its current spartan + fast design.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I'd like to experiment with it for topic detection but I just don't have the compute. Closest thing is explore2.marginalia.nu and similarity pagerank, but it's all very basic and unga bunga.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Google really messed up by prioritizing "authority" and "speed + mobile experience". Just a complete misreading of the content landscape. People who are actually passionate about a topic and write about it for the sake of sharing often don't have the resources or even the desire to invest in SEO and great mobile experience. Crappy commercial sites, meanwhile, can just throw money at SEO and developers to ace all of Google's technical metrics. Google forgot that at the end of the day, it's the content that matters, not how the site looks or its domain authority.

cush 4y ago

More than any other company, Google has influenced the modern web we have today. They created the search -> ads -> SEO flywheel that all websites and their revenue feeds off of. The reason the search results suck is because the web sucks. #1 search results for recipes crash iOS safari while scrolling past hundreds of ads to get to the ingredients. This is the result of Google's design. Google got us all into this mess, and they realistically have no way out with search as we know it. While not perfectly accurate today, LLMs are able to troll through Google's mess and pull out the information people are actually looking for. Over time, Google will be forced to conform and will do the only thing they know how - use your personal information to tune an LLM just for you. It's sad, but the data Google has on people will likely give them a massive edge over Bing and other competitors in the long term

codeflo 4y ago
That's a bit of a non sequitur. Quotes no longer working doesn't have anything to do with the JavaScript on the website. My theory about this is that Google has slowly and steadily A/B tested every useful feature out of their product, and I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > I assume that's because power users are simply a statistically insignificant group They probably assume the same, but the problem with this assumption is that it's self-fulfilling. The reason power users are so small a group is, in part, because software and UI/UX design trends actively prevent it. Especially with SaaS, we live in the era of perpetual MVPs - features get offered the moment they clear the "demo" bar, and hardly ever improved afterwards, except to cut them down further. There is no space for mastery - what you learn to do in first 30 seconds is... all there is to do. More powerful functionality, if it existed, is already removed, after being first hidden away in a non-discoverable "advanced" menu, and then removed, citing low usage. Well, no shit, people won't be using things you go out of your way to hide from them. And then there's the "attention economy", to which power users are anathema, as the attention economy's core idea is to make things as hard and as annoying as possible, and then make money on friction. So honestly, I wouldn't trust such A/B tests alone - they generally cannot distinguish between something people like, vs. something people hate and have no chocice but to make do.

trts 4y ago

There is endogeneity between the results and the product. Sites have been gaming SEO for so long that some terms have become their own recursive universe of ad-based search promoting ad-monetized content. Long-winded recipe pages are the canonical example, but last week I was just looking for info about a place I'd be traveling too, and had to scroll through pages of useless fluff to just get the info I was looking for. It was surprising to realize how much I have stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT will just tell me the answer or provide additional context, all from the safe, ad-free interface where I already am. It's my hope that technologies like this will finally kill the ad-driven internet paradigm. More than social media, it really seems to be the root cause of all of the undesirable things we have seen sprouting like weeds across our relationships, media, and political institutions for the past 15 years.

smitty1e 4y ago

Foe example, I wanted to see results pertaining to Clarence Thomas allegations. There was a blatant "port list" to the results. To find some commentary by a nominally centrist voice, I had to search on a blog. More pure mechanism, less bias, please.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
Have you considered that you might just be frankly right wing and intentionally misplacing the center? Conveniently that would also explain why you feel obligated to write “port side” like there was some kind of conspiracy against saying left leaning.
- smitty1e 4y ago
  > why you feel obligated to write “port side” I mean, the post is directly in front of you. Might you quote accurately? Or were you too busy condescending?

nullc 4y ago

I guess no one at google ever got promoted for making search return what the user was actually asking for. The fact that it'll hardly return slow loading or older HTTPS-less (non-commercial) pages has essentially memory-holed a huge part of the internet, containing a lot of valuable and historically important litigation. I'm constantly frustrated in research in looking for material which is out there but which even knowing exact strings from it is difficult to get google (or Bing, which was bad in this way first and is often no better than google) to return.

xnx 4y ago

I do not understand how I get good results for all the examples people give in these threads. Do you have a malicious extension installed that is taking over the results?

KMag 4y ago
Google takes information from the database of personal information it knows about you (called "Kansas" when I worked at Google 15 years ago) as some of the inputs to its ranking system. These days, the score for a page is the output of an ML model that takes in hundreds of scoring signals, both related to the page and to you, and then you get shown the highest score pages. So, unless you and someone else are both searching over Tor (maybe you even need exit nodes in the same country), you're probably not going to get identical results for identical queries. This is what people are complaining about when they complain about Google "personalizing" search results.