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Google's death is deeper than just the corpus, their ranking algorithm is also deeply degrading. A week ago, a search for < James Palmer manchester foreign pol

Google's death is deeper than just the corpus, their ranking algorithm is also deeply degrading. A week ago, a search for < James Palmer manchester foreign policy > wouldn't return https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/23/i-love-manchester-but-please-stop-celebrating-my-hometown/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/23/i-love-manchester-but-p... on the first page while < James Palmer manchester site:foreignpolicy.com > would [1] [2]. This appears to be fixed as of today but this kind of kindergarten level search intent not being fulfilled would have been unthinkable for Google even just a few years ago. [1] https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1670904508191322112 https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1670904508191322112 [2] https://twitter.com/shalmanese/status/1670973880637493249 https://twitter.com/shalmanese/status/1670973880637493249

underlipton 3y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+good+song+reddit https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+g... Still waiting on an explanation of fix for this one.
- hnbad 3y ago
  As you can see from the highlighted results, most are not actually exact matches. They're not even fuzzy matches. They're mostly synonyms. The search query also contains a lot of words that would be considered stopwords (i.e. ignored) in a simple keyword search and don't provide much semantic value in a natural language query (i.e. if it is parsed as a question), so those are probably deprioritized. My assumption would be that the search results are garbage because the query is extremely ambiguous in the search engine's eyes, especially if you omit or modify any of the words (which it is allowed to do because it is not a search for an exact phrase).
  - underlipton 3y ago
    It could just find documents with the exact terms, like a search engine is supposed to.
- jamesash 3y ago
  Put "Pieces of me" in quotes and I get reddit discussion. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pieces+of+me%22+is+actually+a+good+song+reddit&ei=ypmiZLz2BrWrqtsP-7ev6Ag&ved=0ahUKEwi8g5G5ofL_AhW1lWoFHfvbC40Q4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=%22pieces+of+me%22+is+actually+a+good+song+reddit&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzoKCAAQRxDWBBCwA0oECEEYAFC0CViSHmCXI2gBcAB4AIABX4gB4AKSAQE0mAEAoAEBwAEByAEI&sclient=gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pieces+of+me%22+is+actual...

underlipton 3y ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+good+song+reddit https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+g... Still waiting on an explanation of fix for this one.

hnbad 3y ago
As you can see from the highlighted results, most are not actually exact matches. They're not even fuzzy matches. They're mostly synonyms. The search query also contains a lot of words that would be considered stopwords (i.e. ignored) in a simple keyword search and don't provide much semantic value in a natural language query (i.e. if it is parsed as a question), so those are probably deprioritized. My assumption would be that the search results are garbage because the query is extremely ambiguous in the search engine's eyes, especially if you omit or modify any of the words (which it is allowed to do because it is not a search for an exact phrase).
- underlipton 3y ago
  It could just find documents with the exact terms, like a search engine is supposed to.
jamesash 3y ago
Put "Pieces of me" in quotes and I get reddit discussion. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pieces+of+me%22+is+actually+a+good+song+reddit&ei=ypmiZLz2BrWrqtsP-7ev6Ag&ved=0ahUKEwi8g5G5ofL_AhW1lWoFHfvbC40Q4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=%22pieces+of+me%22+is+actually+a+good+song+reddit&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzoKCAAQRxDWBBCwA0oECEEYAFC0CViSHmCXI2gBcAB4AIABX4gB4AKSAQE0mAEAoAEBwAEByAEI&sclient=gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pieces+of+me%22+is+actual...