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I don't understand Google anymore. Surely people can relate to the situation where you end up on an article based on some technical query you have. The article

I don't understand Google anymore. Surely people can relate to the situation where you end up on an article based on some technical query you have. The article repeats your question 7 times, has endless casually-related filler text that still does not answer the question and then ends with: try to unplug it. It is so freaking obvious that it's a malicious content farm, but Google with all of its technical might seem unable or unwilling to detect it. If tech can't do it, organize some type of curation or feedback? Same for image search. You search for "red flower Thailand" and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. The idea that Google is spectacularly good at subject detection from imagery does not seem to actually work out in practice. Most people's search queries consist of just 2-3 words. Nowadays Google consistently just drops the last word as if it knows better than I do what I need. High value elaborate articles on various topics do not rank. Instead, dated articles do. You have to manually bookmark high quality content as you see it, because you'll never find it back via search. Is everybody asleep at Google? This is not a small thing, this is your bread and butter. Teens are using Tiktok for search, you're in real trouble and better start cleaning up your act.

tomcam 3y ago
Their bread and butter is advertising, not search
- sph 3y ago
  Also, malicious content farms pay Google (to show their ads), you don't. So for Google, they are the customer they need to serve, not you.
urbandw311er 3y ago
Well done on putting this far more succinctly than I could have. You’ve absolutely nailed the top three issues with Google search in a nutshell.
- iteratethis 3y ago
  Thanks, I might as well keep going then :) Google has commercialized a huge amount of search terms. I'll use biology as an example. You search for particular species and search results prioritize products that kill the species. You search for a particular plant and you'll have a hard time learning about the species as it only shows cultivated versions and products related to how to care for them. Pure information/knowledge for the sake of learning and curiosity is de-prioritized. Back to image search, it's unable to figure out original sources or doesn't care. Pinterest is the well known manifestation of that. Google shopping results: completely broken. Click through on the products and half the time the price, availability, discounts and stock do not match. Everything is so goddamn broken, and nobody at Google seems to care. I can't explain it, but it's been going on for a good 6-7 years or so.
  - stevenicr 3y ago
    I'll explain it. Giving worse results sells more pay per click ads. I've seen this in many search terms. Purposefully push down the things that people are looking for and they will click on ads. Those sites that have a ton of extra info? Many of them also sell in content ads right? The ad machine took over long ago and you are forced to play the ad auction game if you want to show up in results, and if people are looking for something they are forced to scroll past a lot of ads. I watched this happen in chunks over time. It wasn't always like this, but it is now, and it's been a slow creep over time.
balder1991 3y ago
As an example of how bad the searchability is nowadays, I’ve been creating and expanding my own knowledge base (something like a personal wiki with links to interesting content I find) for about a year. It seems to work very well despite the effort it takes to keep it organized.
- iteratethis 3y ago
  Same here, but in my notes app. Been doing it for years. And if I may expand a little, not just for crappy Google, I also create alternative local knowledge bases at work. I can't find anything at work. Everything is spread out across chat, Wikis, SharePoint, email. All having different owners, content may at any time disappear or move, there's constant authorization headaches. Whenever I come across something useful that I expect to be of some future use, I make a local copy. File, web page, wiki, anything. Because our information systems are a massive failure.
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    I think this is typical of most work places. Our ability to maintain good knowledge bases has essentially collapsed. Every coding task at work I basically start with reverse-engineering the system because no one really knows how it all works anymore.
- chubot 3y ago
  I've maintained my own hosted wiki since 2004, and yeah I'm glad I didn't completely outsource information management. It's definitely getting hard to find certain things I know I've seen. Now I just need some kind of open source search engine to run on it ... (a bunch of text files that render to HTML, and ideally following the links 1 or 2 levels deep) ~20 years ago Google desktop search was a fantastic piece of software ... very fast and accurate on your local files. I don't think something like that exists now, and maybe never existed for Linux Search engines are extremely modular and Unix-y. You have a bunch of indexed corpora and you intermingle them at ranking time, with respect to a query. But unfortunately there is no real incentive to provide something that has measurably good results and is also open to your own data and modifications The incentive is to make a walled garden out of it
mech422 3y ago
the one that pisses me off most is installing/configuring a software package... Top articles always end up being "apt-get install foo" and never address the configuration at all.
- VladimirGolovin 3y ago
  ChatGPT 4 is fantastic for this kind of questions. No Google spam to filter out, and you can ask follow-up questions on topics such as configuration.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Hallucination and inaccuracy is a downside, but even so it is often still better.
  - mech422 3y ago
    oh? I haven't actually done much with all the A.I. except co-pilot. I'll have to give it a try. Thanks!
QuantumGood 3y ago
I skim from the bottom up now
alberth 3y ago
Honest question, how much of this is simply due to Google slowing showing more & more ads on Page 1 of search results? There use to be a time when paid placement was only 1-2 results. It’s frequent now that the top 5-6 results are paid placement. (And when I’m doing a search for a specific product I know I want, competitors are bidding up those search terms which is annoying because I’m being shown not what I’m explicitly searching for)
- godelski 3y ago
  I have a hypothesis that a lot of this is the result of hyper focusing on short term reward. Just think about how we measure a top exec's performance. It is often dependent on cutting costs and increasing revenue. Cycle through that a bit and if the previous person did their job well then they cut a lot of fat. In fact, they probably cut as much as they thought they could get away with. So next person comes in and they gotta start cutting more than fat. Of course you could go other avenues to increase revenue but cost cutting measures are the easiest and quickest.
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    from a technical aspect, I'd bet their ranking algorithm now just favors ad placement , full stop. it's largely just a product of ourouboros
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
dr_kiszonka 3y ago
> Same for image search. You search for "red flower Thailand" and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. Now, if any of these flowers are next to a red dress, tapping the dress will reveal links to places you can buy it. Google is not asleep. It has just got its priorities wrong. (Or rather, incentives in this organization seem to reward not what users like me appreciate.)
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  Huh, oddly one of the harder things for me to search for is places to buy things, unless they're very mass-market consumer goods.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Not like Amazon doesn't have the same Google problem. Except they openly discuss how the user doesn't have a choice.
  - hoseja 3y ago
    I would gladly pay a commission for a service where I vaguely describe a product and preference and have the best version of it delivered without having to spend hours researching and hunting for deals. Of course this immediately runs into severe perverse incentives and similar issues.
jay_kyburz 3y ago
>You search for "red flower Thailand" and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. https://imgur.com/a/sJCECzQ https://imgur.com/a/sJCECzQ Looks mostly red to me. A little pink too I guess.
- godelski 3y ago
  FYI, you read the parent far too literally. I think most interpret the example as an off hand illustrative example, not a literal one.
yonatan8070 3y ago
Of course content farms rank highly on Google, they're filled with Google ads, so why would Google demote what makes money?
wutwutwat 3y ago
The thing is, all the stuff you’re listing as things they suck at properly detecting, filtering, categorizing, they used to be extremely good at. The google search that exists today is markedly worse than the Google search of 5 years ago. Wtf happened to cause search to just rot away into a useless mess of results that used to be very high quality? It’s such a night and day regression that I’ve legit wondered if this is a sign of the Mandela effect.
- jamincan 3y ago
  I wonder if they've misapplied the Youtube algorithm to searching. Other people who liked the pictures of red flowers also liked green flowers and purple flowers, so let's include that in the results, since that will probably generate more engagement and more engagement is obviously always good.
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    no, the rank Google ad buyers and sellers. probably easy to confirm with a web crawler and generic searchs
- adaptbrian 3y ago
  What you describe here in some order could be pointed at the fact they let someone who used to focus on Ads run all of organic search AND ads. This used to never happen, they had proper separation of church and state. The other part to blame imo is turning down the link graph, over reliance on NLP, and attempting to continue to prop up traffic to old media sites. https://www.wired.com/story/prabhakar-raghavan-isnt-ceo-of-google-he-just-runs-the-place/ https://www.wired.com/story/prabhakar-raghavan-isnt-ceo-of-g...
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  they fundamentally changed their rankings to favored Google ad dollars it's really not a deeper technical problem.
- iteratethis 3y ago
  Couldn't agree more. And it's not just Google. Amazon is a mess. Social media is a mess. It all used to kind-of work but it's rapidly falling apart.
cyanydeez 3y ago
Google has maximized advertisement $ and that's all. We're all technically minded here but very few people really understand how technical choices add up to greater detriments. and that's today's Google. they minimized the index and maximized the searches that yield profit through Google ads. those websites you hate? they monetize Google ad words.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
It's because Google has never been focussed on search quality imo. No search engine produces high quality results anymore. Especially since you get the clear spam sites that somehow reference your query in the page content (where they've just spammed loads of keywords, but also pretty sure some spam sites are doing something dynamic with it).
- jrochkind1 3y ago
  never???
  - lithos 3y ago
    There are people younger than Google here, so might as well have been never to them.
EA-3167 3y ago
Kagi just renders those toxic sites into a grouping called "Listicles" which I then ignore. It's far from perfect, but it's clear that a company with far less money and access than Google doesn't find this an impossible problem to address. So I would suggest that Google knows what it's doing, it just makes them money.

tomcam 3y ago

Their bread and butter is advertising, not search

sph 3y ago
Also, malicious content farms pay Google (to show their ads), you don't. So for Google, they are the customer they need to serve, not you.

urbandw311er 3y ago

Well done on putting this far more succinctly than I could have. You’ve absolutely nailed the top three issues with Google search in a nutshell.

iteratethis 3y ago
Thanks, I might as well keep going then :) Google has commercialized a huge amount of search terms. I'll use biology as an example. You search for particular species and search results prioritize products that kill the species. You search for a particular plant and you'll have a hard time learning about the species as it only shows cultivated versions and products related to how to care for them. Pure information/knowledge for the sake of learning and curiosity is de-prioritized. Back to image search, it's unable to figure out original sources or doesn't care. Pinterest is the well known manifestation of that. Google shopping results: completely broken. Click through on the products and half the time the price, availability, discounts and stock do not match. Everything is so goddamn broken, and nobody at Google seems to care. I can't explain it, but it's been going on for a good 6-7 years or so.
- stevenicr 3y ago
  I'll explain it. Giving worse results sells more pay per click ads. I've seen this in many search terms. Purposefully push down the things that people are looking for and they will click on ads. Those sites that have a ton of extra info? Many of them also sell in content ads right? The ad machine took over long ago and you are forced to play the ad auction game if you want to show up in results, and if people are looking for something they are forced to scroll past a lot of ads. I watched this happen in chunks over time. It wasn't always like this, but it is now, and it's been a slow creep over time.

balder1991 3y ago

As an example of how bad the searchability is nowadays, I’ve been creating and expanding my own knowledge base (something like a personal wiki with links to interesting content I find) for about a year. It seems to work very well despite the effort it takes to keep it organized.

iteratethis 3y ago
Same here, but in my notes app. Been doing it for years. And if I may expand a little, not just for crappy Google, I also create alternative local knowledge bases at work. I can't find anything at work. Everything is spread out across chat, Wikis, SharePoint, email. All having different owners, content may at any time disappear or move, there's constant authorization headaches. Whenever I come across something useful that I expect to be of some future use, I make a local copy. File, web page, wiki, anything. Because our information systems are a massive failure.
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  I think this is typical of most work places. Our ability to maintain good knowledge bases has essentially collapsed. Every coding task at work I basically start with reverse-engineering the system because no one really knows how it all works anymore.
chubot 3y ago
I've maintained my own hosted wiki since 2004, and yeah I'm glad I didn't completely outsource information management. It's definitely getting hard to find certain things I know I've seen. Now I just need some kind of open source search engine to run on it ... (a bunch of text files that render to HTML, and ideally following the links 1 or 2 levels deep) ~20 years ago Google desktop search was a fantastic piece of software ... very fast and accurate on your local files. I don't think something like that exists now, and maybe never existed for Linux Search engines are extremely modular and Unix-y. You have a bunch of indexed corpora and you intermingle them at ranking time, with respect to a query. But unfortunately there is no real incentive to provide something that has measurably good results and is also open to your own data and modifications The incentive is to make a walled garden out of it

mech422 3y ago

the one that pisses me off most is installing/configuring a software package... Top articles always end up being "apt-get install foo" and never address the configuration at all.

VladimirGolovin 3y ago
ChatGPT 4 is fantastic for this kind of questions. No Google spam to filter out, and you can ask follow-up questions on topics such as configuration.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Hallucination and inaccuracy is a downside, but even so it is often still better.
- mech422 3y ago
  oh? I haven't actually done much with all the A.I. except co-pilot. I'll have to give it a try. Thanks!

QuantumGood 3y ago

I skim from the bottom up now

alberth 3y ago

Honest question, how much of this is simply due to Google slowing showing more & more ads on Page 1 of search results? There use to be a time when paid placement was only 1-2 results. It’s frequent now that the top 5-6 results are paid placement. (And when I’m doing a search for a specific product I know I want, competitors are bidding up those search terms which is annoying because I’m being shown not what I’m explicitly searching for)

godelski 3y ago
I have a hypothesis that a lot of this is the result of hyper focusing on short term reward. Just think about how we measure a top exec's performance. It is often dependent on cutting costs and increasing revenue. Cycle through that a bit and if the previous person did their job well then they cut a lot of fat. In fact, they probably cut as much as they thought they could get away with. So next person comes in and they gotta start cutting more than fat. Of course you could go other avenues to increase revenue but cost cutting measures are the easiest and quickest.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  from a technical aspect, I'd bet their ranking algorithm now just favors ad placement , full stop. it's largely just a product of ourouboros

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

dr_kiszonka 3y ago

> Same for image search. You search for "red flower Thailand" and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. Now, if any of these flowers are next to a red dress, tapping the dress will reveal links to places you can buy it. Google is not asleep. It has just got its priorities wrong. (Or rather, incentives in this organization seem to reward not what users like me appreciate.)

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
Huh, oddly one of the harder things for me to search for is places to buy things, unless they're very mass-market consumer goods.
- godelski 3y ago
  Not like Amazon doesn't have the same Google problem. Except they openly discuss how the user doesn't have a choice.
- hoseja 3y ago
  I would gladly pay a commission for a service where I vaguely describe a product and preference and have the best version of it delivered without having to spend hours researching and hunting for deals. Of course this immediately runs into severe perverse incentives and similar issues.

jay_kyburz 3y ago

>You search for "red flower Thailand" and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. https://imgur.com/a/sJCECzQ https://imgur.com/a/sJCECzQ Looks mostly red to me. A little pink too I guess.

godelski 3y ago
FYI, you read the parent far too literally. I think most interpret the example as an off hand illustrative example, not a literal one.

yonatan8070 3y ago

Of course content farms rank highly on Google, they're filled with Google ads, so why would Google demote what makes money?

wutwutwat 3y ago

The thing is, all the stuff you’re listing as things they suck at properly detecting, filtering, categorizing, they used to be extremely good at. The google search that exists today is markedly worse than the Google search of 5 years ago. Wtf happened to cause search to just rot away into a useless mess of results that used to be very high quality? It’s such a night and day regression that I’ve legit wondered if this is a sign of the Mandela effect.

jamincan 3y ago
I wonder if they've misapplied the Youtube algorithm to searching. Other people who liked the pictures of red flowers also liked green flowers and purple flowers, so let's include that in the results, since that will probably generate more engagement and more engagement is obviously always good.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  no, the rank Google ad buyers and sellers. probably easy to confirm with a web crawler and generic searchs
adaptbrian 3y ago
What you describe here in some order could be pointed at the fact they let someone who used to focus on Ads run all of organic search AND ads. This used to never happen, they had proper separation of church and state. The other part to blame imo is turning down the link graph, over reliance on NLP, and attempting to continue to prop up traffic to old media sites. https://www.wired.com/story/prabhakar-raghavan-isnt-ceo-of-google-he-just-runs-the-place/ https://www.wired.com/story/prabhakar-raghavan-isnt-ceo-of-g...
cyanydeez 3y ago
they fundamentally changed their rankings to favored Google ad dollars it's really not a deeper technical problem.
iteratethis 3y ago
Couldn't agree more. And it's not just Google. Amazon is a mess. Social media is a mess. It all used to kind-of work but it's rapidly falling apart.

cyanydeez 3y ago

Google has maximized advertisement $ and that's all. We're all technically minded here but very few people really understand how technical choices add up to greater detriments. and that's today's Google. they minimized the index and maximized the searches that yield profit through Google ads. those websites you hate? they monetize Google ad words.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

It's because Google has never been focussed on search quality imo. No search engine produces high quality results anymore. Especially since you get the clear spam sites that somehow reference your query in the page content (where they've just spammed loads of keywords, but also pretty sure some spam sites are doing something dynamic with it).

jrochkind1 3y ago
never???
- lithos 3y ago
  There are people younger than Google here, so might as well have been never to them.

EA-3167 3y ago

Kagi just renders those toxic sites into a grouping called "Listicles" which I then ignore. It's far from perfect, but it's clear that a company with far less money and access than Google doesn't find this an impossible problem to address. So I would suggest that Google knows what it's doing, it just makes them money.