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Personally, I think the problem is that people abuse Google for things it's really not designed to do, and they don't even realize that. Google is great at fin

Personally, I think the problem is that people abuse Google for things it's really not designed to do, and they don't even realize that. Google is great at finding official webpages by their exact title. If you type the title of a news headline from the 90s, Google will give you the link to it. I think that is amazing. Basically anything that has a canonical URL, Google is good at finding. But when you search for "how to do X" for example, there will be several results that are perfectly valid and they will still need to be ranked in a list. Because it's not a "list" of results, it's ranking of relevancy. So to avoid showing spam, Google will push to the top websites it finds trustworthy. And now every top result comes from the same website. If you need an explanation for the Xz incident, for example, there is no canonical URL for it. There will be several news websites, youtube channels, etc. that have talked about it, competing to be the top result. Google still has to rank them even though the algorithm can't tell fact apart from parody, so no matter what Google does, Google will be the one judging which content most people will read when they want to know about a certain topic. To borrow my fellow robot's words, people are finding knowledge through an algorithmically curated aperture: Google's SERP. If they're evil, they have the power to control everyone on Earth. If they're good, they must be going insane with what to do with their users' crippling dependency on them as a source of truth.

082349872349872 3y ago
I find Google isn't so good anymore for finding things by title; rather than being a search engine they are slowly becoming more like a politician answering reporters' questions, in that instead of returning results based on the terms I asked for, they insist on returning results for the terms they believe I should have asked for.
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  Can you give me examples? Personally, I don't think I've ever had a problem finding things by their name or title on Google. If I type python, I get python's website, if I type hacker news, I get this website. I can type the name of an old program and get their webpage on sourceforge for example. I've also tested that it works with finding the official websites of celebrities, e.g. if you type eminem, you get his official website. It does seem to have biases toward recency and product pages, but finding things by their title isn't a thing Google is bad at.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    I often search for titles containing very specific acronyms or abbreviations (which I would expect to be high precision low recall); Google's first response lately is usually a search based on a "correction" of these to a more common search, presumably because they are biasing to low precision high recall. (eg band names, even at hamming distance, will shadow maths structures) Clicking again on my original query, or liberal use of quotation marks, then does the trick, but it's annoying af. Maybe there's a setting somewhere for "show me the results of my query first, not the 'did you mean' first"? EDIT: upon reflection, the problem is that I use Google in an early XXI manner: if I've been someplace before I use the URL bar, and it's for places I haven't been, that aren't common knowledge, that I want a search engine. There was a time when Google was optimised for this use case, and although that time is long past (in particular, no one buys ads for my queries), the annoyance is recent because now they actively pessimise.
  - Tanoc 3y ago
    It's also gotten very poor at exact text matches. I often make a bet to myself before searching for certain things as to whether or not Google will show something irrelevant. Most recently I was searching for a specific memory address error crashing ASIO. I was using the exact text from the error popup, and Google was giving me results for... Skyrim Script Extender refusing to start. The only shared text was "Page fault" between the two. I've also noticed this when looking for specific part numbers where instead it will give me magazines by matching the ISSN. Forcing quotes is a dice roll, as sometimes that will just return zero results, or Google will do the exact opposite and broaden the search terms.

082349872349872 3y ago

I find Google isn't so good anymore for finding things by title; rather than being a search engine they are slowly becoming more like a politician answering reporters' questions, in that instead of returning results based on the terms I asked for, they insist on returning results for the terms they believe I should have asked for.

AlienRobot 3y ago
Can you give me examples? Personally, I don't think I've ever had a problem finding things by their name or title on Google. If I type python, I get python's website, if I type hacker news, I get this website. I can type the name of an old program and get their webpage on sourceforge for example. I've also tested that it works with finding the official websites of celebrities, e.g. if you type eminem, you get his official website. It does seem to have biases toward recency and product pages, but finding things by their title isn't a thing Google is bad at.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  I often search for titles containing very specific acronyms or abbreviations (which I would expect to be high precision low recall); Google's first response lately is usually a search based on a "correction" of these to a more common search, presumably because they are biasing to low precision high recall. (eg band names, even at hamming distance, will shadow maths structures) Clicking again on my original query, or liberal use of quotation marks, then does the trick, but it's annoying af. Maybe there's a setting somewhere for "show me the results of my query first, not the 'did you mean' first"? EDIT: upon reflection, the problem is that I use Google in an early XXI manner: if I've been someplace before I use the URL bar, and it's for places I haven't been, that aren't common knowledge, that I want a search engine. There was a time when Google was optimised for this use case, and although that time is long past (in particular, no one buys ads for my queries), the annoyance is recent because now they actively pessimise.
- Tanoc 3y ago
  It's also gotten very poor at exact text matches. I often make a bet to myself before searching for certain things as to whether or not Google will show something irrelevant. Most recently I was searching for a specific memory address error crashing ASIO. I was using the exact text from the error popup, and Google was giving me results for... Skyrim Script Extender refusing to start. The only shared text was "Page fault" between the two. I've also noticed this when looking for specific part numbers where instead it will give me magazines by matching the ISSN. Forcing quotes is a dice roll, as sometimes that will just return zero results, or Google will do the exact opposite and broaden the search terms.