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A search engine having bad result is not a simple problem though. Especially at the position of Google, it's neither a coincidence nor something taking them by
by makeitdouble 2y ago
A search engine having bad result is not a simple problem though.
Especially at the position of Google, it's neither a coincidence nor something taking them by surprise. They've been in an arms race with spammers and SEO gurus since the beginning, and had all resources on earth to deal with it. The results being bad as they reached a monopoly position is of their own making, or more precisely a situation they saw as the best tradeoff.
That's where I don't see Google turning the ship around: people who were there for decades to make searches relevant have probably already left a long time ago, or they accepted the new direction themselves. And new people with expertise and enough energy to rock the boat are also in a position to do more impactful work in other companies where they won't have to fight an establishment.
As a example of how hard it is to change direction, we haven't seen Microsoft suddenly build customer friendly OSes, nor Meta having good taste, nor Apple come up with open ecosystems.
- recursive 2y agoIt may be a hard problem, but it gets a lot harder when quality results are not aligned with your companies main source of income.
- Apreche 2y agoIt’s not that hard a problem if you have the resources of a Google. They just have to do what they’ve always been unwilling to do. Let actual humans help curate it. It’s obvious when a site is a content farm. It’s obvious when a site has real reviews vs. just pretend reviews and affiliate links. It’s obvious when a site is actual Stack Overflow and when a site is a clone thereof. The rule should be that only good faith web sites are allowed. Web sites with dark patterns are not allowed. Anyone who is doing any SEO shenanigans gets their entire domain de-indexed permanently. If Google does this, and only this, it will return wonderful useful search results.
- makeitdouble 2y agoI'm kinda looking at it from the other end of the causation: with all their resource, talent, everyone shouting at them on their garbage results to the point specifying individual sites like reddit in the query has become common knowledge...all of this says that changing course is hard. We might be completely mistaken on the reasons why it's hard, but there's no doubt they can't do it easily. On human curation, this brings other problems that Google is also very bad at solving. Google would need to manage their moderators at scale. Even Meta couldn't do it in a sustainable way, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk model is also deeply problematic. Amazon itself puts a ton of effort into customer service and yet doesn't keep up with the scams. Curation and moderation at Google scale is indeed a crazy hard problem.
- WalterBright 2y agoGoogle could add a "relevant" and "garbage" button on search results that only logged in users can click on.