It's not SEO: something is fundamentally broken in Google Search
I want to sidestep that debate somewhat by describing my experience with a more controlled environment: voice searching for YouTube videos to play on my Google Home Mini device. Many will remember how remarkably accurate searches were at initial release c. 2017; songs could be found by reciting lyrics, humming melodies, or vaguely describing the thematic or narrative thrust of the song. The picture is very different today. It's almost impossible to get the system to return even slightly obscure tracks, even if one opens YouTube and reads the title verbatim. Recently, I was trying to listen to a song from Neil Cicierega's Mouth Dreams album, Aerolong. Just that one song. No combination of terms would bring it up. Several times, my Mini tried to play the entire album as a playlist. But just as often, it would return something that was just off ("I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith) or completely unrelated (Bohemian Rhapsody). We should be clear: this is an Alphabet-produced device and interface tapping into an Alphabet-built index with an Alphabet-developed search function and being absolutely incapable of returning the correct result. One may wonder if this might have something to do with the obscurity of the track in question, but Neil Cicierega is an artist of note, if not mainstream; and, besides, it found the correct album and, presumably, would have eventually gotten to the correct track while making its way through the playlist. But that's not what I was asking for as a user; if the system found the correct track but insisted on not going directly to it, it's making a decision for me that I did not ask it to. That would be a horrifying finding, if more evidence could be compiled (beyond this being a commonly-encountered scenario) to show that this, specifically, is what was happening. At this point, however, the only thing that can be definitively concluded is that Google searches are not returning results that they ought to; results that, by all accounts, they would have been able to a few years ago; and results that must not have bren influenced by efforts to eliminate the effects of abusive SEO practices. Something else is going on.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadThen in 2016, John Giannandrea, an AI expert, took over. Since then, Google has increasingly relied on AI algorithms, which seem to work well enough for main-stream search queries. For highly specific search queries made by power users, however, these algorithms often fail to deliver useful results. My guess is that it is technically very difficult to adapt these new AI algorithms so that they also work well for that type of search queries.
While the old guard in Google's leadership had a genuine interest in developing a technically superior product, the current leaders are primarily concerned with making money. A well-functioning ranking algorithm is only one small part of the whole. As long as the search engine works well enough for the (money-making) main-stream searches, no one in Google's leadership perceives a problem.
Naturally, this would be a good time for a competitor to capture market share. Problem is, the infrastructure behind a search engine like Google is gigantic. A competitor would first have to cover all of the basic features that Google users are used to before they would be able to compete on better ranking algorithms.
Where Google once used to return exact or close results for very specific or niche searches, I feel like it struggles to even land in the same ballpark of results. I've been asking myself whether the results have always been this bad more and more over the last year and a half thinking I've been taking crazy pills. Unfortunately, the current competitors still perform even worse for the same queries so it's not like there's enough of a reason to default elsewhere (yet, I hope).
Nowadays, the query you enter into the search field is answered by an AI algorithm that works more along the lines of "I know best what you're looking for". For users who are not very knowledgeable about search engines and tend to search rather superficially, this apparently works quite well. For professionals who want to dig out the really interesting hits in the deeper part of the web, an AI-powered search engine of this sort is quite frustrating.
That is why the basic rule of dethroning an incumbent is to not go into competition heads-on. If someone is successful in shaking Google, then it won't be a search engine company. That company will build some different product first not competing with Google at all, become a leader in that and then, if business model supports, build a better search engine. It is a long process, but that is how it usually works. Google is a classic example of this way of getting at Microsoft. After search, it tried to eat Microsoft's lunch by developing products to compete with MS-Office, and also ventured into mobile and laptop OS.
Amazon's share of product search is more than that of Google's [1]. And earlier Facebook started getting large chunk of ad money, which would have otherwise gone to Google.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-surpasses-10-of-u-s-digi...
- a static blog from 2003 without ads but an excellent recipe
- a YouTube video or promoted article with ads enabled who paid Google to feature them on this query and who will allow other advertisers to market to me on their site
You might say “well they already paid Google so Google is making money either way,” but people will only continue putting money into Google ads if there is a good return for them, ie more views or more money. So Google has material interest in returning results to advertisers, more so than they do on pointing me to a better chicken piccata recipe.
Of course the older search algorithms are also AI algorithms; just not the black-box machine learning algorithms that are so popular in recent years.
My theory is that Google's algorithms care too much about what the average person wants, and not enough about what I want. I'm not the average person. And I thought Google would know enough about what I want by now.
What I really want is more personalised search where I control how the algorithm is tweaked. What would also be useful, and I really can't believe Google hasn't done this yet, is voting on search results. Those content farms would quickly be voted into oblivion.
I'm too scared to look.
Independent webmaster days used to be the best times... Now hackers and corporations run the show. Many are complaining that SEO is getting trumped by outright payola... cough
Things like Net Neutrality and paid promotion have overrun (free and independent thought) search results now and clogged them up with sales funnels to the point that we're just going to get more and more irrelevant results until people are going to have to turn to libraries again to find meaningful and succinct results to questions. AI is in it's infancy and usually geared towards profit for google more so than for human good from what I can observe, because especially during pandemic times, they have pretty big bills to cover.
The underlying problem is the monetization of information. As long as we keep driving this trend truth and accuracy of information will suffer deeply. It's best to keep monetization to less critical resources like entertainment and physical products, they can afford to be sensationalized and monetized more than things presented as science, facts, and credible news.
This trend ruins the value the Internet once had and also steers intellectual value/power back to universities interestingly though, where high tuition often provides learners to more carefully planned presentations and usually more emphasis on accuracy. The future will be expensive for all of us.
It redirects to: https://search.yahoo.com/?fr=altavista
Assuming power users formulate search in ways that are irreconcilable from those of the average user, and assuming Google adapted their models, metrics to the average user and retrained them at each step,
then, we are simply no longer a target market of Google.
Yes. Well, I assume this must be part of it.
In the last year or so I have not progressed past page 3 without being presented with mostly fake results. This even happens when I use specific terms which I know used to return perfect results and when I know the content exists.
For example the other day I wanted to find a presentation made at FOSDEM so I searched for the FOSDEM keyword with filetype: pdf. I saw a handful of genuine results despite knowing there are hundreds of matching documents.
At least academic Google still seems to use the old ranking function by now.
It may just be a part of the strategy to lower costs after achieving domination in most markets.
This is the main reason I eventually coughed up the cash for YouTube Premium. I looked at how many videos I watched in a given day/week/month and found out that based on my hourly rate a a dev, I was spending ~$50/month watching YouTube ads.
I used to get 100's of great results. Now, I get less than 30 and over 70% are spam. You are correct that something is completely wrong. It is 100% broken in this case.
I just can not believe how horrible this is. Just to emphasis how bad it is, I even tried a combination of the phrase in the footer plus the name of the company. It would not return any results for that company/website. Just spam results.
What is going on here?
Double quotes don't work. Putting '&tbs=li:1' at the end of the search string to get "verbatim" results no longer works. Most of the "hacks" from this 2003 O'Reilly book don't work: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/google-hacks/0596004478...
It's all turned to shit.
What is going on here?
Read the other posts for some other ideas of what's happening.
My opinion is that Google doesn't need to care. The company's market cap, as of today, is $1831 Billion dollars. So Wall Street doesn't care either. Larry Page is hiding out in New Zealand, and he probably doesn't give a shit either. :-)
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html <ctrl-f> motives
Take Reddit for example. Date ranges are absolutely useless because they’ve started hijacking the posted date and updating it every single time someone adds a new comment.
It seems to be putting more weight on the popularity of the subject matter rather than the actual content of my search query.
I’ve only used PureScript for a couple of years, and I’m curious how earlier iterations of Search would have performed.
"purscript" "concatenate strings". In this case, 37 results came from Google search.
Interestingly, on music.youtube.com, only the fan extended version and an unofficial video come up, not the plain track that shows up on normal full YouTube.
Which of those does the Google Home Mini search?
Like a curated wikipedia/openstreemap of internet search indexes (with ignore-lists like uBlock has for ads)? I fully realize the impossibility of a handmade search index for the entire web, the internet is just too impossibly large and ever changing. I'm more thinking of subsets of various topics of interest. Different communities could pop up that made specialized crawling algorithms for very specific topics and you could subscribe to those indexes for a very personalized search experience. A mix of automatic classification, indexing combined with hand-tweaked tagging and weeding out spam.
Over time you could have a pretty "broad" search engine - kinda like how OpenStreetMap was initially terrible (coverage wise) but is today extremely competitive with the big guys. With it I could subscribe to or possibly even aggregate/proxy other indexes into a personalized search system. That way I could make a super specialized search that only searched indexes made for information search on technical topics and have another index explicitly filter out unwanted spammy websites.
Some "pre-index" on the search front-end could intelligently decide which indexes to query based on your search string. If you are dissatisfied with the indexes it chose to query you could manually tweak it and redo the search.
At the very least it would be awesome if search engines had a way to submit an "ignore-list" - an index over known crap/spammy websites. It's not feasible for me to keep adding specific ignored urls to a search term. When I search for images online I would prefer to ignore Pinterest by default.
It really irks me that when searching for information that Google defaults to thinking I'm looking for a product to buy. Sometimes I would just prefer to exclude ALL websites that generally only acts as a retail/webshop for goods. That fine grained search method is just not possible today.
I think what were seeing with search is a corollary: the results are blurry, not clear like they once were, like an intentional backing away from clarity. Why dirty the results? Except for teaching copyright holders a lesson*, I don't understand.
*$593 million fine in France v. Google