Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
For example, google seems to want full sentences instead of just keywords now. "How do I do X?" seems to get me better(?) results then "X + some relevant keyword". But I can't seem to get past this "most popular responses" google things I need. I do appreciate youtube videos marked at certain times but watching video isn't always what I want to do. Tangentially, has youtube search been integrated to youtube search or something now? I used to be able to search obscure music in youtube. "Sal dulu a" would both recommend "Sal dulu antasma" and list it but now unless i search for that particularly, it doesn't show up.
Any pro tips on how to google (or use search engines) like a modern human would be appreciated. Or modern version of google dorking (which also seems to not work like it used to for me). Thank you.
514 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] thread> Any pro tips on how to google
Pro tip: try DuckDuckGo, https://ddg.gg.
2. DDG has its own search crawler (and it's getting larger, the more people use it).
You can also try SearX.
It comes up every time DDG is mentioned that it's "Just Bing". It could be made using an early beta version of AltaVista and rejected NetBSD patches for all I care. The results are pretty good regardless of how they're produced.
Still being refined, and it will take a while to be fully-competitive with Google, but the text search results are strong and, unlike DDG, it's an independent search index that doesn't rely on Bing.
They must have been pinned from somewhere, and similar image search won't show me where.
sometimes i have good luck with tineye.com, but sometimes no dice. instagram for instance doesn’t get crawled - I found a good source of info once because someone had made an entire clone of all of instagram, with all the same usernames so it was easy to find the original after finding the clone via google image search
And they speak us about the "algorithm".
If Google Search was perfect you'd never have a reason to click on an ad.
I've used DDG for the past ~5 years, and it is typically worse without using a hashbang like !so for technical queries. I guess that is what the web has evolved to-- knowing which mega-site you want to search against rather than discover new sites?
This filter takes care of that box completely:
This happens _all_ the time on the Twitter app search bar.
theverge.com presents a “show comments” button that shifts out of the way to reveal the worthless taboola links, I honestly don’t know how it isn’t considered click fraud
I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of it, so there must be some reason why it isn't done - does anyone know why?
Gaming is exactly one of the problems and all those sites that lie on spectrum between news to gaming and utilize some aspect of dynamic presentation.
You're likely not the first, but it's an excellent suggestion.
The browser should do it. Websites often do this intentionally in order to trick users into clicking ads. The only way to stop these abuses is for the browser itself to stop enabling them.
Hit the nail on the head there my friend. Super annoying.
I wonder why their search is so slow though. Any ideas?
And somewhere a team of designers and PMs got their bonus for increasing the engagement OKR. Clearly users love the animation and added delay because look at the metrics skyrocket!
But it isn't MUCH better. DDG is just slightly better than Google, that has become infuriating.
Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't find it. But of course, it's still on GitHub.
Similarly, Google will sometimes not find a single result for some Windows API function names, despite them being publicly documented on docs.microsoft.com.
Then searching for "odicht" out of curiousity, they auto-correct it to "olight". So I start with almond-based sugar sweets, follow their auto-correct twice and now I'm staring at headlamps. And even Google has no idea what "odicht" might have been, so I really wonder how Amazon decided to auto-correct from an existing product into a non-word.
Searching for "odense marzipan" including the quotes then works, but it yields the cringe-worthy message:
Your search ""odense marzipan"" was automatically translated into "„odense marzipan“".
(where the only difference between the first and the second thing is that they converted the ascii quotes to up and down sentence quotes)
I very much get the feeling that amazon and eBay "Don't like" Denmark – the former redirects amazon.dk to amazon.de saying "we deliver!" and the latter doesn't exist (but it does wholly-own a local alternative). Going to Denmark always makes me aware of how good the local Danish things are, and how inflexible and annoying the "global" options usually are by comparison. Riding roughshod over the language is a good example of this.
They just redirect you to the nearest bigger country website and call it a job well done.
Tbf, there are no issues buying from German or French versions. UK was the best choice but now customs is a pain in the ass so...
The product is there. It works adding the company name.
A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variations on search strings.
I eventually gave up and punched it in Google to get... kicked back to Amazon to a simple, cheap SATA bluray drive that had been there all along.
This is exactly it. Amazon isn't a shopping site, they're a corporation using third party sellers to offload the risk and cost of providing a wide array of goods. They let customers experiment with product offerings, find products that sell using their web site, then cherry pick the most lucrative ones to produce and stock to compete with their own "customers".
They're not a service for anyone but themselves.
What I don't get about this companies (because this seems a problem shared between google, YT and Amazon) is when they optimize for clicks or whatever their KPI, what are they thinking is the outcome in the mid term?
I mean, IDK around you, but I'm the prosumer regular folks ask for recommendations. They may be safe for the time being but of course I'm going to contribute for their competitors getting klout.
I don't have an alternative for YT, but people watches me using DDG and whe they ask for recommendations for buying stuff I don't even bother with Amazon.
I'm not the type who pushes his decisions onto others, but I already got asked why I don't use google and amazon.
I just tried using Amazon.com to order something to Hong Kong for Christmas - sweet Jesus I don't know why anyone would ever visit that site more than once. I ended up giving up and just ordering the things with the co.uk version and sending them myself.
They extra postage cost is nothing compared to the insanity of the .com site.
Just try searching for a high-end appliance and watch all the Chinese knockoffs that will get ranked higher than the actual thing you're looking to buy. Sure, they cost less, therefore you're more likely to buy something therefore such changes tend to win web labs and go into production. But they've completely destroyed the intent of the search doing so.
There's got to be a reason no-one (to my knowledge) has done this: They probably forbid affiliates from doing their own indexing and ranking. Does anyone know for sure?
They do. I came across a reddit thread where a guy had built a simple php-based search indexer for Amazon and managed to pay for his college through it. After this incident they apparently put changed their developer terms of service!
only to have it disappear somewhere to page 2 or 3 (if even!)
(And that leaves aside the issue of the product page of a really nice wastebasket I bought years ago being hijacked by a meat slicer.)
There is an actual product (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GKQB9T) with all of my keywords in the title. I found it via a google search because I gave up scrolling through Amazon.
I actively avoid shopping Amazon where possible these days, just because it's such a trashy experience.
Now shopping on Amazon feels like shopping on eBay or Aliexpress with fast shipping. Everything name-brand could be counterfeit, and everything no-name is a complete gamble.
Rather weird if true, but I can't really disagree with your observation. It seems like large parts of the web have disappeared in the last five to ten years.
Google do most likely index the sites, but their current algorithm just don't use them, because it as much a promotion algorithm at it is search.
Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.
GitHub does fit the "huge website with lots of duplicate content" description very well.
Then again, Twitter seems to be doing fine. But I have a suspicion that they have some sort of agreement (and GitHub doesn't), because I have to regularly "report as spam" (note how that implies Google decides what's spam and what isn't) Twitter emails and they still pop up in the inbox after a while.
It might be anti-spam, but how is it this shit?
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? https://news.ycombinator.com › item 4 hours ago — But of course, it's still on GitHub. ... Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.
DuckDuckGo works fine, though.
Maybe there's no links to it from other places, or somewhere on github thats crawled / indexed frequently enough.
Considering this comment thread is seemingly quickly indexed, just posting this link might be enough!
Man, ads really are the devil.
Most of my searches are for really old pages or really long tail stuff and Google just simply doesn't bubble them up, if it has them at all. I keep finding web sites lately from links on other sites and find myself asking "Why the fuck did Google not find this?" .. then I go back to Google and try to find it with keywords from the site, and nothing...
Google News too has become flaky. Often does not find stuff you know is there, or finds it one day, but not another. Hrmph.
There was a time I thought I'd trained it to stop telling me about what celebrity said or wore what, but those are creeping back into my feed.
I absolutely hate the Google has changed the semantics of search so that it doesn't really pay attention to your keywords unless you quote them. In Google's mind you're not serious about a keyword until you quote it! Garbage!
What does the business model look like? Ads (it would be in front of a very valuable audience of technical folks)? Or paid subscriptions (perhaps the community votes which resources get crawled / indexed)
Google is simply maximizing profits by giving users results that would cause either more clicks on ads or show more ads. It's mission is to make money this quarter/year. If you believe any of their Silicon Valley-style new age talking points you probably don't have critical thinking skills.
If their products are getting worse for you perhaps you are not part of a profitable segment for them.
He's going to need a seatbelt for that CEO chair if this devolves further.
Try searching for any product outside your wheelhouse and it quickly devolves into an undergrad research endeavor.
I can't trust the first or second page results because of SEO. Then every page after quickly veers off topic or just features sites that aren't as good at SEO.
DDG is heading this wrong direction too. Today I've searched for some ecommerce platform called Comerzzia and it showed me some Comerzia or Comercia or whatever shops near me. It shows maps if it thinks they're related and apparently I can't disable that feature.
> Results for exact term [...]. If no results are found, we'll try to show related results.
But very regularly it fails to find results I know exist in not so unpopular places.
[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
This really got to me about 6 months ago, so I changed all my default searches on all my browsers and mobile to DDG, and haven't looked back. I tried DDG ~5 years ago, and there was no way it could have replaced google for me then, but when I did it 6 months ago, it didn't seem any worse, maybe a little better.
You'd think from the responses herein that using quotes was a panacea.
It isn't. I see what you see. I think it's ignoring the quotes.
It’s almost as if the government and big companies have spent a lot of effort understanding human biology, cognitive function and applying what was learned.
While selling the masses on a contrived story keeps them believing there’s a universe of infinite life available to humanity if you just follow these steps…
Things like human colonization of space, and political memes about wealth are taking advantage of the same biological quirks as religion. It’s just now we can quantify the effects rather than wave it off as mysticism.
But the human story is already set on a path of building a bridge to nowhere.
Maybe it's just me but those always seem vastly gratuitous. Like shouldn't the engine figure that out automatically? It's like half its job.
Does doing the hashbangs actually throw you directly onto the site? I'd assumed it just restricted results to that site.
What are the ways to direct more air into the likes of you.com? You.com was an “Show HN” topic 3 weeks ago[1]. The you.com improvement in 3 weeks is noticeable.
This post has been simplified for sentiment parsers...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29165601
The fundamental, unavoidable problem is that the cost of providing high-quality results on the long-tail of possible searches tends to grow faster than the revenues that can be earned from those increasingly rare, obscure, long-tail searches. Any search service seeking to maximize profit, like Google or DDG, ultimately always evolves to perform less and less well on the long tail of possible searches.
The search service we all wish we could have -- a service seeking to maximize the quality of individual searches, no matter how obscure -- may not be feasible as a profit-maximizing business.
I think even two years ago, Google searches had far more depth and yet Google was quite profitable (then the searches were still biased but now stuff is simply gone). Sure, if someone looked at the marginal profitability of every single search result, it would look like what we're seeing. But there was a time when good indexing of stuff that didn't turn a profit by itself was done as a service to attract people to Google and/or to improve the Internet generally. That time has passed, clearly but it was a decision.
[a] I'm paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/102579-how-did-you-go-bankr...
You can sort of fight it by including a term showing your topic in your search, I think.
I remember once searching for how common same-sex relationships among teenagers are in Japan, as some say it is very common, and all I received were political opinion pieces that did not in any way come with the numbers I sought on Google, so I then tried DuckDuckGo and to my amusement what I received with the same query was mostly pornography.
Neither particularly useful, but the contrast in how both prioritize was interesting to me.
i have a directory of duckduckgo !bang operators, for easy access https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html
This helps to find the specialised search engine, if you need one. (it scans duckduckgo for any new !bang operators, in a nightly built, here is the script: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang )
I suspect, that most of these specialised search engines are powered by elasticsearch. It may be, that elastic is starting to cut into google search, from the low end.
Correct. Google will give you better results with full-sentence-like input. After several years of refining results, Google concluded that there's more benefit in teaching the machines to understand how humans ask questions than to teach humanity how to keyword like a computer expects (especially when you factor in that they get as many queries via voice these days as via text, and voice recognition in general always benefits from more information to disambiguate on). There's an entire semantic-analysis layer in front of the keywording layer these days to determine some semantics of the query to try and guess what category of thing you're looking for.
I generally have no problem with a few keywords for software engineering searches. I usually go general-to-specific (for example, `react unit test useState`).
You can drop the video results by adding `-youtube` to the query.
> "Sal dulu a" would both recommend "Sal dulu antasma" and list it but now unless i search for that particularly, it doesn't show up.
I'm not sure, but it's possible Google dropped 'a' as a signifier because of the semantic query support (as a single particle, it doesn't add signal to a sentence-like query). `sal dulu songs` gives me a list where Antasma shows up as item 3.
In general, my advice for Googling these days would be "don't try to keyword it out." Think more like how you'd ask another human for a random fact they might barely remember.
There's also still some symbols that are specifically understood by Google for tuning queries, listed here (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en). Worth noting: the `+` modifier got killed when Google+ came and went. To force a word or phrase to be part of the results instead of "fuzzy-matched," put it in "quotes". Quotes these days do double-duty as both "I want this literally matched" and "results must include this token."
Please show how to use a full-sentence natural-language query to search for images of a shirt without stripes. Thanks.
`shirt without stripes` definitely fails (and I see it is a natural-language meme because that's what is returned most prominently against that phrase. Hilarious.)
`shirt -stripes` as an image search is also not foolproof. It does a better job, but some leak through (I would assume for two reasons: if the text just doesn't mention it, the negative key filter has nothing to key on, and we have different words for "stripes" that Google doesn't consider synonyms. Is a plaid shirt striped? What about a checked shirt?).
But hilariously, all of the ad results are stripe-heavy. Looks like there's a bug: negative keywords in image search aren't passed as negative keywords to the ad engine, but instead as positive keywords. Wasted money for those advertisers; that's definitely not what the user wants.
For this sort of search, I'd actually use Shopping... Except that while there is a "Striped" category, I know of no way to do a negative category search on the Shopping UI, so I get the opposite of what I want. I can get all the striped shirts ever, but non-striped would be harder.
I suppose I should amend my previous comment to say "If you don't try natural language queries on the fringe of known unsolved problems, it works better than keywords." ;) And since Google is forever targeting the common use-case, perfect may be the enemy of good here for getting most people what they're looking for most of the time.
Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
Coopting quality sites is a bit of a cottage industry. There is also a significant amount of hacked wordpress sites. Their domain may be quite reputable, but they're unknowingly host to a ton of spam.
Unless you have some pretty evil supervillain scheme, no moral compass, and succeed.... that world is never coming back.
I can't imagine they use Googles newest algorithm.
It's a bit funny because the authors of the paper suggest this modification and explicitly states it makes the algorithm extremely resilient to manipulation from commercial interests.
Imagine a service that provides you with a personal search engine in exchange for a list of your bookmarks. Those bookmarks provide the signal for what sites to index for the public search engine.
Right now Neeva seems very good at navigational queries, which I do 90% of the time. It's still not as good at deep research queries for obscure things. Probably related: Neeva is relying on Bing for a big chunk of their queries. But they are building their own index.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/pol41p/comm...
Oh, and the cherry on top is completely abandoning the idea of Natural Language Processing. Go right back to keywords only.
Just some random thoughts. Monetization is a huge bootstrapping challenge for something like this.
https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent#editions
There is definitely plenty of new spaces for a community effort that is similar, or at least hand-held with help from an algorithm.
https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent#editions
mac os only. 5$ or 50$ for automation+archival
Your bubble seems to agree, but the lack of serious competition, even in niches, is a sign that outside the HN bubble Google is in fact not seen as any worse.
Even though it's a bit broken, it has some lucid moments. Just compare:
https://www.google.com/search?q=mechanical+keyboards
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=mechanical+keyboar...
The take-away I want to drive home is that it's absolutely possible to build something the scale of Google c.a. 2003 and run it on consumer hardware. I think, due to general difficulties in making these things profitable, the ideal approach is to make the operation so absurdly cheap it can be run non-profit instead. I'll gladly pay out of my own pocket to have a good search alternative.
A new startup would need to dump loads of money into servers and building their own tech.
So there's just no way to recoup the cost of building a competitor.
Not the same thing but, entire SO website runs on like 2 door sized racks. Search engine might be a different thing but if you have funding to get started, hardware costs aren’t going to be impossibly huge. Most is labor (engineering).
I’m curious, how much compute power it takes to index the whole web? I presume queries are super fast.
I like to append "reddit" to many queries, for example "best bicycle for under $500 reddit", where you can read some interesting discussions, rather than a random SEO website with affiliate links.
I recently tried looking in the Buy It For Life subreddit for a specific type of product, and it appeared to me that one company was taking advantage of that sub to promote their product.
But if you look in multiple threads and do some research, following up with searches related to the item in question, then read the comments, you should be good.
For example: Pony clamps were brought back by another company, but are now being made in China. There isn't anything inherently wrong with that, but I was concerned the quality of the new product would be much less than the old, made in the USA clamps. So, I searched for the specific clamp style from Pony, read about it, then followed up with searches related to ancillary brands that were talked about in the threads. There were some out-and-out product endorsements from the new company, and assurances that the new clamps would be quality. There were also 'natural' comments that sounded suspiciously similar to what the company owner was saying. . . .
I finally settled on a company that is made in Canada.
I just want barebones keywords search, with just the caveat to index just the words on the main part of a web page, not the surrounding ads, etc.
For long stretches of time Google flat out ignores verbatim operator when I try it.
It doesn't work too well for ambiguous keywords or vague questions, but you can always add '!g' for those queries.
Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit"
Unfortunately I prefer to avoid reddit (which also has a fair amount of astroturfing), but I haven't found a good alternative. I severely miss Google's old "discussions" (or was it forums?) filter.
This happens on Amazon reviews all the time as well.
What I end up doing is trying to find a post that isn't all-in on any specific solution... but lists pros and cons of multiple options, because it seems less likely that a content advertiser will post anything negative (or positive about a competitor).
In a few years Reddit will be just like the generic google searches for everything but the most heroicly moderated or obscurely small subreddits.
On the other hand, a different search for "R-values of winter coats" produces a few real gems, like https://outdoorcrunch.com/jackets/
> "R-values of winter coats"
This is a valid alternative... but I don't want to be an expert on winter coats to be able to Google basic information. I'd have to weed through a fair amount of marketing content to even find that the phrase "r-value" exists. In the past this wasn't necessary.
The internet used to be primarily a place for people to connect and share information... and now it feels like primarily a place to be advertised to. There's also the fact that many ads have evolved beyond simple billboards to psychological manipulative clickbait.
It's completely anecdotal and tangential to this topic, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the way marketing manipulates people has created unhealthy amounts of skepticism that further fuels the affinity for conspiracy theories... which tend to be so toxic that they're almost inoculated from marketing.
For some reason though (probably because they used AMP) they basically allow them to do anything they want. Multiple popups, hijacking click events for login modals, and hiding the content with no impact to search results.
So now, in all the glory of the Internet, the person who genuinely wrote the best blog post on the "warmest winter coat" is completely unfindable on normal Google search or you force yourself via a reddit query to a completely hostile user experience unless you login.
It would be cool to just be able to do something like this "warmest winter coat --hobbyist-only".
I like to compare with search.marginalia.nu results from time to time, but the restrictions it puts on the content it traverses do not make for a good daily driver.
Just also poking fun of how Google both killed the "real" blog industry and forced all the good content on reddit (which ironically does every anti-SEO thing ever and where people are trying to go).
warmest winter coat --hobbyist-only
Top 10: 1. Canada Goose Parka 2. Patagonia Down Jacket 3. Marmot Precip Jacket 4. Columbia Winter Jacket 5. North Face Thermoball Jacket 6. The North Face Nuptse Jacket 7. Rab Neutrino Endurance Jacket 8. Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer Jacket 9. Black Diamond Fineline Hoodie 10. Outdoor Research Cathode Hoody
when i search for something specific, i usually include a random niche tangental hyper specific keyword about the thing i want in quotes (until it gets turned into the SEO-buzzword of the day)
"impedance" for analog electronics stuff, "ring-spun" for clothes stuff, etc
Google should be opinionated. It should have a huge bias towards quality. It should not be hard for a small army of employees to be blackholing ANY crap product roundup site. Real product tests, where multiple items were actually purchased and compared, should always float to the top.
Just as much as needing to pay attention to what spam to suppress, they should be asking "what do we we want at the top" and whitelisting really great sources that always cut in front. Why should healthline ever appear before examine.com?
Instead, they have thrown their hands up, said the algorithm is in charge, and to interfere with it would be improper. Bollocks.
- captcha (because vpn)
- spam results (based on location, my location was never very good for technical content)
- paywalls
- no pictures cause photos is now paid (i've signed up for unlimited forever)
And on bing basically I get shopping coupons, games and, well, and microsoft's "anything's valid, except customer sat" approach.
Eg.
'good cheap mountain bike' -> 10 results out of the first 10 are commercial spam and listicles.
'thread good cheap mountain bike' -> 5 human discussions on entry-level MBs, 1 link to a MB forum home page (not a specific thread), 2 commercial spam, 1 paywalled magazine article testing MBs, and 1 online shop product page for a MB that happened to mention a "73mm Threaded BB shell" multiple times.
I don't use them enough, but the replacements are interesting: they seem to mostly search for indicators of a forum (e.g the existence of a next page button).
It's also funny how Google basically nuked groups and made it unsearchable, while once in a blue moon you get a search result to alt.coats.winter or something
Sometimes I feel like that internet isn't for me anymore, and that's a little distressing.
And of course, new search engine, something distributed and in the GNU domain.
Besides, all that can be done with img HTML tag (browsers do have 'disable images' thing already).
We need a PBS/NPR of search engines.
PBS/NPR like solutions would be subject to co-opting forces as with other search engines. Look at wikipedia, touted as a “social good” but undermined by collective activism edits in the name of various ideologies claiming pure intentions of “social good”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Ironically we’re watching this play out now with products and techs that market themselves as “decentralized.” Maybe after this phase the tech community will consider this isn’t something we can tech our way out of.
The reason Google isn't explaining it is because they can't explain it. They don't know why the ML is returning the results it's returning. And whatever it's doing in that black box, it's making gobs of money—Google's sole purpose since Ruth Porat started squeezing every dime out of every orifice–so just keep on keeping on.
banning advertising would help for awhile, but other profit streams would be optimised and expand to fill void, such as data collection/mining
If surveillance capitalism is super-profitable, "making cell phones" capitalism must be even better since Apple is bigger than those companies.
- ad revenue would drammatically decrease
- buying ads would actually be affordable by local sellers
- the market would self regulate against monopolies
But it is still not so dire. I went back to bookmarks, reading lists and keeping note of writers I check out. It's not bad at all as long as I keep in my interest bubble. Google or not, I still would prefer today's internet world to the decades before the internet.
first result is a list from a blog by some "Emergency prep guy" it basically lists 27 coats with information.
Second result is RT online with black Friday recommendations
Third is oprah daily with recommendations and shop links
So, reddit is also, as you said, full of false information + astroturfing as well. Besides not everyone is interested in diving into reddit rabbithole to find information on warm coats.
What do we want google to do? It tries to blend whatever is available, I don't think google got worse on this particularly, but it is probably a hopeless pursuit considering the status of the web. As for forums, adding "forum" at the end sees to work, but I agree it would be nice to have the option in the toolbox.
Most of the time, this is just a list of coats someone googled and copy-pasted info from the marketing pages. This page is an affiliate-marketing site masquerading as a review site.
Not sure if specifically that page is, but that's what the majority of "product review" results in Google are nowadays.
Emergency prep guy seems like at least owns or knows about the products he lists, however he also discloses his site is owned by a company which is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program.
So maybe Google should stop feeding this affiliate spam loop and try to create algorithms that try to actually understand which information is based on personal experiences and not created by financial interest. This is a very hard task to do and also prone to manipulation as well. In the end maybe Google needs some real competition for this to happen.
As you say, this is harder to do well than it sounds. There are definitely a lot of hobbyist types who review things and make a side (or even major) income from affiliate sales. With human judgment, it's quite easy to differentiate the honest hobbyist from the spam sites. I fear that any automated attempt to punish the spam sites would end up hurting the hobbyists more.
SEO blogs are full uncanny valley for me.
The study was poorly done and there were tons of comments pushing the same message: "vegetarians/vegans are annoying hipsters who will lecture you for eating meat and they'll be so deservedly upset by this."
Found it and most of those comments are deleted now (https://redd.it/qskxol). Is the meat industry losing a sizable chunk of profits to more people swearing off meat for moral reasons, or ditching meat as a financial decision?
Edit: Threw that link into a website that restores deleted comments (https://www.reveddit.com/v/science/comments/qskxol/meat_cons...).
Mods deleted all references to fact that the study was funded by a beef company. Blatant corruption?
If I'm asking google or DDG for advice on a product, it's either going to be a reddit or Wirecutter for me. 99% of results on "best *" results in _*literally hundreds*_ of domains like "best*for2021.com" "buybest*.com" "top10*reviews.com" that are all generated by bots containing only the worst knockoff / counterfeit / Chinesium products and tons and tons of Amazon affiliate links.
E.g. I was trying to remember the name of a top-of-the-line soldering station brand (Metcal) I used back in college, so I kept trying permutations of "best professional soldering rework station" on google [0] and DDG [1]but it only comes up with low-end Chinese stations, a few mentions of Weller and Hakko, but no impartial reviewers, no forums or blogs, no discussions...nothing leading to Metcal.
Then I searched "best professional soldering rework station site:reddit.com" [2], I clocked the first 3 links, scrolled, and found Metcal on the second hit. [3]
I was surprised to see Wirecutter did a review [4], and arguably the Hakko FX-888D is the best soldering station ever made (and the X-Tronic is a fine budget runner-up) for *_MOST_* people, but it's still not a Metcal (the thermal capacity and regulation of their iron tips is just unparalleled even with nice Wellers and Hakkos - you can really feel the difference when working with THICC power ground planes and RF connectors).
[0] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=best%20soldering%20rew...
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=best+soldering+rework+stati...
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=best+professional+soldering...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/2c4hnl/best_so...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-soldering-ir...
I can only presume that so many people have given up on the web as indexed by Google and are just searching for "<whatever> reddit" now as the only way to get any kind of content written by real people on a subject instead of SEOd filler "content".
Presumably it won't be long before Reddit itself is flooded with spam content to take advantage of this - I'm sure it's already happening to high value keywords.
When I want information about a product, I join the discord forum associated with that hobby and I ask for recommendations.
Since Discord is a chat service like IRC, I get replies from humans instead of shady astro-turfed websites.
And the entire point of the discussion is that astro-turfing has papered over everything useful on the internet in order to sell low-quality crap.
The fact it doesn't scale is exactly why I use this method. Nobody is paying people to sit in a discord chat and recommend fishing poles. I know the information I am getting is from an enthusiast, if not a professional.
What is needed is a way to archive actual useful information for lookup later.
You can search "warmest winter coat site:reddit.com" and filter by past year, only to get a result from 7 years ago.
I really don't know how to search the web anymore.
This always gets brought up but the problem is far deeper:
When I search for:
> "weirdly specific ab345"
and the results contains thousands of pages without "weirdly specific ab34" then the problem isn't spam sites.
It is Google not respecting my queries.
For me it was the pinterestizing of image search that finally made me realize how pointless google was. Why use a service that is just going to feed me ads in response to every query?
Searching the whole web isn’t nearly as useful as curating useful sites yourself.
All of these threads devolve into anecdotes and reminisces about the "good old days" and complaining about Pinterest. None of which is in the least quantitative.
I'd be interested to see some actual data or research on the subject, if it exists.
Or maybe it's not Google that's gotten worse but the web itself? Again, quantitative results, please, not anecdata.
Google has. They use this data expertly to improve search. Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions.
And likely, exactly because it has become better for all its users in aggregate, it has to become a bit worse for a certain group of power users. There, we can only rely on anecdotes and personal experience, but these tell us it actually has gotten worse.
Similarly, the web can become both worse and better. The really useful articles today are better researched, multi-modal, solid web of links, internet-first. Spam has also evolved. And "top 10 ways to do X"-McContent outranks better articles, because that is what the majority of Google users wants to see and clicks on. They truly have a better experience, while others' experiences suffer. It depends on what you measure.
lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"?
what if i told you that search is an adversarial problem, and that it's possible for google's tech to be getting better slower than the aggregate tech power used to game google search is getting better? is this not a patently obvious possibility? it's not some kind of gotcha impossibility for google's tech to get much worse over time, even if they weren't hamstringing themselves by lots and lots of user-hostile changes which benefit google's interests rather than their users.
Yes. If that sounds so unacceptable or strange to you, I suggest you try it. Works really well when reasoning about unavailable data, or researching a field with slow peer-review process.
> what if i told you that search is an adversarial problem
Then I get an adversarial reaction and a downvote from you.
> it's possible for google's tech to be getting better slower than the aggregate tech power used to game google search is getting better? is this not a patently obvious possibility?
Yes, that's plausible. Should be measurable quantitively too. Can you cite some data on this? :)
We could compare to the available data on the quality of (HTML) e-mail spam filtering over the years, which all have kept up. Like pg said: Spam is solved, when skilled spammers start creating content which does not look, feel, or talk like spam. So webcontent-spammers still are on the first 2 pages of Google, but with content not classifiable as spam/content farm.
> which benefit google's interests rather than their users.
One of Google's interest is their user. But perhaps not the type of user you are. Studies have shown the value that the tech of Google is delivering its users per year. This value was in the thousandths, and this value has risen. Meanwhile, Google makes about tens of dollars per user per year, less for technical users which don't click ads or block these.
> it's not some kind of gotcha impossibility for google's tech to get much worse over time
It really is, no way to mince it. Google search is funded by Google ad tech. Google ad tech has improved ML by a ton. To say Google tech is getting worse, is to totally overlook deep learning revolution, word2vec, transformers, BERT, etc. etc. etc. To state that, is to reveal the truth that you are ignorant of major technological advances in the past decade, only looking at the issue from the viewpoint of a single atypical Google-search user. What would you even do with quantitive SEQ data?
Do you really think it is possible that Google runs an implementation test of a new ranking model, and deploys it, while all measurements, human labeling, and user tests show it is doing worse? Of course not! Only if you think you are smarter, could you think that Google search changed and has gotten worse.
If Google does ML like the rest of the industry, all model changes move up their designed levers, or these changes are not committed. So if Google was unable to improve search, then Google would have looked exactly like 2008 Google. The fact that it does not, shows either you or Google is wrong. If I had to make a bet...
It's a bit bloody rich for you to come out with that attitude when your entire point revolves around your opinion of 'common sense'
> Do you really think it is possible that Google runs an implementation test of a new ranking model, and deploys it, while all measurements, human labeling, and user tests show it is doing worse? Of course not! Only if you think you are smarter, could you think that Google search changed and has gotten worse.
You seem to be confusing the concepts of 'Google have made their tech more profitable' and 'Google have made their search capability better'.
> You seem to be confusing the concepts of 'Google have made their tech more profitable' and 'Google have made their search capability better'.
No, you are confused. Try to Google the article I was talking about. It talks of perceived value to the user. What value would you lose without access to Google maps, search, youtube, gmail, etc.?
Google made their tech more valuable. That sounds like an improvement to me.
> Google have made their search capability better
If you want an explanation for this obvious statement (and not be demanded to ask in return how capitalism works), I suggest you first try to code a simple search engine. I think a 100-line Python script with some imports would do. Only this would make talking about capabilities possible.
The exact clones of StackOverflow and Wikipedia are all over the first two pages of Google.
Is it the any surprise if it ranks highly on alternative sites, spam or not?
I think they've accepted that SEO has killed past ranking algorithms and are rebuilding rank from the ground up using ML with the entire internet as guinea pig. All of the crap results we're weeding through now is grist for the ML mill.
I am literally typing exact phrases for content I know is there and not getting the results I should.
I think they've cut the cord with past algorithms, not an incremental update, a major one.
My thinking so doesn't make it so, however, so just my two cents.
I've actually noticed Gmail spam detection doesn't work as well in the last year or two. I get an obvious spam message maybe every other day. Ads with all images and all.
I also think you're underestimating average users. Anecdotally I've heard my parents complain repeatedly about the incoherent, auto-generated, affiliate link spam that plagues product searches.
They have multiple levers, of which user search quality is a big set. There is always trade-offs and a balance that must be found, which aligns with company vision and strategy. Having these levers allows business-decision makers to direct focus top-down (on a certain set of users, on producing great ad numbers, etc.).
It is clearly hard and important to design these levels and find the right balance, given a rapidly changing company and user-base. So a lot of expertise and power is invested to measure the right things, and to find the right balance (an incorrect/risky balance should also be adjustable with other levers).
So for me: either Google is trying really hard, but essentially failing. Or they have the best of the world, with all the right context, designing these levers. While hard and sometimes wrong, I do not expect to contribute anything which may improve their lever settings. If someone does know, Google would like to hire them.
So while true, that accurately measuring things with proxies, is really hard, and sometimes done wrong at companies. I do not think Google gets this wrong, or at least, gets this to be the best of breed. If their metrics still cause long-term search engine quality loss, would show them to not know what they are doing. I think they do know very well, better than me at least.
I would agree too that the balance of levers right now is in line with Google's strong market position. Search engine quality could take a small hit, if justified with extra adsense income. But when search engine quality noticeably start going down, then all other metrics will suffer. You should have teams with sole focus on improving quality. Other teams will have to realize that favoring their lever over the search-engine-quality lever must lead to worse outcomes for Google in general.
About product searches, I myself was not able to do this satisfactory 15 years back. It improved. But need to stop viewing things as a single lever, a single metric. To say search has become "worse" in general, is to exactly fall into the trap of not accurately measuring and losing too much nuance/details for competing objectives.
If Google really really wanted they could find out why they more often than not include results that doesn't contain my keywords even after I have put doublequotes around them and hunted down and applied their verbatim setting!
After that they could think really hard about how relevant the text:
> and something someone said xyz.
>
>abc is next up and something something
is for someone searching for "xyz.abc"
Or maybe see if they can dig out an old cheat sheet with all the operators they used to support and invite some old Googlers to secretly come in and teach about it but that can wait until they got the basics working again.
Without access to both Googles, the best you can do is compare across different search engines: special-cased ones like search.marginalia.nu can net you a quantitative feel for what exists out there that's less likely to be content marketing, but I am not sure if you can figure out where those pages rank in Google search results for the same terms programmatically?
You can also prepare for the future: record some data today, and compare in 10 years time.
It is pretty quantitative yes, but it happened at different times for different people.
But it used to be that when you searched for something you got pages containing the thing you searched for, and if you couldn't find it at first then you could do a search on the page and find out some enterprising scammer had included your keywords in white text on white background.
Today Google and Bing has teamed up with the scammers so they don't need to use such hacks anymore. Google and Bing will include the results even if they don't contain said keywords at all.
Uncharitable? Yes. Do I hope Google and Bing engineers read this and fix it or do I hope some Russian enterprise launch a better engine?
I actually hope Google find back to its roots! I don't hate you guys but you really don't make it easy for us in between using all the oxygen in the room and annoying me all the time with useless time wasting results.
Use the tools dropdown to specify the time period, for example last week or last 24h. If your WhatsApp started crashing today, relevant content is likely fresh.
When searching for articles, try to write the search like journalist would write the headline.
Use the double quotes aggressively to filter out unwanted pages (by hinting you want a certain phrase).
I don’t think I usually go past the first page. Instead I usually refine the search.
Can’t say about the quality. I still keep finding stuff and I don’t really have any way to measure how it was year or 5 ago.