I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find.
I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a common but complex term, am I looking for a specific article that I vaguely remember a phrase from, do I want something I've seen before, or am I in the mood to discover new, unexpected things?
Also, I just don't want to see results from some sites. Let me tweak the importance of some sites, rather than relying on Google's gameable algorithms.
To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than struggling with bad SEO.
- For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim" option.
- Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on average it works but around the edges it is somewhere between tragic and hilarious. For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not magazine subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating sites that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most people would fall for them. (For a while I wondered if this was all a fluke but now I have confirmed it happens to others in my situation as well.)
- Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?
> "For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in."
Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for sites that contain both of them, yet the first results all have either one or the other, because surely I must be more interested in a popular site that uses only one of these, right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret exact words I type as vaguely related words. Sometimes that's relevant, but often it's not.
> "For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays,"
They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it. I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet. Except with bad advertising, apparently.
The "AI" that Google's search engine seems to have is definitely feeling more "human" over time, but not in a good way --- it's like a stupid salesperson who has trouble understanding what you're trying to find. An analogy I have is that you go into a pet shop and ask for a black cat, and instead the salesperson shows you black dogs, white cats, and green gerbils (because they're absolutely cool these days and you wouldn't want to miss out on a great deal, no?)
> "They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it. I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet."
There's an eschatological trait to targeted advertising, as it seems to be all about past sins. So I'm not too sure about your evaluation and AI's own claims…
> I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet.
The scary thing about AI is that, even as the algorithms have greater and greater intelligence, we're still not much closer to teaching them to do what we want them to do. They can game the system better than ever, and then the universe is tiled with surgical masks.
If "what we actually want" even comes into consideration, we did orders of magnitude better than the current industry standard. (Poor consolation, I know.) Right now, the vast majority of AIs don't even have a concept of "human desire" – probably none of them, to be honest, though some that are good at manipulating their handlers might've come close to a particularly stupid dog's understanding. This is at the core of the Friendly AI problem: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intellig...
Just because we created the AI doesn't mean it'll care about us. That's like saying a maths problem will try to make your favourite number its answer, just because you wrote it. No, you are the one who must make its answer the number you want. It won't happen by chance.
Corollary: you can't patch broken FAI designs. Reinforcement learning (underlying basically all of our best AI) is known to be broken; it'll game the system. Even if they were powerful enough to understand our goals, they simply wouldn't care; they'd care less than a dolphin. https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/specification-gam...
And there are far too many people in academia who don't understand this, after years of writing papers on the subject.
> They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it
Say you searched for a TV a month ago. Now you're seeing lots of ads about TVs. Stupid Google.
But is it? A substantial fraction of those people are returning their TV because something is wrong with it. Now they are looking for another TV set.
Sure, the majority keeps their TV. But it is still profitable to target all those TV buyers, because they have self-selected into the set of people who really want a TV now, and they are willing to pay.
Reaching the fraction of those who need another one is probably[1] very lucrative.
Agreeing: This thread of thought comes up semi-regularly here, I've argued similarly to you.
People will rebuy good products, or be stimulated to replace other similar products (bought a new TV for the kitchen, now the lounge TV seems dated, new boots feel awesome get another pair for when they wear out, new $thing is fun buy one for friends birthday.).
There's also a big place for brand enforcement. Show Sony stuff, to remind someone ['s subconscious!] they bought Sony.
A tertiary effect is what I call the "Starbucks Purposeful Bad Naming effect" - you get ads for the exact TV you bought -- beyond the brand reinforcement, etc., you also get to tell everyone you meet a weird story about how "internet advertising is broken ..." and "yes, my new Sony TV is great thanks, you should get one".
Those ad agencies aren't stupid; they have metrics for their metrics and have tracking that can tell you to the second when your gut bacteria burps ...
> Those ad agencies aren't stupid; they have metrics for their metrics and have tracking that can tell you to the second when your gut bacteria burps ...
Stupid they aren't, but I don't think they're smart in the way they are.
Ad attribution is a hard problem. Or, in other words, it's hard to estimate which $ spent on which advertising activities generated how many $ of profit where. That gap is a huge opportunity to scam the product vendor out of their money.
So the ad agency has a metric for their metric, and their reports overflow with numbers and various charts shaped like food or aquatic mammals. But does that mean anything at all? It might not. Statistics is hard, and as long as the vendor isn't better at it than the agency, money can be made. I used to work next desk to a group of content marketers who had no fucking clue about what their numbers mean, but their customers didn't have a clue either, so they happily paid money in exchange for reports that showed the Facebook campaigns "worked".
Now advertising industry is large, and by definition filled with companies that aren't a paragon of virtue and honesty. These companies specialize, providing building blocks and platforms for each other, and they compete internally. It's not like people building tools for lies and manipulation are suddenly honest when dealing with their in-industry customers and competitors. After all, convincing advertisers that your A/B testing package is worth the money requires... well, advertising.
So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.
I used to work in Ad Operations (literally buying ad space and running campaigns) and can attest to the accuracy of this.
Clients were clueless: they had their metrics and they looked at them often, but from my interactions, deep understanding of those metrics and the realities behind them was lacking. The chain of technologies was patchwork and would rarely support all the required features from ad-serve back up to agency: click and view attribution was especially flaky and inconsistent. The adserving environment we worked in (in app) often had issues with view attribution, and we'd tell clients that, but we knew for a fact that some of our competitors didn't and clients would always ask us why our view attribution numbers were worse.
Combine that with more suspect behaviour from suppliers and competitors than you can poke a stick at (questionable traffic sources and campaigns that were probably outsourced from under you, suspect and plausibly forged numbers, etc) means that most of the metrics are plausibly poisoned with illegitimate data to a degree that is difficult if not impossible to nail down, which more or less makes lots of those metrics worthless.
> So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.
The big reason advertisers show the ads for products you already purchased is also to reinforce their brand. If you buy some stupid cable, you wont remember the name of the company that made it, but you will if they show you the add couple of times in a row and will likely to buy the things there again even if it not the same product.
That's why I miss pre-Google search engines such as AltaVista and alltheweb. "If you searched for "some obscure string of words" you would only get results that matches that exact string. I really don't like how Google just chooses to vary the spelling of your query when a match isn't found. I often search for electronics components using their part number. I'll type in something like "P204PPX" (a random code I just made up) and despite there being no match Google still gives me pages of results that are nowhere near what I was looking for.
And the worst thing is that this is all done to keep those ad dollars flowing. Look at how many companies always have a paid advert associated with their name when a search is made. They are paranoid about losing rank due to Google fiddling their algorithm or someone else doing a better SEO job using their brand.
Google used to respect search operators, and dramatically tone down query optimization for queries that contained operators. As I've written elsewhere, I suspect learn-to-rank is to blame[0], by optimizing ranking for generic sloppy queries despite your query being very focused.
> - Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?
To intentionally discourage you from using Firefox so you give in and switch to their stalker browser.
You're not their customer, advertisers are, so it's only natural that the ads you see aren't personalized. That's never been the goal.
It is, however, technically a potential benefit that the more exactly advertisers can target you, the more relevant ads you could be seeing, which is a wonderful sales pitch for users who are agnostic anyway, but that's not how advertising works in practice.
3. I've read it so many times and seen it misapplied so many times it is getting annoying.
> so it's only natural that the ads you see aren't personalized. That's never been the goal.
I doubt it was the intent of the advertisers to waste expensive impressions on people who weren't in the target audience at all, so I'm pretty sure they expected some personalization WRT which customers gets what ads.
I also very much doubt that it was Googles intention to annoy me to the point where I trash them in public foras, I just don't think they're capable of fixing it anymore as they are way to busy "being Google", e.g. doing cool stuff while not listening to customers (I was planning to add more here, but this single example seems to summarize it well.)
I recognize I might be a bit more direct than usual here and you aren't responsible for the first 97 times I've seen this meme here but as an answer to my question it is not applicable as far as I can see an also generally that meme is just noise here at HN now.
(Anyone who is actually in todays 10000 lucky WRT the "you're not the customer" meme, feel free to prove me wrong.)
My post may contain a meme but it was directly relevant to the post above.
Mentioning that I'm not Googles customer is significantly less relevant (I think irrelevant) when it is obvious that it should have been in the actual customers best interest to avoid spamming me with expensive and utterly irrelevant ads.
Maybe we frequent vastly different websites, but this has absolutely not been true for me, even for companies who are supposed to be experts at using their data. I don't think I've ever seen an ad that has actually been relevant, and I'm not even trying to hide my habits or behaviors.
For example, take Amazon. Their ads all over the web frequently recommends me stuff I've already bought just a month ago, the very same product. Or the products they recommend are way out of my zone, like woman clothing while I never purchased woman clothing or anything close to it.
So, I'm not sure how the ad market even goes around and my friends are describing the same behavior from the ads, even from companies that have my entire shopping history already (like Amazon)
The ad market's business isn't delivering right ads to you, it's convincing people paying for those ads to part with their money. It doesn't have to work well, as long as it works a bit, and there isn't any better alternative around.
I think we agree. What I mean is on average it works for Google, not that it works for us. They still makes boatloads of cash.
For what I know the targeting is equally bad for you and me and everyone and they are just convincing advertisers that is worth paying for despite this.
There are definitely sites who's results I wish I could ban from my results. I won't visit them so they are just a waste of space. My short list, thillist, collider, vulture.
Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a pattern for SEO or ads.
I'm surprised Google's own Search team doesn't get frustrated enough by Pinterest results contaminating their own day-to-day searches that they'd consider ranking Pinterest results lower.
They aren't going to de-optimize their careers in order to optimize search just for themselves. Google used to be somewhat optimized for power users, but I suspect that learn-to-rank is over-optimizing search ranking for the median user.
Given the uniformity of recipe site design I'm starting to wonder if there isn't more going on. Like maybe they are all run by the same company or maybe there is a template that every person that wants to run a recipe site is somehow pushed to use.
I mean literally, search for any recipe, click the first 10 links. Screens and screens if large pictures and superfluous text with actual recipe way way down the page.
I like playing around with "Million Short" - https://millionshort.com. It's a search engine that lets you logarithmically filter-out the top websites. It isn't perfect, of course, but its a fun way to discover things.
Of course some of those top sites, especially the blogging and self-hosting platforms, can still contain obscure stuff that might be just what I'm looking for.
- Affiliate spam from douchebags that provide "reviews" of products just to link back to Amazon. Makes it nearly impossible to find actual reviews of products.
- People who type whole sentences in natural language into Google. I tried since I used the internet to serach for keywords, omit as much words as possible that aren't necessary. Most people (after I guess ~2010?) don't. This worsens the results.
Not OP, but let's say you want to find out the protein content of brussels sprouts.
I would type `protein content brussels sprouts` (without quotes) because I fully understand that the information I'm seeking might be in some tabular form, or phrased in a way I don't anticipate.
Most non-technical people however would type in `What is the protein content of brussels sprouts?` literally.
This leads content creators who see these queries in "keyword analysis tools" to dump SEO-optimized crap into millions of blog posts, with completely irrelevant word soups with countless varations of the question, and the actual information buried deep within that gibberish essay, unreadable by humans, only optimized to drive ad traffic.
Google's optimization for the non-technical use case has lowered the overall search result quality immensely.
There was a time when Google didn't simply ignore some of your search words, or when control characters like +, -, and "" were actually respected (~pre 2010), and the introduction of verbatim mode didn't change much IMHO.
Interesting. Why do you think that content creators wouldn't see `protein content brussels sprouts` in "keyword analysis tools"? Why do you think they wouldn't create millions of blog posts containing words `protein content brussels sprouts` or countless variations thereof?
Because Google optimizes for "quality content" since at least the Penguin update. They're using NLP tools to assess the writing quality (similar to algorithms telling you at what school grade level your writing is).
This was good, because it cured all the copy&pastable 2000s era "tag cloud" sites which simply dumped tons of search keywords all over the place.
Ideally, it lead to a stronger emphasis on high-quality human-written content, but it turns out that this algorithm, again, is easily fooled by feeding it "SEO essays" that looks like prose, but is irrelevant text gibberish, but written coherently.
That lead content creators to expand data that would ideally be presented in tabular form on one page, to multi-page "SEO prose" that looks like it's written for humans, but is completely undigestible.
That, along with Google's auto-suggestion feature that finish your sentences after you type in some words, especially on mobile, lead to the impression that people actually like to search in full sentences.
One can easily make them minority by creating a script which issues keyword-only searches to Google and let it work 24/7/365 from a few hundred machines.
Recent example: I wanted to find out why the directions on those Banquet pot pies say to let it stand for five minutes. The words on the box say it finishes cooking in those five minutes. I want to find out more about that: why didn't it finish in the oven? Is it cover for liability, so people don't get burned?
All Google returns is page after page of recipes and posts about Banquet pot pies that have no connection to my input. Google used to be so good at this kind of thing. I know the answer exists somewhere because I found it once a long time ago searching for answers to the same question. Google found it then.
This could perhaps be illustrated well with a hard boiled egg. If you remove an egg at the 7 minute mark, the internal temperature is still around 100c, and it will continue to cook. To stop it cooking, dunk it in cold water.
Similarly with the pot pie, the filling retains a ton of heat, so it still is cooking for those few minutes, as the heat dissipates. If you left it in the oven five minutes longer (to 'finish') then put it in cold water (like the egg), you would have a pie in a similar, though wetter, condition.
I have another "Google is shit now" anecdote: a few months ago I wanted to look up some trivia for the movie "Lord of War". I entered this term in Google, and since there was a game that was just released, it responded with "Showing you results for 'God of War'". No results on the front page had anything related to the Nic Cage movie.
It was "lord of war director's commentary". I thought it was because many more people were googling for the game, but I just tried and Google is still doing this!
Yes, you said it was happening currently, so I tried it. The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively.
It doesn't appear that you did. The search term in question is "lord of war director's commentary," and you say you're trying "lord of war." And even if the problem didn't exist for you, but did for them, that does not mean it doesn't exist "objectively."
They aren't being rude, just increasing the sample size and reporting back. Perhaps we're witnessing SEO for different regions, regulations, and aggregate history of the two.
I'm a native English speaker. You're feeling that there is a belittling connotation is valid.
The first quote is potentially a dismissal, which is belittling. However, if it stood alone, it could also be interpreted as the person backing off because they lack qualification to interpret the results. But the second quote includes dismissal terms like "complaining" and "not objectively" in a demeaning context.
So, with all that, I'd say your impression is valid. The context highly suggests that these responses were meant to belittle the parent author's contribution to the conversation.
Here is my take on the parent's search results. The God Of War director ( Cory Barlog ) was a big part of the marketing for the game. And he did some in-game commentary for it too. So, this suggests some kind of SEO manipulation. But it could also just be the google spellcheck guessing wrong.
Intentionally? I'll assume good faith. Under that presumption, my best interpretation of that poster is "socially unaware, likely prone to nitpicky argumentation."
The poster who said he was having difficulty getting good results from Google, was obviously venting about his own personal experience.
Next comes along another poster who says "I tried it. I don't have your problem." Another post down, "... The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively."
Excuse my outburst, but who the fuck says that?
The original poster was venting about a problem he experienced. What good can someone do when he comes in and says that he doesn't experience the same problem, and states that it likely doesn't exist? There is no upside here. There's an only a downside: being rude.
I'm not trying to be rude, but I honestly believe a lot of the complaints people make about how useless Google's search results seem overblown. I use Google all the time, sometimes for obscure results, often for technical stuff, and the worst I've ever had to do is look past the first page, but often the first page suffices.
Google showing results for director's commentary of God of War when someone searches "Lord of War director's commentary" is arguably not a failure on Google's part if more people do search for the game than the movie, regardless of the incorrect title.
That said, I completely agree with the theses of TFA. SEO is a cancer.
Google usually shows a link to "search for x instead" when that happens. And let's be fair, most people searching for "Lord of War" are probably really searching for "God of War."
Having to click an extra link or maybe scroll beyond the front page doesn't make Google a shit show.
Half your searches? Isn't it a bit dramatic? You can always check your search history, but I seriously doubt 50% of your searches Google can not find anything - assuming data is somewhere accessible-. Tell us a few of the obscure things that you know exist openly and google could not find for you.
I see these claims all the time, but usually with zero examples.
It's a very rough estimate. I'm not going to check every search in my history. But it feels like the chances I'll find what I need are comparable to the chances I won't.
One example: this weekend I was looking for lyrics from the British folk band Why?. I know they exist; my brother has a bunch of their albums. I have quoted lyrics at Google, I've searched for it on Youtube, I've searched for the band name combined with song titles or names of band members, and I found tons other bands and other random crap, but not the band I was looking for. Eventually I searched for a very specific phrase that was also the title of one of their live albums: "Jig at a Why? Gig", and that finally turned up results.
It's an obscure band, and their name being a common word certainly doesn't help, but certainly combined with song titles, lyrics and band members, it should be pretty clear what I'm looking for? But with Google giving strong preference to the most popular results, Google becomes primarily good at finding things you don't need a search engine for to find them. I want a search engine that's good at finding things that are lost, rather than in plain sight.
Lyrics are notoriously hard to find on Google. I assume it's in part due to copyright issues, but it's also not how Google works. Searches are based on key words, not exact matches of several words in order.
There was once I time where I could type maybe 5 random words from a song and get it as the top hit.
Now there are times where I can’t remember the song title, but I can type a few lines of lyrics verbatim plus include the musician’s name and get only random, unrelated links.
I think this particular query has a problem with the with the unfortunate name "why" which is probably causing the confusion. I don't think search engines did a better job before, nor this has anything to do with Seo. Change the "Why" with another obscure band with a distinct name, you would get results, could Gogle do better, sure, is it worse than before, I reaaly don't think so.
This is how most complaints about "Google these days" play out.
Once pressed to give actual examples, we realize it wasn't a trivial search anyways and certainly not something better Google did long ago on a technical basis. And Bing certainly isn't doing much better.
Of course, there are some things that Google does filter out these days like things that seem like pirated content.
Somewhat unrelated to your point but the phrase "Google these days" made me think the following: Could Google freeze its index and capabilities every one or two years and make it available as a sort of "search the web like it was in 2008" archive?
That might also solve the problem of how to prioritize search results over time. The people in 2015 are likely to have been interested in different things than the people of 2040, especially for some search terms (vine for example). I mean they already do this by having different search engines for different countries/languages.
Those are the top 3 things that routinely yield absolutely no useful results for me. The first two seem to produce pages upon pages of spammy SEO sites (with titles like "fix errors now") which don't even contain the relevant error message or code, and the latter alternates between no results or, once again, pages of SEO spam.
When I was still in an office with coworkers a while back, we had developed the habit of yelling "fuck you Google!" and showing a middle finger at the monitor whenever a search yielded absolutely WTF or useless results, which was a cue to everyone else around to jump in and help. A stronger tirade of profanity was reserved for when someone managed to trip the bot-detector CAPTCHA hellban. At first only the former happened once or twice a week, but shortly before working from home, we were getting Google-screwed multiple times a day, and tripping the hellban so often that most of us switched to a combination of Bing and Yahoo; while still not ideal, and the results weren't much better, at least we weren't routinely getting banned from them for trying harder to find what we were looking for.
Agreed, I almost always find what I am looking for on my first search. It might be a few search results down the page, but usually what I'm looking for is found on the first search.
Maybe I've just adapted to typing in words and phrases into Google in a way that brings up the results I'm looking for.
I wish I would have seen this coming years ago. I would have built a Google Custom Search Engine, and every time I ran into a good website, added it to the whitelist. By now, it would probably be alright.
How are you meant to find the most obscure content? If it's obscure, it probably means it is not relevant to your search. How would a search engine like that even work?
Tweaking importance of some sites seems like a nice idea though, but it could also be a bad thing.
I'm very confused by your definition of obscure. If I search for something rare and not covered very well using as set of precise search terms Altavista and company used to give me almost exclusively relevant results. Modern Google will give me windows helpdesk questions for a query about a linux driver using lots of of quoted terms, at most one of which will appear in the results. Rare results are _exactly_ the time that precise queries give higher quality hits. Substituting a different word will swamp them. Specifying sites to avoid or prefer is an extra signal to help with that
My experience is the opposite: while there certainly was a time when I felt DDG actually respected my queries [1] that time is now gone. The results I get often have very little to do with what I typed in the search box. I find myself resorting to !g more often than ever before.
This was my experience as of a year ago. Nowadays when I do a search on DDG (my default choice) the results are terrible. Then I add !g and the results are even worse. I’ve had so many recent searches for information on technical subjects result in abject failure, leaving me to throw my hands in the air in frustration.
It’s gotten so bad that I’ve installed BasiliskII and SheepShaver [1] just so I can relive the nostalgia of the days when I had my first Macintosh, before I’d even had access to the Internet for the first time. The help system and the documentation for software back then was so much more exhaustive than it is today!
After the last bout of anti-google posts on HN about a month ago, I took the comment advice and switched fully to DDG.
My experience was horrible. I don't tend to search 'popular' subjects, only technical ones, and hobbyist stuff. DDG was just plain useless for this, I had to switch back to google after about a week as I was using the !g prefix almost all the time.
I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a common but complex term, am I looking for a specific article that I vaguely remember a phrase from, do I want something I've seen before, or am I in the mood to discover new, unexpected things?
Also, I just don't want to see results from some sites. Let me tweak the importance of some sites, rather than relying on Google's gameable algorithms.