955
Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find (tech.slashdot.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
293 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 16 points 2 years ago* (11 children)

It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators

No. It's an arms race between content creators and spam.

Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.

10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t.

Huh? The top result for "float needle" in Google seems like a great description to me.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 11 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Doesn't Google provide search results based on your search history? It's algorithm probably worked against them or something. I've heard that anonymous searches usually get better results.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    I have had similar experiences constantly.

    I have a gut feeling that people who frequently bemoan bad search results fall into one of two categories:

    • They have all kinds of tracking, and constantly watch Youtube Shorts or TikTok videos. Meaning their learned behavior is "This person enjoys low-quality spam content and lots of ads", because let's face it, portrait-mode shortform videos are primarily that, a vessel to push ads pretending to be genuinely content hidden among content barely better than ads in the first place.
    • They have tracking entirely supressed and their browser so hardened that Google can't even know that if this user puts in "needle", they do mean a physical object. They don't even know the language the user is searching in, basically. As a result virtually no weighting happens which allows spam content to rise to the top based on its built-in SEO efforts.

    In the end, the second case is not something Google can truly optimize for. Or rather, it'll never be their intention to do that. Though I will say DDG's and Bing's equally or worse search results indicate that a certain level of tracking might actually be beneficial, but we'd need a morally trustworthy keeper of the data (as in, it needs to be owned by the people or something!), nto Google.
    And in the first case, I wish they'd do something about that. I can see why before the proliferation of the constant-ads-as-content spam that is shorts, tracking video watching habits to figure out general habits made sense, but especially because you no longer actively decide on which video to watch, this can no longer be valid input to user behavior analysis.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.

    I've switched to Ecosia and while it's not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?

    I know it's a "secondary" search engine.

    But the thing is that no, hundred times no, anyone who generates ad revenue has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google. Everyone else gets screwed.

    Switching to Ecosia alone made me much more comfortable with using Web.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I’ve switched to Ecosia and while it’s not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?

    Ecosia's results are pulled from Bing, and as the very paper linked here shows, Bing's results are significantly worse than Google's, even accounting for Google's deteriorating result quality. Notice in particular the percentage of spam.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Worse for whom?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Did you read the paper this thread here is ultimately all about?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The paper - I have not, the article - yes.

    I've looked through the paper diagonally now, and since it's a scanned PDF, I'll get back to it to read it patiently.

    I still see that they chose one criterion which is maybe less relevant for things I look for, which are usually not very popular. There's probably a curve somewhere which is better for Bing, apparently, than for Google in that point.

    Because it's my personal experience that I find things much faster with Ecosia than with Google.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent