
Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy - midef
https://www.superhighway98.com/google
======
userbinator
IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that
the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even
mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon
pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very
old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to
a PDF, and the results were otherwise mostly relevant; but now you get only
sites claiming to sell it to you, and more SEO spam.

Two more examples are error messages and IC part markings --- searches are
flooded with results that _do not even contain all the words in the query_. I
didn't put those words there for no reason, ignoring them is absolutely
unacceptable. This becomes ridiculous when you search for error numbers, where
a search containing the exact number and the word "error" gets flooded with
plenty of useless results about _other_ errors.

~~~
Someone1234
I'm just glad I'm not alone, sometimes I second guess if _I_ am the problem.

Currently just to get basically workable results I'm finding myself putting
"every" "keyword" "in" "quotes" (to make sure they're actually in the result
pages at all), the site: modifier to restrict it to real sites, and negative
modifiers (-"keyword") to remove some SEO results.

Google used to be "magic" in that it knew what you were thinking, and gave you
what you wanted instead of what you asked for. These days it is just page
after page of auto-generated results, pages that don't contain anything
relevant to your query, or just low quality results.

I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in Google's search, and I'm sure
they're meeting some metric or another, but from my perspective things have
gone seriously downhill to the point where I am looking elsewhere.

It used to be THE technical search engine de jure. Now it feels like a search
engine you have to hack to get it to work well. Not a good place to be.

PS - I have read, in HN comments (so pure rumor) from self-proclaimed ex-
Googlers, that Google's internal culture punishes people for
improvements/maintenance to existing products, and that promotions come from
developing new products/features. If even semi-accurate might go a long way to
explaining why Google Search feels neglected aside from changes which seem to
exist to improve their button line/promote sister products.

~~~
int_19h
The problem isn't just SEO, it's that Google itself aggressively rewrites
queries to produce more results (which I suspect they want to do to show more
"relevant" ads).

On the most extreme end of this, I've seen four-word queries produce results,
in which three of the words were stricken out. More often, it's just one word,
but it's usually exactly the one that makes the difference between a very
specific query, and a very generic one.

Worse yet is that they try to do synonym substitution, but their algorithm has
a ridiculously low bar for that. Like, you might be searching for "FreeBSD",
and it will substitute that for "Linux", or even "Ubuntu". Or search for a
specific firearm model, and it finds "gun".

Quoting keywords suppresses all of that, but synonyms are actually useful - if
it did them accurately...

~~~
KMag
I left Google in 2010, so it's just a wild guess, but I suspect a big part of
the issue is learn-to-rank is probably being trained on everyone's searches. I
think it would probably do much better if they used the presence or absence of
search operators as a simple heuristic to separate power user searches from
common searches, and trained a separate ranking model on power user searches.

Maybe they're already doing this, but it sure acts like learn-to-rank is
always ranking pages as if the query were very sloppy.

It's been a long time, and I certainly never read the code, but I vaguely
remember a Google colleague mentioning something (before learn-to-rank) about
a back-end query optimizer branch that would intentionally disable much of the
query munging if there were any search operators in the query. There was some
mention about using cookies / user account information to do the same if the
same browser/user had used any search operators in the past N days, but I'm
not sure if that was implemented or just being floated as a useful
optimization.

------
chrisco255
In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter
feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency
to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd
mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then,
because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos,
the platforms actively inhibit constructive, complex discussion. This is one
reason I like podcasts and why, for example, Joe Rogan has become popular. The
demand for long form, complex discussion is higher than the supply the
internet currently provides.

~~~
notacoward
A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly
chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for
example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most
feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of
stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's
crap, it shouldn't be shown to me _anywhere_. Meanwhile, content from my
actual friends or people who I have demonstrated interest in is pushed way
down or all the way out. All because of popularity and some very misguided
notions of engagement. _Bad_ feeds ruined the internet.

I actually do think likes, stars, upvotes, whatever you want to call them are
valuable forms of feedback. I like specific reactions - love, laughter, anger
- even better. But I do wonder what it would be like if those _only went to
the poster_. If they weren't shown to anyone else, and didn't affect _what_
was shown to anyone else. I suspect that it would make "the feed" a usable
model again, instead of the abomination it has become.

~~~
sneak
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which
effectively amounts to censorship. Algorithmic "timelines" (which aren't
timelines at all) are one of the biggest mass scams ever perpetrated. It
allows giant companies to sit and mediate personal friendships, and extract
rent for anyone who wants more reach (even within their existing, opt-in
audience).

I think daily about ways to get people to stop donating content to these
censorship and surveillance platforms. Most people don't run businesses, so
they never realize the rent-seeking nature of these jerks.

~~~
onion2k
_You can 't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content,
which effectively amounts to censorship._

This would imply HN "censors" the front page. Of course that's nonsense.
Sometimes sorting by an algorithm is just sorting.

In the case of HN it's up votes, and in the case of Google it's a basket of
hundreds of criteria (including up votes if you think of clicks on results as
voting). Google probably does have some "censorship" rules like filtering out
illegal content, but I'd be surprised if they're not impartial about
everything else.

~~~
sneak
> _This would imply HN "censors" the front page._

That’s precisely what they do. Everyone’s allowed to censor what they wish on
their own webpage. I, for example, censor from my own webpage (which otherwise
contains a lot of information about me) anything someone could use to
physically harm me.

The issue comes up when the censorship is used, for example, in DMs or
timeline posts between friends (as it is on Facebook and Instagram and
Discord), versus one’s own content on a webpage.

There’s a difference between moderation and rent-seeking.

------
jrockway
> Search for "GM" and the Gmail homepage ranks prominently. Is Google pushing
> its own products on people? Well, yes, but not here. This is an example of a
> query refinement algorithm at work. Google is altering its results in
> recognition of the fact that many people who search "gm" subsequently search
> for "gmail."

I tried this and there are three news articles about General Motors, an
infobox for General Motors, 4 search results for General Motors (their web
page, another of their pages, a New York Times article about them, and the
Wikipedia article about them), a box containing tweets from General Motors,
two more news articles about General motors, and finally a link to GMail. Then
the other "GMs" start, including GraphicsMagick for node.js. I think they did
a pretty good job interpreting "GM" here, and I don't think the Internet is
exactly ruined.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
Just tried this. GMail was the first link, validating "the Gmail homepage
ranks prominently." Also, all the suggestions were gmail (before the search.)

The rest of the results were GM related news/Twitter/links.

~~~
jonas21
Are you sure you're not confusing Google and DuckDuckGo? (I know I do from
time to time)

For me, a Google search returned only General Motors results in the top spots,
while a DuckDuckGo search had Gmail as the first result after the news
stories.

[https://i.imgur.com/m2iXSN9.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/m2iXSN9.jpg)

~~~
aembleton
I get the same as you for DuckDuckGo, but my Google does look different. I
guess Google is customising the results:
[https://imgur.com/dccAZBg](https://imgur.com/dccAZBg)

~~~
TeMPOraL
To add another data point, my Google results for "gm" look like those on your
screenshot, with a market summary card and then GMail being the first result,
and General Motors second - with one extra difference that "Top Stories" card
in my case is above, not below the GMail result.

------
asdfasgasdgasdg
Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named
google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were
about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe
somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title
makes no sense whatsoever.

"Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It
wouldn't get any upvotes, nor deserve any (surely it's obvious that a website
trying to be as many things as Google does will sometimes be inaccurate). But
it would be more truthful.

~~~
airstrike
Agreed, but even "Google sometimes gets things wrong" isn't entirely accurate.

So it favors popularity over accuracy. So what? Google is not in the business
of providing the most accurate search results. It's in the business of
generating ad revenue. If popular links make Google more valuable, then
favoring them is "getting things right" from the perspective of a private
company.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy.
Actually I think that is a seriously editorialized take as well, not in
keeping with the spirit of HN. I think it would be more correct to say that
much of the time popularity _is_ accuracy, in that it's what the searcher is
looking for. When there are a variety of interpretations of a query, the most
popular interpretation is the rational prior expectation. When not -- for
example, when I search for "go" with a history of searching for programming
related topics -- Google tries to give me what I'm looking for.

But it's also just a hard problem. That featured snippet about the dentist for
example: Google's computers aren't investigative journalists. The purpose of
the featured snippet is actually to favor accuracy over popularity by
deferring to journalists when Google senses that the searcher is looking for
information about an event that was covered in the news. However, if the
journalists get it wrong, how is Google going to know? Dollars to donuts, if
Google actually knew the right answer, that's what they would surface.

~~~
airstrike
> I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy.

I'm not the one making that claim, I'm just starting from that assumption
since the parents are claiming as much

------
CM30
Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO. That gets a lot
of blame for ruining the internet, especially on tech sites.

But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather
than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is
definitely an issue.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and
quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat.

Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and would want to
chat.

~~~
zozbot234
> If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and
> quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat.

Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork)
version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online
resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite
a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.

~~~
anticsapp
DMOZ, really? Yes, at the beginning, yes. But 5-6 years later I know plenty of
companies and even bloggers who would locate a "volunteer" and ply him with
hundreds or thousands of dollars to get them in, get free traffic, and that
beast of a PageRank 7 link.

~~~
zozbot234
Yes, but this only ever impacted categories where for-profit links are common
(and over time, people learn to disregard these links). And Google Search
still does a pretty good job of searching for relevant businesses, since it's
one of the main things that people use it for.

------
rob74
One example I came across recently: if you search for "Amiga floppy disk
capacity"
([https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity](https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity)),
you get "1.76 MB", which is completely wrong. Of course, the Wikipedia article
which Google's algorithm chose to extract this information from doesn't
mention the actual capacity of "standard" Amiga floppies (880 KB): "Most Amiga
programs were distributed on double-density floppy disks. There are also
3.5-inch high-density floppy disks, which hold up to 1.76 MB of data, but
these are uncommon." \- so Google picked the first number it found (the
"uncommon" one) and ran with it. I'm just wondering which executive thought
having this "feature" would be a good idea?!

~~~
devinplatt
You can provide feedback on the answer card. I've had a few answer cards fixed
after providing feedback. Notably "https port" used to yield the http port.

Edit: I think you've actually managed to find a really terrific example of a
case where modern ML systems are going to have trouble, because of how that
Wikipedia page is worded in relation to the query.

* There isn't a single phrase that answers the query directly, so the ML model would need to make very good use of context (attention), both within multiclause sentences and between paragraphs.

* There are many different numbers on the page, so the model has to determine the right one. It can't just get lucky by guessing here.

* A wrong number (1.7MB) has close proximity to literal keywords in the query (floppy, disk). (The right number [880KB] does too.)

* The model has to understand and properly make use of "most" vs "unusual" in its decision.

------
cmckn
> Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an
> angry, misinformed mob.

Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses
the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine
importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and
may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google
successful.

I don't disagree with the general point that the amount of content in today's
Web makes the job of a search engine much harder. Perhaps some of Google's
techniques lower the result quality for some users, for some queries. That's a
much more boring title for a blog post, I guess.

~~~
blahedo
> _founded on_ ... _the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob"_

I started grad school at Brown in 1997 and I remember a talk there, by someone
from Google or connected to it, about PageRank. PageRank was still new, Google
was still in beta. Free swag from dotcoms was literally growing on trees. But
I digress.

I remember that the narrative about PageRank at the time was not about
popularity, but about expertise. I _really_ remember that the presenter
brought up a possible threat to validity—what about gaming the system?—and
pointed out that if you wanted to persuade the system that you were an expert
on a thing, you could get lots of people who talk about the thing a lot to
point a link at your site. BUT, he says: that shows the system works! If you
can get that many people who are at least mini-experts on the thing to point
to you, the _only way to do that_ would be if you, too, were persuasively an
expert on the thing.

(These were... naïve times in many ways.)

Twenty years ago this was highly persuasive. It was an un-game-able system,
because "gaming the system" meant the system changed you. I can be pretty
cynical about a lot of things, including and especially Google, but I really
do think that even Google itself believed this. The company was _founded on_
an algorithm that _rewarded expertise_.

It turned out that the algorithm also rewarded angry, misinformed mobs, so
cmckn isn't exactly wrong here. But I think it's important to be clear that to
the extent that Google's algorithms have always done this, they a) weren't
meant to, and b) actually _didn 't_ in the very earliest days, because the WWW
link structure really did, in the 90s, work like they thought it did. (Then
the measure became the target, etc etc)

~~~
lonelappde
PageRank is not how Google tanks pages now. It's not the reason Google serves
so much junk.

~~~
luckylion
Links are still the super-major-almost-100% factor in determining ranking
though, whether you call it PageRank or some other algorithm.

It's why buying expired domains and throwing your totally unrelated content on
them works great.

It's why subdomain/folder leasing is a thing where affiliate sites will pay
"high PR" sites to reverse proxy a subdomain or folder to them _and_ (that's
the important part) link to it from their main site. And boy, does that work.
The same content that would be > page 100 suddenly is in the top 3.

There are other factors, but they don't matter nearly as much as Google's "we
have 200 factors that contribute to the ranking" stuff makes it seem. You can
throw the most atrocious low quality content on a site with lots of incoming
links and it will rank at the top.

------
dang
We've rewritten the linkbait title, as the site guidelines ask. I used what
seems to be the first netural and representative phrase from the article
itself. If someone can suggest language that's more neutral and
representative, we can change it again.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
gscott
When I first starting making websites in 1996 I would market them by going to
other similar websites and we would link to each other. Also, there were
webrings and directories. Now if you link to each other Google thinks you are
gaming their search engine and will demote your link and possibly your entire
site.

------
bovermyer
Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a
search engine.

It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

~~~
jbritton
Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of
websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched
via grep or some simple scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler
to build our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?

~~~
takeda
I miss the time when Internet was so small that a curated list was possible
(Yahoo was priding itself to be biggest curated list[1])

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/](http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/)

~~~
perl4ever
I still have a paperback book that claimed to be a _comprehensive_ , not
_curated_ list of internet sites. It didn't even come with electronic media as
became customary with computer books later on.

------
tomaszs
Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only concern was to
guess how it may be written dont on a page, so Google can find it for me.

I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better
results.

But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same
result.

Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is
not.

You could write an article and Google indexed it and showed it if people
searched for it. Now it does not work that way. If your audience visits other
pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than
perfect match from yours.

And also Patelisms. Once, a short post was enought for Google to index it. Now
it has to be essencially a book. It does not need to answer any question, as
long as it has a length of a book and thousands of illustrations.

I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not
guessing answers. Giving the freedom to explore rather than giving cheap
crappy answers.

~~~
Avamander
> If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info
> from these pages rather than perfect match from yours.

I empirically disagree. For me Google often shows small sites with perfect
matches before big sites with vague matches and a few of my small sites also
rank very well next to giants.

> I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not
> guessing answers.

Why not use quotation marks?

~~~
tomaszs
It only proves Google is unpredictable. And this is also a sad reality. I
often see "my" Google is better adjusted to find some answers but extremely
lame at 90% of other queries.

Ps. Quotation marks help in some degree. But the response pool is often very
small. Also sometimes quotation marks return broader results than expected to

------
hombre_fatal
> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back,
> like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are.

What does this even mean?

The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic
search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work.

Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant
information yet you'll notice how many people will write up an entire comment
online or bicker IRL instead of doing a cursory search. I don't think it's the
internet creating human stupidity / laziness. Unfortunately we had that long
before, and search engines simply try to show the best results with minimal
context.

Also, I think discussion around tech would be much improved if we tried to
come up with a better idea whenever we go through the trouble of complaining
about something. Anyone can enumerate why things are suboptimal, and usually
when you try to come up with alternatives, you find out it's just trade-offs
with no ideal solution.

Trying to pitch an alternative solution (like how a search engine should work)
helps drill down into real conversational bedrock that's much more
interesting.

~~~
basch
I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas,
making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the
world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out
there, but it's damn hard to find.

Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of
being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected
inside filter bubbles.

Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most
repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct.

Google's results are considerably worse than they were and part of that is
google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask
better questions.

~~~
ehsankia
> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas

Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people
discuss fairly complex ideas.

The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree that it's hard
to find for anyone looking for it. The issue is that most people aren't
looking for it, and you can't force them.

A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and that's perfectly fine.
They spent their whole day working hard, come home, and now you want to force
them to spend their night studying and discovering new ideas? That may be the
internet _you_ want but it's not what people want. The internet can be for
more than one thing.

~~~
saagarjha
> Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most
> repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct.

This happens quite often on Hacker News. One of the fastest and easiest ways
to accumulate karma is to be the first to post something like "$hated_company
has always been doing $horrible_thing, they need to change", which most people
agree with, every time a popular story about them shows up. (Thankfully,
usually only a couple of these appear in most discussions, and usually people
don't spam this.)

> Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where
> people discuss fairly complex ideas.

Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter
bubbles and echo chambers.

~~~
danem
> Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of
> filter bubbles and echo chambers.

Nothing on or off the internet is. That is why it is important to keep an open
mind and read widely and voraciously.

~~~
saagarjha
Right. I think Hacker News does pretty well for itself, and it shows: the
users that accumulate karma the fastest usually have insightful comments,
which is rarely true elsewhere.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
No. Exactly like reddit, it awards people that have the most popular comments.

Some people are more insightful than most, but its the exact same system as
reddit

~~~
saagarjha
Well, of course, that's tautologically true. The difference is that the most
popular comments are more often to be insightful, and the people with the most
karma have it because they post insightful things, rather than the type of
comment I mentioned above. (Believe me, I would know if people were spamming
those; there are only a handful of people that accumulate karma faster than I
do, and they all do it "fairly".)

~~~
Aeolun
HN suffers from fanboy’ism just as much, if not more, than elsewhere. Though
I’ll admit there’s many more critical comments as well.

~~~
saagarjha
I consider both kinds of comments to be low-quality, and yes Hacker News has
both. But the really nice comments aren’t just straightforward praise or
criticism.

------
cletus
What a bizarre piece.

We have low-quality content generation not because of Google but because of
the low cost of publishing (which the author even mentions). It's exactly why
we have email spam: it costs nothing to send. To repurpose a Chris Rock bit,
"if sending an email cost $5,000 you'd have no more spam email".

What's the alternative being touted here? No Google? Making things harder to
find? Seriously?

I'd say a far bigger issue is people sharing content from and to people who
think the same, creating these myopic echo chambers of self-reinforcing
beliefs.

Google may do a questionable job at filtering out provably false content but
people are way worse at that.

Within such a system it's too easy to foster fear, anger and hate and to
propagate provably false information. Anti-vaxxers are just one such group
that seem to thrive in this informationless world.

~~~
jmiskovic
Over last decade or so google is becoming less and less helpful. Results are
not user-oriented and they can be far removed from original search queries.
This is google's fault, they are for-profit organization with own agenda.
Google's usage of your personal data to custom-tailor results to your bubble
also contributes to echo chamber.

There are also other factors. There is a vast decrease of internet's signal-
to-noise ratio due to low-cost content you mentioned. For a while we could
rely on google to get us through the jungle to useful information. Now every
SEO is targeting google search. Most other search engines use google's
results, so no help there.

Blaming google doesn't help, their interests are not aligned with user
interests. Author is actually criticizing us and our dependence on this one-
size-fits-all source of information. The alternative is building and adopting
better alternatives to google search.

------
wildpeaks
As an experiment, I have taken the habit in the past year to write down search
queries I'm making along with a short explanation of what I expect to find
(and sometimes even comments on the results) as I was also starting to wonder
if I'm the problem given results seemed to get less and less relevant for a
while.

With the benefit of hindsight, I'd highly recommend it and confirmed my
suspicion that my queries weren't the problem, unfortunately.

It also showed queries are usually only advanced topics as one of my other
habits (writing down summarized information in my wiki) lets me usually skip
searching online for low-hanging fruits or information I already encountered.

------
l0b0
I really wish there still existed a search engine which would absolutely,
without reservation of any sort, simply respect the quote and minus operators.
I searched both DDG and Google this morning for something with a minus
operator, and the search results for both included the unwanted keyword in the
bloody page title. And no, quotes never ever meant "search for similar terms",
but the big players now just ignore all the syntax the power users have been
used to for decades. Luckily the "site:" prefix still seems to work, but for
how long?

~~~
chris_f
Check out Runnaroo. It will respect those operators better than most.

Disclosure, this is my side project. It aggregates results from about 30
different vertical search engines based on the query. Google is actually the
source for the web results.

Here's an example search for "GM" (saw that discussed earlier in this thread):

[https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=GM](https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=GM)

------
majkinetor
The real problem that happened to Internet and is more or less predestined to
happen to anything popular enough:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

~~~
airstrike
Gives a whole new meaning to that Green Day song

------
not2b
Google was designed to prioritize popularity from the very beginning: that's
what their original PageRank algorithm did. Their algorithm has no way of
knowing a concept like "accurate". If almost all of the links on a given topic
go to BlatantlyWrong.com, and when everyone clicks on the BlatantlyWrong.com
link and not the AccurateButBoring.org result that is #2 on the page, the
users will reinforce the wrong answer.

------
manigandham
Seems like the hidden complaint is that online news media is mostly bullshit.

------
colechristensen
Alternative thread:

Google shapes the Internet and that shape leaves many things in ruins.

Google shapes the Internet by motivating so many people to produce content to
make money through advertising. Most people make virtually nothing, a few
people make a lot. There is an enormous amount of content on the internet
whose driving purpose of making money is secondary to that of sharing
something with the world.

Google shapes the Internet through it's algorithm. Ever read or angrily scroll
through pages of BS when trying to find a recipe? The only reason anyone does
that is for google. My grandmother's recipe for deviled eggs was stored on an
index card in a box on the stove. I bet it didn't have 200 bytes of data. A
search algorithm can't do much with that so everybody has to add a grand story
about their grandmother, her toenails, and how nice a vacation to the Balkans
was which nobody ever actually took. It also has to be on top to force people
to spend more time on the site, so they're more "engaged".

I just want to know a good amount of time to hard boil eggs in an instant pot,
but fuck me for wanting to know the number of minutes. "Organizing
information" became being as much of an impediment as possible and directing
me to the winner of the SEO race.

Before Internet advertising was so popular people would put things out there
much more just because they wanted to, not for some profit motive. Now
everybody doing that is doing it on somebody else's platform, making somebody
else money, and often tracking everybody who comes past.

Much of the ruins are "caused" by Google, because Google won the race, next in
line would have done the same thing. Probably.

It occasionally brings up the question of how to fix it. That probably
requires new transport layers, new browsers, and well chosen limitations.
Doubtful it would get off the ground. Decentralized solutions tend to get
overwhelmed with extremely unsavory things. A new "browser" based on an
entirely different stack would be hard to compete, especially if your goal was
eliminating ads and tracking and general money-grubbing.

------
antirez
Google didn't stop there. It ruined the internet even at protocols level.
Google engineers didn't understand the beauty and simplicity of the original
internet protocols, and were in a position to trace the evolution path of such
algorithms without any of the elegance and equilibrium the original designers
had. Now if you want to make an HTTP query you have to understand an
incredible amount of details. Before that with adsense Google forced the web
to evolve into a clickbait arena. Google is the worst thing that ever happened
to the internet.

------
qeternity
A lesson in optimizing the wrong cost function. The internet set information
free. And like the millennia before, the masses congregated to gossip, laugh,
fight, and whatever else helps pass the time.

------
adelHBN
Can anyone suggest alternative search engines, please? I research the
following two areas (1) history and (2) website maintenance and SEO info.
Thanks in advance.

------
_trampeltier
I tryed to search an article / press release, I saw about Corona in january.
But it seems I can't search for "just from january" there is now so much news
about Corona out there, there is no chance to find this article. And much
worse, even I know some key words, Google does present most of the search
results by totaly ignoring the half of my keywords.

~~~
jessriedel
I don't understand. Are you filtering by date? This is one of the search tools
from Google.

------
madrox
This person's argument is arguably weaker with their gmail address written out
inside a H2 tag at the bottom of the page

~~~
jacquesm
Actually, it isn't. It makes it immeasurably stronger. You see, you just _can
't_ get around google. They've poisoned the well in so many ways that you just
have to use their products or you will end up being cut out. Email is the best
example of that. Google determines who can and who can't email and the best
defense against that is to make the problem worse: use a gmail address.

------
schoen
There's actually a person named Henry Beard.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard)

(I have several of his humorous Latin phrasebooks.)

------
soneca
I think I am much more likely to find the truth about a question I have with
Google than asking on a BBS forum or browsing through a curated list of links
on Yahoo.

That's like saying Gutenberg ruined books because now I can find books full of
BS.

------
TeMPOraL
Speaking of popularity over accuracy:

> _Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us
> what we want at the expense of what we need._

I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make
us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently,
and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is _not_ showing that
message. It's actually explained quite explicitly in the movie that the
fatness of people is the side effect of prolonged stay in space, and not of
their dependence on technology.

~~~
titzer
Not sure I got that message, considering the bulk of the population motors
around on their little cushy chairs, drinks slurpies all day, and is endlessly
served by robots, never doing any strenuous work at all, and only interacts
with their screens. The spaceship has artificial gravity, artificial sun,
artificial everything.

The movie is one huge anti-consumerism screed.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It was a cruise ship converted to an ark. It was meant to stay in space for a
short time, precisely because of (as one scene in the movie explained) long-
term exposure leading people to grow fat and weak.

------
tcbasche
The irony of the big 'gmail' address at the bottom of the blog post...

~~~
miked85
It always seems odd to me when owners of a domain don't use their own domain
for email.

~~~
Avamander
Why bother?

~~~
miked85
1\. portability, you are not locked into a provider like gmail

2\. especially for businesses, it comes off as unprofessional if you are using
gmail, yahoo, etc as your contact address

~~~
tcbasche
It's not overly expensive either to get a custom G Suite domain if you enjoy
gmail, but don't want the domain name.

------
toto444
The worst is when you search for important information and you get flooded
with SEO crap.

Try searching for 'retirement for French people leaving in the UK'... It is
close to impossible to find anything relevant.

------
longtimegoogler
My thesis is that smart phones ruined the internet with the rise of Apps and a
different, less text-based interaction with the internet.

In general, I think we would all be better off if phones just supported
calling and texting.

------
gumby
Google’s mission is/was “to organize the world’s information”. There was no
adjective on “organize”.

“Worse is better” wins again.

~~~
devinplatt
Google's mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful."[1]

According to a Wikipedia citation (The Guardian) this was the original mission
statement.[2]

[1] [https://about.google](https://about.google) [2]
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-
pag...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-page-google-
dont-be-evil-sergey-brin)

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

~~~
gumby
Useful to whom is the question of course. I stopped using google a while ago
because it gave me a useful response less and less frequently and I had to
scroll over a lot of cruft to find a good answer if any. When google started
it had the best results and no cruft.

Like people who complain that the latest macs are “terrible”, perhaps I’m
simply not google’s audience any more. That doesn’t make google, or me, wrong.

------
Razengan
Google has been emphasizing click-baity results for years now. A moderately
complex query for X will usually be filled with "Top 10 X" or ignores the
context. Their results (on web search as well as YouTube) also seem to be
biased against Apple and Microsoft which feels a bit scummy.

------
p2t2p
Complains about Google ruining the Internet, has no RSS link on the website.
Stop wining and be the change you seek.

------
wslh
100% correct. I am right now doing an experiment and observing that posting
everyday some low quality text spinned articles amplified the high quality
articles at the point where some obscure high quality articles with ZERO
organic traffic for months suddenly received organic traffic.

------
remir
It's all perspective.

Google didn't ruined the internet. In fact, the internet isn't in ruin.
Perhaps the author should reconsider treating Google, or any search engine, as
sources of truth.

And if Google ruined the internet, then why give them more power by using
Gmail?

------
distdev89
Rubbish! I just searched for `gm` no capitalization, nothing and got a page
full of results for General Motors, from news articles to the wikipedia page.

I searched for `dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth`

You do see the excerpt, but right underneath that you see the Snopes link.

I don't think Google should be in the business of debunking articles written
years ago. As long as it's relevance algorithms can brings up contrasting
sources, in this case the ABC news article and the Snopes stories. It's bad
journalism from ABC that they haven't marked that article as redacted even
though it's been proven false.

Recently I remember, seeing that the google card UI for the news marked an
article as Satire, because in-fact it was a Satire article. I'm not sure if
that's because the original article embedded some information that helped
Google discover this.

They do a pretty good job at organizing information and making it available.

------
malandrew
It also emphasizes liberal media over conservative media. It's often more
challenging then it needs to be to find conservative content even when you
know what you're looking for and you're trying to find it again.

------
amelius
Who cares whether you return accurate results if you can send the user down a
rabbit-hole of some completely irrelevant topic?

------
oytis
Well, if you can solve Google's deficiencies, you can become the next internet
billionaire.

------
dzonga
which are some interesting search engines, do ya folks recommend. I recently
ran into dogpile.com. really relevant results. please don't recommend ddg |
bing as ddg simply mirrors bing.

~~~
JJMcJ
No they use other search engines and have their own web crawler as well.

~~~
JJMcJ
That is, they use other engines besides Bing. They are not simply repackaging
Bing.

------
fancyfredbot
ITYM Google ruined Google?

------
snowsilence
Oh, is it just Google? I thought it was ... everything.

------
beastman82
Happily no one is required to use their services

------
techmaster7b
google has never been good. Sheeple just jumped on the band wagon and started
using it despite it never being any better than the compition. People are dumb
and instead of trying to learn they would rather just follow.

~~~
chance_state
/s ?

------
bravoetch
The internet is not ruined just because Google sucks.

~~~
jimmaswell
How does Google suck here? Do people actually expect Google to hire millions
of extra employees or develop hard AI to rank every single webpage in their
index by accuracy? I don't see any practical alternative to how it already
works.

------
sabujp
tldr; (don't shoot me i'm just the messenger): if google says it's true it
must be. This is bad because people are dumb so they will just look at what
one search engine says without checking sources and believe that to be the
truth.

------
voz_
The author had a few bad queries and chalks the whole thing up to "Google
Ruined the Internet". This is akin to having a bad experience with airline
food and declaring that flying has ruined travel. It is absurd, it reeks of
the stallman-esque style of negative, borderline luddite spew. Instead of
offering a solution, this person just rants.

Google has been a pivotal center of the internet - information has never been
easier to find! Ease of access to information does not, however, alleviate the
need placed upon the reader to sift out fact from fiction.

As a thought experiment, would our luddite-esque author friend prefer that
Google was the arbiter of truth, rather than trends? I certainly would not.

~~~
midef
"information has never been easier to find!"

I think it depends what you're looking for. I realize this is obscure, but I
can't find any reference online to a big Facebook Platform developers'
conference that happened in 2007. It drives me nuts because I was there at
Chelsea Piers with 1,000 people, but it's like it never existed.

~~~
kmstout
Was it this?

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080808121324/http://www.facebo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080808121324/http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9171)

