
Our latest quality improvements for Search - seano314
https://blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-improvements-search/
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Coding_Cat
I fear this will be used more as a form of abuse than as a proper feedback,
looking at youtube. The link also seems to be designed to be skipped over. You
could have told me it has been there for a year and I would have believed it.

Even with Google's volume you have to take the 0.25% of claimed occurrences,
then take the percentage of people who will be offended, then take the small
percentage of people who will notice/know they can report it, then take the
small percentage of people who actually bother.

And even if there won't be an organized effort to game the system it serves to
the lowest common denominator of 'not offensive'. If I type "How to know if
I'm t" and it autofills 'ransgender' that is fine by me, but some people will
consider that offensive (don't ask me why) and report it. Or take for example
unwanted pregancy, you can bet that if one searches for unwanted pregnancy and
Google puts up a neutral snippet from Planned Parenthood people will report
it.

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ProAm
Im not a fan of most of their search improvements. It seems like Google these
days is good at telling me what I already know but have forgotten vs
researching and discovering about information I don't know anything about.

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degenerate
Their blog posts about search are kind of the same. Reading anything google
tells us about their search algorithm feels like I'm churning through
countless iterations of PR spin, rather than actually learning anything new
(contrary to, for example, how backblaze blog posts are packed with info).

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nikanj
Google has started to ignore an amazing number of search terms. For example, I
googled "Olympus EPL3 launch button broken", and the first result was "League
of Legends launch button not working". To add insult to injury, Google tells
you which of your keywords it's ignoring for each particular result.

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Semaphor
First they removed the ability to always require a certain with just one
character (+), then they started making search worse and worse requiring you
to enclose several words with quotes.

It's one of the reasons I switched to ddg.

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nullxone
"There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of
searches we see every day are new"

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FrozenVoid
Search algorithms can't fight a semantic-level threat, they are just blind
term-to-content conversion, like e.g. regex doesn't care if it finds something
bad. Google can't use more expensive algorithms that actually can classify and
understand the content, so their solution to this is human censors/curators.
They get shamed regularly, and with recent youtube crisis(advertisers started
to pull out) they probably started to take this issue seriously.
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-
de...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-
truth-internet-search-facebook)

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
I have an issue in their recommendation to use the Southern Poverty Law Center
as a source to find out extremists. The SPLC is not a neutral source. For
example, it has listed Aayan Hirsi Ali and Masjid Nawaz as anti-Islam
extremists. [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/magazine/can-a-
former-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/magazine/can-a-former-
islamist-make-it-cool-to-be-moderate.html?_r=0&referer=)

The SPLC is free to list whomever they want, but using their list to rank
sites in Google search is very problematic.

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cholantesh
Just read Maajid's section in SPLC's Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists[0].
This is ridiculous; tweeting out a picture of Muhammad is 'offensive' to many
Muslims and is therefore 'extremism'? They must be totally unaware of the rich
history of Persian and Ottoman devotional art which depicts Muhammad.

[0] - [https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual-
field-...](https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual-field-guide-
anti-muslim-extremists#nawaz)

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relics443
I fear that this will become a tool for SJW and whatever their right leaning
counterparts are called.

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Animats
Two days ago, Breitbart News started appearing at the top of news search
results. That's not a sign of improvement.

