Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months? They've had to have been utilizing ML to 'improve' searches for some time now, but the quality of the results has decreased suddenly and inexplicably (for me).
It all started going downhill since Google's "Hummingbird" switch to be honest. Interviewing for Google, I actually brought this up with an engineer in the search team during the lunch.
He said they haven't noticed any regressions. I said I figured that would be the case but I can definitely feel the difference as a daily user.
This is indicative of a larger issue - testing is probably as difficult as solving the halting problem i.e. code could be generated from proper tests, yet teams tend to trust their tests completely. I see high profile websites having severe usability issues or being outright broken in ways that would be immediately caught by "interns randomly click here and there" usability tests. But these version got deployed probably because testing did not show any regressions.
I tend to believe that if user complaints about new problems or regressions increase over statistical noise - there is a problem.
I noticed the same. I've wondered for years why it happened and sometimes when I'm frustrated I try to think about it. But I am not entirely sure that the degradation in search results for me happened only in the past 5 years. Maybe, but I'm not sure.
In 2009 Google was amazing for diagnosing Linux issues. I would just copy the error from the console and I'd have links to the issue tracker, a work around and the version in which the bug was fixed. Today I get a link to some github project that has nothing to do with what I'm working on and was closed as being an upstream issue.
I don't have the time, money or energy to build a specific crawler, but a Linux search engine that indexed all the major distros, packages, mailing lists, forums and issue trackers would be amazing.
I had assumed that Google search had gone downhill because it started trying to "personalize" my search results. That wasn't a great explanation though, as I don't use a Google account.
I do a full clear on my web browser (cookies / offline storage / history, everything) and then open YouTube in a private browsing window and it asks me which of my two Gmail accounts I want to log in with. I'd guess it's just a combo of external IP and browser fingerprint, but it's creepy.
I know they do, and I consider this a real problem. I was just saying that personalization isn't a completely satisfactory explanation for the decline in Google search result quality. It is likely to be a factor in that, though.
I love the concept of DDG and have it as my standard but still use Google (via !g) for about 30-50% of my queries. Simple queries work well in DDG (which is basically Bing) but more complicated queries only really work in Google.
Sadly I've been finding the same result. Exact searches on Google are often frustrating, but lately they've been all but impossible on DDG. It seems that all search engines (including those backing DDG) are getting on the ML train and assuming they know what I'm looking for better than I do.
I understand this being default behavior, but there really needs to be a way to disable it.
I found the opposite. I started using DDG when I moved to Brave but after a month, I found I would go to DDG, search page after page and get frustrated and open google and have my result on page one or two.
Personally, my impression is that since at least ~1-4 years, the google searches return less exact matches especially when I search for an exact match of an error message, or multiple exact matches involving the same error message (when I start to become desperate I usually tend to split the error into 2 parts...).
On the other hand the non-exact hits that it returns push me from time to time in the right direction.
Having said this, I don't know of course if A) I'm too old (40) and the mindset of the younger search-people has now changed and/or B) Google just doesn't index tech forums as much as it used to and/or C) there are just fewer forum-posts and/or D) my problems became more complex (don't think so) and/or etc... .
I tried (and still try from time to time) to use DDG and Bing but without success.
Hello fellow 40 year old. I run DDG as my daily, but similarly have a hard time finding exact matches for error messages. I am suspicious, however, that I've learned how to use Google's search controls (", +, etc.) and I'm not sure they work the same on DDG. I also can't find a reference on DDG for how to control advanced searches.
So ... although I feel like we might be having the same issue, I'm not sure I'm using DDG correctly enough to say it's a problem.
Google search worked much better over 10 years ago than it does for me today, i.e. before it abandoned the what-you-search-is-what-you-get model. My once-masterful Google-fu seems to be borderline useless today. I'm not sure what happened over the years, but Google search has morphed into a completely different, less useful product, at least for me.
Any search term not wrapped in quotes can be randomly ignored today. It can inject keywords it thinks you want (but really don't). Google is great for searching modern sites like Stack Overflow, but it seems to have lost interest in servicing power users.
2-4 months? Try at least a year. Google search results are now that creamy scum that floats between an industrial wasteland and the tidal flats it was built upon during the changing of the tides.
Yup, that's when I started to switch to DDG. I remember Google saying that you needed to add '+' +before +words that must be included instead of "putting them in quotes"–how annoying. But even using their new operators, I couldn't get answers like I used to be able to. I already didn't like their data gathering practices by then, so gimping search for me made the transition a breeze.
Interestingly even up to even 9-12 months ago I remember people consistently saying that DDG was so much worse than Google, which I always figured was a result of user error, or a result of not caring about tracking and leveraging the Google profile. I'd been off the Google grid for a while so I couldn't really argue, but I knew that I got significantly better information from DuckDuckGo, having grown accustomed to the level of detail needed. These days I probably only use Google a handful of times a month. The concept that they are purposefully soiling search results to add value to ads and sponsored results sounds about right, honestly. Advertisements used to be much less relevant than the results I'd get if I inputted a string of 5+ words, but anymore I have to be careful not to accidentally click on an ad, as the results tend to be terrible, and I'd rather enter a url into a browser than click on an ad I'm actually interested in. .
Yes, i'm having to go several pages deep and even then not finding anything relevant, I've started to use other search engines and reddit to actually find useful info.
Google poured billions into their search engine for two decades to make it better. Now that have a ridiculous amount of money and power, the search results get.... objectively worse. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: what are Google's motives behind this (clearly intentional) change?
Could something as innocent as training a new neural net or testing a buggy version of the algorithm on subsets of users. But it could also be as sinister as driving traffic to those in bed with Google, silencing opposition, or effectively whitewashing the entire internet...
I was looking forward to seeing someone else share this opinion. So the google behavior is driving some users away, im wondering why others are sticking with it?
I propose that in the course of professional contact we should strive to avoid use of google as a verb.
Yes i know its not slick to say, "Perform a search - using the search engine." instead of, "Google it.";
but it starves a mentality, i think it would disconnect the G-word from the perceived face of the internet, The whole point is a monopoly eventually gets out of hand and starts screwing its users, to its own benefit, due to largesse of the users. If google is to improve itself, We the users have to force it to by ignoring it and going elsewhere, This i think starts by RE-Realizing, as a herd, that there is choice other than the Alaughabet search engine [aka google].
Most definitely. But the folk at Google are very smart, very rich, and already run the most lucrative ad platform in the world. Wouldn't hamstringing their flagship product for the sake of a few extra $B/yr harm them in the long run as more and more users switch to other search engines? They had to have considered that and made the change anyway. What's the endgame? I don't feel it's more ad clicks.
What makes you think they wouldn't? Everything else google seems to do is in the interest of short term profits. Look at all the great products they've shut down simply because they weren't all that profitable.
It's my opinion that a large portion of the websites on the front page of any search (quora and pinboard anyone) are completely bought and paid for.
I think the endgame ends up very close to same everytime this sort of thing happens.
corp gets good people like it, then they get rich and take on investors. when stocks and investors get involved, then there is an expectation of an ever increasing >RATE< of profit. if that rate decrases then stocks are dropped, and if this goes on long enough, the corp is so interested in maximum profits over a shrinking timeslice that it basically takes all and gives nothing in return, that is the point when it is no longer a service, and exodus begins. [myspace]
Maybe you had this problem before but your expectations grew faster than technology? Can you think of something from your search history and fins anything that other search engines found but Google failed?
Their keyboard predictions have gone from "OK" to "Amazing, we live in the future", and over the past couple years to "of course I didn't mean 'aaAAaAAnd', wtf were you thinking".
I frequently suspect they're starting to optimize more for $ than they were before, and ML just gives them more ways to make that number go up another % or so... but it often comes with impossible-to-predict and wildly inhuman edge cases. It's a pretty common trend when companies start focusing on small number increases - each A/B test shows improvement, but the product as a whole worsens and it drives people away in time.
About 2-3 months ago they basically nuked Youtube's search and recommendation. This was associated with some bad press about those features coming up with "harmful content" like unapproved radical politics & conspiracy theories. Now you basically see mostly curated front-page stuff plus some user stuff that had probably never come up in search before (e.g. a fairly common search term will come up with videos that are a decade old and only have 5k views). Maybe changes in Google search are related?
IMO, Youtube changed for the better. It used to focus on controversial and current, now it focus on curated and evergreen content. Exactly the kind of thing people in this thread are missing from Google Search.
Yep, I've noticed a lot more commercial results than before. To find something relevant I often have to dig deep, especially if what I'm looking for is a little bit obscure. I'm glad you mentioned it.
Google Images is a partial example, but this happened a while ago. It appears what they do is use ML to classify what is in the image, and then show images that fit those categories. It is useless now for checking things like, did this logo designer you hired off Upwork/Fiverr/etc just steal someone else's design.
Aspiring science fiction authors, or Neal Stephenson, should write a novel about a world where ML tuned models optimize everything to be just good enough not to churn customers while maximizing margins. (Also applicable to non-profit items like politicians and universities)
