Comment by capableweb
4 years ago
I agree with your general point that the search quality has gone down, quotes doesn't even always work anymore to get exact results.
Looking into your suggested example: That turned out to be interesting and unexpected.
So, the exact string you put here was "David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born", which is what you get when you copy the text from the website. It's correct that it doesn't work on Google searching for verbatim.
The actual DOM of the snippet looks like this:
“David, we have been <br>expecting you - this is what you have
been searching for - this place, <br>David, is where dreams are born.”
If you take any snippet of text that doesn't do a line-break, it seems exact searches do work, like "expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place" or "deep and melodious when it spoke".
If you do take a snippet that does a line-break, then it cannot find anything, like "David, we have been expecting you" or "this place, David, is where "
It seems that Google as unlearned how to treat different type of whitespaces, especially when the author/software has introduced manual line-breaks via the <br/> HTML tag.
I'm sure they have at one point introduced some "quality filter" that gives higher score based on how well the markup is made by the websites, for one reason or another, and eventually it got so "improved" or established that even if it's the only relevant hit for a human, the computer simply ignores the result for low scoring, since the markup is not 100% correct.
For me, 49 minutes after parent comment was posted, searching Google for the quoted phrase "expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place" yields exactly two results: the linked story, and _this HN page_.
To a company as comfortable as Google, the fact that users want to find relevant information, as opposed to watch ads all days or buy products, is an inconvenience.
There is incentive to keep users on-site as long as possible; "our engagement metrics are rising".
There is incentive to shovel users, kicking and screaming, to product pages or advertisements.
Google, Youtube, Amazon and other giants have little incentive to improve search beyond "good enough that our users feel like we're trying to answer their query."
I have a feeling that perfect search is the holy grail that no business is interested in finding. How can it be monetized otherwise?
Maybe 'peak good enough' is where we are at and the sooner a critical mass of people realise that google don't have a monoploy on this the better?
What's depressing is that this problem keeps getting worse and worse! It used to be a problem you'd encounter very occasionally, but I now experience this crap every few days, sometimes even for things that seem very obvious.
I see a silver lining: When Google no longer has economic incentive to deliver quality search results, new search engines can finally take a market share. For a year I've been using DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and they're both great, but sometimes there's something they just don't give me, and I've felt the need to Google it. Now that Google's results are deteriorating, I find myself doing that less. I've been able to quit Gmail, but YouTube and Search have been hard.
"Searching" has for almost two decades been synonymous with "Going to Google and feeling lucky." -- the fact that searching requires effort (and possibly more than one search engine) feels frustrating and refreshing at the same time.
I've tried to move away from Google several times over the last decade but always found myself coming back because Google has always provided me with better results and I would often struggle to find what I needed on other search engines. These days I find myself in the opposite position to the point where I'm using other search engines as default depending on what I'm looking for.
Image searches on Google are just terrible now I normally use Bing by default. Anything news / politics related tends to be heavily censored / curated by Google so I normally use DuckDuckGo for that. Really the only thing I still prefer Google for is code related searches which to be fair probably makes up 90% of my searches. As soon as I feel I can get comparable results on another search engine I'm done with Google.
I've also recently been using ProtonMail as a Gmail alternative and I've been really impressed. It's also nice knowing that should Google's AI ever randomly lock me out of my Google account I can still access my emails.
At some point in the last 3 or more years, Google has been actively optimizing for profit over search quality. Google already has 98%+ of search engagement, maybe they think they can improve quality when competition appears?
Any serious appearing competitor could also be squashed by legal fuckery before getting a chance to earn enough to afford defending themselves in court. Throw in an out of court acquisition as part of settlement and Google can be confident about managing threats.
Can someone confirm if it's also broken then for bits of text that are wrapped in inline elements? I don't have a suitable example to try to search for off hand, but for example:
Perhaps "don't attribute to cleverness something that can be explained by incompetence" applies here.