Comment by marginalia_nu
2 years ago
I think the point he's trying to make that the search results page from the mainstream search engines are a minefield of scams that a regular person would have difficulty navigating safely.
If he was looking at relevance, yours would be a solid point, but since most of the emphasis is on harm, a smaller sample works. Like "we found used needles in 3 out of 5 playgrounds" doesn't typically garner requests for p-values and error bars.
I think this is a good illustration of my frustration with this discussion: I don't think search has gotten bad, I think the web has gotten bad. It's weird to even conceptualize it as a big graph of useful hypertext documents. That's just wikipedia. The broader web is this much noisier and dubious thing now.
That's bad for google though! Their model is very much predicated on the web having a lot of signal that they can find within the noise. But if it just ... doesn't actually have much signal, then what?
The web has gotten bad because of what big search engines have encouraged. If they stopped incentivizing publishing complete garbage (by ruthlessly delisting low quality sites regardless of their ad quantity, etc) then maybe we'd see a resurgence of good content.
I don't think so. I think it's the inevitable outcome of giving all of humanity the ability to broadcast without curation.
Or maybe we're saying essentially the same thing, but you think search engines should be doing that curation. But that was never my conception of what search engines are for.
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The web is bad because it is both popular and commercial. Every now and then I fantasize that just finding a sufficiently user-hostile corner would suffice to recreate the early internet experience of an online world nearly exclusively populated by anticommercial geeks.
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But there's still plenty of signal. It isn't as if there are no working YouTube downloaders, or factually correct explanations of how transistors work. It's just that search engines don't know how to (or don't care enough about) disambiguating these good results from the mountains of spam or malware.
I think that both of you are correct. The internet has much more "noise" than in the past (partially due to websites gaming SEO to show up higher in Google's search results). As a result, Google's algorithm returns more "noise" per query now than it used to. It is a less effective filter through the noise.
Imagine Google were like a water filter you install on your kitchen faucet to filter out unwanted chemicals from your drinking water. If as the years progress your municipal tap water starts to contain a higher baseline of unwanted chemicals, and as a result the filter begins to let through more chemicals than it did before, you'd consider your filter pretty cruddy for its use case. At the bare minimum you'd call it outdated. That is what is happening to Google search
On the one hand, I'm not sure the data corroborates that. If this is a web problem and not a search engine problem, then I'd expect every search engine to have the same pattern of scam results.
I'd also argue that finding relevant results among a sea of irrelevant results is the primary function of a search engine. This was as true in 1998 as it is today. In fact, it was Google's "killer feature", unlike Altavista and the likes it showed you far more relevant results.
Relevant is a difficult concept to agree on. In 1998 it was more about X != Y, that is being shown legit pages that just were not the correct topic.
These days the results are apt to be the correct topic, but instead optimized for some other metric than what the user wants. For example downloading malware or showing as many crypto ads as possible.
I don't expect every search engine to have the same scam results. Scammers target individual search engines with particular methodologies. Google does a lot of work to prevent crap on their engines, the issue is the scammers in total do far more.
If the web is being polluted by a nefarious search engine provider that is excluding the polluted pages from their algorithm, you wouldn't see the same pattern across search engines
Not saying or even suggesting that's happening, but the logic isn't airtight
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> I think the point he's trying to make that the search results page from the mainstream search engines are a minefield of scams that a regular person would have difficulty navigating safely.
Yes, and he makes the point well. It also means if you are part of the 0.49% of people who use Firefox on Android, he isn't talking about your experience. I find Firefox mobile remaining at 0.49% utterly inexplicable, which I guess just goes to show how out of touch with the mainstream I (and I assume most other people here) are.
It's not just ad blockers. My first attempt at a tyre width query got relevant results, mostly because "tyre grip" looked so bad as a search term so I used "traction" instead. In the mean time, friends of my age (60's) can't get an internet search for public toilets to return results they can understand. When I try to help them, their eyes glaze over in a short while and they wave me away in frustration. These mind games with google hold no interest for them.
I am regularly bitten with one thing he mentions: finding old results is hard, and getting harder. It makes it really hard to find historical trends ("am I wrong about what it was like back then?") really difficult.
I agree we can say "this is a minefield of scams" without doing a comparison.
There still is a question about when it got bad--I think Dan mentions 2016 as a point of comparison, and there were plenty of scams back then, so you might wonder whether the days when a query wouldn't return many scams.
If you go back far enough, then there wasn't the same kind of SEO, and Internet scams were much smaller/less organized, but that's a long time ago.
I think the automation tools for scams are what the major change is. In the distant past it was humans doing this, now I'm guessing there are a few larger businesses and likely nation states that have a point and click interface that removes 99% of the past work.