Comment by rahidz

9 months ago

It feels like sometime in the past decade, Google search results went from "Here's what most people click on" to "Here's the most trusted sources, handpicked by Google".

WebMD, Wikipedia, CDC, etc. for health results, the NYT, CNN, BBC, etc. for news, major magazines/newspapers for reviews. Which makes sense from a corporate perspective, you don't want your users searching for something controversial and stumbling upon something that doesn't line up with the mainstream POV. Maybe "Bob's 10 best mattresses" is a thorough and exhaustive article that easily beats the rest, but what if Bob is antivax, or thinks Bush did 9/11? It's safer to just ignore small blogs like Bob's and not risk any controversy.

And here's the side effect. Some of these organizations realized "Wait, we rank really high on Google for anything! So let's pump out shitty listicles about the top 10 air purifiers, even though we're a tech company, and fill them up with expensive affiliate links. We're 'trusted', after all."

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rahidz

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nostromo  9 months ago

Yes, exactly -- Google is the new Yahoo.

It's no longer about training a great algorithm to find great results -- but hand-selecting the most anodyne, least interesting results for everything using a small army of human and AI reviewers.

Not to mention how it ignores half of your query terms for no appreciable reason.

The ultimate irony now is that Google's ads are usually more relevant than their organic search results -- because they actually care about the ad experience.

  • rockskon  9 months ago

    What? Malware ads masquerading as legitimate websites are common and Google hasn't visibly done much to combat them.

katuskoti  9 months ago

Yep, Google outsources search ratings to humans working for a third-party called Leapforce - see "The secret lives of Google raters"[1].

There are specific guidelines for rating results, especially for political and medical queries. This is probably a big part of the massive decline in search quality - authority is valued more over accuracy to the specific query.

1. https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...

nicbou  9 months ago

Google indeed ranks brands much higher. It feels like all of my results are from generic brands, even if all of their content is copywritten drivel. This is especially obvious when you search for travel advice, and every answer is a generic blog post on a travel service website.

jstarfish  9 months ago

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