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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16109 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Google Search Keeps Getting Worse

I am hardly the first person to complain about Google search results circa Fall 2022, and I'm not the first person to recall how search used to feel like magic (1). It's become a commonplace (if a bit overstated) that for Google search to have any value at all, you need to point it at reddit.

Here's a case study: I've recently begun performing with a band so I went to look for ideas about how to improve my stage presence. Ten years ago, I would have just typed two or three words, perhaps just "guitarist live" or "watch guitarist live" and as I recall it, Google was reliably excellent at providing results that matched my intention, by either sorcery or science. Nowadays, perhaps superstitiously, I use complete sentences, so I typed "guitarists that are fun to watch live." The results were very bad. In order:

A group of video recommendations, all four suggestions useless:

  1. Rock Guitarist Live Streams For The 97th Time ! - With Guitar Solos, Chat, Games and Fun

  2. Three Chord Dave Live 50 Guitars music and good times

  3. Three Chord Dave Live 52 Guitars music and good times

  4. Three Chord Dave Live 51 Guitars music and good times

Next, a few links to articles:

  1. 13 Scorching Guitarists on Tour Today - Ticketmaster Blog

  2. The best live streams and virtual concerts to watch while social distancing (take note of this one, from April 23, 2020: we'll come back to it later)

  3. and 8. The next results were the "People also search for" and "People also ask" suggestions, none of which were helpful.

  4. A link to an Insider article called "Musicians you need to see live in concert". That sounded promising, except none of the musicians were guitarists (none of the headline musicians advertised on the search results - once you drilled in, Lenny Kravitz and the Red Hot Chili Peppers probably qualify).

  5. A youtube video, "Top 10 Guitarists of All Time (REDUX)". Closer, but not really what I'm looking for.

More useless results followed, including three of the next five focused on streaming ("A Guitarists Guide to Live Streaming").

Finally, coming to the culture war angle, I want to ask why this might be. Why are Google search's results so bad, compared to the five or ten years ago, or even farther back, when they had inferior technology? Clearly, some of the problem is spam, as many people argue. But that doesn't really decribe what I saw. Is it because they are prioritizing social justice in results? I know this flatters the Motte, but it also explains a handful of the noise in my search above, on a fairly anodyne topic. I got three results about streaming performances: sure, maybe "live" is often linked for "livestream" (Plato's pharmakon strikes again, three cheers for auto-antonyms!), but what explains the second non-video recommendation, number 6 above, "The best live streams and virtual concerts to watch while social distancing"? In my mind, I'm trying to find tips about how to perform live on stage for people in sweaty clubs, gleefully exchanging airborne microbes, and Google's trying to shove an article from April 2020 down my throat. I couldn't do better if I tried to parody this.

If you think my expectations are crazy, I get it, except until recently (geologically speaking), Google would have delivered EXCELLENT results on this topic.

Some other possible explanations:

  • SEO has gotten better than search - this could explain some of what I saw.

  • The internet is crowded now, there's more surface to search! That doesn't seem likely - certainly not substantially more so than five or ten years ago.

  • Maybe google never was magic! I have a bad memory or it just seemed incredible because it was novel.

  • Goodheart's law / overfitting, definitely part of the story: optimizing for revenue reduces engagement and relevance. But then again, so does optimizing for justice! It's hard not to suspect how the often comical and heavy handed attempts at "alignment" have marred ChatGPT.

  • Google engineers are bad. Non-starter, based on the ones I know. Google has lost a lot of excellent people over the years (like Steve Yegge, etc.) but this doesn't add up.

  • Google hires good people, but they don't funnel their best talent into search, because they continue to have an effective monopoly, even in the age of Bing, Duckduckgo, and Kagi.

  • ???

Which is it?

1 https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

I recently shared this video with a friend: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AtMdM4j5N20

I know a guy who is an engineer who works on Google search - I asked him why it’s so bad and he said he disagreed and said it was very good. Nothing I brought up could persuade him.

There’s the reason- GOOGLE THINKS THE SEARCH IS GOOD AND GETTING BETTER

This is sort of the Dead Internet Theory. When I first stumbled on that theory, it was basically about how Google has gotten worse, and if you dig into the results (go past 20 pages), there's nothing. And results repeat themselves.

Then the 'dead internet theory' seemed to magically evolve into 'nobody uses the internet and all the content is from AI'.

Any opinion on the evolution of the Youtube recommender system?

The biggest problem with Google search - and indeed almost all search engines, even intrasite searches - relative to how little it's complained about is by far the insistence on showing results even when very little actually matched the query. If my query gives me little to no results, then please just fucking tell me that and I'll adjust my query. Stop wasting my time showing me something that matched only 2 out of my 3 keywords. I put that third term there for a reason. It's as if the search engine assumes I'm in the habit of searching things like 2022 senate election results parfait, where it can safely disregard one of my terms because I'm just stupid or something. My query was written how it was written for a reason, damnit.

Google is actually vastly ahead of most other search engines in this regard, since it actually lets you enclose a term in quotation marks* to ensure it shows up in the results. This is still annoying, however, because sometimes I want the search engine to permit some amount of fuzziness in a term (e.g., include synonyms).

* And yes, before the naysayers appear, this does work - the only reason you think it doesn't is because your quoted term appears somewhere not visible on the page, like a dropdown menu, or has been removed from the page since it was cached.

I listened to that Freakinomics episode when it came out, so I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but IIRC there’s a woman from Google there that explains how they A/B tested their search over a long period. She said that one group ended up searching more than the other - and then concluded that that means they were more satisfied with Google search.

Now, maybe I’m not as smart as the people over at Google, but I concluded the exact opposite- the people who searched more could just as well be re-searching the same thing, since their first queries didn’t work. It’s not like the alternative is to use Bing, right?

I don’t know which answer is right, but I do think that having people work on a product like this, making absolute conclusions from data that can easily go either way and then making decisions based on that, can’t be good.

I listened to that Freakinomics episode when it came out, so I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but IIRC there’s a woman from Google there that explains how they A/B tested their search over a long period. She said that one group ended up searching more than the other - and then concluded that that means they were more satisfied with Google search.

Google is not that unsophisticated in their metrics for search; this is likely an oversimplification for journalistic purposes.

It’s not like the alternative is to use Bing, right?

It is for me!

It's quite likely that they choose 'people search more' because Google earns revenue from advertising. The more you search, the more money they make.

Is this really how you search? Not "how to improve stage presence for guitarist" or "guitarists with best stage presence"? Because I just typed those into google and all the results are perfectly relevant.

Google search has gotten worse, no doubt. SEO has turned into algorithms building entire networks of blogs with GPT-like content on every topic. Sometimes I get two paragraphs into a blog before I realize the content was algo-generated. Much like the latest GPTs, often it has the info I was looking for. I think censorship and subtle ways of steering people away from undesirable opinions also plays a role depending on what you're looking for.

Google used to have a 'discussions' search option that would only give you results from reddit, forums, and the like. It was great for getting different views and back-and-forth problem solving. Its been years and I'm still upset they removed it.

DDG has been my default search for a while and most of the time I end up having to go back to google to find what I want. Google's getting worse but is still the best out there.

DDG has been my default search for a while and most of the time I end up having to go back to google to find what I want. Google's getting worse but is still the best out there.

Yeah, somewhere along the way DDG stopped recognizing quotes, and doesn't make any attempt to ensure quoted words are in the results. At least google is only a !g away...

The internet is crowded now, there's more surface to search! That doesn't seem likely - certainly not substantially more so than five or ten years ago.

It is a lot more crowded now, an order of magnitude more than a decade ago. That's not the issue though.

The issue is that there's a lower proportion of organic content now; commercial, non-spam properties have come to dominate content production. And, more than that, it's what users want, both in reality and in the signals Google uses to determine the optimal result ordering.

Nowadays I mostly use Google as a frontend to search particular domains. E.g. "site:reddit.com best live guitarists"

Pretty much any list of things is going to be SEO spam. It sounds like your results were mostly spam, possibly even all spam.

I swear Google is deliberately hiding a large portion of real results.

Often when I search exact phrases from lyrics or samples, I'll get nothing. Zero results for "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees". Zero! I don't believe it. Google is telling me that no one on its history of the entire indexed internet has included those phrases together. I refuse to believe it. Those aren't Chomsky sentences that have never been spoken before. Where are the travel blogs? Where are the Hawaiian tourism ads? Where are the yelp reviews? Where are the misheard lyrics? (turns out it was "I love the islands" and the sample was from a Janet Jackson interlude)

But Google says no. 0 results. Zilch. It just makes me wonder what else it's not showing.

Yes, they are delisting giant parts of the Internet. I have done searches on old usernames that I used on webforums in the 00's and I only get a few dozen results even though I made thousands of posts with those handles, and some forums I posted on aren't listed at all. I've gone back to some forums to check directly that my posts are still there, and they are.

Ironically, this is good for my own privacy, but it proves that Google search has gone completely to shit and is simply refusing to index much of the web. I've written at length about my problems with Google search elsewhere but I'm too busy to hunt those writings down now.

I also have major problems with how Youtube ruined their search algorithm in order to "promote authoritative sources" about Covid. You can no longer find raw video of anything, such as protests police shootings or other public events. You can only find edited, slanted news reports about them from government and corporate channels. And of course when you search for non-political topics all you get are shitty 11-minute videos by full-time monetized professional Youtubers instead of from regular people. They've defeated the whole purpose of Youtube and largely turned it into another form of TV.

Are you sure the forums aren't excluding Google with robots.txt?

Google something that does have results (usually they says x million), and go like 20 pages in. There's nothing. Hell, results repeat over and over throughout those pages.

And another experience I had the other day, I googled something and it told me there were like 5 pages of results. Clicked to the last page and suddenly it millions of results and pages after pages.

Anyways, I think there are multiple reasons this is happening. First, Google is constantly trying to keep spammy results out of the search (they've gotten pretty bad lately, imo). It is relatively easy to get a website to the top of the results for most searches. Google is constantly adjusting their algorithm to deal with shit like that, but people learn pretty quick how to overcome that.

The side effect of this is that you're only ever going to get results from large websites that have a dedicated team who are working to get their results on Google, and spammy websites that are literally solely dedicated to getting a high rank. Basically 99% of the internet from even a year ago will be penalized in the results, because they aren't following whatever 'best practices' Google has decided on today. You won't find the internet of the 90s or 00s on Google anymore.

Another thing is that Google wants to control what you see. The concern over 'misinformation' means that most websites are going to be penalized, while the mainstream media and some social media sites get prioritized.

I also personally believe that Google is beginning to create a walled garden. 95% of people are searching for the same 5% of content. From a business standpoint, Google can prune 95% of their results and most people won't be impacted (or at least most searches won't be impacted). This would save them a lot of money, and make them profitable as all hell. This is even more true for YouTube, which has an even WORSE search than Google. I'm simply amazed at how many repeated videos I see when I search something, how many videos completely unrelated to my search, unrelated to my search terms, and they are all from 'big' accounts. I pop on over to Google and search for YouTube videos, and suddenly there's an unimaginable amount of content that I am actually looking for. And I can only imagine that if this were the old Google search, that I'd get an even better experience.

Honestly, I prefer Yandex these days. DDG, Bing, Google, they are useless.

Google something that does have results (usually they says x million), and go like 20 pages in. There's nothing. Hell, results repeat over and over throughout those pages.

Yeah, there's a reason the search tier containing that stuff used to be called (and may still be) "landfill".

Clicked to the last page and suddenly it millions of results and pages after pages.

Same idea; if there are good results in the higher search tiers, it doesn't search the lower ones. Presumably clicking to the last page signals you didn't like what was found higher up, so it searches deeper.

I think a better way to tell for sure would be to work backwards: find a page that you think is suitably rare and not well-travelled but probably still got indexed, pick two random phrases from it, search for them together and check if Google finds the page.

I did this, but with reddit - just typed in random post IDs (sequential, every ID is/was a post), picked posts that have long text, and googled substrings - e.g. from here googled ""being in a business together" "a professional environment together" or "me after the meeting with extremely accusatory", and often no results. Google search is a big complex distributed system, maybe it misses some posts, maybe having it be perfect search for long substrings for all of internet history would be too much effort for not enough benefit to users, maybe it's a bug, idk. Camas/pushshift did better, it caught many but not all posts/comments.

"me after the meeting with extremely accusatory"

Googling that now gives me this page, because of your comment. DDG still has zero results.

I'll get nothing. Zero results for "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees". Zero! I don't believe it.

There's one result now -- this page :-)

Bing also comes up blank.

DuckDuckGo also turns up zero results. Bing turns up a couple of images, but that doesn't mean that they are actually responsive. I am guessing that the "problem" is with your query, not with Google.

Zero results for "I love the island"

I have full page of results.

"I love the palm trees"

The same.

Maybe you search limiting to specific language?

It's the combination of "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees" that returns 0 results. Now, maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe those two phrases have truly never appeared on a single page, but it seems very unlikely. Of all the personal blogs, facebook posts, travel diaries, fanfiction, forums, auto-generated SEO text, etc. etc., I would expect it to have happened once. There are a lot of people in the world posting a lot of text on the internet.

I think you're underestimating how many unique possible combinations of words there are.

It's plausible that was said before, because 'island' and 'palm trees' are very related. As seen above, google can miss existing text. Generally agree though

I think he means both of them together as a query

Google is telling me that no one on its history of the entire indexed internet has included those phrases together.

That's probably because no one on the history of the entire indexed internet has included those phrases together.

Notice that everything found when you correctly spell it "islands" is the song. There's nothing else containing the two phrases whatsoever with the correct spelling; why should there be anything with the incorrect spelling?

why should there be anything with the incorrect spelling?

Because there are tropical islands full of palm trees that are very nice, and people love them. "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees" are basic, common sentences that you would expect to see in a review or travel blog about such an island (eg.), and it seems extremely unlikely to me that they have never appeared on the same page together on the internet.

I think there should be a lot more results with the correct spelling too, for the same reason.

Many years ago, when I listened to and explored music more, my standard method of identifying a song was to memorize two or three short phrases exactly like that, and then plug them into Google once I got to a computer. It almost always worked, and was almost always unique.

I would expect reviews and travel blogs to use fancy sentences, not basic ones.

You used to be able to use imperfect queries to get what you wanted.

Not when using double quotes to confine the search to an exact phrase.

You'd still expect it to provide the "Did you mean" prompt if there are search results that it would catch but for some small difference in spelling.

Sure but that's an add-on service to search itself. I'd prefer no results to deciding that close enough from an explicit search is fine. Just to double check I ran the exact phrase search for both phrases on marginalia which runs on a variant of the original PageRank algo albeit on a smaller index and both (1, 2) came back empty with a suggestion to rephrase.

The 'problem' is that anyone can still publish a webpage containing any content they want. Google will dutifully index the site as we would want it to.

If a given site becomes extremely popular due to it's content, more people will be Googling it. Which will inspire others to publish webpages that might show up in Google searches for that popular site.

And since anyone can publish whatever content they want, they can publish sites that are specifically designed to show up in search results for that site, with 'content' that is actually geared towards getting Google to index the site alongside the popular stuff. Used to be that a site would straight-up copy the popular site's content. Now it just has to match it's profile in the search index, which usually means including the right terms or whatever.

Sure, Google could take some efforts to intentionally punish sites that it seems are using tactics to game their search algo, but how do they actually determine good faith actors just publishing content that people want to see and 'bad faith' actors publishing content solely designed to bump it up the rankings? How does that line get drawn?

And how do you scale your solution? And How do you respond to those complaining of unfair enforcement? Is google going to start walling off parts of the internet from it's own search engine?

I don't think Google is interested in building it's own enforcement wing (which would then itself be gamed) for this purpose.

And being clear, I think Google is still pretty good at finding certain things. Usually esoteric scientific research or specific historical information which is often uses complex, not-often-searched terms.

But as you note, divining the user's 'intent' doesn't seem to be it's forte. You have to explain what you're seeking slowly and in simple language and possibly rephrase yourself a few times before it "gets it." Its like having an old friend who is slowly giving in to dementia as they age, and is still able to recall in great detail information about topics on which they were once experts, but goes off on weird tangents when you ask them about basic facts about the world or try to get them to remember some particular event from their past.

I think the SEO explanation is the most relevant, in addition to google's incentives to fix it being rather weak. They have monopoly status and "you are the product, not the customer". That said, I'm not sure there's any easy ways for google to fix this issue. Even if it were easy from a technical point-of-view (which isn't obvious, I'd expect more competition if this were the case), anyone who wants to change the way they prioritize search results has to deal with a lot of stakeholders and special interests.

A little off topic but I find searching reddit through google (add "site:reddit.com" to your google query) will give me the best results. Reddit has a terrible search feature but its content is still relatively low-spam.

I not so recently went into nostalgia dive for youtube and while a lot of videos were deleted there was one that I couldn't find. At first I just glossed over it, but later it kept bugging me inside. I tried to find it again, but after an hour of searching I got nothing. I got a little vexed and tried again some other time, spending entire evening trying to prove myself that I'm not going senile and the video exists, right? Right?

Yeah, it was useless. Yesterday I said enough is enough and submitted the question to /r/namethatsong and I got the answer.

This is the music video it was posted on youtube 9 years ago and has more than 4million views, yet invisible to the search queries of mine. You can try to search for it yourself by describing thhe music video, but as soon as you put "murder" or "assassination" the search shits itself completely.

My current theory is that google search heavily prioritize recency and popularity above everything else. Which is too bad if you're looking for everything else.

The biggest problem with searching YouTube is that it's not incentivized to show you the results most relevant to your query; rather, it's incentivized to show you the most popular content that happens to have the flimsiest of relevance to your query.

youtube is my bigger complaint. I want the rawest uncut version of events, and often I want the original uploader so they get the credit. If you're at the bleeding edge as they are being uploaded you can get them but after 24 hours you are wading through nothing but local news stations and response videos.

Had a similar experience trying to find a clip of a very specific portion of a particular video game. I KNEW the clip existed because I had watched it all those years ago. I could get pretty specific describing the game itself, the content of the clip, the sort of surrounding logic of why this clip was unique and interesting, and zilch. Plenty of results for reviews of the game, other gameplay videos, or trailers for the game, though.

At least part of it was probably because the clip was like 5 second long, and most of the content showing up in the search was 10+ minutes long. I have to assume that it's easier to monetize longer content. Nobody would want to watch a 30 second ad before a five second clip, vs. several 30 second ads in a ten minute video.

I did eventually locate the clip I wanted but it was a different video with meme text overlaid for some reason.

Can you link to the video game clip?

Luckily it's in my history because trying to find it again would have been maddening.

Don't know if it's relevant to anything.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=W-ZSFw9VqF4?feature=share

Those are excellent search tips, but part of my frustration is that my terrible initial queries were good enough not that long ago - to the point that it often seemed like Google was reading my mind or spying on me (and of course, they actually do spy on us, in a low-key but non-metaphorical way).

SEO has gotten better than search - this could explain some of what I saw.

More to the point, I'd say that at some point the ability of SEO providers to game the algorithm just outpaced Google's ability to respond so much that they threw their hands up in the air and rely on their practical monopoly status and the presumption the potential competitors would just be affected by the same SEO trickmastery as themselves.

I've got colleagues who provide SEO services and yeah, basically they seemingly can create plans to deal with Google's algo changes before they even roll out. Google simply cannot respond quickly because changing their algo on their end is a really big deal whilst changing the SEO optimization of client webpages is trivial, so it's like an Elephant trying to swat mosquitos. And Google has enough tasty blood that it can afford to let a few thousand mosquitos drink and not notice the loss.

And I think Google creating a new form of valuable 'real estate' (positioning on Google Search results) has allowed SEO firms to make a ton of money in a very self-sustaining way. If your company doesn't use SEO services, you'll lose out on business to those that are using them, and vice versa.

Any change Google makes to try to beat current SEO methods will simply create new ones, and the SEO firms will be much quicker to respond with new methods, which propagate immediately.

I strongly suspect Google COULD come up with a solution that would outflank the SEO companies for a while, but there's just no pressure to do so and it would probably be costly.

Remember, for Google you are the product not the customer. Give the searcher what he wants is probably an OK but not perfect proxy for maximize ad revenue, and as Google's search algorithm has improved (from the viewpoint of profit maximization) it has moved away from the former.

guitarists that are fun to watch live." The results were very bad.

I don't understand what you expected. Presumably, Google would have translated your request to something like "guitarist fun watch live" and then gave you recommendations. What were you expecting to get?

I was hoping the search would yield videos of guitarists that do more than look at their instruments, and that audiences find engaging.

That expectation was absolutely reasonable not long ago - five years ago? A decade? Hard to recall. Judging from the response here, people don't believe it, but it's true that, even with shitty searches like that, Google could often approximate my intentions.

Presumably, Google would have translated your request to something like "guitarist fun watch live" and then gave you recommendations.

This makes me wonder if things will go full circle with ML and make search queries that are complete sentences good practice again. I remember a decade or two ago, people saw phrasing good queries as "Google-fu", a useful learnable skill. It's a bit wild that we've gotten to the point where the machine is expected to second guess if you're asking about still-living guitar players (RIP Jimi Hendrix) or live performances.

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