Mahmoud Al-Qudsi at NeoSmart notes that Google search is kind of starting to suck. “As most people are aware, Google search results are constantly changing and evolving. In the past couple of years, there has been a conscious and very deliberate shift – and not just by Google – to go from showing you what you want to see to showing you what they want you to see…. in the past week or so, I’ve personally picked up on a rather annoying and dramatic uptick in incidences of Google’s penchant for – much like a three year old – understanding perfectly-well what it is that you want and pointedly doing anything but that.”
Personally I think Google has stopped caring that much about Web search; that’s the only reason I can imagine that the YouTube search function has been so horrible for years and years. (Facebook and YouTube are at the top of the video game – a media type that is supposed to explode in popularity in the next few years – and search on both properties stinks. Yay.)
As Mr. Al-Qudsi notes, Google has started removing words from search queries and putting “Missing: Search Term” under individual results. This is annoying. You can fix it by clicking on Search Tools under the search box, and then click on the All results option. You’ll have the option to choose All Results or Verbatim. Choosing Verbatim will, as far as I can test, eliminate the missing-word search results. If you’d rather hack the URL, I tested adding &tbs=li:1 and that seemed to invoke verbatim search results as well.
Google has branched out from its beginnings in search to dozens and dozens of enterprises – robots, AI, health, etc. And let’s face it: self-driving cars are a lot sexier and get a lot more media attention than a search engine for the content of the Web. And what’s the big deal about a search engine for the Web, anyway? It’s only essential for finding the content of the open Web, as more and more attempts at “walled gardens” like Facebook keep coming forward. It’s only critical for discovery of content by those publishers who refuse to give in to those walled gardens.
That’s all.
No big.
Categories: Rants
RSS - Posts
I, too, think Google has stopped caring about providing the best possible web search results and find a lack of focus and consistency (on so many levels) increasingly frustrating. A friend and I were discussing the state of google SERPs yesterday afternoon and wondering if it’s nearly prime time for DuckDuckGo or Bing or a whole new player to step in and ramp it up and take over the general web search market share by concentrating on search.
Problem with Google (And Microsoft) is due to so many hands changing there is really nobody in charge. It’s all a bunch of CEO’s that say *Yes* or *No* with out understanding the actual issue. Pretty much group think runs them. I feel like in 2009 Google ran a bunch of independent workers out saying “You and you are out!” “These are in!” Microsoft is actually ran by Nokia now after a major buy out and transfer.
The two dislikes must be Bing and Google CEOs.
Google search started to suck a long time ago. They don’t care about search, and haven’t since the mid 0’s I reckon. If you think it thru, if they are good at search, you get what you want, and leave. No money for big G. if you don’t find what you want, you’re more likely to look at ads, and that makes their money. So it’s a basic paradox for them. Secondly, the emphasis has moved away from the traditional site/page concept and more towards social media. Google has never understood social media because it listens to its engineers, not end users. It can’t create the walled garden that Facebook can, and the only reason that G isn’t already crashing and burning is because Facebook is even worse at search than Google.
I love the author’s sarcasm that getting poor search results for the un-walled internet is no biggie. I’ve written about this same issue, Google intentionally degrading web search & more in my piece entitled. “HOW TO SEARCH THE INTERNET PLUS GOOGLE’S EVIL POLITICS AND CONTROL OF THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE – A VERY BRIEF INTRODUCTION.” It’s a blog post at my website: http://www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org Here is a direct link to this piece:
http://tinyurl.com/Searching-Internet-Google-Evil
That’s what happens when a capitalist marketing company is in control of things. It’s all about making more money instead of providing actual, useful information. Pardon my French, but fuck Google.
I think it’s getting worse and worse. It has been since 2011. In 2011 everyone cared about the internet. All of the best forum posts, information, and overall content entered the scene. And then something happened and everyone flocked to social sites almost exclusively. So now, the only time search is useful is if you want information on random facts, or if you’re looking for an emotionally charged article that’s relevant to 2015-16.
If you try to search anything that’s not a hot topic or random information, you get results that only resemble the words in your search. Like the most recent example I have is when I tried to search “concussion hurts to think”. I got results where the cached messages were along the lines of “The type of brain injury called a CONCUSSION has many symptoms. ….. And to top things off my head HURTS bad, I can’t sleep, my vision is messed up and the kid who did it was only ….. I THINK my headache will go away”
It has nothing to do with the idea behind what I searched. It only looks for words. Which is frustratingly stupid. I used to like search cause you could use phrases to find what you want. Now the only way to do a phrase is to use quotes and that’s just as useless cause no one writes “concussion hurts to think” and “It hurts to think because of my concussion” is way too specific to get a variety of results.
What I want to know is if that is a normal reaction to concussions, which I think is pretty obvious. And it was one of the highly typed in searches so it’s something that SHOULD come up with results, but Google doesn’t care. And Bing is like Google’s lesser mimic, so it’s results tend to be depressingly similar. Clearly the general focus is on different things, and the people who want to use google for useful information because they don’t have money to talk to doctors, or any knowledgeable people in their lives (who seem to be in the minority, cause as far as I know I’m the only person with this particular complaint) are s-o-l.
I say the best solution would be for search engines to have some sort of actual feedback mechanism. Like an upvote/downvote button to say whether a given result is actually relevant.
Google sort of did this 10+ years ago with SearchWiki (that feature was discontinued in 2010.) https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html
We need TWO separate internet systems. One for smartphones that is commercial so you can do your f-k book and social media crap or play casual games.etc. The other would be for research/non commercial sites that don’t make money off of selling you stuff and it would also be where you do your online bank account as it would have extra security and emergency personal could get on and YOU wouldn’t have to be throttled playing your P2P server game.
It would allow the emergence of home websites again as people would not feel bogged down.
Step back in time to 2004 and the home webapage was the dominant thing and that’s because more and mroe people were buying home computers. Smartphones are not really computers you cannot create content and the small screen estate makes it hard to communicate well so you can only do a few lines at a time. Sites like this are too much for people on smartphones it wouldn’t look right.
The ONLY thing keeping home computing alive as it is is custom built PC’s and modding. PC’s are know seen as expensive game machines. It’s really hard to find a mid-range PC anymore as there is either OEM Optiplexes *which I got burned twice* or 1,000$+ liquid cooled/glow in the dark, fanless gaming rigs that will take away your collage savings. The cheap notebooks are only good for doing youtube/facebook and quickly typing up a report. If they were a desktop they would be the bottom of the barrel not much better then a business computer OEM.
If we have two separate webs there wouldn’t need to be throttling and it would encourage the resurgence of home computers.
Oh and the other thing that killed computing was going to 64 bit. The whole *Vista* scare when things wouldn’t work put a lot of independent software companies out of business. There’s a reason Yamaha doesn’t make sound cards (or drivers) anymore and Sound Blaster is in China now and their last one Sound Blaster Z got only half reviews with a lot of (meh) the moment they went to China they produced crap. Their last good one was SB Live and I think Audigy was pretty good too. One of the cards was even compatible with Sound Blaster 16 from DOS era which makes a lot of DOS games work right.
When you play your P2P game like The Crew or Witcher 10 or whatever it would be on the *casual* web where it’s dedicated to that kind of activity and nobody would be throttled. Now everyone is on the same wire so when you play your stupid COD shooting terrorists a doctor somewhere else in the world needs to send/get diagnostic data in a jiff as a patient is dying.
What’s more important? Your stupid internet game or that patients life?
Net Neutrality wont’ fix these moral dilemnas they will only *shift the blame* around and it will crop up again somewhere else.
For some odd reason American’s cover their ears at fixing infrastructure and would rather be lazy and smoke pot.
Starting? There are no good search engines today. Google, Duckduckgo, SearchPage… they all suck. Their main objective is frustrate it’s users…. that’s it. The use of punctuation to hone search results is no longer effective.
Try Yandex. Excellent range of decent advanced functionality.
Phones killed it all. The AI is geared towards what most people search andphone users search for “social” “driving” and occasional shopping. I mean it’s the same as your landline you pick up the phone and dial. Phone users don’t really get the concept of self control. They are perfectly fine with things being fed to them. It’s a lot different then on a PC which (used) to be about user control. The whole concept got killed when government got involved in deciding how the internet should work after 9/11 and after the Egypt revolution which was organized by smartphones. That’s why it happened so swiftly and efficiently.
Western Governments saw that and realized that the clamp needs to come hard on the web or it could happen here in their minds. The government think tanks all feel that right wing people will start magically kill people so the American public is the enemy.
It’s simply censorship. Welcome to North Korea.
\
Todays youths want more of it! The way they are voting results in more of what you just said or typed. In Portland collage they just got rid of US Constitution class in favor of Black and Mexican history so now we have people coming out with even LESS knowledge other then what mouth pieces want them to hear.
Used to be you had to take Latin and Greek as an elective for a reason! Our US Constitution is heavily dependent on it. Today’s kids don’t know jack!