11mo ago

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find

tech.slashdot.org /story/24/01/16/2137200/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find

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It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators. The latter come up with those pages that will tell you the life history of the writer and their dogs, and 20 ads, five popups, subscription offers, allow the site to access your location and send updates questions and 'read more's later you might find out the thing you need. All this to have more ads and rank higher in various searches. 10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn't. ChatGPT gave me the answer I needed in two questions.
- It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators
  No. It's an arms race between content creators and spam.
  Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
  10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t.
  Huh? The top result for "float needle" in Google seems like a great description to me.
  
  Doesn't Google provide search results based on your search history? It's algorithm probably worked against them or something. I've heard that anonymous searches usually get better results.
  
  I have had similar experiences constantly.
  I have a gut feeling that people who frequently bemoan bad search results fall into one of two categories:
  They have all kinds of tracking, and constantly watch Youtube Shorts or TikTok videos. Meaning their learned behavior is "This person enjoys low-quality spam content and lots of ads", because let's face it, portrait-mode shortform videos are primarily that, a vessel to push ads pretending to be genuinely content hidden among content barely better than ads in the first place.
  They have tracking entirely supressed and their browser so hardened that Google can't even know that if this user puts in "needle", they do mean a physical object. They don't even know the language the user is searching in, basically. As a result virtually no weighting happens which allows spam content to rise to the top based on its built-in SEO efforts.
  In the end, the second case is not something Google can truly optimize for. Or rather, it'll never be their intention to do that. Though I will say DDG's and Bing's equally or worse search results indicate that a certain level of tracking might actually be beneficial, but we'd need a morally trustworthy keeper of the data (as in, it needs to be owned by the people or something!), nto Google.
  And in the first case, I wish they'd do something about that. I can see why before the proliferation of the constant-ads-as-content spam that is shorts, tracking video watching habits to figure out general habits made sense, but especially because you no longer actively decide on which video to watch, this can no longer be valid input to user behavior analysis.
  
  I tried this in chrome and in Firefox with hardening enabled and VPN. I got relevant resumes each time but pretty different from each other.
  Entirely shopping links for parts on Firefox vs short videos on chrome.
  
  Since myself and others had no issues with your float needle example, mind sharing what you searched for, and what Google returned?
  
  Yeah if you Google "what is a float needle" the first result on a napa website has a great description
  
  Just putting in "float needle" gets me only relevant results, those being a mix of what a float needle is, what it does, and a few shop results for places where I can buy one.
  
  Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.
  I've switched to Ecosia and while it's not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?
  I know it's a "secondary" search engine.
  But the thing is that no, hundred times no, anyone who generates ad revenue has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google. Everyone else gets screwed.
  Switching to Ecosia alone made me much more comfortable with using Web.
  
  I’ve switched to Ecosia and while it’s not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?
  Ecosia's results are pulled from Bing, and as the very paper linked here shows, Bing's results are significantly worse than Google's, even accounting for Google's deteriorating result quality. Notice in particular the percentage of spam.
  
  Worse for whom?
  
  Did you read the paper this thread here is ultimately all about?
- Yeah. In fairness to Google entire industries have risen around the sole-purpose of manipulating their system for nefarious reasons. That's a hard thing to deal with.
- I feel the future will be personal chat assistants, but that will also start spitting out ads in the future unless a foss version is used.
  
  I'd really love if I could download the weight files and do the chat locally on my computer
- As a result SEO optimised pages are so bloated that I truly hate them.

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