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A comment on To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public. Parent comment

Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public by tills13 on Monday July 15, 2019 @08:48PM (#20446621)
I see comments like this all the time. Am I alone in that search results, for me, have gotten significantly _better_ since a couple years ago?

I can't help but think it's partially due to people using tools _specifically designed_ to make Google's job harder (FF SandBoxes, uBlock, etc) and not understanding the implications of using them... and then blaming Google for returning "bad" results.

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Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public by jammygit on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:13PM (#20446724)
I get a lot more seo spam than I used to, but the results are still quite good. I think we should give google some credit for that at least.

Like, a lot more seo spam though.

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Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public by tills13 on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:20PM (#20446758)
People have gotten really good (i.e. it's their full-time job) at "gaming" Google. That's not to say Google is fallible - every search engine is game-able depending on its algorithm - it's just that these people are _very_ clever.
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Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public by ben509 on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:24PM (#20447016)
They don't even need to clever as much as persistent, because of the selection effects.
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Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public by marcescence on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:26PM (#20446782)
> specifically designed to make Google's job harder "Better search" doesn't necessarily mean "more personalized search."
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Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public by gefh on Monday July 15, 2019 @11:22PM (#20447241)
Unless you're a very average person, I'd argue it does.
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Re:To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public by repolfx on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @05:18AM (#20448592)
Google have metrics on how much better it makes search - at least when I was there it makes quality a lot better, but not, say, double the quality. I think in the early days of the company they thought personalisation would be a much bigger win than it was - it was big enough that it didn't make sense to turn it off or anything like that, and you can see it in action when people say their results are customised to the programming language they are most recently using. But most of the time it's not doing all that much - and the biggest component of it was basic stuff like location and language.
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