Re:Leaving Google
by bohemian99 on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @07:12AM
(#27746784)
Internet search algorithms are bit of an adversarial competition against bad content, no? Given the amount of money at stake for beating the search algorithm, shouldn't we expect any search engine to decline in usefulness over time?
> Given the amount of money at stake for beating the search algorithm, shouldn't we expect any search engine to decline in usefulness over time?
Internet search algorithms should be worth significantly more (and I imagine that this is the case; e.g., I doubt that the combined value of all spam sites together matches Alphabet's market cap).
Given that internet search companies should also have an edge acquiring talent, you would expect that internet search algorithms would win this fight.
The problem with aliasing is that it undermines the ability of users to refine their searches, especially in the case of Google with its unclear semantics for terms within quote marks.
I've switched to using DDG as my first search engine of choice because, while its ranking of sites initially is generally weaker than Google's, it gives me much more power to subsequently refine searches.
AltaVista was all spam results when Google came on the scene. From where I sit, Google just doesn't care to work on search any more.
For example:
- pre 2005?, Google search terms were never aliased.
A search for Bob, never returned Robert or Bobby. To make things "easier", alias searching was added. Now, there is all sorts of algorithmic aliasing happening, and it poisons the results further.
- Couple this with the desire for verbal google searching to work, without complex queries, and even more aliasing/approximation of search results happen.
I've seen homonyms aliased as of... 2016? Why? Google voice searching.
- Quotes are only suggestions, only verbatim search forces precise terms (+ used to mean a word must appear as written, but was removed because it was interfereing with Google plus username searches..)
- These days, Google spends more time trying to take content from web pages, and insert the answers at to of page. They want to be wikipedia, with you never leaving their page.
All of the above, and more, show a steady decline in the desire for precise results, and instead, a desire to sacrifice search quality for profit, and pet projects.
As others in this thread have said, Google isn't Google any more.