Perhaps what's missing here is a garbage collection algorithm. Whatever they are using as 'roots' is not working, and they can no longer infer trust by association. They need to curate and review sites. Or maybe they already do, but the humans' focus is directed by heuristics and those heuristics have been gamed.
Does anyone know if Google still has a functioning QA department? Perhaps this is the same disease we see everywhere of developers thinking they understand testing when really we know just enough to be dangerous.
PageRank worked when there was very little tangible value besides vanity in being number one for a particular search term, and when there was little competition between sites. Once SEO became a key strategy to growing a business PageRank had to shift from finding the most relevant results to removing the things that were pretending to be relevant results. That challenge is much harder.
I contend that practically every update to Google Search over the past 15 years has been to try to defeat SEO spam. There doesn't appear to be anything else. And, unfortunately for all of us, it's a battle Google are not winning.
Even worse, they are completely disincentivised to do anything about it, since presently the ads occupy most or all of the real estate most users see anyway. Buying ads to show up in that section so you aren't drowned out by spam is exactly what benefits GOOG's shareholders. And I say this as a GOOG shareholder, lol.
I've come to believe that the organic results are a niche product that Google could eliminate tomorrow and most consumers wouldn't really realize anything had changed. They'll go to the first result 99% of the time, and 99% of the time that's an ad.
They got a lot of bad sites, but they got rid of a lot of good ones too.
Now google is the modern yellow pages imho. It's more shallow than ever, but it's okay for many, and they can shake down legit sites for adwords to show up.
Totally agree with the main article, sadly however it's like what, 90% of people never go past the first page? And many still assume the top ads are vetted results that are better than all the rest.
Looking forward to leaving google as the yellow pages and encouraging more niche search engines, web rings, and similar.
Perhaps it might be accurate to say that as email has declined in popularity, “spam” has simply moved to the Web.
Don't forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.
Ingo Molnar
From a message to the Linux Kernel mailing list in 1999.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
This is delightful
Especially not when the incumbents are busy digging deeper holes.
It's not perfect, but it's scary how well it works sometimes.
"Can't they" or "won't they" because it's simply not in their business interest?
Small problem: There are plenty of folks, foundations, companies who are not resource limited in attacking something like this, yet it still doesn't happen. So maybe it's not as simple as you think?
Just look at the recent (as of yesterday) stories of the changes that Googs is pushing to re-enable tracking that has been previously manually/intentionally disabled by the users. Look at how Maps is forcing users to enable wifi in order to provide routing directions. This one happened to me personally as well.
The wifi thing is just a silly example. The wifi is required to do fast start GPS. 99.99999999% of their users probably don't want slow start GPS. If you do, sure, it's no longer the app for you. Yes, they are optimizing for the customers they want and giving them a good experience . I'm not sure exactly how this is something abnormal. Like, you are basically complaining they won't add knobs for you. That's pretty standard in good products - but also means if the knobs they aren't what you want, it's not a good fit for you.
I got the email in the latter, and that is a super weird take. They had one control for literally everything, which was owned by admins. They almost certainly got complaints that turning it off it made search suggestions not work in sheets/docs/etc. So they introduced a new separate control for that, and made it controllable by the user. Because it's controllable by the user, it also means the admin can't see the doc search history of the user, only the user can. Nor can they delete your history for you - only you can control it. Your auto-delete preferences, etc apply to it.
None of this seems bad or horrible to me. The only thing even worth picking a bone about is whether the new setting should take it's default from the old setting or not. There are issues in there of course, because as mentioned, before admins could turn it on/off for everyone - and this led to lots of complaints. do you take the admin setting? Do you take the setting the user had if it hadn't been overridden by the admin? etc
The claim, in that story, i that it is forced on by default even if you had it off. This claim is wrong, afaict. It was not worth wading into that clear firestorm of a thread.
The support doc clearly says: "If you disabled Web & App Activity in the Admin console, it is turned off for Google Workspace users. Users can turn it on if they want."
IE if the admin had it disabled, it will be turned off. It also says if you had it disabled yourself, it will default to off.
It goes through this quite clearly if you click "what if i had it disabled" and "what happens if i don't do anything".
Overall presenting this as "re-enable tracking that was manually/intentionally disabled by users" is a real stretch.
That's right, because I wasn't attempting to address that. Instead, I was addressing that the cynicism towards Googs is not unjustified.
It'd be much more interesting if you would engage with the actual conversation being had.
This is 100% factually untrue. AGPS data is downloaded via the net, giving a quick bootstrap.
This statement of your is just used to deflect the truth ; Google wants more, moar, more, always more.
No, it isn't. A cell phone connection is sufficient for that.
I'm happy to change it to "wifi helps with a bunch of features they have". AGPS is not even the only one. Wifi scanning is happening in the phone anyway to know when to switch networks, etc, so they are saving power when it is used instead of cell phone.
GPS is just fine for Garmin, TomToms, etc. Why suddenly for a phone that has WiFi in them Maps suddenly "requires" wifi is just not convincing me of anything other than Googs wants all the data.
Yes, it does. See below.
> I'm happy to change it to "wifi helps with a bunch of features they have".
This does change what you said, because "a bunch of features they have" is not at all the same as "GPS, a feature which pretty much everybody wants to use and wants to start fast".
> Wifi scanning is happening in the phone anyway to know when to switch networks, etc
Not if wifi is turned off. If I'm in my car, for example, I might well turn wifi off to prevent the phone from wasting power scanning for wifi networks that aren't there. But I'm still going to have my cell phone connection on.
> they are saving power when it is used instead of cell phone.
Nonsense. See above. Plus, the cell phone antenna is always scanning too, but on a phone it is far less likely to be turned off to prevent that than wifi is.
What I really can't understand is how any of this is connected to your (correct) claim that search is hard and content curation is hard and so we shouldn't expect Google, or anyone else, to just magically solve it. Google could easily serve the needs of users much better than it does, even if it can't do it perfectly. But it won't because it's not in the business of serving user needs, it's in the business of serving advertiser needs, and serving users is just a by-product.
If Google really wants to solve the problems of users, instead of advertisers, it should have users pay them instead of advertisers. But of course it won't since it has spent more than two decades now getting users used to the idea that search and other "hard" services should magically appear for free, and hoping those users won't notice that they are actually the product, not the customer.
This is such a uncharitable assumption i don't even know where to begin. Nobody can serve everyone well. Trying is a quick ticket to failure.
The choice not to serve certain people is clearly the correct one, even if one could theoretically do more than you do now. Why isn't the simpler, more charitable answer that they are just serving the majority of their large userbase, or whoever in that user base they care about? Why is it everyone who feels like they aren't served has to decide the reason is because someone is doing the wrong thing, rather than "guess i'm not the user they are looking for".
As for whether you can do more - Good strategy (and product choices) are framed as mutually exclusive choices: https://hbr.org/2012/09/bringing-science-to-the-art-of-strat...
That is always going to make someone upset, because yes, you could do something more than you do for them. That doesn't make that path make any sense. Trying to do more of everything for everyone is pretending that you don't need to make choices, and that those choices don't have consequences (for example, what users you will retain or not). That is, as i said, a quick ticket to failure.
I never claimed that anyone could. You are attacking a straw man.
You are completely ignoring the actual point I made, which is that Google is a business, and every business serves the needs of those who pay it money, and in Google's case that is not its users, it's advertisers. So serving user needs has to be a by-product.
> Why isn't the simpler, more charitable answer that they are just serving the majority of their large userbase, or whoever in that user base they care about?
Why isn't the simpler, more obvious answer the one I gave, that Google, like every business, serves its paying customers first, and users are not paying customers?
You seem to be going to extraordinary lengths to ignore this obvious fact.
You do a thing (wifi alway on), so clearly everyone does, and therefore clearly we should force it!
The much simpler explanation, given that the product doesn't seem to be failing by any measure, is that maybe you just aren't who they are targeting?
One of the main reasons products fail is because they try to please everyone, and have so many knobs that the UI is horrible.
Good product design requires choice. You don't like those choices. Okay, awesome, it's not the product for you. That doesn't make it the wrong choice, or a bad design. It just means you aren't in the user base they are catering to.
Most of the time, if it turns out the user base thy are catering to is unsustainable, the product will fail, and something that does cater to that user base will take over. So how is this not a uniformly good thing?
The market has products for people who like different things - those users will decide what wins or not.
Google does not need WiFi in order to give directions to locations in the Maps application. However, gaining access to WiFi locations is beneficial to Googs in other fashions. They choose to force people to do it for their gain, not the benefit of the Maps user.
Now, you're trying to say that because some people are technically aware about things and have become vocal and push back against the tide that is Googs' overreaching into people's lives is some how in the wrong. You also seem to be implying that the fact that the vast majority of people are not vocal on the point makes it okay even though they have no idea what is actually occurring. Since they are not complaining, everything is okay, right? That's not how that works.
The location options for wifi or not, are in android settings, part of system wide settings.
No change to google maps will make this setting disappear. It is not an extra control google maps can drop.
Your entire UI tact us baseless, and makes zero sense.
You're been spreading misinformation and misconceptions through this entire thread.
Can you at least argue with facts?
But a large part of the problem is that Google can't be bothered to follow their own rules:
Again and again I catch them ignoring my doublequotes and verbatim options.
There aren't any conflicting incentives around that, are there?
Either you respect user queries or you don't.
Also, look at it another way:
Kagi manages to do this while building on Google! It is in another league, just like Google used to be.
Even nano scale Marginalia (1 guy, 1 tower pc, 4 drives) manages to respect my queries.
Things are simply never this binary.
Is it though? There are plenty of examples of businesses or even entire industries trying their level best to slow down changes and innovations that will hurt their profits. And in many cases the products may become worse, but more profitable, over time. In the 1970's, you could buy a washing machine in the United States that would last you 25 years. Try doing that now. I'm sure a lot of folks would like their washing machine to last two and half decades, but that's not that profitable if you're in the business of selling washing machines.
There is lots of support for assuming the worst of google in this case.
Then I found Kagi last year who manages to exeed my expectations, proving that my original assumption is correct:
It is still possible to provide good results today, Google just fails at it.
I'm not saying it is easy. But it is possible.
(Extra interesting: Kagi builds on Google and Bing, two engines that drive me crazy, yet Kagi manages to be great!)
It’s perfectly reasonable to speculate about whether search quality is sacrificed in the interest of some incentive Google is trying to balance in favor of its own revenue stream. The fact that it’s complex is immaterial.
Has the web ever been much beyond that? Have people ever really been just hitting "give me a random web page about X"?
Of course search engines are very useful, just that these conversations about content and "the web", I feel like there's not much focus on how so much traffic is guided through link aggregation.
Link aggregators are also very much part of the problem. Besides the astroturfing, they tend to favor the lowest common denominator in content. Popular vote just doesn't seem to be a good way of surfacing quality content, especially not with the social incentive of winning internet acclaim for submitting a good result.
HN does surface the odd gem, but why can't I pick one of those and say "Hey, this topic interests me, show me more like this"? I'm currently working on build something to that effect, and so far it seems at least reasonably possible.
RSS was good in one way, but it also sort of turns everything it comes into contact with into a blog.
Why not start it? One of the beauties of reddit subgroups is that not only do you find random very specific ones, but if you don't, you can start your own.
Oh, wait
I use search for information, but I often have to dig quite deep to find something worth clicking on or reading. And that's true for Google and DDG (which I mostly use).
When it's raw, basic knowledge, then I'm using !wiki or !mdn etc. in DDG to search those sites directly. Note: Wikipedia and Mozilla Developer Network are two of my favorite sites.
But when it's something more subtle and specialized that I'm not very familiar with then often my only hope of finding something useful is to search via aggregators and forums like HN, Reddit etc. because then I can gauge the quality of the links via the discussion around it and the people who post them. Or in some cases I know about a specialist or journalist and can use their name to filter out spam.
Discovering these kind of things via search is really hard, especially if their authors are not known. It's the spammers and low effort creators that get rewarded the most, partly because of search engines, partly because of visitors who are content with that kind of quality.
I wish I knew some decent curators or magazines, but most of the stuff I come across is just too far from what I‘m looking for. Search engines don’t help much here either.
Some of these raw looking indie games have turned out to be gems. Thinking of Faster than Light, Loop Hero etc. It's hard to gauge the game-play from a quick look. Not even "similar to" searches help too much. It's not really about the money spent, but rather about the time both finding and then playing. I wish I had a list of curators that I really dig. So far, hit and miss.
We choose not to offer the same thing based on our values; no-tracking and infrastructural independence, meaning we aren't captured like other search options: https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.htm...
A potentially standard way to find other related feeds, instead of just consuming the content of one author/website. Curated by real humans that produce useful content (that's why I have them subscribed).
Simple thing that could have been very powerful for discovery if this was thought about early enough.
Search is a solved problem. But you're starting from the false premise that Google and your expectations are aligned, they're not. Google shows you what they want you to see, typically spam sites carrying their ads. That's not what you're looking for but from their perspective they've 'solved search'.
It's a curation problem. We have billions of pieces of content being created and only a handful of curators to bring that info to us. All the big search engine players want to be "the one" but it's a fools errand IMO.
No one search engine will be able to become "the one" because there is simply too much information. Google with all of their cash in the bank and talented engineers can't even crack the problem. The problem though is even though each search engine offers something different, they all think they offer the same thing and compete to muscle out any smaller players.
So you get a situation where you want a metal roof for your house, metal roofer gives you a quote. Big roofer guy in town hears about this and runs the metal roofer guy out of town, then tells you he cant offer you a metal roof anyways.