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. Be it social network integrations (Google+, Facebook connections, twitter feeds, etc), local results, results based off of previous queries (at least this one is in an attempt to show you “relevant” information), and more. This is all old news and has been hashed to death (and to no avail).
But 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.
I am speaking of course about the dreaded “Missing: important_search_term” that seems to pop up in just about every search result, with an uncanny ability of picking the most relevant keywords and conveniently “forgetting” to include them in your search. Initially, this search feature was reserved for only the most esoteric of search queries that typically turn up only a handful of results (under a few pages total) with all search terms included. In an attempt to be helpful, Google would include additional search results with some keywords removed, so as to remove the burden of extra constraints and widen the search parameters somewhat. Now? It seems like Google’s either come down with a rather bad case of human-robot transmitted alzheimer’s or else we’ve reached an all-new high when it comes to dumbing down the web (newspeak, anyone?).
Let’s take a simple example: a two-word search query. You’d assume that a two-word search query means a very high probability that each and every word1 means something, as anyone – let alone a company whose entire raison d’être depends on natural language processing – could easily tell you.
Out of complete curiosity and having not used it out of a preference for Transmission, I decided to launch Deluge.app, a once-popular torrent client, and see how it fares. Dismayed to find that all these years later, it still doesn’t support “retina” DPIs2 and set out to see if anyone cared or if this software was really as dead-in-the-water as it seemed:
The first three results entirely omitted what is arguably the most-important of my two – only two! – keywords (and that’s only a call I would make if someone were to put a gun to my head and demand that I pick which of these virtually-equally relevant keywords was more important). The first result that Google bothered to actually look up with both keywords is exactly what we are looking for – but it was banished to fourth place thanks to Google’s overly-“intelligent” algorithm!3
What does Google have to say on the matter?
If you use a long query, Google might ignore some of your keywords. Maybe there aren’t many results that match all your keywords or maybe some of them are redundant.
Yeah. Right. Google did this because there weren’t enough results in a search with both the keywords and it felt bad about coming back empty-handed? Let’s check: 238,000 results with both keywords included – definitely not the case. And an overlap between “deluge” and “retina”? I think not.
Unfortunately, this slippery slope of trying overly-hard to “interpret” what the user was “actually” looking for when 99% of us have already learned how to clarify that for the sake of search is only making Google’s results more-and-more useless.
Before anyone pipes up and comments about Google’s “literal search terms” option – been there, done that. I use Google because it’s smart enough to include words like “help” or “assistance” when you search “aid” or “disk” when you search “drive” or “disc” – without them, we might as well go back to the days before full-text search and when the furthest NLP research had reached was dreams of HAL 9000.
Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And I don’t mean a competitor to Google, a competitor to Google circa 2010 or even 2006 would instantly become my go-to engine. But unfortunately we have only a handful of startups re-using results harvested from the same APIs everyone but Google uses (Bing’s and sometimes Yandex’s). Maybe Wikimedia’s new search engine will be the first, but with the way search engines have gone in the past, likely not.
Ideally, even punctuation – something that the world has been begging Google to offer an ability to include in the search terms since forever *cough* C++ *cough* C# *cough*, but let’s focus on features they actually offered and have since taken away for now. ↩
Though as with most other GTK (or Qt) ports to OS X, I shouldn’t be surprised by the shoddy cross-platform GUI support. ↩
OK, confession time: the article linked to in the fourth result – the one that says “no retina support […] Deluge” actually talks about another app’s lack of retina support on OS X, but just go with it! ↩
The real problem with Google is spam. Here’s a random headline from the Wall Street Journal.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Apple,+FBI+Wage+War+of+Words
In no sane universe are “dailyreadlist” “hotapplenews” “globetopnews” “myinforms” “rebootdaily” “follownews” “scoopnest” “3novicesafrican” (!) “bizdailies” “thehornnews” finanzen” “newstral” “newsflow24” “gadispensaries” (!!) “wopular” or “brunchnews” legitimate bloggers nor reposters of WSJ content.
And that was just the first 3 pages.
Google *REALLY* needs to up its game against robogenerated spam results.
If you search for “deluge.app” “retina”, google does return only 7 results. For some reason if you search for “deluge.app” retina, you get 8
I don’t think it’s that unreasonable in that case to assume you wanted something a little different and broadened the search.
@Ralph: I’m not seeing only eight results, but anyway, I think you’re missing the bigger problem: the very first result in OP’s first screenshot that actually includes both terms is the one he is looking for. If there aren’t enough specific terms, shouldn’t the broader-match results turn up after and not before the most-relevant content?
Imagine if I told you I have someone who might be the perfect soulmate for you, but unfortunately because the pool of candidates for “perfect soulmates” is so small, I’m also including people that are maybe compatible with you or maybe not – a kind and thoughtful act, on my behalf…. And then I proceed to introduce you to these latters while holding back the perfect match until a random time that I saw fit?
Yea, I’ve noticed the same thing. Most recently when trying to do some serious research. Academic papers on the subject I was interested in were buried somewhere on page 3-4 of my search results in preference to “top 10 this”, “7 best ways to do that” type articles on low rent blogs like Buzfeed.
I suspected that the algorithms may have incorrectly decided that your search about Deluge was navigational. I thought that adding more context would help, so I went to Google and searched for “does deluge.app support retina”.
The number 1 search result they gave me for that search term was your blog post!
Again, the rest of the SERP seems to consist of poor quality “top 10 retina apps” articles, and the article that directly answers the question is below the fold (on my phone anyway).
I suppose, in fairness, your article does indirectly answer the question, but it’s going to throw the user for a loop when they see a completely unrelated headline.
I suspect Google will eventually see users digging way beyond the first organic result for answers, taking them further away from the monetized portion of the SERP (particularly since they’re killing ads on the side on desktop), and then they’ll start to pull back a little on their latest changes.
Hate Google, always have – its not a true Boolean search. I dont want my words re-spelled additional terms assumed or and such stuff. And if I have a choice between complex as hell but under my control, and “easy”, I never take easy, F easy.
thanks for this interesting article re: Google Search, which I haven’t used for about 2 years now. Normally my searches are much less esoteric than your example and generally from the desktop so I don’t mind scrolling down to successive pages. As noted by Pete Morris, eventually their bottom line will force them to adjust.
I call it the quote-creep effect. I started noting that I was using double-quotes in the queries a lot more (almost did not realize it). Maybe Google’s intention is to force user to use quotes more often? Nah, majority don’t even know its use…
So what possessed them to do this? And why, after more than a year of bot-sites (say copying stackoverflow into their CMS) haven’t they figured out to use the timestamps of their cached material and bounce this pollution out? what, google cannot take a 10-word string and put quotes at beginning and end and check its own results?
to add… it used to be that sites that parroted other sites were penalised.
It feels like a 180º turn… (in a google car 8-0 )
I use duckduck go and switch to Google if I have to. Because of SEO keywords you often need to use long tailed keyword searches. This means a 2 keyword search will pull up useless stuff in most cases while a 4 words or higher search will get you much better results as those aren’t used by SEO as often. I also find mixing words around and trying to use different words that mean the same thing. For example: app, application, program, etc. greatly improve the results. You could also join this free course by Google on doing power searches: http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/
https://bynd.com/news-ideas/google-advanced-search-comprehensive-list-google-search-operators/
Use Duckduckgo.co instead of google, then use duckduckgo’s super handy search bangs to search google or other specific site.
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
https://voat.co/v/FuckGoogle/comments/60966
“Welcome to the party, pal!”
I remember 2004 when I was in school – our teacher tought us about which keywords to select. Propose an answer, but do not ask a question, since you want to find a full answer!
Very few people got it right and where able to utilize Googles index.
Around 2012 keyword harvesting sites started to destroy search results.
I stink google strived to assist people who could not utilize the searchengine by keyword selection and later hung itself while fighting spam.
I miss 2004’s tiny index and powerful keyword refining.
Have you tried qwant ?
Works just fine for me.
Yeah they ignore quotes for exact phrases, they ignore the + sign which used to tell Google to make sure that particular word was always included and they straightaway change many words. e.g. I was searching about NVDA, the open source Windows accessibility screen reader but it kept showing me results about NVIDIA. At times like this, I am glad Bing and DuckDuckGo exist. Although none of them is perfect, we don’t want a search engine turning evil scenario like what happened with Microsoft’s PC OS monopoly.
Amen, I thought I was going crazy!
I tried everything
word0 +word1
“word0” “word1”
word0 AND word1
clearing cookies
rinse repeat
clearing cookies
search through google.com/ncr
clearing cookies
install googleDisconnect
It’s became annoying beyond description.
1. > If the goal is to push more adds just please have some common sense and make an option for a google search service with a subscription fee I will pay for it!
2. > If the goal is to be clever and “deep mind” my search query than please have some common sense and give me a “2009 web crawler that actually crawls” opt-out option.
I love the information on your websites. Regards.
Yes, back the upgrades to the search engine 3 years and I will be happy again!
I’ve been obsering Google’s gradual decline for a few months now. Every week it’s getting harder and harder to find EXACT matches to my query. If I search for something SPECIFIC (like lyrics) based on a few keywords, I have to waste about 20 minutes refining my search and trying various other queries… until I give up. This month I’ve had at least 5 searches for “x y z” that end up only showing results for “x y”.
Seems like useless results with a 1 in 20 dose of the search is the norm…. what a crock…sad I let them waste my time.
I am really amazed people are not seeing the deliberate effort by Google is called obfuscation and it is intimately linked with politics. In a global, corrupt society the only way to CONTROL your people is to control what they believe. Its an elementary form of psychological warfare. Our spec ops teams who specialize in the area of psychological warfare do all sorts of plays on information in other countries but unfortunately, if you look closely, you will see if is being practiced on the American populace in various forms. For example, if you perform a search for the ENTIRE video of Vladimer Putin’s interview here in the states, (not the common edited one) you will almost never be able to pull it up even though its out there. Search for something controversial that is favored by the right and watch which sides viewpoint comes up first… its quite obvious. There is a profound, strong political bias present in Google that reveals there are agendas at work here.
Every declining civilization attempts to control more and more what information its citizens have access to, especially prior to a takeover effort. By limiting the information resource citizens cannot confirm truth or communicate it if they know it and the masses can be controlled and minorities of enemies nearly perfectly suppressed. Its a systematic pretense to a change in a system of power and has been in every age, from the dark ages, to Nazism, to modern communism. People can be prepared to support atrocities, accept lies, and create socially oppressed minority people at will, and ultimately accept something they never otherwise would have. Our special ops, nsa, ets may be at work on us via google, and thats why ther is no competition…. the situation is getting serious and must be made know so more people can refuse to use google products before they have a full monopoly.
Great read. I’ve been looking for someone to put into words what I have been noticing. It seems that when you search negative things about Google, in a Google search, the results are very limited. Hmmmm…
Obfuscation.
Google is NOT a search engine. It is a jewish product designed to help those goy jews who have not only sacrificed their own kids souls, but their own. Alternative search engines do NOT exist, since they all use google for the same shitty results.
The 18th degree of freemasonry has a password. That password, hoseanna, supposed to be halved in communication, to prevent us figuring this out, proves they worship lucifer. Now why do you think pure evil should do what you want, when they have no choice but to give those who would kill their own kids future prospects, what they want (sold their kid’s soul’s for) Um, figure it out.
The internet is already as dead as the food these people would claim is wonderful. Yeah, if it was that fuckin good, we would not need adverts forced on us selling only jewish shite.
There’s really no need for racist comments or bigotry of any kind. Please keep this discussion civil and on-topic.
They are trying to control society.
So, I search for “silvermark”, because I am looking to replace a cooking utensil. Really mundane stuff, but I also use google for serious research.
Google insists on splitting my search term into two words so that I get a whole slew of results offering me silver, hallmarked jewellery.
I reduce this slightly be adding -silver & -mark to my search terms.
1. Why should I have to? Does google assume I have a malfunctioning space bar?
2. How long before the NOT operator is deprecated in favour of profit?
Yes totally agree
Maybe they are making the climate right to start charging for services so eff em!
They didn’t even design of invent anything so they are just leeched
normally i am unable to get any useful search in goggle in my computor
because of googles asinine search results..This was even hard to find..had to try 5 different searches..My biggest concern is…Why is google giving me out dated info on just about everything?.,.I mean 7 years or more old! WTF Google?
Maybe we need to move to a categorization of internet content, similar to and encyclopedia format, instead of keyword searching. So if I wanted to learn about the Pascal langiage I might choose – computers – programming – language – Pascal – then potentially several sub categories.
They are also deliberately dumbing down web content and web design by using their monopoly position to push up sites that use pro-mobile designs and push down results for sites formatted for computers. They are absolutely evil, greedy, and beneath contempt.
SO annoying!
I also noticed this trend for a few years. I think google doesn’t have the coverage it once used to, so it doesn’t even have a good pool to give results from, which would explain the limited results. Agree that we need a competitor.
I’ve searched for this discussion (ironically, using google) because I am increasingly annoyed with non-relevant returns. Have we crossed the rubicon–how do we break this ingrained habit of Googling as the all omniscient guide. It has become increasingly evident that results are greatly diminished by censorship. Have there been any good articles or NON-MSM exposes on topic? I’m just presuming the algorithm is now broken,dictated by corporate dollars, as fundamentally sold-out and corrupted by plutocratic interests as the undemocratic US government? I do not trust google returns as a resource for news.
For many of the reasons mentioned, minus the racial insults, I stopped using google 99% of the time. Started using Bing and realized that it was the same agenda. Started using mozilla private search with Duck Duck Go. I don’t use any browser with newsfeeds that can’t be disabled.
I don’t even bother using search engines at all any more, there’s no point; I just ask questions on forums and get answers from real human beings
The so called “Jews” that are behind all this evil are not even Jewish, they are Khazarian/AshkeNAZI Caananites, basically IMPOSTERS who took the moniker “Jew” in order to hide behind it (and steal the identities of real Isralites/Jewish people) to make them look bad by default. So the “racial slur” shaming does not apply to these IMPOSTERS. Do your research and stop believing the “anti semite” nonsense. These people are NOT SEMITE (which meant CAUCASIAN/ISRAELITES). Society has been brainwashed to call those who tell the truth about these evil vipers as “anti semite” by these SAME evil vipers! They have stolen the identities of the true Israelites and placed the false label of “Goyim” onto them (projecting what they ARE onto their enemies) which is what psychopaths do! And yes: GOOGLE SUCKS!
Not saying that i disagree with this comment I entirety (I’d research and source my info if I felt strongly that I would, disagree & this is interesting and I might..) BUT you are at least somewhat off the mark, as the correct definition of Semite is:
Sem·ite
ˈsemīt/Submit
noun
a member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs.
I’d caution you not to take such a superior, lecturing tone, in general, but this is especially important if you cannot bother to check your facts with simple, verifiable things. Nothing is so simple about the rest of it!
Anyhoo
Why does a thread on the uselessness of Google as a search engine become a gathering place for the species of intellectually under-endowed racist, bigoted, conspiracy nut of the sort to whose comment this is a reply?
I am frustrated with Wikipedia. It’s worse than the previous search, at least if it’s information you are looking for. I tried searching for an image I found a couple of years ago that I know is from Europe, and Wikipedia sent me Chinese info. No matter how I worded my search trying to find the European painting only the Chinese came up so it’s back to the library for a while. That’s a nice change, actually.
Google used to be pretty accurate.
If the term you searched for was mistyped, you found nothing. If the term you searched for was rare, you found 50 results.
But, you found pretty much exactly what you searched for.
Now google just spams you with popular results, pages that made the best deal with google to get a high page rank and ads.
What you search for is no longer the main concern, it’s a distant second.
What google cares about now is pretty much just spam, showing you as many pages they can profit from in one way or other as possible.
Fuzzy search in itself is a good idea the way it started out, as a mere suggestion if google thought you made a typo and you had to manually click on it, or display right away only if google did find 0 results with the entered term.
Now fuzzy search is an excuse to spam you with anything that you may click on to generate revenue for one page or another.
I tried to search for something as mainstream and popular as a list of pc games sorted by release date but all I got was upcoming releases (no list, articles about specific games) and top ten lists of upcoming games. And of course a bunch of sites only vaguely to what I searched for.
I spent 3+ hours trying to sift through this mess and didn’t come up with anything (also thanks to gaming sites nowadays no longer providing easy to navigate info but everything is wrapped in an article covering a few games at a time in the universally inconvenient “mobile” format).
The instant I switched to duckduckgo.com I found 5 results up top with exactly the kind of list I was looking for.
It’s no longer question whether google is spying on you or whether google additionally adds some results you not want.
By now google has become objectively worthless as a search engine.
Corporate greed has eradicated the ONE THING that made google the number 1 search engine in the first place, accurate results.
Because honestly, no one can sell me that this has anything whatsoever to do with user friendliness.
Not that you should do this, but go to Google Images, have safe search turned off, and search for any porn star. It’s literally their job to be naked. So what does Google show? Only images of them fully clothed. WTF? You have to explicitly (pun intended) add the word “nude” after their name to force Google to do the obvious. How does adding a search term cause more items to show up rather than less?
Other random musings. One time I searched for “wookiee”. Google asked if I didn’t mean “wookie”. No. I know how to spell wookiee. Why didn’t Google? (They’ve since fixed this.). Recently I searched for Bill Gates. Google shows a blurb called “People also ask” which had the question “How old was Bill Gates when he died?” followed by the answer “62 years”, implying he was dead. I added feedback to tell them they were stupid, and thankfully they’ve fixed it. But how did the screw that up in the first place?
This thread was quite hard to find, and yes, because… you know why. I am happy to see some humans talking at the drawing board. I read many blury points, some fine points and a likkle bit a’ nonsense. K, that said, I juss wunna say, REMEMBER, these virtual tours and discussions and medias (the internet) and access to them ARE CREATED BY INDUSTRY. They will, and do, create systems and products that benifite themselves over their own children and people who can not otherwise feed their immediate wealth. THE ABILITY FOR THE UN-OPPERTUNE TO USE THE INTERNET AND TO “SPEAK” AND BE REPRESENTED IS BEING ACTIVELY DISMANTELED BY INDUSTRY and GOVERNMENT. !!!!SPEAK OUT LOUD ABOUT IT TO PEOPLE FACE TO FACE!!!
… especially to those in the industry…
k… thanks for hearing a starving artist….
who can’t find his own web page….
SPEAK OUT
and be civil 😉
I remember the days when almost every google search had a wikipedia article as the first result. Nowadays I’m lucky if it shows up on the second page. Why is google always making “improvements” that are anything but?
I remember the days when almost every google search had a wikipedia article as the top result. That was very convenient. Nowadays I’m lucky if it shows up in the second page.
There is one simple fact that will make it all very clear. Google Search is not a search engine, it is an Advertisement Engine.
Your article absolutely nails my experience using modern Google Search.
There’s this weird mentality of “if our search engine determines that your keywords aren’t relevant, then they aren’t relevant” in their system that drives me insane.
Also annoying is the “People also search for” stuff. I don’t care what “People” are searching for, I’m looking for results with MY keywords!
I once tried to search for something; can’t remember what, but I repeatedly changed the terms because the results just weren’t what I was looking for.
I got the “unusual traffic from your computer network” page because Google thought I was a spambot/scraper.
If they weren’t playing Scrabble with my keywords, I wouldn’t have to keep trying to search.
Great article, the points made are still relevant today.
So absolutely useless as a search engine, exemplified by today’s experience:
The search string “porcelain sink splashback” returned too many results so, seeing that many of them were for tiles, I added “-tile” , to no effect.
Even adding, firther “-tiles” had no effect.
Google has actually ceased to be a search engine and has pushed me to duck duck.