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! ↩
This was an interesting read – the comments, mostly. I have discovered I can’t get sane results from Google Search anymore – it s been getting worse for years, and now its just silly. I recall reading about folks could find themselves in “filter bubbles”, and only be served data that would provoke “reach for the credit card” response. Sure, I know – if we use the internet at all – we are just lab rats. But it used to sort of work. In the early days, it was just magical. Now, the whole experience has become really rather awful. I find it difficult to get honest uncensored, unfiltered information anymore. I found this 2016 note, by entering “Why has google become so awful” and of course, I entered this query into Duckduckgo, which I have had to use for years now, after any google-search, to check filtering intensity.
It’s just gotten really awful. We are software developers (among other things), and we watched as Google removed all of our free apps on their “Playstore” – for various bogus reasons – one by one. Of course – the Google-matrix wants only paid-apps so they make money – but our stuff were cool computer language interpreters.
The Google-Apple-Amazon-Facebook thing exists to make money. Fine. We all like to make a bit of money. But the current economic model is configured to exclude and just vapourize any agency that is not a revenue generator for this ologopoly.
It is sad. The entire Android O/S was supposed to be an open-source alternative to the Apple nightmare – but once it got up and running – Google just nuked the small guys.
And what is curious and quite comical, the nasty tricky stuff even shows up now in their search-engine results. One of the commenters indicated that everything now is a trick or a vectored-scam (you wanted this, they sold you that, and at a higher price than was promised, etc). Sure, we can expect to need caveat emptor when using the credit-card – but do we have to get misled and offered obfuscated disinfo even when doing web-searches?
And the answer is ( by Google), seems to be: “Fuck, yeah! You losers stuck using your keyboards and screens are how we suck in the bucks! We have big houses in the Californistan sunshine. You sit in the darkness, playing stupid fingertwitch games. The order of things is that you send us money, and we feed you neural stimulus. Don’t like that? Well, too bad. Go do something else. While I go for a drive in my new $100,000 Tesla! Ha ha ha ha…” And so on.
The internet has just simply become really awful, like most other late stage things. I thought it might be different – but nothing really changes.
But I really do worry about libraries dumping ( or even just not maintaining) their hard-copy source documents. The world is seriously in danger of becoming pathologically stupid and crazy-easy to manipulate and mislead.
Want to try some search examples, and see how butchered search results have become? We believe there is a high probability Covid-19 was the direct result of Gain-of-Function research work being done at both the Wuhan virology lab, and at a US lab. There is “tons” of evidence that exists that supports this conclusion, and much of it has been released on the internet. Much is even in peer-reviewed academic journals, in articles written by folks with Phd’s. It’s not “conspiracy theory” nonsense – it’s almost certainly what actually happened.
Try and find it.
🙂
Google gets the last laugh – somehow leading me to this banal verbosity. Take that, me!
Quick follow-up; I agree with a lot of the commenters, but something someone mentioned triggered a thought in my head re: the ignored negation of words or phrases.
So I took the negation (the minus in front of a word or phrase (double-quote the phrase if it has spaces)), and put it first in my search, followed by all the remaining items I had already tried.
Voila! the negation seemed to finally work; my habit over the years (22+ in the network engineering space) has always been to drop the negation at the end (‘search for this… but not this’ logic). It would appear that google has reversed that order of operations in their algorithm.
Hope it helps. I’ll keep trying this out.
Should searchers then request the opposite of what they truly are searching for??? Try that!
I can hardly wait for the new Russian search I am a huge fan of our country’s original idea of checks and balances. Russia, and not Yandex as far as I understand, is set to come out with it’s own search engine in mid-July. I I believe they are suspposed to come out with their counterpart to Wikipedia by mid-2022. When it comes to informaiton, we cannot under any circumstances allow our world to come under the singular control we once saw in the 1250 years of the dark agesm when one religio-political entity had overriding control over any and all information. Horrible atrocities and muillions of deaths have occured due to that kind of control of information. Because the world has already gone through one dark age and doesn’t need another, I propose we make the Russian search engine and Russian counterpart to Wikipedia a staple to fact-checking policy in our country, and around the world. I have no information about these programs yet, other than they are being supervised by one of the Russian government media and tech oversight ministries. We must be prepared for the tirade of abuse that would condemn having alternative fact-checking sources, by pointing out how singular informatino sources have historically precipitated corruption, and wide-spread oppression. If snyone learns of how to access these PLEASE SHARE!!!
It has taken me some time to figure this out, but if we aare really looking for an explanation on the growing intentional uselessness of Google’s search results, I think the answer is rather stark; information control is mind-control, literally. A well-known publication quotes a psychologist stating essentially the same conclusion. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/10/11/epstein-google-is-the-most-powerful-mind-control-engine-ever-created/
If google won’t give sane search results, and becomes a manipulative entity, then the cat and mouse game is on, and the end-user will always lose due to lack of relative force (all abusive moves are about power and dominance, this is no exception).
The least you can do is block as many of Google’s ads and tracking as possible and tell IT to do what YOU want, not have it predict (badly, and knowingly-so, who cares if sales are made, right?) what it thinks you want. No, no, what it knows you are going to BUY, even if you don’t want it and perhaps send it back for a refund later…
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, what about where the road paved with bad intentions leads? What if it were the same place by a merely more roundabout route because what matter is the state of the vehicle, fuel and passengers, not the destination?
@ Q –
How are Russia respectable enough about matters of information integrity to be trusted? You act as if they are! Sure, better a duopoly than a monopoly – but NOT if they are ultimately working for the same background forces, or forced-to (who runs the world on a banking level is the next question).
Total Control = Total Information Awareness. A program revealed just after 9/11 and quickly hidden again (technically closed-down but merely de-branded and continued under other names more covertly as THIS was the REAL end-game ALL ALONG, the circumstantial evidence is HUGE for this. Follow the money, ALWAYS. WWI-WWII-MKUltra-Operation-Paperclip-JFK-Vietnam-Arms-Industry-Israeli-Military-Tech-Boost-enabling-far-greater-point-defence-against-the-rest-of-the-Middle-East-via-superior-tech-now-spying–and-mind-control-tech-TOTAL-Control-via-Total-Information-Awareness-and-here-we-are-Today.
People dissed the TV series Homeland S07 I think for being unrealistic, when it was the MOST realistic (apart from the physical resilience of the operative to nerve agent which was major dramatic license). They just weren’t ready for the reality we live in. Funny how the controlled media didn’t want many hearing the message (which, if it didn’t match reality, wasn’t a risk, right? Just some fantasy drama and gripping at that).
So, the mind-control IS absolutely intentional, and is IMHO linked to CIA spawn Facebook getting such a free ride with its privacy-abuse, Microsoft also (helped spooks more than the legal minimum and arguably left backdoors in, and abused customers privacy on their behalf for decades)
If one wishes to get into the history of what organised Globalist powers want for the world, then feel free. They exist and haven’t gone away AFAIK (which is little, I am too busy to research to high standards of integrity which is a must).
People just LIE so much when they get a scary little clue as to what might be happening in the world, don’t they? Is why one shouldn’t give power to cowards (and most women are cowards, but most men too, including myself at times – I have suffered a LOT personally for speaking out though in my own social realms because people will lash out at emotion-generators instead of asking themselves WHY they feel that way and whether they should shoot the messenger in the first place – even supposed aware and alternative-minded people, it is very sad and frustrating to have to spoon-feed people how to think and judge accurately, because they are so capitalist-oppressed they don’t have the time to learn and discern the truth).
@Myself: Typo:
“who cares if sales are made, right?” =|= (and was supposed to be) “Who cares just as long as ‘sales’ are made, right?”
Even complex algorithms and corporations such a Google can suffer institutional mental illness in the form of biases, obsessions and irrational logic (when viewed with a wide enough, long-term enough lens, of course, which quarterly return culture or even longer-term investment, doesn’t necessarily promote).
you don’t know how to search properly. if ‘retina’ is the key term, it goes first, then the disambiguation (+ipad +iphone) then your qualifier (+feature +display +dpi) then your framework (deluge) without noise (-linux -osx) and you put that string to both bing and google, since bing exercises less censorship and pushes fewer agenda. DON’T SIGN IN to Google or Bing, obviously, and get a proper adblocker.
A not so simple boycott of the net would rattle some big cages. Basically what this on going fiasco of sheepLife is telling me is, go back to your ‘idiot’ programmimg ie: idiot box and resume full sheep behavior. In other words, GET BACK IN YOUR BOX! How dare you think you can think for yourself
MATRIX
It’s 2022 now. I grew up with Google as a search engine. In the 90s: some good search terms, let’s say on a technical product and a bug of it, it brought you to the places-to-be. Relevant fora for instance.
Today, it seems to just use the product name. It will return company pages, shops etc. Maybe there’s an interesting link on page 5 of the search results – idk.
It’s sheer crap.
Google now “dissapears” / anything that isn’t in agreement with whatever government you happen to be suffering under! It’s just an advertising platform blah bla etc etc. Thank goodness for the few privately owned platforms……where we can connect with the Truth…. a bit.
Oh my god, I thought I was the only one seeing how bad this has gotten. I do ceramics in a homemade electric kiln and I am always searching for technical information. I would type in, “Kiln themocouple degradation” and the results included,” Find thermocouple degradation in your area!”, “Lowest prices on thermocouples”, “Quality kilns at low prices!” The sites that did offer content were masquerading as legitimate sites with suspect domain names and generic information, often plagerized from other sources. I miss the good old days of the internet.
Google et al represent themselves as world-wide search engines (Google’s HOME page has a big Google search button), but they are ignoring almost all of the smallest sites on the web. For a given domain, count up the number of pages listed in its sitemap.xml, then do a site:domain search and count how many are returned. For a small site, this is likely less than 10%. Even for so-called SEO experts’ sites, five I did this test for only averaged 28% listed.
Bing is better, but likely less than 40% listed. Proxy search sites like Startpage use Google, so their results are the same sub-10%. DuckDuckGo uses Bing and others, so its results are better but still inadequate.
For big sites, only the first 200 pages are listed by Google. Where is that stated? Do SEO experts even know that, even though many tell their customers to do so?
This makes their search results non-organic, as ignoring most of the vast number of pages of the small sites on the web means that those included by the 15% damping factor is substantially reduced but also biased towards the not-so-unpopular.
This makes their results unreliable, because if they are doing this for your site, they are likely to have left out many pages that might have been returned high or at the top in some of your searches. This all means that if you did come across one of the unlisted pages by another means, searching for it will never find it. Google et al are ghosting the web in favour of popular sites.
Report Google et al to your consumer affairs office with the sitemap.xml vs site: search results for your domain. With all the attention Google et al at receiving from various jurisdictions, perhaps we can get the real damage they are doing to online businesses and other sites corrected as well.
(M)uch like a three year old? There are countless adults like that!
alpha bought google long ago–we knew they would slowly to exploit as many people through Google Search as they could. And they did. –we knew If they did it right out of the gate we would’ve dropped it. ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS, ABSOLUTELY. the only reason people are tolerating for this long this time around is because they are all too busy watching anime, playing games, taking pics or posting memes to care. Then when they are 65 and realize they have zero freedoms left, then it will be a “big deal”