> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.
Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete word soup of search results people type in.
A single mediocre experience optimized to work ‘most of the time’ for ‘most people’ is quite contrary to the narrative that has made Google such tremendous amounts of money (“let us surveil you so that you can have a more personalized experience”) though, isn’t it?
Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are searching for if their past behavior suggests that they mean what they type? Couldn’t the “search only for <exact query>“ option be a very good data point on making that determination automatically, or enabling a user setting for “give me exact results based on what I actually typed by default”?
It seems possible to me that this behavior has more to do with the value of ads for “big” keywords than with (poorly) inferring user intent.
I have a sense that this is the dirty little secret of the spyware advertising industry, personalization just isn't that great. Yeah, putting you into a male or female bucket, parent or child, homeowner or renter, that's worth a little bit. But, to find out your name and address and search history and how long your last bowel movement took, just to deliver an ad that's theoretically hyper-optimized to make you buy something... I just don't believe it.
I don't believe that it's worth anything near what they are charging for it, except perhaps in the case of politics, which has always been an extremely efficient use of money. And even then, it's not worth a tiny fraction of the real cost it has to society.
Netflix has achieved the dream of movie studios going back more than a century now. They have the talent, the money, and more than two decades of data. Netflix knows what you watch, when you stop watching, how often you watch, which movie covers work best.
And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more than a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Netflix should be putting out nothing but hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of Thrones.
Yet they are not. In fact, they do not even have a single show that is to the level of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Wire. HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix. Meanwhile, Netflix is making live action Cowboy Bebop and cancelling it before people even know it existed. I'm really curious what the data said about funding that particular project. On one hand, you have the cult following of the anime that will absolutely tear a live action version to shreds. On the other hand, you have to convince the uninitiated into viewing a remake of 23 year old anime.
Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix catalog than watching content tells you everything you need to know about how little people trust Netflix recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout line. Oh, and, their top 10 feature is currently the biggest recommendation feature on their site. And it's not even personalized! If that's not a complete admission of defeat I don't know what is.
Netflix has produced a lot of fairly solid content. Not at the level of the all-time great prestige TV shows like the ones you mentioned, but enough to keep a lot of subscribers happy for long periods of time at an accessible price. House of Cards (at least until the Kevin Spacey scandal blew up), Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, BoJack Horseman, Disenchantment, etc are a few that come to mind that I watched and enjoyed.
I think Netflix has two big issues. The first is the way they drop seasons all at once prevents the natural cycle of pre-episode hype, post-episode interviews, speculation and leaks, fan anticipation, fan arguments (ship wars, etc), etc. Fan culture can't develop around this content as easily because there's never any breathing space for fans to collectively sit with the story so far. The shows that become a cultural force like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones need us to keep coming back to the conversation every week. They have us talking about what happened last week and will happen this week with our colleagues at work and around the dinner table. How can these Netflix IPs enter stable orbit in the cultural zeitgeist when they're once-a-year events? It devalues the work, positioning it more like a movie that you watch and then forget rather than a story you become invested in over a long period of time.
Full season drops also allow people to binge a whole season of content for a single month's subscription and then immediately churn (ask me how I know). I assume they have some data-driven reasons for doing this, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.
Besides that, I think they should put more wood behind fewer arrows. They've developed a reputation for aggressively cancelling smaller shows with passionate followings which makes a lot of people not even want to bother until something has become an established mainstream success. I think of them now as the Google of content-creation, putting out a lot of solid (but not amazing) products and then cancelling them once people start to grow attached.
Wrote something similar before:
"The writing has been on the wall for some time:
1. Grading system changed from 1-5 to 1-2 (thumbs up/down). They thought that the users where full of crap when rating. I do believe some bosses just looked "bad" when buying in the next Adam Sandler movie. This started a cozy culture where no one in Netflix was wrong. Recommendation engine becomes comically bad, even with the best and the brightest.
2. They started to buy everything under the sun. South park made an episode about it even. All the comedians got their own stand up specials. It was now way easier to get a top score (thumbs up). Bosses where happy.
3. As they no longer focuses on quality which they no longer can measure (measuring time watched and churn is not that useful!), they start to strive for quantity. Which is expensive, very expensive.
I guess that in the next decade Netflix will become the next Comcast and cost 35 USD per month, and it all started in an innocent change to the grading system."
That's not how the entertainment business works. If I had to guess, Netflix's data-driven approach to content production is like card-counting in blackjack. It only gives them a slight edge on the house. A net positive outcome over hundreds or thousands of hands but offering no guarantee over the outcome of any single hand.
> HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix
Netflix did win the most Emmys in 2021.[1] And they only started producing original content in 2013 or so. That's pretty good.
> Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix catalog than watching content tells you everything you need to know about how little people trust Netflix recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout line.
They may also be optimizing for revenues as opposed to recommendation quality (homegrown content being cheaper than licensed)
Part of this might just be account switching issues though. If I’m watching for myself I can usually find what I want quickly. The problem comes when I’m trying to browse with my wife to find something we can both live with. At best it gives the my preferences and the Union of me + wife’s preferences (and vice versa on her account.) But what we’d really want is a separate recommendation feed that shows the intercept of me + wife’s preferences.
But most people are lazy and won’t account switch for different contexts like that anyway, so there’s just no way they can keep the profile data as clean as it needs to be for a television.
Netflix is not recommending what they think you'll like, they are recommending what they want you to watch. Once you're a subscriber, they want to keep you there as cheaply as possible.
This is exactly what their data analytics has told them to do.
Have a few popular, quality tv shows with star-studded casts as loss-leaders to bring in new viewers. Otherwise the model is to produce and recommend the shows that get them the most eyeballs per dollar; the bare-minimum to keep their subscribers there:
- Stand up specials are dirt-cheap, quite popular, and provide never-ending variety.
- Ditto with 'reality' shows, bake-offs, make-offs, expose documentaries, etc.
- Old sitcoms and b-movies that have a proven re-watch-rate.
Throw in a handful of first seasons to keep the FOMO up, and you've got a captive audience on the cheap. Maybe one or two will catch on and become the next loss-leaders.
They may not have the quality shows that are 'running laps around' HBO and AMC, but by any of the metrics Netflix cares about they are simply running laps around HBO, AMC and everyone else.
>And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more than a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Netflix should be putting out nothing but hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of Thrones.
I don't follow this argument. Knowing what people like has very little to do with the quality of original creative content; surely you don't expect Goodreads to put out Shakespearean novels, or Spotify to be producing original hits on par with the Rolling Stones? Should ESPN have better pro sports scouting and coaching talent than the professional leagues?
Knowing what people like, however, _does_ have to do quite a bit with selling those people a product - which Netflix just reported 15% YoY growth to $7.7B yearly revenue, they're clearly very successful to this end. I think you actually have it backwards - if anything, Netflix represents a total fulfillment of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Despite mediocre original content, this is a $200B company with 200M subscribers growing revenues by double digits two decades after IPO.
If Netflix paid $450k+ salaries to screenwriters instead of engineers, you'd very likely get better movies on a worse streaming platform. And when Netflix has shelled out for Hollywood talent, like Mindhunter which has David Fincher and Charlize Theron, the results are quite good.
Regardless, to take the fact that Netflix pays for premium engineering and analytics talent, but does not pay for premium filmmaking talent, and then spin that fact into Netflix being "a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization" is a questionable criticism.
Strong comment. I agree completely with your negative assessment of the “value” of consumer habits to optimize Netflix recommendation. In my own case I feel trapped in a very shallow local minimum. Yes I watched a revenge flick or two but now I am type-cast for life.
Netflix really doesn't need to produce something like the wire or mad men or breaking bad. There's no reason to make a show that appeals strongly to 70% of the market when they could make 70 shows that 1% of the market is fanatical about. They don't have only one channel that competes for content and they don't seem budget limited.
Ironically, it seems like AmazonPrime is far better at that.
As for then top ten being bottom barrel stuff, I think you overestimate how popular mad men was vs. something like king of queens.
I will say, Netflix seems to fail in many cases, and I don't understand how they think content discovery is supposed to work.
Right, people radically overestimate how much a profile is worth. Someone who owns a house in a rich area is somewhat easy to identify, and you target them... along with everyone else who is also trying to reach that rich slice, so you pay more.
The very high quality pieces of information can be things like "wants to buy a life insurance policy this week" or "just had a baby" or "just bought a plane ticket to XYZ," or "is in the frequent flyer program and spends more than $20,000 per year on travel."
However the majority of information about people, the overwhelming majority of whom have no significant disposable income, is worthless and not worth tracking for the most part. You reach those people through traditional mass marketing means.
It's a great point you have made. I work technically as a data scientist, but my domain is scientific data. I have quite a few GitHub packages and get recruiter calls for data science jobs almost every week, with pretty generous salary offers.
And from what it seems to me, there is a giant bubble. The vast majority of companies doing "data science" jobs are things that a smart undergrad can do with a month or two of training. And this is because I believe C-suites have completely gulped down the data is oil mantra. There are entirely charlatan companies with unicorn, even decacorn valuations now being built on this mantra - for example, CRED in India.
Yet, as you said, and as I believe too, most of the data is worthless.
Right, but unlike oil, most data is worthless most of the time.
For example, I'm about to list my house on the market. The real estate agents who reached out to me last year and the year before that to try to induce me to sell the house had no chance of succeeding. Now is the time if they knew the secret that I'm about the list the house that they should all be competing for my business. The only relevant piece of information is that I'm about to sell the house. That is a valuable lead that many in my region would bid on. My background information is frankly not that relevant to the value of that lead, and isn't something that is readily surfaced by the kind of deep profiling that is supposed to be going on. It can be signaled by me signing up to some kind of list that sells my lead to a zillion people at once, but is never going to be surfaced accurately to the people who can earn the most profits from it by my Youtube habits or whatever.
Zillow sells the logged in user data in the market I'm buying in to the real estate agents listing the houses, but that again is not something being modeled by some kind of big data operation, but is merely the same kind of "little data" provided on things like dating websites or LinkedIn when people browse your profile. There's no modeling going on there that requires sophistication.
> However the majority of information about people, the overwhelming majority of whom have no significant disposable income, is worthless...
I've had a supposition for a while now that the targeted advertising industry should be closing the consumer cashflow loop by advertising effective self- and employment improvement, with the objective of increasing the disposable income people have so they can then make more brokering traditional sales
>I have a sense that this is the dirty little secret of the spyware advertising industry, personalization just isn't that great.
Personalized adverts and recommendations can be incredibly, horrendously dumb.
Here's what I see when I hit amazon's homepage at the moment :
A "buy once again" column that features blackout curtains I bought 3 months ago (no, curtains don't need to be replaced every months, amazon.), USB cables I bought multiples of in the same time frame, a wireless charger (I already bought two before).
An entire line dedicated to showing me backpacks (I bought one less than a year ago)
An entire line dedicated to headphones (I recently bought wireless IEMs)
An entire line dedicated to watches (same)
I don't get it. Supposedly the best and brightest work at firms like amazon and google to brainwash us to buy stuff, but classic, random, non-targeted advertisement is more likely to make me discover products I'd buy than targeted advertisement because the latter only shows me things after I don't need to buy them anymore!
Here's what I would expect actually intelligent targeted advertising to do :
After buying a smartphone, recommend accessories (cases, screen protectors, USB-C dongles, chargers, whatever)
Here's what targeted advertisement actually does :
show me smartphones ads everywhere I go after I already selected and BOUGHT a smartphone. No, I don't need to buy another smartphone weeks after a recent replacement, amazon!
The same sort of phenomenon can happen after google locks on searches I did to buy something. I can't wait to see the internet advertisement industry crash and burn, it's overvalued nonsense.
A "buy once again" column that features blackout curtains I bought 3 months ago no, curtains don't need to be replaced every months, amazon.),
Disagree there. About 75% of the things I buy on Amazon are repeating purchases that I nevertheless don't want to be automatically scheduled. It used to be a real pain in the neck to reorder something manually, so I'm glad they made that easier.
But yes, in general, Amazon is full of low-hanging fruit that's been neglected on the tree for a decade or more. Buying clothes from Amazon still manages to be a worse experience than going to the mall, for instance, which is really saying something.
I think the fact that most recommendation algorithms have seemingly converged on what seems like a really poor and naive implementation - fixation on very recent activity - shows that the sort of deep personalization touted is mostly BS.
Both YouTube and Amazon heavily personalize by recommending primarily the 3-4 things that I've interacted with in the very recent past.
This is not true. For example every time Summoning Salt uploads a video, which happens every few months, it will show up on my recommend feed because YouTube knows I'm willing to watch their ~1 hour documentaries even though I'm not subscribed to them.
Youtube seems to be a rare exception here in that people actually feel like its algorithm is useful. However, even then, their algorithm mostly seems to devolve to "what creators have you usually watched videos from" and (usually directly after you watch such a video) "what videos did other people who watched that video watch?" Basically the same principle as PageRank, just with a lot less spam to deal with.
This could (probably isn't) be a very quick implementation with a heuristic like 'if percentage of viewed videos from channel x (essentially per channel viewed) > threshold ==> show new video from channel x on homepage next time user appears.
Make it fancy and use a multi armed bandit and call it machine learning/AI/data science.
The most common pattern I see relating to personalized advertising as someone being advertised to is that I will often see an ad for something I just bought (or some competitor to it) repeated relentlessly for a couple of days after buying it and this is after not seeing any related ads during the days prior where I was actually doing some research into the product space.
Maybe I'm an outlier but they seem to miss the window of relevance on me often enough that I notice it as a commonly repeated pattern.
I know it seems moronic, but I think it might actually make sense from the advertisers point of view. Some percentage of people who buy a thing are going to return it and buy something similar in the next week. That percentage is almost certainly large compared to the percentage of the overall population who's going to buy that thing in the next week, and it seems plausible to me it's even large compared to the number of people who have been browsing for the thing but haven't bought yet. (Think of it as the ratio of people just browsing vs ready to buy.)
Even so, wouldn't it be much smarter if they kept track of what the expected life expectancy of the thing you bought is, and then years later start feeding you ads for a replacement? Or is it too hard to track people over such a long period of time?
I don't think any advertisers would be able to offer "People who bought a washing machine 3 years ago" as a category that can be targeted without a riot
Same experience. What's even more mystifying is that often it is for items that no human would be likely to be buying many copies of in a short span of time (high ticket items, or items where you probably don't need more than one).
Just because I bought something doesn't mean I kept it. And those 0.1%, or whatever, returning items are very likely to buy another one of a different brand.
Exactly. If I just bought some power tool for a home improvement project, I am the least likely person in the country to want to buy that exact same power tool the next day.
Not if you hate it and want to return it. In fact there’s a calculation to be made - what percentage of people return or dislike their drill? Because that subset of the population is probably more likely to be looking to buy one than any other.
A return rate of say 1% may lead to more people looking to buy a drill who have just bought one in the last week than people looking to buy their first drill.
> In fact there’s a calculation to be made - what percentage of people return or dislike their drill?
If that's true, they left something out of their calculation: What percentage of people will install an adblocker as a result of feeling like they're being hounded for a few weeks? This scenario was mentioned specifically by Tim Cook when he introduced the Safari anti-tracking features.
I haven't consumed significant amounts of ads in a long time, only some logos in sports and the occasional visit to family or the rare times adblock fails (YouTube premium user too). So I can only imagine how hilarious that must be.
I think you're right. I'd like to see an analysis of the effectiveness of personalised advertising based on tracking versus ads based purely on local context. The latter being if you're on a web page about birds then you get ads for bird seed and bird houses. No tracking involved.
It's always fun watching an ad system try to figure out nonbinary people. Spotify ads can't decide whether I'm a successful businessman or Spanish-speaking housewife.
It's always fun checking Google's ad settings and seeing what they think I'm into.
Apparently now I'm into baseball, flowers, boating, celebrities, country music, credit cards, geology, event ticket sales, fishing, and windows OS. Among a couple hundred other things. It even gets some rather basic facts (marital status, company size, education) wrong. I seriously wonder how they generate this profile?
Well... It actually got some categories right, but I don't really feel that's very impressive considering that it put me in every category by the looks of it.
It fascinates me to see how the ad algorithm responds to people who watch content in multiple languages. I study a lot of languages as a hobby, so I often watch YouTube videos that are in Mandarin, like news broadcasts and niche hobby channels. YouTube has now started showing me ads (in Mandarin) which seem to be targeted to Mandarin-speaking immigrant parents of young children who want a way to teach them Mandarin despite my, and my spouse’s, very busy careers. I find this amusing because I am a single, pasty white man in my 20s.
That’s just Spotify. Many years ago they had a little tool that actually reported what demographic slots it pegged you at based on your listening preferences. The top two hits for me were 1.) early 20s, college educated, White, woman 2.) 60+, blue collar, African American, male
At the time I was a late 20s, college educated, South Asian male. I’m very cis and very straight. And yeah my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, but that was a weird profile to settle me on.
Some people fit in convenient buckets, but lots of people don't, and assuming all people do, will make the ad system useless to a lot of people. Even if you're not non-binary at all, you could still be a successful businesswoman or a Spanish-speaking houseman (househusband? stay-at-home dad?).
Better to just follow people's interests, instead of using their interests to incorrectly pigeonhole them and then drawing incorrect generalisations from that.
Something about my actual interests and activity apparently makes youtube think I'm into Fox news and all the crazy shit found there.
Now, who else has this same value judgement about me? This assessment that I neither declared for myself nor even ratified.
It's annoying but ultimately harmless that youtube shows me conservative wackjob stuff.
But is that same profile in someone else's database that marks me as someone to watch or something? Does it affect my insurance rates, my liklihood to get extra scrutiny when travelling, my ability to purchase or register a firearm, my access to jobs that might be extra sensitive or responsible, basically any of the things where someone either private or the state does any sort of background or credit check on you for any reason, and there are really many of those when you think a out it.
I'm guessing, today, it's probably not really affecting my life in any real way, but, there is no way it makes any sense to say that will still be true tomorrow.
There was that infamous case of a retailer figuring out someone was pregnant before they did based on what they were buying and mailing a customized flyer...to their dad's house. I don't remember the exact situation, but it probably wasn't the only incident.
That btw is an anecdote from the association mining community.
I spent a lot of time learning about association rule mining in my AI courses, including the implementation details of competing ways to mine them. The technique seems extremely useful and fascinating (I jury rigged it for on the fly league of legends champ recommendations to maximize calculated win rate change given limited information), but I almost never see it used in the real world or even see it talked about anymore.
I believe you're referring to a rumor (which may be true, I just mean it in the sense that it's out there and not something you or I have verified) about Target.
My experience working in a similar domain (NLP summarization, which leverages methods like text rank which are identical to pagerank but for text summation) is similar.
Personalized page rank is not significantly better at summarization in my experience, even "queryable" summarization, but that also could be a pure implementation problem or a problem of hyperparamater selection...
Does it really work so well in politics? I've read in various places that a lot of political advertising in America functions basically as a means for channeling donors' money to a few K Street firms belonging to party insiders.
I agree with you. I highly doubt that our economy has enough (product, message) combinations to justify the need for personalization based on more than a dozen attributes.
I will buy X, if I need X. And once I buy X, it's done. For example, I wanted a cordless drill last week. Did the "site:reddit.com" thing (I actually have been doing that almost subconsciously now, as Google results are all trash), chose a drill, and ordered one off Amazon.
Then, after that, what's the point in showing drill ads to me for two weeks?
There's a well known effect in advertising that advertising a product to a person that has already bought that product generally increases their satisfaction with the product and the purchase, and may cause them to recommend the product to others.
Probably that's what they are going for if they're doing it on purpose.
> There's a well known effect in advertising that advertising a product to a person that has already bought that product generally increases their satisfaction with the product and the purchase, and may cause them to recommend the product to others.
Do you have a link for further reading on that? That's fascinating if true.
It's not supposed to feel good. If 9/10 people have a brief negative thought about the advertising experience and nothing else happens, but 1/10 people happen to have their friend on the phone at the time and makes a referral, then overall that is a win for the brand.
It's pretty straightforward to understand that when the vast majority of your sites income is generated from ad revenue, that data is being used to optimize for generating ad clicks, etc., rather than actually giving users the best/most relevant/useful/desireable information for their purposes.
From the behavior of ads (that I imagine are highly optimized), all that knowledge is useful for front-running an specific TV model all over your internet once you decide to buy a TV.
It seems to be completely useless for anything else, and specifically harmful for product discovery, that is the one way ads add societal value.
I worked for a healthcare recruitment company in a capital city with some large hospitals and a number of universities. I can't for the life of me understand why they chose to spend so much money on trying to track healthcare professionals online when they could just advertise it on-premise where they actually hang out.
I can't understand why every company want me offer “personalized” service. It never works, and if I can't manually set preferences, then it's not personalized (because “personalization” means exactly that).
Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are searching for...
You're missing what "personalization" has come to really mean. It means knowing enough about the user to give them an experience you can profit from and which they will accept. If there isn't something you can expect profit from, there's no reason to give them anything.
This used to be solved by allowing queries like `Class Inheritance +ruby' to require results to include "ruby". They killed this for Google+ by changing it to quotes, so `Class Inheritance "ruby"' but now they interpret even those. When I use Google, which is less and less, I am not looking for a fight with a computer to express my intent, I'm looking for the answer to a question. That never seemed to be an issue until recently.
I work for Google Search. If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase. Nothing has changed in this. When it happens that people feel it fails, it's often that they don't realize we've matched that word or phrase appearing in ALT text or text that's appearing in a less visible part of the page -- or in a few cases, the page might have changed since we indexed it.
> If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase.
I'm sorry to tell you, but this is flat wrong. I commented[1] about this a few months back with a random phrase as an example. I see it often in my day to day also.
I searched for "eggzackly this" and all 10 results on the first page contain the phrase, although most have punctuation in the middle.
Looking at all 22 results (without opening the "omitted results" section or image results), the phrase became harder to find off the first page, but I tended to find it in the source code, or the DOM, or the cached version of the page, or by disabling JS (sometimes requiring a combination of those techniques). I found it in 21 out of the 22. The one page I couldn't find it in (the dolls one) looks like a frequently updating page, and it was highlighted in the snippet, so it looks like it was there at the time of crawling but not now; the cache isn't there for that page.
Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.
Punctuation matters. I explained this in another response, and I should have mentioned it as part of my response here. But to repeat, these are typical reasons why it might seem that quoted search isn't matching when it is:
1) text appears in ALT text
2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text)
3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat"
4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)
In the [eggzackly this], you found matches of those words separated by punctuation -- which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched.
I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.
The article has been updated with a response from Danny Sullivan, the person you're responding to, which is worth a read.
I just tested "eggzackly this" and every result on the first page contains the string "eggzackly this", albeit usually with different punctuation ("Eggzackly. This [...]", "Eggzackly, this.", "Eggzackly! This [...]")
I'm sorry but this has absolutely changed. I'm not sure why but quite often we are suggested results in queries that ignore quotes. The engine is even telling us that if omitted those terms.
We don't have control over this and it's very frustrating.
We haven't changed anything. Promise. Honest. Not at all. But we definitely want to look into any cases where people feel this isn't working, so actual examples (if people are comfortable sharing) will really help.
What you're talking about is probably a case where there's a quoted word or phrase as well as other words that aren't quoted. In such a case, we're going to absolutely look for content that matches the quoted parts. That's a must. The other words, we'll look for them, but we'll also look for related words and sometimes, we might find content that doesn't match one of them.
Because those other words aren't quoted, we'll tell you if we find a match that seems helpful but doesn't contain those non-quoted words. That's what the message is about. But it should never be telling you we omitted a quoted word or phrase because we won't -- with one exception.
If there's literally nothing on the web we know of that matches a quoted word or phrase, then we're not going to show anything at all and say we couldn't match any documents.
I tried to find a counterexample and I couldn't! I believe you that quotes really are working. What's confusing though is that a quoted word or phrase often doesn't show up in the Google results snippets. This is certainly the reason why people think quotes aren't being respected.
Though, why does enabling "Verbatim" (in tools) on a search reduce the number of search results if all my terms are already quoted? Enabling Verbatim often does it make it feels like my queries are interpreted more literally, but if quotes are already being respected I don't understand how Verbatim would reduce the number of search results.
I agree, it would be easier if it were in the snippet. That's something we're looking at. I believe it used to, but sometimes the quoted part might not have been the best overall snippet to use. But as said, we might revisit that.
On the counts -- basically, it's all really rough estimates. We make a rough quick count, you go deeper into the page, we make a fresh estimate. It can change, and it doesn't always make sense and personally, I'd hope we just get rid of counts because of this, perhaps more confusing than helpful.
Interestingly I tried my pet peeve search, and it worked for the first time this year! It is for a specific recipe, and I search for 'ocau slow cooked balsamic beef'. I have had to manually find it in the archive of the overclockers.com.au forum for the past year, as Google seemingly forgot it existed no matter what search terms or operators I used.
The main difference is I am using Firefox on Manjaro and not my historically typical environment for searching. Normally I would either be using Chrome on Windows or Chrome on iOS if I am in the kitchen.
I will play around on some other devices and see what evidence I can find.
P.s. I'm being referred in for a role at Google currently, is the Search team only in a specific area like Silicon Valley or is it a global team? Most of the jobs in Australia seem to be commercial facing, not product facing.
Glad to hear that works! Search has teams around the world. I'd suggest if you see something relevant, apply even if it's in a particular location. Remote work has changed a lot things.
Hey, thanks for much for this comment. I've personally experienced this and looked myself for an example when I first read your comment, but I couldn't find one.
Today I stumbled upon one. Here's a broken example query: linux next hop "[::]"
This is not the case in my experience. I type a query with some parts in quotes and often get lots of results that have in small letters at the bottom something along the lines of “does not include <word in quotes>”, with no in bold highlighted part showing the phrase in the page context. This was not the case in the past and google made sure the word I put in quotes is absolutely mentioned somewhere
I’m guessing this happens when there are less results matching my phrase
I would love if you or anyone who ever has this happen can share an example, if you're comfortable doing so. We'll debug. But if you quote something, we shouldn't show anything but that which matches the quoted material.
Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted part and the other things are optional. So when you see that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably has one or more of the other words or related words you didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those non-quoted words at all."
And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted words.
Totally agree it would help if we did a better job bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't include them if there's better text to describe the page overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.
Unless it's changed in the past 56 minutes, the SERP is pretty up-front that it can't find any pages with all three of those.
It literally says `No results found for "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly".` right at the top, and then shows you the (properly explained) results for the non-quoted version of the query.
Mobile doesn't show that, at all. It also doesn't show that bit if you use the brand name "kitchenboss" instead of "kitchen boss", which I originally intended. My phone might have auto-corrected that without me noticing.
Anyway, with the terms I posted earlier, on desktop it says:
Results for kitchen boss g320 disassembly (without quotes):
It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search
Then it goes on to show me lots of unrelated results, instead of showing me the 'not many' great matches for my search. If my search doesn't turn up many good results (let alone great), that fine. Show me what you've got, let me decide how to broaden my search to get more. All of the unrelated results being shown are marketing spam sites. That's not helpful.
On mobile and desktop, I'm getting a message saying that when you search for ["kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly"] that we have no results. And there's not much we can do if there are no pages we find that match all those words you required be present. There just aren't the pages.
What we can do is try searching for all of the words, so perhaps you'll find something useful that way. But even we can tell when doing this that the results might not be what you want, which is why that automatic warning about maybe these aren't great matches.
IE: we can't show you what we've got for a query where there are no exact matches. It's impossible. We can show you what we got if we don't require all the word be present. And we can tell you what we're doing. And you always have the choice to restart the query in another way if you don't like that.
Now here's something else. You probably used the quotes because I'm guessing you figured it was better to tell us exactly what to do than trust us to look at all the words and analyze the context and so on and see if we could make matches generally. If you had done that, just searched for [kitchen boss g320 disassembly], then the first web page result is the instruction manual for your sous vide machine. It has cleaning steps, which I'm guessing also might be what you're after? (It looks like it's just take off the outer casing).
Those results, doing it directly like that, are different than when we gave them to you after your quoted search failed. and that's probably because when you gave us quotes, and there were no matches, we might have tried some stricter matching to keep closer to the original requirements rather than use our general ranking.
To wrap up: maybe don't try the quotes at first. It's totally fine to type in a long natural language query like [how do I take apart a kitchen boss g320] and if you do that, the instruction manual is right there.
I added the quotes because I wasn't getting what I wanted without them. I don't need the user manual; I already have that and I'm not just trying to clean it. I wanted to find a guide to fully disassembling it, like the videos you find for phones when you want to replace a cracked screen yourself. Knowing that there are no matches at all is good information. (Disappointing, but good.) Trying to give me results for a different query, apparently assuming that I accidentally used the exact-match-only quotes, is not useful and kind of condescending. I think that's what leads people to think the quotes don't work the way they used to. Finally, the wording about not many good matches makes it sound like there are some good matches, but they've been mixed in with these other irrelevant matches. That's probably just a wording issue on the message, trying to soften the "We can't find anything" result.
Thanks for the additional information. It really helps understanding the situation.
Showing results for non-quoted words isn't intended to be condescending nor an indication that we think someone made a mistake. Apologies that it comes across that way.
We think we're clearly saying there are no matches with the "No results found" message. If we stopped there, the page would have nothing else. And I get that for you -- and perhaps others -- that might be preferable, a further reinforcement that there's nothing out there.
For others, not so helpful. They potentially might give up with no real way of going forward, when just losing the quotes perhaps could get them useful information.
And I get the trade-off concerns. I've seen many comments here that things done to support less "pro" users are annoying. And yet, we do need to find a way to support everyone. I think that's why we've probably gone with the message about no matches with and showing the quotes.
Perhaps we should consider making that an option -- "Would you like to try this search again without quotes."
As for the message about not good matches, we always try to show the best stuff we have first. That's the point of our ranking. The warning is meant to indicate that even though we'll list the best we have, for that query, none of it is particularly helpful -- not that here are a bunch of results, and there's some good matches mixed in with poor ones. Ranking that way would make no sense.
But it might be also that we're so close to it -- that we always try to rank the most useful stuff first -- that we didn't consider the interpretation you had. So thank you again, it's really helpful to get that feedback.
Sorry the information doesn't appear to be out there. I hope if you disassemble it on your own, you'll post the info out to the open web. I'm pretty sure you'd end up ranking well for that and helping others who might have a similar need.
Weird. On a computer, `"kitchenboss" "g320" "disassembly"` returns exactly six results, all of which appear to include the quoted terms. Plus the "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" message at the top. Which sounds like exactly what you want. I wonder why it's different on mobile.
So, besides the possibility that you are flat out wrong (as another commentator claims you may be), let's assume that you're right.
1. This is still horrific UX/UI
2. The culture internally at Google seems to have a "we know better than the users" attitude in all things.
3. Query rewriting is a horrific technique in general with almost zero value to life/society outside of fixing spelling errors. Whatever your A/B testing says about it's purported utility is polluted by Google's own dark patterns and political whims of the managers who run the internal search organizations.
It helps to actually know better than your users if you want to take the attitude in number 2. I don't believe that you or Google knows better than it's users, for many reasons previously enumerated in this thread and others.
One day Google search is going to be displaced and it's current utilization of query rewriting techniques will be one of the fundamental reasons for this.
You should take the absolutely massive amount of recent criticism and the fact that users repeatedly claim it's happening in the face of your claim it's not seriously rather than literally blaming the users writ large for a problem that is fundementally with the behavior of Google search.
I routinely see queries with quoted keywords where results don't have them highlighted in the snippets on the results page (but do have other, non-quoted keywords highlighted!).
That doesn't mean the quoted words weren't present in the content. It just means our system didn't think creating a snippet around those words was the most relevant snippet. Which I get, in some cases, actually would be better. It's something we're looking at.
Your system for snippet creation is so bad that according to you it's created a situation where many, many users believe that quotes don't work because of how bad it is.
Please fix it, like now. Displace your teams current sprint priorities, or the anti-google search backlash will turn into a situation where in 2025 Google is on the defensive for search market share from a Phoenix rising yahoo or something like that.
The fact that anyone at Google ever okayed this behavior at all in the first place is simply rage inducing and you should see that with the magnitude and persistence of the "actually it really doesn't work bro" kind of comments.
If a snippet doesn't contain the words I searched for, I don't click it, because I assume Google has fucked up the search again and given me some irrelevant thing. If that is what has actually changed in the last few years making people think results are bad, the snippet algorithm, please revert that. I want to see the exact context that the words I typed appear in the page.
In some cases? I'm literally asking for a specific word to be included no matter what; how could it be irrelevant to the quote used to describe a page?
Snippets we show tend to focus on full-sentences or enough context to describe what a page is about or relevant to a search. If we have a match that's strongest simply because a quoted term appears in ALT text or some obscure menu item, that probably doesn't generate a compelling snippet in how we normally would measure things. But given that for someone doing that quoting, seeing the quoted area might be the most important thing. So the regularly snippet process isn't as helpful -- and it's something we'll look at.
I don't have any recent information on how google search works, but years ago it looked at the expertise level of the searcher. So newbies received newbie results, advanced searchers received advanced results (and more visibility into filtering functionality). Today... they're hiding the advanced features and also seem to be reducing personalization of results to save compute resources. It's horrible.
You: Class Inheritance +ruby
Google: searching for "cash inheritance..."
I work for Google Search -- we never operated like this. We don't know that someone is somehow a "newbie" vs and "advanced" searcher and change (nor did change) the results somehow.
This is very helpful if I search for a name I didn't quite pick up or don't know how to spell, or if I only remember fragments of a quote or topic, then I just blurt out my stream of consciousness and Google will mostly point me in the right direction. That being said, I wish I could explicitly tell Google to treat my query more literally. Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some kind of grammar. They have these kinds of prompt mechanics for GPT3, so I doesn't seem too unrealistic, even if it's all ML nowadays.
I work for Google Search. We have several ways for you to do this. The easies is to put quotes around a word or a phrase that you absolutely, positively want to be present in content retrieved. And yes -- it still works. It really really does, but if you or anyone finds an example where you believe it doesn't, please let me know. We'll debug it. The reasons people sometimes think it's not working is because the text appears in ALT text, or it appears in text that's not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text), or there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat") or sometimes a page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available). You can also use verbatim mode from the toolbar so that we search for only the exact words you provide.
I don’t think op meant it literally, but the fact that the results are so keyword stuffed that despite “appearing” on the page they are actually irrelevant to the page and thus useless.
Have you tried this? It immediately turns verbatim off. For everyone! It's been like this forever. Years and years. Gaslighting won't help here!
In terms of quotes, again, this does NOT work like +, like verbatim. If it did, then that term would absolutely show up, just as it is, in search results. Yet, over the years I've seen:
- aliasing happen from within quotes (EG, bob -> robert)
- quotes entirely ignored (eg, those terms NOT showing up)
Yet searching with verbatim on, immediately causes those quoted words to appear!
You are absolutely gaslighting people on this! Right now, in this thread. And if it isn't intentional, if you aren't gaslighting, then how can you not even notice that verbatim turns off, the second you select a date range?
I want to say so much more here, but it's filled with such ... vitriol, that I think my terminal would melt.
I'm not trying to gaslight anyone. And what would be the point? To say something works if it demonstrably doesn't work?
Yes, I tried this for some of the presets before I replied. It worked. It still works.
My sincere apologies for not specifically testing custom date range option as well. I should have; you are correct. That won't work. I'll pass it on to see if there's a way it can. My apologies again.
If you need to do this another way, what I also said works. Do it in the search bar using the before/after command. Just quote all the words, and that's the same as verbatim.
It's like you're just spouting Google propaganda, without validating what you're saying. Just like with vertabim/date range, which has been a thing for close ot a decade, which Google has received endless reports about, this too does not do what you say.
Your responses are akin to those canned responses one gets when you post a bad review. "So sorry, please contact us here at this email address.", which of course is all about impression, and results in nothing ever happening.
This has been going on almost a decade, yet oh what, no, haha is your response.
Verbatim mode means we search for exactly the terms you put into the box. Quoting terms means we search for exactly the quoted terms. That's what I meant by them being them same.
So if you did this search in verbatim:
[search for this]
It's the same as:
["search" "for" "this"]
in terms of the instructions we're getting on what to retrieve -- look for content that has all of those words and only those words. No spell check. No synonyms. Just those words.
The ranking of the results might differ, because we probably use slightly different ranking systems when using verbatim versus quoted words. But in either case, the retrieval requirement is the same. Results should have all the required words.
I don't really see what the link above is saying to somehow refute all this. That link is about a quoted search for ["eggzackly this"] and nothing to do with verbatim mode. And it says that it found those two words in that order with punctuation...
Which is what I explained elsewhere in this (now huge) thread. But to give it again:
Typically the reasons people believe quotes are not working when they are is because:
1) text appears in ALT text
2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text)
3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat"
4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)
In the [eggzackly this] example, that's what was happening as the poster saw -- we found those words separated by punctuation, which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched.
Personally, I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.
Most important -- quotes SHOULD work as you and others are expecting. We WANT them to work that way. That's why we spend time looking at these reports saying they're not. I have spent lots of time doing just that. We find the matches. But if anyone believes they aren't working, and the reasons involved above aren't happening, let me know. We'll get on it. We want them to work as expected, and we want everyone to feel they're working that way.
For additional clarity, quoting has always, always, always been different than +, and verbatim. When you(Google) removed +, so that 'google+ searches' could work without interference, quoting was already a thing, and people were just told by some airhead googler "Oh, but quoting is the same! Just use that!"
It wasn't. It isn't. I never has been. Ever.
Verbatim was introduced to replicate that lost + functionality, after massive outrage at the inability to find search results. The fact that you, and other Googlers still think "" is the same as verbatim/+, when it doesn't even show the same search results, is highly, highly questionable.
To be beyond blunt, you're wrong. You are completely and totally wrong. +/verbatim and "" are not the same thing.
Please go away, and learn how your own product works, before commenting on it, ok?
At the time, + was used to require that something be present. Quotes were used to require words appear in a particular order. You could do a search where you quoted a phrase, but that didn't necessarily require it to be present (as I recall). If you absolutely wanted the quoted phrase to be there, you had to quote and put a + in front of the quoted phrase. So yes, they were different things.
When + was eliminated, quotes took its place. Quoting a single word was the same as when you used to + a word -- find the exact word. Quoting a phrase still meant find the phrase, but that also meant it was required to find the phrase.
With +, then with quotes and with verbatim, it's about what you retrieve. Verbatim says get these words or words and only those words. Quoting says get these words and only those words (and only those words in a particular order, if you indicate that). Just like + used to mean get these words and only these words.
The ranking of results might vary when you quote versus verbatim, but what you're asking to be retrieved is the same to us.
At the time, + was used to require that something be present
When + was eliminated, quotes took its place. Quoting a single word was the same as when you used to + a word -- find the exact word. Quoting a phrase still meant find the phrase, but that also meant it was required to find the phrase.
No, quoting did not take its place. At all. That's why verbatim was introduced, after outrage. Google claimed it did, but it still aliased. It still decided to provide results without quotes.
Again, this is why verbatim was born. From that "Google no longer gives precise results, ever" angst.
I can confirm what bbarnett says about date ranges and verbatim. Turning on a date range toggles verbatim off. Turning on verbatim toggles the date range off. It's impossible to enable them both.
As for the quoting, it should work. And if you have an example where it's not, please let me know. Quoting is designed to exact match. It shouldn't produce synonym matches, correct misspellings, find content that's not on the page as we saw it when indexed (I think I did say one confusing part is that if there's punctuation, that gets dropped when matching).
I read the article, and the HN comment it links to, but didn't find an example in either, and it doesn't match my experience. Does someone have a concrete example when using quotes results in pages not containing the search terms?
I work for Google Search, and as I shared elsewhere, quoting still works. It really does. If you or anyone finds an example where you believe it doesn't, please let me know, and we'll debug. Typically the reasons people believe it is not working is because:
1) text appears in ALT text
2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text)
3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat"
4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)
I believe you! (see my other comment in response to the original one).
But it seems people don't (my original comment is being heavily downvoted because of this). And although they can't submit even one example, the fact that they don't believe you is obviously a symptom of a bigger problem.
For some reason, Google is losing the trust of power users.
No results containing all your search terms were found.
- few results with quotes, not more without quotes:
Your search did not match any documents.
It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search
Tip: Try using words that might appear on the page you’re looking
for. For example, "cake recipes" instead of "how to make a cake."
- no results with quotes, but results without quotes: Google says that the search with quotes didn't find anything, and that they searched without quotes instead.
I have yet to find any instance where Google corrects the inside of quotes without any warning.
Google has been regularly ignoring quotes for at least 5 years, probably longer. That was one of the biggest factors for me dropping it as my main search engine.
That's like speaking to little children, that are learning to talk, reproducing their errors. Some adults believe that it's cute, but it's idiotic, confuses the babies and make their progress more difficult and slow.
I don’t think this means anything for the point you wanted to make about search results, but please note you’re exactly wrong about baby talk! It’s not a good analogy.
Baby talk (or CDS, child-directed speech) helps engage their attention and provides valuable feedback. Kids who experience less CDS develop language more slowly.
N = 3, we intentionally never baby talked to our kids, and spent a lot more time reading them novels and other things without pictures or simplified language than (I'd guess) most people do (we did also do plenty of picture books), and their language development was in all three cases way ahead of schedule.
Could just be luck (well, genetics, probably) I guess. Maybe they'd have developed even faster if we'd used baby talk. One shitty thing about parenting is it's really hard to tell what helped, what hurt, and what didn't matter at all.
>...their language development was in all three cases way ahead of schedule.
I would put a lot more of it to having (seemingly) engaged parents. Even a backwards strategy enacted by a loving parent who is consistently trying their best is likely to outperform the result that most can manage (owing to time/money/education/etc).
That is my belief as well: being there, listening, interacting lovingly, paying attention is overwhelmingly more important than a particular technique.
I've never baby-talked to our son, but I do coach him to say things that are within (or almost) within his speaking capabilities. So for instance, this evening we were reading The Gruffalo, and he pointed to the fox and said, "Fox eat!" I said, "The fox wants to eat the mouse?" He said, "Yeah!" So I tried to coach him to say "Fox eat mouse". He got as far as "Fox eat there"; maybe he'll get to "Fox eat mouse" in a week or two.
I did this as well with the same results (but also have reason to believe genetics played a major part). But I'm not sure we're optimizing for the right thing. I'm far from convinced that accelerated language development is a good thing. I think development may suffer in other areas.
Why would you believe genetics plays a part? There is minimal evidence for that. You have actual evidence for things like your higher than average time engagement, nutritional indicators, as well as health and dental care. You probably live somewhere with decent air and water quality. Then of course the likely fact that parents have relatively prodigious vocabularies, fluency and articulation. This is why your kids are smart.
Lots of evidence that genetics have a large influence on early language development, especially speech, if you care to look. E.g. this study finds genetics contributing over 60% of variance: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3851292/
No doubt when we start looking at impairments and deficits that you can find plenty of situations where a high proportion of the phenotypic variance is heritable. But when you restrict the study to the top 60th to 95th percentile (which we are discussing here) I don't think you will find particularly strong relationships.
It's not genetics or a language strategy, just engagement.
Compare a toddler living in a ghetto concrete jungle to one who takes daily strolls through Central Park or Suburbia. The enrichment of parents teaching about the trucks and the trees and the lady with a purple hat pays massive returns.
I did goo goo gaa gaa for the first 6-8 months since you can tell there’s really nobody home up there yet and it’s cute and engaged my other kids to play with the youngest. But yes. Mine seem fine as well so I doubt CDS is going to make/break a human being.
Fathers descend to "baby talk" when the child is learning and slowly bring them up to par instead of trying to just force perfect talk from the start. They do this instinctively.
There's some great comments on this from salman khan, I think. He recorded the first years of his kid's life at home and documented this phenomenon
You think the baby really wants to hear googoo gaagaa? Now, they are trying to say "I'm hungry. Feed me!" Babies must look at adults doing the googoo gaagaa, and think to themselves that these adults are absolute morons.
The sites that Googs returns are basically the internet's version of googoo gaagaa. I look at the websites returned, and often think that the site's owners must be morons. Useless drivel clearly designed to game the Goog search results. I think think about how moronic it is that Googs allows this.
You think the baby really wants to hear googoo gaagaa? Now, they are trying to say "I'm hungry. Feed me!"
I suspect they know the sound they want to make but they don't know how to articulate it. They make an approximation and we can encourage them repeating the correct version, so they realize we understood what they're trying to do: "you're half way" but repeating their approximation is misleading.
In my experience waaaaaaaAAAAaahhh meant wet diaper or something hurts. Leeeeeah, leeeaaaahhh was being hungry. Phonetically is similar to the beginning of a polish word mleko (milk)
I honestly find it pretty helpful. You can type "russian murder painting" into Google and it will come up with Ivan the Terrible and His Son. All that hinting may be annoying if you know exactly what you wanted, but I'm not a specialist in everything I ever search for.
Then again, both DuckDuckGo and Kagi also give that result for that search phrase. As well as being more generally useful for more specific searches as well.
What would be nice is if you could toggle this behaviour. Sometimes I know exactly what I'm looking for, sometimes I don't. Assuming I never do is at least as silly as assuming I always do. Just give me the option.
I am frankly baffled that after all this focus on "personalised search", they still don't actually allow you to personalise your search like that.
Right, although piping junk into the search box and expecting it to bring back something useful is trained behavior.
I've been using DuckDuckGo a lot more recently and the thing that surprises me isn't the kind and quality of the results, it's that I actually need to use my brain to search.
It's not about whether this is a good or a bad thing—I kind of like the precision in a way, it's just jarring how different it is as an experience.
Do they? I see this stated all the time, with no references.
They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water
Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people, they would be more thoughtful with their searches.
Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real food. The same way some cities limit parking at big events so that people have to take mass transit. It's for their own good, but they have to be shown the way.
Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people
This may be Google's goal, but it hasn't happened yet.
I don't have very many friends or acquaintances in the tech bubble, so I base my observations around real people in the real world. More and more they're giving up on Google entirely.
Their primary search engines these days seem to be Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, and other non-Google sources.
When I ask someone why they're searching Amazon reviews for tech support information, they tell me because it's not on the web. That's Google's failure.
You can only be thoughtful with your search if you know what you are searching for. But oftentimes i'm not really certain what i'm looking for, or i don't know the exact terminology that should be used, so i'll just enter some related terms, in the hope that google leads me in the right direction.
A truly thoughtful search requires an understanding of:
- What you're searching for, which as you mention means terminology and knowing that information exists. (If you don't know that there's a country called Burkina Faso, it's never going to occur to you to search for its capital)
- How each of your search tools works, its benefits and drawbacks. It's similar to selecting a programming language or framework: If I need to know a holiday date (e.g. I can never remember when the fuck President's Day is), I'll Google it because that's something even a normal person would notice if they screwed up. On the other hand, when I'm looking for current events information, I use a search tool that specializes in news searches for journalists and researchers because I don't want my search results biased by what Google thinks I want to see.
- The domain in which you're searching, so you can evaluate what the search tools provide for you and use the tools iteratively.
- Your own abilities and desires, which requires self-knowledge. A search is only a success if it produces something helpful to the searcher, and something they can't understand or won't use = not a successful search
- What information is and is not available. It sounds like a silly thing, but this is how a lot of scams work: They're testing for people who lack a certain subset of common knowledge. For example, I've seen articles talking about local elections that imply nefarious intent behind some information not being provided online, and they're obviously written by people who don't commonly work with local election data. Because if they did, they'd know that when working with local election data, the default is 'idk we have it in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere'.
Search is HARD and Google has figured out one tiny, tiny part. It's just the part that was the easiest to build with what they had and that was easiest to monetize.
> Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real food.
Many people already resort to real food, even with plenty of junk food around.
“Problem” is unfortunately, that it comes at a price, that many are simply not ready or able to pay.
Who should step in is a good question, and probably governments should make access to information a right and have high quality public service available (in this case a public web search engine). Public libraries used to fulfill this role for centuries.
> Their primary search engines these days seem to be Instagram, Pinterest...
Why would someone want to search Pinterest? Every time I've gotten a search result to Pinterest it's been some scraped image completely and frustratingly devoid of the context I was originally searching for. Pinterest is one of the worst offenders on the web.
I see what you are saying but it seems to me that it used to do a much better job at that. These days I feel like I'm fighting the search engine constantly and it is certainly not magically finding what I want anymore. It feels like some crusty unmaintained tool that I have to know how to use.
It's funny to observe my stepson learning his way through Google. It's happening mostly through the assistants on TVs and locked cellphones. But he's learning to do exactly what you said: half-second thoughts and brute forcing many queries for the same subject. He's 7.
A less charitable interpretation --- and unfortunately one that could be true --- is that Google does not want you to think. It wants to keep you stupid because it's easier to deceive those who can't think and bend their thoughts in the direction that gives G more $$$. I'd say it's not merely optimising for the stupid; it's actively encouraging it. It wants to be your brain, control your thoughts and life.
Google has optimized to whatever sequence of behaviors achieves the most profit. The search results are not chosen for utility to the user but as nudges in a cycle of influence intended to drive you to attend to an ad, purchase something, or consume particular content.
They should not be engaged in non-consensual manipulation of social or political behaviors, and the ethics of market manipulation at scale through advertisement are far from clear.
I use market manipulation to mean just that, someone manipulating the market in whatever way. I'm not familiar with the legally-oriented meaning of this term.
Market cornering is classic market manipulation. Google uses every asset at their disposal to maintain their 98%+ death grip on the search markets. The list of competitors bought, stifled, legally crushed, or absorbed is probably endless. The search market is thoroughly cornered.
I used the phrase intentionally and specifically. Advertising isn't always market manipulation, but it can be and is used to that purpose.
Google uses advertisement and content "curation" to manipulate consumers. This results in product preference, purchasing behavior, and market conditions favorable to Google and/or unfavorable to Google's competition. This includes siloing consumers in political bubbles and manipulation of narratives through the deliberate selection, order, and pacing of content exposure based on the intent of Google's shotcallers.
The reinforcement cycles inherent to their algorithms are used to manage the information made available to vast numbers of people, with highly detailed behavioral profiles used to achieve behavioral outcomes, whether it's buying something, voting, or preferences for or against particular policies or candidates.
Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete word soup of search results people type in.