Google search turned stupid again

[RJSV]

   Had one of those 'ah ha' moments, thinking about:
   WHY DOESN'T Google do that 'Cookies' notification thing...required notice up front, when you browse some WEB site, like 'A&B Car Sales' ?
Then realized: Google doesn't need Cookies, to track someone, as the search stuff gives them (that)!  Ah, nice, they get to do tracking and don't account for it. Nice set up!
  Now, today I'm wondering about whether, maybe, Google provides the AUDIO TO TEXT service, for our TV subtitles for hearing impaired.  I've noticed, sometime around end of May this year, those TV subtitles (Comcast) have gotten dumbed-down,...sometimes in ways so humorous and lame:
   Person saying "Girl in there..." got subtitled as
                              "GORILLA"

[SilverSolder]

   Had one of those 'ah ha' moments, thinking about:
   WHY DOESN'T Google do that 'Cookies' notification thing...required notice up front, when you browse some WEB site, like 'A&B Car Sales' ?
Then realized: Google doesn't need Cookies, to track someone, as the search stuff gives them (that)!  Ah, nice, they get to do tracking and don't account for it. Nice set up!
  Now, today I'm wondering about whether, maybe, Google provides the AUDIO TO TEXT service, for our TV subtitles for hearing impaired.  I've noticed, sometime around end of May this year, those TV subtitles (Comcast) have gotten dumbed-down,...sometimes in ways so humorous and lame:
   Person saying "Girl in there..." got subtitled as
                              "GORILLA"

Human translator replaced with speech-to-text software.  What could possibly go wrong? 

[RJSV]

    People responding have it, almost correct, but I wanted to take a moment to join, but emphasize the distinction, between taking A SIDE,...that being the abandoning of 'neutral' presentation purely for profitable 'clicks' or simple traffic increase, by way of controversy.  That's well known.
   The direct point on Google, however, is this extremist/dualist dynamic is played, virtually exclusively on ONE SIDE, (almost in defiance of common sense, if business model calls for 'whichever'.).  There's no 'whichever makes for clicks'.
   "...Google has clearly picked it's side...",. Yes, thanks I could not have said it simpler.
AND a virtual monopoly.
   In Europe: "...tears us apart, in a bad way...".
Again, thank you: Our US monopoly Google is not
   "Turned stupid" on us...  Just a tired old pretend.
   I have CATS that put on a RUSE with less naked stupid.

[DonKu]

I think I first really noticed it in 2004 and frankly, never seen any improvement after that. Total hit-or-miss every time. More usually miss. Since around 2004, people started to use Google as an address translator so they can type "facebook" instead of facebook.com, and Google encouraged this behavior by purposely dumbing down the algorithm.

Somewhere around 2004 it seemed my search results for "ski area hours," for instance, inevitably included at least one website named https://skiareahours.com . It was click-bait, of course, "This domain is for sale" click-bait. The writing was on the wall for those who see.

google is your friend for trivia pursuit and popular culture. maillists are your friend for technical information. google returns results faster than the speed of gossip. It typically takes a day or two for a maillist to return the correct answer.

[ebastler]

google is your friend for trivia pursuit and popular culture. maillists are your friend for technical information. google returns results faster than the speed of gossip. It typically takes a day or two for a maillist to return the correct answer.

I don't follow. When I search for information -- certainly including technical information -- which I expect to be locatable via a lexical search, Google comes through for me most of the time. (And certainly more often than Bing or DuckDuckGo.)

If course, there is technical information which may be difficult to locate by just "searching for terms". I don't expect Google to have a deep understanding of anything (technical or otherwise), and it does not.

So questions along the lines of "Why does my ABC not work as expected" or "What is the best circuit to achieve XYZ" are indeed better asked on a forum or mailing list, where actual human experts can hopefully answer them. But I don't blame that on deficiencies or doctoring of Google's search algorithm.

[DonKu]

google is your friend for trivia pursuit and popular culture. maillists are your friend for technical information. google returns results faster than the speed of gossip. It typically takes a day or two for a maillist to return the correct answer.

I don't follow. When I search for information -- certainly including technical information -- which I expect to be locatable via a lexical search, Google comes through for me most of the time. (And certainly more often than Bing or DuckDuckGo.)

If course, there is technical information which may be difficult to locate by just "searching for terms". I don't expect Google to have a deep understanding of anything (technical or otherwise), and it does not.

So questions along the lines of "Why does my ABC not work as expected" or "What is the best circuit to achieve XYZ" are indeed better asked on a forum or mailing list, where actual human experts can hopefully answer them. But I don't blame that on deficiencies or doctoring of Google's search algorithm.

Let's try it this way: google regurgitates obsolete technical information along with everything else. Such obsolete information causes you to waste time in at least two ways. First, you must learn the hard way why the information is bad, why it's no longer applicable. Then you must manually cull all of the bad hits, one at a time.

On the other hand, if you want to know what Spock's uniform looked like in The Original Series, google's your friend. Because trivia's timeless.

[AnalogueLove1867]

Yeah.
Google definitely does lead its users to the results that make google money and make google look good ( politicized results or latest mainstream news).
 it is definitely less useable than it was ten or fifteen years ago.
truthfully, it is impossible to get away from this issue with other search engines.
Still, you do get a bigger range of results by searching the same thing in different engines.
google, yandex, dogpile, ask.com ( ask jeeves ), Lycos, AOL, wolfram-alpha, baidu, yahoo, bing, excite, duckduckgo, webcrawler ... etc etc etc
Each have different flavors of result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

[SilverSolder]

Yeah.
Google definitely does lead its users to the results that make google money and make google look good ( politicized results or latest mainstream news).
 it is definitely less useable than it was ten or fifteen years ago.
truthfully, it is impossible to get away from this issue with other search engines.
Still, you do get a bigger range of results by searching the same thing in different engines.
google, yandex, dogpile, ask.com ( ask jeeves ), Lycos, AOL, wolfram-alpha, baidu, yahoo, bing, excite, duckduckgo, webcrawler ... etc etc etc
Each have different flavors of result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Many/most of the search engines are "fronts" to either Google or Bing -  those two are the only remaining "real" search engines, as far as I know (apart from Yandex obviously)

[RJSV]

   I have, or had, 'TACKTLE' memory, for the simple volume control wheel, on my AM radio.  Never, did I push up for louder volume, followed by cursing:
"Crummy radio products! Blah blah blah...dang thing won't even RESPOND...What's wrong, now ?".
   NEVER.  But now, a 'glitch' here, there seems all part of the landscape.  And I can't buy a radio, at least common retail.
   So, I tune in via my phone.  On the house WIFI (expensive boxes).  As an Engineer, I pushed that volume control, on AM radio, expecting results...simple common sense.
But now, a person has to start, down the line of reasoning; Did I move too far from server?  Is it my complicated (Google-Android) phone ? Or, crummy marketing driven 'radio' station, POD CASTS and all that?  I mean, dropout after dropout after....well, you get the idea.
   A year ago, I decided; Get the the BOOK, dummy!
So I purchased 'Android for Dummies'.  Kompleat waste, chock full of subtle advertisements.  (Readers, in case my dialog seems drifting here, I'm saying this TECH corporation, 'Google' is not appearing easy for use, like AM radio example'.
   Response to that, even in my own self-musings, is that, well, at least the Smartphone can bring me across the world, whya: I can search and get all kinds of new info.  True, but it seems so uniformly 'junky'.  Plus that great big monopoly dominates so much, that simple little Radio is obsolete, not on store shelves.
   Wanna buy an old-school AM Radio ?  Sure, just log on to ABCinc.dotcom, create account / password, get a PayPal account/password. Receive 3 immediate texts asking "How useful did you find our web store?".

   Tried a (supposedly) simple contact/email to a Computer Science Instructor, regarding an interesting class;. No problem; their web site wants me to create a HOOGLE email account/password.

And, (lol), they STILL wanted me to fill out a cust feedback thingy (even though I had given up, on the Google deal).

[RoGeorge]

It happens again.  For me, Google gives now search results from forums and blog from about 10-15 years ago, and low to average quality answers at best.  It doesn't return some 15 years ago material because of its stellar quality, not at all.

Often I'm searching EEVblog with google, by adding site:eevblog.com at the end of the search.  Doesn't work any more, not broken just that it returns irrelevant results.

Yesterday I've clicked on YouTube from a live USB Linux installer (so no login and no browsing history), and I've been loathed from what I've seen in the YouTube main page.  Looking at the titles and thumbnails was enough to tell all suggestions from YouTube were absolute garbage.

Then I thought, maybe I've lived for too long under a rock without looking outside.  Maybe that's how pop culture looks like these days.  So I've search "science" in the youtube bar, and no, still trash suggestions of videos with slightly "sciency" related titles, but in fact focused on hype and superficiality, more like the clickbait kind of science. 

First page of YouTube is looking just like the wall of fame in an idiots asylum would probably look like. 

And I've scrolled a lot, for about 10-20 pages, it was all the same.  My conclusion so far:  The main YouTube page is filled with trash not because that is what pop culture looks like, or because that's what the average Joe likes to watch, no.  I think the main YouTube page is filled with trash because that is what YouTube is promoting, and what YouTube is pushing to its viewers.

I wouldn't rant about YT if it weren't for the long term implication I'm afraid will follow this.  Pushing trash into people's mind can only spiral us down.  It almost looks like the "algorithm" is educating the whole world to become the people from the Idiocracy (2006) movie.

By each year, this movie turns more and more into a new genre:  Prophetic Documentary.



 

The problem with natural selection is that it has no goals, it is only driven by environment and luck.

The environment is the one who choose who's to thrive, and who's to die.  So far the Earth and its biosphere were our environment, the filter that made us what we are today, but now we are at the point where we create and shape our own environment, which environment in return shapes us.  Maybe we should put some goals into it.

That's a circular dependency there, a feedback loop, and that can go horribly wrong if we don't pay attention to it.

So far it seems the loop oscillates.  Saying this because history tells about periods of alternating good times and bad times.  It is not the forest any more who shapes humans.  It's the other humans.  We are living by social rules, not by nature's rules.  The asphalt jungle is our forest v2.0, now with Internet and VR headsets. 

TL;DR  I hope the search results in Google right now are from 10+ years ago only because Google is re-indexing to prioritize quality over popularity.