Author Topic: The Open Secret of Google Search 2/2  (Read 61 times)

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The Open Secret of Google Search 2/2
« on: June 22, 2022, 03:01:48 PM »
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Google is still useful for many, but the harder question is why its results feel more sterile than they did five years ago. Haynes’s theory is that this is the result of Google trying to crack down on misinformation and low-quality content—especially around consequential search topics. In 2017, the company started talking publicly about a Search initiative called EAT, which stands for “expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.” The company has rolled out numerous quality rater guidelines, which help judge content to determine authenticity. One such effort, titled Your Money or Your Life, applies rigorous standards to any pages that show up when users search for medical or financial information.

“Take crypto,” Haynes explained. “It’s an area with a lot of fraud, so unless a site has a big presence around the web and Google gets the sense they’re known for expertise on that topic, it’ll be difficult to get them to rank.” What this means, though, is that Google’s results on any topic deemed sensitive enough will likely be from established sources. Medical queries are far more likely to return WebMD or Mayo Clinic pages, instead of personal testimonials. This, Haynes said, is especially challenging for people looking for homeopathic or alternative medicine remedies.

There’s a strange irony to all of this. For years, researchers, technologists, politicians, and journalists have agonized and cautioned against the wildness of the internet and its penchant for amplifying conspiracy theories, divisive subject matter, and flat-out false information. Many people, myself included, have argued for platforms to surface quality, authoritative information above all else, even at the expense of profit. And it’s possible that Google has, in some sense, listened (albeit after far too much inaction) and, maybe, partly succeeded in showing higher-quality results in a number of contentious categories. But instead of ushering in an era of perfect information, the changes might be behind the complainers’ sense that Google Search has stopped delivering interesting results. In theory, we crave authoritative information, but authoritative information can be dry and boring. It reads more like a government form or a textbook than a novel. The internet that many people know and love is the opposite—it is messy, chaotic, and unpredictable. It is exhausting, unending, and always a little bit dangerous. It is profoundly human.

But it’s worth remembering what that humanity looked like inside search results. Rand Fishkin, the founder of the software company SparkToro, who has been writing and thinking about search since 2004, believes that Google has gotten better at not amplifying conspiracy theories and hate speech, but that it took the company far too long. “I don’t know if you searched for holocaust information between 2000 and 2008, but deniers routinely showed up in the top results,” he told me. The same was true for Sandy Hook hoaxers—in fact, campaigns from the Sandy Hook families to fight the conspiracy theories led to some of the search engine changes. “Whenever somebody says, ‘Hey, Google doesn’t feel as human anymore,’ all I can say is that I bet they don’t want a return to that,” Fishkin said.

Google search might be worse now because, like much of the internet, it has matured and has been ruthlessly commercialized. In an attempt to avoid regulation and be corporate-friendly, parts of it might be less wild. But some of what feels dead or dying about Google might be our own nostalgia for a smaller, less mature internet. Sullivan, the Search liaison, understands this longing for the past but told me that what feels like a Google change is also the search engine responding to the evolution of the web. “Some of that blog-style content has migrated over time to closed forums or social media. Sometimes the blog post we’re hoping to find isn’t there.” Sullivan believes that some of the recent frustrations with Google Search actually reflect just how good it’s become. “We search for things today we didn’t imagine we could search for 15 years ago and we believe we’ll find exactly what we want,” he said. “Our expectations have continued to grow. So we demand more of the tool.” It’s an interesting, albeit convenient, response.

Google has rewired us, transforming the way that we evaluate, process, access, and even conceive of information. “I can’t live without that stuff as my brain is now conditioned to remember only snippets for Google to fill in,” one Reddit user wrote while discussing Brereton’s “Google Is Dying” post. Similarly, Google users shape Search. “The younger generation searches really differently than I do,” Haynes told me. “They basically speak to Google like it’s a person, whereas I do keyword searching, which is old-school.” But these quirks, tics, and varying behaviors are just data for the search giant. When younger generations intuitively start talking to Google like it’s a person, the tool starts to anticipate that and begins to behave like one (this is part of the reason behind the rise of humanized AI voice assistants).

Fishkin argues that Google Search—and many of Google’s other products—would be better with some competition and that Search’s quality improved the most from 1998 to 2007, which he attributes to the company’s need to compete for market share. “Since then,” he said, “Google’s biggest search innovation has been to put more Google products upfront in results.” He argues that this strategy has actually led to a slew of underwhelming Google products. “Are Google Flights or Google Weather or Google’s stocks widget better than competitors? No, but nobody can really compete, thanks to the Search monopoly.”

“Is Google Search dying?” is a frivolous question. We care about Search’s fate on a practical level—it is still a primary way to tap into the internet’s promise of unlimited information on demand. But I think we also care on an existential level—because Google’s first product is a placeholder to explore our hopes and fears about technology’s place in our life. We yearn for more convenience, more innovation, and more possibility. But when we get it, often we can only see what we’ve lost in the process. That loss is real and deeply felt. It’s like losing a piece of our humanity. Search, because of its utility, is even more fraught.

Most people don’t want their information mediated by bloated, monopolistic, surveilling tech companies, but they also don’t want to go all the way back to a time before them. What we really want is something in between. The evolution of Google Search is unsettling because it seems to suggest that, on the internet, we’ve built, there’s very little room for equilibrium or compromise.

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« Last Edit: June 22, 2022, 03:38:54 PM by javajolt »