<story><title>How is search so bad? A case study</title><url>https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/bad-search/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zackees</author><text>The real reason why search is so bad is that Google is downranking the internet.&lt;p&gt;I should know - I blew the whistle on the whole censorship regime and walked 950 pages to the DOJ and media outlets.&lt;p&gt;--&amp;gt; zachvorhies.com &amp;lt;--&lt;p&gt;What did I disclose? That Google was using a project called &amp;quot;Machine Learning Faireness&amp;quot; to rerank the entire internet.&lt;p&gt;Part of this beast has to do with a secret Page Rank score that Google&amp;#x27;s army of workers assign to many of the web pages on the internet.&lt;p&gt;If wikipedia contains cherry picked slander against a person, topic or website then the raters are instructed to provide a low page rank score. This isn&amp;#x27;t some conspiracy but something openly admitted by Google itself:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;guidelines.raterhub.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;guidelines.raterh...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;See section 3.2 for the &amp;quot;Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness&amp;quot; score.&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that I&amp;#x27;ve had around 50 interviews and countless articles written about my disclosure, my website zachvorhies.com doesn&amp;#x27;t show up on Google&amp;#x27;s search index, even when using the exact url as a query! Yet bing and duckduckgo return my URL just fine.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t listen to the people who say that&amp;#x27;s its some emergent behavior from bad SEO. This deliberate sabotage of Google&amp;#x27;s own search engine in order to achieve the political agenda of the controllers. The stock holders of Google should band together in a class action lawsuit and sue the C-Level executives of negligence.&lt;p&gt;If you want your internet search to be better then stop using Google search. Other search engines don&amp;#x27;t have this problem: I&amp;#x27;m looking at qwant, swisscows, duckduckgo, bing and others.&lt;p&gt;~Z~</text></item><item><author>rahulchhabra07</author><text>I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks.
The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts&amp;#x27; efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It&amp;#x27;s just surface-level knowledge that I get from competing websites who just want to make money off pageviews.&lt;p&gt;It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better.&lt;p&gt;However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better quality search results today. When Google started, it had a breakthrough algorithm - to rank page results based on number of pages linking to it. Which is completely meritocratic as long as people don&amp;#x27;t game for higher rankings.&lt;p&gt;A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>preommr</author><text>Google&amp;#x27;s search rankings are based on opinions held by other credible sources. This isn&amp;#x27;t really blowing the whistle when, as you admitted, Google admits this openly.&lt;p&gt;And maybe your site doesn&amp;#x27;t get ranked well because it&amp;#x27;s directly tied to project veritas. I don&amp;#x27;t like being too political, especially on hn and on an account tied to my real identity, but project veritas and it&amp;#x27;s associates exhibit appalling behavior in duplicity and misdirection. I would hope that trash like this does get pushed to the bottom.</text></comment>
<story><title>How is search so bad? A case study</title><url>https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/bad-search/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zackees</author><text>The real reason why search is so bad is that Google is downranking the internet.&lt;p&gt;I should know - I blew the whistle on the whole censorship regime and walked 950 pages to the DOJ and media outlets.&lt;p&gt;--&amp;gt; zachvorhies.com &amp;lt;--&lt;p&gt;What did I disclose? That Google was using a project called &amp;quot;Machine Learning Faireness&amp;quot; to rerank the entire internet.&lt;p&gt;Part of this beast has to do with a secret Page Rank score that Google&amp;#x27;s army of workers assign to many of the web pages on the internet.&lt;p&gt;If wikipedia contains cherry picked slander against a person, topic or website then the raters are instructed to provide a low page rank score. This isn&amp;#x27;t some conspiracy but something openly admitted by Google itself:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;guidelines.raterhub.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;guidelines.raterh...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;See section 3.2 for the &amp;quot;Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness&amp;quot; score.&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that I&amp;#x27;ve had around 50 interviews and countless articles written about my disclosure, my website zachvorhies.com doesn&amp;#x27;t show up on Google&amp;#x27;s search index, even when using the exact url as a query! Yet bing and duckduckgo return my URL just fine.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t listen to the people who say that&amp;#x27;s its some emergent behavior from bad SEO. This deliberate sabotage of Google&amp;#x27;s own search engine in order to achieve the political agenda of the controllers. The stock holders of Google should band together in a class action lawsuit and sue the C-Level executives of negligence.&lt;p&gt;If you want your internet search to be better then stop using Google search. Other search engines don&amp;#x27;t have this problem: I&amp;#x27;m looking at qwant, swisscows, duckduckgo, bing and others.&lt;p&gt;~Z~</text></item><item><author>rahulchhabra07</author><text>I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks.
The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts&amp;#x27; efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It&amp;#x27;s just surface-level knowledge that I get from competing websites who just want to make money off pageviews.&lt;p&gt;It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better.&lt;p&gt;However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better quality search results today. When Google started, it had a breakthrough algorithm - to rank page results based on number of pages linking to it. Which is completely meritocratic as long as people don&amp;#x27;t game for higher rankings.&lt;p&gt;A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>creato</author><text>&amp;gt; Despite the fact that I&amp;#x27;ve had around 50 interviews and countless articles written about my disclosure, my website zachvorhies.com doesn&amp;#x27;t show up on Google&amp;#x27;s search index, even when using the exact url as a query!&lt;p&gt;I just tried it, it&amp;#x27;s just showing results for &amp;quot;zach vorhies&amp;quot; instead, which it thinks you meant. I just tried a few other random &amp;quot;people&amp;#x27;s names as URL&amp;quot; websites I could find, sometimes it does this, sometimes it doesn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the results that do appear are hardly unsympathetic to you. If google is censoring you&amp;#x2F;your opinions, they&amp;#x27;re doing a very poor job of it.</text></comment>