Talk about synchronicities!
I was just complaining about how difficult it was to find information to research a project.
Then I read an article by a UC Berkeley professor, titled "Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google" which said that google search results have been taken over by spammers and marketers, which I totally agree with. Unfortunately, his recommendation, which takes up most of the article, is for another search engine which produces even fewer useful results than google does! And I've never seen Bing do a better job than google, even when using it to search for technical information on Microsoft's website, which you would think they would be especially careful to index properly.
Then we get this post submitted:
Sent in by member Amir Fasad
I've been doing research of various sorts my entire adult life, and for the past fifteen years or so this has included extensive use of the Internet. Despite our much vaunted technological progress, the web is a worse place to do research than it was a decade ago. This may seem controversial, but others have noticed as I have the shocking deterioration of research capabilities.
Google, for example, has altered their search algorithms over the past ten years, allegedly in part to punish "content aggregators", who added lists of terms to their sites to cause hits, despite some of these being legitimate news and science sites. Regardless of the motive, some of the changes have not been for the better.
Google used to rank results by how they matched the search terms, which let users reduce a known quantity of results using minus signs before new terms. Now, doing this causes the number of hits to jump up and down, seemingly at random, probably as larger and smaller databases are used. This may speed things up if traffic is heavy, but not adding new descriptors to the original hits prevents users from doing a broad search sure to include the desired material, and then drilling down until they find what they want.
Further, most of the top hits today are basically advertisements, and it is nearly impossible to get the non-commercial content that used to appear first. These ads may be disguised as something vaguely related to the user's search, but the end result is that the formerly easy to find non-commercial material is drowned out by thousands of unwanted results.
One reason these changes seem deliberate is that archive.org hosts a "wayback machine" which I used for years to search google as it existed at selected dates in the past, and to search for deleted web content by URL. Suddenly a few years ago, these functions became almost useless, as both former google pages and most of the attempted URLs were blocked, and I was presented with a "retrieval exclusion error". One could imagine such a message in the case of a legal threat by a site owner, or someone defamed on an archived site, but why would seemingly millions of unrelated sites be impossible to access? The wayback machine, was only performing a valuable service by storing content that was voluntarily made public in the first place.
Another site, which is more specific to my interests but an important indicator nevertheless, was patent surf. It let users enter natural english language descriptions, including entire pages, of a technical concept, for example, and the site would return a short except from each of an entire list of United States patents relevant to the meaning of the search. That sites seems as dead as Jimmy Hoffa, and another site with equal functionality seems about as hard to find.
All of these things could be coincidences, or teething problems, or a result of random business decisions or corporate failures, but maybe not. The end result, however, is the same. The web is getting harder to use for anything but pop culture related interests. I feel bad for the younger generation that may never know what it was like when it was at its best.
