Are Internet searches getting dumber?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Lately I've noticed that when I type in a search, I often get results for the closest "common" search question that is not remotely what I was asking. For instance, I just searched "how did they do screen wipes before computers", and I only got results for the best screen cleaning products. My memory could be faulty, but I seem to recall that when I would type similar searches in the past, I would get 4 or 5 random results followed by the thing I was actually looking for. Now it seems like search engines are trying to figure out what I'm asking, and they're fucking it up badly. In the attempt to use the primitive level of search intelligence we've achieved in 2015, they're delivering worse results than the old crude approach, like the switch from practical effects to CGI or carburetors to fuel injection. I'll be thrilled to see the sophisticated search results I get after these techniques have undergone 10 years of refinement, but in the meantime I can't get answers for half the questions I'm asking.

Has anyone else had this problem, and have you found any workarounds?

[Purple]

What search engine are you using? I know that yahoo really sucks to the point of blatantly altering my search query. But I've not had such issues with google. This said, google does customize results to your previous searches which makes it dumber in the long run. My advice try DuckDuckGo. I've been using it for years and have no complaints.

[Vendetta]

Internet searches have always been dumb.

The best way to get useful information out of a search engine is to never use natural language questions they don't work or help, think of as many unique keywords as you can and include only them in the search

eg. the thing you were trying to find I searched for

wipe transition physical film

And this was in the first page of results

https://www.quora.com/Back-when-film-ed ... s-achieved

(Though even then most of the results are talking about the cinematography of wipes not the actual process of editing film to produce them).

[Esquire]

This might be a kind of anti-expert bias; if you're using a technical term most people don't know, literal search results are better than popular ones.

[Adam Reynolds]

A large part of the problem comes from advertisements. Those tend to bias themselves towards being useless when you are interested in facts. Another occasional issue comes from the fact that Google and YouTube, if you always stay logged it, bias their results based on your previous searches. In a more extreme case, Facebook has been known to run experiments based on the news sources that it shows you, to determine how much mood is affected by either positive or negative news.

I also have to second DuckDuckGo. It is notable for being an engine that does not track your search history to the same degree as anyone else. If you don't want advertisers to track you, use it rather than any of the sites that directly store and use your data that is tied to you directly.

[Vendetta]

I like how people's answer to the question "this tool doesn't work well for me" is "use this hipster version instead".

Which is amazingly unuseful if you're still using the tool wrong.

Let's dissect what a search engine actually does, taking the search used in the OP:

how did they do screen wipes before computers

The first thing it does is ignore words which are too common.

In this case the terms actually searched becomes:

how did they do screen wipes before computers

Then it searches based on those keywords, preferring page results which match more of them. What that means is that because you included the word "computers" in the search you get lots and lots of results which match screen, wipes, and computers. That produces all the results in the world about how to clean a computer screen and some about how to delete everything on a computer no matter what search engine you use. (though hilariously I tried the exact search given in the OP in DuckDuckGo and within the first five results it wanted me to know about how to wipe a baby's ass without baby wipes, so that's a fucking useful search engine!)

It's nothing at all to do with adverts, those are clearly marked in the results page, and it's nothing to do with your search history, and it's certainly nothing to do with using whatever hipster search engine you happen to prefer instead of giving in to the man. I got a useful hit before despite never having searched for film editing techniques before and having searched about computing a hell of a lot.

Because search engines are a tool, and you need to use the tool properly to do useful work with it.

Don't do natural langauge searches, the search engine is just ignoring all your grammar anyway, think of keywords which will specifically include the results you want, don't try and exclude terms except in very specific cases and certainly don't try and exclude them by just putting in the keyword itself!

[Executor32]

Using the correct terminology helps, too. Substituting 'screen wipes' with 'film transitions' completely eliminates results for screen-cleaning wipes.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Thanks for the tips, everyone!

[General Zod]

Sometimes you need to include various bits of Boolean in order to make it really useful. Double quotes around multi word phrases to make it search for a single string instead of individual words, "screen wipes", before computers, and use a dash if you want to exclude certain things. -cleaning to avoid ads for cleaning wipes for example.

[Purple]

Stuff like this makes me wish they'd get the Semantic web going already.

[Zeropoint]

I know, right? It's frustrating, if also a bit enlightening, to see how search engines don't UNDERSTAND anything. For example, I haven't figured out how to search for drawings of MLP:FiM characters operating armored fighting vehicles (yes, this is a thing) without ALSO getting images of small SCUBA air bottles and sleeveless shirts with pictures of horses on them. Google just sees "pony" and "tank" as contentless, abstract tokens to match.

[Darmalus]

@Zeropoint
Example: MLP:FIM military tank -shirt

Not one picture of a shirt or air tank, lots of ponies driving war machines around.

the Google search operators
https://support.google.com/websearch/an ... 6433?hl=en

[Simon_Jester]

@Zeropoint
Example: MLP:FIM military tank -shirt

Not one picture of a shirt or air tank, lots of ponies driving war machines around.

the Google search operators
https://support.google.com/websearch/an ... 6433?hl=en

Note the key idea that we are including all that we desire, while excluding all that is irrelevant.

"Pony" is a word that is used for many things, and most of them have little or nothing to do with My Little Pony. Therefore, if all things containing the word 'pony' are brought to our attention, we will be forced to pay attention to many things that themselves have nothing to do with our goal.

The three letter acronym "MLP," on the other hand... well, I'm sure it stands for things other than My Little Pony, but I doubt any of those other acronyms are in nearly such a common use on the Internet. Thus, it is a better test for "Do I personally care about the contents of this webpage and want to look at it?"

Of course, "tank" is used to refer to "tank tops," a kind of shirt, as well as to armored fighting vehicles- but in this case, "tank" is too good a word to pass up, so we use "-shirt" to exclude all references to My Little Pony tank-top shirts.

[Lord Revan]

It's best to remember that search engines aren't AI even in the way it's used for videogame NPCs, search engines don't think "oh that's what you meant!" but rather match the keywords to the list of sites they have with more words being match technically being higher on the list.

[Elheru Aran]

And let's not forget that search results can be influenced by the most popular websites. Try putting in a movie title in Google; you'll first get its website, Wikipedia entry, IMDB, image search. Then there'll be a list that mixes up some review sites with torrent sites. Finally you'll start seeing smaller reviews and such. It can vary depending on how old it is-- for example a movie from the 70s is unlikely to have a lot of reviews unless it's a pop-culture phenomenon like Godfather or something.