Our latest quality improvements for Search
blog.googleI fear this will be used more as a form of abuse than as a proper feedback, looking at youtube. The link also seems to be designed to be skipped over. You could have told me it has been there for a year and I would have believed it.
Even with Google's volume you have to take the 0.25% of claimed occurrences, then take the percentage of people who will be offended, then take the small percentage of people who will notice/know they can report it, then take the small percentage of people who actually bother.
And even if there won't be an organized effort to game the system it serves to the lowest common denominator of 'not offensive'. If I type "How to know if I'm t" and it autofills 'ransgender' that is fine by me, but some people will consider that offensive (don't ask me why) and report it. Or take for example unwanted pregancy, you can bet that if one searches for unwanted pregnancy and Google puts up a neutral snippet from Planned Parenthood people will report it.
Im not a fan of most of their search improvements. It seems like Google these days is good at telling me what I already know but have forgotten vs researching and discovering about information I don't know anything about.
Their blog posts about search are kind of the same. Reading anything google tells us about their search algorithm feels like I'm churning through countless iterations of PR spin, rather than actually learning anything new (contrary to, for example, how backblaze blog posts are packed with info).
Google has started to ignore an amazing number of search terms. For example, I googled "Olympus EPL3 launch button broken", and the first result was "League of Legends launch button not working". To add insult to injury, Google tells you which of your keywords it's ignoring for each particular result.
First they removed the ability to always require a certain with just one character (+), then they started making search worse and worse requiring you to enclose several words with quotes.
It's one of the reasons I switched to ddg.
"There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new"
Search algorithms can't fight a semantic-level threat, they are just blind term-to-content conversion, like e.g. regex doesn't care if it finds something bad. Google can't use more expensive algorithms that actually can classify and understand the content, so their solution to this is human censors/curators. They get shamed regularly, and with recent youtube crisis(advertisers started to pull out) they probably started to take this issue seriously. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-de...
I have an issue in their recommendation to use the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source to find out extremists. The SPLC is not a neutral source. For example, it has listed Aayan Hirsi Ali and Masjid Nawaz as anti-Islam extremists. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/magazine/can-a-former-...
The SPLC is free to list whomever they want, but using their list to rank sites in Google search is very problematic.
Just read Maajid's section in SPLC's Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists[0]. This is ridiculous; tweeting out a picture of Muhammad is 'offensive' to many Muslims and is therefore 'extremism'? They must be totally unaware of the rich history of Persian and Ottoman devotional art which depicts Muhammad.
[0] - https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual-field-...
I fear that this will become a tool for SJW and whatever their right leaning counterparts are called.
Two days ago, Breitbart News started appearing at the top of news search results. That's not a sign of improvement.