Has Google gotten worse over the years? I’m not referring here to the alleged moral or ethical quandaries of “Big Data” or wealthy corporations in general. Rather I’m talking about the actual efficacy of the product. And, in the spirit of ongoing language evolution, I’m using “Google” to refer to search engines in general.

Ye Olden Days

Like you, I don’t have records of my searches and the results from years past, so all I have to go on is memory. Like anyone who used the internet in the late 1990s, I recall vividly how searching on pre-Google sites was frustrating — especially on dial-up connections. Google was a game-changer: lightning fast results on a bare-bones page. Other search engines caught up, or tried to. One thing they all had in common was that they returned results based on what you searched for.

Predictive Algorithms

Then something changed, something fundamental about the way search engines work. They began using algorithms to guess what you must have wanted to search for. We all know this is helpful — if you misspell a word, for example, or forget someone’s name (just type that hot guy in avengers and you’ll find who you’re looking for pretty quickly, once you scroll past the Jeremy Renner results).

But it also works out pretty badly, if you actually did type in exactly what you were looking for.

Here’s a very recent example. I was scrolling through The Daily Beast on my tablet and noticed that (unlike any other site), the simple act of scrolling was interpreted by The Daily Beast’s website as a tap on a link. This seemed disingenuous, a sneaky way to report more clicks to their advertisers, and I wondered if it was even possible. So I googled are some mobile websites more sensitive to touch (no quotes, no question mark). The first two results on Google were close to what I was wondering: a Quora post asking if ads had become more sensitive to touch (with no good answers) and a Reddit post basically asking the same thing (also with no good answers). But all the results after that were nothing like what I’d asked. “screen too sensitive - Android Forums”; “Add Touch To Your Site - Web Fundamentals”; “Your smartphone could be hacked without your knowledge - CNBC”; “Build Mobile Websites And Apps For Smart Devices - Google Books”; “Minimize Risk While Surfing The Web On Your Phone”. And so on. Other search engines I tried, including Duck Duck Go, Ecosia, Yahoo!, and Bing, were equally useless on this question — which I attempted to reword several times.

After I began this draft entry, I kept noticing this. A teacher at my kids’ school sent us a .docx file, which is proprietary to Microsoft Office and I had trouble opening it on my phone and tablet. So I searched the Play Store for a better app. I saw huge apps meant for all types of document work; I only wanted a simple, small app that would read .docx files. So I googled, looking for the simplest docx reader app for Android. None of the results had noticed “simplest” in my query, so I resent the search with that one word in quotation marks. Now the results were way off. PDF reader apps. Text editors. Apps for mobi files. “How to transfer files between your PC and Android”. It got sillier from there. Most of the results pages didn't include all the words in my query, and almost none of them were related in any way.

(I did eventually find several apps that allegedly read .docx files on Android devices, but none of them were very good.)

Another query: Frustrated with Google News’ stubborn insistence on showing only men’s sports in the Sports section, I searched for why doesn’t google news show stories on women’s sports. (In the past, users could hide entire sections. I used to hide both the Sports and Entertainment sections. But now the sections are always there.) None of the results were relevant, and this was true on multiple search engines. Is it possible that no one has ever noticed this before, or that anyone who's noticed it has never posted about it? I guess. But I doubt it. Regardless, the search engine won’t show any results related to this. (Perhaps if any search engine ever indexes this page, it will scoot to the top of the results.) See screenshot at right/above for Google News’ male-dominated sports page.

Must Be The USER’S Fault

Then I happened upon this blog entry in Scientific American: “How To Be A Better Web Searcher: Secrets From Google Scientists”. Ah, I thought. Someone is here to explain how to shortcut around the predictive algorithms and get true search results. But no. The entirety of the entry blamed users for poor search results. You ignorant people, you; if you only searched better! The first example given was a student working on a report about the history of the Belgian Congo at the end of the 19th Century. The writer says the student typed capital Belgian Congo into her smartphone, and “discovered that the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is Kinshasa”. Of course, this was the wrong answer. But the writer blamed it on the student. Yet even in his telling, the girl searched for correct terms; it was the search engine that returned the wrong answer. Why didn’t it look at her search terms? She hadn’t searched for anything about the Democratic Republic of Congo, had she? No, she searched for capital Belgian Congo. Yes, it was her error to not look for a source that actually mentioned the country she was curious about, but the first error was the search engine returning an irrelevant result.

The article goes on to talk about looking for secondary sources, doing second and third queries to see if there’s conflicting information, and so on. It never once addressed how Google often ignores our search terms. In fact, it continues to accuse users of being dull-witted. And then it gave 1999-style tips like “modify your query by changing a term in your search phrase” and “make your query more precise... with special operators... such as double-quote marks”. Haha. Really? In the end, the entry concluded that search engines are great but “we lack the skills to use them appropriately and evaluate what they tell us.”

But Why?

So why did they change?

I assume the main reason for the change is that Google doesn’t trust you to search for what you actually want. What I don’t understand is why there’s not a checkbox so I can tell the search engine: “This IS actually what I wanted to search for.”

The Frustration

In the past, if I typed simplest docx reader app for Android, then every result shown would have all those words on the page. They might not be in the right order, but they would all be there. Today, that’s not true. Google will assume you must not have meant “simplest”, because that’s not a common search term. So the results will included thousands of web pages without that word. The only way to force that word to be included is to put it in quotation marks. Once you do that, it assumes the other words aren’t that important, so it will ignore something else. You still get a bunch of Android app related pages, just not the ones you want.

Device Dependent

Another thing that’s changed is that Google will change the results depending on which device you’re using. If you search using a phone or tablet, Google downgrades sites that aren’t as mobile friendly. Searching on a PC, you’re much more likely to get informational sites instead of ones with good mobile designers. Again, there should be a checkbox for this in my search engine settings. Yes, I want sites on mobile to be mobile-friendly, but I heavily prefer better information over prettier design.

‘Both Sides’ And ‘General Interest’

While researching a few controversial topics recently, I noticed two other things that have changed.

One is that Google tries the “both sides are valid” approach, even on questions where there aren’t really two sides. For example, search for how old is the earth. The “answer card” (big rectangle at top) includes the correct answer, and the first couple of links after that are from science-oriented sites. But the fourth result is a creationist site asserting the biblical “truth” of a young Earth. Scrolling down the page, we find more religious sites claiming the same thing, interspersed with scientific pages giving the actual approximate age. Those non-true sites aren’t helpful to anyone actually interested in the age of the Earth; they should only show up if someone includes search terms like Bible, Genesis, creationism, or “how old is the Earth according to religious fundamentalists?”

Another, perhaps related: on any topic the search engines thinks is controversial, the algorithm assumes you have a “general interest” in the topic. Even if you carefully word your search query toward a certain viewpoint, the algorithm figures out the general topic and responds as if you simply wanted to know more about that topic in general. For example, if you search for solid pro-choice arguments, you clearly are looking for arguments in favor of the pro-woman, pro-choice position. But the search results pretend you were generally interested in arguments about abortion. They include “The Best Pro-Life Arguments” (in second place!), “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments”, “How To Turn The Tables On Four Pro-Choice Arguments”, etc. All these were from the first page of results. The results are similar on other topics I tested, including climate change, tax cuts for the wealthy, military spending, etc.

Please note: I am NOT asking Google (or any other search engine) to take a position on those topics. I perfectly understand that people who disagree with me also want to use search engines. But again, note that in my first example, I didn’t search for “how old do religions teach the Earth is?” I searched for the age of the Earth and was incorrectly presented with several religious sites. And in the second example, I would understand the results if I had searched for “arguments about abortion” — but I didn’t. Again, I have toyed with these over the past few years, refining my search terms. Even when I carefully tailor my query to favor a particular response, the search engines (all the ones I tested) return a few “the other side” results, even ones that don’t include the words I entered.

(If I was on “the other side”, I think I would be just as bothered by this. If I carefully entered “how old is the Earth according to the Southern Baptist Convention?”, I would NOT want a bunch of science sites giving the 4.54 billion years answer.)

Google News

I’ve noticed that Google News (and here I am referring specifically to “Google News”, not to the general category of news aggregator sites) has a similar pattern as those last two complaints. It notices that I click on articles critical of the current president, so it assumes I have a general interest in the president and inundates me with all types of stories about him, even op-eds that are supportive of him. If I click on a story under the Health heading, talking about the lasting damage from concussions in violent sports (football, boxing, etc.), then it assumes I have an interest in violent sports — which I do not — and saturates my feed with stories about violent sports. For a while, I had checked “atheist” as one of my interests, and Google News fed me a steady diet of “why atheists are horrible” stories and columns. Ugh.

It cannot differentiate between opposition and support; only interest.

Yes, there are the little three-dot menus next to each story, including options like “fewer stories like this” and “more stories like this”. But they don’t actually change anything. I click these all the time and it doesn’t appear to affect which stories I see.

Suggested Solutions

The solution to the Google News problem is simple enough; just don’t use it. In fact, the only reason I’ve visited it in the past few months was for curiosity, to continue clicking the “fewer stories like this” button to see if it would have any effect. (It hasn’t; if anything, it’s gotten worse.)

But one can’t simply quit using search engines — I mean, obviously, one could quit using search engines. But that makes it awfully difficult to... search for stuff on the internet.

I don’t think there is a solution on our end. The search engines could include an option — most of them feature a “settings” module these days — where we could check “process my search query just as I typed it” or “ignore predictive algorithms and quit trying to guess what I really want” or something. That would work for me.

But, what would work even better, I think, is to actually make the algorithms better. Because I don’t think it’s the existence of the algorithms that’s the problem. I just think they’re not doing a very good job. Just as the algorithms that direct targeted ads are really stupid, these search engines ones aren’t very smart either. Why would I want a week’s worth of ads for a storage ottoman, beginning the day after I bought a storage ottoman? But that’s what the algorithms decided: “Hey! This guy likes storage ottomans! Let’s advertise them to him!” Has any person, ever, in the history of the world, ever bought a new storage ottoman just days after buying the previous one? That’s gotta be fairly rare. In the same way, the search engine programs just notice something in the query that they can do something with — “Android app”, for example — and run with it.

Maybe someday they will be smarter. I hope so. It can be tough to be a technophile in a world where new tech is consistently disappointing or pointless.