[PLUG-TALK] Is Google searching more shallowly lately?

[Bill Ensley]

Curious to know the public site you landed on and if others of
us doing similar searches come up with it.

-Bill Ensley

On 5/14/2014 9:27 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> We've always known that Google indexes only a small fraction of
> the web's billions of web pages, but I'm wondering if they are
> ignoring public webpages that they used to include in search
> results, because Joe Average rarely follows the links to them.
>
> A few weeks ago, I was trying to find the median (NOT average!)
> income of rural Laotian farmers - which would help explain a
> Laotian movie I had just seen.  I eventually found the data on
> public pages, but I could never get Google to cough up those
> pages, even with direct quotes and rare keywords.  It's like
> Google didn't know the pages existed - and I suspect they are
> no longer scanned or indexed, because only a few screwballs
> like me ever look at them.
>
> It seems like Google is getting dumber, turning into "Ask
> Jeeves", providing the consumer-related results Joe Average
> usually asks for, rather than what I ask for.  In "The Filter
> Bubble",  Eli Pariser complains that Google personalization
> gives different people different results, based on how the
> algorithms pigeonhole the person asking, a categorization
> based on past results and broad stereotypes.  I've seen some
> of that; getting Australian retail store suggestions after
> looking at an Australian space-related blog, for example.
>
> But I look for a oddball mix of stuff, a very large bubble
> indeed, and get served a lot of regression to the lowest
> common denominator.  If Google is striving to build an
> artificial intelligence, that "intelligence" drives a
> rusted-out Chevy pickup truck, smokes Camels, eats
> McDonalds, and drinks Budweiser.
>
> Hell, maybe they're scanning my old arrest records!
>
> Time to crowdsource a new search engine.
>
> Keith
>