[Agustus]

The funny moment of all this is how Google is becoming the type of search browser that existed in 2000. Altavista, webcrawler, yahoo, and others were the default search engines, but then they started to let advertisers override the search results to be inserted in the search results. Initially, the results were clearly delineated, but over time, they fell in and the note of it being an “ad” fell away.

To be fair, the internet is being conflated into a platform to drive people into walled gardens, and google is trying to deal with helping people into them.

I wondered how long it would take for the site to descend into the dark patterns that caused google to ascend.

[whywhywhywhy]

Image Search has also been completely ruined by their push for ML based results without even checking if it's better.

Years ago I could Image Search a frame of a film and get the film title almost every time, now I get a generic "Street" or "Man" search term and then a bunch of photos that have streets in them with a similar color palette which are never from the film.

They've got so excited by the tech that they can identify an object or setting that they've forgotten just finding the same image elsewhere online and using the context of the web page would give a better answer.

[rainburg]

Luckily, there's an alternative: images.yandex.com

It effortlessly does both reverse image search AND image objects search. Results are usually so good, it almost seems like Google decided to cripple their image search on purpose.

[wilkystyle]

The fact that Yandex includes the OCR'd text in any image you search from is awesome.

[buboard]

I use yandex images so often that it triggers their bot filter. I think they 've found themselves a high-potential niche here.

[enraged_camel]

If there's one party I'd be even less comfortable sharing my data with than Google, it would be a Russian company. Not because I think Russians are evil or anything, but rather because there's even less accountability and oversight (if any at all) with what they do with that data than we have in the US/Europe.

[ehsankia]

That's specifically reverse image search, I find that image search itself has gotten much better at generic search terms.

I agree that the generic results on reverse search are annoying, but my guess is that it isn't replacing exact results, but rather giving you something when there would've been no results at all. If you search for an exact frame that does exist, it usually finds it correctly.

[buboard]

much better at serving pinterest pages and stock image sites ... maybe

[altec3]

Google Search for DIY project images: Get 90% Pinterest results that end up just linking to a random machine generated page with garbage text and a few tangentially related pictures.

Google Search for someones Instagram handle: Get one Instagram result and endless pages of sites that scrape Instagram and have the person's profile interspersed with ads.

[atombender]

Try Bing's image search. It's actually very good. Bigger previews, ability to easily download, smart ML-driven similarity search (you can even draw a rectangle of an image to find something similar to that area), better at suggesting related images, nicer UI overall. The mobile app is also much nicer than Google's when it comes to images.

[pottertheotter]

I switched over to Bing a couple months ago because Google's image search now shows very tiny previews on the right side of the screen. They're often barely bigger than the image I click on. Been using Google since 1999, but I guess I look at images enough it pushed me over.

[smadurange]

Recently I switched from Chrome and Google search to Firefox with Duck Duck Go and found it refreshing actually.

[_ps6d]

The founders of Google knew very well that this was what advertising did to a search engine (and then they did it anyway).

This is "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives" from their original paper about Google in 1998 [1]:

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

[1]: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html