It’s not just you – Google’s search engine has deteriorated. This is the opinion of researchers from the University of Leipzig, who have investigated the accuracy of three major search engines – Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. The researchers spent over a year analyzing 7,400 tests and purchase recommendations about various products on the search engine. The research showed that “low-quality content, especially for products, drowns out useful information in search results”. In addition, Google’s search engine is in a “constant battle against spam pages”, say the researchers according to Mashable. Google is clearly the world’s largest search engine, with an 83 percent market share on computers and a 95 percent market share on mobile. Over 70,000 searches are made on the website every second. This accounts for 68 percent of all internet traffic. Google is popularity-driven AI expert and author Inga Strümke has completely stopped using Google. Instead, she uses DuckDuckGo, a search engine that does not collect information about its users. AI researcher and author Inga Strümke has switched to using DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine that has a greater focus on privacy. Photo: NTB – I want it to be a secret what I am applying for. But I still say “to google” when I mean to search the internet, says Strümke. Before she quit, she noticed for several years that Google was deteriorating. – Google is largely governed by popularity. We expect it to get better, but what does better mean? Google wants as many users and as many clicks as possible. Better just means more popular, in this context, she says. Google responds Google tells news that they do not think the study shows the whole picture. – This study looked at a narrow selection of content that dealt with product reviews, and basically does not reflect the general quality of searches, and whether it is perceived as helpful across the billions of searches we see every day, says Sondre Ronander, head of communications at Google Norway. Sondre Ronander, head of communications at Google Norway. He says Google’s search engine does significantly better than other search engines. Photo: Christopher Bechmann The company refers to a blog post where the problems are addressed. – We have made concrete improvements to address challenges like this. The study itself points out that Google has improved over the past year, and is doing better than other search engines, says the communications manager. Ronander emphasizes that Google is still doing better than other search engines. – Several studies that look at results for search engines for other types of search show the same thing: Google does significantly better than the rest, he says. New phase of technology AI researcher and author Inga Strümke believes that people expect technology like Google to get better and better, but this is not the case. – Technology development is dynamic, it also depends on how society develops and what people want. The AI researcher believes we are in a new phase of search engine technology. – In this phase, you experience this: basing a search engine exclusively on what others think has been relevant is not a good way to determine what are good search results, believes Strümke. She says Google must continue to make the search engine better if it is not going to disappear. – We humans create technology to solve problems. Technology that does not solve problems will not be developed further.
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Google’s search engine is getting worse – news Culture and entertainment
