11mo ago

A US judge just called Google the ‘highest quality search engine’. But how do we determine ‘quality’?

theconversation.com

19 comments

I'd rather not have judges make completely subjective statements like that.
- With the chevron ruling, this is the new norm.
I wonder which others he has tried to get to that conclusion, and how recently.
- I’m going to go with ‘Not Any, and probably not even Google.’
  
  I just go to Bing.com and Google whatever I want.. The internet is an amazing series of tubes.
There was a time when that statement would have had some credibility.
Search engine quality in the United States is determined by 60-80 year olds who have only ever used Google to search for "lexisnexis.com"
- Also:
  Search engine quality determined exclusively by the folks that consistently mistake their Facebook status update field for a search engine.
Mehta said the tech giant has built “the industry’s highest quality search engine”.
This is not wrong. They have done this, in the past. And since then, it has taken a nose dive.
A US judge will say whatever he's paid to say.
- This is the judge who ruled that Google has a monopoly and abused it. If Google is paying them, they didn't pay enough.
  
  Depends on what the punishment is.
What metric is the judge using lol
WTF... Is this the same judge who made anti trust ruling planting seed to be over turned?
- It's technically true. "Has built" can be past tense.
"quality"="gets me the answer I'm looking for, if it exists, and as quickly as possible". Regardless of whether I was making a simple nav query or trying to figure out what an error message from some obscure piece of obsolete software really means. No other metrics need apply.
Unfortunately, Google still has the largest database of pages indexed, even if its frontend sucks like an industrial shopvac. So it can sometimes answer questions that engines using other databases as backing can't, even if locating that answer is like fighting back a horde of zombies with a paring knife.
When the name becomes synonymous with the service.
I'll Google it to make sure this is accurate.
That judge just wants to get on their lobbyist payroll
I'd give that to brave search at this point.
I get reliably more accurate search results with Brave Search tbh. It has a neat little AI summariser tool you can disable, an option to pay $3 a month to go ad-free, it's privacy-centric, clean design, browser-agnostic. Also, it uses its own indexer/web crawler, it doesn't just piggyback on Bing like DuckDuckGo does.
The only time I end up using Google is if I'm looking into a very recent event, like a thing happening in the world that took place in the last 12-24 hours or so. Google seems to index news articles quicker than Brave.

19 comments