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Google Fires Back About Search Engine Spam
coondoggie writes "The folks at Google are taking issue over spam and the quality of Google searches, which some claim has gone down in recent months. Today on Google's official blog, Principal Engineer Matt Cutts said, 'January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English.' Cutts also explained that the company has made a few significant changes to their method of indexing."
My anecdotal evidence trumps your empirical evidence any day!
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
According to our own tests we are 100% awesome. We have tested you and you are not :( --Elgoog
Trust google. Trust everything about them.
"Don't be evil" = "Eh. That's good enough."
help me fix this "Terrible" karma, please!
A typical problem companies have is measuring the quality of their products: By their metric, it's great! But per the user experience it's not. The users must be wrong.
The metric doesn't always capture the things that the users care about. Also, expectations can change. Better than five years ago may not be good enough
Based on my experience, Google's search quality is insufficient to make it useful for most purposes. It's plan B now. No search engine is much better, but plan A is to use better resources: Wikipedia, knowledge written or compiled by an expert, etc.
Inherited from Mentos, The Freshmaker
"spam in most other languages is even lower than in English."
this is definately not true for Spanish. There has always been a higher level of spam results for Spanish
Bottom line is that their 'metrics' are faulty. Who gives a damn about freshness when the content is irrelevant. Bottom line is that in recent memory its actually more difficult to find good results using google.
PS. No one cares about forum postings that barely scratch the surface of a subject, contain incomprehensible grammar, or just contain questions about your topic rather than relevant information. But if google doesn't even want to recognize that it is doing things that customers don't like they will eventually go the way of the dodo bird as well.
the evaluation metrics we've refined over the past decade
In other words, as long as they keep changing the evaluation criteria, they always pass them!
I've seen more parked domains in google results than I have actually content recenty.
If I do a search for something "easy" to find, I don't care that much whether there are 30% spam results or 15% spam results. What I care about is how often I do a search for some obscure information that's surely out there but 95% or more of the results are spam and I have a lot of trouble finding what I'm looking for.
In my purely anecdotal experience, that's definitely up in the past couple of years, but it's something that I suspect is rather difficult for Google to quantify.
But it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the information I really want/need in my searchs.Maybe it is time to change your metrics.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
" according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. "
And thus begins the downfall of Google. Once you start drinking your own lemonade and stop listening to the people who use your product, you're on a greased downhill slope.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Perception is reality.
Anyway, I think the argument is: The spammers are gaming your Metrics. It's not that there's 50% less spam in your search results, it's that you're detecting 50% less spam in the first place.
Google does not have spam, Google is spam.
See, this is where Google goes off the rails and starts to believe its own press. Cutts said, in effect, "Our search engine tells us that our search engine is doing just fine." Yeah, well, ultimately Google's search engine isn't the center of the universe and the ultimate authority on everything. The users are. If the users say that the quality of search results are going down, then they're going down. Period. Google better figure out how to change their evaluation metrics to reflect what users are seeing rather than attempt to change user's opinions to match what their evaluation metrics say.
Every time I search for something these days I get some ridiculous set of non-results due to the fuzzy matching. I search for "TIPC layer3" google nicely finds me results about TCP Layer3 because google thinks I must have typo'd something. This happens constantly with one or two letter off searches where the search results I get are adjusted because the alternative ranks higher.
Google's search is not getting better, it's getting more and more 'Clippy' every year.
What is considered spam anyway?
I mean, I'm sure I'd like to have an "expert" perform my "sexchange" if I want one, but I was just looking for help solving a programming bug.
I also appreciate that some sites try to help me with my searching, but I'd rather have them provide answers instead of giving yet more search results.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Google has a dilemma. If their search engine takes you directly to the place you want to go, they don't make any money. For a good analysis of this, see "Google Sucks All the Way to the Bank", by Jill Whalen She is, unfortunately, right. It's essential for Google's success that some of their own ads be more relevant than their search results. Part of their revenue comes from sending users on a side-trip to AdWords-heavy pages. We've measured this, using a browser plug-in which reports AdWords appearances to us. About 36% of domains with AdWords (counting domain names, not traffic) are what we consider "bottom feeders", junk sites with a commercial purpose but no identifiable business behind them.
On the local search front, spam in Google Places is even worse than in their main search results. This, though, appears to be due to ineptitude, not malice. Google added a business search system to Google Maps a year or two ago; that's what Google Places really is. You've been able to go to a Google Maps page and search for businesses for some time now. Few people knew this.
Then, in October 2010, Google merged the map search results into their main search results. "Places" results suddenly got top billing in Google. The "search engine optimization" (SEO) industry swung into action, and began spamming Google Places on a massive scale. (We have a paper on this, which has been mentioned by Techdirt, the New York Observer, etc. It's an amusing read.) Recommendation spamming, which had been going on for a while at a low level, grew substantially once recommendations started affecting Google search results.
This, incidentally, is why Blekko won't work. If they get enough market share to matter, techniques will be developed to spam them into meaninglessness.
Stopping web spam is technically quite possible. We do it by finding the business behind the web site, and doing some automated due diligence. We check business records, SEC filings, BBB ratings, and Dun and Bradstreet to verify business legitimacy. We down-rate most of the junk. We try to err in the down-rating direction, taking the position that it's the job of a company to demonstrate their legitimacy by using their real name and address on their web site, which has to match real-world business records. Our demo site demo site for this shows what search is like if you take a hard line on spam.
Our approach requires more of a hard-ass attitude than Google's business model can perhaps afford. With Bleekko making Google look foolish, though, and Bing slowly improving, Google may have to actually do something that works, even if it cuts into revenue from the spam.
I've switched to other search engines; from my experience, Google provides too many tangential and corporate references when I do research.
Also, how does Google "know" that their search results were valid? I'll often do a Google search, click a couple of links, and after being disappointed, I'll go to another search engine where I get more useful results.
What bugs me the most are searches on technical or medical topics, where Google give me a dozen "harvester" results -- e.g., I get sites that have stolen conversations from other message boards, and reported them along with tons of ads. Yuck! There must be dozens of hundreds of sites, all with broken answers to questions about JavaScript and/or medicines.
Just because evidence is anecdotal doesn't mean it should be blithely discounted. If I say "Ouch" at being cut, that means the injury hurt me; the pain is quite real even if no one else has felt it.
All about me
I think that the solid consensus among the people I know that track such things is that the spammers are winning and the quality of search is going down. I know that this is my own experience. That may or may not mean that Google is slacking off, but I don't think that perception comes from thin air.
"Our tests say we're better than what our customers are saying!"
Exactly. Who gives a rat's ass if your spam is 1/2 what it was 5 years ago.
Does anyone really remember results from 5 years ago?
It's certainly much more than it was 1 year ago.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
I'm seeing less spam than a few years ago when link farms and Wikipedia clones were showing up everywhere on the top results pages. This smells like Microsoft funded FUD.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Just try to find XP drivers without going some spammy "driversdownload.com". Google is good for one thing...barroom trivia and shopping.. okay two things...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
That's what I tell the missus. Her anecdotes can't be true, according to my metrics, my sexual performance is not just great, it improved by an order of two in the last 5 years.
Of course, I can't tell you or her what my numbers are, or what I measured, or how, because it's proprietary and a trade secret.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've certainly noticed the quality of searches going down recently, at least for less common searches. I regularly search for oddball system files, software, drivers, etc, the first few pages of results are often very scammy looking sites devoid of actual content and what I am looking for is a dozen pages in. Often these results trump even official big company web sites. Heck while half asleep I used Google to search for OpenOffice, clicked the first link, clicked a big download button, and when trying to install it later I realized whatever I downloaded was certainly *NOT* OpenOffice. (Don't know what it was, I deleted it quickly)
Google's biggest mistake is that when I search three words, for example "kontact outer space", I don't get the result of those three words. I don't want google to outsmart me. Sure, they might suggest that I misspelled "kontact" and that it should be "contact", but I know better (kontact is a KDE PIM suite you know). Now I have to add those "+" in front of all words. Annoying. Other than that, google really sucks at searching exact phrases that include punctuation, such as programming code. But that's another story, and pretty OT...
I would sooo use that feature!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
In the last few years, I've found search results have been dominated more and more by content mills like associated content, ehow, hubpages, about, and others; or some low quality Q&A page, like yahoo answers. The pages are hastily written and edited, and low content. The articles are also typically written by someone without any relevant knowledge or experience - so the information is common knowledge or wrong.
If google's metrics say quality is up, but their users think quality is down, then google's metrics need to be revised to match user experience more closely. I've started using duck duck go because they block content mills, and thus I think their results are as good or better than google, even without the complicated algorithms and all the data google has accumulated.
Did you miss this earlier today?
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
In my own experience spam on google is constantly getting worse and more fustrating to deal with ... I expect it for searches where there is not likely to be any hits but it is also starting to creep into top spots in situations where there is more dense information available.
I remember back in the day people working logistics used to run algorithms to maximize profits for store supply chains but their efforts actually lost a great deal of revenue as algorithms did not understand human factors and how people having to go somewhere else to get an objectivly less profitable item would impact their sales.
It is a complex space and to think you can simply throw algorithms at detecting and characterizing a problem you can't detect and quantify in the first place (Unless they actually can but are choosing not to for obvious evil reasons) seems more than just a little bit naive.
If I were google I would conduct a survey and see what real humans think about the problem rather than playing the part of a foolish statistician.
I also take exception to Matts message.. don't tell someone whos pissed off about the amount of spam that it is getting better. This is an amature hour loosing proposition. Just tell us what you plan on doing to fix it or don't say anything at all.
Typing things in correctly apparently is harder. Why should I play on hard-mode because I know how to search correctly?
You can't argue that google wants to limit 'bad' searches -- the search-while-you-type feature obliterates that argument. They don't care about the number of searches you do, and seemingly less and less about the quality.
They should also take a look at the Google groups interface to Usenet. It's nothing but spam.
Always use advanced search and the filters.
Yeah... because one extra click on "Search instead for TIPC layer3" is too hard?
When it adds up to 5000 extra clicks because you find yourself having to do it for almost every other search... yes. I preferred how they used to do it by actually searching for the term you type in and suggesting the term they think it should be, rather than how it is now where they automatically redirect you to what they think it should be and make you click to search what you actually typed.
We have been accused of having a trash detector that has started to fail at detecting trash and therefore that our content has a lot of trash in it.
This is false. You see, we carefully analyzed our content using our trash detector and it detected 50% less trash than before, showing that our content is now cleaner than ever.
Remember the olden days when you could [x] kill a domain that didn't ever want to see again?
Why did they ever get rid of that?
I've taken to using this instead, works great. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
What about an "Elite" search engine? "Made by geeks/nerds for geeks/nerds."
(I lost track of the political correctness, pick either or your own.)
The guy who wants drivers, the guy who wants the KDE results, the guy who wants the scrotwm, my advanced search examples, on and on. We don't want to buy things. We're out to search for ruthless hard info.
Google took a cute step with the "reading level". It sorta helps.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You're right. Blekko is neat.
Google Advanced Search is #1 on Blekko for term Advanced.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Nah, if it depended on her reactions, it wouldn't be objective any more. And besides, it wouldn't fair to downgrade _my_ rating just because on some days _she_ can't fake quickly enough ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here's a great example of returning pages that don't contain what you're searching for.
Search for +open +cat +mug +frame
The first link only contains 2 of the 4 terms.
Returning a page that does not contain a required search term is a failure state.
I find being offended by me offensive.
I suppose if you're surrounded by a bunch of top geek talent, when you have a question on, say, some feature of Linux or networking or something, you just ask the person in the cubicle next to you. Me, I have to use things like Google, and I rarely find answers 'fresher' than 2007, which might as well be 1997 for all their worth with the pace of most OSS projects.
In some cases, they don't show a "Did you mean ...". It happens that search term are just silently chenged to what Google thinks you really mean. I've seen this depend on the context, the other terms you enter for the same search.
On example, for me (using encrypted.google.com, logged in with my account. No idea if that changes anything) if I search for "worf" I get results about Worf the klingon (Wikipedia at #1). But if I search for "keylar worf" (I was trying to find out what the name of that gal was that he boinked on the Holodeck), the terms "keylar" and "word" and "work" are bold in the results but not "worf". Screenshot. There's no notice at all of the change.
Combine that with the problem that nowadays you have to add a "+" in front of half your search terms so they won't get ignored, and you get some seriously irritated users.
Mutt Cutts?
One thing that needs to be handled though is the cybersquatters at the top of many searches, It can't be impossible to filter if they compare searches worldwide.
It has that option, search tools on the left of the screen.
Well a real article from 1997 would be better than what I was describing (though I find adding an Ubuntu version (as that's what I've been using) works wonders.
e.g. Blah don't work 10.10 ubuntu
My point is that the "fresh" sites I get are all paragraphs of the same article, in a site called techwizbang.com or some such, with my exact google search appended as a search query on their site.
I wouldn't even be offended if it was the front page of a blog, but when it's some clearly (I hope) robot generated blog full of ads, often linking to other blogs, I would call it SPAM, even if "fresh", "Comprehensive", and "relevant". It is true they have pretty much halted SPAM in the sense that a porn site comes up when looking for something else, but these search pages, or keyword pages, on crappy robot generated blogs are pissing me off.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I love Google, compared to Yahoo it is light years ahead, BUT, back in the late 90's, early 00's it was easy to do advanced searches and pinpoint specific information quickly. Now the only way to pinpoint specific information is to restrict searches to specific websites where useful information is available. Google's search seems to be much more focused on consumer shopping than anything else these days. Google is becoming less useful as a general search engine and more useful as a consumer search engine and in that very limited function I could agree with Principal Engineer Matt Cutts.
My anecdotal evidence trumps your empirical evidence any day!
They are not necessarily reaching their goal of better searches, they are simply meeting their design specification. Their metrics are a model, a guess, at what better search results *may* be. If the metrics are off, then their results will probably also be off.
hopefully that shouldn't be a problem anymore: "As of December 18th, 2010 experts exchange stopped displaying solutions to search engines" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts-Exchange
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
Actually it does, the description text is hidden until some user actions are taken. A ctrl-f on the page may not return results for the terms, but viewing source and ctrl-f does.
insight through the mind
Your example link returns all four search terms if you grep the source of the page, so your search was actually 100% successful in terms of keyword occurrence.
Keyword relevance, however, is in the eye of the beholder. Look to the comments on that page for occurrences of 'open' and 'frame'...
Caution: May contain nuts.
Two of your terms are in the page content (cat and mug)
One of them is in the pull down menu on the left (frame)
The missing one is used in a link that points to that page and so Google thinks it might still be relevant.
Not that I'm dismissing your point. You didn't get the results you expected...
Actually, if you read the blog post from Google linked in TFS, they aren't saying that "there is no problem" (as parent post's title suggested) or that "it's great" (as parent post's text suggested.)
They did say that their own metrics don't show the trend that various, mostly anecdotal, critics have claimed. But they also said that they view the spam that does exist as a problem, and they announced several steps to address it:
As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.
As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.
This is not a company denying that there is a problem because their internal metrics don't match the problems being reported. It is a company acknowledging that there is a problem and committing to take action on it, even though their own internal metrics don't agree with their critics on the size of or trend in the problem.
Manipulated results example: Google search for Santorum
Keep Doing Good.
Just because evidence is anecdotal doesn't mean it should be blithely discounted.
True, but irrelevant. Google, even though they say that their measurements don't support the trend that certain media articles have suggested, is not blithely disregarding comments about too much spam or the perception that it is increasing. If you read the blog post linked in TFS, you'll see that they do several things:
1. State that their metrics show that spam in results is decreasing,
2. Identify recent steps they've taken to decrease spam,
3. Acknowledge that they are aware of concerns about the quality of results,
4. Suggest that they believe that the perception of a trend toward less satisfying results is a result of their improvements not matching the pace at which expectations of Google are increasing,
5. Acknowledge that, despite the improvements they believe they have made, they "can and should do better",
6. Present steps they are in the process of implementing to decrease spam further,
7. Specifically deny that their algorithms and delisting policies for the search engine are friendly to spammy sites that have Google Ads.
This has annoyed me to no end. I search for a page which contains at the very least some specific words. You go to the page, hit CTRL+F, type in on of the words you are searching for and get 0 results. The way I search I want it to return pages ONLY with those words in it if I put a + in front of something. Don't try to outsmart me google! Don't try to "know" what I "meant to search for". Just give me a result which has the content I asked for. Maybe for the everyday user google is easier to use as they have poor search terms and this works for them, but power users really hate this kind of thing.
Google is becoming the Windows of search engines, they protect you from yourself, and don't deliver what you actually ask for.
How do you know that information actually exists out there somewhere?
I mean, if you search for something where no legitimate content exists, doesn't it stand to reason that the results you get, if any, are 100% spam?
Try searching for a review on any say computer tech hardware item. First page of results will be garbage redirect sites that have spidered other websites and cloned their prices and tried to present it as their own. Google is slowly turning into complete shit, this probably has more to do with investors having more say, and growing too large too fast. Does anyone remember how really great their search results were when it was just a research project?
If I only needed to do so once in a while, it might be OK. But when it happens dozens of times a day, the aggravation and wasted time start to add up. Coincidentally, I just posted a complaint about this to the Google Search forum a couple days ago, asking for a profile setting to prevent this behavior.
Oh, and I agree about the domain blocking. Google used to allow this, and they really ticked me off when they took it away. The -site: hack becomes rather cumbersome when there are dozens if not hundreds of sites you want to block.
Prefix every word or quoted string with a plus. It works, even if it's really annoying.
Google's results have become utter crap. Color me duckduckGONE, baby!
Yes, and this is a problem.
I frequently search for Engineering data sheets.
In the past, Google would give you the wanted pdf in the first few hits.
Now you get pages and pages of spam sites who don't actually have the file you want.
I'm desperately hoping for a Google replacement. Blekko comes close, but not yet.
Despite the "no, we're perfect" attitude, I'm sure all this publicity will find them cranking up the sensitivity on their infallible (sarcasm intended) webspam detector algorithm. Ever try to get in touch with a live human to report a misclassification, or even find out what triggered it? As someone who had his entire (noncommercial, ad-free, and 100% original material) site misclassified as a spam site and delisted from Google for about a month last year, I can confirm that the procedure for getting a potential Algorithm issue addressed by a live human involves knowing someone who is Facebook friends with Matt Cutts.
I eventually got this resolved (with approximately a month of trial and error; I'm not facebook friends with Matt Cutts) - it turned out the webspam algorithm was keying on a text file from an extensive dossier of published anti-malware research, documenting the list of keywords a particular piece of spyware used to trigger popup ads over webpages. For that, entire domain blocked, including subdomains. Censoring the keywords got us unbranded as spammers, but I really shouldn't have to do that.
(PS. I even dumped Google and tried using Bing for a few weeks out of protest...believe me, the view over there isn't any prettier.)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Well google fails my metrics. Usually the top 5 results of most searches consist of content farms or articles around 5 years of age. Why are older articles weighted more than new articles, I want relevant info!
My primary use of Google is to research system and application error messages that I come across while at work. A few years ago searching for an error message would yield some valuable results. These days it seems like the same kind of searches often turn up other people looking for the same information. Those search results usually take the form of forum postings and Usenet postings. Almost every single time, there will be one or two other results in the same result set that are exact same question, just copied into another forum. It's like spammers are simply taking Usenet postings, mirroring them, and then putting AdWords links on the mirrored pages.
Saying "spam in Google's results is less than half what it was five years ago" could be their way of hiding something like "it was 20% then but just 10% now", and if spam has risen at such a rate during this time that 10% now, is greater than 20% then, well... the total spam would be higher even if the percentage itself was cut in half. And acting like there can't possibly be a problem and that everyone is somehow suddenly perceiving a problem that isn't real, makes me think they might be losing touch with improving their search algorithms. Since I love Google, that comes across scary. I'd hate to use Bing. Please don't make me think Bing might be a viable option.
Yeah, I have to agree with you. We have to trust Google. Our eyes lie. Are minds are warped. Only Google is TRUTH. Queue the fanboi choir.
From the point of the user, being present in the source isn't sufficient - it needs to be displayed on the page itself. Being displayed on the page after the user takes some actions is somewhere between these two - it should be weighted lower than an appearance on the raw page.
wow, that sounds like incredible bullshit, or /at best/ incompetence on your part. it's certainly not reproducible; unlike most of the anecdotal fud filling the comments we can at least verify that what you claim is not currently the case. good thing you deleted it quickly, if you had only been able to delete it slowly /god knows/ what would've happened to your computer.
Actually in the past I've seen a lot of pages that don't contain one or more of the terms, then on viewing the cached version of the page it turns out that the missing words only appear in links to that page.
I don't know if that's changed recently though.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
If I was at google, the very first thing I would implement would be a double robot:
- the classic one, identified as googlebot
- another discreet one, identified as IE7 (or whatever is the most common browser at the time), with the page rendered by IE7, blurred a bit and then OCRed.
The two are then compared, and if they are far from matching, dump the pagerank in the bit bucket. This way you eliminate hidden text, white on white and see text in GIFs.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Hey everybody, the intent of the blog post wasn't to say "everything is hunky dory." Spam on Google is up compared to a few months ago, which is why I said there had been an uptick in spam. Our overall relevancy is better than in the past, but not the part of relevancy related to spam. The rest of the post was trying to say that we hear the complaints and we're working on improvements. The revamp to our doc-level classifier launched in the last few weeks, and a change related to scraped content was approved this week and will launch soon. We're testing other ideas to improve things too.
When I search for stuff, I usually get a bunch of "find best price" crap, or nonsense from eHow and other useless sites like that.
Clever signature text goes here.
It's not like they win a prize or even get a cookie based on their internal metrics. There is no business advantage for them to have their internal metric of "good user experience" not correlate with actual user experience.
The metric they are using may be non-optimal or even plain wrong. But the idea that they are intentionally gaming their own internal metrics just so that they can claim "we pass our self-made tests of awesomeness!" is laughable. Google is not that stupid. They want valid metrics because they know that at the end of the day only by making users happy can they can they make money (through advertising, etc.).
I think one of the points Google is making is that objective and subjective measures are very different. People's perceptions very often are not an accurate measure of real trends. For instance there was a time when the quality of Google search results was decidedly better than competitors; everyone was aware of the quality and lauded them. Nowadays, we're totally accustomed to high-quality search results: from Google and its competitors. Thus we tend to be more critical, noticing flaws that we would have previously ignored (because we were so happy for any improvement over previously abysmal search tools). Thus, we feel that there is a local trend of "Google getting worse" when it really has more to do with our standards progressively getting higher. You can see similar trends at other levels of society: e.g. people often feel that crime is on the increase (even though, statistically, the long-term trend has been a decrease in crime in most developed countries), because recent and extreme news reports of crime are over-weighted compared to the numerous (and easily forgotten) days where nothing bad happened.
Of course, for Google to keep its users happy, their metric in some sense should account for people's shifting standards, emphasis on short term events, poor statistical intuition, and so on. In other words, to keep users happy, you have to take into account the foibles of the human mind. (E.g. status bars seem to be going faster if they include motion within them, and people will also report a status bar that starts slow and ends fast as "faster" than one which starts fast and ends slow, even if they take the same amount of time...) But just because you or I feel like the search results have gone downhill doesn't mean that they objectively have gotten worse.
So you're saying Google can't tell the difference between what is important to the browser and what is important to the user.
How's that not a failure state?
I find being offended by me offensive.
I don't care about the source. Do you read the source of every page you go to?
Google can't tell the difference between what is important to the browser and what is important to the human. That's a utter failure to understand your market and what to provide them.
I find being offended by me offensive.