I have been trying to get Google Image search to recognize my wife’s full name. The name appears in several places that Google indexes, like LinkedIn, but they never can find her picture. Instead they give me lots of pictures of people with her first name, perhaps mentioned on a web page that also contains her last name. Adding her middle name does nothing. The first time Google found a link to her name on my blog, it was to a post I wrote complaining about Google! Well they have their priorities (see “common variants”) but I feel that it is no longer a search engine.

Another violation of the search engine “contract” is that sometimes adding search terms produces more search results. What is up with that? It makes me wonder: maybe Google can’t do searches any more and their concept of “relevance” has been corrupted. 

That’s entirely possible, Peter, but I have to ask if you’ve surrounded her name in quotes, to see if that brings about the desired results. when I do the same image search for my name (Dave Morton) without the quotes, my image isn’t on the first page at all, and that’s several dozen images. However, when I put my name in double quotes, my image is in the second row (in fact, it’s the 20th image), so there is a significant difference. Beyond that, I really have no idea.

Thanks Dave, I tried that but couldn’t get any difference, with or without quotes. It is interesting to read about “close variants” (I mis named it above). I found a link:
http://searchengineland.com/farewell-pure-exact-match-google-will-soon-force-campaigns-close-variants-enabled-200615

I suppose the real importance is that YOU recognize your wife’s name(s).

...while not forgetting my own

I am still bothered about this. The concept of pattern matching vigorously requires that more complex patterns have fewer matches - that adding search terms behaves at least slightly like a the Boolean ‘AND’ operation.

I just read that 91 percent of product searches (when it is a Google product) return Google Ads on top. This shows how strongly their “search” algorithms are being driven by irrelevant attributes.  Add to this that Google search terms are prioritized in a bubble where what people click on is driven by a Google preference, which adds weight to that irrelevant preference. This is a self driving “echo chamber” where Google believes what it is telling itself is reality.

Given these things I think Google should be publicly challenged that they no longer are performing a search. The above statistic should lead to lawsuits from advertisers and anti-monopoly lawsuits by our (mostly non performing) governmental protection apparatus.

What is Google now? Let’s call it an online catalog, that has lost its ability to explore the internet and now is playing catch up to Amazon. Google is not a search engine and pretending it is violates a basic trust.

Peter, very true and how it “gets under my skin / irritates me” when I enter my search topic I get a page of responses. After I click on several I notice that there is Nothing contained in these pages that is pertinent to my requested search at all. It’s as if they were just trying to get me to click on their URL so they could push their own advertising / agenda on me.

I have begun to notice this behavior more and more and it frustrates me as a user.

One other thing are those ads. Click a URL and instead of seeing your search result, you are now “Treated” with having to view a 20 second “commercial” for some product.

Some of those sites have gone as far as to monitor the “Sound / Speaker” button. I selected a site yesterday, the Ad started playing with some horrible theme song. I clicked the sound button OFF as to mute the Ad. When the Ad was finally over and it had switched to my subject video, the sound button would no longer respond. Basically I was now watching a silent video!
After going back, selecting the URL once more and sitting through the annoying musical intro, the sound worked fine during the presentation.

Things have gone too far IMO.

(that’s why we still have books…for now).