Wharton Professor Talks About The Decay Of Web Search

Ethan Mollick, an Associate Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, posted on X about his disappointment with overall internet search. He wrote, “There is no greater way to feel the overall decay of internet search then to try to figure out when & if a new season of a show is coming out.”

For those queries, he said that all he saw were “weird clickbait articles.” What it should be, he said, is “an official yes/no or, at worst, rumors from way too specialized discussion forums.”

Here is that post:

There is no greater way to feel the overall decay of internet search then to try to figure out when & if a new season of a show is coming out.

All weird clickbait articles, when it should be an official yes/no or, at worst, rumors from way too specialized discussion forums.

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) December 31, 2023

I don’t really watch that much TV but the searches I conducted on Google for the shows I know about seem like solid responses. Again, maybe the more obscure TV shows or maybe TV shows that just announced their next season minutes ago have a lot of spam? That would be the data void issue that search engines need to deal with.

For example, [when is the new season of ted lasso coming out] showed me this hows after Ethan Mollick posted that tweet:

Now, Google showed last season and so does Bing – but that is because nothing official was announced outside of this hint?

waiting for 202𝟒… pic.twitter.com/fqNyuYMJEh

— Nick Mohammed (@nickmohammed) December 30, 2023

Mikhail Parakhin from the Microsoft Bing Search team replied to that post saying, “Which show you were searching for? At Bing, we really do try. These are popular queries, so lots of sites are trying to SEO themselves to get traffic.”

Here is that reply:

Which show you were searching for? At Bing, we really do try. These are popular queries, so lots of sites are trying to SEO themselves to get traffic. pic.twitter.com/YLA5XkQJfH

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) December 31, 2023

I am too curious about the query, what did he search for specifically…

Over the past couple of months, there has been a lot of negative talk about the poor search quality at Google Search.

It is cool that Microsoft’s Mikhail Parakhin replied to this concern over the New Year’s weekend.

Forum discussion at X.