How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? • Hacker News Board

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#141

Post by scarejunba » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #131

scarejunba wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings. The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you…

Unfortunately their price is excessive and their income mostly comes from rent-seeking the contribution they make to the value of the internet is negligible and they leverage their position to take an outsized chunk out of income streams. Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inel…

That's only if you want access to all the people who find Google useful. The guy I'm responding to wants a smaller web that doesn't grow. You can do that without drinking from the Google firehouse.

No one is taking the ability to make a smaller web away from anyone. But that's the nature of the small web, it's small. And maybe your business can't sustain itself on small. That's just incompatibility of what you want and physical reality.

You know what people say on this website about blocking ads, right? "Your business model is not my problem". It's true.

I get what you're saying and I sympathize. It just isn't compatible with the other guy's view. In a "smaller web" your business wouldn't even exist.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#142

Post by eitland » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

thebean11 wrote: post #130

bluGill wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good? I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.

Because a newspaper does not have enough user targeting data; their ads would not be as valuable since they would not be as well targeted.

I'm tired of saying this but either I've been caught in a fluke of some kind or Google really isn't so good at advertising.

Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier.

Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#143

Post by iamleppert » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

I think the logical next step is for Google to start showing old-school banner ads at the top of the page and pop-ups, and pop-under's. Once that happens (and I am thinking it will be relatively soon), their transformation and subsequent and inevitable slow decline will be fully complete.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#144

Post by winternett » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

I have a feeling that we'll arrive soon at StatGate... The point where we find that many companies have been providing erroneous and/or outright false web stats, recommendations, reviews and other metrics to users in order to steer and increase profit.

Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services.

Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/

At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#145

Post by praxulus » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

smichel17 wrote: post #76

reaperducer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is t…

I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.

If you have a typo in the name, Google will fix it for you, whereas your browser will happily take you to a domain that is probably owned by a scammer.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#146

Post by MiroF » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

gre wrote: post #125

I've been prefixing all my searches with reddit and then filtering by within last month or last year, and something seems to have changed lately. The reddit results say some number of days within the time constraint, but then the result is actually years old which makes it all pointless. This is literally the only way I search google right now because their results are so spammy otherwise.

This is exactly the same for me. I only search reddit through google (and ddg otherwise), but it no longer is providing me with recent results even when I filter.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#147

Post by tterrace » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

awb wrote: post #127

jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

And searching for any company name almost always returns an ad for the company in the first position. This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.

Recently there's been cases where searching for a company name will actually return an ad for a competitor. Companies are being forced into a bidding war to win back the top position for exact searches on their own name.

See: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 and the SS in the reply: https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#148

Post by dvtrn » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #132

JohnFen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pricing is much higher than equally good service that can be had from other companies in other parts of my city, so I consider it overpriced. But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until th…

I feel like we need some precedent here - billing errors in the volume Comcast hands them out are essentially contract violations that go entirely unpunished - you don't get a discount if you have to wrestle with them to correct your bill, you can't charge them for your time, you just come out the other end with what they had originally offered you.

I'm hoping the recent CenturyLink/Minnesota situation gets more scrutiny over telecom bills. You may find this to be relevant [0]. I work in telecom and CTL is one of our vendor partners, I feel like I'm on the phone with them at least twice a week raising flags about billing statements.

[0] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/01/08/centurylink-to-pay-...

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#149

Post by StanislavPetrov » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

Advertising aside, Google's search problems also extend to their political and/or economic agenda (outside of paid advertisements). I do a lot of writing, and often look up articles I have read in the past, sometimes the distant past, in order to reference them in the footnotes of my articles and posts. Many articles on politically controversial subjects (especially those that reflect poorly on "establishment" positions) either don't come up at all or are extremely hard to find, despite putting in numerous, specific keywords. Doubtless this is (at least in part) a function of Google's curated "reliability algorithm" that deranks (and in some cases hides completely) sites and sources that Google deems less credible than mainstream, establishment sources (a black-box decision making process that often ranks credible sites below larger, "corporate" outlets with a much worse track record of accuracy). While one could argue that this sort of algorithmic sorting has some use in its news section, when it comes to search this is a terrible policy. A search engine that hides or obfuscates the specific information or article I'm looking for because it doesn't match their agenda is worthless as a search tool.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#150

Post by pmlnr » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

lustigmacher wrote: post #24

I don't think it's practical. None of the search engines give me results of quality high enough for my daily software development problem, but Google. Tried them all. If you want to get stuff done, you google it. If you want to play socially responsible society member role, you try alternative browsers, until you run out of time, then you google it.

I don't know what you're searching, but I found the opposite to be true. Exceptions being local to geo area shopping, searching for images with text on them with the text - think xkcd -, and extremely obscure software error messages - apart from these, DDG beats google for me. Has been for quite a while.