111–120 of 289 posts
Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have , period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.
How is it that a search giant like Google, with thousands
of brilliant minds, can’t help me find good products to
buy? I think the answer is because it’s not in their best
interest to do so. They like that most consumers will
look at these reviews, click through to Amazon and make
their purchase with little hesitation.
As I understand it, Google derives value from their search engine in the following ways:
1. Directly, via paid ads and product placement.
2. Indirectly, by simply being useful, which means people will enjoy using Google search results, which means they will use them again in the future, which is what allows them to sell ads and gather data on users.
So as far as I can see it's definitely in Google's interest to provide good and useful search results.
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I bet Reddit could take a big chunk of Stack Overflow's market share.
Reddit would need to fix their UI so that it isn't actively hostile to people trying to read content on their site.
I'd like to note, donning my #2 at amzn hat again, that when the idea for affiliate sales originally came up, we certainly did imagine people creating pages with lists like "best bikes for under $500". However, I feel fairly confident in saying that nobody involved in that in the 95-96 timeframe was imagining that such pages would be created by anyone other than actual enthusiasts (probably a reflection of the state…
I also remember the past magically search days fondly..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve found DuckDuckGo can be better at some searches, and at others far worse. I was recently trying to search up how to do something in Excel and every result from DDG was some “excel-help” website that was actually just parroting common search terms as the headers on non-articles full of ads. The entire search space has apparently been hijacked by what is essentially a fake help site. I see results like that on goo…
Similarly on Google and YouTube- nearly the entire search space for "how to pronounce xyz" has been taken over by videos of text to speech recordings that have absolutely no idea how to pronounce anything. There are huge YouTube channels posting this scam content, and they never seem to go away. There are real ones in there too, but there are way more spam words than real ones.
I have to do a google search to get the relevant search result for an amazon product page.
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It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an adversarial process where marketers spend billions of dollars trying to distort the rankings
Google makes an annualized $71 billion in profit after paying tens of thousands of software engineers. I’m not saying I think they should win outright but they should at least be holding their own if they are giving it their all.
Also, it's a huge company. Maybe there are internal structures that when you work hard to advance your career within the company it doesn't align with advancing the overall company.
Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have , period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.
Yep; I can’t believe what used to be bar-none the most useful set of search results will now seemingly scatter results into the list that have zero matches for my search term, as well as some with boldfaced words that I did not even type. And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first , for example. I…