Google Search Is Dying
dkb.io
Google Search Is Dying
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Re: Google Search Is Dying
#2I thought reddit died when people started posting those image memes.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#3Although it's true that google results for subreddit in the specialty I'm looking for are (to me) top results (because I know I'll probably read from knowledged people on what I'm looking for), most of my queries are more about general trivia and other stuff that no platform like reddit can really encompass better than google it self.
I pretty much throw everything at google (like grammar, quotes, places, trivia in general, tech questions - reddit still isn't as good as stack-overflow for developers), Brave browser will take the ads out, and I get to choose my result. It's quite a nice experience.
(And no, I don't recommend Duck Duck Go either. It fails to show obvious results every now and then. I learned that the hard way.)
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#4Why I use duckduckgo
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#5The other day I was searching for a specific kind of jewelry and realized I don't know of a search engine that can do what I needed, which is to just find good results for my search. Searches for jewelry-related keywords triggered Google to go 90+% ads, and their results (and other search engines' results) were so junked up with spam and the same couple sites over and over that they were useless.
We're back to the Web needing a search engine.
[EDIT] I should add that the ads Google was showing me didn't even do a very good job of showing me the very specific kind of thing I was looking for, even though there must be thousands of stores around the world selling pieces that fit the keywords. The ads were for jewelry, but most of them weren't anything like what I was trying to find. In this case an entire page of ads but all from different sites and mostly the thing I was looking for would have been better than nothing, but it couldn't even do that.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#6Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me:
- "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust."
This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. The "best" recipe for pancakes is only what's trending on instagram right now. The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web. The same for trending programmer tools.
- "It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines..."
What I'm shocked by is that Google somehow maintained a balance on this for so long. Well, at least a good enough balance that people still use it primarily.
- "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant" ..."
This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.
- "There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory..."
I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#7I thought reddit died when people started posting those image memes.
The default subreddits are really horrible. Reddit is still okay if you unsubscribe from all of those and only subscribe to the narrow subreddits that you're interested in. Of course, it's hard to find new subreddits that way.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#8Just the way Chrome insists on auto-completing searches has seriously damaged the efficiency of my Googling. I'll search something like "Type-97 whatsit making funny noises", get no results, go to search just for "type-97 whatsit" and it adds the rest back on by itself and I get the same useless results from the first time. I don't make the mistake often enough to remember not to make it, and every time I wonder what moron decided that was a vital feature that shouldn't be able to be turned off.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#9I thought reddit died when people started posting those image memes.
You might be lucky and there is a subreddit for your favorite topic that has very strict rules about memes or lazy content. I wish more subeditors would encourage lazy content or have a "fork" with such rules.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#10I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries.
There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals.
At least going with a community site there tends to be actual discussion and or useful links to the relevant content