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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#121

Post by londons_explore »

eloeffler wrote: post #60
softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some 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 secretl…

About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an article and later integrate feedback from internal review. Otherwise the payment became too low. The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on t…

Classic example of this kind of content... Try searching "How to use X to get stains out of Y".

You will find a page for almost any X and Y combination. And they will all have wording like "Put some X on the stained Y... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the washing machine. Hope it works!".

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#122

Post by progx »

As a developer who use google (for convenience) the research results are getting worse. More and more aggregator sites appear in the search result without any advantage and google give a sh.t of it.

You need extra extension to block these sites from the search result.

Time to move on and use something else, but not google anymore.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#123

Post by endisneigh »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #51

Another reason why adding site:reddit.com is so popular: Reddit's search is even more broken than Google and is useless for searching its own site.

Seriously - has no one in this thread used Reddit search?

It doesn’t even do spell checking or correction:

https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Apple%20ophone

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#124

Post by hobofan »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #79
valdiorn wrote: post #38

Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…

> Can people suggest good alternatives I've been on the Kagi beta test for a few weeks now and, for the kind of searches I mostly do, it seems to be a massive improvement on Google. Strongly recommended. https://kagi.com/

Same. Over the years I've trialed most search engines out there, but always find my way going back there after at most 2 days of trying them, because I end up adding "@google" before every query anyways because the results are bad.

With Kagi most of the results are what I'm looking for. If they are not, I'll still try "@google", but so far with very few queries Google's results were actually better. The biggest drawback is worse "smart cards" results, but I hope they keep those optional/unobtrusive anyway.

The strange thing is that the feeling Kagi gives me, isn't even unknown. It just feels like Google circa 2010.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#126

Post by PaulHoule »

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some 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 secretl…

I like this conspiracy theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#127

Post by micromacrofoot »

One thing that's worrying me that isn't covered here: a lot of this low-quality SEO content is constantly regurgitated to produce... low-quality SEO content. Content farmers use content from Google results to write content for Google results. Google is getting devoured by loops like this.

I'm not a native English speaker, so at one point I was trying to find an authoritative source for an old idiom... and the entire first page were all different websites regurgitating the same inaccurate text! They did no independent verification of their own.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#128

Post by ipaddr »

foobarian wrote: post #68

I mean you can't blame Google too much. In the early days, a large fraction of Internet users made websites and had hand-picked, curated links. This gave Google a fantastic ranking signal with a high signal-to-noise ratio. This is mostly gone now and honestly I'm surprised their search is as good as it is.

You can blame google because they made changes that forced sites to adopt these practices. The hand-picked curated links websites still exist but are so far back in the index they will never show.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#129

Post by jklinger410 »

We're broaching on misinformation from the HN community where people say something is true simply because they want it to be true. This article isn't adding anything, but it will do well on HN, because it agrees with the community.

When you start your post with "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine" you are already well outside the realm of fact.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#130

Post by cosheaf »

foobarian wrote: post #93
cosheaf wrote: post #23

It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam t…

Wonder how we could set up an alt-web without the incentives that cause this problem. Delist any for-profit site? How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?

Federation is the only reasonable solution at this time but the technical overhead of federated search is high enough that most people won't use it so it won't benefit from network effects like Google did in the beginning. There might be a combination of blockchain juju that could make federation viable but all the thought leaders in that ecosystem are too high on their own supply to realize they could use blockchains for anything other than gambling.
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