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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#141

Post by dageshi »

The article is right, but I think it's missing the main cause.

People who used to make high quality web content have moved to youtube instead because you can make more money there and it's probably easier.

Add to that, I think because of the move to smartphones, google tries to give you a direct answer to your question rather than directing you to sources where you could educate yourself to answer your own question which it did more in the past.

But yeah google search is noticeably worse and I don't know that google can do anything to fix it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#142

Post by robotresearcher »

arketyp wrote: post #55
judge2020 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…

This is very helpful if I search for a name I didn't quite pick up or don't know how to spell, or if I only remember fragments of a quote or topic, then I just blurt out my stream of consciousness and Google will mostly point me in the right direction. That being said, I wish I could explicitly tell Google to treat my query more literally. Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some kind of grammar. Th…

> Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some kind of grammar.

The query syntax:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#143

Post by londons_explore »

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.

Google still has archives of the internet from back in ~2005. They can still use the internet back then as a ranking signal for todays content.

Ie. Imagine a now-dead blog which was very knowledgeable about types of violin and would have ranked very highly for "best type of violin string cleaner". Google can look at what content that blog had, and find a page on todays web with similar content saying the same kind of thing.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#145

Post by m348e912 »

bushbaba wrote: post #83
m348e912 wrote: post #32

I add reddit to a lot of google search terms because I want to find discussion on the topic I am searching for. Most of the time I find an opinion, perspective, or more information on the topic I am looking for. Reddit is a lot of things, including hot garbage, but it's also a wealth of information. Here's a billion dollar idea if anyone has the time and ability. Build a search interface that indexes tiktok videos an…

Is this Different than how people looked for this in quora and yahoo answers? Reddit does have a benefit of time decay for most topics.

Quora isn't bad, although it's gotten a little hostile with users that aren't logged in. I can't remember the last time I used yahoo answers.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#146

Post by recursive »

narag wrote: post #67
judge2020 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…

That's like speaking to little children, that are learning to talk, reproducing their errors. Some adults believe that it's cute, but it's idiotic, confuses the babies and make their progress more difficult and slow.

It's not idiotic if it's what the people (generally) want.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#147

Post by pizza234 »

tediousdemise wrote: post #37

Question for any person reading this: what is your favorite alternative to Google?

Google is now my alternative ;) To DuckDuckGo (indirectly, Bing), specifically.

However, I find the technical results poor, so most of the time, in this domain, Google is still my choice.

This point is indeed where the article gets a bit unrealistic:

> The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical [...] queries.

The problem is that there isn't a valid alternative for technical queries (at least, I've found none).

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#148

Post by profstasiak »

Just a heads up if someone is searching reddit for product reviews. I believe most of them are inauthentic. I worked in marketing for several companies and we always had some budget for whisper marketing aka shilling. There are third party agency specialized in shilling on reddit and making it all look authentic.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#149

Post by mettamage »

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…

> - "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."

Haha, the noobs. I use HN instead sunglasses cool face

A bit more seriously: I fully agree with this. And if HN doesn't have what I'm looking for then I use Reddit as well. But if HN has some info on the topic with a few highly upvoted threads, damn, it always impresses me.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#150

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

falcolas wrote: post #94
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…

In my experience, the forum experience is far from dead, but it's effectively impossible to surface in a search engine - any search engine - unless you know the name of the forum. Oh, and the content must also be "fresh". If the content isn't "fresh" (which most of the best forum/blog posts are not), nobody shows it anymore. I can search for a specific blog post using a verbatim quote, but the result (if it exists) i…

This is depressing. Good information is useful for far longer than a carton of milk in your fridge! And a lot of that new "milk" is apparently made of chalk and bilge-water.
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