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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#151

Post by legalcorrection »

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…

Searching Reddit helps but the quality of comments has gotten lower since 2015 or so. It seems to coincide with the wave of subreddit bans and the nakedly politically-driven moderation on subreddits. And with the reflexive attitude—against anything countering the Reddit consensus—that developed during the Trump years. High quality posters seem to have withdrawn from the site (at least in how much they comment) and what's left is mostly ignorant teenagers and bitter millennials with shitty jobs. In turn, that crowd is much less likely to upvote high-quality thoughtful content, so the cycle continues. The decline in quality has trickled even into the less popular subs. Don't get me wrong, the site has always had problems, but the more recent decline in thoughtfulness is dramatic.

The worst part is that despite Reddit getting so much worse, there is no other place that's grown to fill the void. This place is great, and I do search HN when it makes sense, but it's small and narrow in scope. Reddit basically crowds out any competing websites by sucking up all the low-level chatter required to sustain a community, but has also pushed away high-quality posters, who now have no place to go. Very tragic but maybe a good case study in shitty network effects.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#153

Post by Joeri »

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…

For technical content I had great results from using safari books online in the past. Having most tech literature an easy web search away was super convenient, because typically the best treatment of any subject is in book form. The downside is that it is expensive, so when I switched employers I lost access and I wasn’t willing to pay for it myself.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#154

Post by zozbot234 »

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.

The death of hand-curated general web directories like DMOZ has also deprived search engines of a hugely relevant "signal" for high-quality content. I'm not surprised that the SEO blackhats have basically won since then.

(You can view the schema.org specification for machine-readable content description as an attempt by the big search engines to partially reverse this dynamic and give white-hat SEO the upper hand again. IMHO, independent website owners should enthusiastically adopt these detailed descriptions if they care to "save" the Web from the onslaught of blackhat SEO junk. But a worthwhile successor to DMOZ (probably based on federation) must also be a piece of that puzzle.)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#156

Post by winternett »

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…

Another factor that isn't being fully accounted for is a new SEO/marketing technique where many people are asking scripted questions publicly on sites like reddit and then stealthily providing answers that market a product or service. This leads to reddit results not being exactly authentic as well. Pretty much most online reviews cannot be trusted as we are begged to do positive reviews of companies (and when companies outright purchase positive reviews, which is also very rampant) also as a factor.

Though Google is at fault for letting their service falter to the "payola" race, many other factors are in play all across the Internet since data quality has faltered almost totally. For major-cost and non-refundable purchases I need to trust, I go to brick and mortar stores and inspect what I am buying. I am thankful not everything has shifted to an online-only model. It's going to be a very bumpy ride on the Internet until Congress and consumer protection laws wake TF up and do their job.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#158

Post by SCHiM »

I'll echo one of the points in the article: "Google is trying to be smart".

This is the source of many people's frustration, and the source of forced synonyms. A dumb tool that adapts to humans as they use it and tries to be "smart" prohibits us from getting more skilled in the usage of the tool. It becomes unpredictable, and it introduces significant friction each time it does something dumb.

Even if the tool is correct 90% of the time, it is wrong 100% of the time on an emotional/ux level. The successes are invisible in aggregate, but each mistake sticks out like a sore thumb. I guess why this is: modern understanding of our brains (as I, a lay man, understand it) is that they attempt to continuously predict what's going to happen next in their environment. When all predictions are correct it feels good, and there's no tension. A tool that adapts and changes makes our brains predictions turn out wrong, and our brains punish us with tension and attention each time the tool does not do what we want, since it failed to predict the desired behavior.

Previous versions of google felt so nice precisely because our brains, or at least those of hackers, could adapt to its various tricks and shortcuts.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#159

Post by dkonofalski »

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…

Based on some of the April Fools' Day experiments that Reddit has done in the past, I'm not sure why you wouldn't have the same hesitation and mistrust of Reddit posts and comments. So much of the content, even on Reddit, is made by bots or copied by bots from older, legitimate user-generated content.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#160

Post by JimBlackwood »

profstasiak wrote: post #148

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.

Do you have a link to such a service? Not to bash on them or anything, I'm just interested in how they market their services
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