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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#181

Post by dkonofalski »

winternett wrote: post #156
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 compan…

Is Google unique in that, though? Amazon reviews are worthless now because companies pay customers to leave positive reviews or pay review farms to leave positive reviews. Even if someone reports them to Amazon, though, the companies just close their accounts and open new ones with different names and sell the same product. It's so trivial for them to pivot when they get caught that I'm not sure there is a solution to this problem.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#182

Post by codyogden »

Disclosure: I'm the creator of Killed by Google.

There are a lot of good points here about why power users (i.e. HN types, technologists, scholars/researchers, etc) find Google Search frustrating, but it doesn't really provide a balanced perspective which would acknowledge that Google Search for the average, billions-scale user is an incredibly optimized, positive experience. For those users, Google Search is doing exactly what they want: providing instant answers to trillions of queries without making the user click or read anywhere else while making Google an absurd amount of money through ads. I'm not being facetious when I say that if you find Google Search frustrating, then you are no longer the target user of Google Search.

I've noticed that Google Search also provides too much weight on recently added/updated content than actual valuable content. A great example, while anecdotal, is Paul Graham noting that searching his quote on Google--`"Prestige is just fossilized inspiration."`--the first result is typically a third-party blog that is quoting him, not his own website where the quote was originally published. (Though he refuses to add SSL, which is why Google may be dinging his site.)

I, too, find Google Search frustrating for a lot of technical topics. The content ripping spam is overwhelming, even with technical topics. The past couple years, the proliferation of scraping sites that rip information from GitHub Issues/PRs/Discussions and StackOverflow information makes me incredibly angry and frustrated, and that is directly Google's fault for not identifying that spam and removing it. There is also nothing we as consumers can do because of Google's near monopoly on Search. We can switch to competitors, but it doesn't hurt Google's bottom line.

I have absolutely done the `${search query} "reddit"` 'hack' to find reading for my more niche queries--technical or non-technical. Reddit is a wealth of user-generated information, but it is typically a densely written answer and requires a user to comprehend that information. It can be easy to forget that the average reading level of a US adult is middle school level. That average user with a low reading level isn't going to spend their time trying to read paragraphs of text in order to both discover and understand an answer.

tl;dr Google Search is only dying for "us," not for the more profitable "everyone."

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#183

Post by the_other »

cml wrote: post #89
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…

A single mediocre experience optimized to work ‘most of the time’ for ‘most people’ is quite contrary to the narrative that has made Google such tremendous amounts of money (“let us surveil you so that you can have a more personalized experience”) though, isn’t it? Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are se…

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if we found out that personalised advertising actually earned less than just auctioning off the obvious big keywords?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#184

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

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…

That job is probably months away from being automated by GPT-3 and its ilk, supposing it hasn't yet been.

Right now, I don't think you can tell it to use some specific terms in the text it generates, but it doesn't sound like a difficult extension.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#185

Post by godshatter »

aparsons wrote: post #13

I’ve posited repeatedly that when Reddit IPOs, I’ll be reallocating a significant chunk of my portfolio into their stock. Their management has historically lacked focus, but if Reddit ever builds a half-competent search index, and positions itself as a search-first, discovery-second destination, they will be in the FANG tier of stocks. They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base. They have free mode…

As the deceased child comment to this post mentioned, reddit's UI is horrible. I strongly prefer old.reddit.com, but I don't expect it to live too long. A good UX designer would make their site much, much nicer to read (and hopefully much more performant). It appears that they are trying to push people to use their app, which I don't particularly wish to do since I'm on a desktop.

As for search, maybe they should just make a deal with another search engine and have it run the query on their site with site:reddit.com or !r in the background and show the results on a branded page. You would think that having access to their own data would make searching easier, but apparently it doesn't.

I am a big fan of reddit, even in it's broken state. As long as you're street smart and know where to stay away from, browsing reddit is a positive experience, at least for the subreddits I hang out in.

I'm really really hoping that one of the big companies doesn't buy reddit. They wouldn't know what to do with it and it would die an ignominious death. In my opinion, of course.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#186

Post by LoveGracePeace »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #41

And the reason why these small communities are "more trustworthy" is moderation by actual humans. This is always the secret sauce. Google's biggest problem is that they think they can (and that they must) solve everything with automation, but any automated system can be defeated by a sufficiently motivated human.

"any automated system can be defeated by a sufficiently motivated human"

That is exactly the whole problem. SEO SPAM is a symptom. The problem, is that Google went all in on ML and AI. I've been exposed to ML and AI going back to the early 1990's. It always ends up the same, stale sterile outcomes.

Google can fix this by someone doing an intervention with Pichai and concincing him that we are several decades away, still, from any meaningful use of ML and AI, get back to making search good.

On a positive note, Google does work well today as a spell checker.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#187

Post by u2077 »

100% agree. Google search is only useful for searching other sites that don’t have good search. Online communities have better results. If there was a search engine that curated results from various groups across social platforms, I think that would be useful. Especially for technical information or anything else with a small group around it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#189

Post by time_to_smile »

The weird, possibly beneficial, consequence of Google becoming increasingly awful is that I've begun aggressively building my technical book library again.

I've always been a fan of technical books, but would almost never buy classic reference texts because if I just needed to look up an idea or concept real quick I could usually find an adequate explanation online.

The problem is that content marketing in my domain (stats/data science) has gotten so bad that nearly all of the results are Towards Data Science and similar garbage articles, written by relative amateurs that were rushed out to get ranking for a longer tail of search terms. The number of times I've researched a topic I know well but want to understand some nuance of only to find results that are at best naive in their understanding and at worse outright wrong is astounding.

Now whenever I see any recommendations for good books I buy them, even if I don't have time or immediate interest in reading them right now because I know that if in 6 months I have some relevant question I'm likely to find the wrong answer online.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#190

Post by robbedpeter »

judge2020 wrote: post #19
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…

> 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…

Google has optimized to whatever sequence of behaviors achieves the most profit. The search results are not chosen for utility to the user but as nudges in a cycle of influence intended to drive you to attend to an ad, purchase something, or consume particular content.

They should not be engaged in non-consensual manipulation of social or political behaviors, and the ethics of market manipulation at scale through advertisement are far from clear.

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