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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#211

Post by dageshi »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #59

Still in shock that they killed reverse image search and replaced it with some useless AI tech demo. It used to use the actual image and be able to provide context from where that image was found elsewhere. Now it seems to throw the image at AI and the AI will go "Oh that's a street" then they will just show you streets with similar colors as the image you put in. Completely useless for trying to locate what movie a…

I vaguely remember there being some legal reason for that? I think something to do with getty images.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#212

Post by forbiddenvoid »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #140
brimble wrote: post #5

The 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 We…

Am I the only one who just skips the search engines and go straight to the source? If I want factual information, I just go to Wikipedia and use their search. If I want to shop I'll go to respected online stores and again use their inbuilt search feature. Obviously I've just built up a list of good sites in my head which I trust... Google search is good for discoverability if you're new to the web I guess? Although i…

> Google search is good for discoverability if you're new to the web I guess?

This is almost certainly not true. I don't think kids (who make up the vast majority of 'new to the web') care about using Google for discoverability. They'll use YouTube, Twitch and Instagram to find things they care about. Google is for answering questions, not finding new things.

And honestly, it's not generally that good at answering questions.

Source: my 10-year old.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#213

Post by est »

Not only the Google Search is dying, the hyper-text web in general is dying, popups, huge banners, inline ads, autoplay videos, cookie consent footers, login-walls, pay-walls, clickbaits & content farms, geo-blocks, bloated JS rendered templates, hard subtitle inside videos inside iframes, non copy-pastable texts only available on exclusive mobile apps, etc.

It's no longer the same WWW I am familiar with anymore. Reddit is just one of the few sites still had higher text condensity (old UI, to be exact)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#214

Post by lifeisstillgood »

When looking for an answer we don't want the average opinion of the whole world, we want the best opinion of the expert in that subject.

As the internet (and Google) reach out more and more, we get closer and closer to everyone and their opinion being online. And so the average answer online gets closer to the average opinion in the planet.

I know Google thought PageRanknwas the answer for that but they now rely as much (?) on people looking for X and moving on. Which means looking for "what is calculus" "most" people will hit a maths dense page and bounce for a less complex / demanding explanation.

All of which is a long winded way of saying if we want an Oracle to pick Truth from all the pages of the Web, we are not going to find that Oracle.

Humans and human science and curation can only do that.

Odd that essential Librarians is what we need

Edited

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#215

Post by api »

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 view the Dead Internet Theory as Black Mirror style satire. All it would take is liberal application of GPT-3 style transformer AI to content generation and much of the Internet could be fake. You could have fake political trolls arguing with other fake political trolls from the other side, fake blogs, fake review sites, etc. and it would take me a while to notice. Most of the modern Internet is just that bad.

Advertising always creates perverse incentives. It works in traditional media too. Look at what happened to things like Discovery and The Learning Channel when they became subject to advertising based pressure for ratings. They went from having actual educational content to being full of tabloid trash.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#216

Post by creeble »

jedwhite wrote: post #64

There have been many interesting threads recently about the decline of Google's search quality here on HN. There's zero doubt search results are getting worse, and that ads and spam are the cause. But Google's financial performance has been going from record to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the market. Each thread has had some common themes, but what's surprising is how different the problems disc…

I wish you great luck and success. This just seems part of a long cycle to me (of course, the older I get, the more everything seems like a long cycle).

Google wasn’t the first search engine, and I expect it won’t be the last. Page Rank redefined search, and now that results are 95% advertising-driven, the underlying “search algorithm” means nothing at all. Someone with a “new” algo that isn’t so completely ad-driven (until they too succumb to the only existing model for revenue) could un-seat the giant, at least maybe in search.

This is the curse of the advertising model for all things. Though it can make a lot of money for a good long time.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#217

Post by woeirua »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #173

I'll re-post a comment I made about Google Search back in July 2020 because I believe it's still relevant: "Call me crazy, but I've been using Yandex a lot more recently. Political FUD aside, the results are pretty good, and completely unfiltered. It reminds me of how wild and unfiltered the internet was back in 2007. However, I wouldn't recommend it to "casual" users. Using Yandex requires a bit more common sense th…

Yeah... I'm going to go with, not having to worry about clicking malware links is probably the one use of censorship that I am totally OK with.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#218

Post by fallingknife »

legalcorrection wrote: post #151
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 wh…

With quality comes success. With success comes popularity. With popularity comes idiots.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#219

Post by bonoboTP »

It used to be enough to append the word "reddit" but now Google tends to ignore it! It learned to route around people's desire to get useful results and learned to ignore it and show the garbage links instead. You can still get it with "site:reddit.com" though. I wonder when they will remove this option. Afaik a lot of search operators are already undocumented. And they removed the "+" for forcing inclusion of a term, so that only quotes worked as intended, but then also removed full support for quotes and it's now just a hint. Probably every step boosts some engineer's or manager's short term metrics and evaluation reports so it keeps happening.
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