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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#291

Post by julienchastang »

telchior wrote: post #96
listmaking wrote: post #35

Many of these articles/complaints don't compare Google Search to alternatives (Bing / DuckDuckGo / ...), so it's not clear whether web search itself is getting "worse" (in the ways mentioned), or whether the issues are with Google Search specifically. (For example, the article proposes the explanation that "The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust" , which is about the web itself, n…

I try to use DuckDuckGo exclusively, but the results are often poor enough that I have to switch to Google. Just to be clear, I totally agree with all the criticisms of Google here; it's also awful and I'll often end up just doing site: searches, which Google seems to be better at than DDG. It feels a bit like the search engineers have lost the war with SEO.

Ditto. DDG is my default search engine with mixed results at best. I often begrudgingly revert back to Google.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#292

Post by ahelwer »

raoa wrote: post #255

Search for "carbon monoxide" on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. Google serves you an entire page about carbon monoxide poisoning, and recent news stories about carbon monoxide poisoning. You have to scroll through a lot of junk to get to Wikipedia's entry on "carbon monoxide". Bing and DuckDuckGo do a serviceable job telling you about the substance CO. You cannot search "carbon monoxide" to learn about carbon monoxide,…

I have no idea why they stopped making wikipedia the first or second result for a given topic. Seemed to happen a few years ago.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#293

Post by generalizations »

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.

I remember picking up on this when I was researching vpns. Compare the comments on Reddit and hacker news, and the difference is stark. It becomes fairly apparent that a lot of the Reddit comments were paid.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#294

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

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.

As someone who add Reddit to my query when I search products, I’m not really looking for a review. Generally, I look for subreddits talking about what I’m trying to buy. I then see if they have a good wiki/something pinned about purchasing advice. Then, I take a look at what is posted about the product I had in mind (mostly questions not reviews). It’s more interesting to read about the experience of actual users than reading a review. You learn a lot from what they find frustrating.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#295

Post by Buttons840 »

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…

Since there's only a handful of sites you target your searches at, it would be nice if you could just have your own search engine that focuses on those few sites, and perhaps crawls a little deeper.

I've sometimes thought the death of Google will be the self hosted search engine.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#296

Post by XCSme »

Does this mean that "traditional" advertising is becoming more powerful?

If the users can't trust Google to return relevant results, would they simply trust brand power and go directly to the websites they trust? (e.g. go directly to nike.com instead of searching for "running shoes"?)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#297

Post by marktangotango »

da_chicken wrote: post #43
adrianomartins wrote: post #3

Although it's true that google results for subreddit in the specialty I'm looking for are (to me) top results (because I know I'll probably read from knowledged people on what I'm looking for), most of my queries are more about general trivia and other stuff that no platform like reddit can really encompass better than google it self. I pretty much throw everything at google (like grammar, quotes, places, trivia in g…

You can add !g to a DDG search and it will pull from Google. I'd say the quality of DDG is slightly less than that of Google, but not so often that sometimes having to !g the search is an appreciable problem. I've heard people say that DDG just uses Bing, but I'm not entirely sure how true that is. The general problem with all search engines is that the moving target of the search algorithm often doesn't move fast en…

Embedded search in arbitrary web sites sucks because it's a hard problem. The naive solution is to put all text in a database table keyed by "page" and do a sql "like" query. Don't ever do this. Some db's have full text search nowadays. I've implemented "embedded" search a few times in the past and I used Lucene, which actually works pretty well.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#298

Post by mattferderer »

superbaconman wrote: post #239

The biggest issue I have with Google is that every search is performed in the "now" context. This makes looking back, especially on political issues, basically impossible; There's no way to explore how topics have evolved or progressed over time. I don't mind google search for resolving technical issues as it works pretty well in this context, but the second you start to get curious and look for anything older everyt…

Have you tried using the date filters?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#300

Post by aulin »

Google is dying but appending reddit to searches is not the solution.

Product recommendations on reddit usually boil down to a couple of products for each type, the hivemind keeps recommending them and the process kind of self sustains without any chance for other valuable products to be even considered/reviewed/recommended or pass the upvote threshold to be noticed.

Technical questions sometimes have an answer much more times get you to a dead thread that didn't lead anywhere because the attention span on reddit is way too short.

Also reddit users are mostly US based, local communities aren't usually big enough to lead to something useful on localized searches.

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