The Dead Internet Theory reminds me of a minor bit of flavor from a Neal Stephenson book, Anathem. In it it's mentioned that this far future civilization (which has seen civilization broadly collapse from technology zeniths a couple of times) had to abandon their set of planet wide communication networks because people intentionally set up computers that would put out huge amounts of information, but all of it was information to mislead, manipulate, obscure, deceive, or convince you to pay money for something. This was done so much that effectively all information, and all actors which might share information, became adversarial on the broad internet, so it stopped being usable.
Google Search Is Dying
301–310 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#302There 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’m glad more and more people, from both here and on Reddit (similar discussions appear sporadically) are beginning to notice. I actually have most of these links already favorited haha.
I hope your startup pans out well. Thanks for doing your part to make the internet less terrible!
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#303Google 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…
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Re: Google Search Is Dying
#304Some 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…
The other day I looked up the wordle answer (I know I know). The first result was a site where I had to scroll through about 19 paragraphs of SEO vomit to get to the answer. The page could literally have one word on it and serve it's purpose. If that isn't a sign that the the internet, or at least google search, is dead, I don't know what is.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#305Search 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,…
The Wikipedia article is showing up as a featured snippets for me (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9351707?p=featur...).
With the following text just bellow the search box.
> Carbon monoxide (chemical formula CO) is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, flammable gas that is slightly less dense than air. Carbon monoxide consists of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom. It is the simplest molecule of the oxocarbon family.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Speaking of bots, I'd be interested to know the percentage of articles on major traffic content sites are authored or co-authored by AI. My suspicion is this is rife given how many articles read poorly and are almost entirely fluff. If this is true it would appear we are doomed to algorithms shaping our online experiences, which is worrying given the existing shrinking diversity of opinion and content. It's like a en…
~0% right now.
I think the quality of searches like “best TV” will improve dramatically once language models are used to generate SEO spam. Anything would be an improvement over what today’s human spam bots produce.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#307The 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…
I've found Brave Search[1] and Kagi Search[2] to be great alternatives to Google. I know exactly the sort of thing you're describing and both of them are a breath of fresh air in the space.
[1] https://search.brave.com/ [2] Beta at the moment - https://kagi.com/
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#308An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE, "Step one: try turning your computer off and turning it back on again. This is usually a good first step, and you'll be surprised at how often...").
Likewise, I wonder how long appending "Reddit" will work. As others have pointed out, Reddit shills are already relatively common, and it's becoming increasingly common for bot accounts to create lots of random comments to appear to be human (such as finding a thread with thousands of comments, then copying and pasting the comment to another place in the thread or to another thread, or auto-generating a simple sentence based on other comments in the thread).
Sometimes the advertising hordes move so fast they kill something before it even takes off, like what happened with Clubhouse.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#309I 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.
I think you have it slightly backwards. While not entirely Google’s fault, search engines motivated much of this “noise” increase. It’s not as though there were people who just made hand-curated, “high signal” websites and then all those people died. It’s even not that all those people switched to Wordpress or other CMS. It’s that the algorithms used by search engines directly incentivized a lot of the awful practices we now associate with the web. I think the first example of this, which is not nearly as apparent anymore, is it was more beneficial for a listicle to break up its elements into a separate page per element, requiring the user to click and reload an entire page to traverse the list, rather than just have the list on one page. This increased the number of back links if anyone wanted to link to multiple items on the list and allowed per-item SEO friendliness. Another more recent example is the infamous recipe blog. While some people genuinely like adding a backstory to their recipes, most add all of that fluff because Google penalizes short content (likely in an effort to reduce spam I would guess). This results in a weird lose-lose situation for everyone involved which has completely inundated the simple and extremely common search for a recipe. The only ones able to not do this are larger sites like Allrecipes which have enough reputation/clout in the eyes of search engines to avoid the spam classification.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#310Just 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.
Is there any place on the web with authentic reviews? The only thing that comes to mind is something like steam, where you have to at least purchase a copy of a game before leaving a review.
Hobby based Discords can often yield good results if you ask, and many have pinned posts in gear recommendation channels.