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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#381

Post by innocentoldguy »

I stopped using Google in 2021 because I found that I was getting better results and less ads from Brave Search and Duck Duck Go. Recently, I signed up for the Kagi Search beta and have really liked it, especially the "Programming" tab, which limits the search results to programming-related results.

My only concern with Kagi is it requires you to create an account. I don't like Google tracking me and the idea of Kagi knowing what all my search terms are isn't appealing. At least they aren't planning on selling it.

https://kagi.com/privacy

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#382

Post by pwr-electronics »

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…

Change your search strategy. Most forums require a membership to view them, and most long form posts are on personal websites. Google can't or won't serve those. You have to navigate like it's the old web. Find a good place to make landfall, read old posts, ask around, and follow all your leads.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#383

Post by brimble »

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.

Google used to actively fight the spam. Some time around '08 or '09 it was like they very suddenly gave up and never seemed to give it a serious attempt again, as if they'd simply surrendered. Unfortunately, they also made searches much more "fuzzy" around that time or (IIRC) a couple years before, foiling manual attempts to avoid spam by using very specific language or unusual phrases.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#384

Post by cosheaf »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #366
cosheaf wrote: post #23

It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam t…

I honestly don't think this is the problem, like at all. There are human websites made by humans, still. There's more crap, sure, but the good stuff is largely still out there. The problem begins and ends with the conflict of interest that Google both sells ads and selects search results. If they didn't have a vested interest in people visiting sites with their ads on them, they could decimate the number of spam resu…

Show me a site made by people with manually instead of algorithmically curated links and content.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#385

Post by tiborsaas »

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…

Not sure what you are talking about, but it's still available and it still works: https://imgur.com/a/u4864CK

I've just dragged a random image from my desktop and hit "all sizes"

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#387

Post by jquery »

I’ve been doing this for a few years already. Not for all my searches, sometimes I append other domains, but generally I now tell google what domain I’m interested in, and Reddit is a popular one.

Unfortunately, only a matter of time until Reddit is gamed to hell unless they take steps to prevent moderator corruption (which is already happening and severe for many popular subreddits). And so the cycle continues. Avoiding people who want to sell you stuff is a sisyphean task…

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#388

Post by fishtoaster »

I don't know that I agree with the thesis that it's dying, but I think the symptoms it describes are very real.

Searching for "good restaurants in " is useless. Entire real companies exist to fill the top few slots on that search for any given city. My workaround is, as the article says, to search Reddit instead. Look for the subreddit dedicated to that city, then find their most recent thread on good places to eat - you find much better results.

That said, I strongly suspect this only works because it's not a widely-known strategy. As soon as a critical mass of people start going to reddit instead of google, the same enormous weight of effort people put into SEO will instead go to finding ways to subvert Reddit's authenticity. Sock puppet accounts, astroturfing, generating spammy subreddits, voting rings - there are plenty of strategies, and dedicated experts will have a huge incentive to invent more. Reddit will put up countermeasures, just like Google tries to prevent SEO spam. I don't have any reason to believe Reddit will be more successful in the long term than Google is.

So... enjoy it while it lasts. :)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#389

Post by innocentoldguy »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #79
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…

> Can people suggest good alternatives I've been on the Kagi beta test for a few weeks now and, for the kind of searches I mostly do, it seems to be a massive improvement on Google. Strongly recommended. https://kagi.com/

I've been using Kagi for a while now too. I like their stance on privacy, but I don't really like that I have to create an account to use it.

https://kagi.com/privacy

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#390

Post by cromwellian »

Ah, young whipper snappers, everything old is new again, and clearly the world is always getting worse.

Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing 'Cached' pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad.

Long before Reddit was big, USENET/DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb/UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite owning DejaNews, did not often surface links into USENET content, and a lot of forums, for whatever reason, were not indexed by Google. For example, I used to spend a lot of time reading the latest on PC/3D Hardware stuff on Beyond3D, Overclockers, Rage3D, etc and I almost always had either use site specific search (dejanews.com or say, PHP BB's built in local search), or I had to add site:beyond3d.com for example.

And is a large amount of confirmation bias going on in these Google threads that appear. Some people make assumptions that their search patterns are representative of the billions of searchers ("argh, I searched for pytorch k-means and a GitHub wrapper site appeared!") and that their experience is a representative sample, while others focus only on what has gotten worse, and not what has gotten better.

What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out, except by luck because perhaps they don't crawl as many sites as often.

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