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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#451

Post by TheKarateKid »

mike10921 wrote: post #331
eloeffler wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

Lately, half the results I get are pages that I cant view without paying to some service or signing up for a free trial.. Google literally serves up results that are unreachable ..

Can we also talk about how Google allows top organic results to LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook which literally present you with a LOGIN page before you see anything related to your search?

Absolute worst UX ever, yet they allow it because it's their SV buddies.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#452

Post by 0xffff2 »

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/

Looks interesting, but am I crazy for thinking that $10/month is an insane price to pay for a general purpose search engine? Surely Google wouldn't making anywhere near $10/month off of me even if I disabled adblock.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#453

Post by tonyedgecombe »

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #162
bennyp101 wrote: post #10

I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries. There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals. At least going with a community site ther…

Those are infuriating. I hate to see ACTUAL content creators having their livelihoods stolen this way. Why wouldn't Google filter out the worst offenders? It takes literally one minute to get a nice list of a dozen imitation sites that nobody would miss. Maybe Google feels a little inhibited from 'choosing the winners' for all but the largest cases?

>Why wouldn't Google filter out the worst offenders?

There are no Google adverts on GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc but there are on many of the copycat sites.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#454

Post by shuntress »

csomar wrote: post #263
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…

> But Google's financial performance has been going from record to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the market. Of course. I used to get one ad on YouTube from time to another. Now for every 3 minutes videos, I have two forced ads at start and one ad at the end. Heck, the other day, I got an ad inside a 2 minutes video. The fall is going to be legendary.

I think that Google tweaking prices until they find the most profitable ratio of ads-in-youtube to subscription-cost-of-ad-free-youtube is going to be at worst a slight dip. Certainly not a "legendary fall"

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#455

Post by smm11 »

ghostly_s wrote: post #322
eloeffler wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

My friend briefly had a copywriting job writing weed strain descriptions for dispensaries. He was never provided the product he was describing, just told to make it up.

I look back at the newspaper stories I wrote a few decades back. I could get the score from the coach, find out hits from who and when, and after that 20 second interaction, I could write a news story in maybe three minutes, which told you everything you needed to know.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#456

Post by ryeights »

coldpie wrote: post #65
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…

I've had some luck inserting "forum" into search terms to find real human content. Mostly when trying to find technical info about cars, but may apply to other fields.

Yep. site:reddit.com OR forum OR thread

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#457

Post by jakeinspace »

The total fog of war surrounding product reviews is a big reason I enjoy shopping for older, used things online. Nobody is being paid now to shill for 10 year old Dell servers, or a 40 year old analog oscilloscope, or the quality of 1997 made-in-Japan Stratocasters. There are some YouTubers or subreddits who I think I can trust, but the incentive is there for dishonesty.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#459

Post by Loeffelmann »

I think SEO was the big mistake. As soon people understand what makes a result show up first in the search it became a almost meaningless metric. There should really only be one metric that counts. Relevency.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#460

Post by estaseuropano »

My firm belief is that what is missing are the librarians. Google used to rely on web archives and inter linkages between sites, but bad actors from blogspam to quora have gamed this system in every possible aspect. There are probably just too few reliable sites compared to the global mass proliferation of unreliable sites.

Google will need to start taking tough, manual decisions on which sites to depritoritise in both what is shown and in what is considered in its algorithms in order to fix its search. And this is not a task you can outsource to whoever is the currently poorest native speaker is.

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