Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Search Is Dying

dkb.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 1001 posts

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#481

Post by denton-scratch »

eloeffler wrote: post #60
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…

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…

I would expect an automaton to be able to spell; so perhaps the presence of spelling errors is a mark of an authentic page. Maybe one could force Goo to spit out authentic results by including a strategically-misspelled word in the search terms.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#482

Post by tim333 »

Counterpoint: No it's not dying -

Sales 2019 161m 2020 182m 2021 257m

>If you’ve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I don’t need to tell you that Google search results have gone to shit.

Not that I usually do but I tried for macbook M1 and apple pie and it gave me ok results - Tom's Guides and a BBC recipe

Competition - I don't really know anyone who uses Bing or DDG though I believe they are out there somewhere

Ok I sometimes stick reddit on the search which is fine because I like Reddit. I guess the ads are probably annoying but I don't see any due to uBlock.

I'm not sure why I'm the only one saying it's not dying when that seems to be what the facts suggest? Nostalgia for some mythical past when you got unbiased results for "best laptop" or something? Not sure really.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#483

Post by codyogden »

freediver wrote: post #394
codyogden wrote: post #182

Disclosure: I'm the creator of Killed by Google. There are a lot of good points here about why power users (i.e. HN types, technologists, scholars/researchers, etc) find Google Search frustrating, but it doesn't really provide a balanced perspective which would acknowledge that Google Search for the average, billions-scale user is an incredibly optimized, positive experience. For those users, Google Search is doing e…

I agree with this sentiment. You can meaningfully append 'reddit' to only a fraction of actual searches. But we should also note that HN users are the "spearhead" of adoption curve and if there is ever any meaningful alternative to Google, just by the virtue of HN users adopting it, could mean strong propagation in their social circle - the less tech savvy family members, friends and work.

Yes, power users (HN users) are early adopters, but I disagree that it would result in any meaningful change that requires social pressure. Fundamentally, power users and average users view search differently. Power users want "results," average users wants "answers." Power users accept a fact-of-life burden to skim through results and find the right resource that will help them with their query. Average users view skimming results as a waste of time and want immediate information. Results require more effort, answers are immediate and consumable.

You're essentially proposing that less tech savvy users switch to something that requires more effort from them. Even if the results are 10x better--hell! they could be hand picked--it won't convince the average user to take a path of more resistance.

That said, I would love to see a competent competitor enter the marketplace--there already are a few. But I have a feeling we'll be heading back to a system of more niche/focused search engines in the future.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#484

Post by TheKarateKid »

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…

Google could fix this by making the algorithm take into account searches that often end with "reddit", thus applying more weight to Reddit results to similar searches where the user didn't include Reddit in it. Clearly it's an indicator that those are the better results.

Take StackOverflow for example. Almost any programmer will find a SO result as the top result and it's usually exactly what you're looking for. Since there's no money to be made by companies writing blog posts on debugging a compiler error, Google's algorithm works as intended.

Question is: Why hasn't Google done anything about this? It's the organic results that are terrible, so they're not losing ad revenue by placing these garbage sites at the top. Perhaps its to intentionally make better websites pay for ads to get better placement? But those won't be the ones to ever pay to begin with...

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#485

Post by rightbyte »

mattarm wrote: post #73
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…

I have found that installing uBlacklist (a browser extension) and blocking these sites from search results as I encounter them helps noticeably. There are only so many of these "clone" sites that rank highly on Google, so I found it pretty easy to keep up with them for the things I usually search for. There are even shared uBlacklist lists for things like SO clones, but I haven't even bothered to use them.

Ye I have that one to and search hits gets notably better by just adding some 20 sites to it for tech querries.

I makes me wonder how Google can mess this up.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#486

Post by phpnode »

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?

I'm not sure about these days, but historically the engineers on Google search wanted to fix these problems algorithmically, rather than delisting specific sites by hand

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#487

Post by ethbr0 »

TLLtchvL8KZ wrote: post #422
bnralt wrote: post #308

An 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,…

I come across these sites so often it's not even funny. Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or 5 in the first page of search results. I'm assuming they're all ran by the same person, throwing as much ** at the wall knowing some will stick. Many of my searchers now include "reddit" or "forum" at the end to filter out all the spam/crap.

This feels like the underlying issue. Google may have stayed the same, or even slightly improved.

But the web, in the sense of quality:crap ratio, has gotten substantially worse.

This flood seems like the ultimate manifestation of turnkey hosting solutions.

Imho, we could do worse than reviving an idea from email's early days vs spam: negligible per-use charging. The idea was to tax emails at $0.0001 (or somesuch). Insignificant for actual users, but financially decimates high-volume, low-value spammers.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#488

Post by achenatx »

bnralt wrote: post #308

An 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,…

in google you can do site:reddit.com or even site reddit.com/r/subreddit

I do this to search for items on craigslist across the country.

This will force a reddit search.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#490

Post by patmorgan23 »

TLLtchvL8KZ wrote: post #422
bnralt wrote: post #308

An 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,…

I come across these sites so often it's not even funny. Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or 5 in the first page of search results. I'm assuming they're all ran by the same person, throwing as much ** at the wall knowing some will stick. Many of my searchers now include "reddit" or "forum" at the end to filter out all the spam/crap.

If you put site:reddit.com it Google will only return results from reddit.com
Post reply on HN