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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#501

Post by mkaszkowiak »

I agree with the article. It's getting harder and harder to get good quality results. Most of the time I use a site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com prefix, depending on the type of content I am currently looking for.

Lately I've noticed another breaking change. Typically I phrase my queries in English despite being from Poland, due to higher quality content. Over the past month I've been getting more and more Polish results despite the query language. Case in point for anyone who wants to test - "garmin fenix 6 vs 945 comparison".

Search seems a bit off on other Google services as well. Most notably YouTube, which interweaves results with ads and recommendations. Video discovery is becoming increasingly more difficult and it feels like I'm stuck in an information bubble. Which surprisingly works, as I use the website longer, despite it being less entertaining than beforehand.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#502

Post by mihaaly »

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 have the very same feeling concerning electronics. Searching for a particular product does not even popping up 5-10 comparison articles but the content of all seems to be based on technical specifications of the manufacturer only, which I already have a hands on.

Significantly more time required for consciously choosing a product to purchase (which in my case is critical because I am like Sheldon Cooper trying to choose between PS4 and XBOX One normally, to the horror of my wife, she wants a new TV and it is months long project based on accurate and quick data, and now this, with Google, which makes our family atmosphere even more tense : ) )

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#503

Post by DarylZero »

thejackgoode wrote: post #206

I do site:news.ycombinator.com append to my searches very often. Higher than average quality of information is simply an emergent feature of any successful platform with social moderation.

What you're missing is that Google itself used to be a "social moderation" mechanism.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#504

Post by xvello »

SirZimzim wrote: post #273
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…

We need AdBlock lists for search engines at this point.

Indeed, that's why I built https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#506

Post by discardedrefuse »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #75

All I want is a feature to black list certain domain names from search results. Similar to YouTube never show this channel again option. If google hosted such a feature then they would get a very strong signal on poor results and would go a long way to punishing bad behavior and cleaning up the net. It’s so easy to do that I have to assume they chose not to because they make a percentage of the revenue from the conte…

Quenhus posted his custom uBlockOrigin filter list for dealing with dev spam sites popping up in search. https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

I'm trying that now. But previously I was using the uBlackList Firefox extension with some block list subscriptions. https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#507

Post by mcv »

judge2020 wrote: post #19
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…

> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…

But isn't Google supposed to know everything about us by now? Surely they know who types correct search queries and who keeps making typos?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#508

Post by _fat_santa »

cromwellian wrote: post #390

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…

> 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

The problem as I see it is Google has created a bunch of perverse incentives to make your page rank higher. One big problem is Google gives higher rank to "comprehensive" articles. On the one hand that would seem like a good thing right? But what you end up getting is endless affiliate articles that don't seem to be written for humans. And they are really easy to spot if you know what to look for.

A great example is webhosting reviews. Search "best web hosting" and click any of the 1st page results and you will almost always get an article that just rambles on and on and on with headings like: best web hosting for email, best web hosting for blogs, best web hosting for email marketing. To a human, it's an incredibly disorganized mess, but to Google's bots, its "highly comprehensive and authoritative".

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#509

Post by emodendroket »

I don't agree with the thesis. People are doing that because they trust Reddit to be a source of relatively authentic opinions, yes. But you're not going to search Reddit to find official Web sites, established news sources, things for sale, and the like.

The complaints given in the article feel a little bit like observing that and steering it in the direction of the same old complaints about Google not being good for technical search, something that just doesn't matter to most users. I'm not going to Reddit to get answers to those questions either.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#510

Post by young_unixer »

Am I the only one that has trouble with language preferences being ignored by Google? Accept-Language HTTP headers seem to be completely ignored, but even Google account language settings are ignored sometimes. IP address seems to be more important to them.

When I connect from a VPN exit point in Brazil it only shows me results in Portuguese (even when I'm logged in). When I connect from my hometown in Chile it's mostly fine but I think it's still not the same as if I connected from a US exit point, even though I have US English as my preferred language everywhere.

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