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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#611

Post by xerox13ster »

itslennysfault wrote: post #373
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…

imo, google is still king, but you have to be a bit of a power user. You're already using `site:` which is good if you know exactly where you're looking. If not you can use `related:` in the same way. I find using `-something` to remove terms the most useful. I'll search for something (usually an error message) then add `-react` (and mumble "ffs not everything is react"). Then if I still see things I DON'T want add m…

The major problem with this that I've experienced is even if I use operands like + and - to specify or remove terms--more often remove--Google ends up using a synonym in place of that word that means the same thing.

So if for instance I'm looking up info about ADHD meds as an adult, I might get tons of articles about childhood ADHD since that's where all the research is. I search Adult ADHD meds, I still get articles about childhood ADHD. So then I:

-child -childhood -adolescent -teen -kid -momgroup -mother -parent -teenager -children -kids -school -offspring -smallhumans -minor -underage +adult +work -rehab -addiction

and I still get crap blog spam that's probably related to teaching or raising children or some other bullshit like warning about the dangers of addiction or something, and never information about my ADHD or the meds for it.

It's not GREAT is the understatement of the decade.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#612

Post by datavirtue »

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…

I see what you are saying but it seems to me that it used to do a much better job at that. These days I feel like I'm fighting the search engine constantly and it is certainly not magically finding what I want anymore. It feels like some crusty unmaintained tool that I have to know how to use.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#613

Post by EscargotCult »

re: the Dead Internet Theory, anyone who browses the "news" sections of any stock trading app, Yahoo Finance / iOS Stocks app can see that the likes of Barron's, Zacks Investment Research, Motley Fool, Benzinga, etc have been autogenerating "analysis reports" for some time, where some basic fundamentals and options metrics are repackaged in some filler wording. I don't think it'll take much for lots of secondary content to reach this state.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#614

Post by freeflight »

> TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

This strikes me as one of those explanations that gets very close to the truth, but then sharply veers off into fictional territory, which also makes is then trivial for the article to handwave it away with;

> This isn’t true (yet), but it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone.

What's true is that too many Google results are just aggregator bots reposting content from the largest news organizations. There are no "artificial intelligence networks" involved for any of that, that would probably even be an improvement by adding a bit of flavor to the samey content.

But it's very much just copy&paste, to such a degree that it feels like there's only a hand-full of news-outlets in existence, and everybody else just copies their headlines and articles.

In practice this leads to quite the extreme mono-culture when looking up certain hot topics, as the first page will be dominated by the same few articles, with slightly different headlines.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#616

Post by Corrado »

brundolf wrote: post #527
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,…

Free project idea for someone with more time on their hands than me: Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers are winning the arms-race. So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust. People used to curate lists of website…

I think the Keybase project would have been great for providing the "authentication" part of this solution. To bad it died on the vine of the Zoom purchase.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#617

Post by machiaweliczny »

falcolas wrote: post #94
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…

In my experience, the forum experience is far from dead, but it's effectively impossible to surface in a search engine - any search engine - unless you know the name of the forum. Oh, and the content must also be "fresh". If the content isn't "fresh" (which most of the best forum/blog posts are not), nobody shows it anymore. I can search for a specific blog post using a verbatim quote, but the result (if it exists) i…

Google had button to search only forums. Monopoly shows.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#618

Post by foxfluff »

Buttons840 wrote: post #295
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…

Since there's only a handful of sites you target your searches at, it would be nice if you could just have your own search engine that focuses on those few sites, and perhaps crawls a little deeper. I've sometimes thought the death of Google will be the self hosted search engine.

They already exist.
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