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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#651

Post by cco »

eldaisfish wrote: post #624
jedwhite wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers. Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has…

>Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore Do you have anything substantive to support this? I highly doubt it is true given the fact that the verb "to google" literally means "to search the internet".

Your argument supports the original poster. It is no longer a conscious choice, "Do I search for this via Google? Maybe I should use Bing? What about DuckDuckGo?", it is, "Oh, lemme Google that".

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#652

Post by writeslowly »

bloaf wrote: post #278
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…

As a bit of a weird hobby, I like to read up on right wing conspiracy theories. That means I do a fair number of searches for specific terms and people mentioned in fake-news facebook/forum posts. Google seems to slowly oscillate between thinking that I am a right wing loon, and thinking I am Joe Public who must not be shown misinformation. That is, sometimes google is perfectly willing to vomit forth results from th…

I noticed this recently when trying to find primary sources for flat earth claims. They don’t exist on Google, for me at least. You can still find them on duck duck go if you search for something like “flat earth ice wall” but Google just returns generic debunk articles.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#653

Post by agnos »

I had this exact conversation with someone yesterday, who wasn't aware of Google's "site:**" query functionality and expressed the same frustrations on not being able to find actually relevant content. It's simultaneously reassuring and disappointing that many others also rely on site-filtered Google to find information on the internet.

Site-filtered Google is basically the only way I search the web now. As many others have expressed on here, Google used to be such a good "gateway" to the informational web. Now the most relevant results are almost always auto-generated content.

I resort to searching specific sites like HN and Reddit as a safe place to get human content, but I feel this to be limiting in it's own way, almost like echo chambers. Are we past the Wild West days of the internet? It now feels like a dystopian reality where I'm constrained to certain pockets that seem relatively safe.

I believe Google used to allow a "discussions" filter on queries, which would limit your search to forums. I'm not sure why the functionality stopped being supported. The "Dead Internet Theory" is very real. Given the amount of bots and resulting distrust in information, there's an urgent need for some sort of conversational search.

A forum-only search filter is an easy place to start. This could also potentially be a good use case for some decentralized, blockchain-based trust network. If anyone knows of any ongoing projects in this arena, I'd be very interested in contributing.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#654

Post by cableshaft »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #92
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…

There’s something sad and ironic about using Google to search Reddit. One, I mostly dislike using Reddit - I only want to see specific discussions very occasionally. Two, what is the state of the internet if I have to use the best search engine to find content on a website I mostly dislike? Haha.

Reddit's search engine is kind of crap (not terrible, but also not great). That's why I use Google for Reddit, to have a better Reddit search experience.

I figured that's why it's so high, is Reddit's UX keeps slowly getting worse so the best way to find stuff on Reddit is by searching outside of it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#655

Post by slim »

young_unixer wrote: post #510

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 mos…

I'm annoyed each time I use google because it shows me an unreadable search page in arabic (because I live in an arabic speaking country). Fortunately I've been using ddg for years and I rarely use google

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#656

Post by Lascaille »

lhorie wrote: post #404

The irony for me is that Google had a Reddit before Reddit was a thing, it was called Orkut and it was glorious. You could create communities based on whatever the heck you wanted and connect with friends and strangers alike through any twist on any topic you could think of. But Google being Google, it didn't see the potential because Orkut didn't achieve global dominance (despite being the social media platform in p…

'Garage band jamming with my fellow orkuteers' was a meme before image macros even existed

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#658

Post by Lascaille »

websitejanitor wrote: post #470
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…

The weird thing about these is that they blame Google's search results on spam. I work in SEO and I can tell you that they are much better at ignoring spam than they were in 2010, where a lot of these people quoted still have their heads at regarding SEO. What's been going on at Google is reliance on neural nets to take care of various ranking algorithm tasks. We want better keyword matching to generate results, but…

>This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text that covers multiple related topics

Is it accurate to call organisations that write text according to google's incentives 'publishers' or are they merely spammers trying to maximise their pageviews and conversions?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#659

Post by msluyter »

It seems like we're approaching what I call the "dismal equilibrium." This is the idea that any free site/service/app eventually will have to monetize itself in order to remain free, inevitably in a way that degrades the experience. Ads, typically, "pay to win" for games, or perhaps even calls for donations for public radio. An equilibrium is reached when further monetization isn't possible without driving away users; quality is just barely tolerable, hence, "dismal."

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#660

Post by whywhywhywhy »

dageshi wrote: post #211
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…

I vaguely remember there being some legal reason for that? I think something to do with getty images.

That didn’t impact the search tech it impacted the button to search similar under each image result when expanded.

Ruining the tech came years later.

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