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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#691

Post by batisteo »

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…

Like the Web-of-Trust or similar?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#692

Post by alfalfasprout »

Yeah, reddit also has issues with bots. But it's generally MUCH easier on reddit to gauge the quality of the content you're seeing than some top result on a google search.

When looking up "the best " on Google, the results are utterly useless. It's always some site with a financial incentive to buy their particular product. Increasingly, that's low quality Chinese clones of products (and you'll find the same effect is true on amazon).

At least with reddit you can click on a user's post history and spot if something is obviously suspicious. On more popular threads you also get way more signal about whether something is sketchy.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#693

Post by scarface74 »

WalterBright wrote: post #682
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…

I would think that there'd be an online opportunity for a search engine that only searches humanly curated sites. Those sites would be ones that have quality information rather than spam. Some obvious examples - wikipedia, reddit, hackernews, public domain books, etc. It's easy to game an algorithm, but hard to game a human - humans know garbage when they see it. As an aside, whenever I get a prescription, included w…

I would have gotten so excited about something like that 20 years ago, I would have yelled “Yahoo!” from the top of my lungs.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#694

Post by beatsie_ »

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 have noticed the low effort posting. This may extend beyond just Reddit though. Everyone wants the biggest reward for the least amount of effort.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#695

Post by foxfluff »

belter wrote: post #21

I was told then, not to use a direct Google search, but was a naughty boy and knew would be broken for a long time... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730 And you hope the rest will get fixed?

I like their advice about taking screenshots for posterity though.

https://i.imgur.com/upevafi.png

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#696

Post by allochthon »

bradgessler wrote: post #380
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…

I too have found myself searching more in Reddit. Not to throw shade on Reddit, but even if I find exactly what I’m looking for in there, it’s depressing that it’s all bound up inside of another walled garden who will eventually have the same incentive as Google: squeeze every last advertising dollar out of the produc… I mean users. Like Google, it’s just a matter of time before they too lose their balance. A questio…

One small thought — having the search engine be configurable, so that the user can specify which sources to give priority to (e.g., Reddit, NYT Wirecutter, Wikipedia, etc.), would be an incremental improvement.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#697

Post by ankit219 »

disease wrote: post #333
ankit219 wrote: post #77

Agree with the premise, but seems to me that the article does not justify this. I can understand ads, but ads do not affect search results. If you move past ads now (which most users do as they habitually ignore the space where ads would be) even then you should expect good results. SEO seems to be a big problem. Just saying Google is big and they should fix it ignores the nuance and the whole cat and mouse game that…

> If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the first result. Weird, I'm having the opposite experience with stackoverflow pages. Often I get pages from random websites that copy and paste stackoverflow content…

Not 100% sure, but could be a user based personalization thing. Or a location based thing.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#698

Post by shane_b »

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…

Makes sense why they would fuzzy search. Not all users can be expected to know Google fu.

So let mainstream use fuzzy and keep power user features. The big issue is power user support is gone for people with Google fu.

Ads or no ads isn’t really an issue for this because it’s such a small percentage of users that know Google fu.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#699

Post by sub7 »

I wrote an addon called unfuck-google which they've now taken down 4 times.

All it does is force 'Verbatim' searches and sort news results by date which makes things better (but still not that great)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#700

Post by crisdux »

I identify with this so much. I use a range of search engines to fulfill specific needs. Examples below.

* Google - shopping, consumer oriented, up-to-date local content on restaurants and venues

* Google reddit - product reviews, product issues, programming, local "issues"

* Kagi - for informational, programming help, research, politics, anything controversial

* Bing - for video

Google is absolutely terrible for anything even closely controversial. Their algo is too bias towards approved sources and recency.

Another crazy thing, I'm starting to use Microsoft Edge because the feature set and performance is actually really good! I've even convinced other devs at work to use edge, and we're all mac users. The read aloud feature has changed how I consume information completely - mostly because microsoft has text to speech voices that I can actually stand. It's an absolute game changer.

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