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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#751

Post by yazaddaruvala »

g_sch wrote: post #730
zuminator wrote: post #640

Another aspect of Google that completely bugs me. Put in a search term. E.g. "fat wallet" " About 22,100,000 results " it says. Click through to the last page. " Page 6 of about 198 results (1.03 seconds) " So out of 22 million results, I can really only see 198?? That can't be right. Wait, it says, " In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 198 already displaye…

I always figured this was a performance issue related to sharding in distributed systems. Deep pagination is an expensive operation so most search clusters limit the number of visible results by default. That, in addition to an assumption that results beyond a certain number are unlikely to be useful - how many times have you found something on page 10 vs just reformulated your search query? - means that most applica…

Yup, deep paging is a huge problem for distributed search systems. It's not just a Google thing, its every search engine. Here is a section from ElasticSearch's documentation[0]:

"Avoid using from and size to page too deeply or request too many results at once. Search requests usually span multiple shards. Each shard must load its requested hits and the hits for any previous pages into memory. For deep pages or large sets of results, these operations can significantly increase memory and CPU usage, resulting in degraded performance or node failures."

[0] https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#752

Post by ozim »

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 was boiling the frog really really slow.

You can still can get exact searches by google dorks but "normal" people might find "google trying to be smart" actually useful.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#753

Post by udia »

I don't see why Google does not trial offering a paid service where advertisements are stripped away from the search results. A new revenue model in addition to the existing ad supported approach where you pay for your search.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#755

Post by riston »

I agree with the article points definitely, also quite surprised that this issue hasn't raised by google itself or the money outweighs the product usefulness in this area? Non english searches are even worse, usually some huge companies create their landing pages which get higher SEO/paid keyword scores then the actual useful pages.

Doing the reddit trick also for the reviews, but at some point it would also get broken as some marketing people will ruin it by buying reviews etc. Authentic reviews on products/services looks like unsolved problem :) (startup idea).

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#756

Post by riston »

For me it seems that Google search basically has leverage to either make more money or show more useful results to their customers and they have chosen the first option to make more money.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#757

Post by Gigachad »

mad182 wrote: post #357
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…

IMHO it's not so much of a problem with google search, but the internet as a whole. Most genuine discussions have moved from open, publicly accessible web to places inaccessible to search engines and general public. Smaller niche forums, blogs and personal websites with no financial incentive have died out. People have moved to Facebook, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Slack, Twitter and other places behind logins. Onl…

It's because private communities are the only ones free from mass abuse. Public forums moved to private discord groups with hard to find invite links / etc because public forums take an army of anti abuse workers to keep alive. While a discord group just needs a few people to kick the trouble makers and maybe revoke the invite link for a while.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#758

Post by JamesBarney »

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…

You could also incorporate "reputation" of the author. Basically have a real person, the author stake their real identity on the quality of the blog post they wrote.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#759

Post by littlecranky67 »

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 a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory..." > I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible.

I never believed in conspiracy theories, and after I read "Media Control" by Noam Chomsky I understood there is no need for conspiracy theories once you understand how individual incentives are aligned and how individuals always act to maximise profits.

Someone on HN phrased this and I am not taking credit for it but it explains beautifully whats going on: "Google is not making money by showing you the best search result they can, they make money by keeping you searching."

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#760

Post by Gigachad »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #484
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. Sinc…

I think it would be foolish to assume google hasn't spent hundreds of hours in meetings talking about what they can do about everyone having to type reddit. Problem is they are facing an army of SEO experts who are one step ahead of google. As well as legal issues. Imagine if it was found google was artificially boosting reddit in an unfair way.
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