811–820 of 1001 posts
Why not make this optional. Why not recognise that there are some people who may want to do searches using exact match.
Google could still provide exact match but default to "smart"/"assisted"/whatever search. Nope. No can do.
Because how would that support online advertising.
The web that Google promotes and encourages is not the best one, IMO.
Google search has become so clogged up with shit. It's time I switch to DuckDuckGo.
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…
But there is no conceivable universe where seo spam isn't the arch enemy of Google. Google needs to fight spam to survive, it knows it and it does. But that's hard. So hard in fact, that nobody else has cracked the problem, and for all the anecdotal evidence of someone switching to Bing, Google's marketshare is still utterly dominant.
The Dead Internet Theory may have some weight: Google hasn't dropped the ball, but it is slowly drowning into the sea of "content-free content".
But if that's the case, so is everyone else.
Search for a plant species. You'll have the hardest time finding anything about the plant itself, results are dominated by parties selling the plant. Quite often not even the plant you searched for.
Search for a species of insect. Results are dominated by products on how to kill it or sensationalist misinformed articles about their danger.
Search for a species + location/country. Results include all kinds of stuff about the species (which is already poor, see above) but also simply forgets about the location parameter.
The above is a massive problem, because it leads people to believe that a species occurs in a country, whilst it may not. They then incorrectly identify the species on their photo. This error is then infinitely copied by others as it surfaces in search results, which many see as authoritative.
This still pales in comparison to the problem that is Google image search. You search for a species name but the photos returned more often than not are not the actual species. It's a photo from the same page as which the species name occurred on.
Not to mention the Pinterest problem, which absolutely grinds my gears. They get all the free search traffic for stealing people's original works. How the fuck can Pinterest rank so highly, it has no content and is never the original source.
It's hard to put my finger on the timeline, but all of the above has gotten dramatically worse during the last 3-4 years. It was definitely not always this bad. It used to kind of work.
You know what Google should do? They should directly feed from authoritative sources rather than scraping crappy content from bad actors. They do it with Wikipedia and I see no reason why they can't do it for other niches where high quality information is publicly available.
For the above niche, it's entirely solvable. Academics have open databases with species information that is trustworthy, not gamed, and authoritative. How about using it?
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Another factor that isn't being fully accounted for is a new SEO/marketing technique where many people are asking scripted questions publicly on sites like reddit and then stealthily providing answers that market a product or service. This leads to reddit results not being exactly authentic as well. Pretty much most online reviews cannot be trusted as we are begged to do positive reviews of companies (and when compan…
Reddit does have astroturfing, but a lot of communities are aggressive about identifying and banning shills, so it's not as widespread as in google search results.
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…
The other dimension is that, in the past, if you searched for stuff your results were likely to be a blog or a forum thread. Today the bloggers have evolved into instagrammers, TikTokkers, YouTubers, or Podcasters. The Forums and community pages have moved to Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, etc.
So it’s not just that SEO and botspam has eaten the Google results page, it’s that this is all that’s left of the open internet that needed search to navigate. Much of it truly is a wasteland. Google owns part of the blame for crippling RSS and privileging recent pages and specific domains or AMP pages over evergreen, self-hosted content in search results. But also users have given up on the open internet in droves. Instead of starting a fansite they start fan subreddits or discords instead.
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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…
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…
Its a plus in minus in a lot of ways but the biggest con is that its just straight impossible to search a discord log effectively.