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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#961

Post by account42 »

wisty wrote: post #669
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's problem is they've virtually nothing (given their resources) to "commoditizing their complement". https://www.gwern.net/Complement Google's compliment is web sites. What have they done to make a web site easier to make? They even killed their RSS feed. They have released a bit of web tech, but their offerings are generally a bit sad or only solve Google problems (e.g. Go). If you want to distribute an .exe o…

> If you want to distribute an .exe or .app, MS and Apple have released some pretty good tools to help.

You mean having to pay them for the priviledge of not being flagged as "dangerous" by shitty machine learning algorithms?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#962

Post by jedwhite »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #950
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…

Is there a reason why you've chosen the chat style interface vs the standard search box at the top and results at the bottom layout? This is not a comment on the search results itself - always appreciate the efforts to break out of the standard google results and surface other sources, but I found the interface confusing and the previews were also taking up a lot of space. A compact view would be better - or giving t…

Thanks for trying it out. I don't want to take to discussion too off topic, but if I can try to answer in general terms, I think that it is not just that the search results on Google have been getting worse, the user experience has been too. There has been very little real innovation in how search works in the last 20 years, so it is good to try new approaches.

With different views like compact vs visual, our feeling is that it's good to give people choices. If you get chance on desktop with Andi, try a search and then under Search Results, click "Change View", and try some of the other views. List view gives straight compact text results, and there is a Hacker view that presents results in the same information dense view as HN. That's my favorite. There is even a view Goggles that has a similar format to Google circa 2000 :)

I'd love to chat more with you about this, and it is a great topic for when we share what we're building in its own thread here. Just based on feedback, we have two fairly passionate groups of early users on this topic - some love the conversational interface and others just want it to look like Google. So the approach we're taking is to give people choice.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#964

Post by srg0 »

Lascaille wrote: post #662
estaseuropano wrote: post #460

My firm belief is that what is missing are the librarians. Google used to rely on web archives and inter linkages between sites, but bad actors from blogspam to quora have gamed this system in every possible aspect. There are probably just too few reliable sites compared to the global mass proliferation of unreliable sites. Google will need to start taking tough, manual decisions on which sites to depritoritise in bo…

> which sites to depritoritise But do you think there are actually enough good sites left that contain quality content? As has been mentioned elsewhere, are people actually still writing product reviews that are organic and not sponsored content?

And if people are writing actual product reviews, where do they publish them now, given that blogs are dead and social networks are a black hole?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#965

Post by drallison »

February 16, 2022

Join live stream (4PM-6PM Pacific 2/16/2022)

https://ee380.stanford.edu

Speakers: Dmitri Kyle Brereton, Danny Sullivan

EE380 will meet online today, 16 February 2022 at 4PM Pacific

Speakers: Dimitri Kyle Brereton, Danny Sullivan Title: Google Search Is Dying

Yesterday, February 15th, Dimitri Brereton blog link was posted to Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com). The comment, Google Search is Dying, garnered a large number of comments and responses.

http://dbr.io made #1 on Hacker News frontpage. http://news.ycombinator.com as of 0:21 Pacific 2/16/2022 Google Search Is Dying (dkb.io) 3428 points by dbrereton 23 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 1489 comments

Today's EE380 is to discuss Dimitri's observations about Google Search. Danny Sullivan, Google's Public Liaison for Search will address Dimitri's concerns. Some additional panelists have been invited but are not yet confirmed.

Speaker Bios:

     Dmitri Kyle Brereton is a software engineer at Gem, and the founder of BlogSurf – a directory of personal blogs. He graduated from UCLA in 2019 with a B.S. in Computer Science. He has been doing independent research on the question of how to organize information on the internet since 2020. He is currently working on a search engine for blogs.


    Danny Sullivan is Google’s Public Liaison for Search. His role is to help the public better understand how Google Search works and to engage with the outside community to hear feedback on how search can be improved.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#966

Post by CryptoBanker »

dannysullivan wrote: post #916
uberman wrote: post #867

Google Rep: "You said in the post that quotes don't give exact matches. They really do. Honest. Me: Google for "quotes don't give": Top result, does not contain the given phrase Second result, does not contain that phrase This is literally the first thing I tried and I did a view source to be sure. They are lying to us and/or themselves. Looking at the result, I would say 1/2 the results don't include that phrase inc…

I'm the Google Rep, and there were two more parts to my reply which explain this: Here's why people often think quoting with Google doesn't work when it really does (I've looked a huge number of these reports). 1) We match ALT text 2) We match text not readily visible, such as in a menu or small text 3) Page has changed since we indexed it 4) Punctuation... Punctuation comes into play if you did a quoted search like…

Regarding point #2 - why would you ever match text that cannot be CTFL+F'd?

I can understand why you would match it generally, but why would you ever serve those types of results to users in a browser? Why would users ever want this as a feature?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#967

Post by yuuko11 »

As a trader, I can say that at least in Finance, the dead internet theory does apply. Type any stock ticker into google, especially a small one (random example: MRAM), not a single article for "mram stock" is written by a human, you have AI generated pages such as "stocknews.com", and dashboards like FinViz (which fwiw is a good and useful website). The articles are generally generated based on quantitative (and therefor easy to automate) aspects of stocks, for example price to earnings, or that the price has grown alot.

A second type of website exists, which I learnt of from searching tweets in google, and finding that algorithmic spinning (replacing words to avoid plagiarism detection) was clearly being employed. The grammar is often laughably bad, but clearly in terms of google is either the best content available (as their algos see it), or the only content available.

One more Note: Google Trends data is 'deflated' to the number of searches (you can verify this by using Google Ads which gives numbers of searches and comparing to trends data). I assume the method is similar to what is in use for the transparency report's "censorship / outage" feature (explained here: https://transparencyreport.google.com/traffic/overview?hl=en)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#968

Post by dfreeman85 »

wilde wrote: post #828
bambax wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OP is weak because it conflates ads and seo spam. Yes, Google went all in with ads, and yes, this hurt its credibility and the quality of its products. 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 eviden…

SEO is ads Google is failing to monetize. That said, the reason the Reddit trick works is that it uses information Google explicitly excludes when ranking content (engagement signals). Google has a bunch of “objective standards” that it uses to paternalistically shape what the web looks like. Many of these are divorced from what users actually want for pieces of content (https, AMP, a life story in front of recipes t…

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#970

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

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…

>What I'm having a heck of a time finding is technical content; long-form programming tutorials, deep dives into academic concepts

github search is good for that. search for 'list of awesome anytopic'/'curated list of anytopic'/'list of anytopic' and you might find a repository with a curated lists of links on anytopic. (search box on the main page of github)

You even have the 'The definitive list of lists (of lists)' https://github.com/jnv/lists

You might also want to check my side project: I have a search tool / catalog of duckduckgo !bang operators, i am hoping that it allows for better discoverability of specialized search engines.

https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html - (best viewed on a PC)

here is the project page on github: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang

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