Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Search Is Dying

dkb.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

981–990 of 1001 posts

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#981

Post by batguano »

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’m not sure what you’re talking about wrt prescriptions. I just googled “diazepam” and got all the information on my pharmacy insert, and more. And often, more clearly presented.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#982

Post by samstave »

samstave wrote: post #339
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…

Any idea what reddit's valuation is currently looking like? I have long been surprised they havent been acquired .. I assume for sure they have had plenty of offerss in the past

AHHHHH... i figured it out...

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#983

Post by mad182 »

mizzao wrote: post #831
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,…

What happened to Clubhouse? I just realized it was quite popular but now I haven't heard about it in a while. Can you link to a postmortem?

It still exists, the last app update was uploaded yesterday, but it seems most of the users didn't stick around after the initial hype died down. I guess the early focus on monetization and trying to turn it into payment app didn't help.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#984

Post by kerogerokero »

Google search is the dominant search globally.

What sucks is that they're spinning off traffic to their own services. But then again, nothing wrong with that. They own their traffic.

I've gotten huge gains from google alone in the past year, many going to my site (https://avsanpuru.com)

Nope, definitely not dying.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#985

Post by Dogfood_ »

foobarian wrote: post #93
cosheaf wrote: post #23

It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam t…

Wonder how we could set up an alt-web without the incentives that cause this problem. Delist any for-profit site? How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?

No post body was provided.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#986

Post by Pyrious »

alphabetting wrote: post #582
codyogden wrote: post #182

Disclosure: I'm the creator of Killed by Google. There are a lot of good points here about why power users (i.e. HN types, technologists, scholars/researchers, etc) find Google Search frustrating, but it doesn't really provide a balanced perspective which would acknowledge that Google Search for the average, billions-scale user is an incredibly optimized, positive experience. For those users, Google Search is doing e…

This is exactly right. Search for "Seven" on Google and duck duck go. For the average user Google hits it out of the park. 100% useful info with FAQs, where to watch and trailer. DDG is a mess and less than 20% of info is useful.

If you search "seven movie" on DDG it works fine.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#987

Post by TheKarateKid »

Gigachad wrote: post #760
TheKarateKid wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is Google we're talking about. They could very easily conquer the SEO experts the same way they basically eliminated spam and most web browser exploits.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#988

Post by lvxferre »

>Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant”, in addition to personalizing things for you. If you really meant exactly what you typed, then all bets are off.

In simpler words: it behaves like an assumer, and as an assumer it's prone to vomit stupid shit. Should we start treating it as an assumer then?

A shame that the "Google + “site:reddit.com”" lazy hack doesn't work for me. I care about accuracy, not authenticity.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#989

Post by SZJX »

Anecdotally, I got some scam crypto ad called "Bitcoin Era" in my GMail app just last weekend. The whole thing is laughably scammy. I Googled the name out of curiosity, and surprise! Almost every single result in the first three pages is a fake review encouraging people to "invest" in this BS. Only 1 or 2 results are actual reviewers who fight such scams and point out how stupid the whole scheme is, with comments from actual people who unfortunately got scammed. The whole experience seems to corroborate the points made in the article quite well.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#990

Post by notadoc »

I see Google search decline in three stages:

- When they became ad obsessed where entire search results are filled with ads or YouTube recommendations

- Developed recency bias, aka if it's new it must be better, which has incentivized frequent content regurgitation rather than originality

- They became Woke, disappearing results that apparently aren't passing the Woke Filter and/or that don't align with political ideology/objectives

As for reddit, does anyone really trust reddit? Reddit is absolutely inundated with crap, spam, blatant marketing campaigns, political bias, and all sorts of screwy stuff. It's also highly manipulated, and no more trustworthy than Yelp, slightly more than Yahoo Answers.

Search is ripe for disruption but it's a tall order, and user/marketer generated crap like reddit certainly isn't it.

Post reply on HN