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Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

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Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#41

Post by seibelj »

altdataseller wrote: post #38
seibelj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I don’t think anyone at Google or Facebook really cares that much. They are old companies, the big money has been made, and it’s pretty much impossible to launch a new successful product. Everything big has been acquisitions for a decade. If you climb up to executive level it’s just twiddling thumbs until the cash cow starts to die, then you ride off into the sunset because nothing is going to replace the ca…

I dont know about miserable. The money, benefits and work/life balance can be very good. And while the work is uninteresting, its probably a lot more tolerable than working elsewhere.

It is a philosophical thing for me personally. I did a stretch at a meaningless company with good pay and perks and I was so unbelievably bored. If you have mentally accepted your productive output is without personal meaning and you are only in it for a check, then I agree it’s a good gig. I just personally can’t do it. And I think the general no-fucks-given by the workforce is why a lot of stuff is just stagnating and declining.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#42

Post by luke2m »

peppertree wrote: post #36
gundmc wrote: post #13

This topic is posted about once a month for the last 13 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It's the new "this is the year of linux desktop".

Except it seems true

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#43

Post by DethNinja »

dougmwne wrote: post #40

I suspect, but can’t prove that the entire internet is rotting. I get the feeling that organic user contributions are plummeting and being swamped by bots. HN is a small life raft. Many of the niche subreddits I’ve been following for years are seeing their post frequency drop, from dozens a days to a few a week. All the other forums are gone. Maybe there’s something going on in the apps, but they aren’t searchable. T…

I think something is off with the internet too.

It feels as if internet is sharded just like MMORPG servers. Nowadays there are more humans than ever with access to internet but organic creations are getting harder to find and everything is swamped with SEO spam.

I still can’t exactly point my finger on what’s wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#44

Post by lumost »

holografix wrote: post #14

There’s been some debate about this here on HN and someone made a point that resonated with me: The quality of _the web_ has been in decline lately. With ML’s capacity to paraphrase original content and to generate plausible rubbish content from scratch, it’s very difficult for Google’s pagerank (or whatever they call their algo these days) to fight back. That been said, there does seem to be a fair bit of scraping a…

Look at python documentation. There is a metric ton of spam sites that copy and paste python documentation with ads inserted. Google ranks these higher than the primary source.

I suspect google is boosting ad supported content over non ad supported content. Directly incentivizing paraphrased/copy pasta content.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#45

Post by thevagrant »

dougmwne wrote: post #40

I suspect, but can’t prove that the entire internet is rotting. I get the feeling that organic user contributions are plummeting and being swamped by bots. HN is a small life raft. Many of the niche subreddits I’ve been following for years are seeing their post frequency drop, from dozens a days to a few a week. All the other forums are gone. Maybe there’s something going on in the apps, but they aren’t searchable. T…

The impact of walled gardens and "use our app for a better experience" has accumulated.

The constant moving of communities is also a problem. We dropped irc, join us on slack. Crickets.. er we moved to discord. Each move must impact engagement negatively.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#46

Post by weird-eye-issue »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #18

My vision for the future of search: Text search on the web will slowly die. No one trusts the results of random text. Google is in the adversarial position of wanting to censor certain answers as well as present answers that maximize their own revenue. People will search video based content instead, and use the fact that a human spoke the information, as well as comments/upvotes to vet it as trustworthy material (lik…

> use the fact that a human spoke the information, as well as comments/upvotes to vet it as trustworthy material

Ha, is this a joke? You can pay people on Fiver to produce videos for you given any script at all

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#47

Post by vidanay »

DethNinja wrote: post #43
dougmwne wrote: post #40

I suspect, but can’t prove that the entire internet is rotting. I get the feeling that organic user contributions are plummeting and being swamped by bots. HN is a small life raft. Many of the niche subreddits I’ve been following for years are seeing their post frequency drop, from dozens a days to a few a week. All the other forums are gone. Maybe there’s something going on in the apps, but they aren’t searchable. T…

I think something is off with the internet too. It feels as if internet is sharded just like MMORPG servers. Nowadays there are more humans than ever with access to internet but organic creations are getting harder to find and everything is swamped with SEO spam. I still can’t exactly point my finger on what’s wrong.

Personally, I think we are in some sort of technological uncanny valley in between pervasive and ubiquitous.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#48

Post by thevagrant »

lumost wrote: post #44
holografix wrote: post #14

There’s been some debate about this here on HN and someone made a point that resonated with me: The quality of _the web_ has been in decline lately. With ML’s capacity to paraphrase original content and to generate plausible rubbish content from scratch, it’s very difficult for Google’s pagerank (or whatever they call their algo these days) to fight back. That been said, there does seem to be a fair bit of scraping a…

Look at python documentation. There is a metric ton of spam sites that copy and paste python documentation with ads inserted. Google ranks these higher than the primary source. I suspect google is boosting ad supported content over non ad supported content. Directly incentivizing paraphrased/copy pasta content.

I see this with questions and answers from reddit or other forums which get syndicated into various other 'developer' sites and get high rankings on Google.

Search engines should let us configure a whitelist of sites for certain categories/context of search.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#49

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #46
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #18

My vision for the future of search: Text search on the web will slowly die. No one trusts the results of random text. Google is in the adversarial position of wanting to censor certain answers as well as present answers that maximize their own revenue. People will search video based content instead, and use the fact that a human spoke the information, as well as comments/upvotes to vet it as trustworthy material (lik…

> use the fact that a human spoke the information, as well as comments/upvotes to vet it as trustworthy material Ha, is this a joke? You can pay people on Fiver to produce videos for you given any script at all

Viral videos dont lie. I'm dead serious. I think the end of Google is social media content in video form
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