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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886423
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209067
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093439
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31427996
I agree and IMO Google is the new Yahoo, just a lot bigger. So we all need new search engine, again?
I recently wanted to learn more about the python match operator and was hoping to find some good blog posts explaining them and I only found low effort, practically useless SEO sites that are probably all hyperoptimised for any searches containing python... At some point I just gave up. In contrast, I also do SwiftUI development, and here you often find tons of useful, beautiful blogs from people where you can see th…
Yes indeed. The SEO industry has finally worked out how to beat Google and get their stuff pushed to the top. Meanwhile the real experts, who don't have any SEO skills at all, are disappearing down the results. It's a tragedy.
Yesterday I was trying to figure out the World Cup sub rules and I knew they had gone up to 5 but my friend was saying “are they limited to three sub occasions to make the five subs?” and the top ten results were complete garbage with any actual info in the 5th paragraph and none were aware of the limits except that the rules had recently moved up to 5 from 3…
Google started with nerds; nerd learned to write good queries. Then normies appropriated Google and wrote dumb queries in massive volume; Google optimized for handling dumb queries. To get good results today, you have to write dumb queries. For example, a nerd would never write a question as a search input – nerds would write a series of hyperrelevant keywords. Normies don’t understand keywords – they ask questions o…
Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine... I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like. For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to be doing much better. I've found that DuckDuckGo's results suddenly got drastically worse a few months ago: markedly fewer results overall, and the results that do show up have worse relevance (in particular, generic pages about the closest major city, e.g. its official homepage or Wikipedia article, tend to show up for no obvious reason).
Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There m…
Bing is much more useful. yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations. I suspect it's the new focus on content policing versus search quality and corresponding resource allocation, that did Google search in
unless, of course, the politics are .ru
;^)
We all know the algorithm is too easily gamed (1)(2), but they make way too much money to ever blow it up and start from scratch.
Why care about the free results below the line, when the real goal is to get people to click on the ads at the top of the SERP?
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1. If it’s general information you’re looking for, you’re hit with low-quality keyword spam sites, with 900 ads playing all over the page. Google makes the vast majority of its money on ads, so they can’t penalize sites bloated with ads due to anti-trust issues.
2. If you’re doing research on products/software/etc, the results in almost every category are now bloated with affiliate marketing spam. Again, Google cannot de-rank sites that monetize this way due to anti-trust.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I searched for a product on Youtube recently, and the main result was a computer-generated voice narrating words that felt like they had been generated from the product spec (rather than written by somebody with experience with the product)! It will be interesting to see where we are in a few years time.
YouTube search is even worse than Google. Takes 5 to 10 searches to find what you are looking for.