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Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

economist.com

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Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#71

Post by krackers »

massysett wrote: post #53
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yah…

Google doesn't return a lot of stuff that is on the web, that is found by Yandex and Bing. It is unwilling to serve up long-tail results from its index, probably because they're so scared of accidentally serving up "misinformation" and they heavily penalize non-https sites.

And yet for some reason they're all too eager to serve up sites scraping stackoverflow.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#72

Post by strangescript »

dilap wrote: post #31

Microsoft's integration of ChatGPT with Bing is really bad. No-one wants a busy search page with a side-bar of ChatGPT; what's the point of that? The correct interface for ChatGPT + search is just...ChatGPT. But it can also show you a list of web search results, when it's appropriate. A super-clean interface, that always shows you exactly what you want. That would be a killer feature and represent a real threat to Go…

This, I nearly laughed out loud when I saw it. They still don't get it. Google literally figured this out 20 years ago and beat yahoo.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#73

Post by FridgeSeal »

I do not understand the appeal or gpt-powered searches.

Most of my web searches are for looking up specific things, to find the specific link(s) that contains the information I need. These aren’t searches that are going to be made better or faster by an ML model-they’re not natural language queries, they’re just a bunch of terms.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#75

Post by weaksauce »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

there is that service that you can pay for that offers "high quality" but i haven't tried it. can't remember the name off the top of my head but it was on hn within the last few weeks iirc

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#76

Post by LightDub »

chomp wrote: post #18
Invictus0 wrote: post #9

Do you people really want AI generated answers? As if the internet wasn't bland enough as it is. This forum has been soapboxing for years about the longtail of blogs and BBs and niche sites, right up to the moment that Bing got chatgpt.

I just want Google to fall, nothing much more than that. I personally am going to continue using Kagi, but will quietly cheer Microsoft eating Google's lunch.

How old are you? I don't mean this to be offensive. It's just I remember when the same was said about Microsoft when Google was up and coming.

I really am getting old ...

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#77

Post by [deleted] »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

[deleted]

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#78

Post by svachalek »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

Google has been up against SEO for decades and the motivations are much stronger on the other side of the battle. ChatGPT is running off a fixed training set that no one has had a chance to game yet. When someone tries to build a true, current AI search engine we're going to see a whole new level of hallucinating lie machine.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#79

Post by qrio2 »

massysett wrote: post #53
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yah…

Things that i *know* were parts of the internet, that I could find via google 5-10 years ago are no longer possible to find. I get single page search results sometimes, with not even the capability to keep browsing 'more' pages to see things that may be tangentially related. Google has just decided to not show them at all. Remember when the bottom of the page was "Goooooooooooooooogle" and you could click each "o" to go to that page? Haven't seen that in a while, right?

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#80

Post by photochemsyn »

If Google were ever to remove the 'verbatim' option (which is lacking in other search engines like Bing as far as I can tell) it would become much less useful.

Unfortunately, one cannot enable both 'time' and 'verbatim' option under Tools in Google Search. I guess I should go ask ChatGPT why that is the case...

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