Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by dmd » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:07 PM UTC

qrio2 wrote: post #79

massysett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Haven't seen that in a while, right?

It's still there right now.

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

#122

Post by pirate787 » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:07 PM UTC

ranting-moth wrote: post #88

saudade97 wrote: post #42

I don't get the HN hate of Google as a search tool. Yes, SEO has made searching more difficult, but Google is still by far the best search engine provided that your searches are focused and you use search tools (e.g., excluding terms, focusing on certain sites, etc.). I've tried other search engines (e.g., DDG, Bing) and they just aren't as good as Google.

Many of the HN crowd remember when Google came into existence and how wonderful it was. If it existed on the internet, Google would find it for you and it was usually the top resault. It was amazing. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. You regularly have to search, wade through the ads that are written like informative articles, adjust your query slightly and repeat the process. It's rubbish.

This, exactly. Google was a revelation, a clean page with the exact result you needed, at a time when many orgs were putting lots of high quality content online. The other search engines were busy portals and weren't indexing the new content.

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

#123

Post by emodendroket » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:07 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #119

emodendroket wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It now returns results worse than crawlers from the previous era. That is an absurd exaggeration.

Spam masquerading as the answer to my question is WORSE than off topic returns, because it is a trick vs being something I can easily disregard. Before the results would just not match what I was looking for. Now they do match what I was looking for, except some AI procedurally generated the content to show up when I searched those terms, with no regard for the accuracy of what the page says.

Then ChatGPT won’t satisfy you either.

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

#124

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:07 PM UTC

qrio2 wrote: post #79

massysett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Absolutely this. Google has gotten notably worse in just the last two years.

Today:

* Any term that might be related to a commercial product? That product comes first and frequently only.

* Search for two terms? It will first give it's prefer result for each separately - usually commercial products (ha). And then might give them together.

* Quoted terms are often taken as vague suggestions. Negative sign is often useless, etc.

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

#125

Post by polyamid23 » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

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…

I want a button: "never show me content from this domain again".

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

#126

Post by freitzkriesler2 » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

humanizersequel wrote: post #29

marricks wrote: post #7

I think it’s interesting to consider why touchscreen mobile phones won out over their predecessors. Touchscreens are the worst interface option. The feedback of feeling a button, or anything made for the job, is better than typing without specific feedback onto a screen. It won out because of you don’t have a set interface it’s bettor. Now for search, chat gpt will likely always be less reliable than a list of result…

>Touchscreens are worse than buttons Hottest take I've seen on here for a while. In a very specific, very limited set of mobile usecases, buttons may offer a more pleasant experience than a touchscreen. I only say that because there's usually exceptions to any statement, but I can't actually think of one. Touchscreens didn't win because of some lazy sheep-like consumerism, they won because the product is superior. If…

To be fair, touchscreens won out because of the Asian, specifically Chinese market. They were too poor to own laptops and wanted big phablets. Hence here we are today.

I still miss my landscape key board phones. The droid 4 still holds a special place in my head.

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

#127

Post by bbor » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

gipp wrote: post #95

luckylion wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.

There are giant teams of people at Google whose only job is trying to define things like "spam" and "seo abuse" more precisely in more diverse contexts. There are equally large armies of people outside of it trying to outwit the first group and find more and more elaborate loopholes and workarounds. HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it.…

This discussion is pretty sad and frustrating for me. I think your conclusion (“Google has no motive to encourage spam content that rises to the top using SEO tricks”) is about as convincing as it gets, but it’s completely drowned out by a very vague sense that google is a big company and therefor it’s making search worse on purpose. No amount of well-worded HN posts are gonna sway people, imo…

Luckily HN posters don’t exactly represent a meaningful portion of the population.

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

#128

Post by nearbuy » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

mattwad wrote: post #52

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…

As someone else said, the problem is ChatGPT lies straight to your face, whereas at least Google's answers are based on structured data by someone. It's traceable, whereas I would not trust ChatGPT ever to tell me the correct temperature to cook a steak.

Perhaps a bad example, since ChatGPT consistently gets the steak temperature right (or at least gives the same values as Google). Internal temperature of about 130-135°F (54-57°C) for medium rare, etc.

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

#129

Post by pirate787 » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #116

ranting-moth wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the HN crowd remember when Google came into existence and how wonderful it was. If it existed on the internet, Google would find it for you and it was usually the top resault. It was amazing. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. You regularly have to search, wade through the ads that are written like informative articles, adjust your query slightly and repeat the process. It's rubbish.

What these people are remembering is when the web was small and dorks-only. Now it is huge and full of normies of all kinds, including every shade of commercialism and fraud.

Incorrect, the web was mainstream by 1996, two years before Google even launched.

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

#130

Post by ajdoingnothing » Wed, Feb 08, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

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…

Completely agree. Heck, even the current 'waiting list' page (bing.com/new) looks so outdated and a mess. I don't know whether it is the font, the colors, the composition or margins.. Bing itself looks like a mess too. Microsoft truly has no taste.