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

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

#131

Post by massysett »

rich_sasha wrote: post #83
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…

The SEO fiasco means that the index to the Yellow Pages is all wrong. You want to find the Chinese embassy, instead you find Vietnamese takeaway businesses. In the last 2-3 months search quality for me has absolutely crashed and is barely usable.

OK, I searched "chinese embassy" and the top link is "Embassy of the People's Republic of China" at http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn.

I'm willing to accept that maybe you are exaggerating to make a point. Maybe you have a better example that is actually illustrative?

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

#132

Post by jgalentine007 »

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…

I've been having to use Bing to find things. BING.

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

#133

Post by ghshephard »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #73

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.

Depends on your use case - if you are coding, or doing constraint analysis - 75+% of the time it's a single request, single answer, and you are done. The other element with ChatGPT is if you aren't happy with the initial answer for some reason - you can engage in a conversation with it, provide some guidance, and will adjust it to suit specifically what you are interested in. I've found about 50% of my google searches just go straight to ChatGPT these days. Hallucinations are the only real problem I've had - but over time you start to become cynical about the truth of anything factual - asking for unit tests helps quite a bit when coding - double checking any math is also important.

I do agree though, that without citations to the original source - any "Facts" that ChatGPT offers are absolutely untrustworthy.

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

#134

Post by basch »

emodendroket wrote: post #123
basch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on how state works.

If I say "show me the best winter gloves, and only from sites that you can verify actually product tested" and it follows the instruction (ignoring sites that just have a list of popular search results aggregated) then it is better. If it doesn't do what I want, I expect to be able to follow up and teach it.

I expect the chat style stateful search to take instruction for what type of sites I want results from. "Return me a list of websites with recipes for Bolognese that do not have a long story above the recipe. Build a table with the top five results normalized for portion size, comparing and contrasting the ingredients. Highlight unique ingredients in bold."

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

#135

Post by Aeolun »

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…

Search before Google was bad. e.g. I could easily ignore 80% of the results on the first page, but at least it was all actual content.

Then, with Google, it got better and almost all results were relevant.

But we’ve been regressing over the years, and now we’re at the point where 80% of all results are both irrelevant and simply SSO spam.

I find it really hard to believe Google has some of the smartest people in the world on search and they cannot identify this.

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

#136

Post by Stagnant »

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 think that google search's quality decay is a real thing, it takes some real effort to get proper results that aren't SEO'd garbage.

For example, just the other day I was searching for one string that I knew was part of a common code repository. To my surprise google couldn't find anything at all. Yandex on the other hand found the repository immediately and linked to github.

Other common issue with google is the difficulty of finding stuff like forum posts related to the search query. Sure, you could append "reddit" to the query, but there are still plenty of traditional forum sites and some of them have decades worth of discussion. I Never see those sites pop up on a typical google search unless I specifically look for them. Again, with yandex, my experience is much better, it is not uncommon to see posts from forums to be on the first page of results.

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

#137

Post by emodendroket »

tester756 wrote: post #50
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.

>your searches are focused are what? >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. What if their search is…

What if indeed? What does that imply to you? I don’t really care why it is so much better so long as it is.

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

#138

Post by amatix »

weaksauce wrote: post #75
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

https://kagi.com ?

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

#139

Post by DrSiemer »

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…

Often when looking for an answer I just need to confirm what I already know, or look up something I forgot. Google offers me a bunch of sponsored links first and then sites with the best SEO, which will smother me with all kinds of unrelated crap that I do not want and will never need. I'm even running an extension that removes a ton of blacklisted sites from the search results.

ChatGPT usually gives me the answer that I'm looking for and nothing else. Sometimes it does add extra info, which often teaches me about something that I wasn't aware of at all.

But the greatest benefit is I can ask it to clarify anything I don't understand. I don't need to go on a completely new Google quest, or jump through hoops to register on some site and hope a random internet person will ordain to help me out. I can just ask, in the same conversation, and immediately get clarification.

Many people underestimate the incredible learning opportunities a well trained language model provides. It doesn't matter that it hallucinates or lies. Whatever it claims is usually easy to validate. What matters is the speed with which you can find uncluttered new leads or answers.

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

#140

Post by runnerup »

beamgirl wrote: post #41
Hamuko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait for people to switch over from search engine optimization to AI model optimization: figuring out what kind of content you need to produce in order for Google's and OpenAI's models to deliver your message as gospel.

I'm actually expecting AI training data to turn into a snake eating its tail. I've been spending the last month not sleeping so I could try to get up to speed on deep learning, and my understanding is that AI trained on AI generated output becomes crap surprisingly quickly, and AI generated content is already starting to proliferate. I have no idea the extent to which this will hinder new models being generated, but…

> AI trained on AI generated output becomes crap surprisingly quickly

Yet GANs work quite well

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