Maybe what we need is an all-seeing AI browser plug-in that transforms and decrapifies the SERPS and sites themselves.
Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
161–170 of 550 posts
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#162The 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…
Here’s an example for you.
I want you to start a blank slate C (or C++) project. Ask Google how to write heapify, push_heap, and pop_heap in C. Ask ChatGPT the same.
I did this a few weeks ago. I literally could not find the answer on Google. ChatGPT gave me actual C code that I definitely did not trust but did verify.
Google results for questions like that are genuinely awful. It’s full of shitty tutorial websites that are full of ads and either don’t have the answer I need or don’t have it in a convenient form.
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#163People seem to forget: AI is about data, the ability to process it, and having a few smart folks to do algorithms. The third part is actually the smallest and easiest part of the trilogy for AI. Google, has all three. The real question is can they not shoot themselves in the foot while doing it. Also SEO will always target the market leader. As far as Bing's results: I keep thinking Google is trashy. Then I use Bing…
> People seem to forget: AI is about data, the ability to process it, and having a few smart folks to do algorithms. The third part is actually the smallest and easiest part of the trilogy for AI.
MS has them all three too.
And since, as you say, the algorithm part is not the most difficult part, others may enter the playing field soon (we already have DDG and Kagi, for example, with Kagi now experimenting with LLMs too).
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
the tinfoil take is that everyone in charge is fully aware of this eventual problem such that when it occurs, a solution will be presented: ubiquitous verifiable digital ID technology that's required to use popular social media services, such that everything that a Real Person posts will be signed with said digital ID, thus bringing about the end of online anonymity, and the death of the Internet as we presently know…
Entirely possible, but the amount of people who moved to Mastodon after Twitter got lit on fire gives me hope that people might explore options if things go a step too far
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#165The 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…
People who respond like you have are either being willfully obtuse about how awful search has gotten or honestly do not remember how it was 5-10 years ago. As others have mentioned, SEO has all but made search useless for anything outside a narrow window of need. I used to be able to do "deep dives" into the dusty corners of the internet to find things using google and now it's about useless for that.
And I've /recently/ hunted for something obscure, couldn't find it, managed to find an old bookmark to it, the server was still online and the content I wanted was still there. And no amount of crafting of a google search would bring it up. And the server in question didn't contain copyrighted material which would have resulted in a takedown block or anything like that.
It's frustrating how /bad/ Google has gotten for anything other than fairly basic, high level "searching".
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of google was to RANK content on the web, and surface the BEST content to the top. In that regard it has failed, and the expectation is for them to correct the problem and return to delivering good content first. It's not that the content doesn't exist or isn't indexed, its that its been drowned out by noise. Sifting through noise better was the entire reason google took off from more standard crawlers. It…
> It now returns results worse than crawlers from the previous era. That is an absurd exaggeration.
Not really everyone's familiar with the example of cooking recipes being breakfast with the author's life story in order to improve their position in Google rankings, but it's far more prevalent than just recipes. Today I tried to look up something about a feature in a particular piece of reasonably popular desktop software. The top hit that wasn't an advert was several years out of date. The second hit was clearly artificially inflated to long form journalism to try and get me to read a thousand words where 10 would do. Duck duck go linked me to some actual recent results, just like I would have expected with the crawlers of the previous era
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incorrect, the web was mainstream by 1996, two years before Google even launched.
The number of internet users is currently 150x more than it was in 1996. I don't think you can make an argument that it was already mainstream in '96 with a few tens of millions of people on it. The web was overwhelmingly informational up to an inflection point where it became overwhelmingly commercial. That's the thing people are upset about.
This is absolutely right. The web died about then, really. What we have now is shameful and embarrassing, and society is poorer for it.
And it's not Google's fault.
But it also remains true that Google's search just doesn't work well for many people, and that some alternatives work better for them.
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#168It's been a while since they stopped innovating. Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many. It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product. I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different busine…
Note that YouTube was acquired by Google in 2006; it's not a product that was launched by Google.
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#169It's been a while since they stopped innovating. Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many. It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product. I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different busine…
I think YouTube, which has a paid and ad-free version along with its Live TV offering, somehow manages to still be a sleeper hit within the larger Google portfolio and doesn't get talked about enough.
Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
#170The 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…
> What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering?
I mean what you just listed.
Google won the search war because of PageRank eliminating lots of spam, and then something like 15 years of staying ahead of SEO spam and providing useful search.
Lately it seems like they've given up on the arms race and let the SEO spam win, but it isn't clear why.
And Google didn't produce high quality search for free, they used ads and sold the eyeballs they won.