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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#41

Post by SquareWheel »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #19
tzhenghao wrote: post #2

> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit als…

Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30. > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new a…

> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.

User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.

edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#42

Post by theclansman »

kstenerud wrote: post #7

The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics. Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay that you must now slog through in order to get the information you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose over bullet points. The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-ge…

Yeah this, if I want to know how many chapters are there in a game, I have to real an entire article telling me useless stuff before I can get the info I want. Witj ChatGPT I can avoid this. I would say most of my Google searches were for answering questions, not to find articles related to a topic.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#44

Post by Nextgrid »

The article overlooks that "ads" goes beyond just ads on the search results page. Ads is the main problem, in the form of Google's business model which dissuades them from actually improving search result quality.

Spam/SEO/etc sites are very easy to detect - use the presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links, newsletter signup forms, etc as a negative ranking signal, and the problem will be resolved quickly. This can't be evaded, because the same techniques used to evade search engine detection would be abused by ad fraudsters.

The reason they don't do that is that those spam sites help Google in multiple ways - not only do they increase engagement with the search result page ads (the ads might actually be better than the "organic" but spammy results), but the ads/analytics on the spam sites are likely to be Google's which helps them too.

This would not be a problem with any search engine whose incentives are aligned with the users' (Kagi has a "non-commercial" feature for example that I suspect roughly implements the above).

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#45

Post by lincpa »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #19
tzhenghao wrote: post #2

> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit als…

Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30. > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new a…

[dead]

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#47

Post by Gigachad »

kstenerud wrote: post #7

The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics. Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay that you must now slog through in order to get the information you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose over bullet points. The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-ge…

Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be trimmed to bullet points removing useful info.

The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#48

Post by franze »

In the German market for any product related query where you want a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies, which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly newspapers).

i.e.: https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/ https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/ https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/

These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated.

And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".

They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work.

And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now.

Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#49

Post by LewisVerstappen »

petesergeant wrote: post #27
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30. > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new a…

> Reddit's system is terrible This doesn’t match my experience of reading Reddit

That's because you're just unaware of how astroturfed it is.

I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits and randomly picked an account that posted a top meme

https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/

The account has 8 million post karma and every single post it submits to a subreddit ends up on the front page of Reddit... without fail.

The account isn't a mod of any of those subs, but they're clearly using upvote manipulation to get every single one of their posts to the front page.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#50

Post by AdamN »

tokinonagare wrote: post #8
tzhenghao wrote: post #2

> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit als…

> Reddit was Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.

There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.

For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.

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