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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#61

Post by echelon »

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…

Even if Google had been good stewards, they failed to diversify.

AI AdBlock is going to kill whatever is left of Google within the year.

AI content spam is absolutely going to kill social media and search results, but AI adblock will be worse to Google's bottom line.

It's coming, and it's going to be brutal.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#62

Post by DeathArrow »

I have an idea: a search engine where a team of humans adds what website they deem important and also ranks it. Website owners who aren't in the index and want to submit their site, pay a small fee.

The result would be no SEO, no content farms and highly relevant content. I don't think the algorithms and even AI will ever keep track with people who try to game the engines for profits.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#63

Post by thiht »

danpalmer wrote: post #35

From the example image half way through this article... > "retool slack integration" I've just googled this and the top hit was literally the instructions to set up the slack integration. Not a link to it, the actual instructions, although the link to the source page in the Retool docs was there. The rest of the hits were all hits in the Retool docs, except for the last result, which was someone making an HN comment…

Google Search is broken for subjective searches. If you search "best xxx", Google will only return crap. "best xxx reddit" still gives relevant information.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#64

Post by DanielVZ »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #49
petesergeant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 us…

Of course the front-page will look like that. Niche subreddits are a completely different experience.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#65

Post by orost »

The most tragic casualty of this is the ancient wisdom of just google your tech issues. It doesn't work any more! All you get is page upon page of auto-generated help sites that pretend to have solutions for your exact problem but are all actually the same list of generic tips (restart your computer! update your drivers!)

I can sort through it with enough effort, but it's a disaster for non-tech people who could muddle through their computer problems before but now just get hopelessly stuck in the Google Search swamp every time.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#66

Post by Farow »

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…

I'm guessing that monetizing comments is a lot more difficult on reddit as any links can be removed by admins/mods/automoderator.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#67

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #49
petesergeant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 us…

But in the context of TFA - searching Reddit to get factual answers - what appears on the reddit.com front page from day to day is largely irrelevant, surely?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#68

Post by deafpolygon »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #49
petesergeant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 us…

Who cares? The real reddit stuff is not in the front pages.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#69

Post by inductive_magic »

Gigachad wrote: post #47
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.

That sounds like it makes sense - but if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't, why would Google not be able to optimize their algo accordingly? If the results for a query don't match the "nature of the query", it's a bad result. If the algo can be gamed, it isn't aiming for the actual goal, i.e. it fundamentally fails at information retrieval.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#70

Post by martin_a »

franze wrote: post #48

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…

I'm totally with you on that, but who, besides us, knows about this and understands the inner workings?

Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests.

They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today).

I'm not sure how to solve this, to be honest.

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