> It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines.
The obvious spoken out so openly.
Google Search Is Dying (2022)
81–90 of 514 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 c…
>There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network
I would not characterise a community moulded according to the whims of a few anonymous individuals as high in trust.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#83Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Because anything google can detect, the spammers can generate to match. We will soon enter an era of GPT generated spam which not even humans can tell if it's real info or just garbage that looks real.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I disagree that whatever ranking system google uses will just be gamed to the same extent. If google downgraded the rank of pages with lots of ads and trackers it would substantially reduce the incentive to game the system, the reason it won’t is because most of those pages are running Adsense so there’s every incentive for google to keep the status quo.
That is exactly the point!
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#86The two biggest problems I’ve seen develop with Google are that: 1. The quality of the search algorithm’s ability to sift through nonsense to find “the good stuff” seems to have gotten progressively worse, and that’s largely fueled by: 2. Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the “good stuff” is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doe…
> For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense.
That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of anything which make money for someone and who pays Google addwords fees is presented prominently while the rant is buried.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other HN post has 3636 points and 1582 comments. How you could get the number “about 1000” from either of those is beyond me.
Oh well, "about 5,000" then. Whatever, it's a rounding error.
I mean, no. It’s not just a rounding error, it’s literally ignoring the real numbers and pulling something out of your ass to try and sound snarky.
Very few people upvote stories around here so that number is actually very large. Considering the current top thing on the news feed is a magnitude lower points, that actually means a lot.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#88> 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…
As a reddit-addict this really depends on the subreddit you're using. In /r/askreddit you don't stand a chance that your question will attract serious attention, but there are so many subreddits with small usergroups and enough reactions. In /r/askreddit or other popular subreddits, my answers get reasonable attention, even if I'm not on the reddit timeschedule.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In what sense will it kill social media?
Unless social media websites begin to require ID verification, they'll be flooded with LLM-powered bots. Humans will tire of this.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#90The 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 mudd…
Look on the bright side; we're the last generation(s) of folk capable of operating tech at any level beyond what the UX people at FAANG will allow one to reach. The bridge has been burned behind us. Yay job security.