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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#91

Post by ekianjo »

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.

bullet points would be an improvement over bullshit useless prose

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#92

Post by andrewstuart »

orost wrote: post #65

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 mudd…

Stack Overflow is to blame for that.

With the best of intentions they make their data open, resulting in hundreds of clone sites regurgitating the stack overflow data, on sites with names like “ProblemGeek” and “NerdAnswer”.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#93

Post by jhoechtl »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #15
kajaktum wrote: post #4

It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in Reddit to fake good user experience. For example, who the hell knows who mr fart32snap is on this reddit discussion thread talking about good cheap microphone? I don't doubt there's already some of these out there. IMO, the only way this can ever be truly fixed is to have a 1 to 1 mapping between a person and their online personality. An account and their po…

Corporations already do this. Same with NGOs and political organizations. They have done this for a long time. I have a Reddit account that is old with a few thousand of the old "link karma," and received several 4-figure offers for the account for this purpose.

So we need an internet without corporations? Sounds obvious but how we are supposed to achieve this?

Easy self-hosted solutions, like IPFS or Gemini?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#94

Post by onion2k »

inductive_magic wrote: post #69
Gigachad wrote: post #47

Earlier 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.

if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't

That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a lot of factors, from the context of why the user is searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing else. My mother would want some background about the recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot more context.

It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search' based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#95

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #67
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

By extension, high-karma accounts that are run by marketing companies can post in a niche subreddit to subtly promote their product or disparage their competition, and they'll end up on the front page of that subreddit. They'll get a lot of views and a lot more engagement than the average unsophisticated user's post would -- and those astroturfed posts would, on average, rank higher in searches.

This is analogous to SEO, but rather more insidious and sneaky. You can spot SEO blogspam from a mile away. You don't know if a Reddit user is a real person, a bot, or a company's representative.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#96

Post by realjhol »

chimprich wrote: post #76
tokinonagare wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

> Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough. And if you…

> And if you disagree, please post some examples.

The Donald

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#97

Post by bobmaxup »

deafpolygon wrote: post #68
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone must care, no? Those threads get a large number of impressions, assumedly from real users.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#98

Post by projektfu »

"How do I fix some odd setting in Windows, Mac, whatever"

2007: results include documentation, a couple forums, if you're unlucky there's a potentially malware tool that's discovered people need to fix this.

2012: results include Reddit and Stack Exchange, documentation has disappeared, forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install.

2023: top results are just blogspam pushing malware tools and the above-mentioned useless support forums. It's hard to know if Microsoft and Apple even know what their software does.

Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#99

Post by girvo »

senttoschool wrote: post #79
JCM9 wrote: post #17

The 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…

Part of this is because of tools like Discord which is not indexable by Google. We need something better than Discord for community discussions and support. Reddit is indexable.

Discord as the go-to community hub for things like programming languages makes a little bit sad, knowing it’s all ephemeral and locked up.

At least the Nim team has a Matrix bridge I guess, so it’s a solvable problem somewhat. But I find joining yet another Discord group just obnoxious.

I long for the async-only text forums of yore. I’m getting old, aren’t I.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#100

Post by gregwebs »

I switched to Kagi last year and couldn’t be happier. The results are better for me. No ads (the small amount I pay Kagi is well worth it) and a slider to click for programming focused results.

Looking forward to some new great AI search but I doubt it will come from Bing. The other day I tried Bing and it had merged information across 2 different results such that the page title it showed was incorrect and misleading.

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