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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#111
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's very different content though, isn't it? I've never used Discord, but it's mostly chat as far as I understand, and I always found chat somewhat difficult to use for referencing later. You'll have topics shifting, multiple topics going on at once, everything being more informal (and people spending less time on finding the solution instead of jumping on Discord).

I imagine it's harder to get useful content out of that vs forums where topics are pretty contained in threads and it's more formal so there's less noise and pretty much all posts are relevant to the topic.

Maybe if forums had fancy apps for local display and reply etc, and you could sync them between servers, and it could be kind of decentralized. Someone should build something like that and come up with a good name. It would be a useful net of news. Just a thought!

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#113
Who needs Google anyway? Forbes is an expert on everything! I mean holy fucking shit, is there any topic Forbes isn't an expert on? I wonder who are the brilliant minds at Google Search who let shit like that slide. As of the last 2 years, Forbes has become an expert in web development, devops, and who knows what's coming next - experts on systems architecture?

Link buying is as rampant as ever, too. For one of the blogs I own, it's not uncommon to get an out of the blue offer for $500 to publish an article that includes a link to some product. And I have heard those numbers are even crazier in casino, gambling and cannabis niches.

For a new site/blogs these days, Google will stall/throttle you for 2-3 years before it starts even looking at you as if you matter / are a subject expert. All the while, shitty news sites like Forbes get pumped to the top not because they produce high-quality content but because they're jacked up with backlinks.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#115
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…

It is now easier to get Saturn and Media Market ads than technical sites when looking for hardware specifications.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#116

> 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…

I never understood how Reddit isn’t an advertising powerhouse. Their users literally voluntarily segregate by interest, but the proper tech never got built out. Last I checked they integrated a 3rd party solution for that.

reddit became massive overnight because digg imploded. digg imploded because they tried to turn into an advertising powerhouse.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#117
I was an early adopter of Google Search around 2000 when it was better than Altavista. A few years ago I switched to DuckDuckGo. But in the autumn my DDG searches began to have only about 10 results for terms that should have had thousands of results. A couple of months ago I started paying for Kagi search and like it because it's like Google used to be 20 years ago – it shows interesting results.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#118
post #105
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you provide less monetisation for content creators, you end up with less content too. This is not as simple as you think…

You could reward the type of monetization that is correlated to high-quality content and penalize the type that is associated with spam.

Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank way down.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#119
post #110

Indeed, Altavista, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves would probably give better search results than Google as of today.

I upvoted this, but only because of nostalgia. I was there when Google started and it was lightyears ahead of the already gamed Altavista which relied on human ingenuity and meta tags.
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