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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#131

Post by bobmaxup »

Perhaps "generative ai" with summarization and citations will eventually be the future of search engines.

If a language model or some other methodology can distill information from all of these sites and proxy to them in a way that a company can still promote advertising revenue, there should be a clear path away from blog spam. One could imagine it might even disincentivize copying original works.

There are so many paths for using information once it can be transformed reliably.

If natural language understanding continues to improve, it would seem that there is a very bright future for existing search engines.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#132

Post by michaelt »

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?

I always assumed the botted accounts on Reddit were in the hands of marketing companies, ready to upvote posts saying "My Brand X headphones sound great" or "I changed from Brand Y to Brand Z cigarettes because the smooth taste never leaves me feeling over-smoked" or "I made big gains by putting my life savings into this sketchy investment" or whatever they're being paid to promote at the time.

I'd wager you could do a lot to influence public opinion with just an upvote ring, without the botted accounts actually needing to post messages.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#133

Post by moffkalast »

projektfu wrote: post #98

"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 blog…

> forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install

God this is such a pet peeve, those stupid Microsoft forums especially where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing and wishing a good day and suggest fuck all. They ought to just pull the plug on the site and let reddit handle their support for free.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#134

Post by lordnacho »

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…

The computer generated essay and the fake stackoverflow clones are the worst thing ever. It's harder to code now than just a few years ago because of all the BS people put on the internet.

I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#136

Post by Maxburn »

On some topics you can get a different version reality in google search results and what other search engines produce. Any A/B testing on this regardless of your position on the topics should be an eye opener. I'm not a fan of googles activism for influencing political or technical topics and I've attempted to get them out of my life.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#137

Post by thegginthesky »

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.

The real problem is that Google holds an effective monopoly in search, so any digital marketer worth a salt will optimize the crap out of their blogs and pages to get higher and higher rank within Google alone. This will, in turn, lead to what we see today: a race to the bottom in terms of quality to get the best SEO results.

I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#138

Post by mastodon_acc »

thiht wrote: post #63
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.

How is that Google's fault? are you expecting a "Search" engine to perform qualitative analysis on your specific topic and generate a list for you?

"best xxx reddit" that's google working as intended, you searched for a topic on reddit.

I swear with the proliferation of LLMs most people have completely forgotten what a "search" in a search engine means.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#139

Post by izacus »

projektfu wrote: post #98

"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 blog…

You missed the expertsexchange era when they spammed all of Google ^^

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#140

Post by izacus »

bobmaxup wrote: post #131

Perhaps "generative ai" with summarization and citations will eventually be the future of search engines. If a language model or some other methodology can distill information from all of these sites and proxy to them in a way that a company can still promote advertising revenue, there should be a clear path away from blog spam. One could imagine it might even disincentivize copying original works. There are so many…

Why would you think that? The issue is spammers taking over top results with advertised content, why do you think generative AI will actually fix this in any way? Besides just preventing you from actually finding the real information on the bottom of the results?
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