Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Search Is Dying (2022)

dkb.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 514 posts

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#141

Post by happymellon »

michaelt wrote: post #103
greyman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense will it kill social media?

The bit of social media people use to talk to their IRL friends and family will be fine. But the bit of social media where people are listening to celebrities, getting their news, sharing memes, discussing common interests? It might get flooded with bots so convincing as to be indistinguishable from normal users.

It's as soon as it learns that X celebrity is dead generates clicks.

Then folks will learn not to trust it just because it is a computer once everyone is announced dead, and everyone will have to make claims that they aren't.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#143

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

jhoechtl wrote: post #86
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…

> 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 an…

Can you tell us what value you get out of rants from unqualified people? What actionable thing comes out of consuming such information? Because I can’t imagine why anyone would do that, since “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd and disagree even among themselves. Why not just look at another side but one that is still made by a qualified expert?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#144

Post by blfr »

owisd wrote: post #73
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.

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.

Page publishers would still have the same incentive to game the system, only putting a smaller numer of ads, perhaps then more expensive and more carefully selected.

If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one. Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly bad.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#145

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

moffkalast wrote: post #127
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…

> I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits That was your first mistake, the defaults are cesspools full of karma farming bots. Nobody goes to those for advice.

What makes you think that the niche subreddits aren't also full of marketing firms, bots, and upvote networks? With very few exceptions, they are.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#146

Post by Nextgrid »

onion2k wrote: post #94
inductive_magic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like

Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm sure we can agree on is what people don't want. I don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were more ads in the content I'm consuming".

So we could at least start with that.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#148

Post by regularfry »

echelon wrote: post #89
greyman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We can't be far off the state where any captcha-style humanity test that can be implemented is immediately vulnerable to bots, too.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#149

Post by treyhuffine »

The recent success of ChatGPT shows that the current search experience is likely deprecated. With LLMs, you can get information immediately that directly answers your query.

ChatGPT has its limits too though - it's not always right, you don't have options other than to re-ask or regenerate if the one answer doesn't satisfy what you need, we're limited to only text, and the experience may be just a bit too contained/convergent. It feels like it's going to take another product or iteration to really get there.

The question I keep asking - what does the future of problem-solving and finding knowledge on the internet look like in an ideal world given the tools that we have or could now build?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#150

Post by mmcgaha »

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…

Maybe I am wrong about this, and maybe the SEO junk sites would find a way to evolve, but what I really want from google is a plonk button so I can have a personal kill file for sites that I never want to see again.
Post reply on HN