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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#201

Post by stockerta »

carlosjobim wrote: post #187
wslh wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange! I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise. Ou…

To me all signs point to Reddit never having been a commercial venture, but rather an influence and propaganda machine for United States government agencies. So they already have their budget paid.

So because its a three letter agency hustle, thats why Tencent bought in to it? ... JFC

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#202

Post by drowsspa »

regularfry wrote: post #148
echelon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not captchas, OP probably means actual IDs. And to be honest, with some cryptography surely we can find a way to make it work and be anonymous

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#203

Post by ajsnigrutin »

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…

Recipes are a pain in general, even without google, doubly so for baking.

Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless to many american grandmas.

On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of us.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#205

Post by kingkawn »

wslh wrote: post #168
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…

Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange! I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise. Ou…

What could possibly motivate them to drop the ball on crypto ads? Hmmm…

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#206

Post by AdamN »

000ooo000 wrote: post #82
AdamN wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.

Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times) now have more of my time because I trust them more based on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer low quality articles under click bait headlines).

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#207

Post by narrator »

I noticed that there are a lot fewer forum results in Google search than a couple of years ago. Forum results are often pretty good, but I think Google deranks these sites in their quest to clean up misinformation. That's why appending reddit has to be done, because reddit gets deranked because some wrongthink sneaks in despite the best intentions of their moderators. SEO spam sites never say anything that strays into misinfo territory and are just repeat conventional boring info, so they are always near the top. The wrongthink derank is really pronounced if searching for controversial political stuff. In fact, if you search for a controversial recent event you'll get no results and a message that "results are changing quickly."

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#208

Post by ajsnigrutin »

carlosjobim wrote: post #198
j_crick wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the worst of SEO pages are cooking recipes, where you have to scroll down screens of badly written meaningless text before you actually get to ingredients list. At least Google still keeps indexing recipe microformats.

Search your recipes on YouTube. It is a better way of getting the information and higher quality. Edit: To the friendly people downvoting me: Try for yourself and you'll be surprised how much good and informative content you can find on YouTube.

Hi guys! Last month I was visiting my grandma... (3 minutes of this) ...so don't forget to like and subscribe this! Now, i usually use this kind of flour, but I decided to replace it with this special kind from my local farmers market, which is great, because it's sold by this old lady who works... (5 more minutes of that) ... so if you like putting ginger into your cookies, write it down in a comment (3 more minutes of this) ... now you have to fold in the cheese... i have a separate video (15 minutes) just explaining how to fold it in, so I won't show that here, but click the link in the description to see that ...

Yeah... i prefer text. It's even wors with tech stuff.... do they expect me to retype the commands/code from the video?!

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#209

Post by carlosjobim »

arbuge wrote: post #188
franze wrote: 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…

> have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) We have different definitions of zero I think...

Zero as far as the Google spider is concerned

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#210

Post by pclmulqdq »

jhoechtl wrote: post #93
pclmulqdq wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, the pseudonymous nature of the platform, combined with the voting mechanism surfacing content (rather than a mechanism like "following" surfacing the relevant posts to you) makes the platform uniquely manipulable. That makes running these kinds of consensus-manufacturing campaigns easy.

If you get rid of either of those mechanisms, you make it a lot harder to astroturf.

HN would be the same way without dang.

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