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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#221

Post by carlosjobim »

projektfu wrote: post #106
chimprich wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Orwell's term is crimethink of course. I can only think of one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to say certain things to certain people. Thankfully you're still allowed to actually hold the thoughts in your head.

> I can only think of one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to say certain things to certain people.

No idea as to what you're referring to, but you must know many more examples throughout the world and history, no?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#222

Post by jvanderbot »

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.

I'm sure government agencies all over the world are quite popular on Reddit.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#223

Post by twelve40 »

flir wrote: post #153
treyhuffine wrote: post #149

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/c…

> With LLMs, you can get information immediately that directly answers your query. Not as long as they're relying on humans to write pages with that information in. When nobody visits, what's the point in writing a page?

I keep looking for a coherent answer to that question, but have never seen one so far, these are unimportant details that are swept under the AI enthusiasm rug.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#224

Post by account42 »

blfr wrote: post #144
owisd wrote: 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.

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 mobi…

> If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker.

That misses the entire point: Google search results will still be manipulated to push those low quality results higher because even if you don't see the ads enough people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#225

Post by carlosjobim »

stockerta wrote: post #201
carlosjobim wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Where's the conflict? Do you think American and Chinese interests never align?

And to be clear, I think large parts of Reddit is of no interest to government agencies.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#226

Post by willnonya »

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…

So, your solution is omnipresent tracking and retribution?

The source of information is important which is just one of the many reasons why sites like reddit are poorly suited to be used as a reference.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#227

Post by jvanderbot »

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…

Because of a recent HN article on the subject, I was searching for "correlation of ACT scores and IQ", and the first 5 hits were the _same_ crappy 1500 word essay, where various section headers were programmatically changed to include exactly what I searched for.

How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.

I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#228

Post by dpkirchner »

izacus wrote: post #140
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?

If the summarizer does a good job it will probably identify the spam as what it is -- junk intended to funnel you into an affiliate link.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#229

Post by mark_l_watson »

I believe that Google could easily, from a technical point of view, lower the search ranking of web pages that have a lot of affiliate links. However, I also believe that this might be against their business interests.

When I am in a patient mood, I now just use the Edge Browser on my Macs and iPads, and jump right into Bing AI/ChatGPT chat mode. It is really important to make it clear that you want the system to research, follow web links, and summarize results for you. However, I see no advertisements, so how are they going to monetize this? I pay for OpenAI API use and also pay (for now) for ChatGPT, so I guess that I would also pay for an ad-free Bing AI search.

I have always been a Google fan, still love GCP, YouTube, YouTube Music, and Play Books. But they do make their money off of search and advertisements, so it will be really interesting to see how they protect their business.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#230

Post by account42 »

saberience wrote: post #213
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.

Even worse, I've found myself directed to long recipe pages with a huge amount of prose about the history of the recipe, how the author developer it etc, BUT THEN THERE IS NO ACTUAL RECIPE! This has happened multiple times in the past year. And this was often the first or second result when Googling the recipe. wtf?

I've seen some where the recipe was vissible on desktop but hidden behind a button on mobile which can be easy to miss.
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