Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed the expertsexchange era when they spammed all of Google ^^
expertsexchange is on of my favorite ambiguous site names
Not a fan of Pen Island?
Google Search Is Dying (2022)
251–260 of 514 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reddit was Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
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…
High bar is subjective, you're only filtering by the most superficial aspects: are there swear words? Do they have citations? Do they "sound" smart? Are they saying something "problematic"? Same here. There's no cadence. (I'm not talking about /r/AskHistorians though)
I've found hidden gems in free for all, no-karma, no-upvote forums such as 4chan. And you pay attention there, because people are not trying to sound smart.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#253Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#254I don't know if it's Google that is dying. It's more like a large segment of the public facing internet is wilting. The user experience without an adblocker is almost nothing but ads, popovers, permission requests and chat boxes, sign-up-to-the-newsletter requests. And these are the websites that aren't trying to bait-and-switch you
For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or marketing. It's not a good first impression.
There are healthy websites out there but they're really struggling to punch through all the crap.
It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't good search results.
I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#255The 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.
Why do people even care about views? Because of advertising. It is the root cause of all problems on the web today. All Google has to do to fix the web is put itself out of business by delisting pages with ads including its own. Search and the web at large would be fixed in days.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#256Earlier 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.
Because anything google can detect, the spammers can generate to match. We will soon enter an era of GPT generated spam which not even humans can tell if it's real info or just garbage that looks real.
Luckily on Kagi I can just block sites the moment I realize it is nonsense.
Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.
Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.
After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit" Which is funny as builtin search is so utter shit you pretty much need to use google to find anything
Maybe this is giving reddit too much credit, but I do see people say "append reddit to searches" literally every time the topic of search is brought up, so what if reddit is aware people do that but doesn't want to be a search engine? Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't really envy i…
This doesn't ring true to me. Reddit has clearly demonstrated a desire/mandate to monetize, even at the expense of its users. If they thought they had a viable Google competitor they wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth.
The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the spam problem is an upside.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
:D
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#259"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…
> Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful. Kinda... but it then gets broken by the developers of the distros. Static ip on raspberrypi? Sure... /etc/network/interfaces! Nope, not anymore, it's dhcpcd.conf now. It took literally a year for the "new way" to get on top of google search results.
See I understand that, with Microsoft and Apple support you would get a response along the lines of:
"I see you are trying to find the Static IP of your Raspberry Pi, a static IP is a ...... You also have a raspberry pi which is..... Given all of that I think you should really start by resetting your Raspberry Pi and ensure that your Windows license is up to date.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#260From 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…
The same happened to me.
Actually, I begin to wonder if maybe Google might be switching to some "high-quality" mode when it detects that you are a "technical" user?
Seems like a bit of competition was all Google needed to be good again.