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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#271

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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…

Or you know instead of invading peoples privacy irreparably you can maybe just learn not to take opinions on face value.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#272

Post by marginalia_nu »

digitalsushi wrote: post #266
marginalia_nu wrote: post #254

I 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: ht…

Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens. AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here, et al) remai…

> Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.

This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#273

Post by [deleted] »

carlosjobim wrote: post #221
projektfu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#274

Post by nicoburns »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #253
nicoburns wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amateurs can be experts! Amateur just means non-professional

Oh that's cool, didn't knew that amateur surgeons were a thing :)

You may also be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_surgeon

"The barber surgeon, one of the most common European medical practitioners of the Middle Ages, was generally charged with caring for soldiers during and after battle. In this era, surgery was seldom conducted by physicians, but instead by barbers, who, possessing razors and coordination indispensable to their trade, were called upon for numerous tasks ranging from cutting hair to amputating limbs."

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#275

Post by shadowgovt »

> Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News. There must be a lot of people who resonate with it this time around.

Unless, of course, this other part of the article is true:

> Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

... in which case one must ask the question as to whether stories like this being upvoted on HN are organic behavior or the result of botfarming.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#276

Post by JeremyBanks »

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…

[dead]

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#277

Post by account42 »

AdamN wrote: post #50
tokinonagare wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

> 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.

That's implying that there is a single one-dimensional quality metric. The problem is when moderators of popular subreddits (for a particular niche) or those with the most obvious names for a particular topic start to enforcing their own personal biases in the discussion rather than sticking to keeping the discussion on-topic.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#278

Post by NBJack »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #229

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 res…

Don't forget this is how Google started. It was originally a plain search page by design; minimally invasive ads didn't even come until later. Given that it is estimated that 'AI' chat costs about 10X to run per query vs. traditional search, please enjoy this honeymoon period while it lasts. I personally suspect that the real cost is much higher; GPUs are power hungry and these models aren't small.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#279

Post by moffkalast »

nicoburns wrote: post #274
monsieurbanana wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that's cool, didn't knew that amateur surgeons were a thing :)

You may also be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_surgeon "The barber surgeon, one of the most common European medical practitioners of the Middle Ages, was generally charged with caring for soldiers during and after battle. In this era, surgery was seldom conducted by physicians, but instead by barbers, who, possessing razors and coordination indispensable to their trade, were called upon for numero…

How barberic.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#280

Post by JohnFen »

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.

Videos are far less useful than text.
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