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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#301

Post by treeman79 »

zzbzq wrote: post #263
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.

What are "all signs"? Shit you made up in your head? It's owned by China for godsakes, what a half-baked conspiracy theory

Nearly all of Reddit is ultra left wing. No opposing view points are tolerated.

Individual topic sub Reddit’s are okay if they are strict about keeping on topic.

Anything front page is insanity.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#302

Post by carlosjobim »

JohnFen wrote: post #280
carlosjobim wrote: post #198

Earlier 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.

Videos are far less useful than text.

Not at all! It depends greatly on the content and the person. For recipes it is actually useful to see with your own eyes how to do something. The same thing with many other things, such as for example carpentry and mechanics. I agree that text is better for tech content and for a lot of other things that are mostly text based, or more abstract.

We've been conditioned into thinking text is better because we've all been through schooling, which consists of text books and a person yelling in front of a blackboard. If you let kids watch high quality YouTube videos instead, they would get a much better education.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#303

Post by danaris »

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.

That's...just not true, though.

You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our money.

The only reason they want our attention is to get our money.

A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable amount of disposable income, as is true in a healthy society/economy, it would be much, much more viable for many websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than being ad-supported.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#304

Post by Double_a_92 »

girvo wrote: post #99
senttoschool wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of this is because of tools like Discord which is not indexable by Google. We need something better than Discord for community discussions and support. Reddit is indexable.

Discord as the go-to community hub for things like programming languages makes a little bit sad, knowing it’s all ephemeral and locked up. At least the Nim team has a Matrix bridge I guess, so it’s a solvable problem somewhat. But I find joining yet another Discord group just obnoxious. I long for the async-only text forums of yore. I’m getting old, aren’t I.

How would you even index something like Discord? It's mostly a chat app, where discussions are casual and often mixed togheter with others... It's not like a forum where each post is at least a somewhat coherent thought written out properly.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#305

Post by treeman79 »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #203
onion2k wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have given up on web pages for recipes. Videos are still mostly fine. Often a nice condensed version of the recipe will be in the comment section.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#306

Post by makestuff »

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…

The industry term for it is "made for advertising". It is a constant battle because some people in adtech want to increase impressions at all costs, and some people want to block these sites from their systems. Guess which one wins out when executives see how much money it makes?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#307

Post by flir »

twelve40 wrote: post #290
flir wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone (I wish I could remember who) once argued that if you're trying to create an ecosystem around your product, you can't hoover up all the value, you have to leave some for the little guy. I've felt for a while that Google, with its various attempts to put the answer on the search results page, might be skirting dangerously close to that problem. It feels like the only value they're leaving on the table is the c…

so... how much value does ChatGPT as proposed solution leave to the little guy?

My expectation is "not much", because if the fact is utterly divorced from the source, there's not even any point writing near-spam pages to attract people to the site where you're selling something. But I think we'd need to see a working implementation to know for sure.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#308

Post by oriolid »

londons_explore wrote: post #169

Whenever you are thinking Google is dying, please instead consider what an ideal page of search results would look like... When you search for "2012 honda civic brake hose burst pressure psi", which pages exactly would you wish were at the top...? Typically, I find that when google search fails me, it's because the content I'm looking for actually doesn't exist. I'm seeing SEO spam simply because nobody has written a…

> When you search for "2012 honda civic brake hose burst pressure psi", which pages exactly would you wish were at the top...?

A service manual would be nice, but since those probably aren't public a well written blog post would be the next choice.

On the other hand, when searching "jni callback function arguments" the obvious answer (JNI specification) is public, but Google can't find it unless you search explicitly for it and even then you get some StackOverflow stuff near the top.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#309

Post by ilyt »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #264
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…

> Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage Have you tried other search engines because you might be surprised that the problem is more to do with Google than the internet.

Might actually be SEO optimizing for google mostly so less popular engines get saved by having differing algorithms

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#310

Post by treeman79 »

carrja99 wrote: post #189
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…

A few years back I heard a startup pitch for an application that would crawl all those recipe short stories and extract the recipe for you.

While nice. The copyright lawyers would have a field day.
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