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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#311

Post by CuriouslyC »

toss1 wrote: post #269
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…

>>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange! Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues. Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life. When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well…

People have been astroturfing on reddit for a long time, the only reason it's not a cesspool is that reddit has a hardcore anti-marketing bent in a lot of subs and they'll aggressively out shills. I expect that GPT powered reddit bots will make the shills a lot harder to identify though.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#312

Post by bick_nyers »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #272
digitalsushi wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That's if you want to capture someone's focus, not their attention.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#313

Post by carlosjobim »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #72
tzhenghao wrote: post #2

> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit als…

Google held control of who they reward using AdWords, they decided who lives and who dies, who goes bancrupt and who prosper It is their system that rewards SEO spam If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam. Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit

You can submit your site to Google and they will index it. If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you! Even if you don't pay Google a dime.

Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#314

Post by ncpa-cpl »

ilyt wrote: post #241
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…

> 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

Is this phenomenon also happening in the markets were Google is not dominant? Like Yandex, Baidu or Naver?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#315

Post by izacus »

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…

> 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.

The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#316

Post by GeekyBear »

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…

> I don't know if it's Google that is dying.

I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick.

Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points.

The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#317

Post by account42 »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #143
jhoechtl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of anything which make money for someone an…

Can you tell us what value you get out of rants from unqualified people? What actionable thing comes out of consuming such information? Because I can’t imagine why anyone would do that, since “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd and disagree even among themselves. Why not just look at another side but one that is still made by a qualified expert?

Someone "unqualified" may have a viewpoint that the "experts" have not considered or are unwilling to state publicly for various reasons. Of course what value you can derive from such an article depends on the value of "unqualified" here for which we only have gp's labels in this example. The only other mentioned difference is the format - a blog "rant" vs. something published in an established publication and I don't think that is enough to go on to discard the former.

> “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd

Except when they are. The community of so-called experts discarding what eventually turned out to be the truth because it goes against their thinking is hardly unheard of.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#318

Post by danaris »

moffkalast wrote: post #127
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you're just unaware of how astroturfed it is. I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits and randomly picked an account that posted a top meme https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/ The account has 8 million post karma and every single post it submits to a subreddit ends up on the front page of Reddit... without fail. The account isn't a mod of any of those subs, but they're clearly us…

> I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits That was your first mistake, the defaults are cesspools full of karma farming bots. Nobody goes to those for advice.

Spoken like someone in a bubble. "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

Well, if "nobody" goes there, how are the bots able to farm karma? Who's giving them the views and upvotes?

I guarantee you anything that's the "default" is being visited by many, many casual visitors, people not "in the know", and people who don't recognize karma farming bots for what they are.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#319

Post by carlosjobim »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #143
jhoechtl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of anything which make money for someone an…

Can you tell us what value you get out of rants from unqualified people? What actionable thing comes out of consuming such information? Because I can’t imagine why anyone would do that, since “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd and disagree even among themselves. Why not just look at another side but one that is still made by a qualified expert?

What value do you get? You're here reading and commenting on things from anonymous people on a web site that hasn't existed for a hundred years.

> still made by a qualified expert?

It is pretty common that an expert who disagrees with the consensus will not be qualified, because the principal requirement for getting qualified is that you agree with the consensus.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#320

Post by marginalia_nu »

bick_nyers wrote: post #312
marginalia_nu wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

That's if you want to capture someone's focus, not their attention.

If you capture their focus, are you not also capturing their attention?
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