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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#351

Post by brookst »

foobarian wrote: post #270
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…

This is a major reason I think LLMs could help with SERPs - presumably it will be a lot harder to do SEO effectively because now it involves the model training barrier.

Model training is already trivial, just expensive. As LLM optimized HW appears the expense will drop. By 2030, I’d expect decent consumer hardware to be both faster and two orders of magnitude cheaper than what’s in use today for model training.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#352

Post by brookst »

treeman79 wrote: post #310
carrja99 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fun fact: recipes are not copyrightable. The text around them can be, but that’s what you’d be stripping out or summarizing.

If you have an amazing recipe you want to keep control of, trade secret is the way. And then it can’t very well be posted to the internet.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#353

Post by flenserboy »

worrycue wrote: post #171
projektfu wrote: post #98

"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…

Am I the only one still searching Google primarily though keywords/phrases (and the exclusion of keywords/phrases)? I don't see much degradation in Google's results.

I keep trying, but the result quality continues to degrade. Most such searches either return nothing, one or two links, or a host of spam. Google is useless except for business phone numbers and hours they are open.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#354

Post by marcosdumay »

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?

That's probably an US-centric comment. I have no idea what it is either, but the "one party that done X" line is a strong signal of it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#355

Post by davidkuennen »

Jensson wrote: post #343
GeekyBear wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be so good at indexing useful reddit threads.

I would think they apply their normal algorithms.

If it's a good article that's upvoted a lot, it should also be linked in some places and thus get a higher search score.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#356

Post by brandon272 »

I don't know if Google Search is dying. What I do know:

1) In March 2023, I am relying less and less on Google Search. When I do, it is for extremely targeted search queries where I am battling Google's matching criteria to find something that I know exists. This almost always requires creative use of quotation marks and applying suffixes to the end of queries.

2) I am relying more on ChatGPT for a lot of queries. Is it perfect? Hell no. Does it give me wrong information sometimes? Hell yes. But even with that, the answers and solutions given are so much better than trawling through Google search results and trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.

3) I was having a conversation with a family member yesterday. I wanted to direct her to a page on a local government website. I instructed her to Google it. After the phone call I realized that she was likely to search Google for this page and be completely unable to find it, so I just manually sent her the link the page.

4) When I ditched Lycos and Excite and Altavista for Google over 20 years ago it was because of it's simplicity and accuracy. It was because when they decided to start displaying ads, the ads were clearly and transparently demarcated as ads so that no one was confused about what they were looking at. Today, the ads are very clearly intended to blend in with everything else, the simplicity is gone, and the accuracy is no longer there either.

I do think Google has lost its way. And I do think there is a massive market opportunity for someone to develop a "search engine for 2023" that nicely blends what is available to us through LLMs and what is available to us through reputable, clean web sources on the WWW so that someone in search of information can simply find what they are looking for.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#357

Post by dsfyu404ed »

moffkalast wrote: post #335
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? A That's the magic of Reddit, 4Chan and every other cesspool where any niche is only a slight URL change away from any other niche. It's trivially easy to add niche subs 2, 3 and 4 to the list of places that you target.

Yeah and then any mod with half a brain sees you're spamming things everywhere and bans you.

1) That's a whack-a-mole exercise when the astrorufer buys accounts in bulk.

2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance. Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some product.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#358

Post by bsenftner »

bityard wrote: post #220
bsenftner wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the number of ordinary people that try to gas light me for stating that Google has failed in their most basic mission. It's been years, and unless you work in tech or marketing, you're apparently obvious to the situation, and still think of Google as one may have during the 90's.

A lot of people are using this term incorrectly lately. Gaslighting isn't simply telling someone that they are wrong about something. It's a specific, sustained, and intentional form of psychological abuse, most often found in a domestic setting. The origin is the play Gas Light and the plot revolves around a man trying to steal from his wife by making her think she is going insane.

I know what gaslighting is, and I am using the term correctly. When I tell people Google Search is not just bad, it is overt manipulation of your search to waste one's time sifting through prose nonsense because Google promote prose over facts, they often don't just disagree, they overtly over time try to change my mind, they can't let it lie, they have to change my thinking. And they use shallow, obvious insulting language, as they is all they know. It is the duration of time they spend on this mind changing aggression. That's gaslighting

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#359

Post by trinsic2 »

thr717272 wrote: post #256
Gigachad wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have never used anything but google, duckduckgo and startpage. I always end up coming back to google because the results are not as good.

Well startpage has the same results as google, but i stopped using it for reasons I forgot.

What made you chose Kagi?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#360

Post by yalogin »

Google had a problem, it couldn’t think outside of the search box. They had so much technology but they tried to fit everything behind that search box. Now they are scrambling to figure out a plan to counter chat gpt, which truly poses a threat to them. It may not pose a threat right away but the writing is on the wall. Of course it doesn’t mean google is dying. It will be a trillion dollar company for years to come and they will plenty time to figure it out.
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