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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#361

Post by OccamsMirror »

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…

More like they monetise it at the expense of maintaining it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#362

Post by bick_nyers »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #320
bick_nyers wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, but not necessarily the other way around.

I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I don't think most websites are predicated on the notion that the average user is committed, at least initially. Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to your product you can safely prioritize focus because you now have that commitment.

I think engineers generally are above average on the skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order to perform math, analysis, and logic.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#363

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

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.

Like giving Reddit a higher “page score” than other websites?

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#364

Post by mike_hearn »

tacker2000 wrote: post #193
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…

Apple forums are also quite bad. Every suggestion is to reset SMC and thats it. The Stack overflow / stack exchange websites are often the only ones where you get useful answers when having any sort of problems regarding the user facing part of the OS. (And also for anything else to be honest. I think 30% of my questions on google are answered by stack exchange websites)

Apple's dev forums are actually useful but only because of the mind-bending efforts of superhuman Quinn "The Eskimo!", who appears to have been at Apple since forever, is an actual programmer, gives real answers with meaty information and can even look things up in the source code for you. I've lost track of how often I've needed to learn something obscure about Apple's platforms and ended up at a thread where Quinn gives an answer. I've also filed a DTS incident in the past asking a seriously obscure question I wasn't even meant to ask (to do with their code signing system), and got a detailed and correct response back from Quinn+colleagues very quickly. It was by far the best support experience I ever had from a tech firm.

Quinn, if you're out there reading this, I really hope Apple has a succession plan in place for when you take a well deserved retirement!

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#365

Post by mike_hearn »

andrewstuart wrote: post #107
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…

Today, ChatGPT gives you an instant step by step guide which may or may not be correct but will likely get you there.

For the last five technical questions I asked ChatGPT every single one yielded an answer that was either wrong or uselessly vague :( I've now given up. You have to cross-check everything against Google anyway so why not just skip straight to that point.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#366

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

GeekyBear wrote: post #316
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 Reddit trick is increasingly less viable as marketers are astroturfing Reddit.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#367

Post by antomeie »

Didn't the article kind of allude to the fact that the wrong search results might be the most profitable? I mean, it makes sense to me that Google is promoting the worst websites, since they contain the most Google ads...

I'm sure Google employees are well aware of the issues.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#368

Post by mike_hearn »

franze wrote: post #48

In the German market for any product related query where you want a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies, which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly newspapers). i.e.: https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/ https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/ https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/ These pages are…

> Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".

Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the expected state that the best white goods in any category are experiencing constant churn?

I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very well created" but spam because you don't believe the recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful, and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#369

Post by grumpy_coder »

davidkuennen wrote: post #355
Jensson wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though it's not finding the article. It's finding a link to the article on Reddit. I hope people aren't linking to the Reddit thread...

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#370

Post by Jensson »

davidkuennen wrote: post #355
Jensson wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do people link to reddit threads a lot? I'd assume such a signal would be very noisy and not very reliable, so spam sites would just link a lot to their content spam on reddit.
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