Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zero as far as the Google spider is concerned
Not true for very long, their scrapers do use js now and read the dom.
yeah, but they do bot execute user interactions. so its easy to hide links with JS if intended
Google Search Is Dying (2022)
451–460 of 514 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#452Earlier 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. 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…
> A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money
Sounds like money isn’t valuable as a target if it doesn’t exist.
But fwiw the scarcity of disposable income is why there is such an arms race with advertisers- they’re all chasing the same fleeting dollars across the internet.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try the search engine kagi.com It just works. Google stopped being a search company, and is an advertisement company now.
I tried my test search "California style burrito in Austin" and the first page was entirely reddit results. Clicking over to "map" resulted in a single wrong result. phind.com and new bing do this better.
I tried the same query using phind.com, still the most answers came from reddit.
https://www.phind.com/search?cache=5a93485f-b029-45bf-ade1-b...
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
Well how would you fix Google's predicament? I think it's easy enough to conclude they're harming themselves, but what are their options?
Honestly the problem is that Google has been trying to fix it. Alternative and diverse incomes is the solution.
Everyone wants to make a good product, but ads make a product worse. Everyone wants to make a heavily used product but pay-per-use or subscriptions are limiting.
Google Cloud+Workplace, YouTube Premium, Play Store, Nest, ahem Stadia. Google has plenty of attempts at building products that make money without ads. The problem is that they’re expensive and not nearly as profitable.
LLM are bad at search, but people seem to like they. It gives them a clean re-start of search and maybe they’ll use it to do a search subscription where they can retry building their one good product without ads. Probably not though.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious what would you do if you created an ad-free search engine?
It's not the money, it's that I'm tired of believing companies "we won't track you", especially when it's that easy, with login required.
The companies that have incentives to track you are the companies with an ad-supported business model.
The only business model that does not have an incentive to track you is a subscription based model. Yes, it is is easy to 'track' you but what is the incentive to do that? It does not need to monetize your data.
And in order to pay a susbcription, you need an account.
So curious how would you do this differently in Kagi's shoes?
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#456> 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…
Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30. > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new a…
> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.
User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The source code is available here (as of ~2018): https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...
> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.
Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.
0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.
1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're getting downvoted because those of us who have tried for ourselves often find videos vastly less useful, efficient or relevant than a bit of text. Especially in the world of the 'influencer'. Now you have half a video pimping their dozens of YouRedTwitTok accounts you just have to click on, the other influencers they're mutually shoveling traffic to, the products they're being paid to pimp...and if you're luck…
We all have to sift. No matter if the content is text, video or audio. If I'm undertaking a project of some magnitude - like cooking a new dish or changing my brakes - then I don't mind spending a little time to find the highest quality information. And for many things, that will be inside a YouTube video. Even if you have 100 million low quality content creators, you have at least a million high quality content crea…
I can look at a blob of text and have an idea if it's worth looking deeper at in a glance, especially something structured like a recipe. I have to watch the video. That doesn't scale, and I frankly have better things to do than vet content creators via several or many minutes of inane video at a time, much less 'millions' of creators. In fact, the most efficient way I've found to find a new recipe that isn't a waste of time is to start with "ignore video sites" and "ignore influencer infested sites" (e.g. Instagram).
Not that everything on YouTube is crap, just most things. Sometimes seeing a video of someone doing something is the only way I can figure it out. There are many particularly useful videos of how to use complicated test and measurement gear. And tying knots. But the video isn't efficient enough for me to start there.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#458I 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.…
This is my experience too, every time I'm looking for meaningful results, after searching my bookmarks of course.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#459As the web business model is based on ads user experience isn't that important. I'm curious on the monetization model of new prompt based search engines. Ads dominating first pages of search won't be possible anymore. The adoption of new engines also wouldn't be as fast as many think, people habits die slow. So they still have time to think of a way to make money. Alphabet needs some competition. They became stale in the last 10 years.
Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
Media companies pulling shows so quickly makes me sad. It's one of those cases where I think they constantly misread the data. "People don't watch shows with a long story arc as they come out, so we should cancel them" is really "people don't trust us to continue shows with a long story arc until a good stopping place, so they don't want to invest the time in starting new ones"
Part of it is they don't want to renegotiate pay with the cast of a successful show so they cut them off before that becomes an issue.
That's usually solved by multi-year initial contacts.