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Google Search Is Dying (2022)

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Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#461

Post by ClumsyPilot »

carlosjobim wrote: post #313
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you!

I m sorry, this is like news from a different universe.

There is an absolutely world-shattering report on how children have lost all freedom ovet the past 40 years. They used to roam the neighbourhood, then they were allowed to stay in one street, and today we dont let them out of backyard.

I have it on my PC, but can't find it in Google. Its impossible now

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#462

Post by randcraw »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #329
izacus wrote: post #315

Earlier 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?

This is basically a pricing problem. G needs to strike a balance between the naked profitability of selling more ugly and dysfunctional ads versus increasing user delight by delivering more useful search results. While adding more ads boosts their revenue per search, the concomitant loss in value to the user is driving us away per result. The consequence: the user is increasingly looking elsewhere to escape the imbalance between Google's single minded focus on boosting revenue, damn the user.

Many of us have blunted the worst of G search's ugliness using ad blockers, but the polluting of their results by hiding useful content behind myriad lines of useless SEO detritus still dominates, and this loss of value as a utility inescapably poisons their life blood.

Until G's management realizes that their salvation lies NOT in blithely driving away customers, and instead strike a better balance by employing filters that better reject the more irrelevant and less profitable noise among their results, they will continue their current march toward oblivion -- as smarter competitors serve up more palatable search fare, and eat Google's lunch.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#463

Post by codexon »

Jensson wrote: post #372
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, I mean why does it find the right reddit thread instead any of the billions of other reddit threads? That can't be trivial to do since reddit themselves don't do it well.

It was probably linked to by other websites. I've been seeing more news organizations directly linking to reddit, and I believe Google manually boosted reddit results a few years ago. You used to never see them in search results, but now they have started showing up.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#464

Post by renegat0x0 »

In September of 2022 I have started collecting links in repository. Some articles I find useful, to some I am returning back like a turtle into an island.

I have bookmarked 3930 links. The number grows every day. I know this will not replace google for me, but it is a place that allows me to browse my link history and easily find things I have found interesting in the past. My personal filter.

https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#465

Post by JohnFen »

vineyardmike wrote: post #454
marginalia_nu wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Everyone wants to make a good product

Well, most do, but certainly not everyone. What almost everyone wants to make is a profitable product.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#466

Post by JohnFen »

gniv wrote: post #414
Gigachad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be trimmed to bullet points removing useful info. The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.

> Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies. But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking…

> But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page

That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that where Google has already applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#467

Post by JohnFen »

marcosdumay wrote: post #342
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nowadays a cup and a tablespoon are standard unities of volume. They are not any worse than milliliters. There are a few people that insist on ignoring the standards, but those also tend to not publish their recipes.

The issue is that for a lot of ingredients -- flour notably among them -- you can't measure accurately by volume. If you're looking for reproducibility, you have to measure by weight.

And once you start measuring some things by weight, you quickly realize that most things are easier to measure out by weight than volume (particularly sticky ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.

I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram measurements for this reason.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#468

Post by thr717272 »

trinsic2 wrote: post #359
thr717272 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Tested it and found it realized doublequotes something none of the big ones that I can access (bing, ddg, google) does.

That was it.

And the first time I saw a reported bug in the search results getting serious attention and a fix I was sold.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#469

Post by JohnFen »

carlosjobim wrote: post #198
j_crick wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the worst of SEO pages are cooking recipes, where you have to scroll down screens of badly written meaningless text before you actually get to ingredients list. At least Google still keeps indexing recipe microformats.

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.

> Try for yourself

I have, and I really dislike it a lot. I think video is one of the worst formats to convey a recipe in.

I have seen some that write the recipe in the video description, and that's fine. But not enough do it to make YouTube a place I go to get recipes.

Re: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

#470

Post by JohnFen »

carlosjobim wrote: post #424
account42 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks, not going to watch a whole video to get an overview of what I need to prepare.

If you're already adept or not looking into things that are challenging to you, then you might just need a list of ingredients. If somebody who has never cooked needs to dice onions for the dish and doesn't know how to do that, YouTube will help much more than any text. There are so many things and aspects that we don't have vocabulary for and is just faster showing.

Videos to teach technique make a lot of sense. Videos to convey a recipe, not so much.
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