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Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#351

Post by paradox460 »

nsagent wrote: post #324
sgc wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you know the link won't correspond to the title and snippet? Should we just avoid all interesting-looking content because we might have been duped? The only way to avoid clickbait working is if those who have actually seen the entire page can indicate it is not worth viewing - which brings us right back to search engine placement algorithms and curation.

Yes, but the algorithm is optimizing for clicks, not curation. Curation is a much more costly process requiring humans in the loop, which often leads to cries of censorship (e.g. my otherwise popular article is being unfairly down-weighted). Clicks are much easier to track and provide a lot of signal. I'm not saying that Google can't do better. Clearly they have mismatched incentives with their users due to advertisi…

Google had blocklists a decade ago. They got rid of them.

You can use the uBlocklist browser extension to add em back, but its not as seamless

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#352

Post by RGBCube »

NL807 wrote: post #199
dalbasal wrote: post #121

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keep…

I'm rather shocked how the quality of their search results has tanked over the years. I used to be able to find decent academic content, or programming related topics quite consistently 5 years ago. Now I'm getting only a few vague results either from stackoverflow, math stackexchange, reddit, or apple, and the rest is just utter garbage. Yandex, of all search engines provide consistently better results. Fortunately,…

I also personally experienced this today as well. I was trying to find the codename for my friends phone on his phone, which has Google as the default browser. I tried 3 different search queries, which gave me nothing but utter garbage. Then I searched it on my phone, which has Yandex as its default browser.

Boom, it just gave me it, straight at the top, on the quick answer dialog. Same for Kagi, which is a paid but good search engine.

Google is ruined, was so much better 6 years ago.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#353

Post by ThrowAwayChris »

jeffbee wrote: post #285
clnq wrote: post #163

It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience. And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearl…

> Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd I would say they have risen to a detectable but insignificant stake. The founder of Kagi was up here recently saying they have on the order of thousands of active users, after I suggested some objective evidence indicated only hundreds of active users. Kagi is one of the ones with the biggest memeshare on HN, but it still has an a…

I've tried Kagi and I want to love it but the index is just too small to be useful. I come back about once a month and try again.

Bing/DDG have never respected quotes or verbatim, not that Google does anymore either. None of the majors, including Kagi, are surfacing community forums that I know exist and have a permissive robots.txt.

I've been suspecting orders from on high have been suppressing the discovery of organic content and forums for a while. Ten year old Quora questions and some cherry picked reddit content ranked against a keyword blocklist isn't all there is on the internet. But that's all the Bing/Google based engines show.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#354

Post by ThrowAwayChris »

srackey wrote: post #287
bad_username wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Russian search engine pops up in the comments whenever Google search quality is discussed here. I am sure this is non-organic astroturfing.

Nah he’s right. Yandex is pretty good. Easily on par with Google/Bing. I suspect just no one uses it in America so the results aren’t SEO’d to death. I’d bet Baidu is decent too but that one really isn’t set up to interface with the Western internet.

Baidu is fully integrated into the Party's censorship apparatus and delivers absolutely nothing of use for many categories of query. Couldn't even search for wrist watches for a while.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#355

Post by narag »

p3rls wrote: post #337
gardenhedge wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So kprofiles provides a service - providing information to those looking for it - be it fans or journalists. I don't get why it shouldn't be ranked high since it's been a valuable resource since 2016?

It's not a question of "ranked high" - it's that they're far and away #1 in our niche when they are quite obviously just another garbage SEO website. If you can't understand that I'm afraid I don't see a point in continuing.

Can't you do the same they do? Obviously not about the contents, I believe you when you say yours is so much better, but about the SEO. Isn't it possible to imitate their tactics to a certain extent, without getting equally trashy?

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#356

Post by asadotzler »

bad_username wrote: post #245
NL807 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather shocked how the quality of their search results has tanked over the years. I used to be able to find decent academic content, or programming related topics quite consistently 5 years ago. Now I'm getting only a few vague results either from stackoverflow, math stackexchange, reddit, or apple, and the rest is just utter garbage. Yandex, of all search engines provide consistently better results. Fortunately,…

The Russian search engine pops up in the comments whenever Google search quality is discussed here. I am sure this is non-organic astroturfing.

I met the Yandex CEO and CTO in Moscow back in June of 2006 at their headquarters, scouting them out as a Firefox search partner. They had real tech and capable people back then and over the years they got better and better. We eventually signed them as our default in Russia where their native language advantage was a clear win over Google. I still use them occasionally today and find their search to be a solid product.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#357

Post by meiraleal »

awill88 wrote: post #279
meiraleal wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible. What made all the free web possible was free software, not ads. Google and the likes created empires through ads and breaking laws, we owe nothing to them. The sooner they go, the better. Also, they don't own the ads business model, there are healthier ways to sell, buy and deliver ads and that's not what Google and Meta are doing. They need to go. > And a…

It was all considered risky and niche (anything on the internet). What made the free web possible was first and foremost, access to it. Then, probably a combination of technological, cultural, and economic factors and the human beings behind the scenes who worked to either create software to give it away or to make money with ads by creating foobar service. Yes, free software, and yes, because of advertising. It’s bo…

It is not both. The free web would never exist without free software. But would have thrived even more without those parasites.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#358

Post by narag »

CM30 wrote: post #221
dalbasal wrote: post #121

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keep…

> Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay. YouTube's stuck in its own algorithm hellhole. Mostly due to their insistence that creators have to post on a regular basis, creative block or lack of things to cover be damned. So if your niche has nothing to talk about right now, well you'll need to find something, anyth…

If the experts that I've listened to are right, the thing that YouTube promotes is keeping the user hooked for the longest time possible.

That doesn't mean that you, the youtuber, must create a lot of videos or very long videos or very frequently, but you must create a video that induces the person watching it to watch more videos, yours or others'.

There are different kinds of videos that fits that purpose: a series of videos for a course of some subject, a video that points to another video of the same subject, a video that complements other video that the user might have watched before...

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#360

Post by ThrowAwayChris »

Vox_Leone wrote: post #307
radicalbyte wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. The internet itself used to be like this back in the late 90s. Nowadays 95-99% of the web is the general public which means that it has turned into what TV was - the happy happy box to keep the dummies occupied.

>>I've been thinking for some time that we could do with having a sort of private internet for the nerds. If we only could. I'd work for free helping to build it. Count on me. I just think we don't have to build one. We already had it in 1998. It's still there, buried beneath the landfill.

We just need some sort of "search engine" that can find it. If only such a thing existed.
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