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As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

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Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#161

Post by mewpmewp2 »

fsckboy wrote: post #114
wildrhythms wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you have phrased that query?

unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive" so that…

There is a difference here that you saw the house and she didn't and trusted your interpretation of it being melting which you didn't think to trust perhaps. You may not have considered that everyone else would also think it is melting, but as an outsider she was in a better position of judgment.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#162

Post by amf12 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #147
pault wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.

And all the filler text...! When you search for something like "Cyberpunk O'Five location", you'll likely get a page that has the information, but instead of the answer "Reward for the Beat The Brat fight in Arroyo", you get a wall of text that likely starts with "Cyberpunk 2077 was released by CDR in 2022... The O'Five is one of the most powerful sniper rifles". The page will have the answer, but it will take substa…

I just tried your query, and I got the answer in the featured snippet at the top, and I didn't have to read any wall of text:

> "How to get: After beating Buck in the fight in Arroyo, along with fighting off all of his friends, you can find this weapon lying on some barrels by where you first spoke with him"

Unfortunately Search is a hard problem to solve, considering how much the internet has grown from 90s or early 2000s to now.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#163

Post by neotrope »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #88
fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#164

Post by aaron695 »

wslh wrote: post #113
pclmulqdq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

Google does not work. I can show you with a simple example with a few keywords together that does not find the specific resource. I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1]. I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples. Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379…

[dead]

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#165

Post by yieldcrv »

fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

Google predicts too much about local things, in that case it works extremely well in that example, it was in your neighborhood google biased the results to something local and that worked specifically for her and that scenario

This works for most people most of the time and is exactly what we’re finding frustrating

But knowing what you can still use it for is 90% of the battle, my latest common use case is just fact checking AI right now but my primary queries are all to sandboxed language models

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#166

Post by MrRolleyes »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #88
fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

> The trick is that Google actually works great.

This would be true if we could exclude commercial results. SEO is absolutely destroying search quality.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#167

Post by lolinder »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #158
lolinder wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a question of levels of formality in your search terms, I think whether you find Google useful depends on what topics you typically search for. Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing sy…

> Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.

It works some of the time for me, but there are frequently cases where I put the word in quotes and Google just pretends I didn't.

It can be really egregious, too: I've searched for `foo` and had it say `Showing results for bar. Search for "foo" instead?` Then I follow the link that it provided and it still is searching for `bar` with the same prompt to refine the search, even though the double quotes are clearly still present.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#168

Post by photonthug »

LtWorf wrote: post #123
pclmulqdq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.

To me what this shows is that it's really painful to try and use an "intelligent" algorithm for "content mediation" as if it were an actual search engine. Anything that spectacularly fails the "exact substring match" use-case is well on the way to becoming a content-mediator, and potentially as bad a content-moderator/thought-police/etc.

Unfortunately even before anyone started talking about "semantic web" or whatever, substring-match was declining in utility due to spam, so a substring-matcher was only as useful as it's ranking algorithm. So some cleverness in ranking is necessary, but when ranking becomes too clever, or irrelevant due to the arms race with spam, it's an almost inevitable slide from necessary rankers to mediators.

Since all the search/spam arms race is pretty much played out with giants like twitter/google anyway at this point, it is kind of hard to understand why we can't get and keep a separate and truly basic internet search engine that just works. I don't have a handy example, but in my experience even DDG & friends seem to routinely fail the "exact substring match" test for unusual phrases that I know I read verbatim last week.

What I (and I think others) really want is just substring-match tool plus a very minimal amount of extra cleverness for basic stuff like spelling variations, some fuzzing for dates/digits, directly adjacent stuff according to a simple thesaurus. Not my area of expertise, but I would guess that there's a combination of problems that prevent this tool from existing.

a) Other search companies are all trying to do fancy-but-fuzzy "semantic distance" searches to emulate Google

b) It's still true in 2023 that just keeping an up to date index is a super hard problem no matter how many crawlers are in your army

c) Despite bots everywhere, the deeper web in social-media is just too login-walled for the rule-abiding crawlers to deal with

d) There's just no money in do-what-i-say-not-what-i-mean search tools

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#169

Post by amf12 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #76
gretch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head: Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong some exec: It's the same thing! I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicti…

HN (and futurists in general) tend to significantly underweight inertia. People hate change, and absent a catalyzing event or order of magnitude advantage, it will take a decade for usage patterns to shift. E.g. Kagi over Google Kagi could hypothetically be 25% superior in all searches. Most people don't know and don't care. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There…

> E.g. Kagi over Google > Kagi could hypothetically be 25% superior in all searches.

The difference is the business model. Except for a small minority of people in tech and with disposable incomes, the majority aren't willing to pay for Search.

So if Kagi wants to increase their adoption they would need another business model. Advertising (in one form or another) is the easiest one.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#170

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

neotrope wrote: post #163
pclmulqdq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because th…

Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...

Recently, I searched "(-)-BPAP" -- with the quotes -- looking for the chemical benzofuranylpropylaminopentane, which is typically referred to as (-)-BPAP. EVERY result was for a BiPAP ventilator.

So I tried verbatim. It still didn't work.

Verbatim + quotation marks. Still nothing.

I guess New Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. But this is characteristic of its recent performance. I can't even count the number of times Google disregarded part of my search term and gave me an inane result.

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