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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#771

Post by freilanzer »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #434
wayne-li2 wrote: post #222

Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”. That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.

This is going to sound crazy, but do you know what the web really needs right now in 2024? A new, searchable directory. Like the old Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. Just a carefully curated list of trusted sites that are made and managed by humans and for humans. Reddit is usually very bad, because it's heavily astroturfed and trivially easy for marketing firms to game. Something else is required.

That sounds somewhat like Kagi, no?

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#772

Post by DanielHB »

jaynate wrote: post #591
godelski wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's odd to me is how everything is so metricized. Clearly over metricization is the downfall of any system that looks meritocratic. Due to the limitations of metrics and how they are often far easier to game than to reach through the intended means. An example of this I see is how new leaders come in and hit hard to cut costs. But the previous leader did this (and the one before them) so the system/group/company i…

Agree you have to mix qualitative with the quantitative, but the best metrics systems don't just measure one quantity metric. They should be paired with a quality metric. Example: User Growth & Customer Engagement Have to have user growth and retention. If you looked at just one or the other, you'd be missing half the equation.

I think that a good portion of the problem is that there are groups involved in metrics:

1) People setting the metrics

2) People implementing/calculating the metrics

3) People working on improving the metrics (ie product work)

2 is specially complicated for a lot of software products because it can some times be really hard to measure and can be tweaked/manipulated. For example, the MAU twitter figures from the buyout that Musk keeps complaining about, or Blizzard constantly switching their MAU definition.

Often 2 and 3 are the same people and 1 is almost always upper management. I argue that 1 and 2 should be a single group of people (that doesn't work on the product at all) and not directly subject to upper management and not tracked by the same metrics they implement (or tracked by any metrics at all).

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#773

Post by dpkirchner »

kelnos wrote: post #259
saganus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to chime in, I started reading the article due to this comment, as I wanted to check the style of the writing, but the amount of in-your-face insistence to subscribe to yet another newsletter just put me off entirely. There was a CTA right at the beginning (which appeared suddenly after 4-5 seconds of reading so I lost my place), then another one a few paragraphs later, then less than 3 seconds after that, a pop…

Aside from the annoying pop-up, I didn't actually notice the other calls to subscribe. It's a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn't notice the less-intrusive efforts to get me to subscribe, and when I see the intrusive one (the modal pop-up), it makes me less likely to want to subscribe... oof. I think the theoretical ideal from the reader's standp…

Ironically, these sorts of nagging CTAs are exactly the thing that "growth hackers" use to reduce quality in favor of short-term metrics.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#774

Post by [deleted] »

arromatic wrote: post #709
choppaface wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO Spam didn't kill search so much as Google failed to retain Matt Cutts or replicate his community involvement https://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-resigns-googl...

What did he used to do ? Your comment seems contradictory cutts seem to be on anti spam but your comment implies seo did not kill search . Is seo not part of spam?

[deleted]

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#775

Post by DanielHB »

maxerickson wrote: post #187
ChuckMcM wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on. I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking. When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got…

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

Dead in the same sense that IBM was dead in the late 90s, but it is not quite there yet I would say.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#776

Post by dpkirchner »

Anotheroneagain wrote: post #665
taco_emoji wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is such a tiresome criticism. "this would be better if it were more boring" yeah okay and 4 people would read it and 2 of them would fall asleep during

I think that you unintentionally hit the core of why things are turning into crap.

What is crappier: engaging text with colorful text that may offend people, or sterile text from an author afraid of offending a single person? I'm going with the latter.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#777

Post by octopusRex »

willvarfar wrote: post #708
barbariangrunge wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters…

I think a case can be made that the spam problem can be traced all the way back to Google buying Doubleclick. Its really easy to spot the crap websites that are scaping content-creating websites ... because they monetize by adding ads. If Google was _only_ selling ads on the search results page, then it could promote websites that are sans ads. Instead, it is incentivised to push users to websites that contain ads, b…

We need a Reverse Google search that will weed out the garbage.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#778

Post by makeitdouble »

Certhas wrote: post #737
makeitdouble wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft and Meta reinvented themselves a few times over. At this point Windows is just an legacy business unit for instance, and Meta literally changed name to mark the turn. Oracle, IBM and SAP have the advantage(?) of being heavily business focused from the start, and I don't see them ever die a natural death in our lifetimes. As long as they have the money to outbribe the competition they'll be there, and it wil…

The point is, if Microsoft managed, why wouldn't Google be able to reinvent itself?

I think many of us are underestimating Microsoft because of how crappy Windows is and keeps being.

But as a business entity they've been ferocious from the start, and succeeded through sheer perseverance where Google gave up after some tepid tries.

Xbox would have been killed by Google in the first year. Exchange would have stayed in beta for a decade, and Office365 would have had no support if it was in GSuite.

If Google were to find a way, I think they'd need a radically different approach, as I don't see them ever fixing their focus problem.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#779

Post by dpkirchner »

cbsmith wrote: post #441
axus wrote: post #195

Is Google desktop search dead? It's certainly been "shittier" but it's been adequate. Unlike Bing and Yahoo, there isn't clickbait fake news all over the screen. In a market where competitors are a bookmark away, it should be dead, but the big names seem to all collude on having a bad experience that makes more short-term money. How is success being measured internally for "the man who killed Google Search"? Are prof…

Yeah, the amazing thing is that everyone talks about how Google destroyed search, but fails to acknowledge that nobody with a better search emerged. The amount of money at stake with regards to search is such that the decline of search across the board is far more a reflection of a systemic cause than anything that happened inside any particular company.

Google incentivizes low-quality content, content that well-intentioned and - designed search engines must deal with as well. At this point, we're seeing a garbage in/garbage out problem.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#780

Post by octopusRex »

seospamsuck wrote: post #746
pkphilip wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is the correct insight. Google has enough machine learning prowess that they could absolutely offload, with minimal manhours, the creation of a list ranking a bunch of blogspam sites and give them a reverse score by how much they both spam articles or how much they spread the content over the page. Then apply that score to their search result weights. And I know they could because someone did make that list and…

I'm waiting for folks to implement a Reverse Google Search.
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