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Google search's death by a thousand cuts

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#11

Post by shalmanese »

Google's death is deeper than just the corpus, their ranking algorithm is also deeply degrading.

A week ago, a search for wouldn't return https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/23/i-love-manchester-but-p... on the first page while would [1] [2]. This appears to be fixed as of today but this kind of kindergarten level search intent not being fulfilled would have been unthinkable for Google even just a few years ago.

[1] https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1670904508191322112

[2] https://twitter.com/shalmanese/status/1670973880637493249

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#12

Post by cma »

In the TPUv4 paper it sounded like Google search moved over to some really crude AI embedding vector stuff. If you search "book of master system" it gives only results for "book of genesis" because it mixes up the biblical book of Genesis with the Sega Master System.

Searching any programming terms, like camel-case variable names from a system library without exact quotes, just gives random results about Katy Perry and stuff now.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#13

Post by Andrex »

nostromo wrote: post #9
monsieurgaufre wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.

It’s easy to be mad at Facebook, newspapers, Pinterest, Discord, etc. for locking the internet away behind a login or paywall. But it’s also the result of Google capturing all the value from the free internet. The end result is companies trying to capture more of that value for themselves and not letting Google eat their lunch, which required moving content and communities behind closed doors.

Google didn't invent the idea of a web crawler or search engine. Because of how the web was designed, I think it was always an inevitability that the internet would start open but trend closed.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#14

Post by superasn »

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google.

Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google would show me the actual domain registrars instead (like chatgpt does when i ask it). Google has been gamed so badly and they have been doing nothing about it just because the spam blog posts contains their ads.

There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. There is only so much an adblocker can do to fix search. And right now all the useful content is getting blocked while the spam content is not only allowed but ranking on top of everything.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#15

Post by 1970-01-01 »

peepeepoopoo14 wrote: post #5

They need to stop trying to so heavily curate what users are allowed to see in their searches. Since 2020, Google's attempts to operate as the internet's ideological censor have had a noticeable negative impact on the quality of their search results.

>Since 2020

Way before 2020. Circa 2008 it began, and it simply continues to the present. ChillingEffect's downfall in 2015 was a massive blow to the public.

https://searchengineland.com/anti-censorship-database-chilli...

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#16

Post by peepeepoopoo14 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #15
peepeepoopoo14 wrote: post #5

They need to stop trying to so heavily curate what users are allowed to see in their searches. Since 2020, Google's attempts to operate as the internet's ideological censor have had a noticeable negative impact on the quality of their search results.

>Since 2020 Way before 2020. Circa 2008 it began, and it simply continues to the present. ChillingEffect's downfall in 2015 was a massive blow to the public. https://searchengineland.com/anti-censorship-database-chilli...

This is broader than DMCA takedown notices. For example, if you tried to look up the origins of covid, for a long time Google would try to shepherd you away from the lab leak hypothesis, since apparently that's dangerous wrongthink.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#18

Post by xbkingx »

superasn wrote: post #14

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google…

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users.

When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, and abandoned). If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#19

Post by zokier »

completely tangential, but this thread triggered a wave of nostalgia reminiscing how good the few years around 2010 were (or rather seemed to be through rose-tinted glasses) in tech. Among all else it was an era when it really felt that google did just great on almost all fronts, search included. Web in general was lot less app- and mobile-centric because those things were still pretty new things comparatively.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#20

Post by moultano »

foobarbecue wrote: post #10

Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? D…

Can you give an example query and the page it should return?
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