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Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

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Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#11

Post by p-e-w »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #10
e40 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also gives off desperation vibes with Google finally doing some innovation on their monopolistic product now that it’s losing market share to AI.

They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.

If they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#12

Post by weird-eye-issue »

p-e-w wrote: post #11
cjbgkagh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.

If they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.

Your logic makes no sense. Just because something is worse relative to how it used to be does not mean alternatives are now better than it.

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#14

Post by andybp85 »

cwillu wrote: post #9
jasonvorhe wrote: post #7

Reading about anything Google Search in 2026 gives off some Yahoo vibes around 2006.

I noticed yesterday that they've managed to make editing the text field on their search page lag and flip/reorder characters entered during the edit: editing “foot pedal” into “foot pedal keyboard” became “foot pedal oardkeyb”

having coded with several RTEs, this just triggered some PTSD

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#15

Post by cjbgkagh »

p-e-w wrote: post #11
cjbgkagh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.

If they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.

It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#16

Post by chias »

e40 wrote: post #8
jasonvorhe wrote: post #7

Reading about anything Google Search in 2026 gives off some Yahoo vibes around 2006.

Also gives off desperation vibes with Google finally doing some innovation on their monopolistic product now that it’s losing market share to AI.

That and it's wild to celebrate innovation that was literally default behavior 20 years ago, which they themselves worked hard to break.

Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms

Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#17

Post by airza »

chias wrote: post #16
e40 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also gives off desperation vibes with Google finally doing some innovation on their monopolistic product now that it’s losing market share to AI.

That and it's wild to celebrate innovation that was literally default behavior 20 years ago, which they themselves worked hard to break. Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.

I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#18

Post by xnx »

harkdif wrote: post #3

It may just be me, but I find googles search console surprisingly inaccurate or at least hard to parse. Even the data within it is often conflicting and I'm not sure why the results show as they do. Things like it will show a click through rate for specific pages but have no correlation to the search terms that drove that click, yet show impressions for the page far beyond what it shows for terms. Can't imagine it wi…

This is mostly by design. Google doesn't want it to be possible to deanonymize the data.

Re: Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

#19

Post by xnx »

airza wrote: post #17
chias wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and it's wild to celebrate innovation that was literally default behavior 20 years ago, which they themselves worked hard to break. Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.

I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.

Yep. There was all kinds of data a user could enter into Google search and unknowingly share with a search result site. Sucks for "SEOs", but great for users.
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