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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

#111

Post by yosito »

Semaphor wrote: post #92
buro9 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's a feature that I might be willing to pay for. Add Twitter to that list and I'll start finding accessible content again.

They have block/lower/raise/pin for domains, and additionally, they support regex rewriting of domain names, all my twitter results on Kagi redirect to nitter (though I don’t know if that still works, I was gone last week)

Ohhh regex rewriting for domain names? I'm a paying customer for two months but I hadn't discovered that feature yet. Thanks!

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#112

Post by hnbad »

underlipton wrote: post #64
shalmanese wrote: post #11

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] ht…

https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+g... Still waiting on an explanation of fix for this one.

As you can see from the highlighted results, most are not actually exact matches. They're not even fuzzy matches. They're mostly synonyms. The search query also contains a lot of words that would be considered stopwords (i.e. ignored) in a simple keyword search and don't provide much semantic value in a natural language query (i.e. if it is parsed as a question), so those are probably deprioritized.

My assumption would be that the search results are garbage because the query is extremely ambiguous in the search engine's eyes, especially if you omit or modify any of the words (which it is allowed to do because it is not a search for an exact phrase).

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#113

Post by tome »

d--b wrote: post #109

What changed? Just an asumption here. But could it be the fault of the web rather than Google's? Could it be that the web itself is being so flooded with SEO-ed crap content that even Google can't sort through it all?

Kagi gives good results, so it's not a question of being technically infeasible.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#114

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jnurmine wrote: post #95
pupppet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year for this to get a search engine that gives the good results without ads, SEO spam and bogus clone sites. That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.

>I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year

wow, Search really isn't worth developing.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#115

Post by HelloNurse »

not_your_vase wrote: post #2

Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of…

> Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally.

From the point of view of a shortsighted company this might be a false dichotomy because if ad revenue from search grows, search is fine: neither rotting nor broken.

You are assuming that Google treats users as customers rather than as an exploitable natural resource.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#116

Post by Drakim »

d--b wrote: post #109

What changed? Just an asumption here. But could it be the fault of the web rather than Google's? Could it be that the web itself is being so flooded with SEO-ed crap content that even Google can't sort through it all?

Chicken & Egg problem, the reason the web is so flooded with SEO-ed crap content is because of Google Search.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#118

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

This is the Internet version of the tragedy of the commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

So many people and groups want to profit with as little effort as possible that the commons (freely available data, open APIs, FLOSS software, etc.) is being overrun with little to no regard for the long term effects.

Data can be copied endlessly, but it has to be generated the first time and updated or else it becomes stale and its usefulness decays. If no one is willing or able to generate or update it, there is nothing good and the signal-to-noise ratio falls off sharply. Everything is noise and it sucks.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#119

Post by zirgs »

SoftTalker wrote: post #17

I use DuckDuckGo now almost exclusively for search. It's the default in all my browsers. A few years ago Google still did better for some searches but now I don't feel that to be the case.

Google still returns better results in my language, unfortunately. This is why I still add !g to my queries from time to time.
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