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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

#121

Post by suddenclarity »

pseudalopex wrote: post #70
bdw5204 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened because a few corporations were able to capture most of the internet due to a mix of laziness on the part of users and also the death of independent blogs and fan sites. I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or…

> I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or your family. Evil people use the internet to harass other people and to attack their livelihood or put the safety of their family at risk. Many employers now discriminate against em…

Reddit do have a sense of being more anonymous since you can edit and soft delete your content. This is very rare for forums and most of the things I wrote 20 years ago still show up on Google. All my comments on Reddit are "gone".

The decision to limit the API might therefore actually be a good for the average user if it stops archives such as ceddit and unreddit to show your posts after you've edit or removed them. Most people probably don't know about them though and believe their content is gone just because they click delete.

Facebook and Discord groups have been private since as long as I can remember. Sure, someone might leak if you invite the wrong people but compare it with Twitter where you can find all posts from user X including keyword Y. Or even do it through Google cache. It takes minutes to find something to use against anyone if you really want to. Based on the last election in my country, it can be something as simple as listening to the wrong artist when you're 14.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#122

Post by creato »

pavs wrote: post #103
stevenicr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they have whole teams of people looking at sites through the lens of the leaked 'quality rater guidelines' - ? I thought it was like a few thousand people in the philippines downranking sites for thousands of reasons - without being transparent about possible biases and such. Maybe I'm thinking of somewhere else. And wasn't there a story about a bunch people who were doing similar as 1099 contractors in the US…

Looking at the quality of current google searches I highly doubt it. I mean I could single handedly remove thousands of domains in a month and improve google search result, I have a hard time believing that they have 1000s of people doing it and the quality is this shitty.

They were fined 2.4 billion euros for downranking a shitty SEO spam operation: https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/07/google-shopping-lawsuit/am....

How many of those thousand domains will result in billion dollar fines?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#123

Post by suddenclarity »

npsimons wrote: post #60
labster wrote: post #29

The cut that hurt the deepest for me is when negated search terms stopped working. You used to be able to get subsets of data, finding things without a homonym, but now the algorithm just gives you the most common results and the most paid ads.

They retired "links:" (or something named similar) to find websites that linked to a given one. Was very useful, and I've been fearing ever since that they will do away with "site:" next. There was also a time you could paste a URL to a .GPX file into Google Maps and have it loaded. Quick and easy, well before OSM and Leaflet.

Wasn't "links:" mostly (ab)used by SEOs while "site:" is really useful for real users?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#124

Post by jamesash »

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.

Put "Pieces of me" in quotes and I get reddit discussion. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pieces+of+me%22+is+actual...

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#125

Post by danpalmer »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #107
danpalmer wrote: post #100

> What if Wikipedia started charging or restricting API access? Wikipedia has a downloadable data dump that would cost almost nothing to serve to Google, and it has an organisational mandate to make that data available. If they decide to charge for access to that I'm sure Google can afford it. Let's not throw around completely unrealistic hypotheticals.

Selling "consumable" data access is called Wikimedia Enterprise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise

Great, this shows that they are unlikely to restrict as they already have a working business model for it with seemingly reasonable pricing (free for non-commercial, free monthly dumps, etc).

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#126

Post by jamesash »

hackerbeat wrote: post #68
hospitalJail wrote: post #21

This post doesnt seem frontpage worthy, but I'll join in on the google bashing whenever I have a chance. The other day I tried to google search 4chan, imgur and reddit came up before 4chan. heck 4chan wasnt even on the first page... On a similar note, they are trying their best to hide wikipedia, now I have to specifically mention wiki most of the time. I have the best website for a specific thing, I do well in quite…

> I have the best website for a specific thing, I do well in quite a few SEO searches. However, the generic term, (which I'm still the best in), I am nowhere to be found. Can confirm. Same for me.

Similar situation here.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#127

Post by wintermutestwin »

ramraj07 wrote: post #47
troymc wrote: post #45

Unlike the author, I'm not very worried about Wikipedia. Yes, they ask for donations, but that's not a sign that they're dying; donations are their main revenue source. That might be unusual among the web's top sites, but it's not in the grander scheme of things, i.e. there are lots of charities and nonprofits. I didn't know that LLM training sets used Wikipedia. I would have thought that the CC-BY-SA license (on all…

Wikipedia has assets north of 100MM last I read about it. They don’t need donations to run the core wiki media products for a real long time. Their appeal for donations is absolutely distasteful and misleading. All the money they get they use for projects a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with. Such disingenuous behavior from supposedly the “best of us” is why public loose trust in all of modern progressive…

Honest question: What projects are potentially disagreeable?

Are you suggesting that: "free knowledge, open source and open data, transparency, privacy, and collaboration" are ideas that "a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with?"

(I fully admit that I may be missing something from the few minutes of research)

I am interested in this because I believe that the users of social platforms are far better served by non-profits like Wikipedia instead of the enshitification that is fueled by the profit motive.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#128

Post by bryanrasmussen »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #78
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…

I googled something. One of the results was "title (recommended)". That should be enough for Google to ban the result.

so Google should have a list of titles that if found cause them to ban the result, which frankly might affect people with little personal sites who aren't very good at making sites but just want to put up some stuff they really know a lot about, but anyway is there any other items in the list?

I'm pretty sure SEO sites will be able to figure out don't title your page "title (recommended)".

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#130

Post by Quenhus »

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…

For those on Google or DDG, here is my uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines. You may also use the list with uBlacklist.

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