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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

#131

Post by Quenhus »

redsaber wrote: post #46
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…

> There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. Oh I did use ublacklist which mixes blocking in both of the google search and the google image search. But curious what is the filter you have in your uBlock origin?

I'm not OP, but here is my own uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#132

Post by noizejoy »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #118

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 el…

In the history of humanity, intellectual property is a relatively recent phenomenon.

A lot of technology and culture was built without such “protection”.

I sometimes wonder how recent history would have played out without copyrights and patents.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#133

Post by pjc50 »

bdw5204 wrote: post #34
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.

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…

Possibly, but when I think of "old internet" I think of people posting under pseudonymous handles for basically this reason.

> our society permits employers to have a chilling effect on the online speech of their employees

More generally than that. Dylan Mulvaney made one beer advert while being trans and got death threats. She would be counted as a "contractor" rather than an employee.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#136

Post by chronogram »

Quenhus wrote: post #130
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.

These filters are light enough that they work well in Manifest V3 adblockers. The "Google - Global" filter only adds 1376 dynamic rules for example.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#137

Post by dash2 »

noizejoy wrote: post #132
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #118

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 el…

In the history of humanity, intellectual property is a relatively recent phenomenon. A lot of technology and culture was built without such “protection”. I sometimes wonder how recent history would have played out without copyrights and patents.

Yes, but in the history of humanity, economic growth of above 0.1% a year is also relatively recent. One of the things that C18 radicals insisted upon was a decent system of IP.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#138

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#139

Post by pravus »

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?

It's both, really. I seem to recall somewhere around 2006 Google changed to providing personalized search results based on your history. Since then the quality of search has declined horribly and my assumption is that it's a side-effect of the combination of hyper-SEO and a narrow focus on individual interest rather than categories.

I'm starting to believe that some sort of Yahoo model is the best solution because you want a lot of source material to search through, but it needs to be context-aware so that searches are meaningful. I am vastly more effective in my job when search results return reference information rather than blog articles about somebody's weekend hobby project that only explores the most basic parts of a problem I'm working on. And this extends to other categories in my searching as well.

I'm also personally wondering if Google has realized (even implicitly) that because of all of this, it no longer has to do deep searching anymore and can save tons of money by regurgitating cached copies of "related" garbage because people will give up before any expensive operations take place. It makes me wonder if Google's internal resource accounting has anything to do with it but that's just pure speculation on my part.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#140

Post by throwaw12 »

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.

> If they decide to charge for access to that I'm sure Google can afford it Sure, Google can afford it.

How about asking for 10% of revenue when Wikipedia data is used to show search results? Would Google agree or starts another rival to wikipedia and kill it after 4 years?

Systems are so complex that, it is very difficult to predict how they would behave given parts of system gets impacted by other constraints (Reddit vs OpenAI data scraping, Reddit's urge to make money, Reddit moderators protesting against rules, 2 day blackout extending to infinite, Google releasing LLM papers, which are impacting its own business through ChatGPT and so on)

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