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Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

economist.com

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Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#141

Post by ignite »

joe_the_user wrote: post #124
qrio2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things that i *know* were parts of the internet, that I could find via google 5-10 years ago are no longer possible to find. I get single page search results sometimes, with not even the capability to keep browsing 'more' pages to see things that may be tangentially related. Google has just decided to not show them at all. Remember when the bottom of the page was "Goooooooooooooooogle" and you could click each "o" to…

Absolutely this. Google has gotten notably worse in just the last two years. Today: * Any term that might be related to a commercial product? That product comes first and frequently only. * Search for two terms? It will first give it's prefer result for each separately - usually commercial products (ha). And then might give them together. * Quoted terms are often taken as vague suggestions. Negative sign is often use…

Google has gotten notably worse in the last few months. I keep getting the feeling it is serving results for a query similar to what I entered, but more popular. It drowns out any results that actually might answer my questions.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#142

Post by bbor »

basch wrote: post #107
gipp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are giant teams of people at Google whose only job is trying to define things like "spam" and "seo abuse" more precisely in more diverse contexts. There are equally large armies of people outside of it trying to outwit the first group and find more and more elaborate loopholes and workarounds. HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it.…

Their giant teams are an organizational failure then. Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.

Why wouldn’t they do this, if it’s scalable and profitable? Is your theory just “incompetence”? I can’t prove that’s wrong, but I feel the simpler answer is more convincing; that handing off page rank to an army of minimum wage call center workers (for every country & language in the world…) wouldn’t be more effective than the existing algorithms at filtering out spam.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#143

Post by Fede_V »

basch wrote: post #107
gipp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are giant teams of people at Google whose only job is trying to define things like "spam" and "seo abuse" more precisely in more diverse contexts. There are equally large armies of people outside of it trying to outwit the first group and find more and more elaborate loopholes and workarounds. HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it.…

Their giant teams are an organizational failure then. Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.

Absolutely: the challenge is that any signal that you use to identify "good websites" from "bad websites" will be adversarially optimized by incredibly motivated people.

You are dealing with a moving target that has a huge financial incentive. It's a very difficult problem.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#144

Post by DarknessFalls »

massysett wrote: post #53
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yah…

> Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory.

Google didn't innovate that much except to provide a clutter-free interface and slightly better search. Prior to that, I used Webcrawler and then HotBot. A search like what you described would have easily returned useful results.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#145

Post by johnla »

svachalek wrote: post #78
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

Google has been up against SEO for decades and the motivations are much stronger on the other side of the battle. ChatGPT is running off a fixed training set that no one has had a chance to game yet. When someone tries to build a true, current AI search engine we're going to see a whole new level of hallucinating lie machine.

This.

Also, once the ChatGPT AI takes off and becomes ubiquitous, then what if there is a lack of credible content for it to train on?

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#146

Post by jeffbee »

pirate787 wrote: post #129
jeffbee wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What these people are remembering is when the web was small and dorks-only. Now it is huge and full of normies of all kinds, including every shade of commercialism and fraud.

Incorrect, the web was mainstream by 1996, two years before Google even launched.

The number of internet users is currently 150x more than it was in 1996. I don't think you can make an argument that it was already mainstream in '96 with a few tens of millions of people on it.

The web was overwhelmingly informational up to an inflection point where it became overwhelmingly commercial. That's the thing people are upset about.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#147

Post by JohnFen »

saudade97 wrote: post #42

I don't get the HN hate of Google as a search tool. Yes, SEO has made searching more difficult, but Google is still by far the best search engine provided that your searches are focused and you use search tools (e.g., excluding terms, focusing on certain sites, etc.). I've tried other search engines (e.g., DDG, Bing) and they just aren't as good as Google.

> you use search tools (e.g., excluding terms, focusing on certain sites, etc.).

Focusing on certain sites? If you know what site you want, why not just go there? You don't need Google for that.

I've had very limited success with their search modifiers. The main one I want to work is the literal search by putting things in quotes. But I don't think that has ever actually worked for me.

If they brought back the + modifier and it worked, that would also go far.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#148

Post by [deleted] »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #12

The gaming of SEO has been quietly destroying the utility of search writ large as a mechanism for quite a while. Over the last year, its become palpable. Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet. This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their s…

[deleted]

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#149

Post by polyamid23 »

polyamid23 wrote: post #125
massysett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yah…

I want a button: "never show me content from this domain again".

Follow up: Make a profile out of this. Ah, people who don't want to ever see content from quora or something, do like this other content. Let's rank that higher for those people. Easy opt out, by checking "ignore search profile" checkbox or logout.

Re: Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

#150

Post by devonbleak »

bawolff wrote: post #112
massysett wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sort of comment a lot, and I honestly don't know what it's talking about. What are people expecting out of Google that it's not delivering? It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge. I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yah…

A start would be to rank official php/python/etc docs higher than clickbait sites like geeks4geeks

Amen to this
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