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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

#141

Post by pravus »

danpalmer wrote: post #106
stevage wrote: post #99

I would really love to read a deep dive on why Google Search quality has declined so much. There's a lot of anecdotes but I haven't read much that sounds particularly authoritative.

On why , or on whether . I personally find Google Search to be pretty great, and recently switched back from DuckDuckGo which I had been using for ~4 years, because I found I was having to use !g in half my searches. It's also noticeable faster. When I'm looking for an answer, I find Google much more likely to give me the answer. So I'm not convinced that search quality is declining. I'd love to see a deep dive on wh…

What's interesting is that I find Google's search quality today to be on par with the quality that existed before Google showed up and changed everything. Whether it is better than all the other garbage isn't really important to me. I want the good Google back.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#142

Post by noizejoy »

symonda wrote: post #89
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.

This is an interesting point. User managed or curated indices offer unique advantages, especially when 'depth of coverage' is more important than 'breadth of coverage'. I believe that we are witnessing people shift away from demanding 'search breadth' as we speak, so someone might possibly decide to do this.

> User managed or curated indices …

Do you mean self-managed?

Everything else is effectively the influencer scene. Which is increasingly deplorable as well.

Anything with wide enough reach becomes cost-effective for gaming.

So one would have to return to a highly fragmented world to make gaming the system cost prohibitive.

And that would get us to a pre-Internet world. But then again, it’s not entirely unthinkable that we’re headed towards increasing Internet fragmentation if various governments get their way.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#143

Post by eastbound »

Animats wrote: post #33
xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…

Yes. We can point to the exact moment in time when Google turned to the dark side. It was on August 9, 2006, when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] This was the moment that SEO, now officially endorsed by Google's CEO, became respectable. Until then, SEO was considered to be a branch of the spam industry. There were conferences such as the Web Search Spam Squashing Sum…

SEO sends the message that you have a content writer, and, thus, that you are a well established business (The content that is required to be produced is more nefarious than having hamster marketing guys spin in wheels, but the nature of the work is irrelevant to Google).

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#144

Post by mmmmmbop »

pulvinar wrote: post #35
zokier wrote: post #19

completely tangential, but this thread triggered a wave of nostalgia reminiscing how good the few years around 2010 were (or rather seemed to be through rose-tinted glasses) in tech. Among all else it was an era when it really felt that google did just great on almost all fronts, search included. Web in general was lot less app- and mobile-centric because those things were still pretty new things comparatively.

Well, maybe not that good (2011): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073737

This really adds some perspective.

Has there been any actual analysis showing that Google Search is getting worse nowadays? All I'm seeing are anecdotal reports and feelings, and your link shows that this sentiment has been around for more than a decade.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#145

Post by _v7gu »

creato wrote: post #122
pavs wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wow, that is not what that article is saying at all.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#146

Post by eastbound »

userbinator wrote: post #91
foobarbecue wrote: post #10

Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? D…

Part numbers, error codes, and similar "high entropy" terms also seem to suffer the same fate. Even worse than giving no results is giving you page after page of "results" containing slightly different numbers/codes.

No worse than searching for words and having pages that don’t contain them.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#147

Post by tjpnz »

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 quite common for some queries to return a few pages when they might've previously yielded dozens. I'm not sure when it happened but couldn't have been more than 1-2 years ago. There's also less balance (ultimately results) for topics some might deem political, I may be on the left but I'm not blind.

Here's something to try: think of a really obscure TV show you watched when you were young, even better a specific quote. In my experience Google was pretty good at finding sources on where it came from. But now it's incredibly rare.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#148

Post by hsjqllzlfkf »

This is Google's inability to innovate.

Google stated goal was the "organize the world's information". Nevertheless, they didn't come up with Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository. They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization.

Google had early success with search. Then decided to cement their lead by just throwing money at "all the smartest people"[1] so that their competitors would have difficulty hiring. This put Google in the situation where it's better to spend its resources fighting to keep the advantage that they have (by controlling the Internet infrastructure; android, chrome, email, etc) than innovating.

Google is dead man walking, unless something very substantial changes.

[1] "all the smartest people", read, "academically successful but rule-obeying, unimaginative, and risk-averse people".

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#149

Post by hsjqllzlfkf »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #24

Google has lots of smart employees, why can't they just "fix" search?

What is the incentive for "fixing" anything? Removing 1 ad improves the search experience but decreases revenue. On the other hand, adding 1 ad increases revenue. At this stage that's all the innovation I see google doing.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#150

Post by tgv »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #148

This is Google's inability to innovate. Google stated goal was the "organize the world's information". Nevertheless, they didn't come up with Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository. They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Google had early success with search. Then decided to ceme…

A few days ago, some people were discussing Schumpeter's idea that (very) large companies drive innovation. I'm curious what they would make of Google Search.
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