Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 390 posts

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#161

Post by Chyzwar »

seanwilson wrote: post #112
donatj wrote: post #52

I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Moreover people within Google like Matt Cutts seemed to be at the time if not outright encouraging it, at the very least giving…

> I wrote a not-very-coherent in retrospect article about 12 years ago while working for an SEO firm about how SEO was killing the internet. The basis being companies were creating pages and blog posts specifically to target keywords without actually having coherent things to say on the topic. Is there a way to improve the detection of posts like this so they can be deranked? If so, why isn't this done? You would hav…

Google use page rank to figure out popularity of page, semantic analysis of content and manual overwrite of rank.

If you are travel agency you create crap content and you create links to said pages. You target specific keywords and since your overall page authority is high then your shitty reasult flood google.

If you have price comparision website you get manually de-ranked because you compete with google shopping.

If you have stackoverflow clone you rank very high because google can serve more ads on your page vs stackoverflow. Even if google do recognize that content was scraped from SO, they choose to make money.

On some keywords olny way to rank in results is to directly pay to google. For some keywords whole page of results is payed advertisments.

Just to highlight few mechanisms.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#162

Post by SideQuark »

majewsky wrote: post #135
bflesch wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a marketplace. In all situations, the human being follows incentices.

The first does not follow from the second. Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition. If all human behavior was framed as a competition, we would not have been able to construct communities.

>Historically, incentives on human behavior have tended much more towards collaboration than competition

Humans spent far longer in kill others mode than in don't kill others mode. Incentives to not kill others is fairly new in history.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#163

Post by clnq »

It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience.

And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearly zero over the weekend.

Over the last 10 years, I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I would say that I get about 20 times fewer readers from Google. However, Google still constitutes about 90% of my readership, down from perhaps 97% to 99%. These are the facts, looking at my analytics.

The other 10% come from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Bitbucket, MS Teams, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Atlassian, Swarm, Ecosia, topical forums, and company domains. The share of readership from sources other than Google used to be closer to 1% - 3% in the past.

From my experience as a user of Google, I also find it much more difficult to find experts in any given field. About a decade ago, I would find so many more hard-boiled technical blogs. Now, the mid-level college essay-style knowledge is much more promoted. This shift makes sense for Google as an ad company, even if it harms everyone, future Google included.

With all that said, here are my conclusions, based in the reality of my own technical blog and its readership -- Google is worse for the technical crowd, which is now more likely to share technical resources by word of mouth (like Atlassian, Swarm, Teams, topical forums and company domains) or find them with other search engines. Google's effectiveness has not significantly diminished, as it still accounts for 90% of the way people reach my technical blog, so it might still be very functional for this purpose. Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd, a contrast to the scenario 10 years ago. But it seems like the decline of Google is a bit catastrophized.

These are only thoughts from my perspective, though they are grounded in some objective metrics.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#164

Post by foooorsyth »

clnq wrote: post #148
V1ndaar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the "golden days" of using reddit for that purpose are over, too. Both the fact that random other crap comes up due to how stuff is linked on reddit and generally most search engines being too lenient with your search terms and finally more and more conversation going to discord and other places that cannot be searched. It really is one of the most unfortunate things of the modern internet. :(

Reddit is very wrong about almost every discipline I have experience in and can speak on as an expert. I feel like I'd suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia if I paid it any mind. I think there's a good degree of pseudo-intellectualism on the site. Not necessarily in the conduct, but in claims of knowledge and the certainty they present it with. There was a period in my life I've been active on Reddit myself. Looking back on…

Reddit is awful for anything controversial, but it’s good for uncontroversial hobby communities. If I need recommendations on new hockey skates, Reddit is a good place. It basically replaced independent phpBB forums of old — which were even better and less subject to sweeping centralized policy changes like all their subreddit replacements are now.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#165

Post by resolutebat »

dalbasal wrote: post #121

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keep…

> I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible.

Try Wikivoyage, the Wikipedia Foundation's open travel guide. Listings are a mixed bag, but the general advice is often spot on.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#166

Post by firtoz »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #157

I agree but the root cause isn't Google, it's advertising in all its forms, Google's ads just happen to be the most profitable ones. Kill advertising and the web will be fixed automatically and permanently. Using uBlock Origin is everyone's duty towards a better web. It should come pre-installed in Firefox.

You may be interested in trying Brave. Though that's using chromium and therefore connected to Google, kind of? Would be curious to hear the community's thoughts on this tbh.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#167

Post by tempodox »

bflesch wrote: post #134
majewsky wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the only place advertising should be allowed is in a marketplace setting That's the horrifying beauty of it. Everything has been turned into a marketplace.

Everything is a marketplace. In all situations, the human being follows incentices.

That's just the ultra-capitalist creed.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#168

Post by noobermin »

Roark66 wrote: post #89
dageshi wrote: post #29

The web thrived for a decent number of years with ads before it began to really spiral down. For me the biggest cause of that spiral was the shift from most users using desktops to most users using mobile to interact with google. In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their…

>In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak IDK, for me it seems the worst plague are the sites that when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" don't give you a single sentence answer you seek, b…

You wouldn't find this as an issue if you knew how to read documentation and references. You do NOT read everything unless you want to. I do agree for younger people who've never had to read a dense reference that they might not exercise these skills now.

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#169

Post by t0bia_s »

dalbasal wrote: post #121

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago. The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims. The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube. Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keep…

Because there is audience that like garbage and clickbaits. We need to learn how consume digital media and have this stimuli under control.

For example there are plugins like Unhook that let you stop autoplay or suggested videos to show on YT. It's so refreshing to watch YT only for purpose that you initially come for, without garbage distractions...

Re: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

#170

Post by the8472 »

toldyouso2022 wrote: post #123
Roark66 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the desktop search world, google used to respond with large comprehensive articles on subjects that not just answered peoples questions but also educated them on the subject around their question. This was the golden age so to speak IDK, for me it seems the worst plague are the sites that when you search for something like "how to reverse a pushed commit in git" don't give you a single sentence answer you seek, b…

Cookie law is seriously underrated in how much damages it has done. No visible gains for privacy either.

It's not the law that's the problem (well, ok, it is perhaps poorly structured to even allow these things to happen...) but in the end it's malicious compliance of all those sites that put up the banners. The law doesn't require banners. Just don't set any cookies unless they're fulfilling a user intent (such as logging in or a shopping cart), those don't need explicit opt-in.
Post reply on HN