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Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

bbc.com

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Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#161

Post by dmix »

rutierut wrote: post #45
david-gpu wrote: post #4

Over the past several months I find Google search has become completely useless to find anything other than online retailers. I thought it may have been just something about my profile, but this article suggests it may have been an update on their end. Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

DDG was such an absolutely subpar experience for me (used it for 6-8 months) that it wouldn't surprise me if nobody would _actually_ say it's better in a blind test. They just don't like Google. Kagi on the other hand really blew me away, I have no idea how they're doing it, but I'm only using Google for one thing these days (besides G Shopping & G Maps) which is when I want to use ad spend as proxy for quality/relia…

I use both DDG and Google (via ddg shortcuts)

DDG is best for literal quick searches and Google for open ended questions or complicated queries

Never had issues with either really

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#162

Post by dmix »

Hikikomori wrote: post #21
david-gpu wrote: post #4

Over the past several months I find Google search has become completely useless to find anything other than online retailers. I thought it may have been just something about my profile, but this article suggests it may have been an update on their end. Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

Switched to DDG a few months ago and find myself having to switch to Google for many searches. Going to give kagi a try after trialing it.

Part of the pitch for using DDG is that you can easily query Google or Google images (!g !gi etc) or tons of other search engines or just use the regular bing search for basic stuff

It’s more of a privacy friendly search platform than a total replacement for Google

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#163

Post by leotravis10 »

Exuma wrote: post #160
ADeerAppeared wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has an API. One just pays to use that. The problem being the aforementioned conflict of interest. The moment you're a competitor to Google Search (or any of Google's other products), they can kill your API access and ruin you.

Damn... that makes Kagi way less exciting. I thought they had some secret sauce. It's just a paid wrapper WTF

I fear that Kagi is going to suffer the same fate as Neeva did:

"In a way, the brief flicker of Neeva’s existence tells everything you need to know about the last 20 years of search-engine supremacy. Building a search engine is hard. Building one better than Google is even harder. But if you want to beat Google, a better search engine is only the very beginning. And it only gets harder from there." [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva...

Not to mention Kagi's continued sustainability issues (28,071 users at the time of writing) [2] and their plans for their own AI products [3] [4] that would inevitably and eventually doom them.

[2] https://kagi.com/stats [3] https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314

Also, ADeerAppeared is right that government intervention aka a major breakup needs to happen for competition to thrive and I don't see it happening (although I hope I'm wrong).

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#165

Post by p3rls »

nottorp wrote: post #86

Note that the article is crying about the poor small businesses that google killed. Not about the good old days when you could find unbiased reviews that were done not-for-profit out of someone's personal experience on a geocities page that hurt your eyes with all those blink tags.

You are making distinctions without a difference -- those same geocities admins (like myself) are now the creators of many of these small business websites and webapps that have been being held hostage for years by a malevolent corporation bent on destroying the last few decent websites left on the internet.

And then when you complain about this monopoly that controls 90% of the west's internet, and 99% of it when you include Microsoft's collusion you are met with the alums from Harvard Business School "Well maybe you should have thought about that before basing your business on Google traffic"

Oh, but that is incorrect, actually what I should have done is send over a few bribes to some struggling entertainment writers like my competitors did. You can check my other comments in this thread for more on that.

In an actual just world, (not to immanentize the eschaton that was the early internet but) you'd think so many old farts wearing hats still around that actually remember what the internet was supposed to do and be like that all the Google Search liaisons would have been tarred and feathered years ago by now.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#166

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

EasyMark wrote: post #152
cageface wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been saying for two years now that curated directories are poised to make a comeback on the web. It just needs a critical mass of curators. I think this is why those awesome-$tech lists are so popular.

I mean they might have a mini revival but i think we've gone too far to change the process of the general population. Indexes appeal to more organized people who like such things, most of us just throw everything in a pile in a well known location (google) and rifle through that.

Ideally a "modern" directory should be easily searchable as well -- just very selective in what it indexes.

The basic UI could be similar to a search engine, yet with a transparent foundation that could also be perused in a different way.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#167

Post by asadotzler »

jb3689 wrote: post #142
throwaway211 wrote: post #28

Two big reasons people add Reddit to search phrases is because Reddit's search isn't functional and to deprioritise Ad Junk from search. It's to fix broken search, which gets more broken - more unwanted Ad Junk. But Google's an advertising company with it's ad search device in everyone's pocket. At least it's reached sufficient post-don't-be-evil to be honestly shameless, even if it does employ people in PR with brok…

It's odd. How did search engines trick us into thinking that our home page should be a search engine? The only reason I add "reddit" to searches is because a search engine is my entrypoint on my browser. Even then though, I find that Google tends to pin a particular threads. The most humorous ones are when it pins to a thread with "this has been asked already a zillion times" with no actual meaningful content in the…

>How did search engines trick us into thinking that our home page should be a search engine?

The browser makers started in the mid-90s with web search and news called "portals", either their own or licensed from a third party. By the early 2000s the portals had all gone to shit but we still needed them for web search because we still cared about the web and not just a couple of social media apps. As a result, Google's pristine search and search results pages became popular. When we were deciding on a Firefox start page in mid-2004, Google search eventually won because it was simple and effective, like the rest of Firefox.

(My proposal to our tiny team at the time was to make Firefox Start a page of instructions on how to easily change the start page to what ever you wanted, but that was reasonably shot down as asking the user to do extra work.)

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#168

Post by asadotzler »

EasyMark wrote: post #151
mejutoco wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding desktop bookmarks: Adding tags on Firefox is so natural (ctrl+D and maybe tab for comma separated tags). In Chrome it is not possible without an extension.

can't you just save them on the end of the title? doesnt it search through the titles when searching the bookmarks? It's all just a big grep through your bookmarks anyway whether it's in tags or titles

Tags add your searchable word to the bookmark in cases the tile or url aren't enough. Tags are just one more thing you can very easily and quickly filter on too. See the footer of the Firefox autocomplete popup for some other things you can filter on like bookmarks and open tabs. Or you can use a shortcut like # to filter results to just those bookmarks tagged with your term.

Type * in the address bar followed by your search term to search within your bookmarks. Type # in the address bar followed by your search term to search within your tags. Type % in the address bar followed by your search term to search within your open tabs.

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... for the full list.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#169

Post by asadotzler »

Aachen wrote: post #99
joshstrange wrote: post #13

> A spokesperson for Google tells the BBC that the company only launches changes to Search after rigorous testing confirms that the shift will be helpful for users, and that the company gives website owners help, resources and opportunities for feedback on their Search rankings. If you believe this I've got a bridge to sell you. The idea that Google does anything other than to improve its bottom line (in the _shortes…

Sell me another bridge then. This is why I believe it: > Google does anything to improve its bottom line (in the _shortest_ possible timeline) If the results suck, people would find alternatives. Look at how many techies installed Chrome for their parents and grandparents when MSIE was pre-installed and this was an easier-to-use, standards-compliant, and more performant option. It further snowballed from there. It ta…

>If the results suck, people would find alternatives.

Not if Google's moat (selling ads to sites and then sending users to those same sites) is strong because there will be no good alternatives.

You seem to have missed about a century of US companies abusing monopolies and the antitrust efforts to prevent that.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#170

Post by no_identd »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #36
michelb wrote: post #8

This is good. Because it now will make way more sense to compete with Google on searching the internet, since they screwed it up. They’re are panicking and defending their bottom-line instead of innovating and leading. I think internet search is now ripe for disruption. Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google.

> Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google. That's the big problem here. All the new search engines rely on the infrastructure of the old ones. It would take very little collusion between Google and Microsoft to crush something like Kagi. And the moment any new competitor gets big, they'll do it. What's needed is an anti-trust breakup. There's simply too big a c…

I know there exist whole fields of people out there sitting on content crawls
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