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

In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

sparktoro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 412 posts

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#181

Post by criddell »

phpnode wrote: post #121
criddell wrote: post #29

> the zero-click search problem is likely to rise even more I have a hard time seeing this as a problem.

As a user? sure. People who create and curate content quite often want to be paid for their work, they create businesses to support themselves, often in the form of a website. If Google scrapes and repackages that content, so the searcher never even visits the creator's site, what incentive does the creator have to continue making content freely available?

The zero-click queries that I've done have been for fairly simple facts that I think most of us would agree should be zero-click.

What are some examples that I could try that show results that you think should require me to click through?

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#182

Post by onetimemanytime »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…

>>Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade

I have ZERO doubt in my mind that a Google search update that decreases their ad revenue would be rolled back and metrics tweaked to make it so. So...

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#183

Post by FpUser »

axaxs wrote: post #80
gonehome wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search Google now I mostly get spam. “Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads. “Product Review” -> same as above, spam. “Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes. Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful. Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occa…

Agreed with everything above. If I ever X vs Y in google, I append site:reddit.com I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but it's about the largest forum. I really miss Forum search in Google.

>"I really miss Forum search in Google"

I absolutely hated when they did remove it. I was able to sort of mitigate it by adding "forums" and "discussions" to search terms but it is not the same of course.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#184

Post by londons_explore »

Spivak wrote: post #173
zip1234 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and reddit has gotten much less useful with all their push for login and using their app...

This in no way absolves their god awful mobile experience but if you're logged into Reddit with the new UI turned off or use the Old Reddit Redirect add-on it's basically as if nothing on Reddit changed since 2011.

The new UI is great! It keeps the programmers occupied so they stop messing with the old UI that I actually want to use.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#185

Post by [deleted] »

Robotbeat wrote: post #67
allenu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to do that until I realized on Mac, I can just cmd-spacebar to do Spotlight search and type my equation in there.

I don’t have a Mac. Does Spotlight handle units as well as Google does? Also, doing the calculation in Google is handy because it’s easy to share in a modifiable way.

[deleted]

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#186

Post by typon »

cryptoz wrote: post #138
typon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For pretty much any product or review related search I just do " reddit" and then scour the somewhat up voted posts for information. Have to deal with tons of dead links though for any post older than a couple of years. The Web really seems like it's an awful place. The original dream of hyper links is really dead. It's all about jumping from walled garden to walled garden through tricks and luck.

Google is having trouble determining the date of reddit posts and is also making their filter rules useless. You try to filter last month, a result says 3 days ago and you click, but reddit says it was 2y ago!

Agreed, this is infuriating

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#188

Post by AlexandrB »

tompagenet2 wrote: post #133
monkeybutton wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Google Image search has gone down hill significantly too. Getting full pages of pinterest results was bad enough but now on my phone you have to scroll past multiple screens worth of Google Shopping ads or images tagged with the "Product" icon before you see any actual, organic photos of the thing you're looking for.

I know this sounds implausible, but I find Bing image search so much better than Google.

Yandex is surprisingly good at image search and allows you to crop the source image in-browser.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#189

Post by screaminghawk »

1f60c wrote: post #134
germanjoey wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, "Google Instant Answers" are more often than not factually incorrect. It makes me queasy every time I see that... it speaks volumes that's so much more important to them that they keep you on the page that they'd rather give you wrong information than let you go.

A classic example is the instant answer to "who invented running?"

For those that are curious it displays a Quora answer that states:

>Thomas Running

>Running was invented in 1612 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice at the same time.

It's actually quite and interesting post if you follow the link. Obviously it's not correct in the purest form but there is justification for this answer.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#190

Post by numpad0 »

reaperducer wrote: post #148
BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. A lot of people say this is because Google is worse at returning the desired search results for various reasons (algos, ads, spam, etc). I've come to suspect it is more deliberate on the part of Google. I've said it before, so I'll belt out the chant again: "Google doesn't make money from providing the right search results. Google makes money from k…

I’ve seen it: I happened to enter exactly the same query from two separate IPs used by communities without deep cultural connections in between, and only one of them returned the desired results.

That felt like a thick wall of glass separating worlds have suddenly come into my view.

Post reply on HN