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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

#181

Post by praptak »

llamaLord wrote: post #151
jnurmine wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year for this to get a search engine that gives the good results without ads, SEO spam and bogus clone sites. That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.

Can't remember exactly where I saw it, but last number I saw said that Google makes ~$12 a year per user. Which begs the question... why have they not atleast tried a "Google Premium". Fuck it, I'd pay $15 a year to have a Google search that puts as much effort into finding me the shit I actually want as Google does today in serving me BS ads I never pay attention to.

First thought is that it's the most profitable users who would choose adless.

The ads industry would not like their reach to be limited to those not paying for premium search.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#183

Post by consilient »

tgv wrote: post #150
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.

The core of Schumpeter's position here is that innovation requires making large long-term capital investments in risky projects, which small firms can't afford.

Things are somewhat different today then when Schumpeter was writing. On the one hand, governments and venture capital firms are now major sources of R&D funding. On the other hand, the growth of the financial sector has to some degree crowded out higher-risk investments within large firms.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#184

Post by [deleted] »

joelanman wrote: post #178
hooby wrote: post #173

I feel that Google search has been slowly dying for many years now. Where in the past I could find documentation, forum-posts, wikis - concise information - these days I find SEO-optimised marketing fluff, link-farms, clickbait, long-form articles with thousands of words that ultimately say nothing, political tirades that don't make sense for any non-U.S.-citizen, and ads - tons and tons of ads. It would seem that it…

They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.

[deleted]

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#185

Post by fidotron »

The true meta problem here is the age old question of how to fund services, including search, on the web. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Gfycat are all immediate variants of the same problem, which does not have a technological solution. The naive idea that all these things can be free, especially when promoted by those in an ecosystem as propped up as it is by ad revenue, is ridiculous.

Someone has to pay for these things to be developed and operated and typically when they do they get to call the shots, which leads to the modern UX disaster.

At least now the VC situation means we have a lot less product-dumping-by-any-other-name intended to destroy the market for legitimate participants.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#186

Post by mitchell209 »

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…

This is more the fault of DDG / Bing being awful, than it is Google doing a good job. I’ve found Kagi and Brave at worst are on par with Google without being bloated with ads. And oftentimes they’re simply better.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#187

Post by courseofaction »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #171
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…

Google's money is in ads, not search. I'm still curious how they're going to properly monetise ChatGPT at scale. I can't wait for the AI ads...

This is conjecture, but I don't think it's a long shot: The rich are going to pay them to manipulate responses, exactly like happened with google. Whether it's ads or political influence, with the current state of wealth those who deep down only want to make money (and OpenAI has shown their colors, in my opinion) need to look upwards for those cash injections, not towards their consumers.

Right now they are producing value for consumers, in order to attract investors. Investors will want a return: the product will be the consumers.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#188

Post by courseofaction »

fidotron wrote: post #185

The true meta problem here is the age old question of how to fund services, including search, on the web. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Gfycat are all immediate variants of the same problem, which does not have a technological solution. The naive idea that all these things can be free, especially when promoted by those in an ecosystem as propped up as it is by ad revenue, is ridiculous. Someone has to pay for these things…

I agree, and people's unwillingness to pay for the things they value causes the thing to no longer be 'for' them. It's for those who are willing to pay for it (investors).

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#189

Post by courseofaction »

praptak wrote: post #168
AlecSchueler wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't McDonald's one of the biggest advertisers in the world? They sell poor quality food on the basis of brand recognition.

That's unrelated to the point GP is making. The point is that they are not incentivized to put poison into burgers to get money from the poison industry.

Well put. Ads are the poison of information.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#190

Post by courseofaction »

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…

I studied literature, and used to be able to find the most obscure tip-of-my-tongue references by describing fragments I remembered of a text or paper.

Same result: Now it's nothing, or unrelated SEO.

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