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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

#21

Post by hospitalJail »

This post doesnt seem frontpage worthy, but I'll join in on the google bashing whenever I have a chance.

The other day I tried to google search 4chan, imgur and reddit came up before 4chan. heck 4chan wasnt even on the first page...

On a similar note, they are trying their best to hide wikipedia, now I have to specifically mention wiki most of the time.

I have the best website for a specific thing, I do well in quite a few SEO searches. However, the generic term, (which I'm still the best in), I am nowhere to be found. Blogspam and lower quality advice are all over the first 2 pages. Heck, there is actually terrible advice in the first 2 pages, like dis/misinformation.

The other day I was searching something I knew existed, I knew the page, and google would not give me the page. Ended up typing in the website.

Whatever is going on at google is in the major red flag territory. We need to perma fork android, we need to get off chromimum, find an alternative to Pixel. We are near the end times of google, they are going to be AOL taking advantage of old people and those who refuse to change their ways.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#22

Post by perfect-blue »

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…

Assuming you know the domain that usually gives you the result you’re looking for, I would just search site:name.domain

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#23

Post by dsab »

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…

Try to use yandex instead, it is order of magnitude ahead of google when it comes to image search. Edit: sorry I was convinced you are searching by image, not image id.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#25

Post by jerzyt »

Google's Search is dying because of Thousands of self-inflicted cuts. A couple of years ago there were about 3 or clearly marked ads on the first page, followed by generally useful results. Right now, I don't have the patience to scroll past the ads which are almost indistinguishable from useful links.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#26

Post by _Algernon_ »

Andrex wrote: post #13
nostromo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to be mad at Facebook, newspapers, Pinterest, Discord, etc. for locking the internet away behind a login or paywall. But it’s also the result of Google capturing all the value from the free internet. The end result is companies trying to capture more of that value for themselves and not letting Google eat their lunch, which required moving content and communities behind closed doors.

Google didn't invent the idea of a web crawler or search engine. Because of how the web was designed, I think it was always an inevitability that the internet would start open but trend closed.

You could say that google started it. They ate everyone's lunch by including what people were looking for in a box at the top of the search results. Of course sites will respond in kind.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#27

Post by nikanj »

superasn wrote: post #14

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google…

I always have a feeling they could get surprisingly far by having one person doing random searches, then tagging all the obvious spam to be deindexed. But Google is very adamant about never hiring a person to do a job well, if AI can be trained to do the same job badly

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#28

Post by atlantic »

underlipton wrote: post #8
monsieurgaufre wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.

I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction…

One of the applications I used to use on a daily was Google Reader. Then one day, they just shut it down for no apparent reason, and that was that. They don't seem to be focused on customer satisfaction. Hard to understand.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#29

Post by labster »

The cut that hurt the deepest for me is when negated search terms stopped working. You used to be able to get subsets of data, finding things without a homonym, but now the algorithm just gives you the most common results and the most paid ads.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#30

Post by cout »

xbkingx wrote: post #18
superasn wrote: post #14

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google…

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…

I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.
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