Google's profit is driven primarily by ads. The old web is no longer the primary target for Google. Companies like this should probably stop pretending they are non-profit charity or labeling themselves as enablers of a 'better world'. At least this way people would have more realistic expectation, but hey, why should a mega-corp care what people really want...
It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
201–210 of 311 posts
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months Yes. Not just over the past 2-4 months, but over the past five years or so. It's become so bad that Google is no longer the most useful search engine for me.
What would you recommend instead?
DDG has become my first stop. It gets me what I need 90% of the time.
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe bad organic results lead to more ad clicks.
Most definitely. But the folk at Google are very smart, very rich, and already run the most lucrative ad platform in the world. Wouldn't hamstringing their flagship product for the sake of a few extra $B/yr harm them in the long run as more and more users switch to other search engines? They had to have considered that and made the change anyway. What's the endgame? I don't feel it's more ad clicks.
I think the endgame ends up very close to same everytime this sort of thing happens.
corp gets good people like it, then they get rich and take on investors. when stocks and investors get involved, then there is an expectation of an ever increasing >RATE< of profit. if that rate decrases then stocks are dropped, and if this goes on long enough, the corp is so interested in maximum profits over a shrinking timeslice that it basically takes all and gives nothing in return, that is the point when it is no longer a service, and exodus begins. [myspace]
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#204While it's become impossible to browse the wider Web with Google, it's getting a bit easier elsewhere. A few helpful search engines: * https://millionshort.com/ * https://wiby.me/ * https://pinboard.in/search/ A recent movement to build personal Yahoo!-style directories: * https://href.cool/ (my own project) * https://indieseek.xyz/ * https://districts.neocities.org/ * https://the.dailywebthing.com/ The above resourc…
I'm collecting "spartan" websites via reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpartanWeb
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#205While it's become impossible to browse the wider Web with Google, it's getting a bit easier elsewhere. A few helpful search engines: * https://millionshort.com/ * https://wiby.me/ * https://pinboard.in/search/ A recent movement to build personal Yahoo!-style directories: * https://href.cool/ (my own project) * https://indieseek.xyz/ * https://districts.neocities.org/ * https://the.dailywebthing.com/ The above resourc…
holy crap, thanks for sharing Wiby! For the past two weeks I have been trying to find an old website by searching for "old mysterious site search engines" and "how to search deep parts of web" and "search engine tricks old site" and Google has not returned anything, even when I limited the time span to 2005-2006. I made the same search on Wilby and it returned search lores (maintained by the hacker Fravia) as the fir…
I just did a Surprise Me! search on Wiby. This is what it came back with ;-)
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anecdotally and perhaps unrelated - has anyone else noticed a decrease in the accuracy and general quality of Google search over the past 2-4 months Yes. Not just over the past 2-4 months, but over the past five years or so. It's become so bad that Google is no longer the most useful search engine for me.
It all started going downhill since Google's "Hummingbird" switch to be honest. Interviewing for Google, I actually brought this up with an engineer in the search team during the lunch. He said they haven't noticed any regressions. I said I figured that would be the case but I can definitely feel the difference as a daily user.
> Google's "Hummingbird"
I had assumed that Google search had gone downhill because it started trying to "personalize" my search results. That wasn't a great explanation though, as I don't use a Google account.
Hummingbird seems a much more likely explanation.
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
How current is that page? Yahoo used Google since 2015.
That just raises the question: To what extend does DuckDuckGo still depend on Bing? I've asked before, and no one seems to be able to provide me with a source that states that DuckDuckGo is just Bing. Yet it comes up every time DuckDuckGo is mentioned in a positive light.
Does anyone outside the company know how DDG works? IIRC a job description hinted at their backend being in Perl, but little else has trickled out. It's easier to find out how Google works, through patents, presentations, the Percolator paper, etc.
Saying that Bing is one of hundreds of sources is like saying that PageRank was just one of Google's 200 signals. Or that Google was just one of hundreds during Bing's hiybbprqag brouhaha.
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#208It's not just the old web. I have a small website that does not show up in Google's results. When searching for the title of the site it's the 7th result on DDG yet does not appear on Google at all (Google runs out of results after 19 pages, which is also ridiculous considering the search is very common). When I search for the domain name (sans tld) on Google the associated YouTube page is the first result, also an u…
Google does have some webmaster tools where, after you prove you own the site, you can check if there's something you have to fix about it to get listed, can submit new URLs for them to scan, etc..
Even if your site is perfect according to Search Console/Webmaster Tools, that won't get you listed on Google Search.
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which brings us to the elephant in the room: what are Google's motives behind this (clearly intentional) change? They are maximising ad revenue, not the search relevance/usefulness.
I was looking forward to seeing someone else share this opinion. So the google behavior is driving some users away, im wondering why others are sticking with it? I propose that in the course of professional contact we should strive to avoid use of google as a verb. Yes i know its not slick to say, "Perform a search - using the search engine." instead of, "Google it."; but it starves a mentality, i think it would disc…
> I propose that in the course of professional contact we should strive to avoid use of google as a verb.
Stopped using "google" as a verb a long, long time ago, in favor of just saying "search". I don't think that's ever confused anyone.
Re: It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also Kenneth Goldsmith's UbuWeb, a curated directory of (hard or impossible-to-find) avant-garde art, music, writing, video. Launched in 1996. http://ubu.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb
This one's great. I've lost count of how many films I've watched that I would have never found otherwise. Here's another big art repository: https://monoskop.org/Monoskop And a very well-documented collection (a "wiki") of paintings, also non-profit: https://wikiart.org
+1, I forgot about Monoskop, a truly fascinating resource.
Another interesting one is Aaaaarg (according to Monoskop's wiki, originally with one less "a", acronym of Artists, Architects, and Activists Reading Group):
Basically it's a collaborative environment for reading, annotating and discussing texts. The content is submitted by users and (thus) of high quality.
I think you need an invite to access the community. Also, the domain used to be aaaaarg.org, but I think they faced copyright issues of some kind and had to find an alternative domain. (Not sure about this; excellent new suffix, though!)
EDIT: More precise description:
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/aaaaarg-org...