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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

#201

Post by DeathArrow »

courseofaction wrote: post #188
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).

Once someone had something for what he perceived as free, it's hard to convince that person to pay.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#202

Post by DeathArrow »

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…

Is there a good list of spammy sites for uBlock Origin?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#203

Post by Gremblin »

Over 50% of searches don't end up to being a click to a site which means less and less traffic is gained from Google who still monetizes the data they have scraped and the answer they give to users who search.

For content creators this has meant they need to find more and most importantly more agressive ways to monetize their content since less and less traffic means you need to show more ads to keep the money flowing. If google lowered the amount of answers it actually gives and would lead people to click on the sites more there would be less ads and users would be happier as well and there would be less paywalls as well.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#204

Post by 4ggr0 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #193
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…

> Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository I have some doubts about the quality of Wikipedia content. Everything that can be politicised is politicised , everything that can be played in order for someone to advance his/her plans or point of view is played. Apart from bad faith, some article lack relevant info or contain errors due the volunteer nature of it.

I know what you mean but if we consider that Wikipedia is the only such existing platform of that scope, it still technically is the one with the highest quality :)

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#205

Post by amelius »

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.

Perhaps you are simply not the target audience any longer ...

I mean, if they can make billions by serving 99% of people, why would they spend billions on making the remaining 1% happy?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#206

Post by DeathArrow »

pupppet wrote: post #55
xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

I thought Altavista was the dominant search engine, not Yahoo.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#207

Post by yosito »

courseofaction wrote: post #188
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).

Which points to the tragedy of people confusing libre software with gratis software.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#209

Post by windexh8er »

DeathArrow wrote: post #193
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…

> Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository I have some doubts about the quality of Wikipedia content. Everything that can be politicised is politicised , everything that can be played in order for someone to advance his/her plans or point of view is played. Apart from bad faith, some article lack relevant info or contain errors due the volunteer nature of it.

Being of the "highest quality", in this case, is comparative to the landscape we have available. With that said I believe it may be the highest quality open information repository.

And if it's not - then what's better?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#210

Post by traverseda »

Llamamoe wrote: post #154
Semaphor wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pinterest Kagi recently released a leaderboard for per-domain customization: https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png They are 2nd for "lowered" and first for "blocked".

Kagi is amazing but the costs are very non-negligible. :F

More than 1.5 cents per search is a lot, they're pricing model really discourages me from making them my default search engine. A $10 unlimited search would be more justifiable. $15 would be stretching it.

If I'm not on a functionally unlimited unlimited plan (rate limiting is fine if it's reasonable) then I have to think about it every time I search. Should I really be searching here or should I be using the search box on stackoverflow or github or Wikipedia? Just introduces some constan cognitive frisson to the experience.

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