231–240 of 412 posts
Google provides instant answers for most medical queries, calculations, celebrities, sports, news, weather, how-tos, definitions, reviews, map, shopping, images, etc. Most people don't search outside of queries that google can answer from their own sources frequently so this seems plausible.
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…
I'm really starting to prefer DuckDuckGo at this point. There was one time when I thought they would always live in Google's shadow, but in this brave new world of content censorship and commercialization-induced bias, I find that I get noticeably "better" results on the more neutral alternative.
https://saraacarter.com/google-whistleblower-state-attorney-...
Many moons ago, I put a ton of work into a (now defunct) content site that provided specific information in a small vertical. Each post took hours, but I enjoyed writing the articles, and the revenue from the ads was enough to enjoy a little extra cash every month (we're talking just about enough to cover a car payment, for context). Google decided they liked a lot of the content and started providing it in their kno…
This has already happened. People put content on their sites only long enough to figure out what works, then turn that content into a book that can be sold. Every Cal Newport book came out of his blog posts.
Others are turning content into paid newsletters, courses and Patreon-only walled content.
Wrote something 15 years ago? Just set the "Date Modified" to last week and Google will think it's been updated.
The 'content' you and I are seeing are just second and third-hand summarizations of popular topics written by content marketers.
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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…
Quora can be good too, my go to is usually "question reddit", and if that is not sufficient then "question quora". Quora is spammy too though, so it is hit or miss, but when it hits, it hits good.
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I have a cat that is always ravenous for anything edible, even if it's not exactly typical cat fare, e.g., my leftover salad, berries, etc. Trying to search for "can cats eat X" after he manages to get a few sneaky morsels is almost pointless. There are so many spammy sites for every value of X, and I have no idea if it's a sophisticated problem to systematically exclude this type of useless content, but Google's top…
Yep, this is Content Marketing. People use SEO tools to gauge how good a blog post is going to rank, and the current sweet spot seems to be around 1000 words, so they end up filling it with fluff. Some of those are even machine generated. The answer to the "can cats eat X", of course, can't be at the beginning or at the end. The reason is that the user must stay a long time and read the text, otherwise Google punishe…
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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.
Yesterday I discovered, if you go to the 2nd page of the search results the "site:example.com" no longer works. The user hostility is shocking.
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…
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…
I tried this with a bunch of products ripe for spamming: instapot review, nvidia 3070 review, and Apple Watch review, and the first page results were almost entirely reputable.
I also tried “huggies vs pampers pull ups” and the result is quite a good variety of forum threads, blogs, and reputable articles. “Quasar formation” leads to Wikipedia, but also academic articles and astronomy.com. “How beer is made” is even better quality.
Is most of the web junk? Have I gotten astronomically lucky in not finding it? Are these somehow the exceptions that prove the rule?
(Ironically I think my search terms caused this comment to be flagged as spam..!)
Could someone here shed some light on the possible copyright implications of how Google now rips excerpts from web pages and displays them directly on the search results page? A cursory search shows that there have been a few lawsuits in the past[1][2] but they seem mostly related to the act of indexing/caching web pages and the display of thumbnails. However, Google's new method of extracting and displaying possible…
Google would probably make a "de minimis" defense of the practice. A previous case (Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation 2002) allowed thumbnails in search engines as fair use, but that's not quite the same. And current interpretation seems to be pretty restrictive on what's insignificant enough (witness various music sampling cases). And while any individual result may be small, doing so on an industrial scale is probably not "a trifle" and harm can probably be demonstrated. Ultimately, it would have to be tried to tell.
They might also argue implied license. In cases like meta tags, that's probably reasonable. For straight-up scraping, it's more questionable.
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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.
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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.
