Google search's death by a thousand cuts • Hacker News Board

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#231

Post by andersrs » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #100

> What if Wikipedia started charging or restricting API access? Wikipedia has a downloadable data dump that would cost almost nothing to serve to Google, and it has an organisational mandate to make that data available. If they decide to charge for access to that I'm sure Google can afford it. Let's not throw around completely unrealistic hypotheticals.

> What if Wikipedia started charging or restricting API access?

Then my Puzzle Game Redactle (https://redactle.net) would be threatened much like what happened to GeoGusser being charged for Google Maps.

Related to the article: I've also had trouble ranking Redactle on Google because there are a few poorly implemented ad-ridden versions which are part of link farming groups. Many of them pretending to be my 'Redactle Unlimited' brand. Google loves a bunch of spam sites linking to each other more than thousands of links from authenticated users on Reddit, Facebook etc apparently.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#232

Post by ot1138 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:15 PM UTC

Google has sucked as a company from the very beginning. Not necessarily the technology, but the founders and the culture.

How many of you remember back in 2005 or so, when the first lawsuit for delisting was brought against Google by a small business owner? The Google attorney showed up with a complete history of this person's searches and proceeded to demean him in court.

Probably not many of you, because Google buried the story. Today it can't be found (I can't anyway). It was written about in a highly critical book of Google a few years later.

Think Reddit's API story is bad? Google did the same thing back in 2010-2012, slowly tightening the clamps on anyone monitoring them to put them out of business. My company was saved by a call from a famous billionaire to Matt Cuts, after which our little problem promptly disappeared.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#233

Post by tim333 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:24 PM UTC

Reports of Google's death seem greatly exaggerated. The still have 95% share on mobile and 84% on desktop, the latter because Microsoft can make Windows try to force Bing upon you. Google probably have like 99% of the profits in search.

The idea of sites making their data inaccessible is not new. Experts Exchange is still out there siloing the answers but Stack Overflow has all the market share though being open. Google will be fine.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#234

Post by fallingfrog » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:27 PM UTC

What google is no doubt trying to do right now as their highest priority is train their AI bot to sell products to you as part of its responses. I guarantee they are putting 100 times as much effort into that as they are into AI safety.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#235

Post by n4te » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #233

Reports of Google's death seem greatly exaggerated. The still have 95% share on mobile and 84% on desktop, the latter because Microsoft can make Windows try to force Bing upon you. Google probably have like 99% of the profits in search. The idea of sites making their data inaccessible is not new. Experts Exchange is still out there siloing the answers but Stack Overflow has all the market share though being open. Goo…

I switched to Bing recently. It looks exactly like Google with a few extra features and is slightly better at providing relevant results. What Google does is no longer good or unique. As for non-search, Google has killed so many products I will never invest in something new they make.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#236

Post by troupo » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:31 PM UTC

sjkdfkjdsfhjkhs wrote: post #93

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…

It's also not clear why Google killed Blogger. More investment in Blogger with better linking between blogs (the way you can @someone on Twitter) and discovery (#tag searches allowing you to see posts from multiple blogs, curated blogrolls), more realtime/live logging functionality, easy microblogging functionality, etc. would probably have led to a lot more content existing on Google owned spaces, as opposed to bein…

> It's also not clear why Google killed Blogger.

Because they kept chasing "the next big thing" aka "the next product to give me promotion inside the company".

Remember Google Wave? Knoll? Plus? Orkut? Spaces? iGoogle and Sites? Slide? Jaiku? Buzz? Aardvark?...

(I had to scroll through https://killedbygoogle.com to remember some of them)

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#237

Post by barrysteve » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

Probably should save/download whatever you want to keep now...

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#238

Post by Capricorn2481 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:47 PM UTC

ot1138 wrote: post #232

Google has sucked as a company from the very beginning. Not necessarily the technology, but the founders and the culture. How many of you remember back in 2005 or so, when the first lawsuit for delisting was brought against Google by a small business owner? The Google attorney showed up with a complete history of this person's searches and proceeded to demean him in court. Probably not many of you, because Google bur…

Well at least link the book

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#239

Post by thfuran » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:48 PM UTC

CoastalCoder wrote: post #217

DeathArrow wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The evolution of cable television in the U.S. might be instructive. At first, TV (broadcast) was free, with ads. IIUC, when cable TV later rolled out, it was ad-free. Viewers paid for it instead. But eventually even those paying for cable TV were shown ads. So one lesson is that paying for a service might only delay its enshitification. EDIT: It seems I was wrong about cable TV starting out ad-free [0]. So my example…

I think the lesson is that unsolicited advertising should be banned because it corrupts everything it can touch.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#240

Post by dahwolf » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 1:54 PM UTC

LLMs cause quite the paradigm shift.

Before, there was a very strong if not existential incentive to get indexed by scrapers, in particular search engines. Now the situation is flipped where there's a strong incentive to put up ever higher walls, in particular for LLM scrapers.

The difference is obvious: LLMs don't give back. They just rob your life's work and monetize it locally. Why would a platform or its users open up to that?