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In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

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Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#261

Post by amaccuish »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

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…

And half the time I click the wrong thing because the related pages thing slides into view just as I click. That javascript can burn in hell

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#262

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

gonehome wrote: post #63
BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

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…

"Most of the rest of the web is junk."

Google today limits how much of "the web" (their index) they will let you see.

You are only seeing what they choose to allow you to see.

Google, not the user, determines "relevance" and Google automatically excludes results. in theory this sounds useful. In practice, Google is now limiting max number of results to 200-300 or 500 if you add &filter=0. Retrieving 501 search results for a single search is not allowed. Sorry.

Try a search for some common phrase like "the web". Surely this phrase occurs on more than 500 web pages. Yet Google will limit you to only 231 results. Does that represent the entire www. Then you try "repeat the search with the omitted results included". Google then limits you to 466 results. WTF. What if you searched page titles for some string. Is every string you search going to be found in less than 500 pages.

Google search results today are not representative of the entire www. Not even close.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#263

Post by CodeIsTheEnd »

shtack wrote: post #53
Jonnax wrote: post #2

I would say that's about right for me. I Google things for information which I can glean from the search results more than looking for a website. Like what's the definition of a word or a quick calculation is easier than opening the calculator. There's even a metronome if you search metronome.

+1 to this. Weather, translations, timezones, quick math, sports scores (searching “nba” gives a much cleaner interface than going to nba.com), not to mention Wikipedia snippets. That easily covers >50% of my searches.

If you're looking for a clean, fast interface for sports scores, I built https://plaintextsports.com to do exactly that.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#264

Post by bttrfl »

If I were to build my own search engine:

- I'd make sure that multipurpose sites get lower ranks, ecommerce with a blog would get worse rank than a stand alone blog or an ecommerce. this would eliminate all the content marketing and owners would have to focus on their core business

- I would put a cap on amount of content that increases rank. A website with a million recipes harvested from other sites won't be better than a blog with 10 quality recipes.

- I would downgrade rank for use of third-party cookies, invasive ads etc.

- I would give users an option to "mute" a website

- Randomise top results to make sure no one can "occupy" top spots.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#266

Post by lordgrenville »

dmart wrote: post #235
ratww wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam from the results. It must be profitable somehow for the majority of search results to be utterly useless.

> I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam.

Easy for me to believe. They have to use some formula, and as soon as they change it, well, there's a massive industry dedicated to getting around it. If their algorithm is just "filter out what's useless", that's AGI.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#267

Post by rurp »

Shared404 wrote: post #174
axaxs wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome, how did I not know it existed. Thank you!

Always happy to help! I try to "collect" search engines, so I'm always interested in finding more/sharing the ones I've found.

One I just recently discovered is symbolhound.com. It's nice because it lets you search for characters that google absolutely refuses to treat as search terms. I needed to debug some makefiles and bash scripts the other day (not my strong suit!) and it helped me understand some of the weird syntax I was seeing.

As others have mentioned, Google no longer respecting literal search terms has made it much worse for many types of searches. DDG had been great at this, but sadly has been following in Google's footsteps the past few years.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#268

Post by rurp »

jader201 wrote: post #259
cmckn wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the "problem" here is bad search results -- I think the lack of clicks is thanks to search results becoming much richer. The "card" style answers that show up more and more often mean I don't have to actually visit the site where the information originated (which publishers despise, for good reason). Take a common search I made last year as an example, "covid king county" -- I almost never ended up visi…

Yeah, the parent and most its children are focusing on something not even related to the article — this is about providing what the user is looking for without the need for more clicks. While it’s an unpopular opinion on HN, there’s no denying that from a user perspective, that’s only a good thing.

Card results might be a good thing overall, but they certainly aren't only good. In many cases, adding the cards takes revenue away from the exact people who collected or created the content to make them possible in the first place. We'll never know how many websites shut down or never got created to begin with given Google's history of crushing the revenue from various sites on a whim.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#269

Post by bridanp »

jader201 wrote: post #259
cmckn wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the "problem" here is bad search results -- I think the lack of clicks is thanks to search results becoming much richer. The "card" style answers that show up more and more often mean I don't have to actually visit the site where the information originated (which publishers despise, for good reason). Take a common search I made last year as an example, "covid king county" -- I almost never ended up visi…

Yeah, the parent and most its children are focusing on something not even related to the article — this is about providing what the user is looking for without the need for more clicks. While it’s an unpopular opinion on HN, there’s no denying that from a user perspective, that’s only a good thing.

I definitely read this like the two of you. If the information being shown by Google results is what I need, there isn't a need to click further. On top of that, many of us have been "trained" that products like ZScaler are going to block most sites and register a hit with InfoSec. I'm not going to click on bobsfunmainframefacts.com if Google scraped the needed info for me.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#270

Post by nonameiguess »

ratww wrote: post #176
dundarious wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use DuckDuckGo and haven't used Google in years, but searching "can cats eat asparagus" shows three answers above the fold just in the snippets without even needing to go to the page. Yes, they can, apparently, and it's perfectly safe. No ads in the results, either.
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