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

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#261

Post by Solvency » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:07 PM UTC

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).

This seems like a yesteryear problem. People today are paying for EVERYTHING in a subscription model.

Streaming services. Midjourney. YouTube. Twitch. Even ChatGPT4.

I would gladly pay $10/mo for an information-centric search engine that filters out all blogspam and supports power queries.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#262

Post by WirelessGigabit » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

atlantic wrote: post #161

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at Miniflux. Works amazing.

Thanks, I will.

In case you're an iPhone user, I can also recommend NetNewsWire. It's a great application to read your feeds on the go.

And surprisingly it's free.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#263

Post by bushbaba » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

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…

AI LLMs are just curating what content to train on vs indexing the www. It’s actually even more gatekeeper-y

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#264

Post by flyinghamster » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

pravus wrote: post #141

danpalmer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On why , or on whether . I personally find Google Search to be pretty great, and recently switched back from DuckDuckGo which I had been using for ~4 years, because I found I was having to use !g in half my searches. It's also noticeable faster. When I'm looking for an answer, I find Google much more likely to give me the answer. So I'm not convinced that search quality is declining. I'd love to see a deep dive on wh…

What's interesting is that I find Google's search quality today to be on par with the quality that existed before Google showed up and changed everything. Whether it is better than all the other garbage isn't really important to me. I want the good Google back.

It's the Circle of Tech. Earlier search engines such as AltaVista and Excite began to return what they thought you were searching for rather than what you were searching for, and Google was the fast, uncluttered alternative. Now the circle has turned, and today's Google looks an awful lot like yesterday's AltaVista.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#265

Post by tim333 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:16 PM UTC

n4te wrote: post #235

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.

Well maybe. But Google dying links on HN are as old as HN yet it endures. Some past links:

Is google's search business dying? (thepoc.net) 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1217737

Is Google slowly dying? 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7779020

Is Google Dying a Slow Death? 2010 (http://brooksreview.net/2010/11/death-google/) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929821

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#266

Post by flyinghamster » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:16 PM UTC

labster wrote: post #29

The cut that hurt the deepest for me is when negated search terms stopped working. You used to be able to get subsets of data, finding things without a homonym, but now the algorithm just gives you the most common results and the most paid ads.

I've been noticing that on DDG as well. Gentleman's agreement, perhaps? I hope not.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#267

Post by twosdai » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:16 PM UTC

Solvency wrote: post #261

courseofaction wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This seems like a yesteryear problem. People today are paying for EVERYTHING in a subscription model. Streaming services. Midjourney. YouTube. Twitch. Even ChatGPT4. I would gladly pay $10/mo for an information-centric search engine that filters out all blogspam and supports power queries.

Totally agree. But I believe we are at the beginning of the willingness to pay for internet services cycle. Many people can't or don't want to yet, but I think in the next 5 to 10 years it will get a lot more main stream adoption.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#268

Post by WirelessGigabit » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #128

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I googled something. One of the results was "title (recommended)". That should be enough for Google to ban the result.

so Google should have a list of titles that if found cause them to ban the result, which frankly might affect people with little personal sites who aren't very good at making sites but just want to put up some stuff they really know a lot about, but anyway is there any other items in the list? I'm pretty sure SEO sites will be able to figure out don't title your page "title (recommended)".

When all this search engine 'things' came about websites were indexed organically.

Then websites started to optimize for what Google actually parsed. Meta tags, no things behind JavaScript, semantic markup etc. And that worked really well. Stuff was easy to find.

Those were the best days. There was some luring, but at least if you were looking for something technical you found it (provided it existed and was indexed).

This is no longer the case. Give you an example:

Any search term for Windows+Error+KB is a nuclear wasteland of companies having copy-paste pages only to sell you their services at the end. Lately the same has been popping up on YouTube.

Any search for an issue with formatting a harddrive lists 20 pages which sell formatting tools.

A search for checking whether a certain animal is dangerous yields wildly inaccurate results just to sell me pest control. Spoiler: it was a Jerusalem Bug. You don't get a fever at all. The thing just has huge mouthparts, and that can physically hurt.

When you put "(recommended)" in your title because you know it's then displayed verbatim in Google is nasty.

All driven by these websites which 'recommend' things to you.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#269

Post by postmodest » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

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…

The entire internet has become a market for ads traded among corporations, and that the ads themselves are useless to 70% of the audience is meaningless because the market has its own momentum now.

The side effect is that the below-median brainpower of the 30% of the audience who doesn't know any better than to watch ads and click on them is now the driving metric for content.

In a world where programming revenue comes from ads, and only idiots see ads, the programming will cater evermore to the tastes of the most-idiotic viewer.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#270

Post by 8note » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

sombremesa wrote: post #256

raxxorraxor wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should be very strong quotation marks. I would say that it is the other way around. We should be glad that not everything is immediately turned into a product.

Bingo. Getting it into production is a non-concern for non-entities with no reputation, but Google has a lot more to lose. The big guys watch and wait, and use their sizeable wallets when the time comes. I have no doubts that Apple is going to eat Meta's lunch soon, for example — a lunch Meta didn't even realize was there, for all their innovation and go-to-market.

Google puts all kinds of things into production, then takes them down again in a year. The reputation is already that google puts out experiments