[deleted]
Google Search Is Dying
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#272> The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. It's better than it was in the past!
It's not a trivial task anyway, people use google because the results are still better than anywhere else.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#273I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries. There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals. At least going with a community site ther…
We need AdBlock lists for search engines at this point.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#274> Why is Google dying?
> 1. Ads
> 2. SEO
> 3. AI
4. Censorship
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#275Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…
In my experience, the forum experience is far from dead, but it's effectively impossible to surface in a search engine - any search engine - unless you know the name of the forum. Oh, and the content must also be "fresh". If the content isn't "fresh" (which most of the best forum/blog posts are not), nobody shows it anymore. I can search for a specific blog post using a verbatim quote, but the result (if it exists) i…
The forum experience is dying. I spent about 4 years of my time in-between Google stints working on a searchable feed for forum sites. Finally gave it up when I realize the extent to which the forum scene had died and moved to Reddit & Facebook while I was working on the project.
The root problem is that attention has gone from abundant to scarce, and people already have their habits. That makes it really hard to build a new forum site and attract an audience that's willing to type your URL in every day (and if they don't visit daily, forget about building a viable community). Forum hosts like Facebook and Reddit don't have this problem - you can view your Buy Nothing Group and Moms of Springfield posts interspersed with your feed of friends, or your r/factorio content interspersed with a steady stream of r/AskReddit.
There's also emerging technological barriers. If you don't sign up for CloudFlare, as a new website, you're going to get hosed - but at the same time, CloudFlare makes it basically impossible for any new search engine other than Google to spider the site. Ditto security patches, and keeping software up-to-date. Most people don't want to deal with sysadmin stuff at all, particularly if they're trying to build a community as a hobby. So that pushes people further toward hosted solutions with a turn-key secure software stack, which is Facebook and Reddit.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#276The idea of the whole-web search engine is dead. There's too much junk, and too much incentive to surface it in the name of engagement.
I got so sick of Google's useless results that I started out on a fool's errand. I'm using publicly available, curated or moderated link sources to build my own STEM focused search engine. It'll probably end in tears, but I intend to give it a shot.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#277Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…
In my experience, the forum experience is far from dead, but it's effectively impossible to surface in a search engine - any search engine - unless you know the name of the forum. Oh, and the content must also be "fresh". If the content isn't "fresh" (which most of the best forum/blog posts are not), nobody shows it anymore. I can search for a specific blog post using a verbatim quote, but the result (if it exists) i…
> the forum experience is far from dead
If you find a forum for a given subject, it is almost always an authoritative source filled with experts. This is especially true in engineering disciplines.
It's unfortunate that Reddit and social media took over and led to their decline, because it's suboptimal setup in so many ways.
- Reddit in the large is a high noise, low signal monetization chamber. Some subreddits have good moderation, but that doesn't stop the spill over and drama.
- You can't assume much about any given Reddior, and you won't typically form relationships or associations with them. It's pretty much pseudonymous.
- Reddit doesn't focus on authorship. It doesn't allow inclusion of images, media, or carefully formatted responses in threads.
- Reddit corporate is the authority and owner of all content. They can change the rules at any time, and that's a fragile and authoritarian setup for human discourse.
- Reddit corporate is constantly changing the UI and engaging in dark patterns to earn more money. This flies in the face of usability.
Forums should make a comeback. It would be better if each community had real owners and stakeholders that had skin in the game rather than a generic social media overlord that is optimizing for higher order criteria that sometimes conflict with that of the community.
But forums have problems too. They should be easier to host, frictionless to join, easy to discover, and longer lived.
Another way to think of this: every major subreddit is a community (or startup) of its own and could potentially be peeled off and grown. You'd have to overcome the lack of built-in community membership and discovery, but if you can meet needs better (better tools for organizing recipes, community events, engineering photoblogs, etc.), then you might be able to beat them. Reddit can't build everything, just like Facebook couldn't.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#278Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…
As a bit of a weird hobby, I like to read up on right wing conspiracy theories. That means I do a fair number of searches for specific terms and people mentioned in fake-news facebook/forum posts.
Google seems to slowly oscillate between thinking that I am a right wing loon, and thinking I am Joe Public who must not be shown misinformation. That is, sometimes google is perfectly willing to vomit forth results from the propaganda mills, even when I'm not specifically looking for it, and other times I can't get conspiratorial-minded results even when I am making an effort to find them.
This most frequently manifests itself when I am looking for sources for claims that I know exist. Like if I remember reading an earlier conspiracy that has just been invalidated, or someone posts some a video of someone reading a blog post. If google has decided I am an innocent bystander not to be shown conspiracies it can be nearly impossible to track down the original blog or posts about the conspiracy.
Recency bias is another huge problem with google results. Older content gets heavily de-prioritized, even when it is clearly what you want. Google is willing to give up on terms in your search before it is willing to show you old stuff. For example, if you tried to research early Ukrainian political corruption during Trump's impeachment, your results would be nearly entirely Trump-related content even if you tried to use google's date-filters and exclude terms like -Trump.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#279Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…
> Can people suggest good alternatives I've been on the Kagi beta test for a few weeks now and, for the kind of searches I mostly do, it seems to be a massive improvement on Google. Strongly recommended. https://kagi.com/
Any reasonable justification for requiring sign-up/a user account?
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#280The other day I was searching for a specific kind of jewelry and realized I don't know of a search engine that can do what I needed, which is to just find good results for my search. Searches for jewelry-related keywords triggered Google to go 90+% ads, and their results (and other search engines' results) were so junked up with spam and the same couple sites over and over that they were useless. We're back to the We…
Am I the only one who just skips the search engines and go straight to the source? If I want factual information, I just go to Wikipedia and use their search. If I want to shop I'll go to respected online stores and again use their inbuilt search feature. Obviously I've just built up a list of good sites in my head which I trust... Google search is good for discoverability if you're new to the web I guess? Although i…
Wikipedia is the perfect contrast to google search results.
- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful related links if you need more information.
- Pages are organized and brutalist.
- Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free.
Contrast this to Google:
- 50-100% noise (depending on the query; more information requires more queries and therefore less signal)
- SERP pages are disorganized and absolutely riddled with UX dark patterns (modals, banners, autoplaying video, etc). Many pages with good info are over-styled/over-javascripted/over-languaged, and finding the one or two sentences you're looking for is a chore.
- One-off SEO spam plagues everything; ads and affiliate links are pervasive. Stewardship is a waste of time.