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Google search's death by a thousand cuts

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#281

Post by stevenicr »

pavs wrote: post #103
stevenicr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they have whole teams of people looking at sites through the lens of the leaked 'quality rater guidelines' - ? I thought it was like a few thousand people in the philippines downranking sites for thousands of reasons - without being transparent about possible biases and such. Maybe I'm thinking of somewhere else. And wasn't there a story about a bunch people who were doing similar as 1099 contractors in the US…

Looking at the quality of current google searches I highly doubt it. I mean I could single handedly remove thousands of domains in a month and improve google search result, I have a hard time believing that they have 1000s of people doing it and the quality is this shitty.

a simple yahoo search-https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=google+quality+raters&fr=u...

first ten results include: theworkathomewife dot com › google-ads-quality-raterHow to Get Paid to Be a Google Ads Quality Rater

Sep 18, 2022 · As a quality rater, you ensure ads on Google – and other search engines – are both accurate and visually appealing. You will be given sample search terms and potential

Forbes - After Months Of Protest, Google Search Quality Raters Finally Get A Raise

ARS - 2017 - https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...

and the google note:https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en

with a hand wavy - these raters don't actually effect the results..

I read dozens of pages of the raters guidelines pdf years ago - and I can see how they are being sneaky with things the 'down rank things that lack trust signals' - which in of itself sounds okay - especially with some situations.. but that exact thing can be used to push down entertainment sites, and can help adwords make more money by forcing lots of sites to pay to show up in the top 10 or miss 90% of the internet traffic.

So I agree that they are pushing shitty results in many search verticals - but yeah it does seem they are using thousands of people to create them this way on purpose.

It's no longer a better search engine - it once was - today it's popular because it's a default on many devices, and the network effects make it so people build their sites and update their listings like it's the only yellow pages in town.

Their high-brow censoring leaves much entertainment and other things better found using other portals to search and find imho.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#282

Post by foobarbecue »

jkukul wrote: post #104
wodenokoto wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they removed the results from index, but I believe they started searching for vectors instead of text matches. Your ids are nowhere in vector space.

Shouldn't it be possible to work around this by wrapping the query in double quotes? Google promises to do an exact match search when wrapping in quotes. So I'd imagine the OP's query should work when the image id is wrapped in double quotes. Otherwise, it'd mean that it's not in the index anymore.

Yep, I tried with double quotes, both times.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#284

Post by benabbottnz »

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…

> The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones

Absolutely. I have a browser extension installed specifically to block domains that are this type of spam from my Google search results, and I’m adding to it almost weekly.

Come on Google, you’re seriously ranking that as front page worthy?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#285

Post by alphager »

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.

That's called Kagi. It exists.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#286

Post by redsaber »

Quenhus wrote: post #131
redsaber wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. Oh I did use ublacklist which mixes blocking in both of the google search and the google image search. But curious what is the filter you have in your uBlock origin?

I'm not OP, but here is my own uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

thank you!

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#287

Post by JohnFen »

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…

> we need AI to generate something more concise, more to the point, more digestible.

This is what I don't want from a search engine. What I want from a search engine is a list of links to places that have relevant information. I don't want the engine to summarize or distill what those places are saying. Too much knowledge and understanding is lost by not doing that myself.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#288

Post by JohnFen »

amelius wrote: post #205
joelanman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.

Perhaps you are simply not the target audience any longer ... I mean, if they can make billions by serving 99% of people, why would they spend billions on making the remaining 1% happy?

One would think that given the purported depth and breadth of our economic system, it would be possible for that system to address all audiences instead of just catering to the most common denominator.

But we've been on a race to the bottom in most sectors for a long time now.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#289

Post by n6h6 »

StrictDabbler wrote: post #222
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 other day I searched for "canned cabbage soup". The mobile website locked into a mode I've never seen before. It would only provide blogspamish recipes for canning your own cabbage soup linked through the tiled suggestion interface. Not a single text-style link was returned and none of the results were pre-canned soups. I scanned though page after page without getting anything else. Oddly, when I searched "canned…

Yeah, I've seen that. I'd have called it "recipe mode" but I like your name for it better.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#290

Post by abramN »

>> Large models are trained on public data scraped via API. Content-heavy sites are most likely to be disrupted (why post on StackOverflow?) by models trained on their own data. Naturally, they want to restrict access and either (1) sell the data or (2) train their own models. This restriction prevents (or complicates) Google’ automatic scraping of the data for Search (and probably for training models, too).

This is going to be the interesting part to me - one HUGE usage scenario for AI would be doing automated searches and distilling results from the web - if sites start preventing that then AI innovation could be stifled - OR we'll see a scenario where the average person is very limited with that their AI subscription can access. We could have a situation where e.g. Fandango prevents AI from searching its site to help people plan their movie outing, but instead has their own model that they'll charge for access. We could have models talking to each other, deals made between the owners of the models for access, and the average citizen uses a search engine optimized for monetization, that may have data that's months out of date but they can pay extra for the model that provides current data.

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