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Google is dead. Where do we go now?

circusscientist.com

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Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#281

Post by nobodywillobsrv »

torben-friis wrote: post #274
nostrademons wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…

People didn’t leave social media, social media left them. Instagram used to show your friends, not it shows algorithmic content. Same for the other networks. People are still there but it’s now the new tv.

Everyone should be simply posting algorithmic content to Facebook. Screenshots, etc not giving them your own life stuff imo. We need to push back on personalized feeds. Share a high percentage of what you see so that there is a digital commons and not just some island for each person.

Social media platform used to be less about passive consumption.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#282

Post by egypturnash »

mikepurvis wrote: post #176
nostrademons wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…

Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years. I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbo…

Everyone who was on Livejournal before G+ “invented” “Circles” had absolutely no problem with locking posts to “friends” (people they followed) or various “friends groups” that were subsets of their friends. It was fucking hilarious to see everyone say it was too hard on G+. Just two dropdowns right there on the new post page next to the main text field. Super simple. Creating and editing the groups was a pretty simple task with its own page.

Now that I look back at that I wonder what kind of theories suggest that abilities like that will result in reduced ad impressions, since I feel like every decision made by social sites makes much more sense when viewed through that lens.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#283

Post by socalgal2 »

rickcarlino wrote: post #123

The way people get information online is changing rapidly. I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based. For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they rec…

Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend events) instead of only planners (people hosting events) so it drives people away.

Sadly I don't know any better platform but it seems ripe for a new entry.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#284

Post by rickcarlino »

socalgal2 wrote: post #283
rickcarlino wrote: post #123

The way people get information online is changing rapidly. I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based. For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they rec…

Are you using "Meetups" to mean Meetup.com or just events in general? Meetup.com has completely gone to shit. Trying to find an event is super frustrating. They show the same events over and over. They don't enforce categorization. People mark online only events as in person and the platform doesn't care. They also started trying to charge users (people looking to attend events) instead of only planners (people hosti…

I meant both, and you are correct 100% that meet up has entirely gone to shit.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#285

Post by JKCalhoun »

crazygringo wrote: post #175
JKCalhoun wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser The author admits as much.

The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted? It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful. I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.

Massively? I can't know. I read the article and upvoted 1) because it suggests a rocky road ahead for Google and 2) because, as you may have guessed, I dislike ads, dislike Google's complicity in ads, and so am happy to discuss.

I happen to in fact think we have reached an inflection point. Whether "Google is dead" depends probably a good deal on where they go now.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#286

Post by socalgal2 »

delichon wrote: post #126

Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control. Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not. A browser (exte…

The problem is curation. People will mis-categorize in every way possible just to try to get eyeballs. I see this all over the web.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#288

Post by ninthcat »

levocardia wrote: post #268
fairity wrote: post #125

Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser. As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly. Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers…

Your experience is 100% compatible with the linked article: the seven-figure spender is presumably running a much higher margin business and can scale narrowly profitable ads much more effectively. The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue: a perfectly efficient market with no profit for the advertiser. Google (and Meta et al) are so good that for m…

> The natural equilibrium for a perfect ad market is for the ad spend to be exactly equal to increase in revenue

Not quite, the equilibrium is when marginal ad spend results in no change to profit. The ad spend at equilibrium should result in increased profit compared to no ad spend.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#290

Post by JKCalhoun »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #170
JKCalhoun wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want a list of links that I have to then click through in a kind of Russian roulette—hoping I don't get some kind of SEO crap.

Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap near the top of most of my search results. And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want. If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.

I don't believe I was demanding anything of the sort. If you're happy with Google, enjoy. I am adding my own anecdotal experiences to other's (who appear also to have found search lacking for some time now).
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