Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google search's death by a thousand cuts

matt-rickard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 332 posts

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#291

Post by anotheruser13 »

nine_k wrote: post #278
Animats wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. We can point to the exact moment in time when Google turned to the dark side. It was on August 9, 2006, when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] This was the moment that SEO, now officially endorsed by Google's CEO, became respectable. Until then, SEO was considered to be a branch of the spam industry. There were conferences such as the Web Search Spam Squashing Sum…

> web rings and link indexes The popular "Awesome ${whatever}" collections are very much that, link indexes for relatively narrow areas. Curation matters. This is something computers are still bad at, or are too expensive to deploy for a mass-market service.

In general, listicles suck. (Business) Insider is a good example of this.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#292

Post by anotheruser13 »

userbinator wrote: post #91
foobarbecue wrote: post #10

Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? D…

Part numbers, error codes, and similar "high entropy" terms also seem to suffer the same fate. Even worse than giving no results is giving you page after page of "results" containing slightly different numbers/codes.

Same with phone numbers. Most of what is returned has suspicious sites in .ru, .pl, et al.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#293

Post by lucidyan »

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, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google.

I recommend this userscript https://github.com/vladgba/Back2source for avoiding Stackexchange clones, it saved me a lot of time.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#294

Post by dgroshev »

robertlagrant wrote: post #97
_Algernon_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say that google started it. They ate everyone's lunch by including what people were looking for in a box at the top of the search results. Of course sites will respond in kind.

They were better than the incumbents. The incumbents allowed people to buy search ranking.

Google now does effectively the same with their in-search ads. Most of the time the entire space above the fold is just ads.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#295

Post by hsjqllzlfkf »

halflings wrote: post #174
hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #148

This is Google's inability to innovate. Google stated goal was the "organize the world's information". Nevertheless, they didn't come up with Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository. They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Google had early success with search. Then decided to ceme…

> They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Not only did Google make the main breakthroughs that all LLMs still rely on today (mainly attention architecture, and large scale training of DNNs), but they had a chatbot similar to ChatGPT (Meena [1]) way before ChatGPT was a thing. Granted: they didn't release it to the pu…

Yeah I'm sure they had a really good LLM, they just decided not to show it to anyone.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#297

Post by cma »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #110
cma wrote: post #12

In the TPUv4 paper it sounded like Google search moved over to some really crude AI embedding vector stuff. If you search "book of master system" it gives only results for "book of genesis" because it mixes up the biblical book of Genesis with the Sega Master System. Searching any programming terms, like camel-case variable names from a system library without exact quotes, just gives random results about Katy Perry a…

I looked for “book of master system” and it gave me results about the SEGA book. Granted, vectorization could be one of the issues plaguing search, but it isn’t the primary issue.

Yeah it was book of megadrive that gave the biblical genesis results, not master system, I misremembered. It was going around on Twitter a few weeks back.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#298

Post by jrnichols »

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…

> Humans simply can no longer digest it - we need AI to generate something more concise, more to the point, more digestible. Without the marketing, fluff and bait and filler.

I think one of the fears some have about AI/machine learning/etc is that they realize their entire advertising & marketing world could become irrelevant. Users could get short, accurate answers without having advertisements in the way.

Kind of like how things were many years ago.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#299

Post by Semaphor »

THENATHE wrote: post #276
Semaphor wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pinterest Kagi recently released a leaderboard for per-domain customization: https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png They are 2nd for "lowered" and first for "blocked".

Why is w3 so low? I always found it at least marginally helpful.

It is better now, before the revamp, it had incredibly outdated information. Even now, there is very little reason for anyone not to go to the same page on MDN instead, unless they are a literally-just-starting-out beginner (as MDN has more information). That, coupled with them ranking high on organic results, makes people want to block them.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#300

Post by Semaphor »

traverseda wrote: post #210
Llamamoe wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi is amazing but the costs are very non-negligible. :F

More than 1.5 cents per search is a lot, they're pricing model really discourages me from making them my default search engine. A $10 unlimited search would be more justifiable. $15 would be stretching it. If I'm not on a functionally unlimited unlimited plan (rate limiting is fine if it's reasonable) then I have to think about it every time I search. Should I really be searching here or should I be using the search…

There is Ultimate which is not capped. That seems to be what you want?

Personally, my record was below 900 searches and usually below 800, so the 1000 searches (technically 1500 because early adopter) are absolutely fine for me.

Post reply on HN