Google has lots of smart employees, why can't they just "fix" search?
"Fixing" search is, at this point, to Google, "getting people to click on more ads"
Google search's death by a thousand cuts
31–40 of 332 posts
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.
I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction…
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Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#33The 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 moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…
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 Summit in 2005 on how to kill it.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#34Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of…
I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.
This happened because a few corporations were able to capture most of the internet due to a mix of laziness on the part of users and also the death of independent blogs and fan sites.
I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or your family. Evil people use the internet to harass other people and to attack their livelihood or put the safety of their family at risk. Many employers now discriminate against employees or even just people applying for jobs who openly express opinions on the internet. And even posting pseudonymously isn't completely safe because it is usually possible to deanonymize posters if an attacker is obsessed enough.
The sad reality is that many people do inauthentic things for the sake of career advancement (think of all the college students who do extracurriculars or projects for the sole purpose of "resume padding") and refuse to do things they actually believe in for the sake of their career. When creating quality online content becomes a risk to career advancement, people are going to stop doing it. In the long term, that means a siloed internet full of corporate propaganda, SEO optimized blogspam and clearly inauthentic posts.
In short, I believe Google search is getting worse because the internet is getting worse. And the internet is getting worse because our society permits employers to have a chilling effect on the online speech of their employees and those who might be their employees someday. And because the independent internet has shrunk dramatically, the handful of corporations that control almost the entire internet can now get away with siloing it off so that's what they're doing.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#35completely tangential, but this thread triggered a wave of nostalgia reminiscing how good the few years around 2010 were (or rather seemed to be through rose-tinted glasses) in tech. Among all else it was an era when it really felt that google did just great on almost all fronts, search included. Web in general was lot less app- and mobile-centric because those things were still pretty new things comparatively.
Well, maybe not that good (2011): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073737
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#36I use DuckDuckGo now almost exclusively for search. It's the default in all my browsers. A few years ago Google still did better for some searches but now I don't feel that to be the case.
It’s a skinned version of Bing and Microsoft has forbade them from introducing any chat-based functionality. Hence their little demo going away quickly and quietly.
I also use it, but if Bing starts to make real gains and Microsoft thinks more DDG users will go to Bing than Google if they kill DDG, they will kill DDG.
They’ve been playing a very risky game for a long time.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…
I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.
Yup, same for me.
It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#38Google's Search is dying because of Thousands of self-inflicted cuts. A couple of years ago there were about 3 or clearly marked ads on the first page, followed by generally useful results. Right now, I don't have the patience to scroll past the ads which are almost indistinguishable from useful links.
The really messed up part for me is that the “real” results are getting so bad the ads are increasingly what I’m searching for.
It’s not a web search engine, it’s an ads search engine.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#39Google has lots of smart employees, why can't they just "fix" search?
Don’t worry, the brain drain is in progress.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#40Since Google collects a lot of personal data from each user, search results for the same query are different and personalized. This seems like a perfect solution - beside the tracking.
For example, if someone searches for ‘python’, Google can use the context to show results about either a snake or a programming language. But what happens if someone wants to learn to program in Python as first programming language and has previously searched for a frog and visited the zoo last week?
In my opinion, the information that Google collects is useless and doesn’t enhance the search results.