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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

#321

Post by hooby »

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?

You are totally right.

Google makes billions from advertisers - the companies who pay for ads, the companies who create those SEO-optimized marketing-pages. Those are the target audience, that Google wants to make happy.

Why would they care about us users? We don't pay for search.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#322

Post by robertlagrant »

dgroshev wrote: post #294
robertlagrant wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree it's not great, but it's not as bad as silently reordering the actual search results.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#323

Post by episiarch »

joelanman wrote: post #178
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…

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.

In the fable it is not a golden goose. This is significant because killing a golden goose would result in golden flesh.

The (not golden) goose lays golden eggs. The recurring time-based nature of the eggs is the key aspect of the fable.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#324

Post by dmvdoug »

liveoneggs wrote: post #306
dmvdoug wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have they ever addressed this in later years? Like, what was their justification for Google becoming the AdMonster it did?

Yes but you can't hear them because they are on yachts

Sounds like a job for the orcas…

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#325

Post by hooby »

wesapien wrote: post #258
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…

Can you give me an example of something you can't find and I'll try to find it?

There's nothing I can't find with Google.

If I do scroll through the search results, select a few promising ones, wait for the page to load (slowed down by multiple fat ads), click away the cookie warnings, reject the GDPR consent, disagree with the newsletter popup,switch to reader mode to remove the visual clutter, scroll down the page skimming the content for the right paragraphs... then I will eventually get the same information, that ChatGPT could just have provided me instantly without all the hustle.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#326

Post by jnurmine »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #114
jnurmine wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year for this to get a search engine that gives the good results without ads, SEO spam and bogus clone sites. That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.

>I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year wow, Search really isn't worth developing.

I might pay more if they didn't sniff any other data from me. Search is just one color of light from the prism, so to speak.

Edit: not beam but color

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#327

Post by sh34r »

Y’all know there are other search engines, right? Yandex is becoming increasingly more useful for politically incorrect content and DMCA violating content. Bing has always been the best for porn. DuckDuckGo is great for many things as well.

SEO becomes a lot more difficult to pull off when there isn’t one search algorithm used by 99% of users.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#328

Post by Quekid5 »

dmvdoug wrote: post #324
liveoneggs wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but you can't hear them because they are on yachts

Sounds like a job for the orcas…

Lol, hope springs eternal :).

... but more seriously: Yeah, their reasoning (now) isn't exactly going to be unbiased and/or unblemished by their own experience. They probably have the most extreme survivorship bias ever. (Not their fault, they just do because of whatever factors got them into the position they're in.)

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#329

Post by Quekid5 »

dmvdoug wrote: post #228
LaundroMat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what Brin and Page said in the paper where they presented Google... "[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" and "[W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm." Both from The An…

have they ever addressed this in later years? Like, what was their justification for Google becoming the AdMonster it did?

They're now richer than god. Why would they care about anything other than money? Societal rules don't affect them very much at this point.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#330

Post by underlipton »

hnbad wrote: post #112
underlipton wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+g... Still waiting on an explanation of fix for this one.

As you can see from the highlighted results, most are not actually exact matches. They're not even fuzzy matches. They're mostly synonyms. The search query also contains a lot of words that would be considered stopwords (i.e. ignored) in a simple keyword search and don't provide much semantic value in a natural language query (i.e. if it is parsed as a question), so those are probably deprioritized. My assumption wou…

It could just find documents with the exact terms, like a search engine is supposed to.
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