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In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

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Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#341

Post by fomine3 »

bcrl wrote: post #295
gonehome wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search Google now I mostly get spam. “Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads. “Product Review” -> same as above, spam. “Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes. Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful. Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occa…

Amazon search is similarly broken. Try to find an ECC DIMM on Amazon. Everything I try results in dozens of listings for non-ECC DIMMs. Even searching for " ECC" doesn't work all that well. It's sad that in these days of advanced neural networks, we can't get a simple binary attribute matched correctly in search results.

That's because they called "non ECC"

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#342

Post by tfehring »

Retric wrote: post #310
lordgrenville wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam. Easy for me to believe. They have to use some formula, and as soon as they change it, well, there's a massive industry dedicated to getting around it. If their algorithm is just "filter out what's useless", that's AGI.

Then what’s the point of using Google? In terms of AGI, we have that if Google where to say employ people to look at say the top million searches and heavily penalize junk they could make real headway. Personally, I swapped to DuckDuckGo in 2019 and have been consistently happier but Bing or whatnot is probably equally valid at this point.

I use DuckDuckGo by default but I probably add !g to redirect to Google 2/3 of the time. DDG seems to be a little bit worse about rewarding user-hostile SEO spam [0], but honestly the main reason is that with Google I can use [1] to block those domains. DDG is also still noticeably worse for vague or complex queries IME.

[0] When I search "postgres array_agg" on DDG - something I actually had to search for today - the Postgres documentation is the 6th hit (not even visible without scrolling down!), preceded by crap like https://archive.is/7JeSe. On Google it's the 2nd hit, also preceded by what seems like SEO spam.

[1] https://github.com/wildskyf/personal-blocklist

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#343

Post by totetsu »

pkamb wrote: post #320
typon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For pretty much any product or review related search I just do " reddit" and then scour the somewhat up voted posts for information. Have to deal with tons of dead links though for any post older than a couple of years. The Web really seems like it's an awful place. The original dream of hyper links is really dead. It's all about jumping from walled garden to walled garden through tricks and luck.

1. Search " reddit" 2. AMP page loads 3. "See Reddit in... App or Browser?" banner w/ grayed out page. Tap Browser. 4. Click through the AMP page to the real Reddit page. 5. Second "See Reddit in... App or Browser?" banner w/ grayed out page. Tap Browser. 6. Fail to read the majority of comments, which are hidden by New Reddit. 6. Manually edit URL bar to replace "www." with "old." 7. Read the comments.

That's still more user friendly than trying to read peoples instagram without an account.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#344

Post by Proven »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #311
gonehome wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search Google now I mostly get spam. “Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads. “Product Review” -> same as above, spam. “Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes. Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful. Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occa…

Product vs Product -- I hate those generic websites that compare everything to everything. I am absolutely sure that Google can detect and downrank them. Why doesn't it? Maybe most users like those links, and Google is happy to oblige by keeping them at the top? In that case, I suppose, I should blame the mass market taste rather than Google. I think the future of search is in finding trusted results, such as those u…

Why? Because they get clicked on by users who want to buy crap and won't read anything long, or don't want to visit 4 pages to compare 3 products.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#345

Post by ChefboyOG »

nwienert wrote: post #202
gonehome wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search Google now I mostly get spam. “Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads. “Product Review” -> same as above, spam. “Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes. Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful. Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occa…

There's a common thread in every one of the good sources of search information: user curated content. Usually: voted on/curated by members who are specialized in some way (reddit, so, hn, wikipedia to a degree). The fallbacks are editorial sites. If you make a search engine that focused on indexing user-curated sites + results outside of that that are themselves curated/voted-on by your search engine users (ie, you a…

This is the essence of what Google implements. Links between sites are a form of user curation, user behavior (clicks, read throughs, bounce rate, etc.) are like inferred votes. The problem is, everything is gameable. Marketers abuse reddit as well, it just isn't quite as profitable as ranking #1 on Google. If a major search engine implemented a voting model, it too would spring an entire industry of "optimizing" for rankings via upvotes.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#346

Post by perl4ever »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…

I got so annoyed with Google that I set my default to duckduckgo and/or Bing, but now I've gotten in the habit of switching back to Google constantly, because once I am directly faced with the quality of the other options, they suck.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#347

Post by Proven »

Arnt wrote: post #82
BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…

Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago. Because every search I've done today produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results, above the fold. I can't say I've really counted how many days that's true. I can't even say that I really remember what searches I did yesterday or the day before. But if I'm not totally weird and google searches were dramatically bett…

They had the feeling lucky button because the chance the answer you wanted was ranked #1 was significant.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#349

Post by _ea1k »

judge2020 wrote: post #339
_ea1k wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing very similar issues. Google seems to heavily favor sending people to the sites with the highest content volume instead of the highest quality content. The worst thing is that content creators are manipulating this to build content farms full of low quality content and overwhelming ad volumes. I miss the old web where Google was really great at finding that one guy's blog post that was actually useful.

> instead of the highest quality content That's a tall order - Google doesn't know the quality of the content, only how popular it is. Right now it's based on data science pooled from existing search result clicks, but originally it was based on the amount of backlinks each site had - so instead of user viewership and satisfaction, it was dependant on the amount of nerds at the time who had already found the site/art…

> That's a tall order - Google doesn't know the quality of the content, only how popular it is.

True, and I suspect that is why noone really does it better.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#350

Post by ocdtrekkie »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #260
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To my knowledge, Google has not denied any information requests they've received Your knowledge stops very short in this area then. Google is utilizing the entire playbook to delay and obscure information from antitrust regulators. For example, Google almost always responds to requests for response from regulators on the last legally permissible day to do so, often after requesting multiple extensions. Here's an ar…

I started to write up a whole thing, but your hn history and linked twitter shows you're very openly rabidly anti-google. That's fine, and in general I'd even mostly agree with you. I draw the line at suggesting government raids of private companies, though. That won't ever be a good idea.

There are a lot of companies I am pretty anti, to be fair. Find me say one nice thing about Facebook. Or Tesla.

I would say in the case of big tech companies, I am concerned the standard playbook is no longer viable. They often are more powerful than the countries that would regulate them, and they use threats and market manipulation to overpower nation states. There are now multiple examples where a company has used withdrawal or suspension of services to force a country to undo or roll back a law, or where a company has outright bought a political measure that repeals legislated protections for individuals.

The sole place sovereign nations still have the upper hand is arguably physical force. I think we need to start looking at some of these companies as organized crime, not civil violators.

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