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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#341

Post by pinot »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #59

Still in shock that they killed reverse image search and replaced it with some useless AI tech demo. It used to use the actual image and be able to provide context from where that image was found elsewhere. Now it seems to throw the image at AI and the AI will go "Oh that's a street" then they will just show you streets with similar colors as the image you put in. Completely useless for trying to locate what movie a…

GIS now includes screenshots autogenerated from YT videos. Sometimes helpful but if I wanted to find a video I’d do that.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#343

Post by ghostly_s »

vlunkr wrote: post #304
eloeffler wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an article and later integrate feedback from internal review. Otherwise the payment became too low. The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on t…

The other day I looked up the wordle answer (I know I know). The first result was a site where I had to scroll through about 19 paragraphs of SEO vomit to get to the answer. The page could literally have one word on it and serve it's purpose. If that isn't a sign that the the internet, or at least google search, is dead, I don't know what is.

There's a whole industry of sites like this for NYT crossword answers, to the point that it's often impossible to get any organic results at all for something that's been clued in the Times, which is frustrating because I don't just want the answer (there's a button in the app that does that already), I want to learn about the thing I’m unfamiliar with. Luckily, most topics that come up have some content on Wikipedia so I go there instead.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#344

Post by ForHackernews »

foobarian wrote: post #93
cosheaf wrote: post #23

It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam t…

Wonder how we could set up an alt-web without the incentives that cause this problem. Delist any for-profit site? How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?

You could check out https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

It's a new internet protocol (NOT www) designed to be minimalist and interesting to hobbyists.

> How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?

The same way they did in the web 1.0 days - somebody would maintain the server themselves, or pay to have it maintained.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30072085

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#345

Post by sinyug »

pdimitar wrote: post #166
sinyug wrote: post #24

I moved to DDG a few years back and don't miss Google. While it is possible that Google might have provided similar results to what DDG did for the same query, I have noticed that when DDG fails to provide good results, Google fails with it. And the author is right about appending the site name to the query (reddit etc). Sometimes, it is the only way to avoid the crap that the search engine would otherwise provide.

Sure, but just lately DDG started deteriorating for me as well. Maybe that coincides with another big update they did and didn't tell anyone about it -- looking for certain phrases that describe sex no longer works. A lesbian friend made me aware of that; she recently complained that she can no longer find porn through DDG queries so she started bookmarking various such websites and is going to them directly. ...What…

> Sure, but just lately DDG started deteriorating for me as well.

Might be an issue with one or more of their backends censoring certain phrases in a sporadic fashion. While they do have their own crawler,[1] I don't think it has a significant effect on the breadth or accuracy of their results.

[1] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#346

Post by kjkjadksj »

Have you ever utterly failed to extract information from google and just given up entirey? This happened to me most recently when I tried to look up what model snowboards are used by certain athletes in the winter olympics.

You cannot bring up a relevant result. The minute you add the athletes name and snowboard to the query, no matter the surrounding terms, it just brings up the media dump of articles about the snowboarding event, not the equipment.

I ended up giving up, I couldn’t believe I couldn’t find anything relevant no matter how hard I racked my brain coming up with different terms for my query. What a frustrating experience when the tool you’ve relied on for 20 years has stopped proving itself to be reliable.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#347

Post by selfhoster11 »

madrox wrote: post #327
softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…

That inauthenticity comment really hit home for me, too. I realize that I do not trust the internet at large, and haven't for a long time. That's been the real trigger for my retreat from mass social media into smaller, tigher online communities. Even HN is starting to feel like it wants to sell me something.

The latter feeling may be because HN is run by a startup accelerator. They run literal native ads on the front page whenna startup they sponsor goes live.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#348

Post by mrctte »

bnralt wrote: post #308

An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…

Yeah, those pages are definitely auto-generated. Static site generation makes it possible for those types of pages (I call them "shims") to jump to the top of the results list. I wrote about it here: https://zestyrx.com/blog/nextjs-ssg

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#349

Post by coffeefirst »

judge2020 wrote: post #19
softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…

> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…

Right, although piping junk into the search box and expecting it to bring back something useful is trained behavior.

I've been using DuckDuckGo a lot more recently and the thing that surprises me isn't the kind and quality of the results, it's that I actually need to use my brain to search.

It's not about whether this is a good or a bad thing—I kind of like the precision in a way, it's just jarring how different it is as an experience.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#350

Post by dheera »

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…

As soon as Google removed Wikipedia as the first result of everything they started dying.
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