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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

#381

Post by ratww »

nonameiguess wrote: post #270
ratww wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is Content Marketing. People use SEO tools to gauge how good a blog post is going to rank, and the current sweet spot seems to be around 1000 words, so they end up filling it with fluff. Some of those are even machine generated. The answer to the "can cats eat X", of course, can't be at the beginning or at the end. The reason is that the user must stay a long time and read the text, otherwise Google punishe…

I use DuckDuckGo and haven't used Google in years, but searching "can cats eat asparagus" shows three answers above the fold just in the snippets without even needing to go to the page. Yes, they can, apparently, and it's perfectly safe. No ads in the results, either.

The reason for that is that no professional Content company has made content for "can cats eat asparagus" yet. If this ever pops up on SEMRush or SEOMoz people will start making pages for it, and the results that don't get clicked will be driven to the second or third page.

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

#383

Post by the_duke »

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.

In the new Reddit settings you can disable new Reddit, which will make the regular domain use old Reddit.

No broken links and much better experience.

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

#384

Post by bartread »

alert0 wrote: post #329
bartread wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had similar issues quite a bit recently and have resorted to trying other search engines. Sadly DuckDuckGo, Bing, Wiby.me (!) and others aren't really better. Good search was historically one of the harder unsolved problems on the web, even back in the 90s. The problem is that nowadays we treat it rather like a solved problem when in reality it's still probably one of the harder unsolved problems on the web.

The thing for me is DDG results aren't worse either though. I'd much rather support them than Google. Very often when I use the g! modifier to redirect the results aren't much better.

It seems people have a pretty mixed experience here. I trialled DDG for several months back in 2019 but switched back to Google after I found myself using !g for almost every search.

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

#385

Post by bartread »

_ea1k wrote: post #349
judge2020 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And we're back to my original point that, where it's used, the AI powering search simply isn't very good.

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

#386

Post by doix »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #358
Retric wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've used DDG for years now. They give me the exact same results that Google does, all the time. And why wouldn't they when they're indexing the same web sites. Full-text search isn't rocket science, after all, and it's not like new websites with quality content have surfaced lately given the incentives. I don't even bother to cross-check Google's result anymore, something I occasionally used to do maybe two years ag…

That's interesting, whenever I search for anything programming related the results differ greatly and google always wins.

I actually switched to DDG cold-turkey and didn't use !g at all. Until I couldn't solve some problem and someone in my team said "it's the first result on google", I felt pretty stupid then. Since then I've given up and just automatically stick !g whenever I'm searching anything programming related.

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

#387

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

rchaud wrote: post #233
sharkweek wrote: post #38

Many moons ago, I put a ton of work into a (now defunct) content site that provided specific information in a small vertical. Each post took hours, but I enjoyed writing the articles, and the revenue from the ads was enough to enjoy a little extra cash every month (we're talking just about enough to cover a car payment, for context). Google decided they liked a lot of the content and started providing it in their kno…

> The problem of course arises when content creators stop making the content for Google to scrape and index, what then? This has already happened. People put content on their sites only long enough to figure out what works, then turn that content into a book that can be sold. Every Cal Newport book came out of his blog posts. Others are turning content into paid newsletters, courses and Patreon-only walled content. W…

>Wrote something 15 years ago? Just set the "Date Modified" to last week and Google will think it's been updated.

...which is awful! Try searching for historic information on a viral topic and the results are littered with incorrectly dated listings that may satisfy the search criteria but are from the wrong time span.

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

#388

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

irrational wrote: post #44
sharkweek wrote: post #38

Many moons ago, I put a ton of work into a (now defunct) content site that provided specific information in a small vertical. Each post took hours, but I enjoyed writing the articles, and the revenue from the ads was enough to enjoy a little extra cash every month (we're talking just about enough to cover a car payment, for context). Google decided they liked a lot of the content and started providing it in their kno…

Did they scrape your content and put it into their own database? That is, if you had deleted all of your content, would it still have appeared in the Google results?

I'm pretty sure Google is rather quick to delete dead listings, but their is a twilight period where pages persist in results. This is especially annoying with forums hosting dead and un-archived links.

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

#389

Post by ejjpi »

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…

We are in this situation because people never wanted to pay anything on the web, so we have become the product. That's the price to pay when you want everything for free.

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

#390

Post by joshspankit »

notahacker wrote: post #258
screaminghawk wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that are curious it displays a Quora answer that states: >Thomas Running >Running was invented in 1612 by Thomas Running when he tried to walk twice at the same time. It's actually quite and interesting post if you follow the link. Obviously it's not correct in the purest form but there is justification for this answer.

On the other hand "who discovered running?" quotes a tweet telling a variant of the same joke. I wonder if GPT-3 has learned about Mr Running yet?

At what point do the layers of abstraction and sarcasm become indistinguishable from truth?

I don’t know, but I feel like our societal perfect storm + AI + time will get us there.

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