Anecdata: I was searching for macOS stuff last week (trying to get something working because Big Sur has changed a bunch of stuff) and, most of the time, the top results where from 2011-15. Completely useless.
In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
391–400 of 412 posts
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
“Show me results from the last 24 hours”
“Ok: here are results dated 4 years ago, but I gotchu. The ‘other articles like this’ changed last time I crawled it!”
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s hard to see how this isn’t anticompetitive. Using their market power in search to show their own ads but prevent anyone navigating to view any others seems like something that should end up in court.
Google has always respected robots.txt and has well documented how to restrict crawling. I don’t see it as anticompetitive so much as copyright violations. The fact that Google makes advert revenue using this strategy just contributes to damages. Anticompetitive would likely require Alphabet (and potentially other companies) from preventing users from accessing the original web page (which might be possible but more…
Now I’m curious: what would happen if someone had no idea that Google existed (insert wild reason here. I’m leaning towards lived in the woods for 40 years and self-hosts content without reading anything, like a hermited author)?
Does Google still get to say “everyone knows we scrape your content” and “We have instructions about opting out”?
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’m pretty sure Google actually deletes nothing.
The original goal was to have all data digitized in 200 years.
Of course, they remove things from results and from public view, but delete? I suspect no.
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#395Meanwhile, plugging in unfamiliar phone numbers no longer produces useful results at Google.com, as they WANT you to click in for more information.
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#396Google 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…
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…
I get better “ Product vs. Product” and “Product Review” results with ddg these days.
Once I took the time to read one of the sites and it’s obvious it’s generated content, and awful at that. I still reading pros and cons of one of the product and the same thing was mentioned under both, just with different wording.
GPT-3 or similar is going to make this way worse.
The only time I still use google (via !g on ddg, what an awesome feature) is to search for local info or in native language. But even here ddg is getting better, especially if I append the name of my city or country.
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ooh thanks! I'll throw that on the list!
Do you ever publish your list? After reading through this discussion, I am inclined to explore search. This crap sneaks up on a person one little adaptation at a time. Searching on Yandex was a wake up call.
Most of it is here [0].
I update whenever I remember, which is sometimes.
It is currently up to date, except for the above linked engine. It doesn't have as many special purpose engines as I'd like though.
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see any reason why Google can't pay for using your website's content on their search engine. Looks to me exactly like the same deal they've been cutting with media owners from Australia & France. The law should cut this side too. For individual content owners as well.
Generally the price of information is race to the bottom, people shouldn't be expected to get payed anymore. I'm happy to pay for content: I pay for Youtube and Netflix, and they pay content creators. I'm also buying books on Kindle. But when I signed up for the Economist, what I read was significantly worse content than Hacker News comments.
i'm just happy all of you are still commenting for free :)
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#399Earlier 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…
I have a cat that is always ravenous for anything edible, even if it's not exactly typical cat fare, e.g., my leftover salad, berries, etc. Trying to search for "can cats eat X" after he manages to get a few sneaky morsels is almost pointless. There are so many spammy sites for every value of X, and I have no idea if it's a sophisticated problem to systematically exclude this type of useless content, but Google's top…
>Trying to search for "can cats eat X" after he manages to get a few sneaky morsels is almost pointless
Contrary to that I tried "can cats eat salad" and got basically a yes in the first line:
"If your cat loves lettuce and greens, these can be a great source of water, bulk, and nutrients..."
It fits with the 2/3 of searches end without a click though. That was on Google's results page - I didn't have to click.
Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's infuriating when Google prefers the documents that ignore some of my keywords even when there are plainly pages that include them all. I get the sense that there's an over-weighting of broad semantic match, to the detriment of lexical match, in their current ML model, whatever form it is now. It's harming quality for a segment of technical users like ourselves but might be "better" in the aggregate over all user…
They are missing the mark on excellence. Apparently having thousands of PhD's and product managers does not make for a better search experience.
Having hundred of millions of smart people heavily incentivized to game whatever metrics you come up with is a bit of a handicap too.