And the reason why these small communities are "more trustworthy" is moderation by actual humans. This is always the secret sauce. Google's biggest problem is that they think they can (and that they must) solve everything with automation, but any automated system can be defeated by a sufficiently motivated human.
Google Search Is Dying
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Re: Google Search Is Dying
#42Ironically, Reddit search is terrible so you really have to use Google to do a thorough Reddit search. reddit + search term is a powerful combo on Google.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#43Although it's true that google results for subreddit in the specialty I'm looking for are (to me) top results (because I know I'll probably read from knowledged people on what I'm looking for), most of my queries are more about general trivia and other stuff that no platform like reddit can really encompass better than google it self. I pretty much throw everything at google (like grammar, quotes, places, trivia in g…
You can add !g to a DDG search and it will pull from Google. I'd say the quality of DDG is slightly less than that of Google, but not so often that sometimes having to !g the search is an appreciable problem. I've heard people say that DDG just uses Bing, but I'm not entirely sure how true that is.
The general problem with all search engines is that the moving target of the search algorithm often doesn't move fast enough anymore, and there's so much data that you're virtually guaranteed to have an overwhelming amount of wildly off-topic results. SEO farming has significantly damaged the utility of search engines, too. Finding obscure material is difficult because keywords are swamped, and it's exacerbated by the fact that the overwhelming use of search engines is for common URL lookup or to replace whatever invariably godawful embedded search a website might have. It's mostly DNS for people rather than a tool to actually search the web.
Speaking of, why is embedded search so invariably godawful? It's really quite impressive how useless it usually is.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#44For whatever reason, Quora has been hogging up my search results for the past month or two. It happened suddenly, and now I'll have to use site:URL or similar to get the desired results.
And agree on the reddit thing. Their search engine sucks, and you're stuck with using search engines like google to find anything decent.
Edit: Should be mentioned that google still yields decent results if you're using quotation marks and logic operators - but for free text, it took a nosedive.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#45Some 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…
Working at a marketing agency, I can promise you the Dead Internet Theory really isn't even a conspiracy. It's depressing.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#46Some 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…
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Not sure what woke activists have to do with it. It's not hard to guess whom Google is beholden to from recent search results: advertisers. They are increasingly an ad platform, not a search engine or informational resource. Makes me yearn for the days of the public library, which just might make a resurgence to fill the vacuum Google has left.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#47Just the way Chrome insists on auto-completing searches has seriously damaged the efficiency of my Googling. I'll search something like "Type-97 whatsit making funny noises", get no results, go to search just for "type-97 whatsit" and it adds the rest back on by itself and I get the same useless results from the first time. I don't make the mistake often enough to remember not to make it, and every time I wonder what…
In the category of features that think they know better than the user, I hate whoever decided they should start using word embeddings in searches. For example, you get the same results for "expand" and "extend" with both words highlighted in results when you search for either. This makes google entirely useless for complex technical topics with decades/centuries of established jargon. Searching for mathematics has be…
Try searching "median height" and all you get is "average height". Goddmit
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#48While I do not disagree that google search has degenerated because of ads it still finds what I am looking for better than any other search engine. I just skip ads.
As for reddit - it is the last place I look for things.
The whole article reads as someone advancing the agenda without any real substance
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#49Some 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. Feels like it's optimized for common voice queries, in sentence form. They've sacrificed technical/HN users to focus on this.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#50The other day I was searching for a specific kind of jewelry and realized I don't know of a search engine that can do what I needed, which is to just find good results for my search. Searches for jewelry-related keywords triggered Google to go 90+% ads, and their results (and other search engines' results) were so junked up with spam and the same couple sites over and over that they were useless. We're back to the We…
> We're back to the Web needing a search engine.
I feel like that this has not changed the last 20 years. Yes - google was at some point like a miracle that seemed to solve lots of problems around searching the www for information.
While google "refined" its search and monetarized it the web still evolved and is evolving to something.. different. Many of websites most people already know, competing around google top rankings and ad revenue; there are even people dedicated to "make $website more visible to the web (what they really mean is google)" for lots of money while the real internet goes on in the background.
We need more ways to search the web. We need lots of different search engines that are competing and working together also. The web is still young and no one really knows what it will be in the future. (I fear it has to do with ads. Lots. Of. Ads)