Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google search's death by a thousand cuts

matt-rickard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 332 posts

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#41

Post by throwaway4PP »

dsab wrote: post #23
foobarbecue wrote: post #10

Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? D…

Try to use yandex instead, it is order of magnitude ahead of google when it comes to image search. Edit: sorry I was convinced you are searching by image, not image id.

It sounds like your suggestion came about by mis-reading the parent comment, but I will offer my 2 cents: yandex.com's english results for hard to find, technical terms are infinitely better than google's.

as someone who remembers How Google Used to Work, Yandex feels like Old Google. It indexes the hell out of long tails, will find exact, specific terms and phrases, and 100% respects generic search operators such as exclude "-".

do I look for news articles on it? hell no. do I find the unfindable (on google, and increasingly, on duckduckgo)? yes, I do.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#42

Post by wpietri »

Quekid5 wrote: post #37
cout wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.

Yup, same for me. It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)

Totally. Advertising is fundamentally about distracting someone so you can put money in your pocket without regard to the impact on that someone.

I have a lot of complaints about, say, McDonald's, but they make their money through giving people something of value to them. Advertising legitimizes the making of money in a way unrelated to value delivery. (The same is true about a lot of finance.)

When you combine that with up-and-to-the-right numerical goals and standard executive incentives, over time you pretty much guarantee what Doctorow calls "enshittification". Delivering value becomes at best a side effect of the system.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#43

Post by collaborative »

xbkingx wrote: post #18
superasn wrote: post #14

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google…

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…

I am trying something different that might work for you with aisearch.vip

The challenge will be staying true to not showing ads, respecting user privacy, and not requiring a subscription. So far, the only thing that works is free daily quota + pre-paid

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#44

Post by tommica »

bdw5204 wrote: post #34
monsieurgaufre wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.

This happened because a few corporations were able to capture most of the internet due to a mix of laziness on the part of users and also the death of independent blogs and fan sites. I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or…

Most people just don't have anything interesting to say

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#45

Post by troymc »

Unlike the author, I'm not very worried about Wikipedia. Yes, they ask for donations, but that's not a sign that they're dying; donations are their main revenue source. That might be unusual among the web's top sites, but it's not in the grander scheme of things, i.e. there are lots of charities and nonprofits.

I didn't know that LLM training sets used Wikipedia. I would have thought that the CC-BY-SA license (on all text) would keep them away. It's not like Chatbot-4000 can cite all the Wikipedia articles used to train it, nor is Chatbot-4000 going to license all its output under a CC-BY-SA license (as required by the license terms).

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#46

Post by redsaber »

superasn wrote: post #14

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google…

> There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this.

Oh I did use ublacklist which mixes blocking in both of the google search and the google image search. But curious what is the filter you have in your uBlock origin?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#47

Post by ramraj07 »

troymc wrote: post #45

Unlike the author, I'm not very worried about Wikipedia. Yes, they ask for donations, but that's not a sign that they're dying; donations are their main revenue source. That might be unusual among the web's top sites, but it's not in the grander scheme of things, i.e. there are lots of charities and nonprofits. I didn't know that LLM training sets used Wikipedia. I would have thought that the CC-BY-SA license (on all…

Wikipedia has assets north of 100MM last I read about it. They don’t need donations to run the core wiki media products for a real long time. Their appeal for donations is absolutely distasteful and misleading. All the money they get they use for projects a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with. Such disingenuous behavior from supposedly the “best of us” is why public loose trust in all of modern progressive movement.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#48

Post by paradox460 »

cout wrote: post #30
xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…

I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.

I've used uBlocklist to filter these things since Google removed that feature

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#49

Post by ramraj07 »

not_your_vase wrote: post #2

Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of…

Google search is broken because the internet has evolved in the AdWords era. Every person with a heartbeat has realized the monetary potential of making money from page views and SEO, so there’s a race to the bottom to capture the top spot for every search term in Google. Even if Google comes at it from an objectively user centric perspective this seems like an insurmountable problem to solve. But adding insult to the injury, post Sundar Google is just IBM/oracle at this point. So it’s just circling the drain at double the acceleration.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#50

Post by cout »

atlantic wrote: post #28
underlipton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction…

One of the applications I used to use on a daily was Google Reader. Then one day, they just shut it down for no apparent reason, and that was that. They don't seem to be focused on customer satisfaction. Hard to understand.

I think you meant to say user satisfaction? Or did you pay for google reader?
Post reply on HN