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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

#401

Post by pyinstallwoes »

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…

Google results in the past year or two seem extremely odd to me. I see less results than I used to, I see more of the same sites than I used to, and a lot of content that I try to find that I know I used to be able to, I can't.

Oh, and then there's a bunch of weird links that come up to obvious content generated by AI being peddled. Odd.

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

#402

Post by ddingus »

Shared404 wrote: post #397
ddingus wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] http://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/

Thanks. OctoPart can go on your speciality list, fwiw

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

#403

Post by Shared404 »

ddingus wrote: post #402
Shared404 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] http://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/

Thanks. OctoPart can go on your speciality list, fwiw

Many thanks, I would've killed for this about a month ago.

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

#404

Post by ergot_vacation »

axaxs wrote: post #80
gonehome wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

Agreed with everything above. If I ever X vs Y in google, I append site:reddit.com I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but it's about the largest forum. I really miss Forum search in Google.

You too eh? Over the past decade I've gone from loving reddit to actively avoiding it in most cases, but if I'm looking for specific info on a niche topic, adding "reddit" to a search is often the only way I can get real content written by and for real human beings instead of SEO spam.

Sinister twist though: the SEO crowd has gotten wise to this. I've noticed recently that they've started throwing "reddit" into their spam as a random keyword.

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

#406

Post by forgotpwd16 »

It should be noted that Google (applies to other search engines) searches aren't just web searches anymore. Rather Google is frequently used as knowledge engine similar to WolframAlpha albeit not in that level (yet). Specifically a click-less Google search can be:

    spell checking (term "wrng wrd")
    dictionary (term "define word")
    word translation (term "random in greek")
    calculator (term "1+1")
    unit conversion (term "1m in ft")
    weather (term "weather tokyo")
    sport scores (term "uefa scores", or ufc, nba, ...)
    map instructions (term "instructions to nearest city")
For fun search any of the aforementioned terms alone (besides the first one) and with term mentioned in parentheses. Also lots of searches return card information (e.g. "spell checker" or "Issac Newton") or snippets which are seen when searching for instructions. That is when searching something encyclopedic where one-line summary or some simple instructions will suffice means someone will not go ahead and open Wikipedia or any other site.

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

#407

Post by account42 »

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…

> Full-text search isn't rocket science, after all

Full text search isn't, but ranking the results is - and more importantly there is no objectively best ranking.

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

#408

Post by tannhaeuser »

account42 wrote: post #407
tannhaeuser wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Full-text search isn't rocket science, after all Full text search isn't, but ranking the results is - and more importantly there is no objectively best ranking.

Yes, and Google sucks at it.

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

#409

Post by newsbinator »

gxqoz wrote: post #277
newsbinator wrote: post #23

2/3rds of my Google searches are: * current time [city] * [city] weather * [city] covid

Are you like frequently traveling to different cities based on the covid level? Is your behavior somehow changing significantly due to slight differences in covid deaths in your city?

Yes, correct

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

#410

Post by thephyber »

joshspankit wrote: post #393
thephyber wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”?

My take is that if you serve web content to unauthenticated clients, you must expect humans and robot users will look at, remember, and catalogue your content.

To the extent that you want to control your content, you need to take measures to do so. Reject unauthenticated, assert copyright/trademark controls, or do some basic searching to implement open standards which most/all legal agents adhere to.

The thought exercise is moot if you consider how many laws people are governed by in the modern world that they don’t know about but are still expected to learn and abide by. Also worth thinking about what recourse you expect this naive website owner to be able to effect given they have done the absolute minimum to protect their content.

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