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

51–60 of 332 posts

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#51

Post by McSwag »

ramraj07 wrote: post #47
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…

Is it just me? 100m doesn’t seem like “a lot” of money to cover legal, rent, infrastructure, engineers, administration, for a “really long time” to me. Having a reasonable buffer seems like a responsible thing to do.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#52

Post by omoikane »

SoftTalker wrote: post #17

I use DuckDuckGo now almost exclusively for search. It's the default in all my browsers. A few years ago Google still did better for some searches but now I don't feel that to be the case.

I am not sure a different search engine does any better in the face of reddit and twitter outages, if those places held the content I want to find.

In the old days, we ran our own personal websites and we want our content to be discovered, in contrast with today where someone else host our content and wants to have a lot more say on what is discoverable. I think we need to have less reliance on centralized hosts if we want more control over searchability of content.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#53

Post by foobarbecue »

moultano wrote: post #20
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…

Can you give an example query and the page it should return?

Sure. Searching M1104273380R should return https://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR-V1.... and this paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19829 .

Interestingly, when I tried this just now, I did get the paper as a result. I could swear I tried this same search yesterday and had zero results.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#54

Post by ramraj07 »

McSwag wrote: post #51
ramraj07 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is it just me? 100m doesn’t seem like “a lot” of money to cover legal, rent, infrastructure, engineers, administration, for a “really long time” to me. Having a reasonable buffer seems like a responsible thing to do.

To run just Wikipedia it seems quite sufficient. It’s KTLO on multidecade old technology with no real upgrade or new feature added in as much time and no exponential scaling needs. They should be set for a decade if not More even if their engineering stack is shit (which it’s not). They publish their spending. They are not spending on their website.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#55

Post by pupppet »

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…

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#56

Post by stevenicr »

nikanj wrote: post #27
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…

I always have a feeling they could get surprisingly far by having one person doing random searches, then tagging all the obvious spam to be deindexed. But Google is very adamant about never hiring a person to do a job well, if AI can be trained to do the same job badly

Don't they have whole teams of people looking at sites through the lens of the leaked 'quality rater guidelines' - ? I thought it was like a few thousand people in the philippines downranking sites for thousands of reasons - without being transparent about possible biases and such. Maybe I'm thinking of somewhere else. And wasn't there a story about a bunch people who were doing similar as 1099 contractors in the US striking because they were not getting a living wage or something?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#57

Post by stevenicr »

hospitalJail wrote: post #21

This post doesnt seem frontpage worthy, but I'll join in on the google bashing whenever I have a chance. The other day I tried to google search 4chan, imgur and reddit came up before 4chan. heck 4chan wasnt even on the first page... On a similar note, they are trying their best to hide wikipedia, now I have to specifically mention wiki most of the time. I have the best website for a specific thing, I do well in quite…

I've written many times that the consistent censoring results makes it ripe for competition.

I firmly believe that many of the algorithm changes for choosing results are based upon ideology, and a desire to push commercial things down below the first page as a money grab forcing people to pay the ppc auction extortion.

Which means worse results for most searches beyond 'local shop open / phone number' - google, the new yellow pages.

New smaller, niche engines; less censored, more federated is what I'm looking forward to.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#58

Post by enos_feedler »

For the years I worked at Google I always wondered when they would update the “organize the worlds information” mission. The reason was simple: information eventually will reorganize itself around everyone trying to make their own money. Not money for Google. It felt like a mission that would only decrease in urgency not bc they are solving it but the world (internet) would get better at it over time

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#59

Post by npsimons »

BestGuess wrote: post #4
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.

that makes a lotta sense even to my ignorant mind. so everyone got login'd prompted since companies make the most money data gatherin or what have you, plus reducing bots, stuff like that, it all makes individual sense and then amounts to search engines not working good anymore. Plus real blogs or websites with real human writing get buried or never shown because of bot or that SEO thing I tried to understand? I'm ju…

I'm all for reducing bots and spam, but registration doesn't seem to have solved that problem for reddit.

On top of this, siloing adds the extra bonus that it breaks things like The Internet Archive. There are a lot of communities on Slack and Discord that are just prime for vaporising without a trace. A TON of knowledge will just disappear once someone decides to turn it off, for whatever reason.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#60

Post by npsimons »

labster wrote: post #29

The cut that hurt the deepest for me is when negated search terms stopped working. You used to be able to get subsets of data, finding things without a homonym, but now the algorithm just gives you the most common results and the most paid ads.

They retired "links:" (or something named similar) to find websites that linked to a given one. Was very useful, and I've been fearing ever since that they will do away with "site:" next.

There was also a time you could paste a URL to a .GPX file into Google Maps and have it loaded. Quick and easy, well before OSM and Leaflet.

Post reply on HN