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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#511

Post by bigthymer »

fishtoaster wrote: post #388

I don't know that I agree with the thesis that it's dying, but I think the symptoms it describes are very real. Searching for "good restaurants in " is useless. Entire real companies exist to fill the top few slots on that search for any given city. My workaround is, as the article says, to search Reddit instead. Look for the subreddit dedicated to that city, then find their most recent thread on good places to eat -…

> I strongly suspect this only works because it's not a widely-known strategy

I think this post in combination with HN users' comments indicates that this is a widely-known strategy. It's cool. I've been doing it too and didn't know that everyone else did it too. Reddit is already being secretly advertised on but I guess we'll see how things end up.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#512

Post by smrtinsert »

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some 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…

Dead Internet Theory is totally believable. I remember back in 2006-7 or so, being slightly curious about putting up a food review site because I was really angry at my local X food establishment. I found places were you could buy complete restaurant database ready to be scripted onto the web for maybe 90 a pop. The data was actually pretty good, but I was shocked by the huge community around flipping these dbs into internet spam. For the very high majority these were hungry business types who could barely open a code editor without asking for help. I only expect the problem has gotten exponentially worse since then now that ai generated content has improved in quality.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#513

Post by theyeenzbeanz »

Google search has been next to useless for me at least in the past few years. Results use to be on the spot, and now I get wildly various results that have nothing to do with what I looked for. The biggest issue is it trying to substitute words which renders my terms useless. Then there’s also the quora answers showing first and most answers there are being paywalls now.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#514

Post by ColinHayhurst »

gjvc wrote: post #356
ColinHayhurst wrote: post #120

Is Google still a Search Engine? Or is it rather an Answer Engine? Answers are more-and-more provided on what used to be SERPs, but now is too often dominated by answers on the page, ads, and big marketing budget SEO optimised landing pages. We still believe in the value and power of discovery; call us old-fashioned but we focus on 10 blue links using an independent index. Your vanity search maydisappoint, and our ra…

This is an important distinction, albeit semantic and somewhat contrived. If I believe the earth is flat, I may find much evidence to corroborate that theory via Google. Though I may ignore the overwhelmingly greater volume of evidence to the contrary, I will still find what I want. So is it now a search for "the facts" or "the facts that I want" ? The AdSense model is arguably tilted towards the latter.

It is. We also see this as an issue of "objective search". Two users we think should see exactly the same set of results, for a given query and settings they can control (eg location/language setting). That's another positive that comes from our stance on no-tracking; with no harvested personal data, we can't "personalise". So no steering users into content reinforcment whirlpools and/or ad-pulling filter bubbles.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#515

Post by scher »

Reddit is a great source of people's discussions and quality posts on various topics. When I tried to find people's pain points to automate collecting problems to solve(and now it's an advanced Reddit search tool[1]), I found out that niche forums are great places to collect them. However, it's difficult to find more of them, plus scraping the data is time-consuming(custom parser for a new forum). And, the most important thing, there are not so many discussions that one may find on Reddit.

What I like about the website, it's you can find a huge amount of subreddits, every one of them dedicated to a niche topic that people there are willing to discuss. They share opinions, actively engage in discussions, and help in moderating good content. Is there any other place like this? There are many situations when one still be preferring Google, but as for niche discussions I don't see any other good place to visit. Maybe it was Quora before, but now it's a spam place.

[1] https://olwi.xyz

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#516

Post by robbyking »

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some 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…

> The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit

Are you a fan of r/mtb or r/mountainbiking?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#517

Post by visarga »

brimble wrote: post #5

The 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…

They have the buyer ready to buy and still missed the sale because they wanted to make a profit on ads. How ironic. And this kind of experience probably turns a lot of buyers off from using Google search.

We don't need your unrelated ads, we already know what to buy, don't patronize us. We need help getting to the product page from keywords. We need real reviews. We need a shopping experience we can trust.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#518

Post by emodendroket »

judge2020 wrote: post #19
softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some 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…

I honestly find it pretty helpful. You can type "russian murder painting" into Google and it will come up with Ivan the Terrible and His Son. All that hinting may be annoying if you know exactly what you wanted, but I'm not a specialist in everything I ever search for.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#519

Post by [deleted] »

eloeffler wrote: post #60
softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some 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…

About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an article and later integrate feedback from internal review. Otherwise the payment became too low. The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on t…

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