I could live with all the nonsense SEO hacking results and the ads if it worked. But today it is like it is misinterpreting everything you put into it like some bad comedy movie.
Google Search Is Dying
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The other day I looked up the wordle answer (I know I know). The first result was a site where I had to scroll through about 19 paragraphs of SEO vomit to get to the answer. The page could literally have one word on it and serve it's purpose. If that isn't a sign that the the internet, or at least google search, is dead, I don't know what is.
It’s like a DDoS attack on your mind (distributed because everyone is doing it). The attention span economy at its finest.
Reminds me of those ways to catch spammers or bots by occupying some of their resources with meaningless tasks for as long as possible. Except it’s turned around.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s even any real money in ads anymore or if it’s just a giant circle jerk that slowly destroys society…
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#523It's also categorically broken in somewhat basic ways recently.
1. I searched a term, and there were not many exact results for it, with the suggestion to try verbatim search - clicked it, quotes where added, and then the _same suggestion_ appeared with added quotes. I kept clicking until I got a few hundred quotes in a row and google thought I was a bot. 2. Just today I searched for a camera related term, any many results appeared from one website with the suggestion to search for more results only from the site. For some reason, that search returned only a single result.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#524Ah, young whipper snappers, everything old is new again, and clearly the world is always getting worse. Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing 'Cached' pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad. Long before Reddit was big, USENET/DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb/UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite…
> What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out The problem as I see it is Google has created a bunch of perverse incentives to make your page rank higher. One big problem is Google gives higher rank to "comprehensive" articles. On the one hand that would seem like a good thing right? But what…
While that may be true, it’s also true regardless of the ranking algorithm or which web search is the winner.
Webspam will seek to game whichever search company has dominant market share and they will structure their spam to overcome the filter and ranking specifics of that engine.
Considering tools like GPT-3, one could easily imagine in the limit, a spammer running a large number of searches through a search engine, finding out what ranks high, and the training a generative model on that dataset to produce similar articles. Auxiliary signals like inbound links and DNS records they can also usually work around by purchasing domains or buying inbound links.
It will always be a war and there is never going to be a victory over webspam. Even with something like web3 where posting content costs money I can imagine ways spam.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#525It's interesting, and quite concerning, that Reddit has cemented its position as a key repository of useful information on just about everything just as its drive towards monetisation really kicks into gear. It's concerning because, as part of that monetisation strategy, Reddit is becoming increasingly walled off and anti-user. I am sure I am only one of many long-time Redditors who have vowed to stop using the site…
Can I ask what the important differences of old.reddit.com are?
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#526Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…
> Google with site:news.ycombinator.com if I want to find "forum-like" discussion on topics I'm interested in.
Use https://hn.algolia.com/ instead. You can see your results as you type your query and even sort it based on time.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#527An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…
Free project idea for someone with more time on their hands than me:
Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers are winning the arms-race.
So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust.
People used to curate lists of websites, which partly solved this problem but didn't necessarily scale. I wonder if that idea could be supercharged.
Consider a browser extension that people install, which:
a) gives users a button to mark a site as trusted/favorited
b) tracks domains visited (and frequency)
Then, separately, you can manually add people you know personally to your "network". You trust them, so anything they trust is also something you might be able to trust. Manual favorites could be weighted higher than frequently-visited sites, and both could be displayed inline next to links on all pages you visit. You could also see which people the trust in a given link comes from, in case some of them consistently have bad judgement about these things and you want to remove them from your list. Then, finally, you could create a personalized search-engine that only indexes the sites determined to be trusted by your personal network.
Of course this would require placing a great amount of trust in the extension and service themselves, so maybe they would have to be open-sourced or self-hostable or something (a profit motive might create a huge amount of temptation to abuse the data). That's a stickier problem.
Edit: There was a little ambiguity left here about transitive trust; “friends of friends” type stuff. I think if this went on for unlimited hops, we’d be back at square one. So maybe it only uses direct contacts, or maybe some small N of hops (where longer ones are weighted lower?). Maybe this would be configurable, not sure.
Also re: privacy, maybe you could come up with a clever way to E2E encrypt the site visit data, even though it’s shared with many parties?
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#528I'm also a staunch site:reddit.com google user
I was skeptical at first, but it really does seem to work for most queries, especially queries about products. I tried standing desks, streaming setup stuff, keyboards, linux desktop configurations, it's all there, all mostly ad free, definitely SEO free.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#529> You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.
The solution on a technical level seems so trivial. Lower the score for pages with affiliate links and ads!
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#530Still in shock that they killed reverse image search and replaced it with some useless AI tech demo. It used to use the actual image and be able to provide context from where that image was found elsewhere. Now it seems to throw the image at AI and the AI will go "Oh that's a street" then they will just show you streets with similar colors as the image you put in. Completely useless for trying to locate what movie a…
I totally agree with you in that it is now completely useless in comparison to what it was.
But to be fair the accurate version could be used maliciously (for stalking someone, etc). I just don't use that tool at all anymore.