How much is this a broader Google issue? Ads are encroaching more on Gmail, Calendar randomly drops meetings, and Maps is now noticeably worse than Apple Maps.
It definitely feels like they’re being run by financial spreadsheets now.
Google Search Is Dying
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#562Some 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…
Based on some of the April Fools' Day experiments that Reddit has done in the past, I'm not sure why you wouldn't have the same hesitation and mistrust of Reddit posts and comments. So much of the content, even on Reddit, is made by bots or copied by bots from older, legitimate user-generated content.
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Re: Google Search Is Dying
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
That's like speaking to little children, that are learning to talk, reproducing their errors. Some adults believe that it's cute, but it's idiotic, confuses the babies and make their progress more difficult and slow.
I think this has proven to be false.
Fathers descend to "baby talk" when the child is learning and slowly bring them up to par instead of trying to just force perfect talk from the start. They do this instinctively.
There's some great comments on this from salman khan, I think. He recorded the first years of his kid's life at home and documented this phenomenon
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#564> Even the exact match query operator (“ ”) doesn’t give exact matches anymore
I wonder if this isn't because most people don't think of quotes as being the "exact match" operator, and so expect fuzzy matches. The former exact match operator (plus) didn't have that issue, and was a better match for the exclude operator (minus).
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#565Isn't it just saying Facebook is dead?
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Then again, both DuckDuckGo and Kagi also give that result for that search phrase. As well as being more generally useful for more specific searches as well.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#567An 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,…
I come across these sites so often it's not even funny. Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or 5 in the first page of search results. I'm assuming they're all ran by the same person, throwing as much ** at the wall knowing some will stick. Many of my searchers now include "reddit" or "forum" at the end to filter out all the spam/crap.
Yup, just found this morning that an article my wife wrote on a very obscure legal topic was stolen, reformatted, and posted on some "life hacks" sort of site. It shows up #3 in the DDG results. At least her originals are still #1 and #2.
Meanwhile I have in my inbox in the last 24h at least a half-cozen emails looking to do SEO work for my company website.
Web = untrustworthy? YUP
I'd happily pay for a serious version of 1999 Google, but updated to filter out anything advert based, and search for exactly what I want.
Search is such a fundamental function, and we've done the experiment and the advert model fails - it needs to be just another utility.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#568I hardly ever use reddit, don't browse it, find its hints to install the app annoying. Its been so off my radar, posts like this keep making me think I must be really missing something special.
but probably not.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any idea what reddit's valuation is currently looking like? I have long been surprised they havent been acquired .. I assume for sure they have had plenty of offerss in the past
They have filed for an IPO last month with the SEC so they should go public very soon. Last valuation was at 10b$ which is ridiculous for a website that can literally get its most popular subreddits shutdown arbitrarily whenever a small group of extremely online volunteer mods decide to "go on strike" by locking the subs because they don't like something/someone else on the website. It happened before and the admins…
I've also thought that. The reddit shutdown made the frontpage of (reputable) news sources, I can't imagine that investors aren't going to be asking the admins how much control they really have over the user experience on any given day.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#570Some 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…
No, because they broke quotes. That's going out of the way to try and tell me what I think.