Wow, I am glad I'm not the only one doing this, every single product thing I ever search is + reddit
Google Search Is Dying
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#582Disclosure: I'm the creator of Killed by Google. There are a lot of good points here about why power users (i.e. HN types, technologists, scholars/researchers, etc) find Google Search frustrating, but it doesn't really provide a balanced perspective which would acknowledge that Google Search for the average, billions-scale user is an incredibly optimized, positive experience. For those users, Google Search is doing e…
This is exactly right. Search for "Seven" on Google and duck duck go. For the average user Google hits it out of the park. 100% useful info with FAQs, where to watch and trailer. DDG is a mess and less than 20% of info is useful.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#583I find it amusing that even though I find more "organic" results on reddit, reddit's own search isn't great IMO, so I find myself often googling site:reddit.com inurl: followed by the search query I'd have preferred to enter by its own.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#584i think it's less the case that "Google is dying" and more the case that the open and decentralized internet is dying. all the good content is moving into miniature walled gardens, behind paywalls, behind authwalls and deep inside apps where you can't change the font size on your smartphone. increasingly all that's left out in the public are these SEO'd craptastic advertorials.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#585Some 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…
There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers.
Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has a distribution monopoly through Android, its deal with Apple on iOS and MacOS, and on desktop through Chrome.
I'm working on a search engine startup. It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level. And despite being technically possible on desktop with Chrome, it is for all practical purposes beyond what any typical consumer can easily do.
Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google and clicking ads.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#586Some 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…
> I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. There is so much shilling on Reddit if you knew it would blow your mind. I wish more people realized this. Reddit is the best place to shill because not only is it ridiculously simple, people also automatically assume you’re not shilling, and then once you seed the idea, eve…
Reddit also - in my opinon - actively enables shilling and botposting. Why do they have an API?
A forum that's meant to be 100% about humans talking to humans doesn't need an API, so why does it expose one?
Also the model of user-created and user-moderated subreddits actively enables the creation of shill accounts. It's trivial to create a subreddit and use it to farm karma with a ton of bots. If you can keep real users from ever entering your walled garden of a subreddit (of which there are many) your bots will never be detected until you wipe their comment history and set them loose on the rest of the site.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#587Some 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…
I too have found myself searching more in Reddit. Not to throw shade on Reddit, but even if I find exactly what I’m looking for in there, it’s depressing that it’s all bound up inside of another walled garden who will eventually have the same incentive as Google: squeeze every last advertising dollar out of the produc… I mean users. Like Google, it’s just a matter of time before they too lose their balance. A questio…
> how can we build an internet that’s hostile to advertisers?
You have to reify "trust" into concrete, computer-representable data. Maybe borrow the "web of trust" concept from PGP, but do some sort of multiplicative thing where the amount you trust someone's recommendation online is the product of the trust relationships between you and the recommender. That's really the best you can do - even legislation against online advertising will be subverted by companies that go through layers of proxies to buy influence.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#588If only I had a penny for every time someone says Google search is dying...
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#589A major problem with search degradation is that lots of content is behind walled gardens now: apps, instant messaging/chat and video platforms that aren't as indexable like social video platforms, YouTube is pretty good about metadata to index. More content is behind paywalls.
Less and less is being written in blogs, sites and publicly indexable content.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#590It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam t…
This sounds almost like Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Google made links on the web the measure of how good a page was. That became the target of everyone trying to do SEO. As a result, it stopped being a good measure of how good a page was. But in the long run, nothing will work in that environment, because every measure will be gamed as soon as people figure out t…
Yes, it's very similar with the added caveat that Google has an interest in serving results that have ads from their own network. This is why Google's metrics can be hacked. Anything that is barely above being classified as spam but serves ads from Google's ad network will be prioritized over other results simply because they have to hit their quarterly revenue targets. SEO hacking is not possible if a search engine is just a search engine but Google is also an ad network so they will always be susceptible to being gamed.
This is also the case for social media platforms. They're incentivized to surface content that generates engagement and ad revenue. Basically ads are at the root of all problems when it comes to the internet and the content on it.