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Google search's death by a thousand cuts
61–70 of 332 posts
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.
Yup, same for me. It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)
That's exactly what Brin and Page said in the paper where they presented Google...
"[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"
and
"[W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."
Both from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (1998)
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the applications I used to use on a daily was Google Reader. Then one day, they just shut it down for no apparent reason, and that was that. They don't seem to be focused on customer satisfaction. Hard to understand.
I think you meant to say user satisfaction? Or did you pay for google reader?
Google Reader, like many other Google products, was developmentally mature (read: relatively cheap to maintain) and drove users to profit centers. An example that more closely fits your criteria is Google Play Music, which was superior to its replacement, Youtube Music, and which I paid monthly for. I cancelled my subscription when they sunset it.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#64Google's death is deeper than just the corpus, their ranking algorithm is also deeply degrading. A week ago, a search for wouldn't return https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/23/i-love-manchester-but-p... on the first page while would [1] [2]. This appears to be fixed as of today but this kind of kindergarten level search intent not being fulfilled would have been unthinkable for Google even just a few years ago. [1] ht…
https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+g...
Still waiting on an explanation of fix for this one.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've heard that Google will process queries that don't seem to get results for the searcher and they improve if you come back to it. I never test this because I've usually given up (wasn't important) or moved on to other ways to find the information.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#66The 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…
You can use the AdGuard Annoyances list in the uBlock Origin settings to block certain types of content. This includes blocking cookie scripts that pop up every time you opt out of non-essential cookies. It also has an unbreak filter list that, when used in combination with EasyList, can remove anti-adblock warnings .
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#67The 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…
I think that there are current SEO practices that make sense that a search engine uses as a ranking signal, like accessibility (mobile friendliness, screen reader compatibility, +), time to load (performance, image optimization, no js bloat), security (https), no stuff appearing on top the content (modals), use of h tags and breadcrumbs to order content, srucured data for bots and more.
Of course people game the system, apply shady practices, sell courses with tips. It is a nuance topic, the name now is bastardized by marketing companies doing shady things, but on his core is just practices to create good websites and provide a good user experience
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#68This 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 have the best website for a specific thing, I do well in quite a few SEO searches. However, the generic term, (which I'm still the best in), I am nowhere to be found.
Can confirm. Same for me.
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try to use yandex instead, it is order of magnitude ahead of google when it comes to image search. Edit: sorry I was convinced you are searching by image, not image id.
It sounds like your suggestion came about by mis-reading the parent comment, but I will offer my 2 cents: yandex.com's english results for hard to find, technical terms are infinitely better than google's. as someone who remembers How Google Used to Work, Yandex feels like Old Google. It indexes the hell out of long tails, will find exact, specific terms and phrases, and 100% respects generic search operators such as…
Yandex is also usually quite a bit better at finding pirated things in my experience
Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts
#70Earlier 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.
This happened because a few corporations were able to capture most of the internet due to a mix of laziness on the part of users and also the death of independent blogs and fan sites. I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or…
> I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or your family. Evil people use the internet to harass other people and to attack their livelihood or put the safety of their family at risk. Many employers now discriminate against employees or even just people applying for jobs who openly express opinions on the internet. And even posting pseudonymously isn't completely safe because it is usually possible to deanonymize posters if an attacker is obsessed enough.
Discussions moved from independent forums to Facebook groups and Reddit. Discord later. Facebook and Reddit are not more anonymous than independent forums.