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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#71

Post by hef19898 »

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…

Regardless of automation, there will always be jobs that are so "dumb" but still expensive to automate that people can do cheaper then machines.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#72

Post by foxfluff »

endisneigh wrote: post #53

I can’t this article seriously: > Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. What’s the connection between Reddit being searched for and Google dying? Read the article, doesn’t make sense. Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is where many projects have community discussions. People are always saying Google is dying or search resul…

> What’s the connection between Reddit being searched for and Google dying?

Google returns page after page of seo garbage. You often have more luck finding what you want on reddit.

> Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is where many projects have community discussions.

The point is that a good search engine would find the result you want without requiring you to go out of your way to specify the site on which you're likely to find that result. It gets worse when you think that these reddit results often provide links to what you want on the web. Somehow google can't do that.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#73

Post by mattarm »

bennyp101 wrote: post #10

I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries. There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals. At least going with a community site ther…

I have found that installing uBlacklist (a browser extension) and blocking these sites from search results as I encounter them helps noticeably. There are only so many of these "clone" sites that rank highly on Google, so I found it pretty easy to keep up with them for the things I usually search for. There are even shared uBlacklist lists for things like SO clones, but I haven't even bothered to use them.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#74

Post by ivank »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #42

Ironically, Reddit search is terrible so you really have to use Google to do a thorough Reddit search. reddit + search term is a powerful combo on Google.

https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ will sometimes find things that neither Google nor Reddit search can dig up (it queries pushshift and includes recent and deleted comments). It doesn't have any relevance ranking but it's still possible to get interesting results; also, it supports asterisk suffixes on words.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#75

Post by cjbgkagh »

All I want is a feature to black list certain domain names from search results. Similar to YouTube never show this channel again option. If google hosted such a feature then they would get a very strong signal on poor results and would go a long way to punishing bad behavior and cleaning up the net. It’s so easy to do that I have to assume they chose not to because they make a percentage of the revenue from the content farms.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#76

Post by zucked »

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…

I, too, search " + reddit" often for product reviews and such. Thing is, the results on that front have started to slide as the paid review side of the internet catches on. I'm finding that it's getting harder and harder to trust the reddit search results - lots of shill accounts and obvious junk. That's not a google problem, specifically, but it's another degradation of a workaround for declining search result quality :(

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#77

Post by ankit219 »

Agree with the premise, but seems to me that the article does not justify this. I can understand ads, but ads do not affect search results. If you move past ads now (which most users do as they habitually ignore the space where ads would be) even then you should expect good results.

SEO seems to be a big problem. Just saying Google is big and they should fix it ignores the nuance and the whole cat and mouse game that goes on. Eg: I am based in India, and am looking for which cable channel/streaming service is broadcasting a game of my favorite soccer team. The first 10 results would not have the answer, but as a user you would only know that after opening the link and reading through 500 or so words introducing teams, opposition, competition, form etc. but not what I am looking for. Most of these are news websites, who would make a loud noise if their results do not come on top. For a search engine relying on signals (even with AI), it's an incredibly hard problem to know if those 500 words would have the exact answer. [1]

Reddit is good for searches where things are in flux, or when it's a user centric thing. Because they have done the SEO well. Similarly the results leading to Stack Overflow for developers are equally important. Yet, when you want to research on some topic, or learn more, you would inevitably start with Google.

If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the first result.

[1] The result which surfaces often include the direct question: "How to watch team A v team B game in India?". How do you design algos to combat that and yet include legitimate results. Have a lot of text on the page is often the most given advice on SEO.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#78

Post by dleslie »

Reddit search is superior because the results are community curated and because, counterintuitively, the search algorithm is terrible.

It's doesn't suffer _as much_ from the deluge of garbage on there dead internet, and the search is good enough to discover what you're looking for while remaining bad enough to provide compelling surprises.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#79

Post by andyjohnson0 »

valdiorn wrote: post #38

Google 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…

> Can people suggest good alternatives

I've been on the Kagi beta test for a few weeks now and, for the kind of searches I mostly do, it seems to be a massive improvement on Google. Strongly recommended.

https://kagi.com/

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#80

Post by dale_glass »

gipp wrote: post #11

The thesis seems a lot closer to "the open Web is dying".

A bit of both, I think, they feed into each other.

Google being useless for something like product reviews means that any smaller sites that are any good are not getting the traffic they deserve, because they're being outcompeted by the ads and the fake review sites.

People still need the content, though. But how do you find that review without a search engine? You have to resort to that even though Google sucks for the general web, it's still very much useful if you restrict it to something very particular. You have to know where to start though, so you have to resort to one of the 4-5 huge sites like Reddit or Hacker News where you know people are going to be discussing whether a given wifi router is any good or not.

Which has the side effect of concentrating things even more on those sites. If the place you can trust for networking equipment reviews is Reddit, then probably you'll also comment somewhere on Reddit next time you get bitten by a bad one and want a second opinion or just to warn people. And reddit gets bigger still.

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