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Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

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Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#71

Post by _8j50 »

altdataseller wrote: post #52
seibelj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a philosophical thing for me personally. I did a stretch at a meaningless company with good pay and perks and I was so unbelievably bored. If you have mentally accepted your productive output is without personal meaning and you are only in it for a check, then I agree it’s a good gig. I just personally can’t do it. And I think the general no-fucks-given by the workforce is why a lot of stuff is just stagnating…

Gotcha. I also share the same sentiment but my sentiment is even darker. I think most products dont need to exist - not just Google or BigTech. The same applies to project mgt tools, that new fintech product, or that new SaaS tool. Almost everything has been done. Given that i cant go back to school to learn to do genomics or rocket engineering, im just gonna resign myself to go thru the motions and get a paycheck, a…

I don't know, I've been there and it's like I have an opportunity to learn and do something wildly different or new and that's something to look forward to even if the only person that will appreciate what I did is myself. Imagine working at google if you found a flaw in their page rank algorithm or monarch db implementation/design? That would feel gratifying. I personally don't care much if I contribute to a society that gives -1 shits about me or appreciated by coworkers that will throw me under the bus if it meant a brownie point for them (been there, done that).

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#72

Post by electromech »

t-3 wrote: post #5

Google search has been in decline for at least the past decade, and been surpassed easily for at least the past 5 years. Try running a local instance of a meta-search engine like https://github.com/searx/searx - you'll never want to go back.

This greatly appeals to me, but I don't quite understand how these work. I looked into searx and friends, and it seems too good to be true. Like, if it's turning around and making requests to Google, don't they detect that as bot-like traffic? Seems like a good way to get your IP blocked or worse.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#73

Post by xboxnolifes »

I don't think Google Search got worse, as in, I don't think changes they made directly made search a worse experience than not adding the change. I think that spam posters, scammers, et al., have gotten much better at gaming SEO, that Google got stuck with two bad options: (1) do nothing and have all common search terms loaded with spam, scams, and viruses, or (2) change how their search works to lessen the amount of bad actors, but also reduce the good search outcomes showing up.

Maybe I'm wrong. This is just a hunch based on looking at how big online communities fail, and how services that rely on user generated content fail. At a certain scale, you can no longer rely on people being good actors with light moderation. You need to tighten up moderation, even if it means making the community overall worse than it's peak. As, the alternative is letting the bad actors make it even worse than that.

More and more lately I've been coming across spam, reposted content from sites like StackOverflow, w3schools, Reddit, etc., but posted on different domains, on a page plastered with ads. To me, this is a peak into the arms race between Google's Search trying to return good results, and bad actors trying to get their spam to the front results.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#74

Post by internet_user »

DethNinja wrote: post #43
dougmwne wrote: post #40

I suspect, but can’t prove that the entire internet is rotting. I get the feeling that organic user contributions are plummeting and being swamped by bots. HN is a small life raft. Many of the niche subreddits I’ve been following for years are seeing their post frequency drop, from dozens a days to a few a week. All the other forums are gone. Maybe there’s something going on in the apps, but they aren’t searchable. T…

I think something is off with the internet too. It feels as if internet is sharded just like MMORPG servers. Nowadays there are more humans than ever with access to internet but organic creations are getting harder to find and everything is swamped with SEO spam. I still can’t exactly point my finger on what’s wrong.

The internet died in 2016.

https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#75

Post by Wyoming23 »

altdataseller wrote: post #37
nostrademons wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the quality of hyperlinks has declined precipitously. Google's big insight was that what people say about a page matters more than what the page says itself. Hyperlinks were fundamental to the (pre-2013) ranking algorithm, in ways that were far more fundamental than just pagerank. This worked really well when people authored HTML pages by hand (or in FrontPage or DreamWeaver) and would promiscuously link out whe…

As well as the fact fewer ppl are maintaining their own websites or blog. The content is now in places that cant be crawled as easily like Instagram, Tiktok and Twitter as well as FB groups.

The loss of blogs is so huge in all sorts of ways.

Some random person's travel blog in 2008 would be full of genuinely useful information. That's gone now, replaced by regular people just posting pics to social media and then affiliate-link filled seo-optimized travel sites, half the time written by someone who hasn't even gone to the place but is just copying info and adding sponsored content.

The same is true for essentially everything- gardening, video games, books, bikes, bird watching, baking. The genuine amateur enthusiast content isn't published on the open web in accessible text. It's locked in walled gardens or just never created in the first place, with people choosing to post a couple pictures or videos rather than write a blog post about it.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#76

Post by Wyoming23 »

thevagrant wrote: post #48
lumost wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at python documentation. There is a metric ton of spam sites that copy and paste python documentation with ads inserted. Google ranks these higher than the primary source. I suspect google is boosting ad supported content over non ad supported content. Directly incentivizing paraphrased/copy pasta content.

I see this with questions and answers from reddit or other forums which get syndicated into various other 'developer' sites and get high rankings on Google. Search engines should let us configure a whitelist of sites for certain categories/context of search.

Which can be so frustrating when a bad answer gets propagated this way.

I've had times where the same "bad" information (whether completely wrong, incomplete, misleading, not best-practice, confusing, whatever manner of "bad") showed up on multiple different sites all on the first page of Google, often clearly copied from one another or the same original quora/stackoverflow/whatever.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#77

Post by mister_goo »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #18

My vision for the future of search: Text search on the web will slowly die. No one trusts the results of random text. Google is in the adversarial position of wanting to censor certain answers as well as present answers that maximize their own revenue. People will search video based content instead, and use the fact that a human spoke the information, as well as comments/upvotes to vet it as trustworthy material (lik…

Thanks for your insight. My experience is that not all people (re)search, for some people, social media is their only source of information online.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#78

Post by mister_goo »

electromech wrote: post #72
t-3 wrote: post #5

Google search has been in decline for at least the past decade, and been surpassed easily for at least the past 5 years. Try running a local instance of a meta-search engine like https://github.com/searx/searx - you'll never want to go back.

This greatly appeals to me, but I don't quite understand how these work. I looked into searx and friends, and it seems too good to be true. Like, if it's turning around and making requests to Google, don't they detect that as bot-like traffic? Seems like a good way to get your IP blocked or worse.

There is another option: Google offers a paid API for search.

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#79

Post by solarkraft »

D13Fd wrote: post #61
thevagrant wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The impact of walled gardens and "use our app for a better experience" has accumulated. The constant moving of communities is also a problem. We dropped irc, join us on slack. Crickets.. er we moved to discord. Each move must impact engagement negatively.

I feel like so much has moved to Discord. That’s great for immediacy and back-and-fourth interaction but it puts all of that information that used to be Google searchable into a black hole of Discord searches.

But it would've been the same thing with IRC. Worse even, since that has no history (by default).

Re: Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?

#80

Post by solarkraft »

lumost wrote: post #44
holografix wrote: post #14

There’s been some debate about this here on HN and someone made a point that resonated with me: The quality of _the web_ has been in decline lately. With ML’s capacity to paraphrase original content and to generate plausible rubbish content from scratch, it’s very difficult for Google’s pagerank (or whatever they call their algo these days) to fight back. That been said, there does seem to be a fair bit of scraping a…

Look at python documentation. There is a metric ton of spam sites that copy and paste python documentation with ads inserted. Google ranks these higher than the primary source. I suspect google is boosting ad supported content over non ad supported content. Directly incentivizing paraphrased/copy pasta content.

I think it's plausible that there are types of spam Google can't fight against, but this ought to be possible (which supports the "malice" theory).
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