Google search's death by a thousand cuts • Hacker News Board

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#71

Post by pseudalopex » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:10 AM UTC

perfect-blue wrote: post #22

foobarbecue wrote: post #10

Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? D…

Assuming you know the domain that usually gives you the result you’re looking for, I would just search site:name.domain

"There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results."

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#72

Post by DougN7 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:37 AM UTC

pupppet wrote: post #55

xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

Brilliant idea!

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#73

Post by wodenokoto » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:39 AM UTC

foobarbecue wrote: post #10

Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? D…

I don’t think they removed the results from index, but I believe they started searching for vectors instead of text matches. Your ids are nowhere in vector space.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#74

Post by nottorp » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:39 AM UTC

Is the article's author worrying about Google specifically or search generally?

Because Google specifically has been degrading from self inflicted cuts for years.

Agreed that reddit going dark and machine generated "content" will only make it worse, but perhaps he should have talked about search generally then?

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#75

Post by megablast » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:44 AM UTC

In the very early days of google, you could search for a simple problem, and the result would be on the search page. No point in clicking. I guess a few people clicked the other answers, so they rose to the top.

So now it is very rare to get the answer on the search page, because it makes no money for google.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#76

Post by tacker2000 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:47 AM UTC

superasn wrote: post #14

The 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…

Yea why cant i just remove these spammy Stack Overflow clones. Its wasting me precious time whenever I need some answers. Seems like such an easy feature but yea Google already lost its way a long time ago…

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#77

Post by ItsBob » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:51 AM UTC

Kye wrote: post #65

foobarbecue wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure about Google but DDG changes the results when I come back to them. So, for example, if you search for something, click on one of the links to open it and then go back to the search results, there will be a couple of new ones added.

Not sure if some are removed also but it definitely changes.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#78

Post by WirelessGigabit » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:51 AM UTC

superasn wrote: post #14

The 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…

I googled something.

One of the results was "title (recommended)".

That should be enough for Google to ban the result.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#79

Post by dehrmann » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:56 AM UTC

zokier wrote: post #19

completely tangential, but this thread triggered a wave of nostalgia reminiscing how good the few years around 2010 were (or rather seemed to be through rose-tinted glasses) in tech. Among all else it was an era when it really felt that google did just great on almost all fronts, search included. Web in general was lot less app- and mobile-centric because those things were still pretty new things comparatively.

In 2010, I worked for a company that was active in SEO spam. Google began putting a stop to it with Panda in 2011. Search results were pretty bad back then, too.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#80

Post by WirelessGigabit » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 6:58 AM UTC

atlantic wrote: post #28

underlipton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction…

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.

Take a look at Miniflux. Works amazing.