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Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

bbc.com

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Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#71

Post by hollerith »

ricardo81 wrote: post #66
hollerith wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) Altavista was the dominant engine, which rapidly gave way to Google essentially as soon as Google became available, and since 2000 Google has been the dominant engine. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was getting my info on what engines people were using mos…

Alltheweb was fairly prominent then. The likes of Ask Jeeves and Lycos had a few % market share. Gigablast also had its day back then.

Before I switched to Altavista, I used Lycos for most of my searches though I did occasionally use Ask Jeeves and Alltheweb just to explore the space of offerings.

During those years, I also used DMOZ regularly, which is not a search engine, but rather an index of links organized much like a card catalog in a library is.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#73

Post by whstl »

hollerith wrote: post #58
ricardo81 wrote: post #51

The article starts with intimating that SEO is the problem. Perhaps to an extent it is, though I'd say with G's massive market share that optimising for one sweet spot with one search engine is really the problem. It makes SEO easier, one search engine and criteria. 20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines you'd be ranking well in some but not others. A good argument for alternative algorithms (…

>20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) Altavista was the dominant engine, which rapidly gave way to Google essentially as soon as Google became available, and since 2000 Google has been the dominant engine. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was getting my info on what engines people were using mos…

Altavista was very popular in tech circles. But I remember "normies" mostly using and talking about Yahoo, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and even lots of local, country-specific, search engines. And after that moving to Google.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#74

Post by aragonite »

coldcode wrote: post #18

I searched for how to use a massage ball (my back hurts) last week and got a giant page full of ads and ad-like sections for buying one with barely any articles at all. That is not a search engine; it's an ads engine.

At the very least Google (or any search engine for that matter) should consider implementing a feature that allows users to explicitly signal query intent. For instance, a 'noshop:' prefix could be used to signal that the user is not looking to buy anything. There are two distinct groups of users searching for terms like "massage ball" or (in my own case) "managed switch": those looking to buy the product and those who looking to learn about the technology. Serving ads to the latter group is not just irritating but also ineffective since those queries were never going to lead to purchases in the first place.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#75

Post by ricardo81 »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #36
michelb wrote: post #8

This is good. Because it now will make way more sense to compete with Google on searching the internet, since they screwed it up. They’re are panicking and defending their bottom-line instead of innovating and leading. I think internet search is now ripe for disruption. Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google.

> Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google. That's the big problem here. All the new search engines rely on the infrastructure of the old ones. It would take very little collusion between Google and Microsoft to crush something like Kagi. And the moment any new competitor gets big, they'll do it. What's needed is an anti-trust breakup. There's simply too big a c…

Agree, intervention is needed.

Any new entrant sort-of has to prove itself also as crawling sites can be hard, e.g. Cloudflare which fronts an appreciable portion of the web. Also large sites like Reddit you need to crawl them at 100s of pages a second to keep up to date with content, not something they're generally going to appreciate without a recognisable benefit to them.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#76

Post by _heimdall »

hobs wrote: post #34
nycdatasci wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was inevitable. Traditional search is an inefficient way to access information in a world with large AI models. Google is being forced to do this due to competition from openAI, meta.ai, perplexity, etc.

It's really not, they are extremely complementary.

Not necessarily. Internet search algorithms were designed to solve the discoverability problem. LLMs are generative, they're creating content rather than finding it for you.

They also serve a different business model. Sure you can have ads in LLM answers similar to Google search results, but Google is also selling clicks. LLMs are designed and used, at least today, to give you the answer so you don't need to see an original source.

Beyond that, the idea of a generative algorithm being used in tandem with sponsored results sounds pretty gross in my opinion. I already don't like Google's approach to search results, but if they're also generating the responses on the fly why am I even there? Its only a matter of time before the generative algorithm is trained specifically to drive more sponsorship revenue, maybe by making up content that works better for ad bids or stuffing a reference to a sponsor into a response only because the inline ad pays or converts better.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#77

Post by ricardo81 »

hollerith wrote: post #71
ricardo81 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alltheweb was fairly prominent then. The likes of Ask Jeeves and Lycos had a few % market share. Gigablast also had its day back then.

Before I switched to Altavista, I used Lycos for most of my searches though I did occasionally use Ask Jeeves and Alltheweb just to explore the space of offerings. During those years, I also used DMOZ regularly, which is not a search engine, but rather an index of links organized much like a card catalog in a library is.

Yahoo bought a lot of the alternatives out, going from memory, then eventually switched to Google results.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#78

Post by jascha_eng »

booleandilemma wrote: post #50
coldcode wrote: post #18

I searched for how to use a massage ball (my back hurts) last week and got a giant page full of ads and ad-like sections for buying one with barely any articles at all. That is not a search engine; it's an ads engine.

I just did the same search and the first result was how to use a massage ball. I scrolled down a bit and saw a reddit thread titled "using a massage ball for back pain". The declining quality of Google's search results is greatly over exaggerated.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I also am using an ad blocker, but aside from that the pages that are returned work perfectly fine for me for the most part. Yes sometimes there is some useless blogs taking up top spots but then I tried the so hyped alternatives like kagi and they don't filter these out either so eh...

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#79

Post by qp11 »

skilled wrote: post #3

Honestly, bravo at BBC for whoever green-lighted this story. It puts the finger right on where it hurts for small publishers and illustrates Googles new way of thinking. I am sad but also frightened for small creators and those who simply share interesting information once in a while. Google is bulldozing these people away from anywhere near the AI answers or the ten blue links below it. The article didn’t mention it…

Small content creators are always going to experience randomness and chaos 'in the current system', cause the Amount of Content far exceeds the amount of Attention available.

If the platforms were honest they would signal to everyone how large that gap is. And people would make a more informed call about whether to get into content creation.

Instead of doing that the platforms just puts the whole onus on content creator "quality" - hey man if you aren't up in the ranking its your fault, maybe you are a looser, go do something more outrageous, scream a little louder, repeat yourself 24x7, spam everyone. Or buy our ads. Its a nice scam cause you get even large corps and presidents shelling out billions on ads.

Re: Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

#80

Post by varelse »

aragonite wrote: post #74
coldcode wrote: post #18

I searched for how to use a massage ball (my back hurts) last week and got a giant page full of ads and ad-like sections for buying one with barely any articles at all. That is not a search engine; it's an ads engine.

At the very least Google (or any search engine for that matter) should consider implementing a feature that allows users to explicitly signal query intent. For instance, a 'noshop:' prefix could be used to signal that the user is not looking to buy anything. There are two distinct groups of users searching for terms like "massage ball" or (in my own case) "managed switch": those looking to buy the product and those w…

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