When google ended Google Reader it killed blogs and other self-hosted websites. Google killed the web and in so doing it killed itself.
Google Search Is Dying
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#702I remember being on a call with the Bebo people like 2 days after that absurd buyout and asking sarcastically: “So what color is the Ferrari?”
The answer: “Yellow”.
Now you have the Battery.
Reddit is so friggin user-hostile that I don’t read most of the comments anymore: because I literally can’t. You can do a little browsing but the minute you’re trying to pay actual attention you get slammed with the dark patterns about installing the app or linking your gmail or both.
I hope it’s the management team that gets weeded out of the gene pool and not the whole site, because it was fucking cool at one time and could be again.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#703Some 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…
There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers. Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has…
> almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore...Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google
I don't disagree with this as a fact, but I think there are a lot of things that work this way that aren't actually monopolies in the competition-preventing sense. If I wanted to launch a new breakfast cereal, getting my product into grocery stores would be one of the major challenges of starting that business. Competition for shelf space is a core concern of a lot of consumables. This definitely creates a lot of stickiness and barriers, and that comes with its share of downsides, but there are also good reasons that distribution systems work the way they do. Transaction costs are important.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#704Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it was inevitable that the maturing of the winners from web 2 would lead to its death and that is the stick that drives dev of the next stage. It's certainly where my interests have turned the past few years
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#705The circularity of this meme is funny to me, even if the article is fundamentally true: This article is very very popular on hackernews, indicating that people agree that google search results are bad. What sources does the author draw from? He cites opinions from, among other places, Hackernews and Paul Graham.
"Find an opinion popular on hackernews, restate it in a blog post, refer to previous discussion on hackernews as evidence" may be a lucrative strategy for accruing internet points!
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#706Many of these articles/complaints don't compare Google Search to alternatives (Bing / DuckDuckGo / ...), so it's not clear whether web search itself is getting "worse" (in the ways mentioned), or whether the issues are with Google Search specifically. (For example, the article proposes the explanation that "The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust" , which is about the web itself, n…
Search for "Seven" on Google and Duck Duck Go. It's very telling. Most complaints in here apply to powerusers which won't be noticed by vast majority.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#707An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…
I concur on the looking up technical errors bit directing you to auto-generated sites! I was recently trying to troubleshoot a very basic error message for Linux and was getting results and webpages that would list the error message in the title in some way, but then give instructions on "First, open up device manager", "Click Win+R to open windows command prompt", etc. Lots of untrustworthy ads. Different URLs, almo…
I usually look for these hallmarks:
1) if this is from the project's own site, it's good.
2) if it looks like an archive of the project's mailing list, it's good.
3) if it looks like an internet forum, it might be good, or it might be just another poor soul asking the same question.
4) if it's on StackExchange, it's like on the forum, except your chances are slightly better. Karma must flow.
5) if it's on Reddit, it's like on the forum, except your chances of getting an answer are worse.
6) if it's a blog of some geek, sometimes it can be better than 1) and 2), or you might just get a straight answer.
7) in any other case it's most likely a SEO farm. Run.
If I have a linux problem these days, google usually gives me the relevant piece of source code on Github from which the error message originates. Like, you're a big boy now, go figure it out yourself.
It seems we're back to the early 2000s, when search engines not so much specialized in topics, but leaned heavily towards one type of content or the other. Holy hell, maybe one day Reddit's own search will be good enough so google can be ditched for good!
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#708It feels like Google has transitioned the same way as news has transitioned to entertainment, just 20 - 30 years later.
They found, just like TV executives, that there's more money in shoveling drivel to masses, than actual information to a few.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#709sad but I do this too
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers. Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has…
> almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore...Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google I don't disagree with this as a fact, but I think there are a lot of things that work this way that aren't actually monopolies in the competition-preventing sense. If I wanted to launch a new breakfast cereal, getting my product into grocery st…
I don't think competition for shelf space is the right analogy here. Perhaps for Apps within the App Store you could argue that. But when there are only two mobile operating systems with meaningful market share, and when they make it impossible to change to a new search engine at all, and the results all come from only two sources (Google or Bing) that's a straight monopoly over distribution.
It's a similar situation with the App Stores also. They are monopolies. We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software.