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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#721

Post by david_allison »

jedwhite wrote: post #64

There have been many interesting threads recently about the decline of Google's search quality here on HN. There's zero doubt search results are getting worse, and that ads and spam are the cause. But Google's financial performance has been going from record to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the market. Each thread has had some common themes, but what's surprising is how different the problems disc…

Tell HN: Google returning 'Untitled' results that redirect to malware/spam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30117388

Still ongoing for me, not as bad, but an example from a couple weeks ago:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11O1_awYptJ9mKzn-w9T45fpNPj4...

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#722

Post by pmlnr »

trdlts wrote: post #208
profstasiak wrote: post #148

Just a heads up if someone is searching reddit for product reviews. I believe most of them are inauthentic. I worked in marketing for several companies and we always had some budget for whisper marketing aka shilling. There are third party agency specialized in shilling on reddit and making it all look authentic.

Is there any place on the web with authentic reviews? The only thing that comes to mind is something like steam, where you have to at least purchase a copy of a game before leaving a review.

Blogs. They are very hard to find though.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#723

Post by trzy »

This problem will become more acute as all-day wearable AR devices become mainstream and the state of the world is recorded and parsed by a distributed network of them. You’ll be able to check the quasi-real-time and historical states of a particular restaurant, pull up the exact menu that was being served yesterday, as well as reviews. None of this will be indexable by Google. However, Google is particularly well positioned to leverage their technology and resources to be a leading player in the market for such devices.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#728

Post by hassancf »

bnralt wrote: post #308

An 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,…

So when doing a search, we are searching in a place (Reddit) that’s being moderated by humans.

Because doing a search in a place that’s not moderated by humans would generate too much noise.

I think this kinda takes us back to the old times with Yahoo (and humans sorting the information) etc…

A giant step backwards, if you ask me.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#730

Post by g_sch »

zuminator wrote: post #640

Another aspect of Google that completely bugs me. Put in a search term. E.g. "fat wallet" " About 22,100,000 results " it says. Click through to the last page. " Page 6 of about 198 results (1.03 seconds) " So out of 22 million results, I can really only see 198?? That can't be right. Wait, it says, " In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 198 already displaye…

I always figured this was a performance issue related to sharding in distributed systems. Deep pagination is an expensive operation so most search clusters limit the number of visible results by default. That, in addition to an assumption that results beyond a certain number are unlikely to be useful - how many times have you found something on page 10 vs just reformulated your search query? - means that most applications just leave the default limit in place.

Returning a count of results, however (especially if it doesn't need to be precise), is a lot less expensive. Hence why Google is happy to give you the 22,000,000 number.

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