Agree - it's deteriorating. And that's probably why we've seen a bunch of upstart engines appear like kagi, you.com, several others.
Google Search Is Dying
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#742An 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,…
Free project idea for someone with more time on their hands than me: Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers are winning the arms-race. So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust. People used to curate lists of website…
This reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "whuffie" from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (man, that title takes me back!).
Whuffie is, roughly, money determined by your social interactions. More importantly, others also have a queryable score that's weighted according to who you esteem highly - this sounds like what you're proposing!
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#743The Dead Internet Theory, yet another dumb far right conspiracy.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…
Here's a perfect example of this phenomenon. https://archive.md/wwMY3 https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+linux&oq=how+old+...
Fortunately, most of those web results give a pretty good rundown on the history of Linux. But yes, this is weird! I'll get it looked at.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#745i think once google made the decision to go from returning results you want to see to returning results you want to see ( minus what google and their political friends don't want you to see ) created the incentive to look for alternatives.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#746I mean you can't blame Google too much. In the early days, a large fraction of Internet users made websites and had hand-picked, curated links. This gave Google a fantastic ranking signal with a high signal-to-noise ratio. This is mostly gone now and honestly I'm surprised their search is as good as it is.
I think you have it slightly backwards. While not entirely Google’s fault, search engines motivated much of this “noise” increase. It’s not as though there were people who just made hand-curated, “high signal” websites and then all those people died. It’s even not that all those people switched to Wordpress or other CMS. It’s that the algorithms used by search engines directly incentivized a lot of the awful practice…
> larger sites like Allrecipes
But the problem here really is the consumer. In the past, people would have bought a recipe book or subscribed to a cooking magazine and thought nothing abnormal about having to exchange money for data. Now the consumer expects quality data for free. Obviously something has to suffer.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#747I was skeptical when I started reading, but then I started thinking about it, and 99% of the time I use Google (actually Startpage, I don't use Google directly), I already know what websites have the content I'm looking for. Those sites just have piss-poor search tools.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#748An 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,…
Free project idea for someone with more time on their hands than me: Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers are winning the arms-race. So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust. People used to curate lists of website…
This was kind of the idea behind a side project I started a few years ago:
https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-searc...
In that post, I don't address the reputation management aspect as much, but it's central to making the whole thing work, and I think crowd-sourcing and a well-conceived reputation management system that can influence results are good next areas for exploration.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#749I’ve posited repeatedly that when Reddit IPOs, I’ll be reallocating a significant chunk of my portfolio into their stock. Their management has historically lacked focus, but if Reddit ever builds a half-competent search index, and positions itself as a search-first, discovery-second destination, they will be in the FANG tier of stocks. They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base. They have free mode…
They can't keep their website online and their search tech is so broken it regularly fails at returning my own sorted post history, let alone find anything.
You make good points:
>They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base. They have free moderation.
...but overall I think they're likely to get wiped out mass exodus Digg style due to some black swan mismanaged incident before they enter FAANG tier
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#750I’ve posited repeatedly that when Reddit IPOs, I’ll be reallocating a significant chunk of my portfolio into their stock. Their management has historically lacked focus, but if Reddit ever builds a half-competent search index, and positions itself as a search-first, discovery-second destination, they will be in the FANG tier of stocks. They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base. They have free mode…
>They have the dedicated, active user base.
Have you ever used reddit? It's manifestly full of bots, with the second largest usergroup being schoolboys looking for porn and talking about video games.
There's a reason the ads you see on reddit are for absolute garbage products made by companies you've never heard of.