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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#761

Post by lotsofpulp »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #759
softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some 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 fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory..." > I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible. I never believed in conspiracy theories, and after I read "Media Control" by Noam Chomsky I understood there is no need for conspiracy theories once you understand how individual incentives are aligned and…

That does not make sense. If searches did not result in satisfactory results, then people would stop searching.

Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN or Reddit.

This is a problem for google, maybe not right this minute as growth might offset dissuaded users, but nevertheless, it does not behoove them in the long run to provide garbage search results to people.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#762

Post by dankwizard »

It is only a matter of time until "Search term + Reddit" leads you to a thread with multiple, legitimate looking comments with varying degrees of upvotes and downvotes, and the entire thread has been ran by a marketing firm/search engine hit squad.

I too am guilty of trusting the Reddit concencus when searching, and if there were a few legitimate looking threads that had been planted I probably would have eaten them up.

Sure you get the occassional comment or link share, but I'm talking like 300+ comment thread carefully executed.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#763

Post by nfc »

brundolf wrote: post #527
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,…

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…

I was thinking something similar recently, and I also believe it's an idea worth exploring. Something else to add to this conversation. There's an obvious difference between two cases in which a trusted person trusts a url:

1) Single contributor website (blog, personal page...): It seems that we could spread the trust the whole website in the algorithm (at least more than for the next case)

2) Multi contributor website (forum, newspaper): It seems the trust should be given at an URL level

Something worth delving into if we are designing this trust based search engine in real-time here at HN ;)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#764

Post by sneeze2659 »

Can somebody please recreate Google circa 2005-2012?

I'm pretty happy with the other search engines, but I do miss having a google profile that would feed me the correct kinds of search results. I refuse to believe that nobody knows how to do this (I don't) as Google was doing their indexing with commodity hardware on bread racks in the beginning. There have been scores and scores of swe in and out of that company.

I know that web crawling is hard, but we could use a few more options.

Is it inevitable that spam SEO and even legitimate applications like quora, stackoverflow, will dominate every search result?

Is it because of the "Deep Web" of content and information locked behind commercial, login required, and Web2.0 UIs?

Is it really over?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#765

Post by littlecranky67 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #761
littlecranky67 wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - "There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory..." > I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible. I never believed in conspiracy theories, and after I read "Media Control" by Noam Chomsky I understood there is no need for conspiracy theories once you understand how individual incentives are aligned and…

That does not make sense. If searches did not result in satisfactory results, then people would stop searching. Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN or Reddit. This is a problem for google, maybe not right this minute as growth might offset dissuaded users, but nevertheless, it does not behoove them in the long run to provide garbage search results to people.

> Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN or Reddit.

You are right but overestimate the number of people doing these restrictive searches. They should be in the <0.1% range. I personally switched (to duck and latly kagi.com) and know quite some people in tech that did so too, but the non tech-savy person (which are the majority of overall users) doesn't even know other search engines.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#766

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #173

I'll re-post a comment I made about Google Search back in July 2020 because I believe it's still relevant: "Call me crazy, but I've been using Yandex a lot more recently. Political FUD aside, the results are pretty good, and completely unfiltered. It reminds me of how wild and unfiltered the internet was back in 2007. However, I wouldn't recommend it to "casual" users. Using Yandex requires a bit more common sense th…

>"Call me crazy, but I've been using Yandex a lot more recently. Political FUD aside, the results are pretty good, and completely unfiltered.

Note: Russia doesn't give a flying fuck about American copyright law. Yarr.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#767

Post by wdencker »

brundolf wrote: post #527
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,…

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 is very much in the spirit of what we were trying to do with trove.to [1] — give people an easy way to curate & annotate lists of websites, and layer a social graph and endorsement system on top of those lists.

The problem we encountered is that the vast majority of people are not hyper-organized list makers — the 1% rule of the internet [2]. To create a "human curated search engine" with any utility, you need a massive amount of manually-categorized data — data which most people are simply not interested in generating. This is why no social bookmarking site (e.g. delicious, pinboard, etc.) has ever taken off to hundreds of millions of users.

I still think there's something exciting to be built here, but it will likely need to take a more "automated" approach as you suggested.

[1] https://trove.to/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#768

Post by lifeisstillgood »

clairity wrote: post #354
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #214

When looking for an answer we don't want the average opinion of the whole world, we want the best opinion of the expert in that subject. As the internet (and Google) reach out more and more, we get closer and closer to everyone and their opinion being online. And so the average answer online gets closer to the average opinion in the planet. I know Google thought PageRanknwas the answer for that but they now rely as m…

you're really pushing that appeal to authority to its logical absurdity. how do you find the real 'best' expert and their 'best' opinion? everyone, even in their so-called field of expertise, is prone to error. limiting your information gathering to a single person exposes you to all of their errors directly, with zero error correction applied. taking input from many people, even non-experts (gasp! the horror!), give…

Ok let's go back to "defining our terms".

I am going to go with expert as someone recognised by other experts. Yes that's horribly self referential but it is the basis of everyone who calls themselves doctors or scientist or engineer. In this case I can have expert plumbers and expert removal men.

And in this light an expert is someone whose opinions come from the foundations that all other experts in their industry recognise and agree with. Lysenkoism in other words is not going to fly - not without a shit ton of new evidence that stuns everyone.

So no I am not appealing to authority, I am appealing to science. There are views / opinions / statements that are falsifiable. And if the web is full of falsified statements (let's go with vaccines cause autism), then Google cannot say "51% of web pages that contain "vaccine" also contain "causes autism" therefore that is now true". (and no that's not how Google works, but unless google hardcodes what is truth, it can eventually only go with what is fed into it. And as we are seeing, what is fed into it is getting worse, partly through SEO and partly because more and more of the world is getting on line and we once had a web dominated by the pages of university professors and now it's dominated by drunk twitter rants. Sometimes by the same university professors ...

Humanity has great geniuses, evil scum, but the most of us muddle about in the middle. Science found a way to take the work of a genius and then keep it balanced there in mid air for the next genius to stand on.

We should not assume the best of us, the best of our work, the best of our actions, can be found by averaging the planet.

I do have hope - pop shows demonstrate that we can vote for great singers, so i do trust that mass voting will be part of the solution - I trust in democracy. I am just not convinced Google knows how to fix truth nor is set up for people to vote for truth.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#769

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

jfoster wrote: post #135
aparsons wrote: post #13

I’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…

I think Amazon or Microsoft acquiring Reddit would probably just be the end of Reddit. They would feel pressured to censor it into non-existence.

They're already owned by Advance Publications, a privately held company.

To buy reddit they'd have to negotiate with the Newhouse family, not reddit's employees.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#770

Post by Gigachad »

zmmmmm wrote: post #719

> There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory I think we're well on the way ... Was recently pretty shocked, searched for "gas heating repair" and got back at the top some sites with my suburb name in the title. Naturally I thought, wow, if there is a local place I should go there. Clicking into it, it has everything about my suburb - a picture of the local park, and whole…

Yes you are right, almost every business with an online presence is generating vast amounts of garbage which exactly targets a huge range of specific keywords. From the search engine perspective, the page is exactly what you are looking for.
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