Hacker News is also becoming a replacement for google for some things for me, I'll just come here and search on some tech related thing which I think is highly likely been discussed on here to see what others think / first hand experiences.
Google Search Is Dying
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#782Some 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…
I agree google is bad, but I think reddit is rapidly becoming equally as inauthentic. I'm sure every major player at this point understands the gains that can be had by astroturfing reddit. The real problem seems to be the internet is inherently untrustworthy and going back to finding people you trust in the real world is the only fix I can see.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#783An 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 want Google to allow me to specifically include/exclude mirrors from my search results. "Only show my the original source of this content", or "only show me mirrors of this content".
I don't want to see the same result repeated 5 times across different stack overflow mirrors.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#784I think this is an interesting topic - for me it really highlights the problems inherent to making algorithms profitable. Often pushing them in one direction or another has really pronounced effects on their unbiased nature. I personally think PageRank is still the best algo around and there are not too many good copies. The other thing to consider is that allowing for selection of 'common searches' reduces server load and is computationally less expensive than processing the same search over and over. Also, the way people ask questions may have changed. I mean I know many people that use the 'omnibar' to go to a webpage they know the address of. Like searching google for 'Facebook' just so you don't have to type '.com'.
I remember the days of AskJeeves when your query literally had to be a question - that was very tedious. I am not anxious to go back to that if thats what a decentralized internet looks like.
But I do think we are on a precipice where the size of the company plays a huge role in getting noticed. If you want to stop this don't click on the 'ad' links in the search results. Scroll down until you see the page you want to go to.
@fxtentacle It occurred to me that Microsoft may have blocked the Google Crawler so that people have to switch to Bing. I am really not a fan of how much Microsoft is trying to force people into their ecosystem and are rapidly closing the doors. Took me two hours to figure out how to remove Windows Defender from a VM.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#785I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries. There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals. At least going with a community site ther…
There HAS to be a way for google to detect a site is a copy and de-rank it. I refuse to believe their army of PhDs can't figure this out. Google's incentives are wrong. They make more money from SEO spam with ads than from the original sites.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#786I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries. There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals. At least going with a community site ther…
Here is my uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines. You may also use the list with uBlacklist.
If you can do this, so can Google. This just shows they refuse to.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#787Some 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…
>most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust
i think that specialised search engines are gaining ground. For example, I am using github search for searching code samples, that works better than google.
You might want to check my side project that tries to explore the subject. I have a search tool / catalog of duckduckgo !bang operators, i am hoping that it allows for better discoverability of specialized search engines.
https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html - (best viewed on a PC).
The latest addition is a description for each search engine, just hover over the name, and you get a description derived from the sites meta and title tags.
I think that specialised search engines are gaining ground, it has become easier to set one up, thanks to elasticsearch/lucene. They can be quite good, for a limited domain, and they don't have to invade your privacy in order to find out what you are looking for. I think that what is missing are tools like this, that would aid the discovery and use of these search engines. I hope that this will allow them to eat into the market from the 'low end'.
The projects source is here: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang
Unfortunately they don't invest too much into !bang operators at duckduckgo, however that's my input data...
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#788Some 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…
Great take on the topic. I completely agree, love the small communities that form in Reddit and there I can find the experts to ask.
StackExchange is better for an informed discussion. Reddit has become too much like Yahoo! Answers.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#789Earlier 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…
I would think that there'd be an online opportunity for a search engine that only searches humanly curated sites. Those sites would be ones that have quality information rather than spam. Some obvious examples - wikipedia, reddit, hackernews, public domain books, etc. It's easy to game an algorithm, but hard to game a human - humans know garbage when they see it. As an aside, whenever I get a prescription, included w…
At least France and Belgium have public websites with the information sheets of all authorized drugs. I think at least the French one generally comes up in the first results on Google (when searching from a French connection).
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#790Some 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…
I agree google is bad, but I think reddit is rapidly becoming equally as inauthentic. I'm sure every major player at this point understands the gains that can be had by astroturfing reddit. The real problem seems to be the internet is inherently untrustworthy and going back to finding people you trust in the real world is the only fix I can see.
We've also got to address the people and corporations that are gaming the system that google has created. Google is by no means off the hook, but Marketing practices have also taken a very bad turn to deception and in reinforcing a payola systems recently that we may never be able to recover from trust-wise.