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Google search's death by a thousand cuts

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#81

Post by WirelessGigabit »

wodenokoto wrote: post #73
foobarbecue wrote: post #10

Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? D…

I don’t think they removed the results from index, but I believe they started searching for vectors instead of text matches. Your ids are nowhere in vector space.

Is this why back in the day if you typed in 2 works it would show results with those 2 works and how the majority of time just the first?

When I'm looking for a technical solution I combine words. But Google gives me the middle finger, returns results for the first one which is like 'Windows Service' only to show me a generic website which has a download link for every KB number out there.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#82

Post by wintermutestwin »

pupppet wrote: post #55
xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

Until ChatGPT came along, I figured it was inevitable that human curated search came back into ascendancy as the crawler model has become such a failure.

Now we can use ChatGPT to filter through Google's infested mess, but this double edged Sword of Damocles will be able to create infinite attempts to bury genuine content with ad spam.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#84

Post by drpixie »

pupppet wrote: post #55
xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

You might have stumbled onto a practical and useful application of LLMs. Yahoo (or whoever) could crawl the web, categorise each page, and provide a genuine "Index".

Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :)

I've always felt that an index by subject would be more useful than string-match based searching. Of course, the index might rank links within each sub-sub--sub-sub...category with something like the original page-rank.

Now if Yahoo (or whoever) could avoid the enshitification trap ... imagine what a fabulous resource that could be.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#85

Post by oneshtein »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #24

Google has lots of smart employees, why can't they just "fix" search?

Google services are paid for by advertisers. On the fair market, there is competition that forces prices to decrease. Google is forced to sell more ads at the same price, or competitors will displace it from the market.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#86

Post by oneshtein »

cma wrote: post #12

In the TPUv4 paper it sounded like Google search moved over to some really crude AI embedding vector stuff. If you search "book of master system" it gives only results for "book of genesis" because it mixes up the biblical book of Genesis with the Sega Master System. Searching any programming terms, like camel-case variable names from a system library without exact quotes, just gives random results about Katy Perry a…

Google search results are driven by clicks. There are much more non-programmers than programmers, so they pop non-programming topics to top of the list. Average user don't care about programming languages. Google is a general search engine, not a specialized one. There was attempt to spy on users and split them into different buckets, but it's dangerous to population, because a government can just ask Google for the list of «wrong-thinkers».

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#87

Post by Semaphor »

superasn wrote: post #14

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google…

> Pinterest

Kagi recently released a leaderboard for per-domain customization: https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png

They are 2nd for "lowered" and first for "blocked".

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#88

Post by symonda »

Quekid5 wrote: post #37
cout wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.

Yup, same for me. It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)

This is a good point. The problem is that it is very hard to make a living serving high-quality results which is likely why ad-funded search still dominates. The vast majority of the world will likely never want to pay for search on its own.

There are, of course, a few relatively successful paid general purpose search engines but these serve a niche demographic if you consider the world-wide scale of google et al. Possibly specialized search (we build one) will be able to thrive in the future, but these engines also serve niche markets in the end.

Thus, the real competition to ad-based search is not high quality search and that is likely why search results don't get better.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#89

Post by symonda »

pupppet wrote: post #55
xbkingx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, an…

Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.

This is an interesting point. User managed or curated indices offer unique advantages, especially when 'depth of coverage' is more important than 'breadth of coverage'. I believe that we are witnessing people shift away from demanding 'search breadth' as we speak, so someone might possibly decide to do this.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#90

Post by buro9 »

Semaphor wrote: post #87
superasn wrote: post #14

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google…

> Pinterest Kagi recently released a leaderboard for per-domain customization: https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png They are 2nd for "lowered" and first for "blocked".

Well that's a feature that I might be willing to pay for.

Add Twitter to that list and I'll start finding accessible content again.

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