Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is dead. Where do we go now?

circusscientist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 873 posts

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#821

Post by autoexec »

pedalpete wrote: post #120
bluedino wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. Lifelong hockey fan, I never understood this complaint. I believe it was FOX that did the 'highlight the puck' thing for a few years in the 1990's. You can't see the ball in American football, either. But you don't need to. The guy that's running and everyone is trying to tackle? He has the ball. Just like th…

I'd go a step further and say the ball/puck is not the interesting thing to watch. Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all? Think about tennis. There is the trope of people's eyes going back and forth following the ball, but I don't think they are following the ball directly. They are going back and forth looking at the person who is going to hit the ball.

> Imagine if you couldn't see the players, and just saw the puck. Would that be interesting at all?

Honestly, I don't know. Is it really the players people care most about? More than the score? The players come in and out of teams so often that caring about any specific player seems strange. Teams seem more important. I suspect that just seeing colored sticks (with colors signifying the team) and the puck would probably work just as well but then I don't get the appeal of watching sports in the first place.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#822

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

tomjuggler wrote: post #729
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google ads are very time & location dependent, the fact that it's showing to you might be a bad sign since you are most likely not close to Durban and this seems like an ad you only want to run locally.

Yes our ads were geo-fenced when I had them on. We have always had a good web presence, I think the conclusion is that nobody looks for services on Google, and our reliance on it above other channels is now no longer viable

Everybody looks on Google for services; or ChatGPT googles/bings it for them. Still the same.

We had a 10x jump just last month for my own company.

For bigger company I consult with we had stable revenue last 2 years even though search traffic declined by 50%, our Google ads still perform the same. In general buying intent still seem to come through Google, only 10% via GPT.

It will become more and more, but a full drop in 3 months means something else is wrong.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#823

Post by rightbyte »

crazygringo wrote: post #456
imron wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search. From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.

Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers. If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?

The design of Chrome is such that people use Google search instead of entering the tld.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#824

Post by autoexec »

raincole wrote: post #757
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #61

I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…

> Look where everyone is looking In other words, Google. Google search grows every year despite people are dead sure it's "dead." [0]: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-google-search-grew-2...

Google search sucks and it's sucking worse all the time. Nobody knows what else to use though so people keep using it. The results are mostly spam and AI slop. If a searcher has to search several times to get information they used to get with a single query suddenly the average number of searches per searcher spikes and it looks like growth I guess. Worse, lots of people are trusting the AI results which is bound to lead them astray with lies and eventually be corrupted with ads/paid manipulation. For now though, the results Google returns are also mostly AI generated crap so at least people save themselves a click.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#825

Post by autoexec »

microtherion wrote: post #779
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #61

I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…

> From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots A friend recently explained to me that this trend is awful for newer businesses trying to get into a niche: * Chatbots give a lot of weight to Wikipedia in their training data. * Wikipedia demands "notability" for pages being created. * So non-incumbent businesses have a hard time getting on Wikipedia, and chatbots keep recommending incumbents.

Eventually the solution for this will be you paying the AI company to promote your products or suppress your competitors. Even now, chatbots are a terrible way to get product recommendations. They're trained on way too much ad copy and too many bullshit reviews. As ever, the best thing a company can do to advertise is simply to be excellent at what they do and be very affordable.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#826

Post by qwertywert_ »

glitchcrab wrote: post #662
qwertywert_ wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure they don't? How would you know? Every intern I've worked with uses discord

Your experience (as a single data point) doesn't mean that everyone the age of the interns you work with uses Discord.

I'm responding to his personal datapoint with my own. I agree with you though..

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#827

Post by Dylan16807 »

glitchcrab wrote: post #658
Dylan16807 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $125, which is also about the price of one year of cloud storage, you can get a hard drive big enough to store half a million photos and also back up a million photos. It probably won't ever go over $200. And the hardware to serve that hard drive is somewhere between free and another hundred.

Sure, but then you're putting all your eggs in one basket (hard drive). If you really want to divest yourself of the cloud then you need to set things up in a redundant and fault-tolerant fashion. And at that point the outlay is much more than 'just a hard drive'.

Did you skip the "back a million photos" part? That's at least 3 copies of every file, spread across your group. If you want maximum safety you can add a local backup too, which isn't much more money. You don't need to spend anything on fault tolerance. Your files should already be on multiple servers, but also if it goes down for a few days that isn't a big deal.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#828

Post by stinkbeetle »

xbmcuser wrote: post #679
stinkbeetle wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Most men don't understand what women have to go through in everyday interactions and most women don't understand the same for men. And I think your analytical reaction to an emotional problem proves my point I feel.

> Most men don't understand what women have to go through in everyday interactions and most women don't understand the same for men.

Probably true. This is entirely different from the previous assertion you made though.

> And I think your analytical reaction to an emotional problem proves my point I feel.

It doesn't, and you have not addressed anything I said which might make your point.

Re: Google is dead. Where do we go now?

#829

Post by collaborative »

baobun wrote: post #770
collaborative wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It affects everyone. It's always been the case, also in traditional advertising. As soon as a company gets rich it defaults to massive marketing (at a loss) to stay on top and drown the underdogs. That's why I think marketing spend should be capped by revenue by law. The current system stiffles competition

I lke it. It would be wonderful if the cap was gradually reduced to 0.

That would make it easy to implement: a simple payment receipt to a journalist who visited a "demo" would be enough to start fining them. Imagine the honesty of the press when it can't get bribed by the oligarchs anymore. Or imagine charities needing to court local producers instead of poison-cola for endorsements. It would be a different world!
Post reply on HN