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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#841

Post by chaxor »

cromwellian wrote: post #390

Ah, young whipper snappers, everything old is new again, and clearly the world is always getting worse. Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing 'Cached' pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad. Long before Reddit was big, USENET/DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb/UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite…

I think the biggest sentiment shared with everyone against Google search at the moment is the eagerness to see better competition. While it may be true (and certainly easy) to paint everything with this large brush of 'nothing has changed, we've seen this before' - it misses the point just a tad, which is (imo) aimed at the disdain for constantly being tracked, and wanted to have a much more hacker friendly web experience (like the old days). Things such as https:/serx.cf/ (https://searx.space) or https://github.com/benbusy/whoogle-search (https://whoogle.dcs0.hu) should prevail on a site such as HN - and furthermore, we should be setting the path with these tools for the future use of internet by non-power users.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#842

Post by [deleted] »

mizzao wrote: post #831
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,…

What happened to Clubhouse? I just realized it was quite popular but now I haven't heard about it in a while. Can you link to a postmortem?

[deleted]

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#843

Post by moffkalast »

Xeronate wrote: post #782
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…

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.

Meanwhile you still need Google to search reddit as reddit's built in search remains trash.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#844

Post by CountHackulus »

chillfox wrote: post #821
jedwhite wrote: post #585

Earlier 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 have tried using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, but Firefox changed it back to Google with every update, so eventually I just gave up on that endeavor.

That's really strange, I've got it set as the default in Firefox on 3 different computers (2 mac 1 windows) and it's stayed the default over several updates. I think something might be wrong with your computer?

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#845

Post by Androider »

How about uBlock Origin, but for search? A crowd-sourced + manually vetted ban list at the domain level. Google is too timid and can't just permaban low quality SEO spam domains for fear of getting sued, instead they can only tweak the algorithm. But a community solution has no such limits.

Copying Stack Overflow questions and answers to your site? Entire domain is banned, no appeal process, nobody using "uBlock Origin for Search" will ever see your site again. Boom, done.

Maybe it could be done as an extension? It puts a little ban button next to a search result on google.com, that instantly bans the domain locally for you, and also nominates the site for the global ban list.

I feel like there's a lot of low hanging fruit here, like completely banning just the top 1000 SEO sites would already dramatically improve the results.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#846

Post by toomanydoubts »

valdiorn wrote: post #38

Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…

I've replaced "site:news.ycombinator.com" with hn.algolia.com and couldn't be happier.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#847

Post by radicalriddler »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #846
valdiorn wrote: post #38

Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services. Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types? Some of the search patterns I currently I use: * Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music an…

I've replaced "site:news.ycombinator.com" with hn.algolia.com and couldn't be happier.

If I'm interested in anything technical, I'll search hn.algolia, it's a brilliant tool.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#848

Post by jmpeax »

I'd just be happy with a search engine where you can choose to remove an entire site from the results. Sick of getting towardsdatascience pages written by students rehashing chapter 1 of textbooks.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#850

Post by _HMCB_ »

jedwhite wrote: post #585
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 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…

“…almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore”? 6-8 quality leads in the last 14 days (ave. sale at $3,200) on less than $220 spent on ads begs to differ with you. We’ve only started advertising the last two weeks. We’ve had calls and form submissions _all_ from Google and we only launched our site roughly 45 days ago. I’m not a Google fanboy and I think Search does need an overhaul but people are mostly definitely using Google Search. Another client of mine gets 8-12 new customers per month all from Google searches and she doesn’t spend a dime on Google.
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