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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

#91

Post by userbinator »

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…

Part numbers, error codes, and similar "high entropy" terms also seem to suffer the same fate.

Even worse than giving no results is giving you page after page of "results" containing slightly different numbers/codes.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#92

Post by Semaphor »

buro9 wrote: post #90
Semaphor wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They have block/lower/raise/pin for domains, and additionally, they support regex rewriting of domain names, all my twitter results on Kagi redirect to nitter (though I don’t know if that still works, I was gone last week)

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#93

Post by sjkdfkjdsfhjkhs »

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…

It's also not clear why Google killed Blogger.

More investment in Blogger with better linking between blogs (the way you can @someone on Twitter) and discovery (#tag searches allowing you to see posts from multiple blogs, curated blogrolls), more realtime/live logging functionality, easy microblogging functionality, etc. would probably have led to a lot more content existing on Google owned spaces, as opposed to being siloed behind Facebook and Twitter paywalls.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#94

Post by AdamN »

Animats wrote: post #33
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…

Yes. We can point to the exact moment in time when Google turned to the dark side. It was on August 9, 2006, when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] This was the moment that SEO, now officially endorsed by Google's CEO, became respectable. Until then, SEO was considered to be a branch of the spam industry. There were conferences such as the Web Search Spam Squashing Sum…

There was/is whitehat SEO: properly creating links to relevant content within a site, using keywords that help bots find relevant content, traversing your own site to make sure there aren't dead zones with content that will never be found.

Google should have leaned into just this small segment of tooling and done much more of a ban hammer on the bad actors. They didn't and a bunch of people have left. I use DuckDuckGo mostly and sometimes Google but never by default. I don't even like DDG that much but it's good enough.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#95

Post by jnurmine »

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.

I might pay like max. 3 EUR a year for this to get a search engine that gives the good results without ads, SEO spam and bogus clone sites.

That amount of money is probably more than Google now makes from my online presence because I adblock, block 3rd party cookies, tend to click "block" to everything including the idiotic "legitimate concern" and never ever click on ads.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#96

Post by wodenokoto »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #81
wodenokoto wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the query “where is Microsoft headquarters” they want to return results with phrases like “Microsoft is located at …”

This makes non technical question-answering easier, to the chagrin of every techie.

I think your problem is a mix between a lot of things, but mostly it seems to be SEO farming.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#97

Post by robertlagrant »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #26
Andrex wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google didn't invent the idea of a web crawler or search engine. Because of how the web was designed, I think it was always an inevitability that the internet would start open but trend closed.

You could say that google started it. They ate everyone's lunch by including what people were looking for in a box at the top of the search results. Of course sites will respond in kind.

They were better than the incumbents. The incumbents allowed people to buy search ranking.

Re: Google search's death by a thousand cuts

#100

Post by danpalmer »

> What if Wikipedia started charging or restricting API access?

Wikipedia has a downloadable data dump that would cost almost nothing to serve to Google, and it has an organisational mandate to make that data available. If they decide to charge for access to that I'm sure Google can afford it. Let's not throw around completely unrealistic hypotheticals.

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