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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#911

Post by chestervonwinch »

mad182 wrote: post #357
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…

IMHO it's not so much of a problem with google search, but the internet as a whole. Most genuine discussions have moved from open, publicly accessible web to places inaccessible to search engines and general public. Smaller niche forums, blogs and personal websites with no financial incentive have died out. People have moved to Facebook, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Slack, Twitter and other places behind logins. Onl…

> Reddit is one of the last places with huge amounts of publicly accessible online discussions.

There are still some pretty active enthusiast message boards, e.g., https://www.tacomaworld.com

But your overall point is valid, I think. My pointing to a single active forum doesn't change the fact that many of other enthusiast groups have moved to facebook groups and the like.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#913

Post by jijji »

Google went downhill when they changed the "Google Instant" algorithm from what people actually are searching for, to something more aligned with some leftist ideology based around what they hope people are searching for. This happened around 2015 [0], and was in full effect by 2017 [1].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190627113146/https://www.proje...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190627121520/https://www.theep...

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#914

Post by Ygg2 »

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,…

How bad is Google search?

I had to search crates.io . Let me tell you. It's not the pinnacle of search.

What I searched was `fast bitset implementation`. My results consisted of drill bits a stack overflow questions and a Baeldung article on hashSet vs long[]

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#915

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.

It's only a matter of time before reddit too becomes too inauthentic to trust. Not only is it directly funded by advertising, its audience is mainstream enough for advertisers to invest time and money posting fake opinions in order to make it look like it's coming from real people.

I seriously hope I never see comments or news about people appending hacker news to searches. I don't want advertisers to kill this site when they catch wind of it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#916

Post by dannysullivan »

uberman wrote: post #867

Google Rep: "You said in the post that quotes don't give exact matches. They really do. Honest. Me: Google for "quotes don't give": Top result, does not contain the given phrase Second result, does not contain that phrase This is literally the first thing I tried and I did a view source to be sure. They are lying to us and/or themselves. Looking at the result, I would say 1/2 the results don't include that phrase inc…

I'm the Google Rep, and there were two more parts to my reply which explain this:

Here's why people often think quoting with Google doesn't work when it really does (I've looked a huge number of these reports). 1) We match ALT text 2) We match text not readily visible, such as in a menu or small text 3) Page has changed since we indexed it 4) Punctuation...

Punctuation comes into play if you did a quoted search like "dog cat" and there's text that says "dog, cat" then we'll see that without the punctuation. That doesn't seem a major issue but we're looking at if we could improve there.

And...as noted in another reply below, in the first result, if you look at the cached page that shows the ENTIRE page that we indexed (rather than the paginated version you land on), there's this text:

quotes, don-t-give-up-the-fight

with when you remove the punctation, is the match:

quotes dont give

And I get that this can be frustrating, that we don't consider punctation in a quoted search. That's not a new change, however. It's been that way for ages. But as I also said, it's something we might revisit.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#917

Post by jonathankoren »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #907
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…

"Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore." This bluntness does not go far enough. People do not change defaults, no matter how "easy" it may be to do so. A default is a pre-made choice by someone other than the consumer. There is no set-up process where the consumer makes a choice. The choice has already been made. Consumers do not make this choice. Even if they could…

> Defaults are effectively permanent settings. It does not matter how easy it is to change a default setting if practically no one ever does it

Thinking about when Firefox defaulted to Yahoo. I wonder what switch rate was.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#918

Post by majormajor »

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…

Firefox on Linux Mint was pointing at something else for a while (DDG I think? Bing? I don't recall).

I gave up after a few weeks and had to switch it back to Google. Google's not perfect - it's never been perfect, it was just better than the alternatives - but it's still less bad than others.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#919

Post by MitziMoto »

initplus wrote: post #783
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,…

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.

Google has publicly admitted they cannot reliability determine the original source of a peice if content. This is a big problem for content creators.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#920

Post by 8organicbits »

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…

`site:reddit.com` has been worked poorly for me recently, although I've used it many times in the past. He's my most recent search (I was traveling and trying to watch Netflix, but geo-block was preventing some shows from appearing):

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Areddit.com%20ne...

The entire first page is for NetflixViaVPN subreddit (not linking to avoid SEO). They have a stickied post that seems to shill two VPN providers I haven't heard of. This is plausible, as maybe Netflix hasn't either... The stickied post has comments disabled, so it's hard to tell. Then if you click other posts, a bot auto-links the stickied post, but everyone is making different suggestions that may imply the stickied post is wrong.

Interestingly, the same search on DuckDuckGo only has three posts from that subreddit. This better matches what I wanted! The first one I'm seeing is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN_Guide/comments/rgh2xn/best_netf...

This seems much more plausible. All those comments suggest a provider I've heard of and that I've heard other people mention IRL. Google seems to rely too much on the URL or the page header, so it's stuck in a single subreddit.

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