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

The man who killed Google Search?

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

921–930 of 939 posts

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#921

Post by halo18 »

_xivi wrote: post #912
halo18 wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem to be doing great? The example search I got on their home page was 'best headphones' which pretty immediately surfaces http://www.quietheadphones.com/ - which is openly for sale, and also covered in affiliate links. A bit farther down the page is a 'best headphones for 2020' article. And this is the example result set they push on the home page to a potential buyer. You guys pay for this thing?

What are you comparing it against? Do you actually have a better alternative or just having a bad day? The fact that you tried to pick on 2 of the results for such a generic keyword, show that it's miles ahead of mainstream search engines which are filled with SEO spam. I tried that same search on Google, duckduckgo, bing, brave, yandex, even yahoo and needless to say the results were pretty much all SEO spam, list-s…

Google, with blacklisted domains. I wish an actual better alt existed.

I didn't 'try to pick on' - I pointed out two garbage results in a query that they literally push you to from the home page as examples for potential customers. If those results aren't doing what people claim (not highlighting seo spam) then I'm not really left with any faith that the queries they don't elevate to their home page will be better.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#922

Post by gofreddygo »

DanielHB wrote: post #784
sumanthvepa wrote: post #537

Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research. The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else. Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined…

> So blaming Raghavan for what happened at Yahoo! is just stupid. He joined yahoo in 2005, if my memory serves correctly yahoo was already pretty much IBM-dead by then. The downfall of yahoo was due to the hard push of popup ads in the late 90s and very early 2000s. Much like the google history of today though, maximising metrics at the cost of user experience. But it all happened in yahoo way before he joined.

I can't sign up to blaming 1 person for a company's failure.

But people need a reason however wrong and a symbol for it. Article is painting growth-hacking as "the" reason for Google's failure and a single person as a symbol. a spineless management puppet sheepskinned as a scientist. Classic expose material.

I don't agree with the article's emotion or conclusions but I can't deny that Google is in a bad, bad place. Founders don't care. User's being preyed on. No one to fight for the user's interests. Parasites eating it up feeding on whatever's left. employees and users expressing betrayal and abuse. In the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

And for the world, a loss. Almost like a good friend gone the way of drug addiction.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#923

Post by eastbound »

dazc wrote: post #659
freetinker wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit chicken-and-egg. Another perspective: Google’s system incentivizes SEO spam. Search for a while hasn’t been about searching the web as much as it has been about commerce. It taps commercial intent and serves ads. It is now an ad engine; no longer a search engine.

Best exercise bike articles, and such, are what lots of people people actually search for. There is no incentive to provide quality work which answers these queries hence the abundance of spam and ads. If you want to purchase consumer products at your own expense and offer an impartial opinion on each of them then you will have no problem getting ranked highly on google. You will lose a lot of money doing so, however…

> Best exercise bike articles, and such, are what lots of people people actually search for

Google doesn’t have to return the SEO-optimized page. Google has other options:

- Return 10 results of the 10 top products,

- Derank any site that seems SEO-optimized,

- Derank any commercial site,

- Derank any site with a cookie banner (implying the user is tracked and the writer is trying to write what the user wants to read) or the infamous mailing list popup,

- Prioritize comparisons from brick-and-mortar journals, or give credentials to other vectors of trust,

- Act as a paid directory, where only paid answers appear,

- Return individual positive and negative comments about products, extracted from review pages, maybe even in a graph (“Good for USB-C according to 95% of the reviews, provides an electric shock according to 7% of non-affiliated comments”).

There WERE many options. Google CHOSE to rank awful sites that provide decreased value, and worse than that, it chose that all other sites won’t be viable, killing them. Google chose the face of the internet today.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#924

Post by ChuckMcM »

arromatic wrote: post #714
ChuckMcM wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would add sites for a particular topic (aka slashtag) to their list. That would build a virtual custom search engine within the search engine. And topic specific searches thrown at it would consistently out perform Bing and Google in terms of search quality. The meta "spam" slash tag (everyone got their own) would let you tell the engine sites you never wanted to see in your search results so if you were tired…

Why did it shut down ?

Ultimately, lack of traffic. During Blekko's lifetime Google went from paying people less than $10M/quarter to send their search traffic to Google to over $4B/quarter to do that. If you are ad based you need traffic to serve ads to.

At some point a pay for search model might emerge that has a big enough audience to support a company but that time is not yet here.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#925

Post by anticensor »

octopusRex wrote: post #777
willvarfar wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a case can be made that the spam problem can be traced all the way back to Google buying Doubleclick. Its really easy to spot the crap websites that are scaping content-creating websites ... because they monetize by adding ads. If Google was _only_ selling ads on the search results page, then it could promote websites that are sans ads. Instead, it is incentivised to push users to websites that contain ads, b…

We need a Reverse Google search that will weed out the garbage.

Reverse of Google Search is also Google Search, due to how the ranking works.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#926

Post by crdrost »

_xivi wrote: post #912
halo18 wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem to be doing great? The example search I got on their home page was 'best headphones' which pretty immediately surfaces http://www.quietheadphones.com/ - which is openly for sale, and also covered in affiliate links. A bit farther down the page is a 'best headphones for 2020' article. And this is the example result set they push on the home page to a potential buyer. You guys pay for this thing?

What are you comparing it against? Do you actually have a better alternative or just having a bad day? The fact that you tried to pick on 2 of the results for such a generic keyword, show that it's miles ahead of mainstream search engines which are filled with SEO spam. I tried that same search on Google, duckduckgo, bing, brave, yandex, even yahoo and needless to say the results were pretty much all SEO spam, list-s…

> how tf is NYTimes an authoritive source on purchasing headphones?

Acqui-hire. So what happened was in around 2010 or so a voice-over artist named Lauren Dragan who I think was already dabbling in professional tech journalism, wanted to write about headphones and microphones since she was getting really opinionated about them in her VO work.

So she contributed an article to “The Wirecutter,” which was trying to be like Tom’s and Engadget (I think they then dropped “the” from their name? Which makes one want to abbreviate as WC which is just tragic). I think it was just a freelance article on “audiophile headphones”...?

Well, the audiophile community online was growing etc. and this proved to be remarkably successful because it gave the audiophiles some professional validation, right? “I work in audio booths, I have to listen super closely, I know what I am talking about.” So it made money for The Wirecutter and they pitched her on “if we just bought you dozens of headphones online would you take notes and make a rec” and she's been doing stuff like that for them ever since.

Wirecutter broadened its focus to a lot of other topics, usually not with the same reliability—it really depends on the reviewer’s biases and such, and Lauren’s VO/audiophile bias of “I want my headphones to have a very flat EQ to match what's on the track, it's more important that they don't croak at higher volumes...” was something she could communicate well about in terms of sibilant highs or feeling too much or too little bass. Vs “we looked at air purifiers and, uh, they purify air!” ...

Meanwhile NYT was trying to grow their online presence as newspaper sales die... So they bought up Wirecutter, as a sort of “new journalism,” a “we wanted to get into this anyway, and it's easier if we don't try to build up the network effects ourselves but just take a site’s traffic who is already successful.” So yeah, they aqui-hired Wirecutter and put all their stuff on their domain and it kinda sucks now, but some of that were trends that were already beginning before they were acquired and there's still usually some decent data hiding in the “the competition” section of every “WC” article.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#927

Post by immibis »

Aerroon wrote: post #626
FullstakBlogger wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else. Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML…

> The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. I would go further and say that it is impossible . Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes. Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algo…

you can click one of the ML-selected categories at the top of your homepage to tell it what you'd like to see today

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#928

Post by immibis »

fuzztester wrote: post #754
nox101 wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are things they could do and that ML could maybe help? * They could let me directly enter my interests instead of guessing * They could classify videos by expertise (tags or ML) and stop recommending beginner videos to someone who expresses an interest in expert videos. * They could let me opt out of recommending videos I've already watched * They could separate sites into larger categories and stop rec…

Those are some good suggestions, particularly the first one: >let me directly enter my interests

YouTube has this feature

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#929

Post by immibis »

skydhash wrote: post #632
barnabyjones wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.

If you’re watching a single subject of interest video on your phone (TikTok type of content), it’s great. But landscape videos is more pleasant and there’s a reason we move from 4:3 for media. But that actually means watching the videos, but what I see is a lot of skipping.

Landscape videos were more pleasant on landscape screens, which are rarely used now, so they aren't more pleasant now.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#930

Post by eschaton »

snowwrestler wrote: post #613
wepple wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there known examples of ex-McKinsey employees that are generally considered a force for good in general?

Tom Peters’ work on management excellence is generally well-regarded and he started it at McKinsey. He’s also more recently spoken pretty aggressively about how he thinks McKinsey has lost their way as a business and become a negative force.

Not that well-regarded any more since his fabrications came to light.
Post reply on HN