[HN Gopher] Google Search Is Dying
___________________________________________________________________
Google Search Is Dying
Author : dbrereton
Score : 2280 points
Date : 2022-02-15 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dkb.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dkb.io)
| cromwellian wrote:
| 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 owning DejaNews, did not often surface
| links into USENET content, and a lot of forums, for whatever
| reason, were not indexed by Google. For example, I used to spend
| a lot of time reading the latest on PC/3D Hardware stuff on
| Beyond3D, Overclockers, Rage3D, etc and I almost always had
| either use site specific search (dejanews.com or say, PHP BB's
| built in local search), or I had to add site:beyond3d.com for
| example.
|
| And is a large amount of confirmation bias going on in these
| Google threads that appear. Some people make assumptions that
| their search patterns are representative of the billions of
| searchers ("argh, I searched for pytorch k-means and a GitHub
| wrapper site appeared!") and that their experience is a
| representative sample, while others focus only on what has gotten
| worse, and not what has gotten better.
|
| What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded
| the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search
| engines are any better at filtering it out, except by luck
| because perhaps they don't crawl as many sites as often.
| shuntress wrote:
| I think this is very important to note and I agree.
|
| Whether or not google search right now is as good as it _could
| be_ should not be the main point of discussion.
|
| We have to remember to acknowledge that the web google is
| indexing now differs _drastically_ from the web it was indexing
| 20 years ago. Web pages are now less likely than ever to be
| freely accessible plain text put forth in good faith for public
| consumption. Google (in addition to dealing with big walled
| gardens designed explicitly to hide content from google) is
| trying to sift through basic spam, industrial scale SEO
| exploitation, and nation-state cyber warfare.
|
| Bitching about google search being bad almost feels like
| yelling at the canary in the coal mine when it passes out.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I vaguely disagree with this.
|
| The issue (at least for me) is that google is no longer
| actually searching for the thing I ask for, and it's being
| blatantly disrespectful of users who cared enough to learn
| how to actually use the search features.
|
| Quick example from today? I did a literal two word search -
| gulp admzip - and while the result are okish, an increasing
| amount of space is taken up by results with this handy little
| blob at the bottom:
|
| "Missing: gulp | Must include: gulp"
|
| "Missing: admzip | Must include: admzip"
|
| WTF are they smoking? I asked for two fucking words, and the
| top result doesn't include one of them. Then the second
| result doesn't include the other.
|
| So then I add quotes around the phrase I want "gulp admzip"
| because I'd really only like to actually see results that
| include that EXACT phrase, and... drumroll... IT DOES IT
| FUCKING AGAIN: "Missing: gulp | Must include: gulp"
|
| And that literally has nothing to do with the quality of the
| items it's searching, and everything to do with Google
| deciding what I meant - Clearly I meant the npmjs.com package
| adm-zip, because that item gets vastly more views than any of
| the real search results.
|
| I couldn't have possibly meant to restrict the search to the
| actual fucking phrase I told it to search for, because there
| aren't that many results, and they don't get many views.
| Drew_ wrote:
| Have you considered that there may not actually be any good
| results for the exact phrase "gulp admzip"? Especially
| considering "admzip" is a misspelling as you admit?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Not getting results back is GOOD!
|
| That's meaningful feedback that my search needs to be
| improved.
|
| Getting all spam back is actually ALSO GOOD! I can
| visually distinguish spam pretty quickly, and it's also
| meaningful feedback that my search needs to be improved.
|
| Removing my ability to search for exact phrases is
| fucking BAD! I'd much rather get spam or nothing when I
| search for a directly quoted phrase, rather than google
| just start returning bullshit.
|
| The problem is that the bullshit google returns is
| actually very hard to visually parse out - they're real
| sites that get lots of views, those views are just
| ENTIRELY unrelated to what I'm actually searching for.
| That's really hard to filter out quickly.
| usui wrote:
| > Especially considering "admzip" is a misspelling as you
| admit?
|
| I don't think this is true. A quick look at
| https://github.com/cthackers/adm-zip
|
| > var zip = new AdmZip("./my_file.zip");
|
| It's entirely possible that a person could be querying
| the exact variable name "admzip" for a variety results
| that should only be code snippets of the by-convention
| "AdmZip" variable name with no concern for the package
| name "adm-zip", which, by the way, Google will interpret
| hyphens as just whitespace, so it's the equivalent of
| searching "adm zip".
|
| I know this could be a case because I do this kind of
| programmatic search all the time, and in fact I remember
| specifically searching the web for "AdmZip" and not "adm-
| zip" a few years ago.
|
| And if there are no good results for "AdmZip", that's
| fine! At least I can, at a glance, quickly know that
| there are not many code snippets across the web lying
| around with that conventional variable name.
| usui wrote:
| I highly agree that "Missing", "Must include", has to be
| one of the worst hijacks of search functionality I've ever
| seen. Please just respect my search terms, as it doesn't
| fully respect them even when I put them in double quotes!
| It takes far longer to scan my eyes across the results dump
| and then retroactively see that my results are absolutely
| not what I am looking for, than to just see that there
| aren't many results for my exact query.
|
| Decreasing the feedback loop time is essential to modifying
| my query quickly so that I can eventually find what I am
| looking for.
|
| The "Missing", "Must include" pages have always, always,
| ALWAYS, in every case, never given me what I am looking
| for. If it did, then I would have just taken out my search
| term.
| shuntress wrote:
| This is the exact angle of discussion I'm saying we should
| try to avoid because this behavior from Google is an effect
| of an underlying problem with _the entire web_.
|
| Most sites that include the _exact phrase_ "gulp admzip"
| are empty spam of regurgitated word lists of every build
| tool or dev package designed to attract errant clicks that
| help boost ad metrics. That is why Google can't "just grep
| the entire internet".
|
| Incidentally, I agree with Google here that whatever
| problem you're trying to solve is more likely to be an
| issue with either gulp or admzip and you will be better
| served by content specifically about one or the other.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| We should avoid discussing the fact that the search
| engine is now hijacking my search to show me things it
| would prefer I have searched for?
|
| You know what - I'd much rather just see the spam sites.
|
| The spam sites are useful feedback that my search is
| either too generic, or there aren't many good hits.
|
| Further, some of them aren't actually spam sites - I'm
| not afraid to click through 5 or even 6 pages of results,
| and I can usually visually distinguish obvious spam from
| content very quickly.
|
| I can't do that if Google has removed my ability to
| actually filter the results to the relevant search terms,
| and just keeps showing me the freaking link to npm over
| and over again.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| And the problem with the entire web is a result of
| incentives -- Google's algorithms don't discourage people
| from creating spam and clone sites. You might even say
| the algorithms encourage spam because they have been
| terrible for so long.
| cromwellian wrote:
| > I asked for two fucking words, and the top result doesn't
| include one of them
|
| You are aware that it has always been like this? That's why
| the "+" operator even exists. Even 10 years ago or more
| (before Google+ stole the "+" operator), you could get back
| results that don't actually include your search terms and
| you'd have to do +gulp +admzip to force their inclusion>
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has
| degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the
| other search engines are any better at filtering it out
|
| The problem as I see it is Google has created a bunch of
| perverse incentives to make your page rank higher. One big
| problem is Google gives higher rank to "comprehensive"
| articles. On the one hand that would seem like a good thing
| right? But what you end up getting is endless affiliate
| articles that don't seem to be written for humans. And they are
| really easy to spot if you know what to look for.
|
| A great example is webhosting reviews. Search "best web
| hosting" and click any of the 1st page results and you will
| almost always get an article that just rambles on and on and on
| with headings like: best web hosting for email, best web
| hosting for blogs, best web hosting for email marketing. To a
| human, it's an incredibly disorganized mess, but to Google's
| bots, its "highly comprehensive and authoritative".
| cromwellian wrote:
| While that may be true, it's also true regardless of the
| ranking algorithm or which web search is the winner.
|
| Webspam will seek to game whichever search company has
| dominant market share and they will structure their spam to
| overcome the filter and ranking specifics of that engine.
|
| Considering tools like GPT-3, one could easily imagine in the
| limit, a spammer running a large number of searches through a
| search engine, finding out what ranks high, and the training
| a generative model on that dataset to produce similar
| articles. Auxiliary signals like inbound links and DNS
| records they can also usually work around by purchasing
| domains or buying inbound links.
|
| It will always be a war and there is never going to be a
| victory over webspam. Even with something like web3 where
| posting content costs money I can imagine ways spam.
| joebob42 wrote:
| I guess in the perfect magical world where the algorithm
| detected "suitability for humans for the given query" then
| if gpt-3 spat out a bunch of stuff and it ranked highly, it
| would mean this wasn't really spam, because it was useful
| to humans, even if it was generated in a spammy way.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Oh man I'm glad I'm not the only one who adds "Reddit" to every
| search. If I want info about computer parts, software, games,
| cooking, fitness, etc. Then I don't think there's anywhere better
| at the moment. At least there's nothing better that Google serves
| up.
|
| I'm fed up of Google returning blog spam, ads, and shamelessly
| rehosted content. I want real information by real people, not
| automated blog posts with titles covering every common search
| term.
| TheMerovingian wrote:
| I recently found myself looking for info on gardening potatoes.
| Each time I used google, I'd get the equivalent of "Top 10
| things to plant this spring". It's AI generated drivel, void of
| any substance. Like reading book's table of contents, nothing
| else.
|
| I added "site:reddit.com" and I had my answer on the first hit.
| This is sad.
| pdmccormick wrote:
| I just have one question... does Netcraft officially confirm
| this?
| rajup wrote:
| If only I had a penny for every time someone says Google search
| is dying...
| nullc wrote:
| Too bad reddit has utterly sabotaged itself here.
|
| The logged out views of reddit only show a couple comments from
| each thread, and then the pages are full of hidden comments from
| other unrelated threads.
|
| So if I search for some exact text on reddit, google will often
| present an unrelated page that doesn't contain the queried text--
| yet it does contain it: hidden. Actually finding the real thread
| with the text is a nightmare unless you know of some of the few
| reddit full text searches out there.
|
| Sadly, even the broken logged out reddit interface is still often
| a better thing to search than google... but only in the sense
| that southpark's "IT" (spoof of the segway announcement) beat
| dealing with the airlines. (
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK362RLHXGY )
| kozikow wrote:
| I remember when searching for vacuum cleaner recently. Google 1st
| page is 100% SEOers gaming search to earn money on affiliate
| links. On reddit you can find comparisons like this:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/VacuumCleaners/wiki/recommendedvacu... .
| That's a clear example of what article is talking about.
| pictur wrote:
| I think what kills google searches is seo bullshit. Even the
| worst sites with seo are now on the first page. In the past, SEO
| really forced quality, but now it's enough to make your website
| compatible with bullshit like amp.
| trzy wrote:
| This problem will become more acute as all-day wearable AR
| devices become mainstream and the state of the world is recorded
| and parsed by a distributed network of them. You'll be able to
| check the quasi-real-time and historical states of a particular
| restaurant, pull up the exact menu that was being served
| yesterday, as well as reviews. None of this will be indexable by
| Google. However, Google is particularly well positioned to
| leverage their technology and resources to be a leading player in
| the market for such devices.
| jdeaton wrote:
| > Early adopters aren't using Google anymore.
|
| What are they using now?
| bbulkow wrote:
| Google maps results are on their way to death. I was recently
| doing a search having gone down to a three block area, did not
| show the result - Google pulled out a few blocks and showed a
| category result there. There was a higher ranking category result
| in the block i remembered, i had to remove my search term and
| zoom in!
|
| The problem is not ads, it is not even capitalism, is the
| requirement of our western capitalism to require constant growth.
| Doing what Google did 5 years ago, with the profits of 5 of years
| ago, should have been fine - but the markets demand growth, so
| companies have to pull into unsustainable territory and that
| wrecks the company.
|
| Boeing is a great modern example.
|
| No one ever really expected much of reddit. It could just do its
| thing. But now, spun off, it will have to relentlessly seek
| growth, and the counter is ticking for its destruction.
| drawkbox wrote:
| A major problem with search degradation is that lots of content
| is behind walled gardens now: apps, instant messaging/chat and
| video platforms that aren't as indexable like social video
| platforms, YouTube is pretty good about metadata to index. More
| content is behind paywalls.
|
| Less and less is being written in blogs, sites and publicly
| indexable content.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced
| content on the internet are actually generated by artificial
| intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media
| influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing
| range of newly-normalised cultural products._
|
| This strikes me as one of those explanations that gets very close
| to the truth, but then sharply veers off into fictional
| territory, which also makes is then trivial for the article to
| handwave it away with;
|
| _> This isn't true (yet), but it reflects some general sense
| that the authentic web is gone._
|
| What's true is that too many Google results are just aggregator
| bots reposting content from the largest news organizations. There
| are no "artificial intelligence networks" involved for any of
| that, that would probably even be an improvement by adding a bit
| of flavor to the samey content.
|
| But it's very much just copy&paste, to such a degree that it
| feels like there's only a hand-full of news-outlets in existence,
| and everybody else just copies their headlines and articles.
|
| In practice this leads to quite the extreme mono-culture when
| looking up certain hot topics, as the first page will be
| dominated by the same few articles, with slightly different
| headlines.
| animanoir wrote:
| I search Reddit because real people answer.
| devit wrote:
| I think Google should just remove all pages with affiliate links
| from its index (which of course includes detecting all the ways
| to defeat that like URL shorteners, redirect pages, JavaScript
| hackery, giving a different version to the crawler, etc.)
|
| Every time you search for "best X" you'll find a page with low-
| effort copied or write-for-hire content design to get you to
| click on Amazon affiliate links as opposed to what you are
| looking for, which is an actual review by someone who is an X
| enthusiast, personally bought and tested all the options and is
| eager to share their findings.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you
| typed in. It tries to be 'smart' and figure out what you 'really
| meant'"
|
| I miss Alta Vista. You had to provide your own thinking. I'd
| construct searches like: (word OR Word) AND (word NEAR word). I
| loved the NEAR command.
| bozhark wrote:
| Someone please make a search engine that actually searches Reddit
| well
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad
| results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and
| ads.
|
| The solution on a technical level seems so trivial. Lower the
| score for pages with affiliate links and ads!
| acheron wrote:
| Speaking of inauthentic shills, how much did this guy get paid by
| reddit? If there was really a time where reddit was a good source
| of authentic information, it's many years in the past at this
| point.
| chrisblackwell wrote:
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Take this idea seriously: This is the "final form" of free
| search, and we will see subscription services providing relevant
| and useful links in the future.
| novaRom wrote:
| People use Google Search only because Alphabet pays a lot of
| money to OEMs to have it as default search engine.
| ckmar wrote:
| I am soft-launching unfluence.app in the coming weeks. It's live
| now, though not yet marketed.
|
| It is a platform for finding and sharing recommendations within
| your own trusted network. I'd love to hear your feedback!
|
| You can read more about it on the home page[0], from its
| inspiration, comparisons with existing solutions, to a down-the-
| road monetization model that aligns with the network.
|
| It is being built by Kujo - a brand in the lawn care industry,
| and so is seeded with products and brands for that community. The
| initial launch will be within the lawn care community. However,
| the platform is community-agnostic and supports creating
| communities for any groups.
|
| [0] https://www.unfluence.app
| phreeza wrote:
| Just wait until the people doing SEO now realize this and start
| astroturfing at the same scale on Reddit. It'll be ruined much
| faster and with less hope of getting fixed than Google.
| gear_envy wrote:
| My uBlacklist filter list has grown rather large.
|
| I've (finally) come to the realization that most websites are
| trying to sell me something. It's usually affiliate link spam, or
| the articles provide just enough info and then ask you to sign up
| for their newsletter or buy their ebook or subscribe to their
| service or whatever other predatory monetization bullshit they've
| implemented.
|
| I get it, websites cost money to run and providing useful
| information for free is a bad business model. My issue here is
| that Google search rewards this spammy behavior in order to
| maximize cash flow. And this type of thing works very well on
| normal non-tech-inclined people so it won't ever go away.
|
| I dislike Reddit's current browsing experience, but the value of
| the platform has always been its smaller interest-focused
| communities and the ability to access the opinions of actual real
| humans instead of content marketers.
| JSONderulo wrote:
| Agree - it's deteriorating. And that's probably why we've seen a
| bunch of upstart engines appear like kagi, you.com, several
| others.
| kderbyma wrote:
| correction. dead. it's useless...even images....it's. dead.
| teawrecks wrote:
| What if it's not google results that suck, what if it's the
| internet? Reddit is (in theory) what we wish the internet still
| was: a bunch of loose communities with people sharing and
| discussing content, both original and not. The internet at large
| has become primarily different forms of ads. There was a time
| when the internet was littered with ads in popups, then they
| became banners on the side, now they are the content itself.
|
| It's feels silly to wish there could be an open version of reddit
| because that's what the internet is. It's just that there's so
| much noise now that it's impossible to find the signal. At one
| time google was that filter to find the diamonds in the rough.
| But now they have no incentive to filter that stuff out, because
| 9/10 times, the rough is THEIR ads. We need a new filter that's
| not funded by advertising.
| fomine3 wrote:
| I found that Google sometimes returns very few results even
| though search word is common one. I suspected that so they can
| reduce their server resource. I'd like to pay better search
| result.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| oh man, on point. I literally just did a day of picking a new gas
| range and finally the best results were Reddit. Trying to search
| for information on through google and general sites was so
| infuriating. It sucks now.
|
| I would seriously pay $10 a month for a search engine that worked
| really well and wasn't in the ad game. But I guess that's not a
| common stance.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| I've certainly learned to appreciate higher-quality 'review'
| content more than I did in the past, and to be more willing to
| actually pay for it (e.g., Consumer Reports, Wirecutter).
| scrollaway wrote:
| Kagi.com which I mentioned upthread is exactly that: paid
| search engine with no ads. It's free during beta.
|
| I don't mean to sound like I'm advertising it but I agree with
| you and I hope it can garner some interest.
| billiam wrote:
| The real Dead Internet Theory is not that bots make the content
| on the Internet, but that bots train humans to make their content
| for them.
| yhoneycomb wrote:
| Somehow I'm really surprised that I'm not the only one who adds
| "site:reddit.com" or "site:reddit.com/r/specificSubreddit" to my
| Google searches
| belter wrote:
| I was told then, not to use a direct Google search, but was a
| naughty boy and knew would be broken for a long time...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730
|
| And you hope the rest will get fixed?
| foxfluff wrote:
| I like their advice about taking screenshots for posterity
| though.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/upevafi.png
| zwieback wrote:
| Not for work though, if I search "3 way solenoid valve" or "food
| safe stainless steel" I get good results. Sure, I have to scroll
| past a few ads but the cost of running the thing doesn't come out
| of my pocket.
|
| For other stuff, yeah, Google is in pretty sad shape. I remember
| how exciting Google was when it was first created, those days are
| long gone.
| clearleaf wrote:
| The algorithms haven't been over those specific subjects enough
| to "refine" them to modern "standards" and it's only a matter
| of time before enough people search 3 way solenoid valve to get
| it connected to the forever growing mountain of useless search
| terms. It's actively decaying.
| awwstn wrote:
| This post is on point, but the bottom section highlights a nuance
| that may mean Google Search is not in fact dying: Google remains
| the best way to search Reddit, by a longshot. As someone who
| searches Reddit multiple times daily, I have tried a number of
| Reddit clients and always find myself falling back to Google.
|
| Perhaps this is where the entry point opportunity is...build a
| search engine for power users that effectively filters results to
| "authentic" content from reputable UGC platforms.
|
| As an aside: the advent of GPT-3 is going to make it really hard
| for reddit mods to keep doing as wonderful of a job as they do
| today.
| cosheaf wrote:
| It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated
| by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and
| turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and
| shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore
| their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without
| human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and
| whatever signal is there is just SEO spam that is optimized for
| serving ads. It's like an ouroboros eating its own tail.
| foobarian wrote:
| Wonder how we could set up an alt-web without the incentives
| that cause this problem. Delist any for-profit site? How would
| the sites keep the lights on without ads?
| endisneigh wrote:
| There's no better solution - you either have ads or a
| paywall, which will result in few users.
|
| If there were a better solution we'd all already be using it.
| Certainly you can rely on savvy people to produce free stuff,
| but the total amount of content will be drastically lower and
| therefore fewer consumers.
|
| The best thing is to just use bookmarks and your favorite
| sites' own search.
|
| There's just too much trash on the net
| agumonkey wrote:
| To me it's more a sociological problem than technological.
| Also networks have changed.. somehow the decentralization
| idea is spreading fast. For ideological, technical, cost ..
| or other reasons. Some people start neighborhood wireless
| networks etc.
|
| It also seems to me that internet has somehow became a middle
| man and is not providing human deep enough interactions,
| especially outside chat-like website (basically any exchange,
| business)..
|
| I could envision a whatsapp like system with quality control
| for producers and transparent transaction/tracking/accounting
| management offered by the network so people spend less time
| on side-loads and just focus into helping each others and
| doing what they need to.
| foxfluff wrote:
| People could certainly run hand-curated indexes and search
| engines seeded by such. I think marginalia.nu search behaves
| somewhat like that.
|
| I'm really interested in the idea of decentralized search
| where everyone has the power to choose for themselves who to
| trust.
|
| > How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?
|
| Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good riddance I
| say, once we get there.
| foobarian wrote:
| > Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good
| riddance I say, once we get there.
|
| I wish there was some middle ground. Think of all the
| useful Youtube videos showing how to play an instrument, do
| woodworking projects, fix cars... there is a vast amount of
| knowledge there. Maybe YT should be nationalized :-)
| rileyphone wrote:
| Youtubes early success was due to being a free video
| hosting platform, the monetization just led to the rise
| of 10:04 long videos. In any case most larger creators
| will put sponsorships in band like the good ol days. I'm
| hoping decentralized alternatives can take over like
| Peertube or Odysee, but I do also appreciate the more
| traditional business model of Vimeo.
| Lascaille wrote:
| > People could certainly run hand-curated indexes
|
| Do you think there's a lot of good content out there left
| to index?
| foxfluff wrote:
| Yep! There's a massive amount of useful content on the
| web. A lot of it is just a pain to find right now,
| because the quality of search is bad and the amount of
| garbage is a thousandfold greater.
|
| It's true that walled gardens have been eating up useful
| information and that is a real shame, but make no
| mistake: there's still a ridiculous amount of good stuff
| on the open web. They're not playing the SEO optimization
| game so they get buried.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I've had no problem finding sites to index with my search
| engine. Like it's tiny compared to Google today, but it's
| about the same size they were when they first started
| out. Leads me to think there's probably as much, or more
| now as there ever was. There's just more noise to go with
| it.
| cosheaf wrote:
| Federation is the only reasonable solution at this time but
| the technical overhead of federated search is high enough
| that most people won't use it so it won't benefit from
| network effects like Google did in the beginning. There might
| be a combination of blockchain juju that could make
| federation viable but all the thought leaders in that
| ecosystem are too high on their own supply to realize they
| could use blockchains for anything other than gambling.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://yacy.net
| ForHackernews wrote:
| You could check out https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
|
| It's a new internet protocol (NOT www) designed to be
| minimalist and interesting to hobbyists.
|
| > How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?
|
| The same way they did in the web 1.0 days - somebody would
| maintain the server themselves, or pay to have it maintained.
|
| Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30072085
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| This sounds almost like Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes
| a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
|
| Google made links on the web the measure of how good a page
| was. That became the target of everyone trying to do SEO. As a
| result, it stopped being a good measure of how good a page was.
|
| But in the long run, _nothing_ will work in that environment,
| because _every_ measure will be gamed as soon as people figure
| out that Google is using it. Google 's only choice is to try to
| stay ahead of the SEO crowd, and I'm not sure they can do that
| (well) for too much longer. In fact, if the article is to be
| believed, they're already starting to fail.
| cosheaf wrote:
| Yes, it's very similar with the added caveat that Google has
| an interest in serving results that have ads from their own
| network. This is why Google's metrics can be hacked. Anything
| that is barely above being classified as spam but serves ads
| from Google's ad network will be prioritized over other
| results simply because they have to hit their quarterly
| revenue targets. SEO hacking is not possible if a search
| engine is just a search engine but Google is also an ad
| network so they will always be susceptible to being gamed.
|
| This is also the case for social media platforms. They're
| incentivized to surface content that generates engagement and
| ad revenue. Basically ads are at the root of all problems
| when it comes to the internet and the content on it.
| Lascaille wrote:
| > SEO hacking is not possible if a search engine is just a
| search engine
|
| Uh, yes it is. If the owner of the site being searched is
| generating profit from that site being searched then they
| will game the search engine's algorithm to get them the
| most clicks.
| cosheaf wrote:
| I'm not interested in a pedantic argument. If you didn't
| understand what I meant then you should have asked for
| clarification. A search engine designed to surface useful
| information is not gameable if it is not in the business
| of generating quarterly profits from its own ad network.
| A site designed to drive traffic to itself can still try
| to hack the system by generating spam but without
| Google's incentives for surfacing such content because it
| serves ads from its own network there will be fewer such
| sites and useless content to go along with it.
|
| At the moment Google is incentivized to uprank spam
| because the spam comes with ads from its own ad network.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Of course it's still hackable.
|
| A search engine finds 50 pages that are exact matches for
| the search. Which one does it present as the top of the
| list? How does it decide? Unless it decides literally by
| a random number generator, however it decides, someone
| will try to discover the algorithm, and exploit it. This
| is true whether or not the search engine allows or
| displays ads.
|
| > I'm not interested in a pedantic argument. If you
| didn't understand what I meant then you should have asked
| for clarification.
|
| I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a
| misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your
| position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically
| but over the substance.
| cosheaf wrote:
| This is actually what google does. They find the 50 sites
| for your query and then do a multi-armed bandit test to
| see which one gets the most clicks but with a bias
| towards sites that serve ads from the Google ad network.
| A search engine without that bias is not gameable because
| it will converge on the results that is most popular for
| a given query and not because it also serves ads that
| affect the search engine's bottom line.
|
| Popularity is gameable but not the same way as Google is
| currently gameable because as soon as a site becomes
| popular and starts exploiting its ranking it will be easy
| enough to add a decay factor to prevent such sites from
| dominating the top results during the multi-armed bandit
| stage of ranking.
|
| In any case, the logic of why Google is going to shit is
| obvious. Arguing about fixes is not going to change their
| underlying business model and why spam is dominating
| their results. As long as they are a search engine, an ad
| network, and a corporation that must maximize profits
| their results will continue to deteriorate until the top
| results are all just spam.
|
| > I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a
| misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your
| position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically
| but over the substance.
|
| Then that wasn't clear and seemed like a pedantic point
| since it's obvious that any algorithm is gameable and I
| should have made it clear that I wasn't talking about a
| perfect search engine but one that was not susceptible to
| profit driven spam (which is currently the reason that
| Google results are going to shit).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| May I suggest a term?
|
| In my mind, if the web page tries to exploit knowledge of
| the search engine's algorithm, that's "gaming". This is
| done by the web page, without the deliberate co-operation
| of the search engine.
|
| If the _search engine_ is the one doing the funny
| business, to increase their own profit, to me that 's
| beyond "gaming". That's... "corruption" might be the
| right word.
| cosheaf wrote:
| That's reasonable. Substitute "corruption" wherever I
| used "gaming" when referring to maximizing profits at the
| expense of serving useful search results.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It's not just the links. After the links, google mined facts,
| like "how much does a german shepherd weigh," so no on gets
| those clicks, and the incentive is gone there too. They're even
| mining the snippets of the content, lowering the incentives for
| creating that too.
| cosheaf wrote:
| It's essentially a machine for printing money and people
| don't really understand what they're giving up in exchange
| for "free" search results. Google is beholden to market
| forces, it's no longer in the business of indexing useful
| information because the market doesn't value useful
| information, it values ad revenue.
|
| This is a structural problem and anything that gets large
| enough will succumb to the same forces. If the incentives are
| for optimizing ad revenue then that's what all corporate
| machines will do at scale, regardless of their initial
| motives and incentive structure. It doesn't help that Google
| is also an ad network, hence the ouroboros aspect.
| Lascaille wrote:
| You say it's a machine for printing money in a topic about
| people complaining that it doesn't work any more. It may
| have been but it won't be forever if things keep going the
| way they're going. Quality content is already being locked
| away.
| cosheaf wrote:
| We're in agreement. I don't think quarterly earnings are
| the right way to design and build products. Maximizing
| profits is not correlated with value and is often
| inversely proportional to it. Google was so successful
| that they changed the incentive structure of all content
| on the web. Now they're like the yeast drowning in the
| byproducts of their own metabolic processes. They
| exploited whatever nutrients were available (hand curated
| links) to make them initially successful and now there is
| no more worthwhile content being generated that is not
| designed to rank highly on Google (which is not the same
| thing as quality content and is instead content optimized
| for generating ad revenue from the Google ad network).
|
| It's the same with social networks, upvotes and likes
| skew the the type of content that is generated to be
| liked by the people liking and upvoting instead of being
| insightful. Popularity is not the same thing as insight
| so the social web is full of mostly useless but popular
| content.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I honestly don't think this is the problem, like at all. There
| are human websites made by humans, still. There's more crap,
| sure, but the good stuff is largely still out there.
|
| The problem begins and ends with the conflict of interest that
| Google both sells ads and selects search results. If they
| didn't have a vested interest in people visiting sites with
| their ads on them, they could decimate the number of spam
| results.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Which websites are shown in the search results is not
| influenced by whether Google has ads on them.
|
| The only thing that influences Google search results is
| Google's desire to keep as many people using Search as often
| as possible, since nearly all of Google's money comes from
| showing those text ads at the top of the Search results. This
| is all public information, you can read it in the 10K etc.
|
| So if Search sucks, it's not because Google has the wrong
| incentives but because they can't solve the problems Search
| faces.
| cosheaf wrote:
| Show me a site made by people with manually instead of
| algorithmically curated links and content.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'm not quite sure what you are asking, but this maybe one
| of these?
|
| https://simplifier.neocities.org/
|
| https://cheapskatesguide.org/
|
| https://indieseek.xyz/
|
| https://www.gameboomers.com/
|
| https://sadgrl.online/
| cosheaf wrote:
| Great, now compare this to all the content generated on
| content farms for selling ads and gaming search engine
| rankings.
| mark_mcnally_je wrote:
| https://goodwebsites.org
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Right, but that's pretty trivially identified. I've had
| great success doing that with my search engine. Here's a
| thousand domains that are low in farmed contents in no
| particular order:
|
| https://downloads.marginalia.nu/good-domains.txt
| cosheaf wrote:
| So why do you suppose Google doesn't surface the domains
| and results you presented? For example, I searched for
| "game reviews" and gameboomers was nowhere to be found.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I have no insight in their search engine, but I do know
| it would hurt their ad revenue to surface results that
| have no ads. Lends itself to speculation. But it could
| just be some confluence of other factors, of course. They
| seem to aggressively favor recent content (I do the
| opposite).
| cosheaf wrote:
| Which is why I said it's an ouroboros eating its own
| tail. The scale it operates at and given that it's also
| an ad network guarantees that whatever results it finds
| will favor its own ad network. It doesn't even have to be
| intentional since all they're doing is optimizing some
| metrics and running ML algorithms. There is no single
| person that could be blamed for the deterioration of the
| results. There is no way around this conflict of interest
| and they will continue pushing the envelope to increase
| their own revenue at the expense of useful results for as
| long as possible.
|
| If a site is hosting ads from the Google ad network and
| is barely above being spam then Google will prioritize it
| over other results in order to maintain its quarterly
| revenue predictions.
| notacoward wrote:
| So basically Google is a parasite that killed its host. I
| really _really_ like that analysis. Thanks!
| cosheaf wrote:
| Thanks but it's not really my analysis. I learned it from an
| art project: https://googlewilleatitself.com/.
| foxfluff wrote:
| Last night while doing a search, I found myself pondering the
| fact that recently I've been using DDG more than before.. and
| it's not because DDG has become so good, it's because Google has
| become so trash.
|
| Ironically, only a moment later I noticed on an IRC channel I've
| been on for nearly two thirds of my life that someone just
| complained about Google giving nothing but SEO trash.
| jsharf wrote:
| Appending "reddit" to the beginning of search queries could get
| SEO'd away too if enough bots start posting to reddit :/
| sinyug wrote:
| I moved to DDG a few years back and don't miss Google. While it
| is possible that Google might have provided similar results to
| what DDG did for the same query, I have noticed that when DDG
| fails to provide good results, Google fails with it.
|
| And the author is right about appending the site name to the
| query (reddit etc). Sometimes, it is the only way to avoid the
| crap that the search engine would otherwise provide.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Sure, but just lately DDG started deteriorating for me as well.
|
| Maybe that coincides with another big update they did and
| didn't tell anyone about it -- looking for certain phrases that
| describe sex no longer works. A lesbian friend made me aware of
| that; she recently complained that she can no longer find porn
| through DDG queries so she started bookmarking various such
| websites and is going to them directly.
|
| ...What is weird is that I tried a few phrases several weeks
| ago and they didn't work but I just tried a few right now again
| and they did work this time. Strange. But there are still a few
| that absolutely don't work.
| rightbyte wrote:
| DDG just uses other search engines, right? So any of them
| could have added some prudent filter.
|
| I don't get the hype around DDG. They are at the mercy of the
| underlying search engines.
| pdimitar wrote:
| True, it steps on Bing is what I think people said.
|
| And yeah I too am not hyped for it but it still does serve
| a real need -- to be less ad-oriented than Google. But I
| guess it's time to start looking around.
| sinyug wrote:
| > Sure, but just lately DDG started deteriorating for me as
| well.
|
| Might be an issue with one or more of their backends
| censoring certain phrases in a sporadic fashion. While they
| do have their own crawler,[1] I don't think it has a
| significant effect on the breadth or accuracy of their
| results.
|
| [1] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| I'd go further than the article and say that Amazon marketplace
| is decaying for the same reason. Instead of SEO webpages we have
| cheap knockoff junk from questionable oversees sellers. If I want
| to buy anything these days, I search for _best ___ reddit_ and
| then look for that exact item on Amazon.
| sub7 wrote:
| I wrote an addon called unfuck-google which they've now taken
| down 4 times.
|
| All it does is force 'Verbatim' searches and sort news results by
| date which makes things better (but still not that great)
| imglorp wrote:
| The passive voice in the headline buries the lede.
|
| What's really happening: Google is strangling the golden search
| goose for a quick meal.
| cosheaf wrote:
| They did that right when they chose the advertising model. It
| was never going to work in the long run and the founders knew
| it. They just thought they could build an AI system before that
| happened and it turned out they were wrong. Useful AI that
| could distinguish real knowledge from SEO optimized spam was
| much further away than they thought/imagined.
| [deleted]
| XCSme wrote:
| Does this mean that "traditional" advertising is becoming more
| powerful?
|
| If the users can't trust Google to return relevant results, would
| they simply trust brand power and go directly to the websites
| they trust? (e.g. go directly to nike.com instead of searching
| for "running shoes"?)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I am pretty sure people at Google are reading this thread. I'd
| love to see their reactions :)
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Their search may be dying but I've noticed that the "new tab"
| page on Chrome mobile shows links to content that are
| particularly relevant to me.
| keb_ wrote:
| I've been doing the `site:reddit {my search query}` for years,
| and it's been great to be able to find authentic opinions.
|
| In case anyone else does this and is tired of typing
| `site:reddit` all the time, checkout the Mycroft project for
| search engine plugins. I use one in particular[1] and alias it to
| `.r` in Firefox.
|
| [1]
| https://mycroftproject.com/install.html?id=33343&basename=go...
| busymom0 wrote:
| I posted around 3 years ago how Google search results had become
| extremely unreliable. Searching for thugs like "Reddit best hand
| mixer" and setting the date filter to be for example "last year"
| would give me results from 8 years ago. This wasn't exclusive to
| Reddit. Plus this used to work perfectly fine around 4 years ago.
| I remember when it stopped working.
|
| Also programming related searches have now started giving me
| results of random shady websites which are copying results from
| stackoverflow and Google puts them at the top for some reason.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| Let me guess, no actual data on DAU, just subjective impressions
| about the quality of search results?
| aulin wrote:
| Google is dying but appending reddit to searches is not the
| solution.
|
| Product recommendations on reddit usually boil down to a couple
| of products for each type, the hivemind keeps recommending them
| and the process kind of self sustains without any chance for
| other valuable products to be even
| considered/reviewed/recommended or pass the upvote threshold to
| be noticed.
|
| Technical questions sometimes have an answer much more times get
| you to a dead thread that didn't lead anywhere because the
| attention span on reddit is way too short.
|
| Also reddit users are mostly US based, local communities aren't
| usually big enough to lead to something useful on localized
| searches.
| amelius wrote:
| Google had this coming.
|
| At a certain point, good is good enough. At that point, it's a
| matter of time before the competition catches up.
|
| Also, they let their algorithm degrade, making it even easier for
| the competition.
| [deleted]
| scrollaway wrote:
| Ive been experimenting with Kagi lately. It seems very promising.
| The results have been fairly reliable at all types of queries
| except the ones where I straight up ask google a question.
|
| Anyone else tried it?
|
| https://kagi.com/
| Phenomenit wrote:
| I use kagi exclusively now and have since I was invited a few
| weeks ago. I've tried to think of about a usecase where I need
| Google like shopping but even then kagis result are better and
| Googles are irrelevant after the first few results.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Yeah, I like Kagi - and I even talked to the founder about
| working there. It doesn't do well at questions, and doesn't
| have some of google's widgets (e.g. currency conversion) but
| it's better than duckduckgo.
| eitland wrote:
| But seriously, who actually needs widgets and all the other
| distractions?
|
| I've used Kagi since December and I'm ready to pay $5, $10 or
| even $20 a month if they just continue to provide the same
| quality as they do today.
|
| I mostly search at work and I come to a search engine to find
| things I search for, not to get suggestions for what I should
| search for instead, not to enjoy cute widgets and stuff.
|
| A search engine can be as basic as it wants if it gets my
| results, but if results are equal obviously nice is better
| than ugly.
| mischa_u wrote:
| Kagi's currency conversion widget works fine for me, I use it
| almost daily: "10 eur to usd"
| https://kagi.com/search?q=10+eur+to+usd
|
| Which widget queries are you having trouble with?
| smallerfish wrote:
| Ah! You are right. Google supports a level of indirection
| that Kagi does not. "100 pesos to dollars" or "100 pesos to
| usd". If you use the actual currency code, Kagi works.
| iamjbn wrote:
| Thanks for this article. Adding to other "Google is dying"
| discussions that I have collected over time as part of my
| personal research:
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cSMY5wXSKhJdMxeJEvTUJ21e...
| tremon wrote:
| It's not dying that much since it's obviously your preferred
| publishing platform.
| iamjbn wrote:
| Yes that might be true, I'm just collecting information.
| calbruin wrote:
| What does this say about the valuation of Reddit?
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Two words: 1. Cha 2. Ching!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > What if you want to know what a genuine real life human being
| thinks about the latest Lenovo laptop?
|
| I'd check Amazon reviews. When was Google ever the first tool of
| choice for product reviews? I don't remember that era.
| crisdux wrote:
| I identify with this so much. I use a range of search engines to
| fulfill specific needs. Examples below.
|
| * Google - shopping, consumer oriented, up-to-date local content
| on restaurants and venues
|
| * Google reddit - product reviews, product issues, programming,
| local "issues"
|
| * Kagi - for informational, programming help, research, politics,
| anything controversial
|
| * Bing - for video
|
| Google is absolutely terrible for anything even closely
| controversial. Their algo is too bias towards approved sources
| and recency.
|
| Another crazy thing, I'm starting to use Microsoft Edge because
| the feature set and performance is actually really good! I've
| even convinced other devs at work to use edge, and we're all mac
| users. The read aloud feature has changed how I consume
| information completely - mostly because microsoft has text to
| speech voices that I can actually stand. It's an absolute game
| changer.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >Kagi
|
| I looked into this, but you have to sign up for an invite, and
| they first demand you give them a bunch of information. I
| bailed at the second question. "what do you want in a search
| engine". How about not making me answer questions to use it?
| crisdux wrote:
| I give them the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to
| create a good product and are truly interested in
| understanding user needs. afaik they are planning on making
| the search engine a paid product. Which I'm okay with. I
| seriously plan on paying for it if it's a good price. For
| some searches, I genuinely feel like I have a leg up among my
| peers because I'm able to find higher quality relevant
| information much faster using kagi.
| Mudhiker wrote:
| I finally have a reason to create an account.
|
| I've been using Google Search since it was a cool beta site
| announced on Slashdot. Over the years I've built a career based
| on my ability to effectively search. I remember about ten years
| ago, people thought I had some kind of insane gift because I
| could immediately find ANYTHING. Not really, I just had an
| instinctive skill for creating effective queries.
|
| Good search has been a huge part of my ability to develop
| software. I don't mean StackOverflow either. I learned to use
| Google to search Microsoft APIs and forums, as well as to dig up
| long obscure posts on the almost-dead languages and technologies
| I found myself supporting. Day by day, this is less and less
| possible. I'm losing a critical tool that has helped me be
| productive.
|
| As an Autistic one of my strengths is feeling patterns in
| systems, and in the past few years, I've definitely noticed the
| garbage results described in this article.
|
| Yesterday, my wife asked me if we have any cold meds. I said, "we
| have several, but let's look up interactions with your new
| antidepressant." I know from experience that all kinds of
| unpleasant side effects can arise from mixing these.
|
| On her phone search results, there were none of the quality sites
| I expected, such as Drugs.com. Instead I had to crawl through a
| bunch of SEO garbage and psuedo-health to find what I needed. If
| she was doing this on her own, she might have clicked on
| something dangerously erroneous. The web is becoming increasingly
| hostile. (And don't get me started about the infinitely
| scrollable boomer ads that come up below a local news story)
| emodendroket wrote:
| I don't agree with the thesis. People are doing that because they
| trust Reddit to be a source of relatively authentic opinions,
| yes. But you're not going to search Reddit to find official Web
| sites, established news sources, things for sale, and the like.
|
| The complaints given in the article feel a little bit like
| observing that and steering it in the direction of the same old
| complaints about Google not being good for technical search,
| something that just doesn't matter to most users. I'm not going
| to Reddit to get answers to those questions either.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| The Dead Internet Theory reminds me of a minor bit of flavor from
| a Neal Stephenson book, Anathem. In it it's mentioned that this
| far future civilization (which has seen civilization broadly
| collapse from technology zeniths a couple of times) had to
| abandon their set of planet wide communication networks because
| people intentionally set up computers that would put out huge
| amounts of information, but all of it was information to mislead,
| manipulate, obscure, deceive, or convince you to pay money for
| something. This was done so much that effectively all
| information, and all actors which might share information, became
| adversarial on the broad internet, so it stopped being usable.
| agnos wrote:
| I had this exact conversation with someone yesterday, who wasn't
| aware of Google's "site:**" query functionality and expressed the
| same frustrations on not being able to find actually relevant
| content. It's simultaneously reassuring and disappointing that
| many others also rely on site-filtered Google to find information
| on the internet.
|
| Site-filtered Google is basically the only way I search the web
| now. As many others have expressed on here, Google used to be
| such a good "gateway" to the informational web. Now the most
| relevant results are almost always auto-generated content.
|
| I resort to searching specific sites like HN and Reddit as a safe
| place to get human content, but I feel this to be limiting in
| it's own way, almost like echo chambers. Are we past the Wild
| West days of the internet? It now feels like a dystopian reality
| where I'm constrained to certain pockets that seem relatively
| safe.
|
| I believe Google used to allow a "discussions" filter on queries,
| which would limit your search to forums. I'm not sure why the
| functionality stopped being supported. The "Dead Internet Theory"
| is very real. Given the amount of bots and resulting distrust in
| information, there's an urgent need for some sort of
| conversational search.
|
| A forum-only search filter is an easy place to start. This could
| also potentially be a good use case for some decentralized,
| blockchain-based trust network. If anyone knows of any ongoing
| projects in this arena, I'd be very interested in contributing.
| young_unixer wrote:
| Am I the only one that has trouble with language preferences
| being ignored by Google? Accept-Language HTTP headers seem to be
| completely ignored, but even Google account language settings are
| ignored sometimes. IP address seems to be more important to them.
|
| When I connect from a VPN exit point in Brazil it only shows me
| results in Portuguese (even when I'm logged in). When I connect
| from my hometown in Chile it's mostly fine but I think it's still
| not the same as if I connected from a US exit point, even though
| I have US English as my preferred language everywhere.
| slim wrote:
| I'm annoyed each time I use google because it shows me an
| unreadable search page in arabic (because I live in an arabic
| speaking country). Fortunately I've been using ddg for years
| and I rarely use google
| alphabetting wrote:
| > Google search is dying because more and more people are
| searching for reddit.
|
| They're not dying if the people are still using Google for their
| searches.
|
| Reddit search is awful. They could try to make a Google
| alternative but search is very hard. #1 query on Bing is "Google"
| for a reason.
| mastah88 wrote:
| Already started using other search engines Google is useless now.
| superbaconman wrote:
| The biggest issue I have with Google is that every search is
| performed in the "now" context. This makes looking back,
| especially on political issues, basically impossible; There's no
| way to explore how topics have evolved or progressed over time. I
| don't mind google search for resolving technical issues as it
| works pretty well in this context, but the second you start to
| get curious and look for anything older everything breaks down.
| mattferderer wrote:
| Have you tried using the date filters?
| swayvil wrote:
| When you search for something with presently political punch. And
| then do the same search on a different search engine. And see the
| difference in the results. See how Google controls what you see,
| to control what you think.
|
| Yeah, fuck that fascist noise.
| narrator wrote:
| I wonder if spammers have somehow gamed the Google political
| controversy filter. I stopped using Google because their search
| results returned only things in agreement with mainstream talking
| points for anything remotely controversial.
|
| If you search for "What countries are using ivermectin" on
| Google, you get the second link being a broken spam site (the
| kitchen sisters) and pages of results saying Ivermectin doesn't
| work. I wonder if the broken spam site figured something out to
| get ranked that high.
|
| If you use duckduckgo or Yandex you get a whole page of relevant
| results that actually answer the question. The number of topics
| where Google refuses to return relevant results and instead
| focuses on talking points is very large at this point.
| dionian wrote:
| Used to use reddit long ago but left due to the inherent (if
| subtle) censorship.
|
| However, I've been using site:reddit.com in google searches for
| years after leaving reddit as a user, mostly when I want to find
| more realistic opinions about certain products or solutions and I
| want to filter out marketing. It's served me very well.
| TimLeland wrote:
| Check out this site that will save you a few keystrokes when
| searching Reddit using Google: https://gooreddit.com/
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I won't name the specific search engine I am using as a default,
| as I'd like to prevent it being manipulated for as long as
| possible, but I will say this:
|
| Google is my second to third search engine choice at this point -
| never my default. Google search has, in effect, become the 2nd or
| 3rd page of Google Search results; you only resort to it when you
| are truly desperate, and have very little hope of it doing any
| good.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A few years ago (2015), curious about _where_ meaningful
| conversation might be hiding out online, I did a little
| experiment, making use of Google Web Search as it happens.
|
| The process involved finding a set of search terms which might be
| expected to appear in more substantive discussions, or at least,
| the sort of discussion I'd tend to be interested in, and then see
| how many such occurrences there were across various sites,
| domains, TLDs, and the like.
|
| The result was "Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers
| on the Web".
|
| The title comes from the list of terms I'd used, the _Foreign
| Policy_ Global 100 Thinkers list, contributed by readers of that
| magazine (and I suspect curated by editors). That is, it 's
| generated by a third party, reflects a largely refined audience,
| reflects a range of political and ideological viewpoints, and are
| mostly reasonably distinctive.
|
| I approximated total page hits on a site (in English at least)
| with a search for the word "this".
|
| And to proxy for more mundane comment, I chose to search for the
| arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian".
|
| This of course gave rise to the now-world-famouse FP:KK ratio.
| That is, the ratio of hits for the FP 100 Global Thinkers vs.
| "Kim Kardashian" on a given web property.
|
| Another metric was FP/1000, which is mentions of the FP 100 names
| per 1,000 web pages (based on the "this" search results).
|
| I chose roughly 100 websites and/or domains to search. This meant
| performing 30,000 cumulative web searches, a practice Google
| apparently take a dim view of, though performing one query
| roughly every 45 seconds or so seemed to work at the time.
| (Google's anti-bot defences have since become far more rigorous.)
|
| The results were interesting and occasionally surprising.
|
| Facebook had by far the most detected pages, 2.6 million at the
| time. Again, this isn't a precise count but a _relative proxy_.
|
| Wordpress had the 2nd most FP100 results, and a density 10x
| greater than Facebook. This was when I realised that Wordpress in
| fact ran the sites behind a great many other organisations and
| publications, many of which are fairly high quality.
|
| Metafilter had by far the highest FP:KK ratio at 32.75. (Compare
| Facebook at 2.10, and Twitter at 0.96.)
|
| Google+, supposedly where smart people tended to hang out, rated
| only an FP:KK of 0.39.
|
| I also looked at a number of mainstream and alternative media
| sites (the New York Times scored abnormally high, but that was
| largely through having one of the FP100 members as a columnist,
| mentioned not only on his own articles but in many others, Paul
| Krugman). Fox News scored predictably low (and many instances
| referenced the then Pope), but still higher than the BBC and
| Reuters.
|
| Alternative media tended to rate higher than mainstream, but
| often focusing on a relatively small number of liberal thinkers,
| Noam Chomsky standing out in particular, also Krugman and
| Lawrence Lessig.
|
| In education, what struck me was how much more content results
| appeared for leading private universities (Harvard, MIT,
| Stanford) than flagship public schools, with UC Berkeley
| especially paltry page count, though a higher FP/1000 ratio.
| University of Michigan represents better. I included a few
| European universities as well, which had modest results.
|
| I don't recall why I threw Federal Reserve domains into the
| search, but this was when I realised that St. Louis is
| effectively the research arm of the system.
|
| And I threw in generic and cc TLDs for good measure.
|
| As mentioned, the reseach _as conducted_ would be virtually
| impossible today, though there are now several quantitative
| searchable archives which report on the number of results across
| hosts and /or domains for various terms. I'd really like to be
| able to make use of those.
|
| In the context of the past few years, refining searches to terms
| of more recent interest and relevance to information quality
| would also be fascinating.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
| procinct wrote:
| > Early adopters aren't using Google anymore.
|
| Can anyone share what they are using?
| mrkramer wrote:
| Although I don't use Reddit that much I must say Reddit is
| diamond in the rough; communities are super helpful and unlike
| Facebook it is not walled garden plus you don't have to use your
| real name. It still needs work and improvement but I really like
| Reddit.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| reddit is absolutely a walled garden. They'll instaban you for
| wrongthink at the drop of a hat. Powermods will ban you from
| many subs for participating in one they think is guilty of
| wrongthink. And if you create multiple accounts ('throwaways'
| are encouraged in many subs) but then fail to track which subs
| have banned you which of your accounts for wrongthink reddit
| will ban _all_ of your accounts for "ban evasion" even though
| their own help page tells you how to copy subs from one account
| to another: https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/205243365--How-...
|
| And most subs won't let you talk on a new or low karma account.
|
| Peak reddit was 2015. Giving moderators the power to lock posts
| was a sign of authoritarianism to come and it's only gotten
| much worse.
| serverlessmom wrote:
| When google ended Google Reader it killed blogs and other self-
| hosted websites. Google killed the web and in so doing it killed
| itself.
| dadboddilf2 wrote:
| The Dead Internet Theory, yet another dumb far right conspiracy.
| m348e912 wrote:
| I add reddit to a lot of google search terms because I want to
| find discussion on the topic I am searching for. Most of the time
| I find an opinion, perspective, or more information on the topic
| I am looking for. Reddit is a lot of things, including hot
| garbage, but it's also a wealth of information.
|
| Here's a billion dollar idea if anyone has the time and ability.
| Build a search interface that indexes tiktok videos and makes
| them searchable. To do it really well you might have to
| transcribe the videos.
|
| Here's my VC pitch. Tiktok answers questions you never thought to
| ask, but if you can find a way for it to answer questions you do
| have, you have provided access to an obscene amount of
| interesting information.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Is this Different than how people looked for this in quora and
| yahoo answers?
|
| Reddit does have a benefit of time decay for most topics.
| m348e912 wrote:
| Quora isn't bad, although it's gotten a little hostile with
| users that aren't logged in. I can't remember the last time I
| used yahoo answers.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| It's interesting, and quite concerning, that Reddit has cemented
| its position as a key repository of useful information on just
| about everything just as its drive towards monetisation really
| kicks into gear. It's concerning because, as part of that
| monetisation strategy, Reddit is becoming increasingly walled off
| and anti-user. I am sure I am only one of many long-time
| Redditors who have vowed to stop using the site completely once
| old.reddit.com goes, and it's only a matter of time.
|
| It's probable that a huge amount of useful information will soon
| become much more difficult to access, and/or diluted by stealth
| advertising, as Reddit looks to aggressively monetise its
| position. I'm interested to see if a credible alternative emerges
| and if there is any effort to move some of the existing useful
| data off the platform.
| Mezzie wrote:
| It's very interesting to me as somebody's who's been making and
| burning Reddit accounts since before the Digg implosion. 15
| years ago, I trusted what I saw on Reddit when it came to
| things like products: If I came across a post on the best can
| openers, I had some certainty that people were just sharing
| their opinions on can openers.
|
| Now I don't trust a single damn thing I see on that site.
| flatiron wrote:
| Yeah I have a 6 month timer on Reddit accounts because I tend
| to post on topics in my home town and my close hobbies and
| I'm afraid of being doxxed. At least in HN I just talk about
| programming languages and stuff so I keep my account. I also
| use reddits account name generator. I think that also helps
| that my name there wasn't thought up by me. Least a little
| level of abstraction.
| saddestcatever wrote:
| Do you have a better site or resource you now go to for
| queries like can opener opinions?
|
| Yes, Reddit isn't perfect, but I've been hard pressed to find
| better options.
| [deleted]
| colordrops wrote:
| The only real option is to spend more time, cross reference
| against many sites and forums, and use your intuition as to
| which comments and reviews are authentic. Also pay
| attention to negative reviews.
| gatonegro wrote:
| Not really what you're asking for, but I saw this[0] a
| while back and it's made me actually think about can
| openers a bit now. You might find it interesting, too.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_mLxyIXpSY
| Mezzie wrote:
| lol that video was what started my can opener hunt. Also
| that YT is why I now have a microwave and a toaster on my
| 'things to hunt down' list.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Depends on what I'm looking for. If it's something small
| (under like 20 bucks for me, substitute whatever for your
| comfort level), I don't even bother. I just go to Target
| and pick up the 2nd or 3rd cheapest whatever.
|
| Now if it's a bigger ticket item, it gets dicey, because
| then the best strategy, in my experience, has been to
| determine what about said item really matters to you and
| then find a group of people who share that and ask their
| opinion. The problem with this is that those people have
| the best information, but also very exacting standards and
| aren't very sympathetic to arguments like "But I don't HAVE
| hundreds of dollars for a coffee maker."
|
| Honestly, more and more in the past few years consumer
| products and services in the world has just been like a
| race to 'get something past me' and I've just started
| making my own stuff, buying vintage, or borrowing because
| I'm tired of being sold crap.
| safog wrote:
| I just default trust Wirecutter for everything these days.
| I know they might not be optimal - there's probably a
| better alternative for my specific usecase if I spent the
| time on it but I'd rather just let them make the decision
| on trivial things.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| I can't trust a review site that uses affiliate links,
| which is even more of a joke now that it's paywalled.
| floatingeye wrote:
| Can I ask what the important differences of old.reddit.com are?
| Retr0id wrote:
| It's a bit like comparing HN UX to Twitter UX (but with the
| same actual content)
| Lascaille wrote:
| Just use it and see for yourself. It's almost a 100%
| different user experience.
| IncRnd wrote:
| The article writer didnt' look carefully at the graph, which says
| in fine print at the bottom, " _Y-axes are not comparable, charts
| show_ when* each had its own peak search interest. Data Source:
| Google Trends"
|
| So, it is a mistake to assume that the quantity of the searches
| can be shared between the different graphs. Unless there is
| another data source that shows Reddit has the most searches, this
| is not meaningful. Actually, the graph is a Google graph, so
| everything on the graph is from a Google Search.
| arnklint wrote:
| Love it, same old paul graham propaganda, of course Reddit hasn't
| peaked even if the graph resembles the one right next to it :) I
| think pg peaked some 5 years ago.
|
| But the main topic, has google search peaked. Yes it has. The
| amounts of ads vs great relevant search results peaked some time
| ago.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| On one hand I totally agree - Google is becoming unusable for any
| refined specific searches, if you use any SEO-enhanced keyword
| you mostly get nonsense.
|
| But on the other hand I am thinking - Google is not stupid, they
| know what they doing. Maybe this kind of search is a good fit for
| the majority of the less-tech-savvy people, and only audience
| here on HN think it's bad.
| consp wrote:
| I actually use the term "forum" as an additive search term. It
| usually goes to domain specific forums which actually contain
| what you look for.
|
| I also tried googling an answer to (an apparently common bug) in
| Windows relating to Bluetooth connections and I have not found
| any non generic answers anywhere in the search results no patter
| what I quoted or whichever term I added. Just generic crap, that
| same crap copy and pasted over and over and over again and non-
| specific bullshit answers from Microsoft itself.
| dankwizard wrote:
| It is only a matter of time until "Search term + Reddit" leads
| you to a thread with multiple, legitimate looking comments with
| varying degrees of upvotes and downvotes, and the entire thread
| has been ran by a marketing firm/search engine hit squad.
|
| I too am guilty of trusting the Reddit concencus when searching,
| and if there were a few legitimate looking threads that had been
| planted I probably would have eaten them up.
|
| Sure you get the occassional comment or link share, but I'm
| talking like 300+ comment thread carefully executed.
| koshnaranek wrote:
| I'm pretty sure marketing firms already have some power mods
| planted.
| [deleted]
| mathattack wrote:
| How much is this a broader Google issue? Ads are encroaching more
| on Gmail, Calendar randomly drops meetings, and Maps is now
| noticeably worse than Apple Maps. It definitely feels like
| they're being run by financial spreadsheets now.
| leephillips wrote:
| Google could restore relevance to their search results by
| severely demoting or eliminating pages that contain any
| advertising from an ad network, especially adsense. Of course,
| they're not going to do that, because relevance of results is low
| down on their list of incentives. The article is correct in
| pointing out that Google's founders predicted Google's demise
| with pinpoint accuracy.
| listmaking wrote:
| Many of these articles/complaints don't compare Google Search to
| alternatives (Bing / DuckDuckGo / ...), so it's not clear whether
| web search itself is getting "worse" (in the ways mentioned), or
| whether the issues are with Google Search specifically.
|
| (For example, the article proposes the explanation that _" The
| long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to
| trust"_, which is about the web itself, not specific to Google.)
| telchior wrote:
| I try to use DuckDuckGo exclusively, but the results are often
| poor enough that I have to switch to Google.
|
| Just to be clear, I totally agree with all the criticisms of
| Google here; it's also awful and I'll often end up just doing
| site: searches, which Google seems to be better at than DDG.
|
| It feels a bit like the search engineers have lost the war with
| SEO.
| julienchastang wrote:
| Ditto. DDG is my default search engine with mixed results at
| best. I often begrudgingly revert back to Google.
| lostmsu wrote:
| I do that too. But recently I also started inserting !g
| before my searches hoping to get better results only to
| notice I am already on Google.
| alphabetting wrote:
| Search for "Seven" on Google and Duck Duck Go. It's very
| telling. Most complaints in here apply to powerusers which
| won't be noticed by vast majority.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| I use DuckDuckGo almost exclusively, and most of the criticisms
| directed at Google Search also apply to DDG.
|
| I don't think the web can be indexed and searched in the way it
| has been done. I think it needs human curation.
| csee wrote:
| This is all so true. I append reddit to most of my google
| searches because I don't trust google anymore, and I don't do it
| in reddit only because their search sucks.
| SodiumMerchant0 wrote:
| benreesman wrote:
| I remember being on a call with the Bebo people like 2 days after
| that absurd buyout and asking sarcastically: "So what color is
| the Ferrari?"
|
| The answer: "Yellow".
|
| Now you have the Battery.
|
| Reddit is so friggin user-hostile that I don't read most of the
| comments anymore: because I literally can't. You can do a little
| browsing but the minute you're trying to pay actual attention you
| get slammed with the dark patterns about installing the app or
| linking your gmail or both.
|
| I hope it's the management team that gets weeded out of the gene
| pool and not the whole site, because it was fucking cool at one
| time and could be again.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| The current admins are so deep in the authleft cult that
| ousting them is the only way to save the site.
| santhoshr wrote:
| Google should buy Reddit
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Question for any person reading this: what is your favorite
| alternative to Google?
| pizza234 wrote:
| Google is now my alternative ;) To DuckDuckGo (indirectly,
| Bing), specifically.
|
| However, I find the technical results poor, so most of the
| time, in this domain, Google is still my choice.
|
| This point is indeed where the article gets a bit unrealistic:
|
| > The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular
| 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical
| [...] queries.
|
| The problem is that there isn't a valid alternative for
| technical queries (at least, I've found none).
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| I'll re-post a comment I made about Google Search back in July
| 2020 because I believe it's still relevant:
|
| "Call me crazy, but I've been using Yandex a lot more recently.
| Political FUD aside, the results are pretty good, and completely
| unfiltered.
|
| It reminds me of how wild and unfiltered the internet was back in
| 2007. However, I wouldn't recommend it to "casual" users. Using
| Yandex requires a bit more common sense than Google, because
| malicious domains show up every now & then. For power users
| (99.99% of HN), this isn't a problem.
|
| With all things considered, it's totally worth it. I never
| realized how censored Google Search was until I stepped away. As
| a grown ass man, I don't want anyone telling me what I "cant see"
| or attempting to define what's "acceptable" - The freedom to
| choose is intoxicating almost."
|
| You can select a filter to hide any Russian results.
| rg111 wrote:
| I am very frustrated with Google search results right now. I do
| use it to search for facts only and it is my main calculator
| app now. But that's it.
|
| I have been adding "reddit" to search terms since two-three
| years ago.
|
| And I have been made aware of two new search providers: kagi
| and you.com.
|
| Kagi was announced in HN, I believe , and I am now a beta user,
| and I am surprised at its quality.
|
| It does not pull underhanded shit like Google does, and
| although it is better than Google in filtering out spammy, SEO
| sites, I would say- not by much. My overall experience is much
| better with kagi than with Google. I found myself grumbling
| towards it after I failed with Google in initial days, but now
| I go straight to kagi itself.
|
| I like you.com but hasn't used it much. It is nice to see
| varieties categorised in one single page.
|
| Google will certainly lose any user who can be categorised as
| "power users" even by a jiffy.
|
| That includes High School students researching for papers they
| are writing and aquarium users searching about fishes.
| afiori wrote:
| A few months ago I found myself in need to install Telegram on
| a new PC and a quick google search (I still had not configured
| another search engine nor an adblocker) gave 4 ads for scammy
| websites.
|
| I am sure that they try a lot, I am not convinced that their
| strategy is optimal.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >"Call me crazy, but I've been using Yandex a lot more
| recently. Political FUD aside, the results are pretty good, and
| completely unfiltered.
|
| Note: Russia doesn't give a flying fuck about American
| copyright law. Yarr.
| dannyw wrote:
| Yandex is amazing.
|
| For anything borderline contentious, Google gives incredibly
| "sanitised" results.
| woeirua wrote:
| Yeah... I'm going to go with, not having to worry about
| clicking malware links is probably the one use of censorship
| that I am totally OK with.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| I would pay for good results.
| valdiorn wrote:
| 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 and
| educational material.
|
| * Google with site:reddit.com at the start for questions best
| answered by other humans; crowd-sourced answers, authentic
| replies from mostly real people.
|
| * Google with site:news.ycombinator.com if I want to find "forum-
| like" discussion on topics I'm interested in.
|
| * Google Image search with site:amazon.co.uk when looking for
| niche products I need to buy, because Amazon's search is so
| incredibly broken and game-ified.
|
| What I'm having a heck of a time finding is technical content;
| long-form programming tutorials, deep dives into academic
| concepts (I do a lot of signal/audio processing and search for
| blog posts related to these topics), circuit schematics,
| electronic engineering content. These used to exist on enthusiast
| forums 10-15 years ago, but Google often no longer surfaces hits
| from these forums, both because the content is old and the forum
| model is dying. Reddit is the "replacement" but it plagued with
| low-effort "look at my thing" posts that help nobody.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| youtube has some great technical content
| falcolas wrote:
| In my experience, the forum experience is far from dead, but
| it's effectively impossible to surface in a search engine - any
| search engine - unless you know the name of the forum.
|
| Oh, and the content must also be "fresh". If the content isn't
| "fresh" (which most of the best forum/blog posts are not),
| _nobody_ shows it anymore. I can search for a specific blog
| post using a verbatim quote, but the result (if it exists) is
| buried under 10+ pages of "fresher" content, no matter how
| disconnected it may be from the search.
| koshnaranek wrote:
| So frustrating to find background Information to a big
| current event. Google will aggressively show the same news
| articles over and over.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| Google had button to search only forums. Monopoly shows.
| graeme wrote:
| Anyone know the origin of the fresh rule, and the purpose? It
| makes sense in some niches but in others it is so obviously
| bad I wonder why Google added it
| visarga wrote:
| There was a big news event once (forgot what) and Google
| was only showing aged pages at the time. So they started
| prioritizing freshness.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I feel this would be solved if the search engine weighted
| results based on whether users trust the domains.
| Lascaille wrote:
| That only works if you validate users, otherwise the trust
| database becomes 99% the result of the actions of SEO
| firms.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Hmm, or you outsource the trust problem to your users.
| Let them select which domains to trust or who to trust to
| weight trustworthiness of domains for you.
|
| Imagine that user A can create a list of domains with
| trustworthiness score. User B can then use that list by
| going to user-a-awesome-curation.koogle.com?q=nice+shoes
|
| It might create filter bubbles but it would be
| transparent filter bubbles. You could even wikify/open
| source the curation.
| datavirtue wrote:
| A lot of this could be solved if we could signal intent or
| context before searching. But that would require that you
| know how to use the tool which is a gargantuan user barrier
| from Google's point of view. Meanwhile, we have to hack
| about trying to signal context.
| api wrote:
| The entire information ecosystem has internalized a bias
| toward "freshness." It's even really strong in software.
| Evidently code is more valid and correct if it has recent
| GitHub commits.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I guess this is why a lot of sites now removed dates from
| their articles.
| Lascaille wrote:
| Software is the most toxic environment possible for
| freshness bias. Every month it seems like there's a new
| framework/ecosystem/whatever and everyone's migrating to it
| and you're behind the times if you're not using it.
| Gigachad wrote:
| This is only if you bother chasing the absolute freshest
| trend. Things like React, Ruby on Rails, Node.JS, etc
| have been the standard and most popular tools for close
| to 10 years now and aren't going anywhere.
| beatsie_ wrote:
| Google allows for searches within ranges of dates.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Almost no software just works if left unattended for years.
| If its a library it means it will likely not work with the
| latest versions of everything else. Your bug reports will
| go unattended.
|
| People also have a lot more tolerance for missing features
| or issues if they see it improving regularly. While getting
| something unsatisfactory as the last and final version is
| not nearly as acceptable.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The forum experience is dying. I spent about 4 years of my
| time in-between Google stints working on a searchable feed
| for forum sites. Finally gave it up when I realize the extent
| to which the forum scene had died and moved to Reddit &
| Facebook while I was working on the project.
|
| The root problem is that attention has gone from abundant to
| scarce, and people already have their habits. That makes it
| really hard to build a new forum site and attract an audience
| that's willing to type your URL in every day (and if they
| don't visit daily, forget about building a viable community).
| Forum _hosts_ like Facebook and Reddit don 't have this
| problem - you can view your Buy Nothing Group and Moms of
| Springfield posts interspersed with your feed of friends, or
| your r/factorio content interspersed with a steady stream of
| r/AskReddit.
|
| There's also emerging technological barriers. If you don't
| sign up for CloudFlare, as a new website, you're going to get
| hosed - but at the same time, CloudFlare makes it basically
| impossible for any new search engine _other_ than Google to
| spider the site. Ditto security patches, and keeping software
| up-to-date. Most people don 't want to deal with sysadmin
| stuff at all, particularly if they're trying to build a
| community as a hobby. So that pushes people further toward
| hosted solutions with a turn-key secure software stack, which
| is Facebook and Reddit.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > but at the same time, CloudFlare makes it basically
| impossible for any new search engine other than Google to
| spider the site
|
| I hadn't heard about this, can anyone supply a link for
| more context?
|
| Is there anything a Cloudflare customer can do to "opt in"
| to being scraped by other search engine bots?
| falcolas wrote:
| > The forum experience is dying.
|
| Perhaps the _experience_ is dying, but the wealth of
| curated information in forums is still there, is still
| incredibly valuable, and in some cases is still being added
| to. Here 's one example I used extensively recently; it was
| sent to me by a colleague, since I never could have found
| it via a search engine.
|
| https://gearspace.com/board/studio-building-
| acoustics/610173...
| buildbot wrote:
| There's a few niche ones out there that are even growing a
| bit! For example for medium format cameras the largest
| groups are not on reddit.
| shuntress wrote:
| > The root problem is that attention has gone from abundant
| to scarce
|
| I don't think that's necessarily true.
|
| I think the root problem is that running & using a forum is
| too difficult. That is why centralized forums (like you
| mentioned, reddit and facebook) that handle it for you won
| out against decentralized forums run by forum members.
|
| Even before facebook/reddit/etc forums tended to live or
| die by individual effort of one passionate system admin
| dealing with all the hosting, updates, accounts, and spam
| until they get fed up and the forum closes because they
| can't find someone else to take the keys.
| r_klancer wrote:
| One of my favorite niche forums is
| https://archboston.com. It has years of deep-dive
| discussion from passionate users about the history and
| progress of Boston area infrastructure and real estate
| development projects.
|
| For a while there the site was up but not allowing new
| accounts to be created -- someone was paying the hosting
| bills but didn't have time to do any admin tasks.
| Thankfully, someone else stepped up and people post new
| stuff every day (albeit with banner ads at the top of
| each page now, which is honestly not too bad)
|
| I'm happy, but it could have gone _poof_ so easily.
| echelon wrote:
| > the forum experience is far from dead
|
| If you find a forum for a given subject, it is almost always
| an authoritative source filled with experts. This is
| especially true in engineering disciplines.
|
| It's unfortunate that Reddit and social media took over and
| led to their decline, because it's suboptimal setup in so
| many ways.
|
| - Reddit in the large is a high noise, low signal
| monetization chamber. Some subreddits have good moderation,
| but that doesn't stop the spill over and drama.
|
| - You can't assume much about any given Reddior, and you
| won't typically form relationships or associations with them.
| It's pretty much pseudonymous.
|
| - Reddit doesn't focus on authorship. It doesn't allow
| inclusion of images, media, or carefully formatted responses
| in threads.
|
| - Reddit corporate is the authority and owner of all content.
| They can change the rules at any time, and that's a fragile
| and authoritarian setup for human discourse.
|
| - Reddit corporate is constantly changing the UI and engaging
| in dark patterns to earn more money. This flies in the face
| of usability.
|
| Forums should make a comeback. It would be better if each
| community had real owners and stakeholders that had skin in
| the game rather than a generic social media overlord that is
| optimizing for higher order criteria that sometimes conflict
| with that of the community.
|
| But forums have problems too. They should be easier to host,
| frictionless to join, easy to discover, and longer lived.
|
| Another way to think of this: every major subreddit is a
| community (or startup) of its own and could potentially be
| peeled off and grown. You'd have to overcome the lack of
| built-in community membership and discovery, but if you can
| meet needs better (better tools for organizing recipes,
| community events, engineering photoblogs, etc.), then you
| might be able to beat them. Reddit can't build everything,
| just like Facebook couldn't.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| This is depressing. Good information is useful for far longer
| than a carton of milk in your fridge! And a lot of that new
| "milk" is apparently made of chalk and bilge-water.
| kashnote wrote:
| Are people still drinking cow milk? Oat milk all the way.
| brimble wrote:
| Yes, of course they do, the alternative milk market is
| growing fast but most people still go for cow milk if
| they want milk. That's why grocery stores still devote a
| ton of space to cow milk.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I guess it depends on where you are. Here in Sweden it's
| about 50/50 (if you take into account the non-
| refrigerated milks).
| brimble wrote:
| Here (mid-tier city in the US) it's more like 80/20 or
| 90/10 at any normal grocery store, and I suspect there's
| higher product turn-over for dairy so the actual sales
| figures favors dairy more than that suggests.
| skrbjc wrote:
| Non refrigerated milk can still be from cows.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Sweden was the 4th highest consumer of milk per capita in
| 2013. Unfortunately that seems to be the most recent
| data.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_c
| ons...
| r_klancer wrote:
| I'm relatively well informed but I always just assumed
| oat "milk" was an inferior substitute marketed to the
| actively or wannabe lactose intolerant. [EDIT: and vegans
| of course.] (No idea if "wannabe lactose intolerant" is
| really a thing, but i'm thinking of the way gluten
| sensitivity became a faddish self-diagnosis for a while.)
|
| I still don't drink the stuff, but it's only dawned on me
| in the last year that there are other reasons, such as
| environmental concerns or ... actually, I'm not sure.
| Opening two tabs to Google "oat milk why" and "oat milk
| why site:reddit.com" now, which conveniently makes this
| relevant to TFA :)
| dagw wrote:
| Of course it depends on where you in Sweden you are. The
| super market in the the more affluent part of a large
| city where I live is about 50/50. Out in the 'sticks'
| where my parents live it's much closer 80/20
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Since there's only a handful of sites you target your searches
| at, it would be nice if you could just have your own search
| engine that focuses on those few sites, and perhaps crawls a
| little deeper.
|
| I've sometimes thought the death of Google will be the self
| hosted search engine.
| foxfluff wrote:
| They already exist.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Hard to find a business model for a self hosted search engine
| though.
| [deleted]
| CA0DA wrote:
| Kagi search (currently in beta) is actually pretty good.
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| It's particularly awful on mobile where you get Google's
| "smart" cards which can be ads, followed by ads then the actual
| results which are mostly SEO trash. Trying to find support for
| Google Fiber routers was nearly impossible because Google just
| tried to interpret what I wanted as signing up for Google Fiber
| and just overwhelmingly suggests that. It gets even worse on
| Youtube where after like 10 results for what you typed in they
| just show you "things you might like".
| itslennysfault wrote:
| imo, google is still king, but you have to be a bit of a power
| user. You're already using `site:` which is good if you know
| exactly where you're looking. If not you can use `related:` in
| the same way. I find using `-something` to remove terms the
| most useful. I'll search for something (usually an error
| message) then add `-react` (and mumble "ffs not everything is
| react"). Then if I still see things I DON'T want add more `-`
| to the string.
|
| It's not GREAT that you have to do that, but it's pretty
| functional and certainly better than going past page 1 of
| search results.
|
| Anyways, here are some other things you can do for reference:
| https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433
| xerox13ster wrote:
| The major problem with this that I've experienced is even if
| I use operands like + and - to specify or remove terms--more
| often remove--Google ends up using a synonym in place of that
| word that means the same thing.
|
| So if for instance I'm looking up info about ADHD meds as an
| adult, I might get tons of articles about childhood ADHD
| since that's where all the research is. I search Adult ADHD
| meds, I still get articles about childhood ADHD. So then I:
|
| -child -childhood -adolescent -teen -kid -momgroup -mother
| -parent -teenager -children -kids -school -offspring
| -smallhumans -minor -underage +adult +work -rehab -addiction
|
| and I still get crap blog spam that's probably related to
| teaching or raising children or some other bullshit like
| warning about the dangers of addiction or something, and
| never information about my ADHD or the meds for it.
|
| It's not GREAT is the understatement of the decade.
| coldpie wrote:
| I've had some luck inserting "forum" into search terms to find
| real human content. Mostly when trying to find technical info
| about cars, but may apply to other fields.
| ryeights wrote:
| Yep. <search_term> site:reddit.com OR forum OR thread
| jadence wrote:
| I've found my jobs' internal (social) message boards/mailing
| lists/Slack channels/etc to be great resources as the only
| contributors are those who work/worked at the company. Your
| (ex)coworkers presumably met/meet a certain competency bar and
| are less likely to spam. At larger companies there are message
| boards/mailing lists/Slack channels/etc for nearly every topic.
|
| For local information, I've found forums for local sport teams
| to be great resources during the off season. Posters are often
| happy to engage in any sort of chat during the off season. Even
| if you haven't gotten to know the frequent posters during the
| sport's season you can use the (usually highly visible w/o any
| additional clicks) account age/# of posts/"karma" as a proxy of
| posters' trustworthiness. note: If you don't normally
| contribute on-topic (i.e., about the team and sport) posts, I
| would only search the forums for your questions and not post
| off-topic questions as that'll get you quickly banned.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > Can people suggest good alternatives
|
| I've been on the Kagi beta test for a few weeks now and, for
| the kind of searches I mostly do, it seems to be a massive
| improvement on Google. Strongly recommended.
|
| https://kagi.com/
| holbrad wrote:
| Looks interesting.
|
| In the FAQ they mention potentially charging around
| $10/month.
|
| Not sure if I'm being entitled or anything, but I was
| expecting something more like the original WhatsApp model of
| a few dollars a year.
|
| Perhaps I'm under-estimating how computationally heavy search
| is.
| bjtitus wrote:
| Kagi has a "consumption" section where they show how much
| your searches cost to perform.
|
| I've done 20 searches this month (I haven't switched it to
| default) and it says I have incurred $0.25 (between $0.01
| and $0.02 per search) so it would seem that it's very
| expensive for them to provide results at the moment. It
| would absolutely be unsustainable at a few dollars a year
| given these consumption numbers.
| up6w6 wrote:
| I'm not sure how they are counting the searches, mine is
| indicating more than 100 searches per day and I certainly
| don't access their website that much (maybe search
| suggestions count too?). Their results and overall
| product are much better than Google but I won't pay 30
| usd per month for that.
| Closi wrote:
| Every time you make a 'search action' it charges you,
| including changing categories on the site or changing the
| filters on the search.
|
| Lets say you search for "Photo Of A Mother" * Then you
| click "images" * Then you click "Sort by Recent" * Then
| you click "Licence -> Public" * Then you click "Size ->
| Large" * Then you click "Size -> Extra Large" *
|
| Every time I have put a star in the above is a time where
| you would be charged a search (so the above would be
| charged as 6 searches). It's the same thing with
| switching to news, applying filters, blocking a site or
| boosting a site etc - I've validated this on my Kagi
| account by clicking actions and seeing what it does to
| the billing, and just by using the search engine and
| using the lenses feature for example you can quickly rack
| up loads of searches.
|
| Now let's say you search for an error while you program,
| visit the first site, it's not got what you want so you
| click the back button and then visit the second site,
| that's not got the right answer so you click back and
| visit the third site... That's currently counted as 3
| different searches rather than 1 search. If you open them
| in different tabs it's counted as 1 search though.
|
| And with all this then you are suddenly over 25% through
| your daily allowance on the $10 plan. Even choosing to
| 'block' a site in the search charges you to block it.
| They are talking about charging $0.015 per search if you
| go over-quota (which is something like 20 searches on the
| $10 plan), but as far as I can tell if you are using it
| moderately heavily you will blast part the 20 searches
| and could end up with an eye-watering bill.
|
| I think the team are great, and when I was on discord
| they were really receptive, but I ended up giving up on
| Kagi after trying to use it as a daily driver as I
| figured they wouldn't be able to find a good enough
| monetisation strategy for my level of usage (after
| hearing discussions in the pricing channel). The product
| is good, it's just that they can't offer it at a price I
| can accept (and I _suspect_ they can 't offer it at the
| moment at a price that the market can accept, unless they
| can reach a deal on API licencing or roll their own
| search).
| ndiddy wrote:
| That pricing model is insane. I think it will remain a
| niche product only used by the wealthy unless they can
| get it down to somewhere like $5/month for unlimited
| searches.
| Closi wrote:
| > Perhaps I'm under-estimating how computationally heavy
| search is.
|
| It's because they aren't rolling their own search, they pay
| Google and Bing to do the search for them (via the Google
| and Bing Search API's which are charged), mix in a few
| results from their own crawler, and then reorder the
| results.
|
| So they will always have a higher cost base than both Bing
| and Google, because they are paying for 3 different search
| indexes (including their own), plus Bing and Google's
| margins on the API, plus their own infra costs.
|
| (Now if this is a sustainable model or not is another
| question...)
| hobofan wrote:
| Same. Over the years I've trialed most search engines out
| there, but always find my way going back there after at most
| 2 days of trying them, because I end up adding "@google"
| before every query anyways because the results are bad.
|
| With Kagi most of the results are what I'm looking for. If
| they are not, I'll still try "@google", but so far with very
| few queries Google's results were actually better. The
| biggest drawback is worse "smart cards" results, but I hope
| they keep those optional/unobtrusive anyway.
|
| The strange thing is that the feeling Kagi gives me, isn't
| even unknown. It just feels like Google circa 2010.
| preinheimer wrote:
| I think the hardest thing with trying a new search engine
| is the constant question "i wonder if the old one would
| have done this better"
| foxfluff wrote:
| I wish there was an extension that would search
| simultaneously on different engines and present them in
| columns side by side.
| floren wrote:
| I've signed up for the beta, but it's hard to shake the
| feeling that signing in to a search engine is a mistake. "We
| respect your privacy", "we'll never sell your data", I've
| heard these claims before and they've almost always been
| lies. They can _tell_ me that they don 't maintain an eternal
| history of all my queries, but how can I ever verify that?
| Qub3d wrote:
| Kagi ultimately will be a _paid_ service. As I 've noted in
| the context of other services (email), by providing revenue
| in the form of paid services (and _only_ paid, no freemium
| tier) the service doesn 't have to implement ads at all,
| and thus can skip the pressure to deliver more and more
| data in exhange for better rates.
| foobarding wrote:
| Neeva has a similar ad-free model. The experience is
| getting better all the time.
| floren wrote:
| I guess it comes down to trusting that they'll sit on
| that big stack of user data, exactly the same stuff
| Google used to build a trillion-dollar company, and
| continue to decide day after day _not_ to sell it. Will
| they continue to hold out if VCs get involved?
|
| Yes, I'm aware that all the same arguments apply to
| DuckDuckGo, and that Google & Bing already explicitly
| _do_ sell this stuff, but the stronger the promises, the
| more I demand to see proof.
| Qub3d wrote:
| I think part of it is also an implementation pressure. If
| you put your dev work into building a system around
| managing subscriptions and processing user payments, its
| less easy to flip a switch and start siphoning data to
| 3rd-parties when they come calling.
|
| In theory, this would be visible to end-users as a halt
| in feature roll-outs, because the dev team has to pivot
| to building ad-tech.
|
| I hope to god VCs don't get involved; if they do I'd be
| the first to bail. I'm hoping that the revenue model
| makes VC money allergic to them in general. Bootstrapping
| is preferred for this type of service (see also:
| Pinboard, sr.ht)
| api wrote:
| Umm... Google and Bing track the hell out of you whether
| you sign in or not. DuckDuckGo claims not to but the sites
| you hit through it certainly employ tons of fingerprinting.
| geysersam wrote:
| > how can I verify that?
|
| Write and ask them. GDPR requires that users can retrieve
| all stored information associated to their profile/person.
| Most large internet companies have this functionality.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I love this search engine, it gives me the same feeling that
| Google did when it became a thing. Their business model after
| beta will be that users pay to use it, and it has no ads.
| This is a very encouraging sign, and personally I'll be
| willing to pay for quality search without ads. I hope enough
| other people feel the same to make Kagi profitable and
| functioning for years to come.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Looks interesting, but am I crazy for thinking that $10/month
| is an insane price to pay for a general purpose search
| engine? Surely Google wouldn't making anywhere near $10/month
| off of me even if I disabled adblock.
| gwern wrote:
| Those two sentences have no connection. You can gain a huge
| amount of consumer surplus, even as the seller reaps almost
| none of it. Google's gain from ads bears little relation to
| your gain from Google. (This is why people are so much
| better off in markets: it's actually very hard for a
| business to get more than a small fraction of consumer
| surplus.) As it happens, when people try to estimate your
| gains from a general purpose search engine, it usually
| comes in at like $100+/month (search 'willingness to pay
| search engine' and think about how long it would've taken
| you to find that in a physical library, and how you
| wouldn't've bothered in the first place because such a
| search would be impossibly expensive). So, $10/month would
| be a steal compared to not using a search engine at
| $0/month.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > So, $10/month would be a steal compared to not using a
| search engine at $0/month.
|
| But that's a fantasy dichotomy as long as free search
| engines exist, and there's plenty of them. If you could
| somehow change the world and wipe them all out in an
| instant, I guarantee that people would scramble to
| provide alternatives. We will never live in a world where
| your only option is $10/month or no search. (Free & open
| source search engines already exist and you could host
| one at home or on a cheap VPS; there are also P2P search
| engines)
| gwern wrote:
| Of course people would scramble, but it has nothing to do
| with how much value you can screw users out of using
| advertising, because even if ads were worth $0 revenue,
| search is so valuable you _could_ just plain charge
| users. This is why there is essentially no relationship
| between the value of search and the ad revenue. The value
| of the ad revenue could be $0, and the value to the user
| would still be $100+ /month.
|
| And because the consumer surplus is literally an order of
| magnitude or two more than the subscription fee quoted,
| that is prima facie a case that a subscription search
| engine could have a marginal benefit of >$10 compared to
| the free ad-supported engine. It, or the subset of
| searches you opt to use it for, only needs to deliver a
| little more value to be worth it. Quite aside from the
| problem of Google Search being increasingly jammed full
| of ads, wasting your time, or any distortion of ranking,
| people just plain dislike and avoid ads
| (https://www.gwern.net/Ads).
| greycol wrote:
| The value proposition is in surfacing a result that you
| wouldn't already have from the free search engine. Your
| personal calculus will of course vary but lets do a basic
| business case with the following assumptions
|
| Free search engines work 95% of the time for your
| employees searches
|
| Kagi can get a result in half of the remaining 5% (this
| is definetly the biggest assumption and I haven't had
| enough experience with kagi to say if this is realistic)
|
| Your employee does 1 search a day and 30 days in a month
| (so kagi gets you 0.75 more completed searches a month).
|
| It takes an employee 15 minutes to search manually
| through documentation or come up with a solved algorithm
| from first principals when the search fails.
|
| In that situation your employees time needs to be worth
| less than $53.33 dollars an hour for the $10 dollar plan
| not to break even.
|
| So play with the numbers how you want to make up your own
| mind but it does seem reasonable to argue there's a
| market for it at that price. Personal use where missing a
| result could have no cost is ofcourse another question.
|
| edit: 0.75 not 1.5 searches a month extra
| foxfluff wrote:
| Sure, I'm not contesting that there's a market for it.
| Going along that line of reasoning, there's also a market
| for a group of experts you can phone and get an answer
| from at $100 / hour, and so on. But let's not push the
| goalposts too much :) My personal calculus says it's not
| worth $10 for me (I don't rely on search much for my
| work).
| yCombLinks wrote:
| The price is crazy only because you're used to not seeing
| the price you're paying (ads). I spend $10 on things way
| less valuable very often. A good search engine is at least
| as much value as intellij to me, and my company pays 5
| times more than that per month for intellij.
| tobias3 wrote:
| The problem is that ads price discriminate. Google may not
| get much money off of you, but there are other users that
| are very valuable (think of a manager in a billion dollar
| enterprise searching for a subscription product to buy).
| Would you be okay with it costing 0.05% of your income?
|
| Of course it will be hard to compete with ads as business
| model if the alternative doesn't allow for price
| discrimination.
| clusterfish wrote:
| You'd be surprised. Google makes more than that from
| showing ads to an average US user. Same for Facebook iirc.
| Closi wrote:
| Their pricing is closer to $30 a month if you are searching
| more than a handful of times per day.
|
| At $10 a month you have to pay per search if you search
| over 20 times per day or something.
| reayn wrote:
| I've also been using Kagi for ~1 month and god can I testify
| for how fantastic it's been. You have to TRY to find blogspam
| and the allowance of blacklisting domains plus some other
| handy search customization features make it an absolute joy
| to use.
|
| It may lack "instant answer" widgets or other fancy search
| engine features but it gets the actual "search" part of the
| equation so right that I find it astonishing how I ever used
| DDG/Google in the past.
| cornedor wrote:
| You can enable Instant Answers in the settings, it is not
| as complete as other search engines yet, but it is
| improving :)
| reayn wrote:
| Yeah I've flicked it on a couple times but rarely notice
| much change, though honestly it's not a search engine
| feature I've come to desire, as even if you get a widget
| the majority of the time it may parse incorrect data or
| not even show what you wanted (which happens a lot with
| google's widgets IIRC).
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| Any reasonable justification for requiring sign-up/a user
| account?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Presumably because, as they move out of beta, they want
| people to start paying to use their search engine. Thats
| the only way they can afford to be ad-free.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I'm 100% happy to pay for an ad-free search engine that
| doesn't sell my data. I don't really like having all my
| search terms being linked to me via an account, but I
| suppose that's already happening anyway. I guess I picked
| the right day to stop looking at clown porn.
| holbrad wrote:
| I guess how would you implement monetization without an
| account in some form ?
|
| You could just allow a given IP address ? But that's just
| as trackable and has tons of downsides with using from
| other locations.
| keonix wrote:
| You could sell tokens that get used up after each search
| or expire after certain amount of time since first use.
| Browser extension could store tokens and provide them to
| website as needed in random order. Tokens could be resold
| so no tracking by payment processor
| freediver wrote:
| To buy a token you still need payment details. How would
| this be different to just buying a subscription?
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| They could do the SaaS model and give you an API key or
| unique URL allowing up to 10000 searches per month which
| you could share with friends/your company
|
| That's probably a worse business model, but it would be
| really interesting to hear what other monetization ideas
| Kagi considered or is considering.
| r00fus wrote:
| Works at an enterprise level (e.g. exchange rate
| providers) but would be a bad fit for a B2C product.
|
| Managing customer expectations on api key usage (esp. if
| that key is publicly visible e.g. URL parameter vs. HTTP
| header) is not worth it unless you have higher-priced
| products.
|
| Also api keys would mean you might have to prevent re-
| selling, etc. Furthermore, they could still analyze api
| key usage to get the same historical data on you as if
| you logged in.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Would still link searches to your API key.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for a while now too. I like their stance
| on privacy, but I don't really like that I have to create an
| account to use it.
|
| https://kagi.com/privacy
| bloaf wrote:
| As a bit of a weird hobby, I like to read up on right wing
| conspiracy theories. That means I do a fair number of searches
| for specific terms and people mentioned in fake-news
| facebook/forum posts.
|
| Google seems to slowly oscillate between thinking that I am a
| right wing loon, and thinking I am Joe Public who _must not be
| shown_ misinformation. That is, sometimes google is perfectly
| willing to vomit forth results from the propaganda mills, even
| when I 'm not specifically looking for it, and other times I
| can't get conspiratorial-minded results even when I am making
| an effort to find them.
|
| This most frequently manifests itself when I am looking for
| sources for claims that I know exist. Like if I remember
| reading an earlier conspiracy that has just been invalidated,
| or someone posts some a video of someone reading a blog post.
| If google has decided I am an innocent bystander not to be
| shown conspiracies it can be nearly impossible to track down
| the original blog or posts about the conspiracy.
|
| Recency bias is another huge problem with google results. Older
| content gets heavily de-prioritized, even when it is clearly
| what you want. Google is willing to give up on terms in your
| search before it is willing to show you old stuff. For example,
| if you tried to research early Ukrainian political corruption
| during Trump's impeachment, your results would be nearly
| entirely Trump-related content even if you tried to use
| google's date-filters and exclude terms like -Trump.
| writeslowly wrote:
| I noticed this recently when trying to find primary sources
| for flat earth claims. They don't exist on Google, for me at
| least. You can still find them on duck duck go if you search
| for something like "flat earth ice wall" but Google just
| returns generic debunk articles.
| Lascaille wrote:
| This sounds like filter-bubbling. From what I can tell,
| Google doesn't have user specific filter bubble but user-
| category filter bubbles, and it's constantly updating the
| category of users it thinks you're in.
| pwr-electronics wrote:
| Change your search strategy. Most forums require a membership
| to view them, and most long form posts are on personal
| websites. Google can't or won't serve those. You have to
| navigate like it's the old web. Find a good place to make
| landfall, read old posts, ask around, and follow all your
| leads.
| AugurCognito wrote:
| > Google with site:news.ycombinator.com if I want to find
| "forum-like" discussion on topics I'm interested in.
|
| Use https://hn.algolia.com/ instead. You can see your results
| as you type your query and even sort it based on time.
| Joeri wrote:
| For technical content I had great results from using safari
| books online in the past. Having most tech literature an easy
| web search away was super convenient, because typically the
| best treatment of any subject is in book form. The downside is
| that it is expensive, so when I switched employers I lost
| access and I wasn't willing to pay for it myself.
| beatsie_ wrote:
| I have noticed the low effort posting. This may extend beyond
| just Reddit though. Everyone wants the biggest reward for the
| least amount of effort.
| tgtweak wrote:
| We're not far from a publisher revolt against google -
| essentially if you're a publisher with good data, doing the
| legwork of curating and moderating user generated content, and
| making it discoverable... google is just cherry-picking your
| content and laying it into the search results in the form of
| answers and snippets and plastering their ads on it (or AMP-
| serving your content).
|
| I don't think it's sustainable in the long run and the barrier of
| entry to make a solid search engine is lowering every year -
| there are several solid alternatives where before it was a
| unfunny joke to assert there would be a proper google competitor
| 5 short years ago.
|
| I don't think Google is going to fix this, the fact that it has
| evolved to where it is today is a result of concerted and
| persistent product focus in that direction.
|
| High hopes that we'll see a better-than-google alternative break
| out in the near future.
| theyeenzbeanz wrote:
| Google search has been next to useless for me at least in the
| past few years. Results use to be on the spot, and now I get
| wildly various results that have nothing to do with what I looked
| for. The biggest issue is it trying to substitute words which
| renders my terms useless. Then there's also the quora answers
| showing first and most answers there are being paywalls now.
| [deleted]
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it was inevitable that the
| maturing of the winners from web 2 would lead to its death and
| that is the stick that drives dev of the next stage. It's
| certainly where my interests have turned the past few years
| keithnz wrote:
| Hacker News is also becoming a replacement for google for some
| things for me, I'll just come here and search on some tech
| related thing which I think is highly likely been discussed on
| here to see what others think / first hand experiences.
| gotbeans wrote:
| I'm almost happy to see this for the wrong reasons. For the past
| few months I don't know how many times I've complained about the
| dire state of Gsearch.
|
| For every single search, I have to consistently scroll one page
| down to skip ads and product matches ala "google shopping" belt.
| It's just insane.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Sources for this article: Paul Graham, Michael Seibel, Daniel
| Gross and Hacker News.
| romanovtexas wrote:
| how long before reddit is also gamed by paid influencers or bots?
| trop wrote:
| There is no innate reason why a Google search on a subject should
| return high quality results. This is predicated on there being
| someone willing to write thoughtful, informative, well-researched
| content and post it on the open internet such that a search
| engine can monetize that content via user profiling and
| advertising.
|
| There may have been a moment when enough people were willing to
| put up their writing/images/videos for free such that Google's
| search engine appeared helpful in "organizing the world's
| information". But that mission statement was is a smoke screen.
| Google didn't organize. The company, as a gatekeeper, profiteered
| off of the writing/images/videos of others.
|
| The problem isn't that Google search algorithms are low-quality,
| nor that Google has been gamed by SEO. The problem is that Google
| has engaged in a scorched-earth policy of capitalizing on the
| work of others. Google created a secondary market in information,
| without funding the primary market -- which then withered. And
| now there is a tertiary market of SEO spammers capitalizing on
| the propensity people still have to think that a Google search
| will return the truth to them, gratis.
| aaron695 wrote:
| nice_byte wrote:
| scher wrote:
| Reddit is a great source of people's discussions and quality
| posts on various topics. When I tried to find people's pain
| points to automate collecting problems to solve(and now it's an
| advanced Reddit search tool[1]), I found out that niche forums
| are great places to collect them. However, it's difficult to find
| more of them, plus scraping the data is time-consuming(custom
| parser for a new forum). And, the most important thing, there are
| not so many discussions that one may find on Reddit.
|
| What I like about the website, it's you can find a huge amount of
| subreddits, every one of them dedicated to a niche topic that
| people there are willing to discuss. They share opinions,
| actively engage in discussions, and help in moderating good
| content. Is there any other place like this? There are many
| situations when one still be preferring Google, but as for niche
| discussions I don't see any other good place to visit. Maybe it
| was Quora before, but now it's a spam place.
|
| [1] https://olwi.xyz
| bad_username wrote:
| Reddit is incresibly heavy on censorship. It is only a great
| source of topics if they happen to align with a very specific
| worldview. I recommend to have zero trust in Reddit when it
| comes to politics, history, health, and even philosophy.
| mcbuilder wrote:
| Reddit search can be hit or miss, but overall the content is
| higher quality than the numerous garbage quality articles that
| you will get for searching a broad term. You'll also often have
| access to a broad community and maybe wiki if you search a
| popular enough topic. Reddit really shines on niche topics
| though, like what capacitor do I need to replace in my 1996 CRT
| monitor. Often if there is any information to be had you'll get
| the best explanation through reddit, of course this doesn't apply
| for all things but it's good enough that I'm guilty of adding
| reddit to my google search terms more and more.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| I did not realize the extent to which I have come to
| automatically privilege Reddit thread responses when selecting
| among search results,
|
| for all the reasons enumerated.
|
| Wow.
| bnralt wrote:
| 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, "Step one: try turning
| your computer off and turning it back on again. This is usually a
| good first step, and you'll be surprised at how often...").
|
| Likewise, I wonder how long appending "Reddit" will work. As
| others have pointed out, Reddit shills are already relatively
| common, and it's becoming increasingly common for bot accounts to
| create lots of random comments to appear to be human (such as
| finding a thread with thousands of comments, then copying and
| pasting the comment to another place in the thread or to another
| thread, or auto-generating a simple sentence based on other
| comments in the thread).
|
| Sometimes the advertising hordes move so fast they kill something
| before it even takes off, like what happened with Clubhouse.
| tjchear wrote:
| Might the inevitable arms race between bot writers and bot
| detectors be the missing accelerator for a general AI that has
| a predilection for top 10 white label brands of generic
| consumer products?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Post truth society has arrived, trump was a symptom, not the
| cause.
|
| Combined with AI imitating speech and deepfakes, and technology
| of inplanting false memories, we will have the matrix, just not
| the wau we expected ^ ^
| facorreia wrote:
| Google used to be better at filtering out garbage content like
| this. They have resources for detecting low quality content
| (e.g. all pages on this domain follow the same content-free
| pattern). I suspect that doing that wouldn't drive ad revenue
| up, so they don't bother.
| baby wrote:
| What happened to clubhouse?
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| It almost immediately upon the real adoption curve (this
| seems like October November 2020 anecdotally to me) just
| absolutely filled to the brim with NFT shills, cryptocurrency
| pumpers, and "self actualization with this one weird trick"
| promoters of their MLM. But early 2021 it was impossible to
| find any rooms with anyone discussing anything but these
| things.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| Yeah, and unfortunately the only rooms not run by scammers
| were filled with people talking about anti-semitic
| conspiracy theories. What a cesspool it became.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Twitter knocked them off with Twitter spaces.
| bozhark wrote:
| Nah, they just kind of sucked.
|
| Like, who really needs a voip protocol pretending to be a
| program?
| keewee7 wrote:
| I have noticed that a lot of tech and startup clubs on
| Clubhouse were created by users from India and Iran. Today
| the clubs are still dominated by users from these countries.
|
| Nothing wrong with that but that also indicates the usual
| clickfarm spammers from developing countries had unfiltered
| access to Clubhouse from day 1.
|
| This might sound elitist but it's probably a good idea that
| C2C apps get their first batch of users and community leaders
| from high income countries before branching out to the rest
| of the world.
| sss111 wrote:
| this is elitist and misinformed
| teatree wrote:
| India is a young country with a 1.4B population, with a lot
| of engineers. I know the quality can vary from gemstones to
| tombstones but there is an active tech community.
|
| >This might sound elitist but it's probably a good idea
| that C2C apps get their first batch of users and community
| leaders from high income countries before branching out to
| the rest of the world.
|
| Why?
| iqanq wrote:
| For the same reason some apps (used to?) launch on iphone
| first.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > it's probably a good idea that C2C apps get their first
| batch of users and community leaders from high income
| countries before branching out to the rest of the world.
|
| Unless they're targetting local communities with some sort
| of culturally relevant format, its good for their bottom
| line to target the most profitable customers of advertising
| anyways.
| hassancf wrote:
| So when doing a search, we are searching in a place (Reddit)
| that's being moderated by humans.
|
| Because doing a search in a place that's not moderated by
| humans would generate too much noise.
|
| I think this kinda takes us back to the old times with Yahoo
| (and humans sorting the information) etc...
|
| A giant step backwards, if you ask me.
| initplus wrote:
| 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.
| achenatx wrote:
| in google you can do site:reddit.com or even site
| reddit.com/r/subreddit
|
| I do this to search for items on craigslist across the country.
|
| This will force a reddit search.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I concur on the looking up technical errors bit directing you
| to auto-generated sites!
|
| I was recently trying to troubleshoot a very basic error
| message for Linux and was getting results and webpages that
| would list the error message in the title in some way, but then
| give instructions on "First, open up device manager", "Click
| Win+R to open windows command prompt", etc. Lots of
| untrustworthy ads. Different URLs, almost line-for-line
| identical webpages.
|
| This was something like the top four search results (that
| weren't sponsored ads).
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I usually look for these hallmarks:
|
| 1) if this is from the project's own site, it's good.
|
| 2) if it looks like an archive of the project's mailing list,
| it's good.
|
| 3) if it looks like an internet forum, it might be good, or
| it might be just another poor soul asking the same question.
|
| 4) if it's on StackExchange, it's like on the forum, except
| your chances are slightly better. Karma must flow.
|
| 5) if it's on Reddit, it's like on the forum, except your
| chances of getting an answer are worse.
|
| 6) if it's a blog of some geek, sometimes it can be better
| than 1) and 2), or you might just get a straight answer.
|
| 7) in any other case it's most likely a SEO farm. Run.
|
| If I have a linux problem these days, google usually gives me
| the relevant piece of source code on Github from which the
| error message originates. Like, you're a big boy now, go
| figure it out yourself.
|
| It seems we're back to the early 2000s, when search engines
| not so much _specialized_ in topics, but leaned heavily
| towards one type of content or the other. Holy hell, maybe
| one day Reddit 's own search will be good enough so google
| can be ditched for good!
| TLLtchvL8KZ wrote:
| I come across these sites so often it's not even funny.
|
| Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or 5
| in the first page of search results.
|
| I'm assuming they're all ran by the same person, throwing as
| much ** at the wall knowing some will stick.
|
| Many of my searchers now include "reddit" or "forum" at the end
| to filter out all the spam/crap.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or
| 5 in the first page of search results."
|
| If only google was smart enough to figure this out
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, just found this morning that an article my wife wrote on
| a very obscure legal topic was stolen, reformatted, and
| posted on some "life hacks" sort of site. It shows up #3 in
| the DDG results. At least her originals are still #1 and #2.
|
| Meanwhile I have in my inbox in the last 24h at least a half-
| cozen emails looking to do SEO work for my company website.
|
| Web = untrustworthy? YUP
|
| I'd happily pay for a serious version of 1999 Google, but
| updated to filter out anything advert based, and search for
| exactly what I want.
|
| Search is such a fundamental function, and we've done the
| experiment and the advert model fails - it needs to be just
| another utility.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| This feels like the underlying issue. Google may have stayed
| the same, or even slightly improved.
|
| But the web, in the sense of quality:crap ratio, has gotten
| substantially worse.
|
| This flood seems like the ultimate manifestation of turnkey
| hosting solutions.
|
| Imho, we could do worse than reviving an idea from email's
| early days vs spam: negligible per-use charging. The idea was
| to tax emails at $0.0001 (or somesuch). Insignificant for
| actual users, but financially decimates high-volume, low-
| value spammers.
| Jiro wrote:
| The web is like that because content farms are optimizing
| the pages to be found by Google and Google doesn't know how
| to filter them out, so we really can't treat it as a
| problem independent of Google itself.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Fair. The fact that Google exists + the fact that Google
| serves a huge amount of traffic + the fact that Google is
| unable / unwilling to filter out content farms =
| incentive to content farm.
|
| If there were no Google though, we'd likely have the same
| thing.
|
| So I guess the only reality that avoids incentivizing
| them is one where (1) there is a massive traffic
| generator & (2) that massive traffic generator severely
| disincentizes content farms.
| Lascaille wrote:
| It isn't so much that 'google doesn't know how to filter
| them out' but there's nothing left after having filtered
| them out.
|
| Nobody is producing real content that isn't behind a
| paywall.
|
| There's nothing to find.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There is real content being drowned out by autogenerated
| SEO crap. I tried looking for rice cookers which didn't
| have non stick coatings, they do exist and some blog
| posts which talk about them but the top results are all
| stores which have just a generic category for rice cooker
| but generate 200 duplicate pages with the title changed
| to exactly match whatever your search term is. So it says
| "Ceramic rice cooker" but shows their generic listing of
| PTFE rice cookers.
|
| Google search is constantly improving but the SEO
| spammers are improving faster.
| willis936 wrote:
| I know this isn't true because I've used google for
| nearly two decades with good results. That information
| hasn't evaporated, it's just buried.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| If you put site:reddit.com it Google will only return results
| from reddit.com
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Not even this is a guarantee. This happens to me regularly:
|
| https://twitter.com/jdgoesmarching/status/14936788621143777
| 2...
| dceddia wrote:
| This has been happening a lot with StackOverflow and GitHub
| pages lately. A lot of the times, the actual GitHub or SO
| link won't even be on the first page.
|
| I'm surprised they haven't done some kind of manual pruning
| of junk like that, or maybe they have and it's not working...
| but on the surface it totally seems like they could implement
| something that says "GitHub has content X, and these other 10
| sites are 99% the same, but we've flagged GitHub as an
| authoritative source so they'll always outrank the clones".
|
| Maybe it's a fear of appearing unfair. Or maybe they secretly
| want to hurt Microsoft by turning a blind eye. Or maybe this
| is actually a much harder problem. If I had to guess it's
| probably #3. But as a user of search it's frustrating to find
| the clones ranked above the real stuff.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Just as bad as the auto-generated pages are company blog pages
| whose SEO rigged post pretends to give "help" for a problem
| where the main solution is of course, using their product.
| dkarl wrote:
| > "Step one: try turning your computer off and turning it back
| on again. This is usually a good first step, and you'll be
| surprised at how often..."
|
| This seems like a natural result of optimizing each search for
| revenue. Think of a search to solve an error message on your
| computer. There's a very small number of vulnerable people who
| are going to spend money as a result of that search, so
| optimizing for ads would mean tailoring the results
| specifically for those people, pushing them to sleazy sites
| where they might spend money on some kind of antivirus scam.
| The results are worthless to you, but who cares? You're
| worthless to Google when you're doing that kind of search. Try
| searching for something that people in your demographic spend
| money on, and the results will likely look better to you.
| zestyrx wrote:
| Yeah, those pages are definitely auto-generated. Static site
| generation makes it possible for those types of pages (I call
| them "shims") to jump to the top of the results list. I wrote
| about it here: https://zestyrx.com/blog/nextjs-ssg
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| I don't see what static site generation has to do with it.
| You can spin up a huge number of shims even more easily with
| a dynamic site and a DB with a list of all the messages you
| want shims for.
| brundolf wrote:
| Free project idea for someone with more time on their hands
| than me:
|
| Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based
| on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where
| trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These
| automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers
| are winning the arms-race.
|
| So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust.
|
| People used to curate lists of websites, which partly solved
| this problem but didn't necessarily scale. I wonder if that
| idea could be supercharged.
|
| Consider a browser extension that people install, which:
|
| a) gives users a button to mark a site as trusted/favorited
|
| b) tracks domains visited (and frequency)
|
| Then, separately, you can manually add people you know
| _personally_ to your "network". You trust them, so anything
| _they_ trust is also something you might be able to trust.
| Manual favorites could be weighted higher than frequently-
| visited sites, and both could be displayed inline next to links
| on all pages you visit. You could also see which people the
| trust in a given link comes from, in case some of them
| consistently have bad judgement about these things and you want
| to remove them from your list. Then, finally, you could create
| a personalized search-engine that only indexes the sites
| determined to be trusted by your personal network.
|
| Of course this would require placing a great amount of trust in
| the extension and service themselves, so maybe they would have
| to be open-sourced or self-hostable or something (a profit
| motive might create a huge amount of temptation to abuse the
| data). That's a stickier problem.
|
| Edit: There was a little ambiguity left here about transitive
| trust; "friends of friends" type stuff. I think if this went on
| for unlimited hops, we'd be back at square one. So maybe it
| only uses direct contacts, or maybe some small N of hops (where
| longer ones are weighted lower?). Maybe this would be
| configurable, not sure.
|
| Also re: privacy, maybe you could come up with a clever way to
| E2E encrypt the site visit data, even though it's shared with
| many parties?
| JamesBarney wrote:
| You could also incorporate "reputation" of the author.
| Basically have a real person, the author stake their real
| identity on the quality of the blog post they wrote.
| Corrado wrote:
| I think the Keybase project would have been great for
| providing the "authentication" part of this solution. To bad
| it died on the vine of the Zoom purchase.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| This reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "whuffie" from Down and
| Out in the Magic Kingdom (man, that title takes me back!).
|
| Whuffie is, roughly, money determined by your social
| interactions. More importantly, others also have a queryable
| score that's weighted according to who _you_ esteem highly -
| this sounds like what you 're proposing!
| nfc wrote:
| I was thinking something similar recently, and I also believe
| it's an idea worth exploring. Something else to add to this
| conversation. There's an obvious difference between two cases
| in which a trusted person trusts a url:
|
| 1) Single contributor website (blog, personal page...): It
| seems that we could spread the trust the whole website in the
| algorithm (at least more than for the next case)
|
| 2) Multi contributor website (forum, newspaper): It seems the
| trust should be given at an URL level
|
| Something worth delving into if we are designing this trust
| based search engine in real-time here at HN ;)
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| The biggest problem, doing that, is that you increase the
| pressure from bad actors to websites that are trusted by lots
| of people.
|
| So, for instance, the more weight you give to sites that are
| quoted by Wikipedia in your search rankings, the more content
| farms will have incentives to sneak edits that link to their
| sites.
|
| There are ways to counter that (eg moderation), but in
| general, defense is more expensive than offense.
| brundolf wrote:
| Right but the idea is that you don't use _sites_ as sources
| of trust, you use _people_. Content farms won't be paying
| your friends and family to shill websites to you.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Like us on Facebook and get this 10 cent coupon or even
| the chance of winning something real!"
|
| Works suprisingly well already, sadly. So yes - at some
| point companies would pay people to vote for them.
|
| But I still would prefer that system (with some
| differences) over the default. Because the people I would
| trust, would not fall for the common scams.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| I mean, of course they will?
|
| A large fraction of facebook content is MLMs and mobile
| game ads from one's own contacts.
| nfc wrote:
| Then you just stop trusting them for your search results,
| it's not like you are unfriending them.
| wdencker wrote:
| This is very much in the spirit of what we were trying to do
| with trove.to [1] -- give people an easy way to curate &
| annotate lists of websites, and layer a social graph and
| endorsement system on top of those lists.
|
| The problem we encountered is that the vast majority of
| people are not hyper-organized list makers -- the 1% rule of
| the internet [2]. To create a "human curated search engine"
| with any utility, you need a massive amount of manually-
| categorized data -- data which most people are simply not
| interested in generating. This is why no social bookmarking
| site (e.g. delicious, pinboard, etc.) has ever taken off to
| hundreds of millions of users.
|
| I still think there's something exciting to be built here,
| but it will likely need to take a more "automated" approach
| as you suggested.
|
| [1] https://trove.to/
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
| brundolf wrote:
| Yeah- that's the only reason I suggested the automatic
| tracking of visits by domain, despite the obvious privacy
| complications there
| allochthon wrote:
| This was kind of the idea behind a side project I started a
| few years ago:
|
| https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-
| searc...
|
| In that post, I don't address the reputation management
| aspect as much, but it's central to making the whole thing
| work, and I think crowd-sourcing and a well-conceived
| reputation management system that can influence results are
| good next areas for exploration.
| sdeframond wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| Another "sticky" problem is how to make a living out of this
| I guess...
| rsyring wrote:
| Have the extension serve ads.
| dennis_moore wrote:
| I like this idea of incorporating trust and reputation. As
| for the curation of websites not scaling, some time ago I
| thought about the possibility of a search engine where the
| user supplies a list of trusted websites (for example,
| university websites, blogs of people they admire), and the
| search engine ranks pages based on link distance to these
| websites.
| Seirdy wrote:
| There's no need for an extension; plenty of websites are part
| of webrings or feature blogrolls. I'm in the process of
| adding one to mine.
|
| Throw in some microformats2 and/or schema.org structured data
| and you're good to go.
|
| Certain search engines specialize in this type of manually-
| curated content; I listed some in the "non-generalist search"
| section of my collection of indexing search engines:
| https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-
| indexe...
| whoibrar wrote:
| I've just had the deja Vu reading this post! Took me a
| minute to realise, I did actually come across this post and
| your blog some time ago, and really enjoyed reading all the
| posts then and now again! Hoping to read more from you!
| batisteo wrote:
| Like the Web-of-Trust or similar?
| eitland wrote:
| Someone will sooner or later mention the sybil attack.
|
| (At some points I feel it is thrown out as haphazardly as
| "correlation does not imply causation".)
|
| But I think you might be onto something. It won't necessarily
| be easy but I think it deserves more than a quick dismissal.
| throw10920 wrote:
| GP comment already explicitly addressed this:
|
| > Then, separately, you can manually add people you know
| personally to your "network". You trust them, so anything
| they trust is also something you might be able to trust.
|
| It doesn't matter how many sockpuppet accounts a marketing
| company creates if you don't click the "trust" button on
| any of them, and if the system is designed so that your
| local trust network only consists of what you trust
| directly and (weighted) transitively.
| foxfluff wrote:
| I've been wanting[0] more or less the same for a long
| time now. Ideally the dataset should be public (and
| distributed) so that you could find bad actors and
| eliminate them from your network (i.e. when you see a bad
| result, you can figure out where it came from into your
| feed), as well as run your own tweaked algorithms. WoT
| alone is great, but it gets better still when you can
| tweak the algorithm.
|
| At that point, it doesn't need to be people you know
| personally; it just needs to be identities with a proven
| track record. If you can manage multiple identities, you
| could make ones e.g. for the explicit purpose of
| presenting a blacklist of bad sites you've found, or for
| providing a "front page" to a certain subject. Anyone is
| free to trust your identity or not, and choose exactly
| how to rank its actions.
|
| This whole thing could be expanded to tagging and other
| metadata as well as comments, and so on.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29691303
| lhorie wrote:
| The irony for me is that Google had a Reddit before Reddit was a
| thing, it was called Orkut and it was glorious. You could create
| communities based on whatever the heck you wanted and connect
| with friends and strangers alike through any twist on any topic
| you could think of.
|
| But Google being Google, it didn't see the potential because
| Orkut didn't achieve global dominance (despite being _the_ social
| media platform in places like Brazil and India at the time).
| Google 's obsession with AI-fying the crap out of its business
| will likely end up being its downfall now that it's proving to be
| increasingly ineffective against the SEO-motivated players, who
| now have an enormously diverse toolkit to game the coveted first
| SERPs, from black hat to downright paying right into Google's
| pockets to get their way.
| Lascaille wrote:
| 'Garage band jamming with my fellow orkuteers' was a meme
| before image macros even existed
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| And the reason why these small communities are "more trustworthy"
| is moderation by actual humans. This is always the secret sauce.
| Google's biggest problem is that they think they can (and that
| they must) solve everything with automation, but any automated
| system can be defeated by a sufficiently motivated human.
| ricardolopes wrote:
| This is it. If you let the machines do their thing
| unsupervised, you're creating an optimisation game someone is
| going to win.
|
| I honestly believe the only way for a search engine to be as
| valuable as Google was years ago is to let human knowledge
| drive more decisions. Maybe closer in spirit to what a web app
| store would look like, or closer to the categorisation Yahoo
| did. Not to browse by category (though even that would be
| refreshing at this point), but to better select the most
| relevant search sources.
| LoveGracePeace wrote:
| "any automated system can be defeated by a sufficiently
| motivated human"
|
| That is exactly the whole problem. SEO SPAM is a symptom. The
| problem, is that Google went all in on ML and AI. I've been
| exposed to ML and AI going back to the early 1990's. It always
| ends up the same, stale sterile outcomes.
|
| Google can fix this by someone doing an intervention with
| Pichai and concincing him that we are several decades away,
| still, from any meaningful use of ML and AI, get back to making
| search good.
|
| On a positive note, Google does work well today as a spell
| checker.
| TillE wrote:
| This is an excellent point. There's the actual moderators who
| are, at minimum, filtering out spam. And then there are the
| human users voting, which I assume carries over in one way or
| another to Google's search ranking.
| fluorinerocket wrote:
| Kagi
| dtemkin wrote:
| I think this is an interesting topic - for me it really
| highlights the problems inherent to making algorithms profitable.
| Often pushing them in one direction or another has really
| pronounced effects on their unbiased nature. I personally think
| PageRank is still the best algo around and there are not too many
| good copies. The other thing to consider is that allowing for
| selection of 'common searches' reduces server load and is
| computationally less expensive than processing the same search
| over and over. Also, the way people ask questions may have
| changed. I mean I know many people that use the 'omnibar' to go
| to a webpage they know the address of. Like searching google for
| 'Facebook' just so you don't have to type '.com'.
|
| I remember the days of AskJeeves when your query literally had to
| be a question - that was very tedious. I am not anxious to go
| back to that if thats what a decentralized internet looks like.
|
| But I do think we are on a precipice where the size of the
| company plays a huge role in getting noticed. If you want to stop
| this don't click on the 'ad' links in the search results. Scroll
| down until you see the page you want to go to.
|
| @fxtentacle It occurred to me that Microsoft may have blocked the
| Google Crawler so that people have to switch to Bing. I am really
| not a fan of how much Microsoft is trying to force people into
| their ecosystem and are rapidly closing the doors. Took me two
| hours to figure out how to remove Windows Defender from a VM.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Ironically, Reddit search is terrible so you really have to use
| Google to do a thorough Reddit search. reddit + search term is a
| powerful combo on Google.
| designium wrote:
| I do that all the time.
| ivank wrote:
| https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ will sometimes find
| things that neither Google nor Reddit search can dig up (it
| queries pushshift and includes recent and deleted comments). It
| doesn't have any relevance ranking but it's still possible to
| get interesting results; also, it supports asterisk suffixes on
| words.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The author says so in the first paragraph.
| Datenstrom wrote:
| Just an anecdote but I was shocked when I went home over the
| holiday and nearly everyone told me they use duckduckgo now.
| These are not tech people either, I am from a small rural town in
| upstate NY. I couldn't believe it and although it is a small
| sample size there must be serious problems with google.
| tim333 wrote:
| Counterpoint: No it's not dying -
|
| Sales 2019 161m 2020 182m 2021 257m
|
| >If you've tried to search for a recipe or product review
| recently, I don't need to tell you that Google search results
| have gone to shit.
|
| Not that I usually do but I tried for macbook M1 and apple pie
| and it gave me ok results - Tom's Guides and a BBC recipe
|
| Competition - I don't really know anyone who uses Bing or DDG
| though I believe they are out there somewhere
|
| Ok I sometimes stick reddit on the search which is fine because I
| like Reddit. I guess the ads are probably annoying but I don't
| see any due to uBlock.
|
| I'm not sure why I'm the only one saying it's not dying when that
| seems to be what the facts suggest? Nostalgia for some mythical
| past when you got unbiased results for "best laptop" or
| something? Not sure really.
| baby wrote:
| That's why I think reddit, facebook, stack overflow, and others
| will replace Google at some point. It makes more sense to search
| through user discussions than a register
| westcort wrote:
| This resonated with me: "The results keep getting 'refined' so as
| to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for
| any technical or obscure queries."
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Google promotes advertisers. Reddit promotes shills. Popular
| platforms will be bought.
|
| The problem is trust vs the appeal of corruption--that is, some
| people will always want to deceive the masses for profit.
|
| At scale, reliable human trust only exists in democratically-
| policed communities, where authentic users control corruptible
| owners--something few platforms want.
| Helloyello wrote:
| cesarb wrote:
| > Even the exact match query operator (" ") doesn't give exact
| matches anymore
|
| I wonder if this isn't because most people don't think of quotes
| as being the "exact match" operator, and so expect fuzzy matches.
| The former exact match operator (plus) didn't have that issue,
| and was a better match for the exclude operator (minus).
| motoboi wrote:
| I suppose this is meant as an advertisement of reddit as a search
| tool.
|
| But I for one haven't, if a recall, correctly, ever done a search
| with "reddit" at the end.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I'd be happy to pay for a search engine devoid of ads and
| tracking at this point, only it can't be Google because that
| trust has been eroded.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| Why oh why can't the author make a point without resorting to a
| sweeping conclusion drawn from an anecdote?
|
| Google search is simply an indexed representation of the
| indexable web. If you're seeing SEO spam, that's a reflection of
| how the web has evolved thanks to the most popular monetization
| mechanisms available today.
|
| Reddit is simply a great site for user generated (mostly) textual
| content. It is not comparable to a search engine . . The
| popularity of "+Reddit" strings appended to the ends of search
| queries likely pales in comparison to the volume of overall
| search queries. One can investigate the differences through
| Google trends where one would see the string "tiktoks" beats
| Reddit this past year.
|
| Articles like these full of self validating biases such as "My
| Opinion of Google search is everyone's opinion and here are some
| selective quotes to show I'm right" are childish.
| edotrajan wrote:
| odd how no one mentioned you.com - They solve all the issues
| mentioned in the link and offer features mentioned in the
| comments like surface content from reddit first
| marco_yolo wrote:
| i think once google made the decision to go from returning
| results you want to see to returning results you want to see (
| minus what google and their political friends don't want you to
| see ) created the incentive to look for alternatives.
| locallost wrote:
| I have a slight contrarian viewpoint although there is some
| common ground. There is nothing technically wrong with Google's
| search, it's that the content online is not authentic anymore.
| And this is what people find on Reddit -- real opinions from real
| people. And the fact people append reddit to their google
| searches is a testament to the fact that Google will actually
| find it. And that Reddit's search won't, and I don't think it
| will be that easy for them to make a good search. If it's easy, I
| don't know why DDG gives me even worse results than Google. I
| tried, but for me it's borderline useless.
| gear_envy wrote:
| It's definitely easier for people to froth at the mouth and
| blame Google, but I believe that the issue of pervasive SEO is
| a chicken-and-egg situation.
|
| There's no actual incentive to produce quality and authentic
| content. Quantity is the name of the game in the click economy.
|
| On the other hand, one could make the case that Google is at
| fault for creating the conditions necessary for this perceived
| decline. (dominant search engine, ad platform)
| kingcharles wrote:
| jeffwask wrote:
| Yup, switched to DDG so I don't have to sort out 3 pages of
| bullshit for every search.
| haoc wrote:
| Isn't it just saying Facebook is dead?
| praveenweb wrote:
| My google search over the last two years has been primarily
| "site:http://reddit.com <search-term>".
|
| Niche communities with valuable insights and anecdotes that
| cannot be found elsewhere.
|
| Now I wish they do well with their upcoming IPO and beyond.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Google's home-grown _recipe metadata format_ , and a single
| WordPress plugin to create recipe blogs, are the reason you can't
| find a decent recipe on Google.
|
| Google's search engine is, without a doubt, superior to all
| alternatives. The fact that it's full of ads and junk is a
| conscious choice. Google could turn all that crap off tomorrow,
| and it would go back to being the best search results. Nobody has
| invested as much money in accurate results as Google has, and
| nobody will get close for years.
|
| _Search_ is, itself, dying. Search is probably one of the
| hardest things you can do with technology. We 've gotten to the
| point that there's just too much shit to search through in too
| many ways. We need to stop relying on search, and start curating
| knowledge. "That's impossible", you say; I direct you to
| Wikipedia.org.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| For whatever reason, Quora has been hogging up my search results
| for the past month or two. It happened suddenly, and now I'll
| have to use site:URL or similar to get the desired results.
|
| And agree on the reddit thing. Their search engine sucks, and
| you're stuck with using search engines like google to find
| anything decent.
|
| Edit: Should be mentioned that google still yields decent results
| if you're using quotation marks and logic operators - but for
| free text, it took a nosedive.
| jurassic wrote:
| It's annoying Quora makes us sign in, but at least the answers
| are written by humans. On average, answers seem better than
| affiliate link blogspam found elsewhere.
| trainsarebetter wrote:
| This is interesting, as someone with an e-commerce site selling
| pretty niche ev conversion parts(www.bratindustries.net), I've
| kinda ignored seo optimization....
|
| Pretty much all of my customers come from the isolated
| communities I'm active in.
|
| this is enforcing that fact that it's more worth my time to be
| active in more communities, rather than push for ads and seo.
|
| Resulting more information rich communities. so is this just
| pushing for information silos or adding more?
| xmly wrote:
| Everything is slowly decaying(dying/chaosing) including
| everyone's body and the whole universe, that is called Second law
| of thermodynamics.
| pixodaros wrote:
| I gave up on Google search around 2012 or 2013 (I occasionally
| use some of their specialized engines such as Google Scholar, or
| use a Google search as a last resort). So this feels sort of like
| a post marveling that blogger and blogspot are no longer as
| popular in the USA as medium or substack, its true but not news.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I don't want to jump on a bandwagon but I've been somehow
| reluctant to use google more and more. It's just a tiny feeling
| but it's telling. ddg.. even bing.. something snapped.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only
| people who don't know that are the team at Reddit_
|
| Hahaha. This has legitimately made me laugh.
|
| The article is sadly quite on point. I'd add that Google is
| _increasingly_ deteriorating for me during the last several
| months. It was actually still little better than now, a year ago.
| [deleted]
| sequoia wrote:
| The circularity of this meme is funny to me, even if the article
| is fundamentally true: This article is very very popular on
| hackernews, indicating that people agree that google search
| results are bad. What sources does the author draw from? He cites
| opinions from, among other places, Hackernews and Paul Graham.
|
| "Find an opinion popular on hackernews, restate it in a blog
| post, refer to previous discussion on hackernews as evidence" may
| be a lucrative strategy for accruing internet points!
| northernexposur wrote:
| I have absolutely been adding 'Reddit' to my queries for 2+ years
| and waiting for this kind article to bring some discourse about
| shit google results.
|
| "This [AI-created content being widespread] isn't true (yet), but
| it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone."
|
| It isn't gone, but it is different. Reddit is essentially a site
| of blogs turned inside out. Each post produces individual
| comments that are often really blog posts tied to commentary/chat
| discourse. Problem is, each post and it's daughter
| discussion/blog posts isn't useful for continuous coverage of a
| topic (e.g. cooking). Thus the subreddits exist with quality
| control through mods that curate content.
|
| Yet, something is missing when there is a single umbrella
| organization with power over these fief post blog chats. I don't
| want to read archives from 2005, but it is the last time it feels
| like the kind of personal blogs I find here on HN were prevalent
| and searchable through places like Google. Each article is
| presented in the context of the user/owners wider work and
| enriched and enriching for being presented that way.
|
| The 'authentic web' of 15 years ago was better, more pluralistic,
| and more diverse in literary and artistic design when there were
| more 'online magazines' in this way.
|
| This death of Google feels unlike the way Usenet died. I was less
| broken up about that death when it happened precisely because the
| web offered a broader, richer landscape. What I Think we are
| being taught, though, is that perhaps USENET and the web
| should've existed together and been supported, since Reddit is
| just Usenet, after all, in many ways.
|
| Google is like a former ritzy neighborhood that has been
| corporatized, had the blood sucked from it, is falling into
| disrepair, and now is ghettoized and awaiting gentrification,
| which will probably mean a return to the walled gardens of yore
| when they start charging for improvements (as in Youtube
| Premium).
| sneeze2659 wrote:
| Can somebody please recreate Google circa 2005-2012?
|
| I'm pretty happy with the other search engines, but I do miss
| having a google profile that would feed me the correct kinds of
| search results. I refuse to believe that nobody knows how to do
| this (I don't) as Google was doing their indexing with commodity
| hardware on bread racks in the beginning. There have been scores
| and scores of swe in and out of that company.
|
| I know that web crawling is hard, but we could use a few more
| options.
|
| Is it inevitable that spam SEO and even legitimate applications
| like quora, stackoverflow, will dominate every search result?
|
| Is it because of the "Deep Web" of content and information locked
| behind commercial, login required, and Web2.0 UIs?
|
| Is it really over?
| hankchinaski wrote:
| ironically i find bing better than google lately - it feels less
| "spammy"/"ad ridden"
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I thought reddit died when people started posting those image
| memes.
| CabSauce wrote:
| The default subreddits are really horrible. Reddit is still
| okay if you unsubscribe from all of those and only subscribe to
| the narrow subreddits that you're interested in. Of course,
| it's hard to find new subreddits that way.
| simion314 wrote:
| You might be lucky and there is a subreddit for your favorite
| topic that has very strict rules about memes or lazy content. I
| wish more subeditors would encourage lazy content or have a
| "fork" with such rules.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Something as simple as subsubreddits would solve this. I.e. a
| "funny" subfolder or something, like proper forums are
| organized in different sections. But Reddit want a eternal
| feed to show as much ads as possible. Low quality posts makes
| them money since you have to scroll by them and thus sees
| more ads.
| simion314 wrote:
| I won't blame the company, is the community. I don't use
| reddist as much but as a Star Trek fan I see there are a
| lot of subeditors, one for each show, a generic one, one
| for the haters, ones from memes, a more technical one etc.
| Reddit the company won't care if you spend your 30 minutes
| free time on the no-jokes one or on that hates-everything
| one ... you just need a big enough community that would
| enjoy a more niche and strict subreddit.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I have seen alot of people that put all their stuff in
| the root of "c". Or the desktop.
|
| I think many subreddits would benefit from small
| subsections and especially 'last comment date' sorted
| feed.
|
| Both those things could be opt-in!
| simion314 wrote:
| What do you expect though? To go on home page of Youtube
| or Reddit and find content exactly on your taste?
|
| That is not reasonable, if I go on private mode on
| youtube homepage I am not surprised to find the most
| popular music that my countrymen are watching, stuff I
| dislike, so I bookmarked my youtube subscription page and
| subscribe to stuff I enjoy and use the search.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Is Google still a Search Engine? Or is it rather an Answer
| Engine?
|
| Answers are more-and-more provided on what used to be SERPs, but
| now is too often dominated by answers on the page, ads, and big
| marketing budget SEO optimised landing pages.
|
| We still believe in the value and power of discovery; call us
| old-fashioned but we focus on 10 blue links using an independent
| index. Your vanity search maydisappoint, and our ranking needs
| improving, but you will find often hidden gems and information
| rich sources. Plus we send you to those rather than demanding
| your eyeballs.
|
| Informational diverity is vital. So we provide one click to get
| results from Brave, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Gigablast, Google,
| Startpage, Yandex too, as explained here:
| https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/02/search-choices-enable-freedo...
| gjvc wrote:
| This is an important distinction, albeit semantic and somewhat
| contrived. If I believe the earth is flat, I may find much
| evidence to corroborate that theory via Google. Though I may
| ignore the overwhelmingly greater volume of evidence to the
| contrary, I will still find what I want. So is it now a search
| for "the facts" or "the facts that I want" ? The AdSense model
| is arguably tilted towards the latter.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| It is. We also see this as an issue of "objective search".
| Two users we think should see exactly the same set of
| results, for a given query and settings they can control (eg
| location/language setting). That's another positive that
| comes from our stance on no-tracking; with no harvested
| personal data, we can't "personalise". So no steering users
| into content reinforcment whirlpools and/or ad-pulling filter
| bubbles.
| [deleted]
| dinvlad wrote:
| > authenticity
|
| > reddit
|
| somehow these two terms don't go well with each other
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Why I use duckduckgo
| andrew_ wrote:
| I still find that DDG's programming related results are limited
| and often resort to using the Google command to find what DDG
| couldn't.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| They sift thru that and give about what you want. I just
| tried it - 'modelling clay'. Google's 3rd page (after many
| paid ads) has what DDG has on top after a disambiguating
| a/b/c box to help you know what you're looking at.
| amelius wrote:
| It doesn't always work well either.
| [deleted]
| skerit wrote:
| > [Reddit] can't be bothered to build a decent search interface,
| so instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word
| "reddit" to the end of our queries
|
| That gave me a good chuckle, it's a daily habbit for me.
|
| Seriously though: the search used to be even worse. I remember
| when they re-implemented it and made a bit thing about it. Wasn't
| it in collaboration with some third party?
| riffic wrote:
| don't append "reddit".
|
| use site: operators, like site:reddit.com or
| site:news.ycombinator.com, et cetera.
|
| edit:looks like I'm not alone here.
| SleekEagle wrote:
| Does this mean it's just a matter of time until Reddit faces the
| same problems that Google does?
| raoa wrote:
| Search for "carbon monoxide" on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
|
| Google serves you an entire page about carbon monoxide poisoning,
| and recent news stories about carbon monoxide poisoning. You have
| to scroll through a lot of junk to get to Wikipedia's entry on
| "carbon monoxide". Bing and DuckDuckGo do a serviceable job
| telling you about the substance CO.
|
| You cannot search "carbon monoxide" to learn about carbon
| monoxide, and that is the issue.
| ahelwer wrote:
| I have no idea why they stopped making wikipedia the first or
| second result for a given topic. Seemed to happen a few years
| ago.
| Deaimel wrote:
| The Wikipedia article is showing up as a featured snippets for
| me (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9351707?p=featu
| r...).
|
| With the following text just bellow the search box.
|
| > Carbon monoxide (chemical formula CO) is a colorless,
| odorless, tasteless, flammable gas that is slightly less dense
| than air. Carbon monoxide consists of one carbon atom and one
| oxygen atom. It is the simplest molecule of the oxocarbon
| family.
| raoa wrote:
| Odd I don't see that. I am told "People also ask" about five
| different questions that each of them amount to "what is
| carbon monoxide poisoning", which replicate the results of
| the search itself.
|
| the fact other search engines get this right, even if not
| nearly as well as Google would have in 2008, tells me the
| problem is not advertising or a contentless web as much as
| Google specifically and deliberately preventing you from
| searching about what you mean.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Odd how much Google became so vastly different between users.
| For me DDG and Google do just about the same thing here.
| Wikipedia first link (well, 1st at Google, 2nd at DDG) with a
| card and then governmental websites with regards to health and
| hazards. Both have one row in their own card dedicated to news.
|
| The only difference is that Google also gives me links to Canda
| and Quebec govs links (where I live) while DDG is all American
| links.
|
| DDG is absolutely not better at giving me a chemistry lesson
| than Google is in this instance, they're both all about
| poisoning, and to be honest it makes ample sense.
| progx wrote:
| As a developer who use google (for convenience) the research
| results are getting worse. More and more aggregator sites appear
| in the search result without any advantage and google give a sh.t
| of it.
|
| You need extra extension to block these sites from the search
| result.
|
| Time to move on and use something else, but not google anymore.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I hardly ever use reddit, don't browse it, find its hints to
| install the app annoying. Its been so off my radar, posts like
| this keep making me think I must be really missing something
| special.
|
| but probably not.
| FpUser wrote:
| While I do not disagree that google search has degenerated
| because of ads it still finds what I am looking for better than
| any other search engine. I just skip ads.
|
| As for reddit - it is the last place I look for things.
|
| The whole article reads as someone advancing the agenda without
| any real substance
| codyogden wrote:
| Disclosure: I'm the creator of Killed by Google.
|
| There are a lot of good points here about why power users (i.e.
| HN types, technologists, scholars/researchers, etc) find Google
| Search frustrating, but it doesn't really provide a balanced
| perspective which would acknowledge that Google Search for the
| _average, billions-scale user_ is an incredibly optimized,
| positive experience. For those users, Google Search is doing
| exactly what they want: providing instant answers to trillions of
| queries without making the user click or read anywhere else while
| making Google an absurd amount of money through ads. I 'm not
| being facetious when I say that if you find Google Search
| frustrating, then you are no longer the target user of Google
| Search.
|
| I've noticed that Google Search also provides too much weight on
| recently added/updated content than actual valuable content. A
| great example, while anecdotal, is Paul Graham noting that
| searching his quote on Google--`"Prestige is just fossilized
| inspiration."`--the first result is typically a third-party blog
| that is quoting him, not his own website where the quote was
| originally published. (Though he refuses to add SSL, which is why
| Google may be dinging his site.)
|
| I, too, find Google Search frustrating for a lot of technical
| topics. The content ripping spam is overwhelming, even with
| technical topics. The past couple years, the proliferation of
| scraping sites that rip information from GitHub
| Issues/PRs/Discussions and StackOverflow information makes me
| incredibly angry and frustrated, and that is directly Google's
| fault for not identifying that spam and removing it. There is
| also nothing we as consumers can do because of Google's near
| monopoly on Search. We can switch to competitors, but it doesn't
| hurt Google's bottom line.
|
| I have absolutely done the `${search query} "reddit"` 'hack' to
| find reading for my more niche queries--technical or non-
| technical. Reddit is a wealth of user-generated information, but
| it is typically a densely written answer and requires a user to
| comprehend that information. It can be easy to forget that the
| average reading level of a US adult is middle school level. That
| average user with a low reading level isn't going to spend their
| time trying to read paragraphs of text in order to both discover
| _and_ understand an answer.
|
| tl;dr Google Search is only dying for "us," not for the more
| profitable "everyone."
| freediver wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment. You can meaningfully append
| 'reddit' to only a fraction of actual searches.
|
| But we should also note that HN users are the "spearhead" of
| adoption curve and if there is ever any meaningful alternative
| to Google, just by the virtue of HN users adopting it, could
| mean strong propagation in their social circle - the less tech
| savvy family members, friends and work.
| codyogden wrote:
| Yes, power users (HN users) are early adopters, but I
| disagree that it would result in any meaningful change that
| requires social pressure. Fundamentally, power users and
| average users view search differently. Power users want
| "results," average users wants "answers." Power users accept
| a fact-of-life burden to skim through results and find the
| right resource that will help them with their query. Average
| users view skimming results as a waste of time and want
| immediate information. Results require more effort, answers
| are immediate and consumable.
|
| You're essentially proposing that less tech savvy users
| switch to something that requires more effort from them. Even
| if the results are 10x better--hell! they could be hand
| picked--it won't convince the average user to take a path of
| more resistance.
|
| That said, I would _love_ to see a competent competitor enter
| the marketplace--there already are a few. But I have a
| feeling we 'll be heading back to a system of more
| niche/focused search engines in the future.
| freediver wrote:
| > You're essentially proposing that less tech savvy users
| switch to something that requires more effort from them.
|
| Not really. When I say meaningful alternative to Google, I
| mean something that is same or less effort for an average
| user, not more.
|
| Ideally a perfect search engine is simple and easy to use
| in the default mode, but can uncover an advanced mode with
| a few clicks (for example ability to ban sites in results,
| just to give an example. This is currently lacking in
| Google and a solid source of advanced users' frustration).
| codyogden wrote:
| Ah, yeah. That makes sense. Yes, the inability to block
| certain sites is such a terrible flaw in Google's
| approach.
| alphabetting wrote:
| This is exactly right. Search for "Seven" on Google and duck
| duck go. For the average user Google hits it out of the park.
| 100% useful info with FAQs, where to watch and trailer. DDG is
| a mess and less than 20% of info is useful.
| disease wrote:
| Great timing! Just today I did a Google search in an attempt to
| figure out why my skin surrounding some recent scar tissue had a
| yellow discoloration. Didn't find my answer until the third page!
| josefresco wrote:
| Google "died for me" not when I first switched to DuckDuckGo but
| only after periodically switching back to Google to check "if I
| was missing anything" and finding only ads, irrelevant _knowledge
| boxes_ , and garbage organic results.
|
| The only thing Google still does better for me is provide "Stack
| Overflow" results.
|
| DDG/Bing might not be perfect but it works for 90% of my web
| searches.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Maybe this anecdote illustrates the point "even quotes don't get
| you exact results any more."
|
| When I search Google Maps for hotels or restaurants, it offers
| filters to apply to the results (price, quality, stars, etc).
|
| If I apply the filters I want (4.5+ review, $$ price), the map
| continues to show other non-filter-passing businesses, cluttering
| the screen. The reason (given by the side panel list) is: "Here
| are some businesses that don't quite match your search".
|
| *Well if I wanted to see those, Google, I wouldn't have applied
| the filters!*
|
| All you've done is cluttered up the map which was the main thing
| I wanted to be able to see the location and distance of things
| exactly matching my criteria. If I wanted to get all the rest I
| would've removed my filters.
|
| Makes me feel that Google is trying to apply too much suggestive
| content for reasons other than what users want, and that someone
| is causing Google to lose its way. (I know, it's just a small
| example.)
| allochthon wrote:
| There's disincentives for Google to do the right thing, for sure,
| e.g., ignoring quotation marks. I assume this is so that you
| never see a blank page (and so ads can be shown, which would be
| weird to see if there were no other results).
|
| But, as the author mentioned, a lot of the problem is the
| inauthentic content on the internet that Google must sift through
| and filter. What makes Reddit still not half-bad (although this
| quality is under direct attack by brigading and troll farms) is
| that you have user-generated, user-curated content and a not-too-
| bad voting system.
|
| In this context, I think a future iteration on search engines
| will be hand-curated results, under actual human-curated topics
| (rather than fuzzy machine-learning-inferred ones). Think of a
| huge directed acyclic graph of topics that goes down twelve
| levels or more in some cases. If you have enough people involved
| in this kind of crowd-sourcing, I think it can be made to work.
|
| A challenge that arises in this context is how to prioritize
| content added to the wiki search engine by good contributors, and
| deprioritize content added by the content farms. I think this can
| be managed with a combination of well-conceived reputation
| management and providing users the ability to specify other users
| (people who seem trustworthy and whose tastes are solid) whose
| preferences will then be used to weight search results.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Seemingly unlimited/endless content but there's nothing worth
| watching on... Where have I seen this before?
| zuminator wrote:
| Another aspect of Google that completely bugs me.
|
| Put in a search term.
|
| E.g. "fat wallet"
|
| " _About 22,100,000 results_ " it says.
|
| Click through to the last page.
|
| " _Page 6 of about 198 results (1.03 seconds)_ "
|
| So out of 22 million results, I can really only see 198?? That
| can't be right. Wait, it says, " _In order to show you the most
| relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to
| the 198 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search
| with the omitted results included._ "
|
| Yeah, that's what I'd like, I want to see all the results. CLICK.
|
| OK, it takes me back to " _About 22,100,000 results,_ " so far,
| so good.
|
| Click through again to the last one.
|
| " _Page 10 of about 22,100,000 results_ "
|
| Ok ok. Let's keep going. CLICK.
|
| " _Page 11 of about 415 results._ "
|
| That's it.
|
| No more results shown.
|
| What happened to the other 22,099,585 results????
| g_sch wrote:
| I always figured this was a performance issue related to
| sharding in distributed systems. Deep pagination is an
| expensive operation so most search clusters limit the number of
| visible results by default. That, in addition to an assumption
| that results beyond a certain number are unlikely to be useful
| - how many times have you found something on page 10 vs just
| reformulated your search query? - means that most applications
| just leave the default limit in place.
|
| Returning a count of results, however (especially if it doesn't
| need to be precise), is a lot less expensive. Hence why Google
| is happy to give you the 22,000,000 number.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Yup, deep paging is a huge problem for distributed search
| systems. It's not just a Google thing, its every search
| engine. Here is a section from ElasticSearch's
| documentation[0]:
|
| "Avoid using from and size to page too deeply or request too
| many results at once. Search requests usually span multiple
| shards. Each shard must load its requested hits and the hits
| for any previous pages into memory. For deep pages or large
| sets of results, these operations can significantly increase
| memory and CPU usage, resulting in degraded performance or
| node failures."
|
| [0] https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/c
| urr...
| zuminator wrote:
| _It 's not just a Google thing, its every search engine._
|
| OK, I see now. I tried it on Bing and got similar results
| with two small caveats. First, Bing gave me 861 accessible
| results, which is a base 2 order of magnitude greater than
| Google's. Second, Bing's total number isn't nearly as
| astronomical, it claims only 191K total results, not
| Google's 22M.
|
| Could it be that Google has just indexed 100x more terms
| compared with Bing? Maybe, but my anecdotal use of both of
| them doesn't really seem to indicate that Bing is so
| deficient. For example, I tried using a phrase that would
| come up with just a few results. "bioavailable turmeric
| extract formulation" (in quotes) yielded 24 results on
| Google, (plus 4 ad results on top). On Bing I got 33
| results, plus 2 ads on top. In fact, Bing looks more like
| "old Google" than new Google looks like old Google.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Just a thought but it may be an indicator of how much you can
| narrow it down by adding more keywords to your query.
| glial wrote:
| I was curious so I tried this and - yep! Same result. Very
| strange.
| gsibble wrote:
| Just throwing my weight behind my agreement and belief that
| Google has gone way downhill in the last two years to where if
| there was a good alternative (and no, DuckDuckGo is not a good
| alternative), I'd use it in a heartbeat. Google as a search
| engine sucks now.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I was skeptical when I started reading, but then I started
| thinking about it, and 99% of the time I use Google (actually
| Startpage, I don't use Google directly), I already know what
| websites have the content I'm looking for. Those sites just have
| piss-poor search tools.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Another reason why adding site:reddit.com is so popular: Reddit's
| search is even more broken than Google and is useless for
| searching its own site.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Seriously - has no one in this thread used Reddit search?
|
| It doesn't even do spell checking or correction:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Apple%20ophone
| butterfi wrote:
| People are not using Reddit's search, they are using Google
| to search Reddit.
| jhickok wrote:
| reddit search is awful. but searching reddit with google is
| heavenly.
| ncann wrote:
| Searching reddit with Google is good, but also not that
| great.
|
| - The date, in many cases, is all wrong. Limiting search
| results to just last month, for example, will usually still
| return reddit posts from years ago
|
| - Search works great on the post title and to a certain
| extent the post body, but is really bad on comments. It's
| really hard to search for a comment especially if the
| thread is large and long-lived
|
| - Many threads seem to not be indexed at all, e.g the daily
| question threads in many big game subreddits
| mcv wrote:
| Whereas searching anything else with google is awful again.
|
| The internet is weird.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Broken search on Reddit is a feature, not a bug.
|
| If search worked reliably there is a lot of content that would
| never be reposted. I've followed several subreddits for a long
| time dealing with hobbies or skills that I know a bit about and
| it is usually the same questions being asked and answered year
| after year. If a user could easily find the response I posted
| in 2006, 2008, 2011, etc then they would not need to make an
| account to ask their question. They could simply look at the
| replies posted with all the photos showing how to accomplish
| what they need to do and then move on with life.
|
| Another reason is that users can delete their posts and their
| accounts. If that subject has been well covered in the past but
| the posters later deleted their content then it will not be
| available for search to find it. I regularly spin up new
| accounts and have since I joined a long time ago. I delete all
| the posts and then later delete the account when I feel like I
| want a new start.
|
| Reddit regularly needs new eyeballs so search has never worked.
| With an IPO in their future, search will never work.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| Reddit also recently started allowing you to necro archived
| posts, probably due to the influx of google search traffic.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I didn't know that. Thanks! It makes sense that they would
| in a way.
| kccqzy wrote:
| https://redditsearch.io/ is the way to go, if you want simple
| keyword matching and don't want Google AI transforming your
| search query.
| joelbondurant2 wrote:
| privacyonsec wrote:
| in one of the keynotes, didn't the current CEO said that Google
| is transitioning from a search to an Answers Engine ?
| sciolizer wrote:
| > Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on
| the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence
| networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in
| order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-
| normalised cultural products.
|
| > This isn't true (yet)
|
| It's at least partially true:
|
| https://www.jasper.ai
| endisneigh wrote:
| I can't this article seriously:
|
| > Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer
| is that Google search results are clearly dying.
|
| What's the connection between Reddit being searched for and
| Google dying? Read the article, doesn't make sense.
|
| Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is where
| many projects have community discussions.
|
| People are always saying Google is dying or search results are
| getting worse. How many sites existed in 2010? How many in 2022?
| How prevalent was SEO and content marketing then vs now.
|
| The fact of the matter is that the web itself is becoming more
| littered with spam. Literally on HN there was a thread on how to
| make 50K a year and one person proudly stated they did so by
| using GPT-3 to create spam related to content they were selling.
|
| Inherently any search engine with programmatic results can be
| gamed programmatically.
|
| The chart in the article is easily explained by the fact that
| it's hard to search those platforms using Google and that the
| internal search is more useful.
|
| Reddit search has always sucked.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Honestly, I would blame Discord for Google's inability to
| return good results as much as anything else, a bunch of the
| new "authentic" discussion has moved there and other non-
| indexable platforms.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > What's the connection between Reddit being searched for and
| Google dying?
|
| Google returns page after page of seo garbage. You often have
| more luck finding what you want on reddit.
|
| > Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is
| where many projects have community discussions.
|
| The point is that a good search engine would find the result
| you want without requiring you to go out of your way to specify
| the site on which you're likely to find that result. It gets
| worse when you think that these reddit results often provide
| links to what you want on the web. Somehow google can't do
| that.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > The point is that a good search engine would find the
| result you want without requiring you to go out of your way
| to specify the site on which you're likely to find that
| result. It gets worse when you think that these reddit
| results often provide links to what you want on the web.
| Somehow google can't do that.
|
| This seems too handwavey - what concrete metrics would you
| use to evaluate the quality of a search engine?
|
| Reddit has even more garbage than Google. The only difference
| is that people can say so on there, unlike on Google.
|
| Reddit search doesn't even do basic spell correction.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Apple%20ophone
|
| Hence people use Google to search Reddit.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > This seems too handwavey - what concrete metrics would
| you use to evaluate the quality of a search engine?
|
| How about the metric in TFA?
|
| > Reddit has even more garbage than Google.
|
| Well, people disagree, and that's why they're searching
| reddit all the time now.
|
| > Reddit search doesn't even do basic spell correction.
|
| You are missing the point.
| endisneigh wrote:
| You're missing the point - a popular sites own lack of
| internal search would explain the use of external search.
|
| The metric in the article does really define search
| results nor has it been used with other providers as
| well.
|
| I'd love to not use Bing/Google but no one has shown me
| something better.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > You're missing the point - a popular sites own lack of
| internal search would explain the use of external search.
|
| Sigh. The point is that 1) Google gives trash results by
| default 2) users know there are good results out there on
| the web, in particular on reddit 3) people append reddit
| to their google search query and suddenly good results
| start popping up 4) if google search wasn't trash by
| default, people would get good results without having to
| specifically direct the engine to reddit.
| endisneigh wrote:
| People use Google to search Reddit because Reddit has
| terrible search. Nothing more than that.
|
| Your other assertions would need to be proved more
| rigorously. Not just for Google, but for any search
| engine.
|
| Don't know what's so difficult to understand about that
| lol.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > People use Google to search Reddit because Reddit has
| terrible search.
|
| Hey why don't you prove your assertion.
|
| > Your other assertions would need to be proved more
| rigorously. Not just for Google, but for any search
| engine.
|
| These are not my assertions. It's a claim the fine
| article is making. And they're not the only one making
| that claim. Anecdotally a lot of people are saying they
| do this to get useful results because Google results are
| trash.
|
| For example:
|
| https://www.resetera.com/threads/google-search-is-just-
| trash...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27429722
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27379228
|
| Heck there's even a website for this:
| https://sirchester.app/
|
| > Because Google results have been spammy and useless
| lately. Adding "reddit" or "hacker news" often yields
| better results.
| arbol wrote:
| I reckon the parent is correct about reddit having poor
| search capabilities. I often search for terms with
| site:stackoverflow.com as searching within stackoverflow
| consistently asks me to fill in a captcha challenge or
| gives poor results.
| u2077 wrote:
| 100% agree. Google search is only useful for searching other
| sites that don't have good search. Online communities have better
| results. If there was a search engine that curated results from
| various groups across social platforms, I think that would be
| useful. Especially for technical information or anything else
| with a small group around it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| One thing that's worrying me that isn't covered here: a lot of
| this low-quality SEO content is constantly regurgitated to
| produce... low-quality SEO content. Content farmers use content
| from Google results to write content for Google results. Google
| is getting devoured by loops like this.
|
| I'm not a native English speaker, so at one point I was trying to
| find an authoritative source for an old idiom... and the entire
| first page were all different websites regurgitating the same
| inaccurate text! They did no independent verification of their
| own.
| intrasight wrote:
| I still use Google, but search specific sites. Usually Reddit and
| Stackoverflow.
| randomopining wrote:
| I literally search everything with "reddit" appended. It's pretty
| amazing how the "answers" part of the web has turned to an L2
| network.
| jordanmoconnor wrote:
| I find Google to be the best way to search other websites (which
| is the conclusion I get from reading this post).
|
| People use Google to search Reddit, not Reddit.
|
| I have found Google to be the absolute best way to search for
| tweets on Twitter. Twitter search is attrocious.
|
| I do search for things on YouTube directly, but that's still
| Google Search.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >People use Google to search Reddit, not Reddit.
|
| Because Reddit's native search is completely broken.
|
| If I'm looking for something specific I've seen before I use
| redditsearch.io if I'm looking for a comment by a specific user
| I use redditcommentsearch.com if I'm looking for de novo
| results I use Google site search on Reddit.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| The weird, possibly beneficial, consequence of Google becoming
| increasingly awful is that I've begun aggressively building my
| technical book library again.
|
| I've always been a fan of technical books, but would almost never
| buy classic reference texts because if I just needed to look up
| an idea or concept real quick I could usually find an adequate
| explanation online.
|
| The problem is that content marketing in my domain (stats/data
| science) has gotten so bad that nearly all of the results are
| _Towards Data Science_ and similar garbage articles, written by
| relative amateurs that were rushed out to get ranking for a
| longer tail of search terms. The number of times I 've researched
| a topic I know well but want to understand some nuance of only to
| find results that are at best naive in their understanding and at
| worse outright wrong is astounding.
|
| Now whenever I see any recommendations for good books I buy them,
| even if I don't have time or immediate interest in reading them
| right now because I know that if in 6 months I have some relevant
| question I'm likely to find the _wrong_ answer online.
| LoveGracePeace wrote:
| We need a Google Search Engine Filter Engine. A site that
| frontends Google, does a quick peek at the first 10 results and
| if they are infested with higher than X percentage of Google Ads,
| exclude them from the results.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| We're broaching on misinformation from the HN community where
| people say something is true simply because they want it to be
| true. This article isn't adding anything, but it will do well on
| HN, because it agrees with the community.
|
| When you start your post with "Reddit is currently the most
| popular search engine" you are already well outside the realm of
| fact.
| pg_bot wrote:
| Reddit is growing and their search is unusably bad. It's easier
| to use google to search for stuff on reddit than to use reddit.
| KindAndFriendly wrote:
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Still in shock that they killed reverse image search and replaced
| it with some useless AI tech demo.
|
| It used to use the actual image and be able to provide context
| from where that image was found elsewhere. Now it seems to throw
| the image at AI and the AI will go "Oh that's a street" then they
| will just show you streets with similar colors as the image you
| put in.
|
| Completely useless for trying to locate what movie a screenshot
| is from, or even similar images because the category searching is
| too general. Yandex image search completely blows it out of the
| water by being nothing more than a modern version of 2010 era
| Google Image Search.
| svth wrote:
| Have you tried using TinEye.com for reverse image search?
| floatingeye wrote:
| I totally agree with you in that it is now completely useless
| in comparison to what it was. But to be fair the accurate
| version could be used maliciously (for stalking someone, etc).
| I just don't use that tool at all anymore.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| > Still in shock that they killed reverse image search
|
| How is this shocking? Google has a very strong track record in
| killing useful services.
| YaBomm wrote:
| try Yandex, it's really good
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I mentioned it in the post. Extremely impressed with Yandex.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Another alternative: https://tineye.com
| dmix wrote:
| Tineye has always been superior to Google reverse image
| search
|
| (Assuming that's what they were going for, not sure Google
| really put effort into it)
| dageshi wrote:
| I vaguely remember there being some legal reason for that? I
| think something to do with getty images.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| That didn't impact the search tech it impacted the button to
| search similar under each image result when expanded.
|
| Ruining the tech came years later.
| pinot wrote:
| GIS now includes screenshots autogenerated from YT videos.
| Sometimes helpful but if I wanted to find a video I'd do that.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Not sure what you are talking about, but it's still available
| and it still works: https://imgur.com/a/u4864CK
|
| I've just dragged a random image from my desktop and hit "all
| sizes"
| cyllek wrote:
| An update on chrome replaced google image search with "Search
| Image with Google Lens" in some instances
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/rgcdbg/google_chrom.
| ..
| edm0nd wrote:
| You can switch it back in the settings
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Google Image Search has been getting regulated out of existence
| by the EU for the last few years.
| msluyter wrote:
| It seems like we're approaching what I call the "dismal
| equilibrium." This is the idea that any free site/service/app
| eventually will have to monetize itself in order to remain free,
| inevitably in a way that degrades the experience. Ads, typically,
| "pay to win" for games, or perhaps even calls for donations for
| public radio. An equilibrium is reached when further monetization
| isn't possible without driving away users; quality is just barely
| tolerable, hence, "dismal."
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I could live with all the nonsense SEO hacking results and the
| ads if it worked. But today it is like it is misinterpreting
| everything you put into it like some bad comedy movie.
| aroberge wrote:
| Up until a month ago, when I searched Youtube using the "latest"
| filter, I could reliably get the latest videos uploaded that were
| relevant to the search terms. Now, it shows a couple of recently
| uploaded videos followed by many which are for weeks ago, while I
| know that many more had been uploaded in the recent days.
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| Google isn't just indifferent to search, it's now hostile to it.
| Removing visible dislikes from youtube being the main example.
| sebastien_b wrote:
| The thing that annoys me the most about Google's results is how
| they're intent on giving you _any_ results, instead of actual
| useful results. Too often I 'll type in something, and it'll give
| pages and pages of results that aren't what I'm looking for.
|
| For example: searched something that _" didn't have many
| results"_ - this is indicated (but somewhat hidden) at the top of
| the results, but isn't made visually obvious - well, I don't go
| looking for that to know if the results were actually what I
| searched for; if it gave me results, it's natural to assume the
| results were actually relevant.
|
| But instead, Google decides to be _absolutely less_ than useless
| by giving me back a bunch of irrelevant results, instead of
| simply _returning NO results_ because there were none.
|
| This is the main reason I've completely given up on Google.
|
| _Edit_ : another annoyance is Google _altering_ your search
| terms - _" searching for YXZ instead"_, or even worse,
| _excluding_ some terms in the results (and having to later click
| _" must include YXZ"_ which, again, is hidden within the
| results). This is particularly infuriating when looking up API
| terms.
| mywaifuismeta wrote:
| I have been appending reddit to my queries for 1-2 years now. I
| agree with everything in the article, but I believe that the
| whole AI trend had a larger negative effect on Google than more
| ad optimization.
|
| Just like the gmail effect, teams internally have been pushing to
| integrate AI into search results. Not necessarily because it's
| the best thing to do, but because someone needs to get promoted.
| They can't just leave search as it is.
|
| Of course, "best thing to do" is meaningless. What are the
| metrics? Getting reliable metrics and running big A/B tests is
| really hard if you have to measure fuzzy things like user
| satisfaction instead of concrete metrics like CTR. But that's
| really what's going on here. Initially, users may have been
| clicking and interacting with results more, but after realizing
| that those results are not actually what they wanted, or are SEO
| spam (hello Medium), they become disillusioned and append reddit
| to their query.
| llaolleh wrote:
| Another reason why is the Google founders have sailed into the
| sunset. The founder ethos is gone when they founders are no
| longer there.
| [deleted]
| bfrog wrote:
| I miss the old school yahoo directory, in part because it seemed
| to be curated by real people like a library would be. Or web
| rings where there would be humans curating content. In a way,
| Reddit is a crowd sourced content curation site with human
| curated topics. No wonder I find almost everything I need there,
| and Wikipedia.
| smcin wrote:
| _Google still gives decent results for many other categories,
| especially when it comes to factual information._
|
| Increasingly it doesn't. I posted a similar finding earlier
| yesterday: _Google search relevance fail: result for "Africa
| longitude"_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337563.
|
| - For that query, Bing's image results are much better, but the
| #1 site hit is still the exact same SEO-manipulated auto-
| generated e-ecommerce page, not any reputable reference source
| like we might expect. And that is a basic query.
|
| - I tried the query on Reddit, the results are a disorganized
| jumble.
|
| - So, the surprise winner on that query is... Bing. Or "none of
| the above". Back to atlases and encyclopedias.
| Matrixik wrote:
| I would love to have search engine similar to Google (I search in
| Polish and English, duckduckgo is no good for this, I tried) with
| ability to have favourite pages. If there are result on any of
| this pages from my search always show them in top 3. It should
| not matter how old are this favourite pages are or when last time
| they were updated or if they have low amount of reference links
| to them. They are my favourite so show me results from them on
| top. And they should still show in my results even if Google or
| any search engine delist them for some boggus reasons from
| default results (they are my favourite so I veted they are good
| for me).
| NoblePublius wrote:
| Google is still the number one driver of users to my business --
| by farrrr -- but non Google sources (mostly DDG) -- have more
| than quadrupled in the last year.
| brimble wrote:
| The other day I was searching for a specific kind of jewelry and
| realized I don't know of a search engine that can do what I
| needed, which is to just _find good results_ for my search.
| Searches for jewelry-related keywords triggered Google to go 90+%
| ads, and their results (and other search engines ' results) were
| so junked up with spam and the same couple sites over and over
| that they were useless.
|
| We're back to the Web needing a search engine.
|
| [EDIT] I should add that the ads Google was showing me didn't
| even do a very good job of showing me the _very specific_ kind of
| thing I was looking for, even though there must be thousands of
| stores around the world selling pieces that fit the keywords. The
| ads were for jewelry, but most of them weren 't anything like
| what I was trying to find. In this case an entire page of ads but
| _all from different sites_ and _mostly the thing I was looking
| for_ would have been better than nothing, but it couldn 't even
| do that.
| BakeInBeens wrote:
| Some objects are more difficult to find but I use Google lens
| to find products all the time assuming I have a picture.
| discreditable wrote:
| I know normal people would never use it but I sorely wish there
| was a way for me to just grep the web instead of using "search"
| as offered by Google et al.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You don't have anywhere near the disposable funds that would
| be required to "grep the web" on your behalf.
| demosito666 wrote:
| One could argue that the initial trigram-based google
| search is essentially "grep for the web" in terms of the
| results it provides.
| billbrown wrote:
| I've found Brave Search[1] and Kagi Search[2] to be great
| alternatives to Google. I know exactly the sort of thing you're
| describing and both of them are a breath of fresh air in the
| space.
|
| [1] https://search.brave.com/ [2] Beta at the moment -
| https://kagi.com/
| Trung0246 wrote:
| Usually I've search for "gemology terms" or "gem cut types"
| first then I've mix and match those keyword until I get desired
| result
| visarga wrote:
| They have the buyer ready to buy and still missed the sale
| because they wanted to make a profit on ads. How ironic. And
| this kind of experience probably turns a lot of buyers off from
| using Google search.
|
| We don't need your unrelated ads, we already know what to buy,
| don't patronize us. We need help getting to the product page
| from keywords. We need real reviews. We need a shopping
| experience we can trust.
| brimble wrote:
| That was the craziest part to me. I was interested in _both_
| products _and_ information, and despite deciding it was a
| good idea to show me almost nothing but ads, they didn 't
| manage to show me anything worth clicking for either purpose.
| I was practically their ideal target for getting someone to
| click an ad on purpose, and they still dropped the ball.
| entropie wrote:
| > We're back to the Web needing a search engine.
|
| I feel like that this has not changed the last 20 years. Yes -
| google was at some point like a miracle that seemed to solve
| lots of problems around searching the www for information.
|
| While google "refined" its search and monetarized it the web
| still evolved and is evolving to something.. different. Many of
| websites most people already know, competing around google top
| rankings and ad revenue; there are even people dedicated to
| "make $website more visible to the web (what they really mean
| is google)" for lots of money while the real internet goes on
| in the background.
|
| We need more ways to search the web. We need lots of different
| search engines that are competing and working together also.
| The web is still young and no one really knows what it will be
| in the future. (I fear it has to do with ads. Lots. Of. Ads)
| mrkramer wrote:
| >The web is still young and no one really knows what it will
| be in the future.
|
| My fear is that walled gardens might win in the future
| because who guarantees you that websites won't move to
| Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Slack and Discord channels
| etc. Open web is weaker than ever just look at LinkedIn;
| walled garden, throws you Register form in the face when you
| try to access it and won't let anybody crawl or scrape their
| content except Google who drives more traffic to their walled
| garden.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Could you clarify what you mean by 90% ads? I would assume
| there are always organic results right after the top 2-3 ads,
| has this changed somehow?
|
| Also you say the results were "all from different sites". Is
| that a good or a bad thing? I imagine having too many results
| from the same site would be less informative, no?
|
| I'm very curious to try the same search query myself, but of
| course I understand that it may not be something you'd want to
| share.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Am I the only one who just skips the search engines and go
| straight to the source? If I want factual information, I just
| go to Wikipedia and use their search. If I want to shop I'll go
| to respected online stores and again use their inbuilt search
| feature.
|
| Obviously I've just built up a list of good sites in my head
| which I trust... Google search is good for discoverability if
| you're new to the web I guess? Although in the old days that's
| what web directories where good for:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
| pkamb wrote:
| It's much easier to type "searchterm" or "searchterm wiki" in
| your web browser address bar and then click through to the
| Wikipedia result than it is to first navigate to every
| individual site and use their non-standard search bar.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I just have https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&
| title=Special... bookmarked with the keyboard shortcut `w`
|
| So `w fish` will produce `https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.
| php?search=fish&title=Speci...` which auto-forwards to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| By my calculations it's one less click. Is that going to
| save you that much in your lifetime to get you better*
| results?
|
| *better = more predictable in my case
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| > I'll go to respected online stores
|
| ... such as? The only general-purpose online store available
| to me is Amazon as far as I know, and I certainly wouldn't
| call them respected.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >If I want factual information, I just go to Wikipedia and
| use their search.
|
| Wikiepedia is a very good resource for a lot of things, and a
| good jumping off point, but you shouldn't assume that you are
| getting "factual information", especially when it comes to
| hot button social or geopolitical issues.
|
| https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-
| philip-c...
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| > Google search is good for discoverability if you're new to
| the web I guess?
|
| This is almost certainly not true. I don't think kids (who
| make up the vast majority of 'new to the web') care about
| using Google for discoverability. They'll use YouTube, Twitch
| and Instagram to find things they care about. Google is for
| answering questions, not finding new things.
|
| And honestly, it's not generally that good at answering
| questions.
|
| Source: my 10-year old.
| MattyRad wrote:
| Wikipedia is the _perfect_ contrast to google search results.
|
| - It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful
| related links if you need more information.
|
| - Pages are organized and _brutalist_.
|
| - Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the
| information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free.
|
| Contrast this to Google:
|
| - 50-100% noise (depending on the query; more information
| requires more queries and therefore less signal)
|
| - SERP pages are disorganized and absolutely _riddled_ with
| UX dark patterns (modals, banners, autoplaying video, etc).
| Many pages with good info are over-styled /over-
| javascripted/over-languaged, and finding the one or two
| sentences you're looking for is a chore.
|
| - One-off SEO spam plagues everything; ads and affiliate
| links are pervasive. Stewardship is a waste of time.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| > _- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides
| helpful related links if you need more information._
|
| This is not true anymore. From Wikipedia founder Larry
| Sanger:
|
| > _Wikipedia Is Badly Biased_
|
| https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
|
| It's completely untrustworthy on anything remotely
| political. Very, very mainstream narrative
| compliant/reinforcing.
|
| - Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the
| information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free
|
| And many of them inject their personal biases.
|
| For hard science stuff, math, and celebrities, it's pretty
| trustworthy but as I said, anything remotely politicized
| will always have the same slant.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Wikipedia pages are not "owned" by anyone other than the
| editors' community as a whole.
| barbacoa wrote:
| As people turn to Wikipedia for information the same
| momentum that ruined Google is sure to follow. It's already
| happened to Wikipedia pages that even tangentially touch
| anything political. If you go on the talk pages you see a
| slow motion battle between good faith editors that want an
| encyclopedia of information with a neutral tone, vs bad
| faith editors that want to use Wikipedia to represent their
| idealogical narrative. It's even spilled over into
| historical pages that don't carry the "correct" judgement
| on the past.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-
| na...
| MattyRad wrote:
| It's probably worth noting that Wikipedia breaks character
| occasionally and does the banner panhandling, intentionally
| nosediving UX to put an ad front-and-center.
|
| This is the behavior that should be penalized by search
| engines- however difficult it is to quantify. Wikipedia is
| some of the highest quality info on the internet, so they
| should be able to afford the penalty themselves.
| thorncorona wrote:
| > It's probably worth noting that Wikipedia breaks
| character occasionally and does the banner panhandling,
| intentionally nosediving UX to put an ad front-and-
| center.
|
| They are asking for donations to fund their best-in-kind
| _free_ project. I know ads aren 't popular on HN but if
| you don't want ads, and you don't want a donation banner,
| how do you expect sites to be funded?
| cs702 wrote:
| Some years ago, I read an autobiography by Jim Clayton, the
| founder of mobile home manufacturer Clayton Homes, now a
| Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary.[a]
|
| One anecdote in the book stuck with me: In the early days of the
| business, Jim kept getting pestered by salespeople from the
| Yellow Pages, who told Jim he would benefit from advertising in
| the Yellow Pages to attract new customers.[b] Jim decided to run
| a test. He ordered and installed a new red phone in the office,
| ordered a new phone number just for the red phone, and bought a
| big ad in the Yellow Pages listing only the line that rang the
| red phone. The ad ran for a year. No one ever called the red
| phone. Jim never again spent a cent advertising on the Yellow
| Pages.
|
| By then, the only consumers and businesses who actually searched
| the Yellow Pages for products and services were those who didn't
| have a choice, e.g., out-of-towners needing a plumber who
| couldn't get the name of a trustworthy plumber from a trusted
| neighbor.
|
| As regards Google, as its search results and rankings become less
| _trustworthy_ , more and more people will stop using them to find
| products and services. Other platforms will benefit, like Reddit.
| And advertisers will follow, as always.
|
| --
|
| [a] https://www.amazon.com/First-Dream-Jim-
| Clayton/dp/0972638903...
|
| [b] The Yellow Pages were in essence a low-tech printed-paper
| version of the search business. Businesses paid to advertise in a
| thick yellow book, and consumers and businesses searched the
| index of that book to find products and services. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages
| honkycat wrote:
| The other day I was trying to find a good website for MTG
| deckbuilding on google.
|
| It was so astrotufed. I could not find anything other than
| blogspam.
| gorbachev wrote:
| It feels like Google has transitioned the same way as news has
| transitioned to entertainment, just 20 - 30 years later.
|
| They found, just like TV executives, that there's more money in
| shoveling drivel to masses, than actual information to a few.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| 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 secretly paid ads. The "best" recipe for
| pancakes is only what's trending on instagram right now. The
| latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being
| shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web. The
| same for trending programmer tools.
|
| - "It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives
| for search engines..."
|
| What I'm shocked by is that Google somehow maintained a balance
| on this for so long. Well, at least a good enough balance that
| people still use it primarily.
|
| - "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you
| typed in. It tries to be "smart" and figure out what you "really
| meant" ..."
|
| This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I
| write.
|
| - "There's a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called
| the Dead Internet Theory..."
|
| I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of
| conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible.
| acchow wrote:
| I wish Google would offer two different search products, one
| assuming Google-fu, and one not.
| dheera wrote:
| As soon as Google removed Wikipedia as the first result of
| everything they started dying.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Except Wikipedia has a reliable place on the page, if a
| Wikipedia entry exists... they never _removed_ it, just
| _moved_ it.
|
| This is the least of the issues with Google.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| There's something sad and ironic about using Google to search
| Reddit. One, I mostly dislike using Reddit - I only want to see
| specific discussions very occasionally. Two, what is the state
| of the internet if I have to use the best search engine to find
| content on a website I mostly dislike? Haha.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Reddit's search engine is kind of crap (not terrible, but
| also not great). That's why I use Google for Reddit, to have
| a better Reddit search experience.
|
| I figured that's why it's so high, is Reddit's UX keeps
| slowly getting worse so the best way to find stuff on Reddit
| is by searching outside of it.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Based on some of the April Fools' Day experiments that Reddit
| has done in the past, I'm not sure why you wouldn't have the
| same hesitation and mistrust of Reddit posts and comments. So
| much of the content, even on Reddit, is made by bots or copied
| by bots from older, legitimate user-generated content.
| [deleted]
| judge2020 wrote:
| > This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what
| I write.
|
| Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed
| half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to
| lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to
| go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for
| working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that
| means striving for fixing the complete word soup of search
| results people type in.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| This used to be solved by allowing queries like `Class
| Inheritance +ruby' to require results to include "ruby". They
| killed this for Google+ by changing it to quotes, so `Class
| Inheritance "ruby"' but now they interpret even those. When I
| use Google, which is less and less, I am not looking for a
| fight with a computer to express my intent, I'm looking for
| the answer to a question. That never seemed to be an issue
| until recently.
| dannysullivan wrote:
| I work for Google Search. If you put a word or a phrase in
| quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word
| or phrase. Nothing has changed in this. When it happens
| that people feel it fails, it's often that they don't
| realize we've matched that word or phrase appearing in ALT
| text or text that's appearing in a less visible part of the
| page -- or in a few cases, the page might have changed
| since we indexed it.
| artdigital wrote:
| This is not the case in my experience. I type a query
| with some parts in quotes and often get lots of results
| that have in small letters at the bottom something along
| the lines of "does not include <word in quotes>", with no
| in bold highlighted part showing the phrase in the page
| context. This was not the case in the past and google
| made sure the word I put in quotes is absolutely
| mentioned somewhere
|
| I'm guessing this happens when there are less results
| matching my phrase
| dannysullivan wrote:
| I would love if you or anyone who ever has this happen
| can share an example, if you're comfortable doing so.
| We'll debug. But if you quote something, we shouldn't
| show anything but that which matches the quoted material.
|
| Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted
| words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted
| part and the other things are optional. So when you see
| that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this
| page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably
| has one or more of the other words or related words you
| didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those
| non-quoted words at all."
|
| And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful
| page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted
| words.
|
| Totally agree it would help if we did a better job
| bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms
| apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't
| include them if there's better text to describe the page
| overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only
| find things that have that exact word or phrase.
|
| I'm sorry to tell you, but this is flat wrong. I
| commented[1] about this a few months back with a random
| phrase as an example. I see it often in my day to day
| also.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094
| primax wrote:
| I'm sorry but this has absolutely changed. I'm not sure
| why but quite often we are suggested results in queries
| that ignore quotes. The engine is even telling us that if
| omitted those terms.
|
| We don't have control over this and it's very
| frustrating.
| dannysullivan wrote:
| We haven't changed anything. Promise. Honest. Not at all.
| But we definitely want to look into any cases where
| people feel this isn't working, so actual examples (if
| people are comfortable sharing) will really help.
|
| What you're talking about is probably a case where
| there's a quoted word or phrase as well as other words
| that aren't quoted. In such a case, we're going to
| absolutely look for content that matches the quoted
| parts. That's a must. The other words, we'll look for
| them, but we'll also look for related words and
| sometimes, we might find content that doesn't match one
| of them.
|
| Because those other words aren't quoted, we'll tell you
| if we find a match that seems helpful but doesn't contain
| those non-quoted words. That's what the message is about.
| But it should never be telling you we omitted a quoted
| word or phrase because we won't -- with one exception.
|
| If there's literally nothing on the web we know of that
| matches a quoted word or phrase, then we're not going to
| show anything at all and say we couldn't match any
| documents.
| siliconescapee wrote:
| I don't have any recent information on how google search
| works, but years ago it looked at the expertise level of
| the searcher. So newbies received newbie results, advanced
| searchers received advanced results (and more visibility
| into filtering functionality). Today... they're hiding the
| advanced features and also seem to be reducing
| personalization of results to save compute resources. It's
| horrible.
|
| You: Class Inheritance +ruby Google: searching for "cash
| inheritance..."
| dannysullivan wrote:
| I work for Google Search -- we never operated like this.
| We don't know that someone is somehow a "newbie" vs and
| "advanced" searcher and change (nor did change) the
| results somehow.
| mcv wrote:
| But isn't Google supposed to know everything about us by now?
| Surely they know who types correct search queries and who
| keeps making typos?
| userbinator wrote:
| A less charitable interpretation --- and unfortunately one
| that could be true --- is that Google does _not_ want you to
| think. It wants to keep you stupid because it 's easier to
| deceive those who can't think and bend their thoughts in the
| direction that gives G more $$$. I'd say it's not merely
| optimising for the stupid; it's actively encouraging it. It
| wants to be your brain, control your thoughts and life.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I honestly find it pretty helpful. You can type "russian
| murder painting" into Google and it will come up with Ivan
| the Terrible and His Son. All that hinting may be annoying if
| you know exactly what you wanted, but I'm not a specialist in
| everything I ever search for.
| mcv wrote:
| What would be nice is if you could toggle this behaviour.
| Sometimes I know exactly what I'm looking for, sometimes I
| don't. Assuming I never do is at least as silly as assuming
| I always do. Just give me the option.
|
| I am frankly baffled that after all this focus on
| "personalised search", they still don't actually allow you
| to personalise your search like that.
| kelnos wrote:
| Then again, both DuckDuckGo and Kagi also give that result
| for that search phrase. As well as being more generally
| useful for more specific searches as well.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Right. Feels like it's optimized for common voice queries, in
| sentence form. They've sacrificed technical/HN users to focus
| on this.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Ask Jeeves is back, baby!
| [deleted]
| beerandt wrote:
| No, because they broke quotes. That's going out of the way to
| try and tell me what I think.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Yep. How many bug reports are useful vs how many are "the
| button didn't work"?
|
| Google is optimizing for that.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Google has optimized to whatever sequence of behaviors
| achieves the most profit. The search results are not chosen
| for utility to the user but as nudges in a cycle of influence
| intended to drive you to attend to an ad, purchase something,
| or consume particular content.
|
| They should not be engaged in non-consensual manipulation of
| social or political behaviors, and the ethics of market
| manipulation at scale through advertisement are far from
| clear.
| samhw wrote:
| Advertising is not 'market manipulation':
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation. This
| dialect of 'Substackspeak' is starting to feel like SEO for
| HN readers.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Market cornering is classic market manipulation. Google
| uses every asset at their disposal to maintain their 98%+
| death grip on the search markets. The list of competitors
| bought, stifled, legally crushed, or absorbed is probably
| endless. The search market is thoroughly cornered.
|
| I used the phrase intentionally and specifically.
| Advertising isn't always market manipulation, but it can
| be and is used to that purpose.
|
| Google uses advertisement and content "curation" to
| manipulate consumers. This results in product preference,
| purchasing behavior, and market conditions favorable to
| Google and/or unfavorable to Google's competition. This
| includes siloing consumers in political bubbles and
| manipulation of narratives through the deliberate
| selection, order, and pacing of content exposure based on
| the intent of Google's shotcallers.
|
| The reinforcement cycles inherent to their algorithms are
| used to manage the information made available to vast
| numbers of people, with highly detailed behavioral
| profiles used to achieve behavioral outcomes, whether
| it's buying something, voting, or preferences for or
| against particular policies or candidates.
| bduerst wrote:
| Yeah, the phrase they should have used is "influencing
| the market" rather than the technical economic term.
|
| Of course, _influencer_ means something different now
| too.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I use market manipulation to mean just that, someone
| manipulating the market in whatever way. I'm not familiar
| with the legally-oriented meaning of this term.
| arketyp wrote:
| This is very helpful if I search for a name I didn't quite
| pick up or don't know how to spell, or if I only remember
| fragments of a quote or topic, then I just blurt out my
| stream of consciousness and Google will mostly point me in
| the right direction. That being said, I wish I could
| explicitly tell Google to treat my query more literally.
| Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some
| kind of grammar. They have these kinds of prompt mechanics
| for GPT3, so I doesn't seem too unrealistic, even if it's all
| ML nowadays.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| You can though, put quotes around it.
| mtizim wrote:
| As per the article, not anymore
| layer8 wrote:
| Google still decides to interpret that however they like.
| Even the verbatim option in Search Tools doesn't always
| help.
| amptorn wrote:
| That's stopped working! Google is just ignoring them from
| time to time now. Did you even read the article?
| bambax wrote:
| I read the article, and the HN comment it links to, but
| didn't find an example in either, and it doesn't match my
| experience. Does someone have a concrete example when
| using quotes results in pages not containing the search
| terms?
| dannysullivan wrote:
| I work for Google Search, and as I shared elsewhere,
| quoting still works. It really does. If you or anyone
| finds an example where you believe it doesn't, please let
| me know, and we'll debug. Typically the reasons people
| believe it is not working is because:
|
| 1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily
| visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3)
| there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4)
| page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the
| cached copy, if available)
| bambax wrote:
| I believe you! (see my other comment in response to the
| original one).
|
| But it seems people don't (my original comment is being
| heavily downvoted because of this). And although they
| can't submit even _one_ example, the fact that they don
| 't believe you is obviously a symptom of a bigger
| problem.
|
| For some reason, Google is losing the trust of power
| users.
| adamc wrote:
| I've hit this many, many times, but I'm not sure I can
| easily reproduce it. Tends to happen when there are more
| search terms, in my experience.
| allochthon wrote:
| It's definitely happened from time to time in my
| experience. If I had to guess, Google PMs really don't
| like blank search result pages.
| bambax wrote:
| I just checked again. Here's what I get:
|
| - no results with or without quotes: No
| results containing all your search terms were found.
|
| - few results with quotes, not more without quotes:
| Your search did not match any documents. It
| looks like there aren't many great matches for your
| search Tip: Try using words that might appear on
| the page you're looking for. For example, "cake
| recipes" instead of "how to make a cake."
|
| - no results with quotes, but results without quotes:
| Google says that the search with quotes didn't find
| anything, and that they searched without quotes instead.
|
| I have yet to find any instance where Google corrects the
| inside of quotes without any warning.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I noticed that years ago, and it was one of my first
| frustrations with Google - the first inkling that the big
| G had jumped the shark.
| rurp wrote:
| Google has been regularly ignoring quotes for at least 5
| years, probably longer. That was one of the biggest
| factors for me dropping it as my main search engine.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > Ideally you would be able specify the search query in
| some kind of grammar.
|
| The query syntax:
|
| https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
| dannysullivan wrote:
| I work for Google Search. We have several ways for you to
| do this. The easies is to put quotes around a word or a
| phrase that you absolutely, positively want to be present
| in content retrieved. And yes -- it still works. It really
| really does, but if you or anyone finds an example where
| you believe it doesn't, please let me know. We'll debug it.
| The reasons people sometimes think it's not working is
| because the text appears in ALT text, or it appears in text
| that's not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar
| or small text), or there's punctuation ("dog cat" will
| match "dog, cat") or sometimes a page has changed after
| we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available).
| You can also use verbatim mode from the toolbar so that we
| search for only the exact words you provide.
| boatsie wrote:
| I don't think op meant it literally, but the fact that
| the results are so keyword stuffed that despite
| "appearing" on the page they are actually irrelevant to
| the page and thus useless.
| johnny22 wrote:
| why can't verbatim mode be combined with time frame
| limits?
| dannysullivan wrote:
| You should be able to. I can. Tools, then change All
| results to Verbatim. Then change Any Time to one of the
| presets of custom range.
|
| Or just quote the words in regular mode then use our
| before/after commands: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/
| status/1115706765088182272
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Tons of people don 't, though_
|
| Do they? I see this stated all the time, with no references.
|
| _They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they
| have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water_
|
| Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people, they
| would be more thoughtful with their searches.
|
| Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real food.
| The same way some cities limit parking at big events so that
| people have to take mass transit. It's for their own good,
| but they have to be shown the way.
|
| _Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for
| 'the most people_
|
| This may be Google's goal, but it hasn't happened yet.
|
| I don't have very many friends or acquaintances in the tech
| bubble, so I base my observations around real people in the
| real world. More and more they're giving up on Google
| entirely.
|
| Their primary search engines these days seem to be Instagram,
| Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, and other non-Google sources.
|
| When I ask someone why they're searching Amazon reviews for
| tech support information, they tell me because it's not on
| the web. That's Google's failure.
| tdeck wrote:
| > Their primary search engines these days seem to be
| Instagram, Pinterest...
|
| Why would someone want to search Pinterest? Every time I've
| gotten a search result to Pinterest it's been some scraped
| image completely and frustratingly devoid of the context I
| was originally searching for. Pinterest is one of the worst
| offenders on the web.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Because if you want to find an image pintrist hosts many
| images.
| freediver wrote:
| > Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real
| food.
|
| Many people already resort to real food, even with plenty
| of junk food around.
|
| "Problem" is unfortunately, that it comes at a price, that
| many are simply not ready or able to pay.
|
| Who should step in is a good question, and probably
| governments should make access to information a right and
| have high quality public service available (in this case a
| public web search engine). Public libraries used to fulfill
| this role for centuries.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Probably junk food should be taxed (as alcohol is) for
| the related health externalities.
| Mezzie wrote:
| > Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people,
| they would be more thoughtful with their searches.
|
| As someone who's been a public librarian, I can tell you
| that is not how people work.
| ako wrote:
| You can only be thoughtful with your search if you know
| what you are searching for. But oftentimes i'm not really
| certain what i'm looking for, or i don't know the exact
| terminology that should be used, so i'll just enter some
| related terms, in the hope that google leads me in the
| right direction.
| Mezzie wrote:
| At the minimum.
|
| A truly thoughtful search requires an understanding of:
|
| - What you're searching for, which as you mention means
| terminology and knowing that information exists. (If you
| don't know that there's a country called Burkina Faso,
| it's never going to occur to you to search for its
| capital)
|
| - How each of your search tools works, its benefits and
| drawbacks. It's similar to selecting a programming
| language or framework: If I need to know a holiday date
| (e.g. I can never remember when the fuck President's Day
| is), I'll Google it because that's something even a
| normal person would notice if they screwed up. On the
| other hand, when I'm looking for current events
| information, I use a search tool that specializes in news
| searches for journalists and researchers because I don't
| want my search results biased by what Google thinks I
| want to see.
|
| - The domain in which you're searching, so you can
| evaluate what the search tools provide for you and use
| the tools iteratively.
|
| - Your own abilities and desires, which requires self-
| knowledge. A search is only a success if it produces
| something _helpful_ to the searcher, and something they
| can 't understand or won't use = not a successful search
|
| - What information is and is not available. It sounds
| like a silly thing, but this is how a lot of scams work:
| They're testing for people who lack a certain subset of
| common knowledge. For example, I've seen articles talking
| about local elections that imply nefarious intent behind
| some information not being provided online, and they're
| obviously written by people who don't commonly work with
| local election data. Because if they did, they'd know
| that when working with local election data, the default
| is 'idk we have it in a file cabinet or on a computer
| somewhere'.
|
| Search is HARD and Google has figured out one tiny, tiny
| part. It's just the part that was the easiest to build
| with what they had and that was easiest to monetize.
| some_furry wrote:
| Here's a perfect example of this phenomenon.
|
| https://archive.md/wwMY3
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+linux&oq=how+old+.
| ..
| [deleted]
| dannysullivan wrote:
| Fortunately, most of those web results give a pretty good
| rundown on the history of Linux. But yes, this is weird!
| I'll get it looked at.
| narag wrote:
| That's like speaking to little children, that are learning to
| talk, reproducing their errors. Some adults believe that it's
| cute, but it's idiotic, confuses the babies and make their
| progress more difficult and slow.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I don't think this means anything for the point you wanted
| to make about search results, but please note you're
| exactly wrong about baby talk! It's not a good analogy.
|
| Baby talk (or CDS, child-directed speech) helps engage
| their attention and provides valuable feedback. Kids who
| experience less CDS develop language more slowly.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk
|
| (I heard about this research a number of years ago.
| Although I must admit, now I wonder if it's affected by the
| science reproducibility crisis!)
| brimble wrote:
| N = 3, we intentionally never baby talked to our kids,
| and spent a lot more time reading them novels and other
| things without pictures or simplified language than (I'd
| guess) most people do (we did also do plenty of picture
| books), and their language development was in all three
| cases _way_ ahead of schedule.
|
| Could just be luck (well, genetics, probably) I guess.
| Maybe they'd have developed even faster if we'd used baby
| talk. One shitty thing about parenting is it's really
| hard to tell what helped, what hurt, and what didn't
| matter at all.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not capable of baby talk. Too weird. I have
| always talked to my kids like they were adults. They seem
| fine.
| flatiron wrote:
| I did goo goo gaa gaa for the first 6-8 months since you
| can tell there's really nobody home up there yet and it's
| cute and engaged my other kids to play with the youngest.
| But yes. Mine seem fine as well so I doubt CDS is going
| to make/break a human being.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I did this as well with the same results (but also have
| reason to believe genetics played a major part). But I'm
| not sure we're optimizing for the right thing. I'm far
| from convinced that accelerated language development is a
| good thing. I think development may suffer in other
| areas.
| db65edfc7996 wrote:
| >...their language development was in all three cases way
| ahead of schedule.
|
| I would put a lot more of it to having (seemingly)
| engaged parents. Even a backwards strategy enacted by a
| loving parent who is consistently trying their best is
| likely to outperform the result that most can manage
| (owing to time/money/education/etc).
| rdtsc wrote:
| That is my belief as well: being there, listening,
| interacting lovingly, paying attention is overwhelmingly
| more important than a particular technique.
| gwd wrote:
| I've never baby-talked to our son, but I do coach him to
| say things that are within (or almost) within his
| speaking capabilities. So for instance, this evening we
| were reading The Gruffalo, and he pointed to the fox and
| said, "Fox eat!" I said, "The fox wants to eat the
| mouse?" He said, "Yeah!" So I tried to coach him to say
| "Fox eat mouse". He got as far as "Fox eat there"; maybe
| he'll get to "Fox eat mouse" in a week or two.
| narag wrote:
| _...but please note you're exactly wrong about baby
| talk!_
|
| But, but... I didn't say anything about baby talk!!
|
| The definition in that Wikipedia page is about something
| completely different: exaggerating intonation.
| cptaj wrote:
| I think this has proven to be false.
|
| Fathers descend to "baby talk" when the child is learning
| and slowly bring them up to par instead of trying to just
| force perfect talk from the start. They do this
| instinctively.
|
| There's some great comments on this from salman khan, I
| think. He recorded the first years of his kid's life at
| home and documented this phenomenon
| recursive wrote:
| It's not idiotic if it's what the people (generally) want.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You think the baby really wants to hear googoo gaagaa?
| Now, they are trying to say "I'm hungry. Feed me!" Babies
| must look at adults doing the googoo gaagaa, and think to
| themselves that these adults are absolute morons.
|
| The sites that Googs returns are basically the internet's
| version of googoo gaagaa. I look at the websites
| returned, and often think that the site's owners must be
| morons. Useless drivel clearly designed to game the Goog
| search results. I think think about how moronic it is
| that Googs allows this.
| recursive wrote:
| "Googoo gaagaa" sounds like happy baby babble to me. Mine
| would more like "waaaaaaaAAAAaahhh" when they were
| hungry.
|
| Congratulations on recognizing the true morons.
| kuboble wrote:
| In my experience waaaaaaaAAAAaahhh meant wet diaper or
| something hurts. Leeeeeah, leeeaaaahhh was being hungry.
| Phonetically is similar to the beginning of a polish word
| mleko (milk)
| narag wrote:
| _You think the baby really wants to hear googoo gaagaa?
| Now, they are trying to say "I'm hungry. Feed me!"_
|
| I suspect they know the sound they want to make but they
| don't know how to articulate it. They make an
| approximation and we can encourage them repeating the
| correct version, so they realize we understood what
| they're trying to do: "you're half way" but repeating
| their approximation is misleading.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Most people don't literally say "goo goo ga ga" to
| babies; what they actually do is echo babies' nonsense
| sounds back at them.
|
| I subscribe to the theory that this helps babies
| understand what they sound like, and therefore helps them
| learn how to produce the sounds they want.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I see what you are saying but it seems to me that it used to
| do a much better job at that. These days I feel like I'm
| fighting the search engine constantly and it is certainly not
| magically finding what I want anymore. It feels like some
| crusty unmaintained tool that I have to know how to use.
| cml wrote:
| A single mediocre experience optimized to work 'most of the
| time' for 'most people' is quite contrary to the narrative
| that has made Google such tremendous amounts of money ("let
| us surveil you so that you can have a more personalized
| experience") though, isn't it?
|
| Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not
| one of the applications of that data be some way to give
| users specifically what they are searching for if their past
| behavior suggests that they mean what they type? Couldn't the
| "search only for <exact query>" option be a very good data
| point on making that determination automatically, or enabling
| a user setting for "give me exact results based on what I
| actually typed by default"?
|
| It seems possible to me that this behavior has more to do
| with the value of ads for "big" keywords than with (poorly)
| inferring user intent.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought
| not one of the applications of that data be some way to
| give users specifically what they are searching for..._
|
| You're missing what "personalization" has come to really
| mean. It means knowing enough about the user to give them
| an experience you can profit from and which they will
| accept. If there isn't something you can expect profit
| from, there's no reason to give them anything.
| the_other wrote:
| Wouldn't it be remarkable if we found out that personalised
| advertising actually earned less than just auctioning off
| the obvious big keywords?
| ThalesX wrote:
| I worked for a healthcare recruitment company in a
| capital city with some large hospitals and a number of
| universities. I can't for the life of me understand why
| they chose to spend so much money on trying to track
| healthcare professionals online when they could just
| advertise it on-premise where they actually hang out.
| svachalek wrote:
| I have a sense that this is the dirty little secret of the
| spyware advertising industry, personalization just isn't
| that great. Yeah, putting you into a male or female bucket,
| parent or child, homeowner or renter, that's worth a little
| bit. But, to find out your name and address and search
| history and how long your last bowel movement took, just to
| deliver an ad that's theoretically hyper-optimized to make
| you buy something... I just don't believe it.
|
| I don't believe that it's worth anything near what they are
| charging for it, except perhaps in the case of politics,
| which has always been an extremely efficient use of money.
| And even then, it's not worth a tiny fraction of the real
| cost it has to society.
| sbcd wrote:
| >I have a sense that this is the dirty little secret of
| the spyware advertising industry, personalization just
| isn't that great.
|
| Personalized adverts and recommendations can be
| incredibly, horrendously dumb.
|
| Here's what I see when I hit amazon's homepage at the
| moment : A "buy once again" column that features blackout
| curtains I bought 3 months ago (no, curtains don't need
| to be replaced every months, amazon.), USB cables I
| bought multiples of in the same time frame, a wireless
| charger (I already bought two before). An entire line
| dedicated to showing me backpacks (I bought one less than
| a year ago) An entire line dedicated to headphones (I
| recently bought wireless IEMs) An entire line dedicated
| to watches (same)
|
| I don't get it. Supposedly the best and brightest work at
| firms like amazon and google to brainwash us to buy
| stuff, but classic, random, non-targeted advertisement is
| more likely to make me discover products I'd buy than
| targeted advertisement because the latter only shows me
| things after I don't need to buy them anymore!
|
| Here's what I would expect actually intelligent targeted
| advertising to do : After buying a smartphone, recommend
| accessories (cases, screen protectors, USB-C dongles,
| chargers, whatever) Here's what targeted advertisement
| actually does : show me smartphones ads everywhere I go
| after I already selected and BOUGHT a smartphone. No, I
| don't need to buy another smartphone weeks after a recent
| replacement, amazon!
|
| The same sort of phenomenon can happen after google locks
| on searches I did to buy something. I can't wait to see
| the internet advertisement industry crash and burn, it's
| overvalued nonsense.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| I think the fact that most recommendation algorithms have
| seemingly converged on what seems like a really poor and
| naive implementation - fixation on very recent activity -
| shows that the sort of deep personalization touted is
| mostly BS.
|
| Both YouTube and Amazon heavily personalize by
| recommending primarily the 3-4 things that I've
| interacted with in the very recent past.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This is not true. For example every time Summoning Salt
| uploads a video, which happens every few months, it will
| show up on my recommend feed because YouTube knows I'm
| willing to watch their ~1 hour documentaries even though
| I'm not subscribed to them.
| sdoering wrote:
| This could (probably isn't) be a very quick
| implementation with a heuristic like 'if percentage of
| viewed videos from channel x (essentially per channel
| viewed) > threshold ==> show new video from channel x on
| homepage next time user appears.
|
| Make it fancy and use a multi armed bandit and call it
| machine learning/AI/data science.
| fomine3 wrote:
| I believe YouTube recommendation is most well working
| one, so some people getting into echo chamber.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| I think you're right. I'd like to see an analysis of the
| effectiveness of personalised advertising based on
| tracking versus ads based purely on local context. The
| latter being if you're on a web page about birds then you
| get ads for bird seed and bird houses. No tracking
| involved.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| It works great for negative political ads though.
| Kye wrote:
| It's always fun watching an ad system try to figure out
| nonbinary people. Spotify ads can't decide whether I'm a
| successful businessman or Spanish-speaking housewife.
| adamc wrote:
| It can have this problem even if you are not nonbinary.
| Buy a few toe rings and have it decide you're a woman...
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Here's another less harmless aspect of that:
|
| Something about my actual interests and activity
| apparently makes youtube think I'm into Fox news and all
| the crazy shit found there.
|
| Now, who else has this same value judgement about me?
| This assessment that I neither declared for myself nor
| even ratified.
|
| It's annoying but ultimately harmless that youtube shows
| me conservative wackjob stuff.
|
| But is that same profile in someone else's database that
| marks me as someone to watch or something? Does it affect
| my insurance rates, my liklihood to get extra scrutiny
| when travelling, my ability to purchase or register a
| firearm, my access to jobs that might be extra sensitive
| or responsible, basically any of the things where someone
| either private or the state does any sort of background
| or credit check on you for any reason, and there are
| really many of those when you think a out it.
|
| I'm guessing, today, it's probably not really affecting
| my life in any real way, but, there is no way it makes
| any sense to say that will still be true tomorrow.
| Kye wrote:
| There was that infamous case of a retailer figuring out
| someone was pregnant before they did based on what they
| were buying and mailing a customized flyer...to their
| dad's house. I don't remember the exact situation, but it
| probably wasn't the only incident.
| foxfluff wrote:
| It's always fun checking Google's ad settings and seeing
| what they think I'm into.
|
| Apparently now I'm into baseball, flowers, boating,
| celebrities, country music, credit cards, geology, event
| ticket sales, fishing, and windows OS. Among a couple
| hundred other things. It even gets some rather basic
| facts (marital status, company size, education) wrong. I
| seriously wonder how they generate this profile?
| tomrod wrote:
| > I seriously wonder how they generate this profile
|
| Poorly!
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Check your Google ad settings here...
|
| https://adssettings.google.com/
| mcv wrote:
| There's not a lot there for me. Just some generic whether
| I want to see alcohol and gambling ads on youtube.
| mcv wrote:
| Some people fit in convenient buckets, but lots of people
| don't, and assuming all people do, will make the ad
| system useless to a lot of people. Even if you're not
| non-binary at all, you could still be a successful
| businesswoman or a Spanish-speaking houseman
| (househusband? stay-at-home dad?).
|
| Better to just follow people's interests, instead of
| using their interests to incorrectly pigeonhole them and
| then drawing incorrect generalisations from that.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >to find out your name and address and search history
|
| So that you can continue to show me ads for a washing
| machine for months after I purchased a washing machine.
| artificial wrote:
| Surely you mean your new washing machine buying hobby?
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I haven't consumed significant amounts of ads in a long
| time, only some logos in sports and the occasional visit
| to family or the rare times adblock fails (YouTube
| premium user too). So I can only imagine how hilarious
| that must be.
| politician wrote:
| I agree with you. I highly doubt that our economy has
| enough (product, message) combinations to justify the
| need for personalization based on more than a dozen
| attributes.
| N1H1L wrote:
| I will buy X, if I need X. And once I buy X, it's done.
| For example, I wanted a cordless drill last week. Did the
| "site:reddit.com" thing (I actually have been doing that
| almost subconsciously now, as Google results are all
| trash), chose a drill, and ordered one off Amazon.
|
| Then, after that, what's the point in showing drill ads
| to me for two weeks?
| bdamm wrote:
| There's a well known effect in advertising that
| advertising a product to a person that has already bought
| that product generally increases their satisfaction with
| the product and the purchase, and may cause them to
| recommend the product to others.
|
| Probably that's what they are going for if they're doing
| it on purpose.
| _dain_ wrote:
| > There's a well known effect in advertising that
| advertising a product to a person that has already bought
| that product generally increases their satisfaction with
| the product and the purchase, and may cause them to
| recommend the product to others.
|
| Do you have a link for further reading on that? That's
| fascinating if true.
| N1H1L wrote:
| Could be - but at least for me it feels intrusive and
| irritating, not any positive feelings really
| bdamm wrote:
| It's not supposed to feel good. If 9/10 people have a
| brief negative thought about the advertising experience
| and nothing else happens, but 1/10 people happen to have
| their friend on the phone at the time and makes a
| referral, then overall that is a win for the brand.
| artificial wrote:
| Have you considered consumer reports? I'm of the Reddit
| persuasion and find it's a good resource. Bummer
| everything is polluted these days.
| xhevahir wrote:
| Does it really work so well in politics? I've read in
| various places that a lot of political advertising in
| America functions basically as a means for channeling
| donors' money to a few K Street firms belonging to party
| insiders.
| dboreham wrote:
| And to Rupert Murdoch.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > personalization just isn't that great
|
| Data analytics truly feels like a bubble.
|
| Netflix has achieved the _dream_ of movie studios going
| back more than a century now. They have the talent, the
| money, and more than two decades of data. Netflix knows
| what you watch, when you stop watching, how often you
| watch, which movie covers work best.
|
| And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more
| than a total failure of the promises of data analytics
| and personalization. Netflix should be putting out
| _nothing but_ hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of
| Thrones.
|
| Yet they are not. In fact, they do not even have a single
| show that is to the level of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or
| The Wire. HBO and AMC are running _laps_ around Netflix.
| Meanwhile, Netflix is making live action Cowboy Bebop and
| cancelling it before people even know it existed. I 'm
| really curious what the data said about funding that
| particular project. On one hand, you have the cult
| following of the anime that will absolutely tear a live
| action version to shreds. On the other hand, you have to
| convince the uninitiated into viewing a remake of 23 year
| old anime.
|
| Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is
| a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix
| catalog than watching content tells you everything you
| need to know about how little people trust Netflix
| recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just
| depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten
| random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout
| line. Oh, and, their top 10 feature is currently the
| biggest recommendation feature on their site. And it's
| not even personalized! If that's not a complete admission
| of defeat I don't know what is.
| htrp wrote:
| > Then there is the personalization. The fact that there
| is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix
| catalog than watching content tells you everything you
| need to know about how little people trust Netflix
| recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just
| depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten
| random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout
| line.
|
| They may also be optimizing for revenues as opposed to
| recommendation quality (homegrown content being cheaper
| than licensed)
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Strong comment. I agree completely with your negative
| assessment of the "value" of consumer habits to optimize
| Netflix recommendation. In my own case I feel trapped in
| a very shallow local minimum. Yes I watched a revenge
| flick or two but now I am type-cast for life.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Just anecdote, but...
|
| The most common pattern I see relating to personalized
| advertising as someone being advertised to is that I will
| often see an ad for something I just bought (or some
| competitor to it) repeated relentlessly for a couple of
| days after buying it and this is after not seeing any
| related ads during the days prior where I was actually
| doing some research into the product space.
|
| Maybe I'm an outlier but they seem to miss the window of
| relevance on me often enough that I notice it as a
| commonly repeated pattern.
| adamc wrote:
| Same experience. What's even more mystifying is that
| often it is for items that no human would be likely to be
| buying many copies of in a short span of time (high
| ticket items, or items where you probably don't need more
| than one).
| treis wrote:
| Just because I bought something doesn't mean I kept it.
| And those 0.1%, or whatever, returning items are very
| likely to buy another one of a different brand.
| gwd wrote:
| Exactly. If I just bought some power tool for a home
| improvement project, I am _the least likely person in the
| country_ to want to buy that exact same power tool the
| next day.
| scott00 wrote:
| I know it seems moronic, but I think it might actually
| make sense from the advertisers point of view. Some
| percentage of people who buy a thing are going to return
| it and buy something similar in the next week. That
| percentage is almost certainly large compared to the
| percentage of the overall population who's going to buy
| that thing in the next week, and it seems plausible to me
| it's even large compared to the number of people who have
| been browsing for the thing but haven't bought yet.
| (Think of it as the ratio of people just browsing vs
| ready to buy.)
| mcv wrote:
| Even so, wouldn't it be much smarter if they kept track
| of what the expected life expectancy of the thing you
| bought is, and then years later start feeding you ads for
| a replacement? Or is it too hard to track people over
| such a long period of time?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| From the behavior of ads (that I imagine are highly
| optimized), all that knowledge is useful for front-
| running an specific TV model all over your internet once
| you decide to buy a TV.
|
| It seems to be completely useless for anything else, and
| specifically harmful for product discovery, that is the
| one way ads add societal value.
| mountainb wrote:
| Right, people radically overestimate how much a profile
| is worth. Someone who owns a house in a rich area is
| somewhat easy to identify, and you target them... along
| with everyone else who is also trying to reach that rich
| slice, so you pay more.
|
| The very high quality pieces of information can be things
| like "wants to buy a life insurance policy this week" or
| "just had a baby" or "just bought a plane ticket to XYZ,"
| or "is in the frequent flyer program and spends more than
| $20,000 per year on travel."
|
| However the majority of information about people, the
| overwhelming majority of whom have no significant
| disposable income, is worthless and not worth tracking
| for the most part. You reach those people through
| traditional mass marketing means.
| N1H1L wrote:
| It's a great point you have made. I work _technically_ as
| a data scientist, but my domain is scientific data. I
| have quite a few GitHub packages and get recruiter calls
| for data science jobs almost every week, with pretty
| generous salary offers.
|
| And from what it seems to me, there is a giant bubble.
| The vast majority of companies doing "data science" jobs
| are things that a smart undergrad can do with a month or
| two of training. And this is because I believe C-suites
| have completely gulped down the _data is oil_ mantra.
| There are entirely charlatan companies with unicorn, even
| decacorn valuations now being built on this mantra - for
| example, CRED in India.
|
| Yet, as you said, and as I believe too, most of the data
| is worthless.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Right, although piping junk into the search box and expecting
| it to bring back something useful is trained behavior.
|
| I've been using DuckDuckGo a lot more recently and the thing
| that surprises me isn't the kind and quality of the results,
| it's that I actually need to use my brain to search.
|
| It's not about whether this is a good or a bad thing--I kind
| of like the precision in a way, it's just jarring how
| different it is as an experience.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Yup, when I want to search anything I use a combination of
| reddit, HN, and Discord. My main use of Google these days is to
| find a website I forget the name of but roughly know what it's
| called. In the olden days, I used bookmark aggregation sites
| like del.icio.us to search for relevant content, which was
| generally more fruitful than a Google search.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > - "There's a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently
| called the Dead Internet Theory..." > I hadn't heard of this.
| Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world
| it seems totally plausible.
|
| I never believed in conspiracy theories, and after I read
| "Media Control" by Noam Chomsky I understood there is no need
| for conspiracy theories once you understand how individual
| incentives are aligned and how individuals always act to
| maximise profits.
|
| Someone on HN phrased this and I am not taking credit for it
| but it explains beautifully whats going on: "Google is not
| making money by showing you the best search result they can,
| they make money by keeping you searching."
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That does not make sense. If searches did not result in
| satisfactory results, then people would stop searching.
|
| Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN or
| Reddit.
|
| This is a problem for google, maybe not right this minute as
| growth might offset dissuaded users, but nevertheless, it
| does not behoove them in the long run to provide garbage
| search results to people.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN
| or Reddit.
|
| You are right but overestimate the number of people doing
| these restrictive searches. They should be in the <0.1%
| range. I personally switched (to duck and latly kagi.com)
| and know quite some people in tech that did so too, but the
| non tech-savy person (which are the majority of overall
| users) doesn't even know other search engines.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Eventually, though, even non technical users will stop
| Google searching if it wastes their time. If they do not
| find what they want, then they can go back to asking
| people in person or instagram or whatever, but I would
| not expect people to keep aimlessly searching.
| danso wrote:
| I agree that Reddit remains a good source for info, but I've
| found that Google usually does a good job surfacing Reddit
| results -- usually in the top half. Though this is most notable
| when I'm googling for esoteric info about TV shows and video
| games (e.g. "best build mass effect 3")
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >Reviews are secretly paid ads.
|
| So are a lot of Reddit comments.
| rogy wrote:
| I didn't really even think about this properly until just now..
| these days I am looking at Reddit, Facebook groups and if needs
| be, YouTube (videos not by 'creators' as far as possible) to
| find information I used to google. Ads and referral links have
| totally ruined the usefulness of so much information.
| shane_b wrote:
| Makes sense why they would fuzzy search. Not all users can be
| expected to know Google fu.
|
| So let mainstream use fuzzy and keep power user features. The
| big issue is power user support is gone for people with Google
| fu.
|
| Ads or no ads isn't really an issue for this because it's such
| a small percentage of users that know Google fu.
| mouzogu wrote:
| But I still prefer to use Google to search Reddit or Stack
| overflow.
|
| Reddit especially has horrible search.
| kingcharles wrote:
| > I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of
| conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible.
|
| Nice try. That's totally what a bot would say.
| mad182 wrote:
| 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. Online newspapers and portals
| are increasingly using paywalls. Most of the genuine human
| interactions and quality content is not indexable anymore.
| Instead we have a million affiliate marketers fighting for the
| top positions in search results with every possible seo trick.
|
| Reddit is one of the last places with huge amounts of publicly
| accessible online discussions.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's because private communities are the only ones free from
| mass abuse. Public forums moved to private discord groups
| with hard to find invite links / etc because public forums
| take an army of anti abuse workers to keep alive. While a
| discord group just needs a few people to kick the trouble
| makers and maybe revoke the invite link for a while.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| Feature, not bug. If there's no public search, it can't be
| gamed for money. The problem TFA identifies is one of
| discerning that the person you're getting your info from is
| an actual person, who cares. The best way of doing that,
| until we find some way of creating institutional trust in
| these matters, is talking to the sort of person that spends
| all day in talking to a chat room about whatever it is you're
| asking about.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >>- "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what
| you typed in. It tries to be "smart" and figure out what you
| "really meant" ..."
|
| >This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what
| I write.
|
| It should do both. And it used to do both.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| This is nonsense. Google is not particularly woke as a whole,
| certainly not to the extent that concerns about "woke"ness
| drive massively important product strategy decisions. And
| certainly the government isn't forcing anyone to be more
| "woke" or, to my knowledge, really influencing search results
| at all. Unless you have evidence to the contrary?
| bitwize wrote:
| Not sure what woke activists have to do with it. It's not
| hard to guess whom Google is beholden to from recent search
| results: advertisers. They are increasingly an ad platform,
| not a search engine or informational resource. Makes me yearn
| for the days of the public library, which just might make a
| resurgence to fill the vacuum Google has left.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| You have to search Yandex if you want English-language
| counter cultural (i.e. reactionary) content.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| Your case might or might not be true on political topics, and
| I won't engage on that, but I think OP mostly mentions impact
| on product reviews and other more 'down to earth' topics.
|
| I don't think woke activists would care too much about shoe
| brands, so I think your response is missing the point at
| hand, which is that search results (including but not only
| political ones) are deteriorating fast
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Do you have any specifics?
| _dain_ wrote:
| google image search for "white inventors". it shows you
| black inventors.
|
| likewise "american inventors", 9/10 image results are
| african-american inventors.
| depaya wrote:
| I was curious about this, so I decided to think about
| what Google's image search probably does and apply
| Occam's Razor...
|
| It appears the image search is closely tied to the
| overall web search; the images returned are images from
| pages that match the search terms.
|
| What would I expect a search for something like "white
| inventors" to return? Are there lots of websites
| cataloging inventors who are specially white, or
| discussing inventors specifically because they are white?
| Probably not, why would there be? But what about websites
| discussing non-white inventors, or talking about white vs
| non-white inventors? That seems much more likely to me
| since discussing and/or promoting a minority is more
| notable and common.
|
| So it seems like the algorithm has decided to categorize
| "white inventor" and "black inventor" in very similar
| ways - both search terms are returning results relating
| to inventors of different races, whereby a non-white
| inventor is more interesting since it's the exception. I
| don't think it is surprising that these search results
| are as they are, and this seems much more likely to me
| than the whatever the alternative is that you are
| suggesting.
|
| On a related topic, if you search for "black people" one
| of the image results is King Kong, and it comes from a
| website discussing comparing black people to monkeys.
| Another one of the images is (white) Mitch McConnell
| surrounded by other white people.
|
| If you want an image search engine that is returning
| images whose content matches your search terms, there are
| tools that specifically focus on this.
| bee_rider wrote:
| For "white inventors:" Most likely if you include a race
| or ethnicity in your search, it is pulling from articles
| discussing race, so the results should be expected to be
| diverse.
|
| For "American inventors:" probably it is keying to the
| second half of "African-American"
|
| White American inventors are typically just referred to
| as "inventors," have you tried searching that?
| _dain_ wrote:
| >White American inventors are typically just referred to
| as "inventors," have you tried searching that?
|
| when I search "inventors", 7/39 images are from articles
| specifically about overlooked black inventors. all
| searches relating to inventors are poisoned by american
| (i.e. foreign) culture war topics.
|
| >probably it is keying to the second half of "African-
| American"
|
| I refuse to believe that google can be so stupid as to do
| this after over two decades of development in natural
| language processing.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Confirmed
| mongol wrote:
| Could not that be a reflection of "the web is woke"
| rather than "Google is woke", though?
| _dain_ wrote:
| possibly, but it's a chicken and egg problem, isn't it?
| so much of what gets popular on the web is based on
| gaming SEO rankings.
| scelerat wrote:
| Could entirely be explained by google's algorithms
| capturing a zeitgeist of sorts, and presently,
| discussions of "white inventors" and "american inventors"
| have a lot to say about black inventors and their
| presence or lack thereof in the historical record. No
| conspiracy necessary.
|
| If you google Donald Trump you get a bunch of news
| results about his legal troubles. Not because Google has
| an axe to grind, but because Donald Trump has legal
| troubles, and it's in the news.
| deathgripsss wrote:
| But if I search something in Google images I'd expect to
| see that term in images not the current trending cultural
| topic relating to that search term.
| scelerat wrote:
| Doubtless the image search is using the same algorithms
| and pulling images from articles. Google doesn't know
| what you're "really" looking for. It just knows you
| searched for "white inventors," and the reason you're
| seeing black faces is that for pages with have high
| pagerank for the phrase "white inventors," there are
| images of black people.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Dead Internet Theory is totally believable. I remember back in
| 2006-7 or so, being slightly curious about putting up a food
| review site because I was really angry at my local X food
| establishment. I found places were you could buy complete
| restaurant database ready to be scripted onto the web for maybe
| 90 a pop. The data was actually pretty good, but I was shocked
| by the huge community around flipping these dbs into internet
| spam. For the very high majority these were hungry business
| types who could barely open a code editor without asking for
| help. I only expect the problem has gotten exponentially worse
| since then now that ai generated content has improved in
| quality.
| cosmosgenius wrote:
| The first review site I go to, to find if the product should be
| trusted or not is reddit only in the hope that not every
| comment is a paid ad.
| Xeronate wrote:
| 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.
| winternett wrote:
| We've also got to address the people and corporations that
| are gaming the system that google has created. Google is by
| no means off the hook, but Marketing practices have also
| taken a very bad turn to deception and in reinforcing a
| payola systems recently that we may never be able to recover
| from trust-wise.
| robbyking wrote:
| > The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are
| being shared inside communities like Reddit
|
| Are you a fan of r/mtb or r/mountainbiking?
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Google could fix this by making the algorithm take into account
| searches that often end with "reddit", thus applying more
| weight to Reddit results to similar searches where the user
| didn't include Reddit in it. Clearly it's an indicator that
| those are the better results.
|
| Take StackOverflow for example. Almost any programmer will find
| a SO result as the top result and it's usually exactly what
| you're looking for. Since there's no money to be made by
| companies writing blog posts on debugging a compiler error,
| Google's algorithm works as intended.
|
| Question is: Why hasn't Google done anything about this? It's
| the organic results that are terrible, so they're not losing ad
| revenue by placing these garbage sites at the top. Perhaps its
| to intentionally make better websites pay for ads to get better
| placement? But those won't be the ones to ever pay to begin
| with...
| Gigachad wrote:
| I think it would be foolish to assume google hasn't spent
| hundreds of hours in meetings talking about what they can do
| about everyone having to type reddit. Problem is they are
| facing an army of SEO experts who are one step ahead of
| google. As well as legal issues. Imagine if it was found
| google was artificially boosting reddit in an unfair way.
| hintymad wrote:
| > This is it for me exactly.
|
| This is for me exactly too. Search "best XXX for YYY", and I
| get back two pages of dubious websites that smell like paid ads
| a mile away.
| [deleted]
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Working at a marketing agency, I can promise you the Dead
| Internet Theory really isn't even a conspiracy. It's
| depressing.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Be the change you want to see!
| salt-thrower wrote:
| I did software dev at a marketing firm for about a year, and
| it was pretty soul sucking, so I know what you mean. I won't
| work at one again unless it's literally my only option.
| lethologica wrote:
| I've been there too. The sad thing was that the people I
| worked with were genuinely great and smart people but
| you're spot on about the actual state of the environment
| being a depressing and soul draining thing. I quit that job
| on moral grounds, I just couldn't be a part of that any
| more.
| [deleted]
| flyinghamster wrote:
| This fits well with my own worldview. I've been griping about
| Google results for years, and jumped for DuckDuckGo when it
| became usable. I'm sure that fifteen years from now, DuckDuckGo
| will be ad-infested crap and someone new will come along to
| replace it, just as Google replaced AltaVista.
|
| Even DDG knows that it can't handle everything, and so it has
| its bang shortcuts. I've used the !reddit one, and I'd use !w
| (Wikipedia) except I do those from the Firefox search bar.
|
| I've heard the "everything's a bot" theory before, but never
| saw a name put to it before. I'd have to guess that 99% of all
| SMTP traffic is spam at this point.
| cge wrote:
| >I'm sure that fifteen years from now, DuckDuckGo will be ad-
| infested crap
|
| In terms of direct ads, perhaps. But for SEO spam, in many
| cases, DDG already seems to be there. For example, things as
| simple as "python datetime", "python json", or "python
| datetime.now", where it would seem obvious that the top
| result would be the documentation for the module/function,
| have spam sites above the actual Python documentation.
| Meanwhile, search for "matplotlib", and your screen will fill
| up with ads.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| i think that specialised search engines are gaining ground. For
| example, I am using github search for searching code samples,
| that works better than google.
|
| You might want to check my side project that tries to explore
| the subject. I have a search tool / catalog of duckduckgo !bang
| operators
| https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html -
| (best viewed on a PC0. i am hoping that it allows for better
| discoverability of specialized search engines. The latest
| addition is a description for each search engine, just hover
| over the name, and you get a description derived from the sites
| meta and title tags.
|
| I think that specialised search engines are gaining ground, it
| has become easier to set one up, thanks to
| elasticsearch/lucene. They can be quite good, for a limited
| domain, and they don't have to invade your privacy in order to
| find out what you are looking for. I think that what is missing
| are tools like this, that would aid the discovery and use of
| these search engines. I hope that this will allow them to eat
| into the market from the 'low end'.
|
| The projects source is here:
| https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang
|
| Unfortunately they don't invest too much into !bang operators
| at duckduckgo, however that's my input data...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I like this conspiracy theory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
| nluken wrote:
| > The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are
| being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web
|
| This point especially rings true for me, but it also concerns
| me a bit. Reddit has killed a lot of other forums over the
| years. If something happens to Reddit, we run the risk of
| losing a large corpus of information.
| ziml77 wrote:
| The reason that the quality on Reddit is higher is because
| there's people moderating those quality subreddits. Without
| those moderators it would all turn to crap and be just as
| useless as Google.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Moderators that are often anonymous/unknown.
|
| (This isn't an argument against your point, just a bit of
| additional context that increasingly is odd to me as Reddit
| gains more and more social weight)
| est31 wrote:
| reddit's search isn't _that_ helpful though. I often get to
| reddit from Google, sometimes I even do site:reddit.com, but
| still using Google 's search.
| chucksta wrote:
| Its not about reddit as a search, it's about using reddit to
| validate your search because the alternative would likely
| yield poor results. You could trust the 10 listacles that
| came up as the first results that all look oddly similar, or
| you can try and filter through reddit by including it in your
| search terms
| TrevorJ wrote:
| I agree. Often, what I am after online is to see what other
| _real_ _people_ are saying about something. typing 'reddit'
| into google is basically a proxy for "please google for the
| love of good, can you start indexing actual human discussions
| again?".
| takeda wrote:
| >> "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what
| you typed in. It tries to be "smart" and figure out what you
| "really meant" ..."
|
| > This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what
| I write.
|
| Yeah I remember this being mentioned in a local presentation at
| university. As a great thing. Google doesn't search for what
| you write, but what you want.
|
| The problem is that very often Google don't know what I want.
| Before they introduced this, I was able to define my query so
| that I got exactly what I wanted.
| userbinator wrote:
| Google knows what _it_ wants. Its job is to convince you to
| agree with it.
| eloeffler wrote:
| About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing
| how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid
| very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was
| paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an
| article and later integrate feedback from internal review.
| Otherwise the payment became too low.
|
| The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to
| keep people on the website into the articles.
|
| The result is trashy articles that could well have been written
| by a bot but aren't. This could possibly be done with the help
| of curated bot-content, but I think we're far away from the
| point where this is really more profitable than getting
| students to do the work.
|
| It's people but they work like bots.
| netcan wrote:
| >> This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-
| content, but I think we're far away from the point where this
| is really more profitable than getting students to do the
| work.
|
| It may be becoming borderline. I expect that
| sentence/paragraph completion is already becoming useful to
| people who churn out quick content for a living. In any case,
| the important part isn't whether or not it's bots. The
| important part is whether or not it's authentic. The precise
| meaning of authenticity gets squishy, but it exists
| nonetheless.
|
| IMO the sentiments are correct, whatever the details. Part of
| why google sucks is that the internet is worse, for a bunch
| of the things we use google to search for. The internet
| becoming a larger, more profitable industry changed it.
| Instagramming for influencer perks, SEOing, or selling
| targeted ads like FB do... it does not lead to the same
| places that earlier iterations of the WWW produced. Times
| change.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| It's a pretty clear indication that the once stalwart
| effort, within Google, to produce a true search experience
| is effectively dead.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| No. Google is just playing the Red Queen's race, and
| losing.
| ballenf wrote:
| How can you be sure that you're not a bot?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Reminds me of an old The Parking Lot Is Full comic.
|
| > Little-known Fact #839: There are only twenty-three
| people alive today, and you're one of them; everyone else
| you know just looks human to lull vou into not searching
| for the other twenty-two. Lonely? You _should_ be.
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/aSexFX2Gy4hdAnYh9
| romwell wrote:
| Eh, if that's the case, I'm cool to be one of the few
| remaining humans among billions of wonderful whoever-
| they-are.
|
| Beings so acceptive of others as to make me oblivious
| there's a difference? That's far more than humans ever
| accomplished.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I pay rent therefore I am.
| [deleted]
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Nice
| technothrasher wrote:
| Because I'm nervous my neighbors will realize my sheep is
| electric?
| fsflover wrote:
| By solving a captcha obviously.
| rhacker wrote:
| 42
| vlunkr wrote:
| The other day I looked up the wordle answer (I know I know).
| The first result was a site where I had to scroll through
| about 19 paragraphs of SEO vomit to get to the answer. The
| page could literally have one word on it and serve it's
| purpose. If that isn't a sign that the the internet, or at
| least google search, is dead, I don't know what is.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| For future instances where you give up trying to figure out
| the wordle, I built a site to make that easier:
| www.wordlespoiler.com
|
| Word of warning: it has the answer to both today and
| tomorrows wordles.
| eproxus wrote:
| It's like a DDoS attack on your mind (distributed because
| everyone is doing it). The attention span economy at its
| finest.
|
| Reminds me of those ways to catch spammers or bots by
| occupying some of their resources with meaningless tasks
| for as long as possible. Except it's turned around.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if there's even any real money in ads
| anymore or if it's just a giant circle jerk that slowly
| destroys society...
| ghostly_s wrote:
| There's a whole industry of sites like this for NYT
| crossword answers, to the point that it's often impossible
| to get any organic results at all for something that's been
| clued in the Times, which is frustrating because I don't
| just want the answer (there's a button in the app that does
| that already), I want to learn about the thing I'm
| unfamiliar with. Luckily, _most_ topics that come up have
| some content on Wikipedia so I go there instead.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Ugh yes that's super annoying! I don't want the answer
| spoon-fed to me. The point of searching it is to actually
| learn a little something which will help me remember in
| the future
| justinhj wrote:
| lol the same happens with WSJ. It's very disappointing to
| try and do a bit of research on a clue and get the answer
| on a bot site linked to the puzzle you're doing.
| Interesting how they do it though.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Article agrees:
|
| > Whether they're a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.
|
| Fake plastic trees.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I would expect an automaton to be able to spell; so perhaps
| the presence of spelling errors is a mark of an authentic
| page. Maybe one could force Goo to spit out authentic results
| by including a strategically-misspelled word in the search
| terms.
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| Classic example of this kind of content... Try searching "How
| to use X to get stains out of Y".
|
| You will find a page for almost any X and Y combination. And
| they will all have wording like "Put some X on the stained
| Y... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the
| washing machine. Hope it works!".
| api wrote:
| "how to use jet fuel to get stains out of my yak"
|
| Nope, nothing relevant. Found a counterexample.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| how to use blood to get stains out of my heart, I had
| hoped I'd at least find a country song with that as a
| lyric.
| useto075 wrote:
| Nothing relevant yet
| divs1210 wrote:
| This is how to use jet fuel to get stains out of a yak:
|
| Put some jet fuel on the stained yak... wait a bit... rub
| it in... and then put it through the washing machine.
| Hope it works!
| jpicard wrote:
| Bloomberg and other news orgs publish bot-assisted articles,
| for example to summarize financial reports the moment they
| appear.
|
| https://archive.fo/1EjSu
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| That job is probably months away from being automated by
| GPT-3 and its ilk, supposing it hasn't yet been.
|
| Right now, I don't think you can tell it to use some specific
| terms in the text it generates, but it doesn't sound like a
| difficult extension.
| DragonL80 wrote:
| That's how I know it's not gpt-3, gpt-3 would write better
| articles. At the very best it's poorly trained Markov
| chains.
| evilduck wrote:
| The idea that a genuinely Dead Internet might be an
| improvement over the current internet experience is a fun
| one, and one I don't entirely disagree with.
| rhacker wrote:
| I mean then is DIT really a conspiracy theory? I know that
| people in HN have already started doing replies with AI in
| some threads. (only because they tell people). Wait a few
| more years and there will be no way to know if forums are
| just bots generating content.
|
| I guess HN would be a weird outlier, because there are no
| ads. Except maybe the bots would be useful after all when
| various "Show HN" or "Launch HN" and have the bots cheer
| those companies and get random publicity.
| malka wrote:
| I sometime use GPT-3 to help me write stuff on forum. It
| writes better than me :/
| ghostly_s wrote:
| My friend briefly had a copywriting job writing weed strain
| descriptions for dispensaries. He was never provided the
| product he was describing, just told to make it up.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I assume this is exactly how they come up with the
| descriptions on most wine bottles
| TheFlyingFish wrote:
| Somebody who worked at a winery once told me that the
| flavors they mention on the bottle are actually what the
| wine is _missing,_ and they name them in the hope that
| the power of suggestion give you a more balanced
| impression.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| It would be interesting to see some sort of study, to see
| the impact on wine labels on: normal people, vs wine
| "experts", vs sommeliers.
|
| I've seen a few of those wine documentaries about
| sommeliers, and they certainly made it _seem_ like it was
| a legitimate ability to identify stuff. I 'd be
| interested to see how close they are in a more neutral,
| measured environment.
| initplus wrote:
| Sommeliers are professionalized, with courses & exams.
| But I don't believe they are actually judged on their
| ability to taste wines and detect flavours. Designing
| such tests would be simple - rate of successful flavour
| identification based on data from other Somemeliers.
|
| Instead Sommelier exams are subjective - candidates are
| judged by another Sommelier on subjective criteria rather
| than objective measurement. In my opinion they judge it
| as a dramatic performance: how quickly can the candidate
| rattle-off various flavours? How "high class" is the
| language they use to describe the flavours? How does the
| candidate present themselves? Sommeliers dress in fine
| suits, but this should have no impact on actual wine
| tasting ability. Yet I am sure if I showed up in a draggy
| old t-shirt I would fail regardless.
|
| The whole industry seems allergic to objective scientific
| measurement. I am sure Sommelier's do have some ability
| to identify varieties, but are they actually tasting all
| those subtle hints they list off? I doubt it.
| lethologica wrote:
| There's been some studies that are somewhat related!
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine
| -ta...
|
| https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/37328
| ghostly_s wrote:
| It's mostly bullshit[1]. Tasters can't even tell _reds
| from whites_ with a great deal of accuracy. [2]
|
| 1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/w
| ine-ta... 2. http://www.morssglobalfinance.com/the-
| ultimate-wine-tasting-...
| woeriud wrote:
| >Tasters can't even tell reds from whites with a great
| deal of accuracy. [2]
|
| Actually, _this_ one is bullshit. While it may be true
| that the average person without blind tasting experience
| cannot do this, anyone who has actually done blind
| tasting seriously should be pretty accurate at this.
| Purely structurally, red wines generally have much more
| tannin and more alcohol than whites.
|
| The famous study that led to this claim (which survives
| because people, especially the HN type, love feeling smug
| about expertise) doesn't really hold up. See eg
| http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-
| wine-ex...
| adamc wrote:
| This is something I notice in advertising generally:
| whatever they most emphasize is least likely to be true
| about the product (e.g., the "great taste" of
| McDonald's).
| posterboy wrote:
| I feel like this is how the lobbying and decision making
| about the legalization is going as well.
| smm11 wrote:
| I look back at the newspaper stories I wrote a few decades
| back. I could get the score from the coach, find out hits
| from who and when, and after that 20 second interaction, I
| could write a news story in maybe three minutes, which told
| you everything you needed to know.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I have the very same feeling concerning electronics.
| Searching for a particular product does not even popping up
| 5-10 comparison articles but the content of all seems to be
| based on technical specifications of the manufacturer only,
| which I already have a hands on.
|
| Significantly more time required for consciously choosing a
| product to purchase (which in my case is critical because I
| am like Sheldon Cooper trying to choose between PS4 and
| XBOX One normally, to the horror of my wife, she wants a
| new TV and it is months long project based on accurate and
| quick data, and now this, with Google, which makes our
| family atmosphere even more tense : ) )
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Most reviews are useless from the start because most
| reviewers are totally dependent on manufacturers or
| dealers providing samples (yet will generally claim to be
| "totally independent"). That's before you get to
| reviewers who can't or don't know how to test the product
| in question and so end up narrating the manufacturers
| specs to their faux testing.
|
| There are very few exceptions to this.
| tpmx wrote:
| Niche, probably outdated, but indicative: The only way to
| purchase a laser printer with high printing quality these
| days is to buy something expensive and hope for the best.
| Magazines used to do actual reviews of these things.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Brother MFC laser printers have delivered for me for over
| 15 years now. I have bought many for various small
| offices and my home and relatives' homes, etc, and I have
| not heard any complaints.
|
| I especially like the scan function where brother web
| connect OCR's the document and saves it as a pdf directly
| in your Box/Dropbox/OneDrive/GoogleDrive folder. Just
| wish it worked with iCloud Drive.
| tpmx wrote:
| Your comment is kind of like the "reviews". Yes, they
| work. :) (I've got one.)
|
| I'm interested in the printing quality though.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| In case you haven't encountered it yet:
| https://www.rtings.com is a good site for TV
| specs/reviews specifically. I know someone who works
| there and their methodology seems legit (I like it more
| than Wirecutter).
| monkeynotes wrote:
| Speaking of bots, I'd be interested to know the percentage of
| articles on major traffic content sites are authored or co-
| authored by AI.
|
| My suspicion is this is rife given how many articles read
| poorly and are almost entirely fluff. If this is true it
| would appear we are doomed to algorithms shaping our online
| experiences, which is worrying given the existing shrinking
| diversity of opinion and content. It's like a entropic gene
| pool in nature, but with information.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Sports stories are frequently written by bots/AI/whatever
| you want to call them. Sports stats makes it relatively
| easy to create written text articles about games. When
| first rolled out, there were some obvious tells such as an
| excessive amount of "for the first time this season" or
| "set a record for the season" in articles about first games
| of the season. Unusual plays or quirky behavior by
| participants tend to be missed in these articles but
| otherwise they're serviceable though somewhat dry and
| bland.
| siltpotato wrote:
| NavinF wrote:
| ~0% right now.
|
| I think the quality of searches like "best TV" will improve
| dramatically once language models are used to generate SEO
| spam. Anything would be an improvement over what today's
| human spam bots produce.
| mixedbit wrote:
| Stock analysis articles are very commonly generated
| automatically from templates. The selected template is
| based on some real characteristics of a described company
| (whether the stock went up or down recently, what is the
| P/E etc.), but the content is generic and reused across all
| companies with similar characteristics.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Apparently, using a machine translation as a basis and
| working through correcting it to read or write foreign
| languages is a growing trend and that's a form of computer
| assisted literacy if I were to guess.
|
| Bar that, it's humans outrunning AI in the race to the
| bottom with a head start. Human people can be forced to be
| incredibly machine like.
| technofiend wrote:
| > Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine
| like.
|
| Amazon has a site for humans to pick up small tasks and
| get paid for them called mechanical turk [1], which is a
| reference to a fake chess playing machine with a human
| inside [2]. With the great resignation and the workforce
| otherwise pushing for a reasonable standard of living,
| I'm not sure how heavily mturk is still used as depending
| on tasks and speed it's really sub-minimum wage work for
| many people. [3] But as The Atlantic article says,
| sometimes it's the only work people can get.
|
| [1] https://www.mturk.com/ [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk [3] https:/
| /www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Probably zero. People are really cheap.
| mike10921 wrote:
| Lately, half the results I get are pages that I cant view
| without paying to some service or signing up for a free
| trial.. Google literally serves up results that are
| unreachable ..
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Can we also talk about how Google allows top organic
| results to LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook which
| literally present you with a LOGIN page before you see
| _anything_ related to your search?
|
| Absolute worst UX ever, yet they allow it because it's
| their SV buddies.
| 1024core wrote:
| > yet they allow it because it's their SV buddies.
|
| At one time, Google used to ban sites for "cloaking":
| offering one version of the page to the crawler, and
| another to the user.
|
| But over time they got into trouble from these sites,
| getting sued left and right. Being accused of putting up
| a wall, and abusing their monopoly. Eventually, these
| sites won out and Google dropped this requirement.
| zo1 wrote:
| Similar story with Image search. "Blah blah something
| something _copyright_ something ". And voila - now you
| can't get direct access to images on the search results
| page.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Regardless of automation, there will always be jobs that are
| so "dumb" but still expensive to automate that people can do
| cheaper then machines.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Writing SEO content isn't necessarily one of them anymore.
| Check out AI content services like https://www.frase.io/.
| You can also generate things like product descriptions
| inside the GPT-3 playground.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Within the last 6 months I'm seeing a rise of very good NLP
| content farms that almost have what I'm looking for but not
| quite. I think what they do is start off a transformer
| based NLP with example queries that others have searched
| for and it generates a realistic looking answer that's
| usually wrong. The scale and breadth of these could only be
| done by machines.
| [deleted]
| slightwinder wrote:
| > 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 secretly paid ads.
|
| So are reddit-comments and entries. There it's even worse,
| because most people don't connect the content with
| manipulation.
|
| > The "best" recipe for pancakes is only what's trending on
| instagram right now.
|
| So, like reddit? I mean every platform has their hive mind, and
| reddit is even worse, because the hive mind can be manipulated
| with paid upvotes, not just reposting and comments.
|
| > The same for trending programmer tools.
|
| Aren't most of them yet again commercial products from
| companies?
| sbate1987 wrote:
| madrox wrote:
| That inauthenticity comment really hit home for me, too. I
| realize that I do not trust the internet at large, and haven't
| for a long time. That's been the real trigger for my retreat
| from mass social media into smaller, tigher online communities.
|
| Even HN is starting to feel like it wants to sell me something.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| The latter feeling may be because HN is run by a startup
| accelerator. They run literal native ads on the front page
| whenna startup they sponsor goes live.
| madrox wrote:
| I don't think that's where it comes from. It comes from the
| same places as Google, where people know the value of this
| community's attention. Posts at the top of HN are designed
| to get to the top of HN.
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| Totally agree on the reddit point, I've also noticed the same
| occurring to me. The girlfriend recently got Pokemon Arceus and
| sometimes asks me to Google something she wants to know.
|
| It's completely pointless, you just get a bunch of articles
| from news sites (??) that transcript the quest but not tell you
| anything more. I miss a nice community wiki like I'm used to
| from playing Dark Souls etc.
|
| I've just started appending site:reddit.com to everything,
| works a lot better.
| TimLeland wrote:
| I've been adding this to my searches for years. Check out
| this site that will save you a few keystrokes:
| https://gooreddit.com/
| salt-thrower wrote:
| Yeah, Fextralife saved my ass multiple times while working
| through the dark souls series. It's a shame that type of
| community resource isn't more popular.
| Havoc wrote:
| >Dead Internet Theory
|
| Reminds me of the "birds aren't real" theory. Its almost more
| social commentary than a serious theory
| Angostura wrote:
| The death of the authentic web really chimes with me. I have an
| almost physical reaction when I occasionally come across a page
| that isn't trying to sell me something, that is a labour of
| love.
|
| A month or so ago, I was trying to help someone retrieve some
| very old Wordpress for Mac files. I found
| http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos and was so touched, I sent
| the author a few dollars for a coffee
| gkkirilov wrote:
| Great take on the topic. I completely agree, love the small
| communities that form in Reddit and there I can find the
| experts to ask.
| dtemkin wrote:
| StackExchange is better for an informed discussion. Reddit
| has become too much like Yahoo! Answers.
| ozim wrote:
| Google was boiling the frog really really slow.
|
| You can still can get exact searches by google dorks but
| "normal" people might find "google trying to be smart" actually
| useful.
| rackjack wrote:
| Maybe a different kind of terror than Dead Internet Theory: the
| Internet is "alive", but it acts as if it was dead.
| zucked wrote:
| I, too, search "<search term> + reddit" often for product
| reviews and such. Thing is, the results on that front have
| started to slide as the paid review side of the internet
| catches on. I'm finding that it's getting harder and harder to
| trust the reddit search results - lots of shill accounts and
| obvious junk. That's not a google problem, specifically, but
| it's another degradation of a workaround for declining search
| result quality :(
| bee_rider wrote:
| The only real advantage of reddit is that somebody will
| usually be insulting the ad account, so you can hopefully
| glean some truth from the insults.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Unless there's a critical mass of shills, and then anyone
| who speaks out against them will get banned and/or
| downvoted to oblivion..
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of subreddits are clogged with the same bad info
| that's gotten all over Google's front page. The stickied
| "list of recommendations" on an enthusiast sub is just the
| same as you'd get from clicking the top result of "Best X
| 2022" on Google, complete with affiliate links
| mastazi wrote:
| I have a similar habit, I often search "[topic] forum" - I'm
| not fond of Reddit specifically due to accessibility issues
| although in some cases I still go there because it's the only
| good source.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Thanks, I hadn't realized I can use site:reddit.com also for
| recipes!
| samstave wrote:
| Any idea what reddit's valuation is currently looking like?
|
| I have long been surprised they havent been acquired .. I
| assume for sure they have had plenty of offerss in the past
| mardifoufs wrote:
| They have filed for an IPO last month with the SEC so they
| should go public very soon.
|
| Last valuation was at 10b$ which is ridiculous for a website
| that can literally get its most popular subreddits shutdown
| arbitrarily whenever a small group of extremely online
| volunteer mods decide to "go on strike" by locking the subs
| because they don't like something/someone else on the
| website.
|
| It happened before and the admins yielded to them so I don't
| see why it wouldn't happen again, especially since it's not
| like they can run the website without that weird cabal of
| (mostly delusional/psychotic) power mods doing their work for
| free.
| Lascaille wrote:
| I've also thought that. The reddit shutdown made the
| frontpage of (reputable) news sources, I can't imagine that
| investors aren't going to be asking the admins how much
| control they really have over the user experience on any
| given day.
| samstave wrote:
| >> _is ridiculous for a website that can literally get its
| most popular subreddits shutdown arbitrarily whenever a
| small group of extremely online volunteer mods decide to
| "go on strike" by locking the subs because they don't like
| something/someone else on the website_
|
| I have a story about this - and its worse than just mods --
| Admins intervene and set narrative on for whom is allowed
| to mod and make mod decisions...
|
| I wont reveal the details - but I have seen Admins
| literally come in and fuck up Mod orders because (my
| suspicion) is that the Admins have MANY accounts that
| /appear/ as mods - but are actually Admin shill accounts...
|
| I had this happen to me first hand and I was appalled.
|
| Reddit's ethics are absolute garbage in this regard.
| technothrasher wrote:
| They were acquired by Conde Nast in 2006.
| samstave wrote:
| Oh, forgot about that... Thanks
|
| Are they still under them?
|
| regardless, what is reddit's current value? (I've been on
| reddit for 15 years - but I have recently deleted my
| accounts due to censorship and ban-hammering for the most
| ridiculous reasons.)
| bradgessler wrote:
| I too have found myself searching more in Reddit. Not to throw
| shade on Reddit, but even if I find exactly what I'm looking
| for in there, it's depressing that it's all bound up inside of
| another walled garden who will eventually have the same
| incentive as Google: squeeze every last advertising dollar out
| of the produc... I mean users. Like Google, it's just a matter
| of time before they too lose their balance.
|
| A question worth posing to this community: how can we build an
| internet that's hostile to advertisers? Secondarily, how can
| said internet also be much more accessible to content authors
| so they won't have to learn a css, html, and JS to publish some
| stuff? Finally, how can that content be discovered from within
| this network?
| allochthon wrote:
| One small thought -- having the search engine be
| configurable, so that the user can specify which sources to
| give priority to (e.g., Reddit, NYT Wirecutter, Wikipedia,
| etc.), would be an incremental improvement.
| niccl wrote:
| A factor in there has got to be 'who pays?' If it's hostile
| to advertisers, then there's got to be money to pay for the
| infrastructure from somewhere.
|
| Maybe a tax on ISPs? I think I'd happily pay $10 extra per
| month for access to an ad-free interrnet. Maybe $20. But how
| many of the people that are already happy with the ads and
| poor google results would do so? Would it be sustainable?
| lrem wrote:
| I think you're grossly underestimating how much is needed
| to replace the ad revenue that feeds today's Internet.
| Remember, majority of people wouldn't pay for getting rid
| of ads, because they don't have the disposable income. So
| they're also not really worthwhile to advertisers. You have
| to divide the revenue by some small fraction of current
| users.
| ryan29 wrote:
| Yep. It's really weird if you think about it. The first
| time I saw a company being upfront about their ad revenue
| [1] I was surprised.
|
| > The Premium fee is basically about $7 per year, which
| is less than what a free user generates in ad revenue.
| Thus leagues that pay for Premium and use an ad-blocker
| are generating less revenue than free users.
|
| They charge about $20 per user per year to remove ads. I
| pay for that, so I'm not sure what kind of ads they have,
| but I'd love to see what they're advertising and what the
| click through + conversion rates look like.
|
| What you said makes sense to me. I wonder if advertisers
| are paying a fortune to acquire users with a lot of
| disposable income.
|
| 1. https://www.fantrax.com/forums/general/messages/public
| /l72mh...
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Agreed, Facebook makes something like 8 dollars a user
| per year? That's just one of the mega services, imagine
| replacing that money for all of the players that power
| your internet.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| Ads will always exist because they work. Only way is to ban
| them explicitly but you can do that with AdBlock for
| example but you still get SEO spam, placed content,
| inauthentic "recommendations".
| throw10920 wrote:
| > how can we build an internet that's hostile to advertisers?
|
| You have to reify "trust" into concrete, computer-
| representable data. Maybe borrow the "web of trust" concept
| from PGP, but do some sort of multiplicative thing where the
| amount you trust someone's recommendation online is the
| product of the trust relationships between you and the
| recommender. That's really the best you can do - even
| legislation against online advertising will be subverted by
| companies that go through layers of proxies to buy influence.
| mettamage wrote:
| > - "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."
|
| Haha, the noobs. I use HN instead _sunglasses cool face_
|
| A bit more seriously: I fully agree with this. And if HN
| doesn't have what I'm looking for then I use Reddit as well.
| But if HN has some info on the topic with a few highly upvoted
| threads, damn, it always impresses me.
| nextos wrote:
| Me too I even have a bookmarklet in Firefox so that I can use
| a prefix (hn) and the search is rewritten as
| site:news.ycombinator.com, to make sure all results are
| limited to HN.
|
| I also have the same kind of bookmarklet for Reddit and
| Google Scholar.
| brimble wrote:
| When I'm looking into some project or piece of software I'm
| unfamiliar with, I really do search for HN posts on it.
| Fastest way to cut through (enough) of the biased material
| and get something genuine. Even hyped stuff usually has
| enough contrarian posts to give you an idea of where to look
| for the skeletons.
| throw10920 wrote:
| HN has now been around a while, is really popular, and is
| starting to catch the attention of ad/marketing companies
| now, though - how do you know what _here_ is genuine?
|
| Even the heuristic of "only trust accounts older than n
| years" isn't perfect, as eventually a few people will
| undoubtedly sell their old accounts on a dark web market
| for a little extra cash...
| flyinghamster wrote:
| And it's not just the spammers. Any topic that touches
| domestic or international politics in any way almost
| instantly brings out a lot of bad-faith actors, here or
| anywhere else on the internet.
|
| > Even the heuristic of "only trust accounts older than n
| years" isn't perfect, as eventually a few people will
| undoubtedly sell their old accounts on a dark web market
| for a little extra cash...
|
| Yikes, I hadn't thought of that angle. That would explain
| some of the long-dormant accounts on Some Other Place
| that suddenly start spewing out-of-character garbage,
| assuming they weren't password-guessed, data-breached, or
| keylogged by some rando.
| api wrote:
| I view the Dead Internet Theory as Black Mirror style satire.
| All it would take is liberal application of GPT-3 style
| transformer AI to content generation and much of the Internet
| could be fake. You could have fake political trolls arguing
| with other fake political trolls from the other side, fake
| blogs, fake review sites, etc. and it would take me a while to
| notice. Most of the modern Internet is just that bad.
|
| Advertising always creates perverse incentives. It works in
| traditional media too. Look at what happened to things like
| Discovery and The Learning Channel when they became subject to
| advertising based pressure for ratings. They went from having
| actual educational content to being full of tabloid trash.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| Searching Reddit helps but the quality of comments has gotten
| lower since 2015 or so. It seems to coincide with the wave of
| subreddit bans and the nakedly politically-driven moderation on
| subreddits. And with the reflexive attitude--against anything
| countering the Reddit consensus--that developed during the
| Trump years. High quality posters seem to have withdrawn from
| the site (at least in how much they comment) and what's left is
| mostly ignorant teenagers and bitter millennials with shitty
| jobs. In turn, that crowd is much less likely to upvote high-
| quality thoughtful content, so the cycle continues. The decline
| in quality has trickled even into the less popular subs. Don't
| get me wrong, the site has always had problems, but the more
| recent decline in thoughtfulness is dramatic.
|
| The worst part is that despite Reddit getting so much worse,
| there is no other place that's grown to fill the void. This
| place is great, and I do search HN when it makes sense, but
| it's small and narrow in scope. Reddit basically crowds out any
| competing websites by sucking up all the low-level chatter
| required to sustain a community, but has also pushed away high-
| quality posters, who now have no place to go. Very tragic but
| maybe a good case study in shitty network effects.
| twoodfin wrote:
| I dunno, looking at the growth curve in Paul Graham's tweet I
| expect most of the drop in average comment quality can be
| attributed to the size of the user base. It's hard to keep
| high-quality content the norm even in much smaller
| communities.
|
| /r/nfl had a reputation for high-quality content and wasn't a
| particular battleground in the Trump Wars. It's still a good
| breaking news feed, and the live game threads are fun, but
| every post is dominated by joke comments and memes.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I find the idea that banning Trump supporters killed reddit
| to be pretty far-fetched.
|
| To the extent there is a change in quality, it probably comes
| from other factors, including having a bigger, broader, and
| different user base now than in the past (and only a small
| portion of that change likely came from Trump-related bans).
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Parent didn't say Trump supporters. And I completely agree
| with their observation. Quality went completely off a cliff
| around that time. I think it just officially entrenched the
| Reddit orthodoxy and that there is a "right way" to think,
| and that infected even non-political subreddits. Not all
| though, I know some subs are much better and open to
| discussion than in the past.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| Yep. These days you'll even get banned from fandom
| subreddits if you criticize the tv show/movie/book too
| heavily.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Quality on any non niche popular subreddits were already
| abysmal long before 2015. Reddit is useless for anything
| which is not highly specific but there are some diamonds in
| the rough: great subreddits exists about fashion, knives,
| gardening, coffee, shaving and plenty of other weird
| interests.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| This is true but I find that about 2015 is the inflection
| point. Even posts about highly technical subjects are not
| as good if they're from after that.
| fallingknife wrote:
| With quality comes success. With success comes popularity.
| With popularity comes idiots.
| jedwhite wrote:
| 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 a distribution monopoly
| through Android, its deal with Apple on iOS and MacOS, and on
| desktop through Chrome.
|
| I'm working on a search engine startup. It is in all practical
| senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their
| search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS
| level. And despite being technically possible on desktop with
| Chrome, it is for all practical purposes beyond what any
| typical consumer can easily do.
|
| Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality -
| is what keeps consumers searching Google and clicking ads.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _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._
|
| I disagree. Two to three years ago I could get more what I
| wanted in a complex search once I tuned it properly. So
| Google had a twenty year run of good and useful searches.
| Google also worked to strong arm their monopoly, yes. But I
| claim they still served some quality after that. It's not
| that unusual for a monopoly built on quality to maintain
| their quality for a period of time after it achieves that
| monopoly status - institutional standards die but they can
| die over time.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search
| anymore...Their monopoly over distribution - not search
| result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google
|
| I don't disagree with this as a fact, but I think there are a
| lot of things that work this way that aren't actually
| monopolies in the competition-preventing sense. If I wanted
| to launch a new breakfast cereal, getting my product into
| grocery stores would be one of the major challenges of
| starting that business. Competition for shelf space is a core
| concern of a lot of consumables. This definitely creates a
| lot of stickiness and barriers, and that comes with its share
| of downsides, but there are also good reasons that
| distribution systems work the way they do. Transaction costs
| are important.
| jedwhite wrote:
| I don't think competition for shelf space is the right
| analogy here. Perhaps for Apps within the App Store you
| could argue that. But when there are only two mobile
| operating systems with meaningful market share, and when
| they make it impossible to change to a new search engine at
| all, and the results all come from only two sources (Google
| or Bing) that's a straight monopoly over distribution.
|
| It's a similar situation with the App Stores also. They are
| monopolies. We've gone from a world of personal computing
| where software was a free market with open choices, to a
| closed and proprietary world where there is only one
| available source of software.
| criddell wrote:
| > We've gone from a world of personal computing where
| software was a free market with open choices, to a closed
| and proprietary world where there is only one available
| source of software.
|
| That's true but at the same time I think most people are
| pretty happy with it. HN readers aren't typical in this
| regard.
|
| I've been writing software as my job since the mid-80's
| and it's only been in the past 4 or 5 years where I
| realized that I'm finally pretty happy with the tech I
| use day-to-day.
|
| If I had any complaint it would be that app stores have
| made software too inexpensive. When I look at something
| like Procreate which I think cost something like $10, I'm
| blown away. This can't be sustainable.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| You have a point but shelf space is physically limited.
| Online real estate is not so limited. In my country there
| is reasonably healthy competition between supermarkets.
| Supermarkets do have self-branded products but they don't
| cross-sell competitors self-branded products.
|
| Here we have Apple with Google and Bing on their shelves.
| Microsoft have Bing and Google on their shelves. And Google
| have Goggle or Bing. Is that healthy or an oligopoly?
| oblio wrote:
| > Online real estate is not so limited.
|
| It's limited.
|
| It's limited by our attention spans.
|
| There's a reason web designers call specific pages
| "valuable real estate".
|
| For example Google's search page, the one with the input,
| is probably the most valuable web real estate in the
| world, closely followed by the first page of results once
| you've typed your query and hit Enter.
|
| I'm willing to bet $100 that the second page of results
| probably gets less than 1000th the hits the first one
| gets. Heck, make that 1 millionth of the hits the first
| results page gets.
| null_object wrote:
| > It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or
| Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine
| on Safari or at the iOS level.
|
| There are five (very simply accessible) different choices for
| Safari on iOS.
|
| But if you switch to iCabMobile on iOS there are TWENTY-FIVE
| search engines to choose from.
| jedwhite wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to point out that is not something
| most consumers are going to be able to do. The only
| meaningful search engine choice is that available within
| Safari. And you did install another App, they still aren't
| used from the system search on iOS, or from Safari itself.
|
| I think you might as well be asking regular consumers to
| root their device so they can use whatever Apps from
| outside the App Store, or whatever search engine they want.
|
| Also, even for a technical user, there is simply no way on
| an iPhone to change to a new search engine not already on a
| tiny list, and from talking with hundreds of consumers, I
| have not talked with a single non-technical person who
| could work out themselves how to change their Safari search
| engine to even one of the 5 limited choices, let alone a
| new option.
| Angostura wrote:
| I don't think installing an app and rooting a device are
| fair comparisons
| jedwhite wrote:
| Unfortunately, installing an App doesn't let you change
| the system-wide search on iOS (or Safari browser), so
| rooting the device would be the only real way. My
| intended point is that if you're a consumer trying to
| change your search engine to a new option on an iPhone,
| there is no way to do it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I would think that there'd be an online opportunity for a
| search engine that only searches humanly curated sites. Those
| sites would be ones that have quality information rather than
| spam. Some obvious examples - wikipedia, reddit, hackernews,
| public domain books, etc.
|
| It's easy to game an algorithm, but hard to game a human -
| humans know garbage when they see it.
|
| As an aside, whenever I get a prescription, included with it
| is a dense two page sheet of detailed information about the
| drug. I see nothing like that online with a search. Why is
| this sort of thing not online?
| seszett wrote:
| At least France and Belgium have public websites with the
| information sheets of all authorized drugs. I think at
| least the French one generally comes up in the first
| results on Google (when searching from a French
| connection).
| WalterBright wrote:
| This is the kind of public service the FDA _should_ be
| doing.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I would have gotten so excited about something like that 20
| years ago, I would have yelled "Yahoo!" from the top of my
| lungs.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Maybe Yahoo's time has come again! Maybe Google's decline
| started when they no longer had competition from Yahoo?
|
| The interesting thing would be coming up with a
| sustainable business model for it. One way might be the
| _users_ pay for it, either per-search or per-month. This
| way the incentives to provide good search results align
| with the interests of the people doing the searching, not
| the people being searched.
|
| The people who want to be searched would have an
| incentive to make a quality site that the search service
| would believe would please their customers.
|
| I can think of people willing to pay for quality searches
| - professionals looking for things they need, like
| programmers, lawyers, researchers, etc.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| >Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses
| to use Google search anymore
|
| Do you have anything substantive to support this? I highly
| doubt it is true given the fact that the verb "to google"
| literally means "to search the internet".
| cco wrote:
| Your argument supports the original poster. It is no longer
| a conscious choice, "Do I search for this via Google? Maybe
| I should use Bing? What about DuckDuckGo?", it is, "Oh,
| lemme Google that".
| jedwhite wrote:
| Google is the default search on the vast majority of phones
| and desktop browsers by default.
|
| People don't change their search engine from something else
| to Google, because it is already the default search engine
| on the devices they buy and the web browsers they use.
|
| So people do not make a conscious choice to use Google. The
| vast majority make no choice at all. Google is synonymous
| with search because it is already the search engine on
| their phones and computers. They are simply never asked
| which search engine they want to use.
|
| Most consumers have no idea that you can even change your
| search engine. After talking with hundreds of users, they
| find it's either impossible to change (iPhone/MacOS) or too
| hard (Chrome).
|
| If you're Duck Duck Go or Bing, at least you're in a very
| limited dropdown list if someone does want to try something
| else. If you're a new search engine startup, you're not an
| option at all.
| kahmeal wrote:
| I think you missed the point here -- people synonymize
| googling with searching and therefore aren't choosing to
| google -- they're choosing to search but ending up using
| google despite having made no conscious effort to do so
| (it's just there).
| dwighteb wrote:
| > It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or
| Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine
| on Safari or at the iOS level.
|
| On my IOS device, under Settings -> Safari -> Search Engine,
| I have a drop down with options, including Bing and
| DuckDuckgo, but defaulted to google.
|
| On Macos, with Safari running, Safari -> Preferences... ->
| Search, Search Engine I have a drop down, defaulted to
| google, with Bing and DuckDuckgo amongst other choices.
|
| Agreed on google"s effort to get their search engine as the
| default. However I just don't understand how changing search
| engine is impossible given what I'm seeing on my devices? Nor
| does it seem over the top onerous to my eyes.
| jedwhite wrote:
| Yes, but you can't add a new search engine at all! So if a
| search engine isn't one of the tiny number of options in
| that dropdown, you can't change to it. That applies on both
| iOS and MacOS. And that option is used for the entire
| system-wide search, not just Safari.
|
| So here's a challenge, try adding a search engine not on
| that list. You can see the search engine I'm working on in
| my profile if you're interested (I don't want to hijack
| this thread with self-promotion). I challenge you to change
| to a new competitive option like it. You simply can't. That
| is a clear monopoly over distribution.
|
| On desktop in Chrome, as noted it is not something any
| typical consumer can do easily. But even if they could,
| Google does not allow you to set the New Tab to another
| search engine, even by setting the homepage to one. So
| every new tab opened on Chrome takes you back to Google
| search, even if a consumer figures out how to change their
| homepage. As for changing the nav bar search, no ordinary
| consumer is going to be able to work out how to change a
| search URL pattern. That is clearly intended to prevent
| consumers changing.
|
| So I stand by my point, especially on an iPhone, you simply
| cannot change your search engine to a new search engine
| like us. It is impossible.
| figers wrote:
| Its been a while but when you visited a search engine
| website it then showed up as an option, not sure which OS
| / browser that was on though
| jedwhite wrote:
| Firefox supports an open search standard which is a big
| improvement, so that's probably where you saw this. It
| provides an easier experience from the nav bar to add a
| new search engine to the browser. In practice, while it's
| a huge improvement, I've found talking with users that
| it's mostly helpful if someone technical is talking them
| through the change.
| pkz wrote:
| I tries you search engine with a few queries and I was
| pleasantly surprised! Keep up the good work!
| jedwhite wrote:
| I didn't want to take the discussion off topic but I
| appreciate that and thank you! Lots of work to do! Please
| reach out if you'd like to as well :)
| daanlo wrote:
| I fully understand your point and defaults are very
| strong.
|
| That being said, I try new search engines from time to
| time and always get back to google, because non of the
| others have worked for me (in a professional context). I
| probably do 200 searches per day and google is most
| likely to give me relevant info on my first query (maybe
| 80-90% success rate). All others I have tried have been
| around 40-50% win an avg. of 2-3 search queries to find
| my result. That is a huge daily time sync on 200 searches
| per day.
|
| I will also test your search engine.
|
| And before having tested it, I have some unsolicited
| advice ;) At least these are things that would make me
| switch: 1) you are strong in my vertical. 50% of my daily
| search queries are professional. Probably 10-20% are
| programming related. If you were better 20% better than
| google at delivering results for that subset, I would
| probably use you. 2) If you had very strong support for
| my locale. Based in Germany, 50% of my private searches
| are in German. Most search engines, apart from google,
| suck in German. My assumption is their market share is so
| small that they don't put effort into any language
| specific search syntax understanding. German or large
| language groups like Spanish, Hindi, French come to mind.
| 3) If you can't become a default search engine on safari,
| maybe you can role your own browser (chromium fork or
| something) where you are the default. You could package
| it as: MySearchEngine App. It is actually a fully
| functional browser, but users really use it because they
| want to use your search engine. That might give easier
| access than having to manually navigate to your website
| in safari.
|
| </ end of unsolicited advice />
| jedwhite wrote:
| The ultimate test of any search engine is always the
| results. While the project I'm working on is definitely
| still an alpha, I'd love to chat with you when you try it
| out. I don't want to take the conversation here off-
| topic. To your general points though, there are
| definitely opportunities to provide better results within
| specialist areas of knowledge, and for local markets.
|
| I think most of the search startups are doing their own
| mobile app. On iOS, the system search and browser remains
| Google/Safari (and the App is essentially just a wrapper
| on Safari for browsing). But at least it is something. I
| think you'll see more people doing desktop apps, although
| the dominance of Google through Chromium forks for this
| isn't a coincidence. It feels like the bad old days of
| re-packaging Internet Explorer with a custom homepage all
| over again.
| masa331 wrote:
| Have you tried Kagi.com? I switched to it and i'm very
| happy even with searches in my native language for
| example
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| > So here's a challenge, try adding a search engine not
| on that list.
|
| Well, you can. _I_ just tried it and works. Granted, you
| need a third party app, but it 's doable.
| jedwhite wrote:
| I'd be interested in the steps you took. Third-party Apps
| on iOS can't change the Safari or system-wide options for
| search engines as far as I'm aware. Installing a third-
| party App just gives you a wrapper around Safari for
| browsing while you use that App only. If you swipe down
| on your home screen to use the system search, or open
| Safari itself, nothing has changed. I can ask you to
| install our App or another search provider's App, but it
| doesn't change your iPhone's search engine or add it to
| Safari.
| [deleted]
| dwighteb wrote:
| I see your point. I would have sworn that DuckDuckGo was
| added as a search entry when I installed that app on my
| ios device, however my memory is hazy from that long ago,
| so perhaps that search engine was added at a different
| point, like when it became big enough for Apple to notice
| them.
| donnythecroc wrote:
| Duckduckgo uses Bing and they also pay millions to be
| included.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| We pay nothing so are not included. On the other hand we
| are happy to provide a one click search from our search
| engine or eight other search engines/services, currently
| from our web app [0]. One click for Google (if that's
| your thing), one click for Bing or Gigablast search
| engine results, one click for Brave and some of the many
| Bing and few Google syndicates - DuckDuckGo, Ecosia,
| Startpage.
|
| [0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/02/search-choices-
| enable-freedo...
| Angostura wrote:
| Source on the 'pays millions'?
| jedwhite wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of DuckDuckGo. My understanding is that it
| took a significant amount of effort and public lobbying
| for them to get added to that list, and it was back in
| 2014 that was announced.
| RunSet wrote:
| > Google does not allow you to set the New Tab to another
| search engine
|
| Firefox has removed the ability to set a default page for
| new tabs and requires users to install an extension to
| restore the functionality, which in fact provides
| degraded functionality. As originally implemented the new
| tab would load the new page instantly. With the
| extension, a new tab is created, focus is given to the
| URL bar and after a brief but noticeable pause, the
| chosen page loads.
| null_object wrote:
| > especially on an iPhone, you simply cannot change your
| search engine to a new search engine like us. It is
| impossible.
|
| See my post above about iCabMobile, where there are
| TWENTY-FIVE search engines to choose from.
|
| There are also other browsers than Safari and iCabMobile
| on iOS, many of which give alternatives to their search
| engine choices.
|
| Naturally if you think only users who choose the
| _default_ browser are interesting as your market, I
| wonder if those users would take a chance on your
| alternative search engine?
| jedwhite wrote:
| I replied to your duplicate post separately, but it is
| worth noting that even if you install an alternative
| browsing App and use it, the iOS system search (swipe
| down from the top to access the search bar) is still
| using Google and Safari. And even if you were to use
| another browser like iCabMobile, it also simply does not
| let you add in a new search engine not already in its own
| options.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Your search engine doesn't seem to offer an OpenSearch
| description. Wouldn't adding one solve the problem for
| some browsers at least? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/
| jedwhite wrote:
| Thanks, just to let you know, yes, it does have an
| opensearch description. But in practical terms that
| doesn't help much even if a startup search engine adds
| it.
|
| Unfortunately, while OpenSearch is great where it's
| supported, outside of Firefox, the only real support is
| for in-site-search on other platforms (where you type a
| site name and then a search string), and not for changing
| your browser search engine. And it doesn't work at all on
| iOS even for site search.
|
| So unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem of how a
| consumer can easily change their search engine to
| something new on Chrome or Safari or an iPhone.
|
| I don't want to sidetrack the discussion, but if you want
| to confirm the opensearch description, you can open our
| site in Firefox, then click the "..." in the browser
| address bar and then click "Install Andi Search". Or
| reach out and very happy to talk you through it.
| nefitty wrote:
| I use my own server for search. I just had to add an
| OpenSearch xml file.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch
| jedwhite wrote:
| The OpenSearch standard is great and definitely an
| improvement where it's supported, but unfortunately as
| far as I'm aware in most browsers that's limited to site-
| search (in website search after typing a url). It doesn't
| work at all on iOS.
|
| On Firefox it makes it easier to talk a non-technical
| user through how to change their default search engine,
| and at least they aren't entering search pattern strings
| into a settings field as with Chrome.
| nefitty wrote:
| I use it on iOS Chrome.
| jedwhite wrote:
| As far as I'm aware and the OpenSearch docs, support is
| limited to in-site searches on most platforms outside of
| Firefox (not changing default search option for example
| using Chrome on iOS). Would be really interested in the
| steps you followed if you're happy to share them.
| nefitty wrote:
| For sure. I added this file at the top level, as
| opensearch.xml. Sorry if formatting is wrecked.
| <OpenSearchDescription
| xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
| xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/"
| > <ShortName>My Search</ShortName>
| <Description>Personal Search</Description>
| <Url type="text/html"
| method="get"
| template="https://mysite.com/?q={searchTerms}"
| /> <Url
| type="application/rss+xml" indexOffset="0"
| rel="results"
| template="/results?query={searchTerms}" />
| <Url type="application/json"
| rel="suggestions"
| template="/suggest?q={searchTerms}" />
| <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
| <Image height="32" width="32" type="image/x-icon">
| https://yarnpkg.com/favicon.ico </Image>
| </OpenSearchDescription>
|
| In the head tag:
|
| <link rel="search" href="/opensearch.xml"
| type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="My
| Search" />
|
| I then went to my site on Chrome iOS and it showed up
| under Settings > Search Engine > Recently visited. I then
| selected it and now anything I put in my url bar gets
| sent to my server. It's pretty sick.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| I concur. And would add that on Safari and iOS, it suits
| Google and Microsoft too keep others out; noting all
| options are Google, Bing or Bing sydnicates). And it
| suits Apple nicely; $15 bn from Google, pure margin. How
| much do they get from Microsft/syndicates? Meanwhile all
| search listed options in Chrome are Google or Microsoft
| (Bing and Bing syndicates). And, to complete all Edge
| options are Bing, Bing syndicates or Google. Disclosure:
| also alternative search engine CEO.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Google pays Apple for the privilege to be the first.
|
| Another way to think it is that Google pays Apple, so that
| they don't create their own search engine.
| rhubarbcustard wrote:
| Just tried https://andisearch.com/ and I like it. Felt like a
| fresh look on results instead of the same old SEO ones. For
| example, searched for a few Java queries and found very
| informative website/results that weren't dominated by
| Bealdung. Searched for "soccer scores", "chelsea FC", "prince
| andrew", "WP export" and found things that would never have
| been on Google's first page, but were excellent returns. Nice
| work.
| [deleted]
| wisty wrote:
| Google's problem is they've virtually nothing (given their
| resources) to "commoditizing their complement".
| https://www.gwern.net/Complement
|
| Google's compliment is web sites. What have they done to make a
| web site easier to make?
|
| They even killed their RSS feed. They have released a bit of
| web tech, but their offerings are generally a bit sad or only
| solve Google problems (e.g. Go).
|
| If you want to distribute an .exe or .app, MS and Apple have
| released some pretty good tools to help. If you want to write a
| blog or make a simple web app, it's unlikely you're going to
| think "Google has some great stuff to help, and has awesome
| tools". Mozilla's web resources are better. Microsoft's web
| resources are better.
| bshoemaker wrote:
| That's so funny, because I use Google to search reddit, because
| Google's search of reddit is better than Reddit's.
| winternett wrote:
| Another factor that isn't being fully accounted for is a new
| SEO/marketing technique where many people are asking scripted
| questions publicly on sites like reddit and then stealthily
| providing answers that market a product or service. This leads
| to reddit results not being exactly authentic as well. Pretty
| much most online reviews cannot be trusted as we are begged to
| do positive reviews of companies (and when companies outright
| purchase positive reviews, which is also very rampant) also as
| a factor.
|
| Though Google is at fault for letting their service falter to
| the "payola" race, many other factors are in play all across
| the Internet since data quality has faltered almost totally.
| For major-cost and non-refundable purchases I need to trust, I
| go to brick and mortar stores and inspect what I am buying. I
| am thankful not everything has shifted to an online-only model.
| It's going to be a very bumpy ride on the Internet until
| Congress and consumer protection laws wake TF up and do their
| job.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| Is Google unique in that, though? Amazon reviews are
| worthless now because companies pay customers to leave
| positive reviews or pay review farms to leave positive
| reviews. Even if someone reports them to Amazon, though, the
| companies just close their accounts and open new ones with
| different names and sell the same product. It's so trivial
| for them to pivot when they get caught that I'm not sure
| there is a solution to this problem.
| winternett wrote:
| It's not really us who can resolve the issues...
|
| I just wrote my own "rant" on the matter and posted it here
| along with the start to fixing them:
|
| Yes, your frustration with the Internet and modern business
| is real
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350322
| adamc wrote:
| There is a perfectly good solution, and some people use it:
| don't buy from unknown vendors. If you buy a product from
| one of a few well-known companies in that space, they have
| a big investment in their brand, and are much less likely
| to engage in behaviors that might diminish the value of
| that brand.
|
| The price is that you pay more -- effectively, you are
| paying for that branding.
|
| I've had so many bad experiences on Amazon that I am
| increasingly doing just that. It doesn't apply to
| everything, but it is a useful strategy.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| So how does that apply to the conversation around Google,
| though? We can't only ingest information from a small
| group of sources. That's antithetical to the entire
| concept of the internet.
| adamc wrote:
| Isn't that effectively what limiting a google search to
| reddit does?
|
| Not that I'm convinced it will keep working, since reddit
| isn't really a vendor in the same sense, and doesn't have
| those incentives.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Reddit does have astroturfing, but a lot of communities are
| aggressive about identifying and banning shills, so it's not
| as widespread as in google search results.
| orangepurple wrote:
| More info about the Dead Internet Theory (DIT)
|
| https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
|
| Archive: https://archive.ph/VoaxV
| coolso wrote:
| > I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly
| because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are
| secretly paid ads.
|
| There is so much shilling on Reddit if you knew it would blow
| your mind. I wish more people realized this. Reddit is the best
| place to shill because not only is it ridiculously simple,
| people also automatically assume you're not shilling, and then
| once you seed the idea, everyone else will do the shilling for
| you indirectly.
|
| The healthiest way to use Reddit is like Wikipedia: assume the
| information you're reading is highly compromised and biased in
| one way or another, but use it as a starting point in your
| further research and it's a great tool.
|
| Reddit posts are not your friends. Upvotes do not mean the
| contents of the posts are legitimate or not shilling.
|
| Reddit is the best place to shill and the sooner the non-
| shillers figure that out, the better off the entire internet
| will be.
| Klonoar wrote:
| >Upvotes do not mean the contents of the posts are legitimate
| or not shilling.
|
| I increasingly think that upvote/downvote culture is the
| worst thing to happen to the internet and the world at large.
|
| The problem is I don't have an alternative solution to
| propose.
|
| Your comment is spot-on in my opinion though - I usually
| _start_ with Reddit results, but try to check against other
| sources before relying on it.
| Lascaille wrote:
| Reddit also - in my opinon - actively enables shilling and
| botposting. Why do they have an API?
|
| A forum that's meant to be 100% about humans talking to
| humans doesn't need an API, so why does it expose one?
|
| Also the model of user-created and user-moderated subreddits
| actively enables the creation of shill accounts. It's trivial
| to create a subreddit and use it to farm karma with a ton of
| bots. If you can keep real users from ever entering your
| walled garden of a subreddit (of which there are many) your
| bots will never be detected until you wipe their comment
| history and set them loose on the rest of the site.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| >A forum that's meant to be 100% about humans talking to
| humans doesn't need an API, so why does it expose one?
|
| Third-party clients?
| jedwhite wrote:
| There have been many interesting threads recently about the
| decline of Google's search quality here on HN. There's zero doubt
| search results are getting worse, and that ads and spam are the
| cause. But Google's financial performance has been going from
| record to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the
| market.
|
| Each thread has had some common themes, but what's surprising is
| how different the problems discussed are. Here are a few of the
| best recent discussions:
|
| Google no longer producing high quality search results in
| significant categories (twitter.com/mwseibel):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136
|
| Search engines and SEO spam (twitter.com/paulg):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29782186
|
| Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search
| results?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372
|
| DuckDuckGo Traffic - with spam discussion
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29852783
|
| Is Google Search Deteriorating?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886423
|
| Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031672
|
| Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535
|
| For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30213110
|
| Disclaimer: I'm working on a search startup, so I have a clear
| bias, but one of the main reasons I am working on a search
| startup is because Google's results are clearly getting worse.
| websitejanitor wrote:
| The weird thing about these is that they blame Google's search
| results on spam. I work in SEO and I can tell you that they are
| much better at ignoring spam than they were in 2010, where a
| lot of these people quoted still have their heads at regarding
| SEO.
|
| What's been going on at Google is reliance on neural nets to
| take care of various ranking algorithm tasks. We want better
| keyword matching to generate results, but Google is developing
| ways to match query vectors to document vectors using stuff
| like BERT. Google is looking at the knowledge graph of entities
| that emerges out of the content we write and is trying to
| figure out which relationships between entities are important
| to a query and which result set has the best coverage and
| diversity. This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text
| that covers multiple related topics and bury the point inside
| of it.
|
| The other major shift in Google is how they consider links.
| PageRank is still around in some form, but there could be other
| link-based algorithms that serve similar purposes. The last few
| years of core algorithm updates put a lot of importance on
| receiving links from news websites for any keyword with
| commercial intent. If you want to rank, go hard on public
| relations.
|
| The result is a real loss of accuracy and a lot more false
| positives that are semi-related to the query.
| Lascaille wrote:
| >This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text that
| covers multiple related topics
|
| Is it accurate to call organisations that write text
| according to google's incentives 'publishers' or are they
| merely spammers trying to maximise their pageviews and
| conversions?
| Deathcrow wrote:
| Yup. IMHO spam has become so good at mimicking genuine
| content, it's hard to recognize even for a human curator.
| There's so many websites in the top google results that I'm
| sure are entirely AI generated, which exist for the sole
| purpose to propagate affiliate links and ads.
| aero142 wrote:
| Yes. It's like the results when people realized you could
| have a classifier trained to match a person's face,
| reversed to generate a new face based on the classifier.
| There are a few extra steps, but the web is just recipe
| sites and product reviews that look like what the google
| ranking algorithms idealized site looks like.
| gear_envy wrote:
| I'm glad more and more people, from both here and on Reddit
| (similar discussions appear sporadically) are beginning to
| notice. I actually have most of these links already favorited
| haha.
|
| I hope your startup pans out well. Thanks for doing your part
| to make the internet less terrible!
| jedwhite wrote:
| Hey thank you. I think one of the good things to come out of
| Google's decline is that there are now a lot more people
| working on the problem of search again. There is also the
| possible if faint promise of a different economic model for
| funding content online than advertising starting to show on
| the horizon, with a lot of the ideas around web3. Ad-tech
| truly does make the whole Internet awful.
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| I'm always interested what people make or do, do you have some
| sort of link?
| jedwhite wrote:
| I didn't want to hijack the thread for self-promotion, but it
| is linked from my HN profile, and thank you for asking!
| csomar wrote:
| > But Google's financial performance has been going from record
| to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the
| market.
|
| Of course. I used to get one ad on YouTube from time to
| another. Now for every 3 minutes videos, I have two forced ads
| at start and one ad at the end. Heck, the other day, I got an
| ad inside a 2 minutes video. The fall is going to be legendary.
| ruffrey wrote:
| I pay for YouTube premium and haven't seen an ad the entire
| time. It's worth $12 a month to me. Also get music streaming
| with it.
| shuntress wrote:
| I think that Google tweaking prices until they find the most
| profitable ratio of ads-in-youtube to subscription-cost-of-
| ad-free-youtube is going to be _at worst_ a slight dip.
| Certainly not a "legendary fall"
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| Isn't strong financial performance what's masking slow decline
| in quality, then when competitors take marketshare everyone in
| Google would be pikachu face.
| creeble wrote:
| I wish you great luck and success. This just seems part of a
| long cycle to me (of course, the older I get, the more
| everything seems like a long cycle).
|
| Google wasn't the first search engine, and I expect it won't be
| the last. Page Rank redefined search, and now that results are
| 95% advertising-driven, the underlying "search algorithm" means
| nothing at all. Someone with a "new" algo that isn't so
| completely ad-driven (until they too succumb to the only
| existing model for revenue) could un-seat the giant, at least
| maybe in search.
|
| This is the curse of the advertising model for all things.
| Though it can make a lot of money for a good long time.
| jedwhite wrote:
| Thank you! I think there are alternatives to ads that are
| worth trying.
|
| A freemium model is viable. You can't have ads or ad-tech
| tracking, or you just end up another Google. But you can have
| free anonymous use, and paid pro or business plans (API use
| etc). And referral link attribution can be done anonymously
| and with no commercial influence on search results.
|
| I also think you have to share any revenue with the people
| actually making content fairly. That's one of the worst
| things about Google, and it's one of the reasons the entire
| media landscape has become an ad-tech nightmare, because
| Google and Facebook take the lion's share of digital revenue.
|
| It's worth trying other approaches. Ads are a corrupting
| influence. If you don't say a hard no to them, they
| eventually take over.
| tazjin wrote:
| > until they too succumb to the only existing model for
| revenue
|
| But it's not - if you're happy with your potential userbase
| being O(millions) instead of O(billions), charging for your
| service is completely fine.
| david_allison wrote:
| Tell HN: Google returning 'Untitled' results that redirect to
| malware/spam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30117388
|
| Still ongoing for me, not as bad, but an example from a couple
| weeks ago:
|
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/11O1_awYptJ9mKzn-w9T45fpNPj4...
| randerson wrote:
| Welp, now that the secret is getting out, I guess we can expect
| Reddit and HN to be taken over by SEO companies.
| vernie wrote:
| In the tweet claiming that Reddit is unique the Instagram chart
| looks about the same. What am I missing?
| yissp wrote:
| While the content on Reddit is probably more authentic than what
| you're likely to find on Google these days, there's still quite a
| lot of obviously (or not-so-obviously) corporate-sponsored stuff,
| and I imagine this is only going to get worse. For example, see
| https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/. I think this is
| unfortunately the fate of any platform that gets sufficiently
| popular.
| mikelpr wrote:
| sad but I do this too
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| One thing I hate about most Google (and Duck) top results:
| Keyword stuffing
|
| I search about how to do X in python, the top result will have a
| paragraph or 2 on "What is X in python " "Why do people use X in
| python"
|
| You can see its being done to stuff more keywords into the
| headers
|
| But why just google? Like I said, duck.com results are similar-
| ish
| mastazi wrote:
| Reddit has peaked, at the time PG wrote that tweet you could see
| some volatility with still some isolated peaks, but if you look
| at it now it's more clear that the general trend is downwards
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit
| ravenstine wrote:
| Search in general is dying.
|
| Although I've yet to evaluate Kagi (though I did get a beta
| invite the other day), the only search engine that seems to be
| not totally nerf'd today is Yandex, and even that one has
| problems (lots of foreign language content). I still primarily
| use DDG a lot, but often times I have to go to Yandex if I want a
| more exact match.
|
| I do have to wonder exactly how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are using
| search engines, if at all? This isn't to say I think they're not
| bothering with search... but that I just don't actually know.
| Might it be that the use patterns of the youth are influencing
| how Google and the rest of the search engines are tailoring their
| algorithms?
| z3t4 wrote:
| Adding money to the mix is always problematic. Money destroyed
| sports. And money destroyed the web. The amateurs are still out
| there, but the content served by SERP's are mostly from
| professionals. Just like when you look at sports on TV there are
| mostly professionals.
| afterburner wrote:
| Indeed, I came to the conclusion to search reddit for answers
| some time ago without any input by anyone (other than being a
| reddit user already). I want a frank discussion of the pros and
| cons of certain choices, not some obvious click-hungry
| promotional article with a bland rosy opinion.
| codingdave wrote:
| I'm not going to vouch for Google's search results - we all know
| they are declining. Even so, if everyone is using Google to
| search reddit, that doesn't tell me that google is losing its
| search dominance. It tells me that even as people try to get away
| from it, they still use it as much as ever and by that usage are
| likely helping Google figure out which use cases they need to
| develop to improve their products.
|
| Also, the idea that reddit will replace it seems unlikely to me.
| As much as there is decent content on reddit, it exists side-by-
| side with junk, jokes, trolling, memes, shills, and straight up
| misinformation. This doesn't stop people from using and enjoying
| reddit - much of the silliness is all in good fun, but it will
| become a serious barrier to trying to become the search engine
| for online content.
| yalogin wrote:
| I did not know that many other people also append "reddit" in
| front of their search queries. Now that I think about it I have
| stopped using google search for things I really didn't know
| about. For all things I didn't know or need to learn about I
| append "reddit" in front of the search query on google or go to
| YouTube for video instructions. I use google search exclusively
| as a short cut to typing for a link, or stuff I know it has
| already indexed like a place of business. For example I want to
| go to an imdb parents guide for a specific movie, I just type the
| name of the movie and parents guide and google shows me the link
| -- this saves me a bunch of clicks and page loads.
| blueboo wrote:
| There's a strong possibility the author is totally wrong here.
| Reddit search is famously broken, so the only way people can
| reliably search Reddit is via Google. (Because Google search
| is...broken?)
| shirro wrote:
| I wish it was Google search that was dying. I suspect the problem
| is a decline in good quality self published text.
|
| There are adversaries gaming the algorithm and pushing low
| quality results as alsways and they seem to be thoroughly winning
| on Youtube. While search isn't working as well as it did for me I
| am not sure it is entirely a search problem. It used to be that a
| well selected query would almost magically bring up the desired
| answer as the first result. Even adding search params to exclude
| low quality sites like quora there is often nothing in pages of
| results now, if you even get more than a page or two. I remember
| when results sets used to be massive. But is it the search that
| is lacking or the content?
|
| IMO Google deserves a large share of the blame. Killing Google
| Reader inflicted a huge blow on distributed self-published
| content and helped drive people towards a bunch of walled gardens
| and systems that promote low quality content.
|
| Where once the blog reigned supreme now content is in the hands
| of companies like Facebook and Twitter where ephemeral, low
| effort writing is either behind a wall or drowned in noise. A lot
| of blog content is now dripping in blatant promotion of people,
| products and service.
| cliftonk wrote:
| Agreed. I rarely search for anything without "...
| site:reddit.com" or "site:github.com". the sheer number of sites
| that scrape github and then pop up above github in the search
| results is a clear example of this. why isnt provenance weighted
| more heavily?
| foobarian wrote:
| I mean you can't blame Google too much. In the early days, a
| large fraction of Internet users made websites and had hand-
| picked, curated links. This gave Google a fantastic ranking
| signal with a high signal-to-noise ratio. This is mostly gone now
| and honestly I'm surprised their search is as good as it is.
| uncomputation wrote:
| I think you have it slightly backwards. While not entirely
| Google's fault, search engines motivated much of this "noise"
| increase. It's not as though there were people who just made
| hand-curated, "high signal" websites and then all those people
| died. It's even not that all those people switched to Wordpress
| or other CMS. It's that the algorithms used by search engines
| directly incentivized a lot of the awful practices we now
| associate with the web. I think the first example of this,
| which is not nearly as apparent anymore, is it was more
| beneficial for a listicle to break up its elements into a
| separate page per element, requiring the user to click and
| reload an entire page to traverse the list, rather than just
| have the list on one page. This increased the number of back
| links if anyone wanted to link to multiple items on the list
| and allowed per-item SEO friendliness. Another more recent
| example is the infamous recipe blog. While some people
| genuinely like adding a backstory to their recipes, most add
| all of that fluff because Google penalizes short content
| (likely in an effort to reduce spam I would guess). This
| results in a weird lose-lose situation for everyone involved
| which has completely inundated the simple and extremely common
| search for a recipe. The only ones able to not do this are
| larger sites like Allrecipes which have enough reputation/clout
| in the eyes of search engines to avoid the spam classification.
| Lascaille wrote:
| > larger sites like Allrecipes
|
| But the problem here really is the consumer. In the past,
| people would have bought a recipe book or subscribed to a
| cooking magazine and thought nothing abnormal about having to
| exchange money for data. Now the consumer expects quality
| data for free. Obviously something has to suffer.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You can blame google because they made changes that forced
| sites to adopt these practices. The hand-picked curated links
| websites still exist but are so far back in the index they will
| never show.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Google still has archives of the internet from back in ~2005.
| They can still use the internet back then as a ranking signal
| for todays content.
|
| Ie. Imagine a now-dead blog which was very knowledgeable about
| types of violin and would have ranked very highly for "best
| type of violin string cleaner". Google can look at what content
| that blog had, and find a page on todays web with similar
| content saying the same kind of thing.
| brimble wrote:
| Google used to actively fight the spam. Some time around '08 or
| '09 it was like they very suddenly gave up and never seemed to
| give it a serious attempt again, as if they'd simply
| surrendered. Unfortunately, they also made searches much more
| "fuzzy" around that time or (IIRC) a couple years before,
| foiling manual attempts to avoid spam by using very specific
| language or unusual phrases.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The death of hand-curated general web directories like DMOZ has
| also deprived search engines of a hugely relevant "signal" for
| high-quality content. I'm not surprised that the SEO blackhats
| have basically won since then.
|
| (You can view the schema.org specification for machine-readable
| content description as an attempt by the big search engines to
| partially reverse this dynamic and give white-hat SEO the upper
| hand again. IMHO, independent website owners should
| enthusiastically adopt these detailed descriptions if they care
| to "save" the Web from the onslaught of blackhat SEO junk. But
| a worthwhile successor to DMOZ (probably based on federation)
| must also be a piece of that puzzle.)
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| How does in your eyes schema help against spam? Product
| rating schema was instantly abused when it Google started
| using it which makes sense since you markup whatever and
| however the fuck you want.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If you markup stuff maliciously (ala the old meta keywords
| spam), you can be banned for it after a simple human check.
| OTOH, it's really hard to tell wrt. most low-quality SEO-
| format junk "is this malicious stuff that should be nuked
| from orbit, or just a clueless webmaster who doesn't know
| any better". It raises the stakes in a way that lets good
| content stand out if it chooses to.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| Yesterday I wanted to find something on reddit (brooklyn vs
| chicago), in last 3 years. Despite setting search result to last
| 3 years google kept showing reddit posts from 8 years ago. Tried
| bing and still it sucked, then tried ddg and finally got
| something relevant, not as good as how google used to be but it
| pisses me off each time I search something up on Google. Google
| has become better at local search and deteriorating on global web
| search.
| dageshi wrote:
| The article is right, but I think it's missing the main cause.
|
| People who used to make high quality web content have moved to
| youtube instead because you can make more money there and it's
| probably easier.
|
| Add to that, I think because of the move to smartphones, google
| tries to give you a direct answer to your question rather than
| directing you to sources where you could educate yourself to
| answer your own question which it did more in the past.
|
| But yeah google search is noticeably worse and I don't know that
| google can do anything to fix it.
| spideymans wrote:
| > People who used to make high quality web content have moved
| to youtube instead because you can make more money there and
| it's probably easier.
|
| Web video has also become so much more accessible thanks to
| faster download speeds.
| sytelus wrote:
| I have never appended reddit in my queries. I don't find majority
| of Reddit credible or complete. The author here is
| extraordinarily hyperbolic. Reddit is not "next" search engine by
| any possible stretch of imagination. I would think search driven
| by very large transformer based models is probably the next thing
| but it's 5 to 10 years away.
| dharma1 wrote:
| Google search still works well for many things, but is SEO
| spam/bot infested for anything that requires a hive mind opinion
| about something from mostly genuine people. Like if I want to
| know what kind of a best in class/best bang for buck/newest
| [insert product] to buy and have no idea where to start, Google
| is often the worst place for it.
|
| I'm not sure if that's because most opinions like this are shared
| on social media like reddit (and in rather unstructured form)
| instead of on blogs/websites that Google mostly indexes, or if
| it's just really difficult machine learning problem to formulate
| something resembling a non-spammy consensus opinion from experts
| by just crawling shitloads of websites that all try to SEO spam
| the crawler
| aantix wrote:
| There was a point in the early days where the Yahoo index was
| more reliable than Lycos.
|
| Then Google came along and worked well, for a while.
|
| But then I found Delicious.com - and those curated bookmarks were
| better than anything Google provided.
|
| Reddit is the new delicious. Fairly saavy Internet users that
| aren't afraid to try new things, so they seem to know about cool
| stuff first.
| going_ham wrote:
| Yup, search is terrible when looking up for very specific/ niche
| topics.
|
| It only works as a fact machine now. For example search for "Who
| is the father of the president of USA?"
|
| I think majority of this problem arises from academia/industry
| disconnect as well as greed.
|
| 1. Greed: Ad revenue.
|
| 2. Academic people + research = Let's create a general solution
| for all. They never bother to understand what problems users are
| facing.
|
| You may wonder, why would any one care to ask stupid facts? Turns
| out people don't need internet for finding relevant information.
| They are already bubbled up, so they search for "facts" to verify
| or argue against their belief. Eg. "Kanye west and Kim
| Kardashian". And for these examples, google works best.
|
| It's really HCI problem. It doesn't take for them to tune down on
| the ads, but why would they? If you search for niche, they just
| show ads because they get $$$. But if you search for facts they
| just give the highlight. And this small highlights create
| positive reinforcements among it's users. It manifest to common
| users that google works.
|
| So google basically is fact machine to find clues for an argument
| or bubble up belief. It is utterly useless for anything else.
|
| Product reviews. Nah
|
| Technical topics: Nah
|
| DIY: Nah
|
| Hobbies: Nah
|
| It's either facts or ads.
|
| Such is modern search engine.
| s-video wrote:
| Word of warning regarding the "site:reddit.com" trick: even
| reddit can get astroturfed.
|
| I share OP's pain though. I wish there was a search engine that
| actively filtered affiliate link laden/spammy/SEO'd/etc content.
| thejackgoode wrote:
| I do site:news.ycombinator.com append to my searches very often.
| Higher than average quality of information is simply an emergent
| feature of any successful platform with social moderation.
| DarylZero wrote:
| What you're missing is that Google itself used to be a "social
| moderation" mechanism.
| buildbot wrote:
| It's also categorically broken in somewhat basic ways recently.
|
| 1. I searched a term, and there were not many exact results for
| it, with the suggestion to try verbatim search - clicked it,
| quotes where added, and then the _same suggestion_ appeared with
| added quotes. I kept clicking until I got a few hundred quotes in
| a row and google thought I was a bot. 2. Just today I searched
| for a camera related term, any many results appeared from one
| website with the suggestion to search for more results only from
| the site. For some reason, that search returned only a single
| result.
| causi wrote:
| Just the way Chrome insists on auto-completing searches has
| seriously damaged the efficiency of my Googling. I'll search
| something like "Type-97 whatsit making funny noises", get no
| results, go to search just for "type-97 whatsit" and it adds the
| rest back on by itself and I get the same useless results from
| the first time. I don't make the mistake often enough to remember
| not to make it, and every time I wonder what moron decided that
| was a vital feature that shouldn't be able to be turned off.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| In the category of features that think they know better than
| the user, I hate whoever decided they should start using word
| embeddings in searches.
|
| For example, you get the same results for "expand" and "extend"
| with both words highlighted in results when you search for
| either. This makes google entirely useless for complex
| technical topics with decades/centuries of established jargon.
| Searching for mathematics has become a torture.
| saurik wrote:
| Put the word you actually want in quotation marks. (It used
| to be "prefix it with +" but then Google+ happened and they
| changed it.)
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I don't think that works anymore, I might be mistaken but I
| recall trying it and still getting non-word-specific
| results.
|
| I tried it just now with ' "median" height ' and still got
| "average" and "mean" results highlighted. (Couldn't
| reproduce with "expand"/"extend" because I didn't recall
| the query that produced both.)
| ketzo wrote:
| wow, you're not joking. search {"median" height} and the
| first result is mean height. that's infuriating.
| saurik wrote:
| The first "result" for me--which heavily focuses on mean
| --is a Google Snippet, which I imagine could have an
| unrelated semantics engine and, frankly, too often (I am
| _not_ saying most of the time, though) shows ridiculous
| garbage anyway (as it is trying to be more intelligent
| than computers really can currently pull off).
| aulin wrote:
| wow, this is so upsetting
| FredPret wrote:
| I tried DDG and Bing, same thing
| pow_pp_-1_v wrote:
| You probably need to enable verbatim results. Click on
| the Tools button (below the right end of the search bar)
| and select "Verbatim" instead of "All results".
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| That was a _very_ useful future a while ago, but it doesn
| 't (reliably) work anymore, google ignores quotation marks
| most of the time nowadays.
| reaperducer wrote:
| As has been discussed and demonstrated many times before on
| HN, this doesn't always work. No one seems to understand
| why, but Google ignores quotation marks for some people and
| not others.
|
| Moreover, how is a regular human being supposed to know
| this? How is this useful to someone not in the tech bubble?
|
| Google's solution to the problem is to make people jump
| through a hoop. That's not a solution. That's a kludge.
| causi wrote:
| I wish I could mail a postcard to Google and Microsoft to
| be put on some kind of "not a goddamned moron" list so
| they'd stop treating me like an ignorant child.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Try searching "median height" and all you get is "average
| height". Goddmit
| senkora wrote:
| Works in WolframAlpha at least:
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=median+height+in+males
| godshatter wrote:
| On DDG you can type "median height -average" and that seems
| to do the trick. Not sure if it works on google search, I
| don't use that.
| efdee wrote:
| Interestingly, when I Google for "median height" including
| the quotes, I have to go to page 3 to find "average
| height".
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| You know, yeah. my bad. My original search was actually:
| median height women. My daughter had wanted to know if
| she was short at 5'4"
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| I'm sure this will get burried, but as someone that uses google
| search extensively for finding solutions to basic coding syntax
| questions, SEO has effectively poisoned googles well.
|
| Where when i would post a simple question previously, I would
| almost always get a SE/SO answer that was 80-90% correct, now I
| only get a bunch of copy cat 'learn coding' web pages that really
| aren't ever the question I'm asking.
|
| I use duckduckgo as a browser and the !SO bang is effectively
| broken due to cookies so I don't know what to do.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| The total fog of war surrounding product reviews is a big reason
| I enjoy shopping for older, used things online. Nobody is being
| paid now to shill for 10 year old Dell servers, or a 40 year old
| analog oscilloscope, or the quality of 1997 made-in-Japan
| Stratocasters. There are some YouTubers or subreddits who I think
| I can trust, but the incentive is there for dishonesty.
| [deleted]
| didip wrote:
| To be honest, contrary to the popular hate, Reddit is actually
| one of the more useful social network I've used.
|
| It contains a lot of memes/junk but it also contains a wealth of
| people's knowledge.
|
| Reddit should steal 1-3 top search engineers from Google and
| build out a much better search. And might as well steal a few ads
| engineers from Google too.
| high_byte wrote:
| unfortunately Reddit is dying alongside Google Search. of course
| by all means I don't mean economically. but quality-wise - yes,
| especially since it was acquired.
| eof wrote:
| There is a mode that google has which is basically the old mode;
| since I discovered it recently out of huge frustration with
| google search results.
|
| After you search for something; select `Tools -> All Results ->
| Verbatim`
|
| This will get google to actually search the way power users
| expect. I am surprised how little known this feature is. It
| should be default, but once known it completely removed my
| frustration with google search.
| zestyrx wrote:
| This is partially due to the proliferation of data-driven static
| site generation.
|
| Two types of sites I see popping up are:
|
| 1) "shims", which generate the bare minimum static content
| required to get listed on Google, usually for obscure or long-
| tail queries
|
| 2) "skins", which make exact copies of sites with publicly
| available context (like Wikipedia or npmjs.org).
|
| Both are enabled by tools like NextJS which allow you to take
| data and convert it to a static site which does well with SEO.
|
| I wrote about this in depth here:
| https://zestyrx.com/blog/nextjs-ssg
| Someone1234 wrote:
| There's not nearly enough discussion in this thread about
| Google's Verbatim mode (Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim).
|
| In my experience turning this on substantially increases the
| quality of Google's search results. It stops ignoring half the
| words in your query and seemingly parses "quoted" phases as you'd
| expect. The biggest problem is that there is no ability to turn
| this on all the time for your account and turning it on is
| intentionally a hassle.
|
| Google still has a lot of other problems even with Verbatim
| enabled, but this makes Google like 30% less terrible even if
| just using it for site:reddit.com-like searches.
| vxnul wrote:
| I come from the 2040s. Don't come here. In the parlance of your
| time, it fucking blows.
|
| Google is still around. It is a third-rate search engine but a
| first-rate reputation engine. Boomers (we still call them that,
| even though they haven't been actual Baby Boomers for a long
| time) still use it to vet people before making hiring decisions.
|
| For $159 per month (everything is on a subscription model) you
| can get the "personalized reputation" treatment by Google, so
| that when said Boomers are deciding whether to hire you, they see
| the unreliable material you paid for them to see--rather than, as
| under the old system, the unreliable material that emerged
| organically. It's a steep fee (these are the deflationary "new
| dollars") but it's a small price to be able to get a job and not
| be picked up by one of the "sweepers" and put into one of the
| performance improvement camps.
|
| I wish I had overthrown capitalism in the 2020s when it was still
| possible.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I don't the same level of vitriol towards ads as some,
| particularly on something like search where there is a clear
| intent to find something and an ad may well be the most
| appropriate result. Like if I search for "Bosch vacujm" why isn't
| an ad for a retailer selling one the most appropriate?
|
| Just so long as ads are clearly labelled as such I'm completely
| fine with it.
|
| But the whole content farming thing is much worse and it explains
| the "reddit" thing. Searching for reviews is now impossible
| because of all the astroturfed affiliate link spam. Adding
| "site:reddit.com" is one of the few remaining ways to find real
| people talking about something. That woo will probably end at
| some point.
|
| But this is a good example of how a metric that becomes a target
| ceases to be valuable as a metric. In this case, the links
| between pages became a goal so those links, the content on the
| pages and the SEO became a game and it doesn't matter if it's
| Google or someone else. If anything, affiliate links are a much
| bigger problem because they fund this "industry".
|
| There will always be a need for search. Google search isn't going
| anywhere.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| All I want is a feature to black list certain domain names from
| search results. Similar to YouTube never show this channel again
| option. If google hosted such a feature then they would get a
| very strong signal on poor results and would go a long way to
| punishing bad behavior and cleaning up the net. It's so easy to
| do that I have to assume they chose not to because they make a
| percentage of the revenue from the content farms.
| depingus wrote:
| Quenhus posted his custom uBlockOrigin filter list for dealing
| with dev spam sites popping up in search.
| https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
|
| I'm trying that now. But previously I was using the uBlackList
| Firefox extension with some block list subscriptions.
| https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
| johnyzee wrote:
| This would be awesome.
| samuelfekete wrote:
| I'm working on a new search engine that will allow you to do
| that. (It's still a work-in-progress, but you can try it out
| here: https://entfer.com/).
| tpict wrote:
| I feel like something happened in the past few days that made
| Google significantly more infuriating to use. I switched my
| default search engine to DDG after the nth case of Google
| presenting search results that matched zero of my (fairly
| mundane) search terms.
|
| The DDG results aren't superb, but they also don't invoke the
| feelings of communicating with a distracted child or poorly-
| trained pet.
| ankit219 wrote:
| Agree with the premise, but seems to me that the article does not
| justify this. I can understand ads, but ads do not affect search
| results. If you move past ads now (which most users do as they
| habitually ignore the space where ads would be) even then you
| should expect good results.
|
| SEO seems to be a big problem. Just saying Google is big and they
| should fix it ignores the nuance and the whole cat and mouse game
| that goes on. Eg: I am based in India, and am looking for which
| cable channel/streaming service is broadcasting a game of my
| favorite soccer team. The first 10 results would not have the
| answer, but as a user you would only know that after opening the
| link and reading through 500 or so words introducing teams,
| opposition, competition, form etc. but not what I am looking for.
| Most of these are news websites, who would make a loud noise if
| their results do not come on top. For a search engine relying on
| signals (even with AI), it's an incredibly hard problem to know
| if those 500 words would have the exact answer. [1]
|
| Reddit is good for searches where things are in flux, or when
| it's a user centric thing. Because they have done the SEO well.
| Similarly the results leading to Stack Overflow for developers
| are equally important. Yet, when you want to research on some
| topic, or learn more, you would inevitably start with Google.
|
| If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends and
| slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric queries. In
| my limited dev experience, that is already happening for Stack
| overflow. I love how the results are clubbed together under the
| first result.
|
| [1] The result which surfaces often include the direct question:
| "How to watch team A v team B game in India?". How do you design
| algos to combat that and yet include legitimate results. Have a
| lot of text on the page is often the most given advice on SEO.
| disease wrote:
| > If I were to predict, Google would start identifying trends
| and slowly start ranking reddit higher for user centric
| queries. In my limited dev experience, that is already
| happening for Stack overflow. I love how the results are
| clubbed together under the first result.
|
| Weird, I'm having the opposite experience with stackoverflow
| pages. Often I get pages from random websites that copy and
| paste stackoverflow content with some jammed-in SEO ABOVE the
| actual stackoverflow results.
| ankit219 wrote:
| Not 100% sure, but could be a user based personalization
| thing. Or a location based thing.
| dleslie wrote:
| Reddit search is superior because the results are community
| curated and because, counterintuitively, the search algorithm is
| terrible.
|
| It's doesn't suffer _as much_ from the deluge of garbage on there
| dead internet, and the search is good enough to discover what
| you're looking for while remaining bad enough to provide
| compelling surprises.
| elliotchaim wrote:
| I don't feel like Reddit is going to pass The Mom Test any time
| soon...
| est wrote:
| Not only the Google Search is dying, the hyper-text web in
| general is dying, popups, huge banners, inline ads, autoplay
| videos, cookie consent footers, login-walls, pay-walls,
| clickbaits & content farms, geo-blocks, bloated JS rendered
| templates, hard subtitle inside videos inside iframes, non copy-
| pastable texts only available on exclusive mobile apps, etc.
|
| It's no longer the same WWW I am familiar with anymore. Reddit is
| just one of the few sites still had higher text condensity (old
| UI, to be exact)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Why is Google dying?
|
| > 1. Ads
|
| > 2. SEO
|
| > 3. AI
|
| 4. Censorship
| Waterluvian wrote:
| There's probably fancy terms for this, but I currently see Google
| at this phase:
|
| "We cannot meet shareholder expectations by selling milk alone.
| We need to slaughter some cows and sell some beef."
|
| YouTube ads are getting worse. Google results are getting worse.
| They're cannibalizing long term value for short term gains.
| taf2 wrote:
| This could be good thing for competition and the future... don't
| let yourself confuse change for bad...
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| Google search has been especially bad for programming queries
| too.
|
| I'll usually see Stack Overflow results, but the entire page is
| then filled with sites that basically just copy-paste SO content.
| udia wrote:
| I don't see why Google does not trial offering a paid service
| where advertisements are stripped away from the search results. A
| new revenue model in addition to the existing ad supported
| approach where you pay for your search.
| skilled wrote:
| I do this also, especially for problems/questions related to
| real-life situations. Someone on Reddit has either already asked
| that question or someone provided an answer. Google should learn
| from this.
|
| Also, I think that author should have mentioned the new crop of
| AI writing tools that have been coming out in troves. And,
| honestly, some of them do a pretty convincing job of writing
| things like blog post intros or specific paragraphs.
|
| And, best of all, all this "progress" is driven solely by
| monetary interest. Google has made millions of people _rich_ ,
| and for a while will continue to do so.
|
| Lastly, I'm bit of a digital marketer myself. I have been in the
| game for a loooong time, too long. And, I can say from personal
| experience - a lot of the top 1 results on Google are still being
| gamed. You can, technically, report blackhat spam[0], but who
| knows how proactive Google is to listen to those reports.
|
| [0]:
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
| trentnix wrote:
| _> The long answer is that most of the web has become too
| inauthentic to trust._
|
| Exactly the problem search is supposed to solve. Google doesn't
| seem to be very interested in solving it.
| kleer001 wrote:
| IMHO Neal Stephenson predicted this in his 2008 book 'Anathem'
| where he talked about the ITA and their Reticulum.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending
| reddit to my queries.
|
| There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6
| different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple
| for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first
| couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15
| different sites that copy the originals.
|
| At least going with a community site there tends to be actual
| discussion and or useful links to the relevant content
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Those are infuriating. I hate to see ACTUAL content creators
| having their livelihoods stolen this way. Why wouldn't Google
| filter out the worst offenders? It takes literally one minute
| to get a nice list of a dozen imitation sites that nobody would
| miss. Maybe Google feels a little inhibited from 'choosing the
| winners' for all but the largest cases?
| phpnode wrote:
| I'm not sure about these days, but historically the engineers
| on Google search wanted to fix these problems
| algorithmically, rather than delisting specific sites by hand
| jll29 wrote:
| And, again historically, Amith Singhal and team preferred
| ranking algorithms to powerful-but-opaque L2R (learning to
| rank) approaches.
| rightbyte wrote:
| One FTE at Google could probably filter out like 99% of the
| SEO spam sites in technical english querries.
|
| It would be a winning battle, since it is less work to
| blacklist than to make a high scoring site.
|
| I guess Google Search internally is a mess. Maybe they have
| no clue what they are doing or have some really bad directors
| and lower managers messing stuff up.
|
| Maybe there are so much blackbox ML called from 1000s of Perl
| files that the engineers don't understand what is happening.
| Lascaille wrote:
| I often wonder how much modern IT infrastructure is simply
| this mess of 'we have no idea how it really works'
| blackboxes strung together with API calls.
|
| I suspect you're right about how much of a true
| understanding they (at google) still have of the behaviour
| of their search engine.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >Why wouldn't Google filter out the worst offenders?
|
| There are no Google adverts on GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc
| but there are on many of the copycat sites.
| Quenhus wrote:
| Here is my uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow
| copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
|
| It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines.
| You may also use the list with uBlacklist.
| colordrops wrote:
| If you can do this, so can Google. This just shows they
| refuse to.
| colordrops wrote:
| There HAS to be a way for google to detect a site is a copy and
| de-rank it. I refuse to believe their army of PhDs can't figure
| this out. Google's incentives are wrong. They make more money
| from SEO spam with ads than from the original sites.
| highstep wrote:
| appending "wiki" is also really useful if you're looking for
| straight facts
| thiht wrote:
| It's sad but I also noticed I have to add << wiki >> more and
| more because Wikipedia is increasingly not the first result
| for searches where it should be the first result. Instead
| there's often the stupid Google widget obviously copying
| Wikipedia's content without a direct link to the actual page.
| visarga wrote:
| I've seen Encyclopedia Britannica ranking above Wikipedia.
| It was really weird, I read both, Wikipedia was better.
| mattarm wrote:
| I have found that installing uBlacklist (a browser extension)
| and blocking these sites from search results as I encounter
| them helps noticeably. There are only so many of these "clone"
| sites that rank highly on Google, so I found it pretty easy to
| keep up with them for the things I usually search for. There
| are even shared uBlacklist lists for things like SO clones, but
| I haven't even bothered to use them.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye I have that one to and search hits gets notably better by
| just adding some 20 sites to it for tech querries.
|
| I makes me wonder how Google can mess this up.
| visarga wrote:
| It's not a bug, it's a feature. You search more times, see
| more ads.
| SirZimzim wrote:
| We need AdBlock lists for search engines at this point.
| xvello wrote:
| Indeed, that's why I built
| https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results
| sumobob2112 wrote:
| Wow, I am glad I'm not the only one doing this, every single
| product thing I ever search is + reddit
| eh9 wrote:
| This somewhat validates how I feel about Reddit: StackOverflow
| for everyone.
| MockObject wrote:
| Ironic that the web is being eaten by a glorified Usenet, leaving
| then, as the main use case for the web, the sort of remote
| commerce that was once handled by Sears catalogs and food
| delivery phone numbers.
| qnsi wrote:
| Just a heads up if someone is searching reddit for product
| reviews. I believe most of them are inauthentic. I worked in
| marketing for several companies and we always had some budget for
| whisper marketing aka shilling. There are third party agency
| specialized in shilling on reddit and making it all look
| authentic.
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| Do you have a link to such a service? Not to bash on them or
| anything, I'm just interested in how they market their services
| [deleted]
| qnsi wrote:
| I see that googling for one seems hard. I can give you link
| to the one we used if you send me an email (@ in my profile)
| criley2 wrote:
| I mean, it's not hard to tell shilling, and truly authentic,
| quality shilling falls along a border of marginally still
| useful content.
|
| Like, I'm hoping to find a specialized community discussing
| products relevant to that hobby or interest, often posting
| images or discussions of data gathered.
|
| For example I am starting a container garden on my patio using
| fabric pots and have searched reddit for a wide variety of
| gardening products. Perhaps I fell for shills but I looked for
| people posting images of their gardens and discussing opinions
| and results, so if companies reselling chinese factory sourced
| fabric grow containers are hiring people to literally make home
| gardens and shill online about products, then so be it, thank
| you for the content? And even then, I don't think I saw anyone
| specifically pushing any brand at all, and even calling the top
| brand (SmartPot) overpriced . Everyone seems to use a different
| brand and they all seem to do fine.
|
| I think that's a strength on reddit. It's harder to shill in a
| specialist community than it is in an Amazon review or personal
| blog.
|
| Another reddit community I would look at often for opinions and
| brands is chef knives and knife sharpening tools. I really
| don't think there's a lot of shilling there that gets upvoted
| and promoted.
| generalizations wrote:
| I remember picking up on this when I was researching vpns.
| Compare the comments on Reddit and hacker news, and the
| difference is stark. It becomes fairly apparent that a lot of
| the Reddit comments were paid.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Which VPN did you end up going with?
| flatiron wrote:
| Oh no are we next? I've very often googled "xyz hacker news"
| because for some reason I trust the people here.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| As someone who add Reddit to my query when I search products,
| I'm not really looking for a review. Generally, I look for
| subreddits talking about what I'm trying to buy. I then see if
| they have a good wiki/something pinned about purchasing advice.
| Then, I take a look at what is posted about the product I had
| in mind (mostly questions not reviews). It's more interesting
| to read about the experience of actual users than reading a
| review. You learn a lot from what they find frustrating.
| wackro wrote:
| Are wikis and subreddits hallowed ground or something?
| evilduck wrote:
| Generally speaking I search Reddit for genuine looking
| _negative_ reviews not the glowing ones. I 'm looking at Reddit
| to steer me away from obviously bad choices.
|
| Basically, shilling has become so pervasive that positive
| reviews are automatically untrustworthy regardless of source or
| apparent trustworthiness. It wouldn't even surprise me to find
| that companies are generating fake negative review content
| without ever endorsing their own products, but it's at least a
| tiny bit harder to fake genuine modes of failure to report on.
| sgslo wrote:
| I suspect shills are aware that people like yourself are
| looking for negative reviews.
|
| Example:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/eero/comments/mk0l1w/eero_vs_orbi/
|
| This entire thread dumps on Orbi Wifi devices and praises
| Eero. Maybe Orbi is inferior to Eeero, but the one-sidedness
| of the discussion is a bit unsettling.
|
| The top comment was created by a poster who almost
| exclusively posts on the /r/eero subreddit over the span of
| one year. Many of their comments are specifically in praise
| of Eero devices.
| foxfluff wrote:
| It's one sided but that's a lot of shills if you think
| they're shills. Shills with 10-year-old accounts and active
| posting history that continues to this day. No, I'm pretty
| sure at least some of them must be authentic.
|
| Take that terminaldude for example. Ok, ten months ago they
| didn't have problems with Eero. Well, I guess now they do?
| https://old.reddit.com/r/eero/comments/pq6mvg/chasing_ghost
| s...
|
| Of course, this only hilights that user reviews are hit and
| miss. It's not so uncommon for something to work well at
| start but then you discover problems later on.
| evilduck wrote:
| On technology specifically I tend to view these types of
| threads more through the lens of tribalism than shilling.
| Like, I don't have reason to believe Lenovo or HP is
| paying people to whine about Apple online, I'm willing to
| believe people will do that all on their own.
| N1H1L wrote:
| Depends on subreddits. I love shoes for example, and
| /r/goodyearwelt is a really decent resource in general.
| /r/malefashionadvice and /r/rawdenim for fashion are pretty
| great too.
| evilduck wrote:
| Thursday Boots astroturfs a large number of the comment
| sections of posts about their products. Red Wing, Nicks and
| Truman have periodically had self-identified employees that
| frequented the site and their specific subs if they exist.
|
| The small group of GYW brands seem to at least be generally
| aware that a community of enthusiasts exists on Reddit and
| that's probably enough to start being skeptical of positive
| reviews.
| N1H1L wrote:
| I am okay with self-identified employees rather than
| astroturfing. Nicks themselves have mentioned how Reddit
| attention helped them stay afloat, and how much of a boon
| it has been for PNW bootmakers. IMO this is a far better
| outcome than that industry dying, the manufacturing
| parcelled to China/SE Asia and a storied bootmaker
| ultimately resurrected as a Frankenstein fast fashion
| brand. Wesco, for example is doing great because of online
| attention.
|
| However, even before Reddit, StyleForum was great, and
| their original darling was Viberg.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Is that against the TOS of reddit?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I click on the profile of any reviewer I'm taking seriously.
| It's easy to spot the astroturf accounts vs the real
| degenerates
| crucialfelix wrote:
| Sure it's easy to spot, bit this is a lot of wasted work.
|
| Maybe we should pay herds of people to flag the bullshit,
| since google won't do it anymore.
| Afton wrote:
| It's easy to spot the badly astroturfed accounts. How would
| establish your baseline truth?
|
| I'm not claiming it's impossible, but it's very easy to fool
| yourself in this territory. A good mark is the one who thinks
| they know the game.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Not really - you can buy Reddit accounts and good shills
| actually use the account somewhat regularly.
|
| You can still spot them, but you'd have to comb through the
| history more thoroughly.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=reddit+account&_trksid=.
| ..
| TheFreim wrote:
| You can also semi-automate accounts. I used to use reddit
| actively and was one of the "most active" posters on a
| couple subreddits, but really I just automatically posted
| certain articles and then replied to comments([0]). I was
| clearly a real person who interacted with people which
| meant I was trusted and because of that the moderators
| would not pay any attention to me. This was all done for
| fun in communities I enjoyed participating in, only
| contributing from sources that I knew would be appreciated.
| This was so easy that I know that if someone put a bit more
| effort into making the automation less obvious and also
| using enough real interaction you could do massive
| manipulation.
|
| 0: interestingly, I posted so many articles from a small
| amount of sources that people started to assume I worked at
| those sites. I had to correct people on this repeatedly.
| Super easy to get trust and once an idea gets out there
| it's hard to get everyone to forget it.
| from wrote:
| I tried to do something similar but couldn't get karma
| very quick (using a paraphrasing API on other people's
| comments and submitting news from RSS feeds). I think I
| had a chicken and egg problem with karma because most
| subreddits require a minimum amount to post. I ran it for
| about two weeks before I lost interest. None of my
| accounts were limited in any way and I was just using
| publicly available Hola proxies. It seems that very
| little scrutiny is applied to the reddit mobile API. No
| captcha is required for registration (unlike the website)
| and no email is required.
|
| Here are some samples:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/user/SereneKingdom36
|
| https://www.reddit.com/user/EnviousEditor41
|
| https://www.reddit.com/user/active_manufacturer6
|
| https://www.reddit.com/user/RemarkableCracker71
|
| If anyone at reddit is reading this, it'd probably be
| pretty trivial to identify the 50 other accounts I made
| like this :)
| TheFreim wrote:
| > I tried to do something similar but couldn't get karma
| very quick. I think I had a chicken and egg problem with
| karma because most subreddits require a minimum amount to
| post.
|
| Doing this on an account that you personally use is
| probably the easiest way, but that doesn't scale well for
| obvious reasons. Getting past time gates (must wait a
| month or more to post in certain areas) and karma gates
| takes time. This kind of makes me want to go back and try
| this again but there are moral/ethical issues that give
| me pause.
| from wrote:
| Yeah I think I would have been more successful had I just
| bought some aged accounts with 50-100 karma. If you're
| "morally flexible" and willing to work with some unsavory
| types there's probably a lot of money to be made but
| that's not really for me either lol.
| Lascaille wrote:
| >chicken and egg problem with karma because most
| subreddits require a minimum amount to post.
|
| Create your own subreddit and seed it with content
| directly copied from other subreddits then have your bots
| all upvote each other.
| from wrote:
| That is creative :) Although I imagine when you have an
| upvoting ring you want to avoid the participants being
| linked together as much as you can
| Lammy wrote:
| > This was so easy that I know that if someone put a bit
| more effort into making the automation less obvious and
| also using enough real interaction you could do massive
| manipulation.
|
| There have been government studies on this as well, like
| "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-
| Dependent Connectivity" in cooperation with the Air Force
| Research Laboratory out of Eglin AFB in Florida:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
|
| ...which coincidentally was outed as Reddit's "Most-
| Addicted City" in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160
| 604042751/http://www.reddit...
| Lascaille wrote:
| > the automation less obvious and also using enough real
| interaction you could do massive manipulation
|
| I think this has already been done with r/politics. I've
| created new reddit accounts to argue with people on there
| a few times and find them being banned within a few weeks
| for the most trivial of infractions, simply comments like
| 'I find it hard to believe someone would express that
| belief in good faith' get you banned, and as you don't
| get a ban without a report someone has to be reporting
| comments that no reasonable person would report.
|
| I came to the conclusion - after a while - that it's a
| secretly walled garden, that basically 100% of the
| content is automated, probably by bot-runners aligned
| with the moderators, and that users that stray into it
| are intensely surveilled until a plausible reason exists
| to ban them. There is zero metacommentary allowed and
| making a post 'about the moderation of this subreddit'
| gets you banned for metacommentary. You now also aren't
| allowed to question user activity, so if someone's
| account history is 100% botlike you get a ban for
| pointing it out.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| Being a reddit mod helps (and also about a decade of reddit
| experience) and these things jump out super quick
| jedberg wrote:
| Wow, based on those prices I could make a killing selling
| my reddit account!
|
| I haven't worked there in over a decade, but if I worked
| there now, I would definitely be scraping eBay and all the
| other sites and closely monitoring all the accounts that I
| see for sale. I'd probably even buy a couple of them to see
| if I could find some patterns in the sellers.
| Lascaille wrote:
| > I haven't worked there in over a decade, but if I
| worked there now, I would definitely be scraping eBay and
| all the other sites and closely monitoring all the
| accounts that I see for sale.
|
| I think if you did that you would rapidly be asked to
| leave, because it would expose how few genuine users the
| site still has. I don't get the feeling - when I use
| reddit - that a majority of the comments or posts are
| genuine.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| At least shipping is free on the Reddit accounts
| hnxs wrote:
| They're more likely to be real when they're 6+ years old.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Even with the shilling, overall on average searching Reddit
| produces the most useful results for several topics. It's
| really good for gauging the severity of a flaw/defect in a
| product for example, which you'd be hard pressed to find data
| on elsewhere.
| trdlts wrote:
| Is there any place on the web with authentic reviews? The only
| thing that comes to mind is something like steam, where you
| have to at least purchase a copy of a game before leaving a
| review.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Blogs. They are very hard to find though.
| monocasa wrote:
| Amazon reviews with a picture inside a dirty living room
| with, like, a toddler only in their diaper in the background
| or something have been pretty reliable.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Every Amazon review stream: 5-star, 2-star, 5-star, 5-star,
| 5-star, 5-star, 5-star.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Is there any place on the web with authentic reviews?
|
| This is where a good social network is useful. I'd trust my
| friends more than any random web site. Unfortunately I don't
| have a huge network to call on, so it would be nice to trust
| my friends friends and so on, but the trust quickly drops. We
| need a way to improve a simple network with some user-
| controlled measure of authenticity and trust.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Hobby based Discords can often yield good results if you ask,
| and many have pinned posts in gear recommendation channels.
| Lascaille wrote:
| This is the other reason Google is failing to return good
| results; so much forum-type content has moved to Discord.
| xeromal wrote:
| Consumer Reports. Since they are paid for subscriptions,
| they're able to afford to vet products with less influence to
| leave a good review.
|
| You have to pay for quality journalism.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Do you really trust CR? In the UK we have which.co.uk,
| which is similar and you have to subscribe to it. But I'm
| fairly sure they are shilling for some of their product
| categories after having subscribed a few times. Like, the
| mattress category is filled with mattress in a box
| companies, which are notorious for paying off
| websites/blogs to promote their products. I really don't
| trust any of these sites anymore.
| flatiron wrote:
| Personally I trust CR as they aren't paid by ads but
| subscribers so it's their benefit to be honest.
| xeromal wrote:
| Exactly how I see it. They can try to double dip but as
| soon as someone finds out, they'll lose all their
| credibility.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Reddit is great for a specialized user. Not only is there
| shilling, but you also find hyper-specialized people who go too
| deep.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| When looking for an answer we don't want the average opinion of
| the whole world, we want the best opinion of the expert in that
| subject.
|
| As the internet (and Google) reach out more and more, we get
| closer and closer to everyone and their opinion being online. And
| so the average answer online gets closer to the average opinion
| in the planet.
|
| I know Google _thought_ PageRanknwas the answer for that but they
| now rely as much (?) on people looking for X and moving on. Which
| means looking for "what is calculus" "most" people will hit a
| maths dense page and bounce for a less complex / demanding
| explanation.
|
| All of which is a long winded way of saying if we want an Oracle
| to pick Truth from all the pages of the Web, we are not going to
| find that Oracle.
|
| Humans and human science and curation can only do that.
|
| Odd that essential Librarians is what we need
|
| Edited
| clairity wrote:
| you're really pushing that appeal to authority to its logical
| absurdity. how do you find the real 'best' expert and their
| 'best' opinion? everyone, even in their so-called field of
| expertise, is prone to error. limiting your information
| gathering to a single person exposes you to all of their errors
| directly, with zero error correction applied. taking input from
| many people, even non-experts (gasp! the horror!), gives you a
| much fuller expanse from which to make your own decisions. this
| expansive approach more fully covers the decision space, and
| provides in-built error correction.
|
| and that's the basis of why many (uncorrelated/diverse)
| opinions are a better strategy than appealing to authority.
|
| you might wonder why it's not better to take a consensus of
| experts only, but then you're back to the biased proposition of
| determining who's an expert in the first place. but more than
| that, "experts" (fashionistas) tend to be highly correlated,
| usually in a few well-worn directions (the fashions), even if
| sometimes opposing, because they don't come anywhere close to
| covering even a significant portion of the potential vector
| space.
|
| this is the problem with google. their hubris leads them to
| erroneously believe they're better than the average bear at
| determining what people want in search (and ads). they're
| decidedly not.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Ok let's go back to "defining our terms".
|
| I am going to go with expert as someone recognised by other
| experts. Yes that's horribly self referential but it is the
| basis of everyone who calls themselves doctors or scientist
| or engineer. In this case I can have expert plumbers and
| expert removal men.
|
| And in this light an expert is someone whose opinions come
| from the foundations that all other experts in their industry
| recognise and agree with. Lysenkoism in other words is not
| going to fly - not without a shit ton of new evidence that
| stuns everyone.
|
| So no I am not appealing to authority, I am appealing to
| science. There are views / opinions / statements that are
| falsifiable. And if the web is full of _falsified_ statements
| (let 's go with vaccines cause autism), then Google cannot
| say "51% of web pages that contain "vaccine" also contain
| "causes autism" therefore that is now true". (and no that's
| not how Google works, but unless google hardcodes what is
| truth, it can eventually only go with what is fed into it.
| And as we are seeing, what is fed into it is getting worse,
| partly through SEO and partly because more and more of the
| world is getting on line and we once had a web dominated by
| the pages of university professors and now it's dominated by
| drunk twitter rants. Sometimes by the same university
| professors ...
|
| Humanity has great geniuses, evil scum, but the most of us
| muddle about in the middle. Science found a way to take the
| work of a genius and then keep it balanced there in mid air
| for the next genius to stand on.
|
| We should not assume the best of us, the best of our work,
| the best of our actions, can be found by averaging the
| planet.
|
| I do have hope - pop shows demonstrate that we can vote for
| great singers, so i do trust that mass voting will be part of
| the solution - I trust in democracy. I am just not convinced
| Google knows how to fix truth nor is set up for people to
| vote for truth.
| clairity wrote:
| you're making a statement of faith, not science. you want
| to believe that the experts you have faith in are
| consistent truth-seekers and truth-tellers, but that's a
| (political) belief, not a (scientific) fact. you have no
| way of confirming even a single sliver of veracity that
| way, especially not through so-called 'expert concensus'.
| rather than contriving a simplistic strawman, to find truth
| and facts in a social system, you still must use your own
| little brain to discern sociopolitical machinations (on top
| of merely technical observations), rather than naively
| trying to offload it to others. our brains have evolved
| over millions of years to do exactly that.
| FredPret wrote:
| Would be cool if we could invent an AI oracle.
|
| Would be hilarious if it gave deliberately tantalizing but
| unhelpful answers like the one in the myths
| alangibson wrote:
| The idea of the whole-web search engine is dead. There's too much
| junk, and too much incentive to surface it in the name of
| engagement.
|
| I got so sick of Google's useless results that I started out on a
| fool's errand. I'm using publicly available, curated or moderated
| link sources to build my own STEM focused search engine. It'll
| probably end in tears, but I intend to give it a shot.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > There's a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called
| the Dead Internet Theory
|
| I think we're well on the way ...
|
| Was recently pretty shocked, searched for "gas heating repair"
| and got back at the top some sites with my suburb name in the
| title. Naturally I thought, wow, if there is a local place I
| should go there. Clicking into it, it has everything about my
| suburb - a picture of the local park, and whole paragraphs of
| random text containing bits and pieces about the local area
| interspersed with odd sentences about gas heating ("Cold mornings
| in XXX can be confronting without effective heating" etc). The
| text kind of makes sense but also reads like it was generated by
| GPT3.
|
| Of course, then I realise, this is all SEO. They have generated a
| page like this for every suburb in my city. There are tens of
| thousands of such pages they are hosting. The most shocking thing
| is this is a small time gas repair dealer. They clearly don't
| know how to do this, they've gone with a low budget to an SEO
| firm who has effectively generated a giant plume of toxic content
| into the web atmosphere, all to create a marginal benefit for
| this one small company.
|
| If a small time low budget unsophisticated company can do this,
| then I have to assume it's happening everywhere. On a mass scale
| we have giant smoke stacks all over the internet spewing toxic
| plumes into the atmosphere. And the humans are gasping trying to
| find the small bits of remaining breathable air.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yes you are right, almost every business with an online
| presence is generating vast amounts of garbage which exactly
| targets a huge range of specific keywords. From the search
| engine perspective, the page is exactly what you are looking
| for.
| idank wrote:
| No it's not, in the same way that an email provider doesn't
| want to deliver spam to its users.
| potatosack wrote:
| Both Google and Reddit are afraid of each other. Google doesn't
| want to show reddit results by default as it doesn't give them
| any revenue and doesn't want reddit to get too big and reddit is
| afraid Google might build a reddit alternative by including more
| and more reddit features within the search.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I stopped using Google in 2021 because I found that I was getting
| better results and less ads from Brave Search and Duck Duck Go.
| Recently, I signed up for the Kagi Search beta and have really
| liked it, especially the "Programming" tab, which limits the
| search results to programming-related results.
|
| My only concern with Kagi is it requires you to create an
| account. I don't like Google tracking me and the idea of Kagi
| knowing what all my search terms are isn't appealing. At least
| they aren't planning on selling it.
|
| https://kagi.com/privacy
| htrp wrote:
| It only took 20 years but Google is now 2000s Microsoft, ripe for
| disruption from the next innovator.
| wanderer_ wrote:
| > SEO optimized
|
| Hmmm.....
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| It seems like every critique around Google is immediately
| trending on HN. I wonder how long it will take to see significant
| market shifts towards competitors. DDG recently surpassed 100M
| search queries a day and I'm curious how their growth will
| accelerate.
| riston wrote:
| I agree with the article points definitely, also quite surprised
| that this issue hasn't raised by google itself or the money
| outweighs the product usefulness in this area? Non english
| searches are even worse, usually some huge companies create their
| landing pages which get higher SEO/paid keyword scores then the
| actual useful pages.
|
| Doing the reddit trick also for the reviews, but at some point it
| would also get broken as some marketing people will ruin it by
| buying reviews etc. Authentic reviews on products/services looks
| like unsolved problem :) (startup idea).
| pepproni wrote:
| Am I the only one that avoids reddit search results? It makes
| stackoverflow look like CERN by comparison.
| Loeffelmann wrote:
| I think SEO was the big mistake. As soon people understand what
| makes a result show up first in the search it became a almost
| meaningless metric. There should really only be one metric that
| counts. Relevency.
| gipp wrote:
| The thesis seems a lot closer to "the open Web is dying".
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I don't know about dying, but definitely more hidden from view.
| Google owns a huge share of the search market and a lot of the
| remainder information discovery is on the large social portals.
|
| Alt search engines do offer an alternative view to what's out
| there, but are not on the scale of Google and many of them are
| ultimately meta search engines relying on Bing for crawling and
| indexing.
| dale_glass wrote:
| A bit of both, I think, they feed into each other.
|
| Google being useless for something like product reviews means
| that any smaller sites that are any good are not getting the
| traffic they deserve, because they're being outcompeted by the
| ads and the fake review sites.
|
| People still need the content, though. But how do you find that
| review without a search engine? You have to resort to that even
| though Google sucks for the general web, it's still very much
| useful if you restrict it to something very particular. You
| have to know where to start though, so you have to resort to
| one of the 4-5 huge sites like Reddit or Hacker News where you
| know people are going to be discussing whether a given wifi
| router is any good or not.
|
| Which has the side effect of concentrating things even more on
| those sites. If the place you can trust for networking
| equipment reviews is Reddit, then probably you'll also comment
| somewhere on Reddit next time you get bitten by a bad one and
| want a second opinion or just to warn people. And reddit gets
| bigger still.
| almog wrote:
| I find it amusing that even though I find more "organic" results
| on reddit, reddit's own search isn't great IMO, so I find myself
| often googling site:reddit.com inurl:<subreddit> followed by the
| search query I'd have preferred to enter by its own.
| jmakov wrote:
| Switched to you.com. Happy.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Have you ever utterly failed to extract information from google
| and just given up entirey? This happened to me most recently when
| I tried to look up what model snowboards are used by certain
| athletes in the winter olympics.
|
| You cannot bring up a relevant result. The minute you add the
| athletes name and snowboard to the query, no matter the
| surrounding terms, it just brings up the media dump of articles
| about the snowboarding event, not the equipment.
|
| I ended up giving up, I couldn't believe I couldn't find anything
| relevant no matter how hard I racked my brain coming up with
| different terms for my query. What a frustrating experience when
| the tool you've relied on for 20 years has stopped proving itself
| to be reliable.
| rurp wrote:
| Oh all the time. There are a massive amount of searches that
| I'd like to do, and I KNOW there are useful hits out there for,
| but I don't bother because the odds of actually getting useful
| results is so low.
|
| I don't know this, but would wager that a lot of people have
| scaled back what they search for on Google either consciously
| or subconsciously. The amount of topics you can expect quality
| results for has shrunk an awful lot, especially for subjects
| that are technical and/or non-current.
| grishka wrote:
| How long until Google starts adding a "results from other sites"
| box when you add "site:reddit.com" to your query?
| rightbyte wrote:
| No. Don't ever write stuff like that on HN. You just gave some
| Google engineer a promotion project idea.
| mkaszkowiak wrote:
| I agree with the article. It's getting harder and harder to get
| good quality results. Most of the time I use a site:reddit.com or
| site:news.ycombinator.com prefix, depending on the type of
| content I am currently looking for.
|
| Lately I've noticed another breaking change. Typically I phrase
| my queries in English despite being from Poland, due to higher
| quality content. Over the past month I've been getting more and
| more Polish results despite the query language. Case in point for
| anyone who wants to test - "garmin fenix 6 vs 945 comparison".
|
| Search seems a bit off on other Google services as well. Most
| notably YouTube, which interweaves results with ads and
| recommendations. Video discovery is becoming increasingly more
| difficult and it feels like I'm stuck in an information bubble.
| Which surprisingly works, as I use the website longer, despite it
| being less entertaining than beforehand.
| dulayjm wrote:
| yeah i realized i've been doing this for a while now. For
| anything that i'm googling that requires some sort of querying
| for personal input beyond that of wikipedia/stackoverflow, this
| is what i use.
|
| I will say as an academic, google scholar is still superior. I
| just search with the !scholar bang on in DDG.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| My firm belief is that what is missing are the librarians. Google
| used to rely on web archives and inter linkages between sites,
| but bad actors from blogspam to quora have gamed this system in
| every possible aspect. There are probably just too few reliable
| sites compared to the global mass proliferation of unreliable
| sites.
|
| Google will need to start taking tough, manual decisions on which
| sites to depritoritise in both what is shown and in what is
| considered in its algorithms in order to fix its search. And this
| is not a task you can outsource to whoever is the currently
| poorest native speaker is.
| Lascaille wrote:
| > which sites to depritoritise
|
| But do you think there are actually enough good sites left that
| contain quality content? As has been mentioned elsewhere, are
| people actually still writing product reviews that are organic
| and not sponsored content?
| bricemo wrote:
| Help me out: I have such a hard time understanding this line of
| argument. What search result do people want when they look for a
| recipe? A site without ads? You can pay for that, there are lots
| of premium great sites. News without ads? Buy the economist. But
| people don't want results full of pay walls.
|
| I'm struggling to follow. Can anyone give an example of a query,
| and then the ideal result that Google is not delivering?
| kiba wrote:
| Bring back wikipedia in search results.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| In case anyone hasn't mentioned it yet: another reason is the
| censorship. Mostly on the right, but also on the left:
| https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html
|
| They are even going as far as deleting Google Drive documents
| that contain things they don't like:
| https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/14908008941574676...
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Yeah, reddit also has issues with bots. But it's generally MUCH
| easier on reddit to gauge the quality of the content you're
| seeing than some top result on a google search.
|
| When looking up "the best <product>" on Google, the results are
| utterly useless. It's always some site with a financial incentive
| to buy their particular product. Increasingly, that's low quality
| Chinese clones of products (and you'll find the same effect is
| true on amazon).
|
| At least with reddit you can click on a user's post history and
| spot if something is obviously suspicious. On more popular
| threads you also get way more signal about whether something is
| sketchy.
| aparsons wrote:
| I've posited repeatedly that when Reddit IPOs, I'll be
| reallocating a significant chunk of my portfolio into their
| stock.
|
| Their management has historically lacked focus, but if Reddit
| ever builds a half-competent search index, and positions itself
| as a search-first, discovery-second destination, they will be in
| the FANG tier of stocks.
|
| They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base.
| They have free moderation. The hard parts are solved. If only
| they get someone like Satya at the helm. (Also a big reason for
| me to believe that an acquisition may also be a good play for a
| AMZN/MSFT)
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| The redesign is absolutely horrendous.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| old.reddit.com and RES is the only way. Every time I have to
| use their new UI I die a little inside.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Reddit userbase is fast deteriorating. The power users who were
| responsible for much of its highest-quality content have been
| fleeing the sinking ship for quite some time - once a fully
| credible alternative springs up (and some are in the works
| already, with superior tech underlying them) they'll be as
| toast as Digg unless they radically course-correct.
| Proven wrote:
| [deleted]
| godshatter wrote:
| As the deceased child comment to this post mentioned, reddit's
| UI is horrible. I strongly prefer old.reddit.com, but I don't
| expect it to live too long. A good UX designer would make their
| site much, much nicer to read (and hopefully much more
| performant). It appears that they are trying to push people to
| use their app, which I don't particularly wish to do since I'm
| on a desktop.
|
| As for search, maybe they should just make a deal with another
| search engine and have it run the query on their site with
| site:reddit.com or !r in the background and show the results on
| a branded page. You would think that having access to their own
| data would make searching easier, but apparently it doesn't.
|
| I am a big fan of reddit, even in it's broken state. As long as
| you're street smart and know where to stay away from, browsing
| reddit is a positive experience, at least for the subreddits I
| hang out in.
|
| I'm really really hoping that one of the big companies doesn't
| buy reddit. They wouldn't know what to do with it and it would
| die an ignominious death. In my opinion, of course.
| Havoc wrote:
| They can't keep their website online and their search tech is
| so broken it regularly fails at returning my own sorted post
| history, let alone find anything.
|
| You make good points:
|
| >They have the data. They have the dedicated, active user base.
| They have free moderation.
|
| ...but overall I think they're likely to get wiped out mass
| exodus Digg style due to some black swan mismanaged incident
| before they enter FAANG tier
| Lascaille wrote:
| >They have the dedicated, active user base.
|
| Have you ever used reddit? It's manifestly full of bots, with
| the second largest usergroup being schoolboys looking for porn
| and talking about video games.
|
| There's a reason the ads you see on reddit are for absolute
| garbage products made by companies you've never heard of.
| jfoster wrote:
| I think Amazon or Microsoft acquiring Reddit would probably
| just be the end of Reddit. They would feel pressured to censor
| it into non-existence.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| They're already owned by Advance Publications, a privately
| held company.
|
| To buy reddit they'd have to negotiate with the Newhouse
| family, not reddit's employees.
| gfd wrote:
| If reddit ever becomes a significant influencer of people's
| buying decision (like this article is claiming), it too will be
| gamed.
|
| Think automatic gpt3 bots making up life stories of how he was
| hiking up mt everest and just so happen to be wearing brand XYZ
| which saved his life. Along with autogenerated selfies to
| submit to gonewild to farm upvotes and other stuff to create a
| realistic user history.
|
| I can't see how reddit can defend against seospam of that type
| when Google can't handle the simpler problem of content farms.
| Reddit will die overnight from being replaced by 99% bot
| accounts.
| tester756 wrote:
| >they will be in the FANG tier of stocks.
|
| what?
|
| forum moderated by random people for free in their free time
|
| reaching MAGMA stocks?
|
| ok, maybe I'm a bit snarky, but seriously the gap is
| giaaaaaaant
| techwiz137 wrote:
| There was a time I could find everything in google. Now results I
| would've gotten easily 10 years ago no longer appear, even worse,
| I get 0 results quite often, whereas even obscure keywords,
| number patterns or hex patterns would easily yield a blog or two
| about a specific thing, now not so much.
|
| Even searching for a particular blog, having forgotten it's name,
| I tried every single keyword and couldn't find it.
|
| I also find it funny that I am doing exactly what the author of
| the blog post argues about. Every single time I look up something
| about trading, ADHD or disabilities, I append reddit or even
| prepend it.
| a-dub wrote:
| i think it's less the case that "Google is dying" and more the
| case that the open and decentralized internet is dying. all the
| good content is moving into miniature walled gardens, behind
| paywalls, behind authwalls and deep inside apps where you can't
| change the font size on your smartphone. increasingly all that's
| left out in the public are these SEO'd craptastic advertorials.
| adrianomartins wrote:
| Although it's true that google results for subreddit in the
| specialty I'm looking for are (to me) top results (because I know
| I'll probably read from knowledged people on what I'm looking
| for), most of my queries are more about general trivia and other
| stuff that no platform like reddit can really encompass better
| than google it self.
|
| I pretty much throw everything at google (like grammar, quotes,
| places, trivia in general, tech questions - reddit still isn't as
| good as stack-overflow for developers), Brave browser will take
| the ads out, and I get to choose my result. It's quite a nice
| experience.
|
| (And no, I don't recommend Duck Duck Go either. It fails to show
| obvious results every now and then. I learned that the hard way.)
| da_chicken wrote:
| You can add !g to a DDG search and it will pull from Google.
| I'd say the quality of DDG is slightly less than that of
| Google, but not so often that sometimes having to !g the search
| is an appreciable problem. I've heard people say that DDG just
| uses Bing, but I'm not entirely sure how true that is.
|
| The general problem with all search engines is that the moving
| target of the search algorithm often doesn't move fast enough
| anymore, and there's so much data that you're virtually
| guaranteed to have an overwhelming amount of wildly off-topic
| results. SEO farming has significantly damaged the utility of
| search engines, too. Finding obscure material is difficult
| because keywords are swamped, and it's exacerbated by the fact
| that the overwhelming use of search engines is for common URL
| lookup or to replace whatever invariably godawful embedded
| search a website might have. It's mostly DNS for people rather
| than a tool to actually search the web.
|
| Speaking of, why is embedded search so invariably godawful?
| It's really quite impressive how useless it usually is.
| marktangotango wrote:
| Embedded search in arbitrary web sites sucks because it's a
| hard problem. The naive solution is to put all text in a
| database table keyed by "page" and do a sql "like" query.
| Don't ever do this. Some db's have full text search nowadays.
| I've implemented "embedded" search a few times in the past
| and I used Lucene, which actually works pretty well.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| > The only people who don't know that are the team at Reddit, who
| can't be bothered to build a decent search interface.
|
| It's better than it was in the past!
| rattyc wrote:
| It's not a trivial task anyway, people use google because the
| results are still better than anywhere else.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Indeed. I add reddit to find authentic results by real people.
| Amazon stars are fake, and similar with other sites. Hackernews
| is also a trusted resource for real opinions.
| TrevorFSmith wrote:
| I suspect that a basic crawler that simply doesn't index pages
| with ads would return better results than Google's terribly
| complex crawler and index.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust_
|
| I hadn't really noticed that my own search habits had slowly
| changed until this article. Appending "reddit" is now a fairly
| regular habit for me, for exactly the trust issue mentioned.
| ziggus wrote:
| You can claim all you want that 'Google Search Is Dying', but
| their quarterly earnings report says otherwise.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It used to be enough to append the word "reddit" but now Google
| tends to ignore it! It learned to route around people's desire to
| get useful results and learned to ignore it and show the garbage
| links instead. You can still get it with "site:reddit.com"
| though. I wonder when they will remove this option. Afaik a lot
| of search operators are already undocumented. And they removed
| the "+" for forcing inclusion of a term, so that only quotes
| worked as intended, but then also removed full support for quotes
| and it's now just a hint. Probably every step boosts some
| engineer's or manager's short term metrics and evaluation reports
| so it keeps happening.
| timwis wrote:
| I tried switching to DuckDuckGo years ago, but found the result
| quality just didn't match google - it wasn't getting me to what I
| was after. Now I feel that way about google even more strongly,
| so perhaps I'll give DuckDuckGo another go.
|
| PS I also do the kind of searching in the article with hacker
| news, e.g. 'JavaScript testing site:news.ycombinator.com'
| bobm_kite9 wrote:
| Although I like the idea of DDG's bang operators, I rarely use
| them (mainly !g when I'm feeling desperate).
|
| What I would find useful is to be able to whitelist a bunch of
| sites on DDG, so that it prioritises results from them first,
| when I search.. basically most of the sites with ! operators I
| guess.
|
| That way I wouldn't get all the SO clone-sites returning their
| rubbish.
| jquery wrote:
| I've been doing this for a few years already. Not for all my
| searches, sometimes I append other domains, but generally I now
| tell google what domain I'm interested in, and Reddit is a
| popular one.
|
| Unfortunately, only a matter of time until Reddit is gamed to
| hell unless they take steps to prevent moderator corruption
| (which is already happening and severe for many popular
| subreddits). And so the cycle continues. Avoiding people who want
| to sell you stuff is a sisyphean task...
| fishtoaster wrote:
| I don't know that I agree with the thesis that it's dying, but I
| think the symptoms it describes are very real.
|
| Searching for "good restaurants in <city I'm visiting>" is
| useless. Entire real companies exist to fill the top few slots on
| that search for any given city. My workaround is, as the article
| says, to search Reddit instead. Look for the subreddit dedicated
| to that city, then find their most recent thread on good places
| to eat - you find much better results.
|
| That said, I strongly suspect this only works because it's not a
| widely-known strategy. As soon as a critical mass of people start
| going to reddit instead of google, the same enormous weight of
| effort people put into SEO will instead go to finding ways to
| subvert Reddit's authenticity. Sock puppet accounts,
| astroturfing, generating spammy subreddits, voting rings - there
| are plenty of strategies, and dedicated experts will have a huge
| incentive to invent more. Reddit will put up countermeasures,
| just like Google tries to prevent SEO spam. I don't have any
| reason to believe Reddit will be more successful in the long term
| than Google is.
|
| So... enjoy it while it lasts. :)
| bigthymer wrote:
| > I strongly suspect this only works because it's not a widely-
| known strategy
|
| I think this post in combination with HN users' comments
| indicates that this is a widely-known strategy. It's cool. I've
| been doing it too and didn't know that everyone else did it
| too. Reddit is already being secretly advertised on but I guess
| we'll see how things end up.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Sure, but "widely known on hacker news" is a very different
| bar. :) Really, the question is, "is it a widely known enough
| strategy that there's big money to be made subverting it?"
| And as soon as the answer is "yes," the battle will be on
| between spammers trying to fill Reddit with low-quality info
| and Reddit trying to keep them out without hurting legit
| users.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Not sure if Google's fault only, but searching for programming
| related content is much, much worse than it used to be. It is
| extremely difficult to get Google to show deeply technical
| content, presumably because it falls outside of the majority of
| search terms.
| riston wrote:
| For me it seems that Google search basically has leverage to
| either make more money or show more useful results to their
| customers and they have chosen the first option to make more
| money.
| SjorsVG wrote:
| I never use Reddit and generally don't find what I am looking for
| in the threads that Google suggests.
| zuminator wrote:
| The author's thesis is a bit confused. Reddit hasn't replaced
| Google as a search engine. Reddit does have a search function,
| but have you used it? It's frankly terrible. Rather, Google has
| become the search engine front end for the huge database that is
| Reddit. Currently they have a symbiotic relationship, but if
| Reddit ever decides to take its data private and build its own
| competent front end, it could potentially splinter off for itself
| a good chunk of traffic.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| "Google's results are clearly getting worse". Can somebody
| quantify this in some objective way?
|
| As in: I have this concrete metric (that anybody can inspect /
| replicate) and I saw it declining from 201X to 2022 etc.
|
| I don't dispute that it is a true fact. The comments reveal both
| ways that this manifests, inventive workarounds and possible
| causes. But without having read through the 765 comments(!) (at
| time of posting) I don't see something that can be quoted as a
| measured reality.
|
| NB: It would be really useful to have such an independent quality
| index, also for future reference when invariably somebody
| provides a "better" search engine.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Alternative interpretation: Google so useful that it instantly
| searches whatever sub-corpus you desire if you simply mention it
| in your question.
|
| Google says it shows zero ads on 80% of searches. So the whole
| "ads now take up entire screen" thing is based on the qualitative
| ramblings of twitter accounts who don't know what they are
| talking about.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| I think part of this is the inverse of the base rate fallacy.
| As people's use of search has gone up, the absolute number of
| bad experience (many ads, or poor results) has gone up
| regardless of whether the actual quality had gone up or not.
| Combine that with the elevated expectation and the confirmation
| bias, some people's perception of search quality will get worse
| and the number of people with such opinion will increase.
| [deleted]
| swlkr wrote:
| I'm also a staunch site:reddit.com google user
|
| I was skeptical at first, but it really does seem to work for
| most queries, especially queries about products. I tried standing
| desks, streaming setup stuff, keyboards, linux desktop
| configurations, it's all there, all mostly ad free, definitely
| SEO free.
| silvercove wrote:
| EscargotCult wrote:
| re: the Dead Internet Theory, anyone who browses the "news"
| sections of any stock trading app, Yahoo Finance / iOS Stocks app
| can see that the likes of Barron's, Zacks Investment Research,
| Motley Fool, Benzinga, etc have been autogenerating "analysis
| reports" for some time, where some basic fundamentals and options
| metrics are repackaged in some filler wording. I don't think
| it'll take much for lots of secondary content to reach this
| state.
| SCHiM wrote:
| I'll echo one of the points in the article: "Google is trying to
| be smart".
|
| This is the source of many people's frustration, and the source
| of forced synonyms. A dumb tool that adapts to humans as they use
| it and tries to be "smart" prohibits us from getting more skilled
| in the usage of the tool. It becomes unpredictable, and it
| introduces significant friction each time it does something dumb.
|
| Even if the tool is correct 90% of the time, it is wrong 100% of
| the time on an emotional/ux level. The successes are invisible in
| aggregate, but each mistake sticks out like a sore thumb. I guess
| why this is: modern understanding of our brains (as I, a lay man,
| understand it) is that they attempt to continuously predict
| what's going to happen next in their environment. When all
| predictions are correct it feels good, and there's no tension. A
| tool that adapts and changes makes our brains predictions turn
| out wrong, and our brains punish us with tension and attention
| each time the tool does not do what we want, since it failed to
| predict the desired behavior.
|
| Previous versions of google felt so nice precisely because our
| brains, or at least those of hackers, could adapt to its various
| tricks and shortcuts.
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