[HN Gopher] Google Search Is Dying (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Google Search Is Dying (2022)
Author : punnerud
Score : 364 points
Date : 2023-03-06 10:21 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dkb.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (dkb.blog)
| ruszki wrote:
| Yesterday I wanted to figure out whether some languages are more
| difficult than others as a native language. Google failed
| miserably. Nowadays, there are things, simple things like that,
| for which Google is increasingly useless. I encounter such every
| week. This definitely didn't happen 10 years ago. In this case,
| it gave me results about bullshit ad sites, random barely related
| Quora questions, what languages are more difficult for native
| English speakers. Nothing helped. Zero proper result in 10
| minutes. There were none which I could use as a reference, or had
| any proper reference.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I believe that Google could easily, from a technical point of
| view, lower the search ranking of web pages that have a lot of
| affiliate links. However, I also believe that this might be
| against their business interests.
|
| When I am in a patient mood, I now just use the Edge Browser on
| my Macs and iPads, and jump right into Bing AI/ChatGPT chat mode.
| It is really important to make it clear that you want the system
| to research, follow web links, and summarize results for you.
| However, I see no advertisements, so how are they going to
| monetize this? I pay for OpenAI API use and also pay (for now)
| for ChatGPT, so I guess that I would also pay for an ad-free Bing
| AI search.
|
| I have always been a Google fan, still love GCP, YouTube, YouTube
| Music, and Play Books. But they do make their money off of search
| and advertisements, so it will be really interesting to see how
| they protect their business.
| NBJack wrote:
| Don't forget this is how Google started. It was originally a
| plain search page by design; minimally invasive ads didn't even
| come until later. Given that it is estimated that 'AI' chat
| costs about 10X to run per query vs. traditional search, please
| enjoy this honeymoon period while it lasts. I personally
| suspect that the real cost is much higher; GPUs are power
| hungry and these models aren't small.
| tzhenghao wrote:
| > The long answer is that most of the web has become too
| inauthentic to trust.
|
| Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it
| catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting
| questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's
| generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with
| discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get
| from customer support. Reddit also doesn't have "promoted"
| content / responses, which is largely the issue with Google ads
| outlined by author.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Google held control of who they reward using AdWords, they
| decided who lives and who dies, who goes bancrupt and who
| prosper It is their system that rewards SEO spam
|
| If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn
| and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam.
|
| Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with
| none of that shit
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You can submit your site to Google and they will index it. If
| your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody
| links to you! Even if you don't pay Google a dime.
|
| Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or
| sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad
| service.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if
| nobody links to you!
|
| I m sorry, this is like news from a different universe.
|
| There is an absolutely world-shattering report on how
| children have lost all freedom ovet the past 40 years. They
| used to roam the neighbourhood, then they were allowed to
| stay in one street, and today we dont let them out of
| backyard.
|
| I have it on my PC, but can't find it in Google. Its
| impossible now
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I can only talk from my own experience, I've launched
| several websites that became high ranking on Google
| solely because of content and speed. Without anybody
| linking to them. Hell, there's still nobody linking to
| them years later, and Google still keeps them highly
| ranked. In niches with well established competitors.
|
| Without Google, I doubt I would have had any chance to
| reach a public, because nobody except search engines will
| give you the time of day when you're not already
| established.
|
| There's many bad things about Google, but they truly
| allow many people a chance to get their voice out and
| many small businesses a chance to exist. That is
| brilliant.
| fathyb wrote:
| Reddit definitely has promoted content and native advertising.
| Perhaps you're not seeing it because you're using the far
| superior old.reddit.com?
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| or download alternative mobile app becouse they allow it, and
| use adblock
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The biggest form of this advertising isn't actually done with
| the knowledge of Reddit. Organizations use Reddit accounts to
| astroturf narratives together, since Reddit is pseudonymous.
| Companies who need better PR, or just a good controversy, can
| do this much more cheaply on Reddit than any other internet
| forum.
|
| Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that _is_ authentic
| can be the most useful stuff on the internet.
| djtango wrote:
| True but, for example, I still find that restaurants and
| travel advice is far superior on Reddit than Google.
|
| Reddit is often my starting point for beginning research on
| purchasing decisions.
|
| Although when buying a digital piano, I ended up finding
| dedicated boards like pianoworld to be better
|
| EDIT
|
| Ironically, I also find YouTube to be a great source of
| research, mostly because the cost to produce content is
| higher and I think it's somewhat harder to produce
| inauthentic content (at least to me so far for the things I
| am researching)
| mstipetic wrote:
| I never understood how Reddit isn't an advertising powerhouse.
| Their users literally voluntarily segregate by interest, but
| the proper tech never got built out. Last I checked they
| integrated a 3rd party solution for that.
| LegitShady wrote:
| reddit became massive overnight because digg imploded. digg
| imploded because they tried to turn into an advertising
| powerhouse.
| ilyt wrote:
| I remember how their idea of paid ad was just a reddit post
| you can comment on.
|
| Which was kinda cool from user side but advertisers didn't
| like people taking piss on them in the comments so they
| undoed it
| petesergeant wrote:
| I would guess they have a huge problem with ad blocking
| margorczynski wrote:
| Especially that places like Reddit attract more "tech-
| savvy" people who have a high amount of ad block users.
| Naive web ads on places like that or e.g. Ars Technica is
| tricky most probably.
| hbn wrote:
| I think that was the case a few years back, but these
| days a lot of casual users are accessing it through the
| official app and getting served tons of ads.
|
| It was a weird moment seeing a reddit comment where
| someone referred to the site as "this app." Made me feel
| old.
| polski-g wrote:
| They need to make the ads and relevant HTML look identical
| to "real" posts so adblocking doesn't work
| brookst wrote:
| This devaluing content to humans, thus breaking what
| makes the site good.
| oblio wrote:
| If you look at their software dev efforts it should be
| painfully obvious why they're not a powerhouse of anything
| :-)
|
| They had great product-market fit early on, were boosted by
| YN, and inertia is a huge thing.
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Yeah, it's an absurdly poorly managed company.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| Which is why it's still useful.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| > Reddit was
|
| Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is
| sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent)
| are moderated to the point that censored would be the more
| appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are
| whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| It's getting a lot worse I agree. It seems like anything that
| might be offensive to anyone having any emotions under any
| circumstance is now blurred and labeled "NSFW".
| chimprich wrote:
| > Then there are whole subs banned (including non political)
| for wrongthink
|
| I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like
| them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's
| a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so
| groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break
| Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political
| disagreement is not nearly enough.
|
| And if you disagree, please post some examples.
|
| As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word
| "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come
| up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism
| that is used mainly by the alt-right.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| [dead]
| realjhol wrote:
| > And if you disagree, please post some examples.
|
| The Donald
| brookst wrote:
| The poster child for vote manipulation? Where front page
| articles would have 5000 upvotes 10 minutes after
| posting? The sub that fetishized persecution despite
| receiving warning by after warning?
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| They banned a large Covid sub r/NoNewNormal where the bulk
| of the content would be accepted as common sense today.
|
| Themes in that sub were that "the cure is worse than the
| disease" (it was) and that "we shouldn't throw away our way
| of life for Covid" (we chose not to in hindsight).
|
| If you are a member of subs like r/lockdownskepticism even
| today then you frequently get banned from other subs.
| chimprich wrote:
| "Common sense" indeed. That subreddit was a hotbed of
| unscientific anti-vaccine lies. However, it was actually
| banned for breaking Reddit rules on brigading.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/c
| ovi...
|
| Quote: Claims of "brigading" are common
| and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we
| found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal
| was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days
| (largely directed at communities with more mainstream
| views on COVID or location-based communities that have
| been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior
| continued even after a warning was issued from our team
| to the Mods.
| _dain_ wrote:
| no, this is BS. pretty much every big political sub does
| "brigading" against other subs, it's impossible to stop.
| a handful of bad actors can ruin it for everyone. reddit
| admins apply the anti-brigading rules selectively. there
| are big subs that have gotten away with it forever.
| brookst wrote:
| That's some revisionist history. That sun was a cesspool
| of bad behavior. It wasn't banned for believing the wrong
| thing, it was banned for organized attacks on anyone who
| dared to believe differently from them.
| projektfu wrote:
| Orwell's term is crimethink of course. I can only think of
| one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to
| say certain things to certain people. Thankfully you're
| still allowed to actually hold the thoughts in your head.
| brookst wrote:
| It has always been a felony to say "certain things to
| certain people". See for instance fraud against the
| elderly.
|
| Which certain people are you being unfairly restrained
| from saying what certain things to?
| projektfu wrote:
| Looking into it I probably accepted a framing I shouldn't
| have.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I can only think of one party that recently passed laws
| making it a felony to say certain things to certain
| people.
|
| No idea as to what you're referring to, but you must know
| many more examples throughout the world and history, no?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's probably an US-centric comment. I have no idea
| what it is either, but the "one party that done X" line
| is a strong signal of it.
| [deleted]
| MrMan wrote:
| that is great for increasing the quality of search results,
| moderation is awesome
| dageshi wrote:
| This point is always brought up and it has no relevance in
| terms of what we're discussing which boils down to opinions
| on products and services from people who have some expertise
| in the matter.
|
| You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a
| question on something related to a product in that hobby.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| Try asking why Aragorn is a black man in the future LotR
| set on /r/magicTCG and see how long you can ask a question
| on something related to a product in that hobby after that.
| There are other swift ways to get ban, like noting that the
| body shape of some characters were changed drastically in-
| between old and newer cards. Basically anything going
| against the pandering of WotC to some twitter users.
| ilyt wrote:
| I got banned out of /r/games for asking "what rights
| trans people don't have that other humans do?" under post
| about someone yelling "trans rights are human rights"
| about Hogwart's legacy. Not being snarky at all, just
| curious (as I'm not from US and don't really get what the
| fuss is about).
|
| Still haven't got a coherent answer out of anyone I
| asked, just insults
| brookst wrote:
| I don't think anyone would take you seriously enough to
| give a coherent answer if you're echoing the language of
| the bigots, even just unintentionally. It's like asking
| "why _should_ black people be able to use the same
| restrooms?" during the civil rights movement. Even as a
| totally honest and not at all disingenuous question, it
| blends into the rhetoric of the reactionaries.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| The whole story related to Rowling supposedly being
| transphobe is crazy. All that canceling because she
| stated in a twit that "person who menstruate" is a stupid
| circumlocution around the word woman. Then, like
| religious taboo, it extended to whatever was linked to
| it. The irony is that all these cancelers are acting very
| 10-100 worst against whoever is the target of the anger
| than what happened to the people they are supposedly
| defending.
| dighp wrote:
| It's a good question, and one that their activists don't
| like answering because " _the right to impose oneself on
| spaces designated solely for the opposite sex_ " isn't
| what most people would accept as a human right. So they
| ignore or block or ban or attack instead of engaging
| reasonably.
| izacus wrote:
| That... sounds like a very well deserved ban considering
| the topic, the reddit and everything that was happening
| around it.
|
| As a moderator of online communities I'd do the same in a
| heartbeat. Take that to Twitter or somewhere.
| soerxpso wrote:
| How is that well-deserved? His comment was literally
| about the topic of the post, and the post was apparently
| allowed. "We allow politics but sorry, you're only
| allowed to have the Right Opinion here. Take all other
| opinions to Twitter!"
| brookst wrote:
| So you're saying they have little interest in
| entertaining someone who just wants to culture war? And
| that's somehow bad?
| tokinonagare wrote:
| What are you speaking about? The company owning the
| father of all trading card game, which had a strong place
| in geek culture, is buying for millions a beloved IP very
| relevant to that demographic too and is making huge
| controversial changes to push for woke ideology and you
| claim that's the people rebelling against it are trying
| to start a culture war. This is pure victim blaming and
| shaming. That's outrageous honestly. Especially given the
| even the (worth watching) Peterson Jackson's movie
| adaption was already controversial to a part of the
| fanbase, and that the Amazon adaptation showed clearly
| that radical-left agenda wasn't welcome in the lore.
| AdamN wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people.
| That's a critical part of having a trust value within a
| social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think
| a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to
| ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there
| won't be content on the sub at all though.
|
| For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting
| and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because
| they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is
| considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say
| anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I
| never see it again.
| grumple wrote:
| I completely agree with the point that banning/censoring
| people is necessary in order to operate any internet forum.
| But I know from firsthand experience that bans are used to
| stifle valuable discussion both on major subreddits and
| niche ones. I've seen it happen to me and to others.
|
| For example, on an r/news post a few years ago about the
| Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I replied to another comment
| where my content was basically the following: "If someone
| threatened to bomb your house, and they had a history of
| bombing houses, would you respond? What about after they
| destroyed your house?". That's almost exactly the wording I
| used (wish the comment hadn't been deleted so I could
| repost it exactly). This not only got me permanently banned
| from r/news, but also reported to the admins who censored
| the account. I suspect I pissed off a reddit admin or power
| user who followed me around reporting me, as shortly
| afterwards in a niche sub, I made another post discussing
| the continuum of force when it came to violent crime,
| quickly received several reports, and my account was
| permabanned from reddit. Note that both the content and
| tone of my posts there were similar to how I post on HN,
| which I think is generally appropriate.
|
| This sequence of events bothered me a lot, because I think
| discussion of the use of force continuum and the ethics of
| preemptive or retributive force are highly relevant to
| today's world, and that the places where I continued
| (didn't start) discussion of them were the appropriate
| places for them. If this conversation can't happen on
| reddit, which it appears it can't, then we need another
| forum. It is clear to me today that reddit has hit it's
| eternal september. I can't bring myself to respond to the
| multitude of low effort posts that typically bombard you
| when you post something other than memeing.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| There's absolutely something wrong. They're not banning
| people for not adhering to posting rules in a sub, they're
| literally banning wrongthink, they're often banning
| political opinions they dislike or don't align with US
| democrat party hegemony.
|
| They suppress subs or influence mods to suppress them for
| them.
|
| There's a myriad of ways in which censorship to shape a
| narrative happens, and that narrative is as true as the
| narrative a few twitter users can set, if highlighted as
| "the majority opinion/the people have spoken" by mainstream
| media.
|
| There's intervention via subterfuge, not an open contract
| you either adhere or not.
| h9h9h9 wrote:
| High bar is subjective, you're only filtering by the most
| superficial aspects: are there swear words? Do they have
| citations? Do they "sound" smart? Are they saying something
| "problematic"? Same here. There's no cadence. (I'm not
| talking about /r/AskHistorians though)
|
| I've found hidden gems in free for all, no-karma, no-upvote
| forums such as 4chan. And you pay attention there, because
| people are not trying to sound smart.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| >There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people.
| That's a critical part of having a trust value within a
| social network
|
| I would not characterise a community moulded according to
| the whims of a few anonymous individuals as high in trust.
| AdamN wrote:
| I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their
| filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low
| quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that
| are making their decisions but I no longer trust that
| outlet anymore.
|
| Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times)
| now have more of my time because I trust them more based
| on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer
| low quality articles under click bait headlines).
| ilyt wrote:
| > I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their
| filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low
| quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that
| are making their decisions but I no longer trust that
| outlet anymore.
|
| YOU MUTED is the key here.
|
| "Majority of subreddit didn't like it so it got
| downvoted" is somewhat democratic will of community.
|
| You muted a user coz you don't want their content is
| personal choice.
|
| _Moderator_ choosing to do so on a whim is neither of
| those. You do need moderators coz some people won 't
| behave but many times rules of subreddit are _basically_
| there so moderator can point to excuse on banning or
| removing whatever they don 't like, not to ban something
| people don't want there.
| regularfry wrote:
| It's high in trust _of a very specific type_. Not,
| perhaps, the type we want or need, but the type we have
| nonetheless.
| account42 wrote:
| > That's a critical part of having a trust value within a
| social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't
| think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for
| them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far
| than there won't be content on the sub at all though.
|
| That's implying that there is a single one-dimensional
| quality metric. The problem is when moderators of popular
| subreddits (for a particular niche) or those with the most
| obvious names for a particular topic start to enforcing
| their own personal biases in the discussion rather than
| sticking to keeping the discussion on-topic.
| lincpa wrote:
| [dead]
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| The advantage of Reddit to the broad internet is that there are
| always people trying to prove you wrong and call out BS.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet,
| and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus
| exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high
| karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30.
|
| > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
|
| It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility
| of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts
| are de facto shadowbanned.
|
| Basically, Reddit's system is terrible.
| wting wrote:
| > It does, though. Your karma basically determines the
| visibility of any new post you try to make.
|
| User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The
| source code is available here (as of ~2018):
| https://github.com/reddit-
| archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...
|
| > And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
|
| User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per
| subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise
| there is no site-wide application of user karma.
|
| Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing
| alternative rankings at Reddit.
|
| 0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users'
| default feed.
|
| 1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts
| makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to
| identify malicious accounts.
| ilyt wrote:
| Entirely depends on subreddit in question
|
| > It does, though. Your karma basically determines the
| visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or
| new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
|
| It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is
| just unfortunate side effect for new users.
|
| Other problem is that karma is global which _basically_ means
| user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-
| based filtering is doomed to fail anyway
| NBJack wrote:
| And it's not a great protection system at all. Just like
| how content generators are gaming Google search, there is a
| problem now with bots that find what is popular and repost
| it later (with a wording change) for karma farming.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| When two people say 'reddit' they might be referencing two
| completely different worlds.
|
| The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago
| was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits
| from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and
| I'd have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for
| more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for
| many other people. And some user might only ever be looking
| at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.
|
| That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it's difficult
| to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned
| ring nothing in my mind, but as there's subs where you can
| only submit post titles 'cat', there sure must be others were
| karma is everything.
| hollander wrote:
| As a reddit-addict this really depends on the subreddit
| you're using. In /r/askreddit you don't stand a chance that
| your question will attract serious attention, but there are
| so many subreddits with small usergroups and enough
| reactions. In /r/askreddit or other popular subreddits, my
| answers get reasonable attention, even if I'm not on the
| reddit timeschedule.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > Reddit's system is terrible
|
| This doesn't match my experience of reading Reddit
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| That's because you're just unaware of how astroturfed it
| is.
|
| I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits and
| randomly picked an account that posted a top meme
|
| https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/
|
| The account has 8 million post karma and every single post
| it submits to a subreddit ends up on the front page of
| Reddit... without fail.
|
| The account isn't a mod of any of those subs, but they're
| clearly using upvote manipulation to get every single one
| of their posts to the front page.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| Of course the front-page will look like that. Niche
| subreddits are a completely different experience.
| ilyt wrote:
| That looks just like making content tailored to subreddit
| it is posted, no shit it's popular.
|
| Also how the fuck "Building a hobby-shelter while camping
| in Kelowna" or some random funny pictures is
| "astroturfing"?
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| But in the context of TFA - searching Reddit to get
| factual answers - what appears on the reddit.com front
| page from day to day is largely irrelevant, surely?
| michaelt wrote:
| I always assumed the botted accounts on Reddit were in
| the hands of marketing companies, ready to upvote posts
| saying "My Brand X headphones sound great" or "I changed
| from Brand Y to Brand Z cigarettes because the smooth
| taste never leaves me feeling over-smoked" or "I made big
| gains by putting my life savings into this sketchy
| investment" or whatever they're being paid to promote at
| the time.
|
| I'd wager you could do a lot to influence public opinion
| with just an upvote ring, without the botted accounts
| actually needing to post messages.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| By extension, high-karma accounts that are run by
| marketing companies can post in a niche subreddit to
| subtly promote their product or disparage their
| competition, and they'll end up on the front page of that
| subreddit. They'll get a lot of views and a lot more
| engagement than the average unsophisticated user's post
| would -- and those astroturfed posts would, on average,
| rank higher in searches.
|
| This is analogous to SEO, but rather more insidious and
| sneaky. You can spot SEO blogspam from a mile away. You
| don't know if a Reddit user is a real person, a bot, or a
| company's representative.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Reddit bots are used for upvote manipulation of
| legitimate posts by brand ambassadors/etc. The post
| histories are just to make the bot look legitimate.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Who cares? The real reddit stuff is not in the front
| pages.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| Someone must care, no? Those threads get a large number
| of impressions, assumedly from real users.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits
|
| That was your first mistake, the defaults are cesspools
| full of karma farming bots. Nobody goes to those for
| advice.
| danaris wrote:
| Spoken like someone in a bubble. "Nobody goes there
| anymore; it's too crowded."
|
| Well, if "nobody" goes there, how are the bots able to
| farm karma? Who's giving them the views and upvotes?
|
| I guarantee you anything that's the "default" is being
| visited by many, many casual visitors, people not "in the
| know", and people who don't recognize karma farming bots
| for what they are.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I said nobody goes there _for advice_ because there
| usually isn 't any there, we mainly go to those for
| arguing nonsense and laughing at memes. And I'm not
| saying that there aren't many advertisements on those,
| but they are usually painfully obvious.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| What makes you think that the niche subreddits aren't
| also full of marketing firms, bots, and upvote networks?
| With very few exceptions, they are.
| parasubvert wrote:
| They also have an okay s:n ratio in my experience, as the
| mod team can work the experience. Like for example, q&a
| type threads tend to be useful. There are folks promoting
| things but it's obvious when they are.
| foepys wrote:
| You don't need to be the size of Coca Cola to
| successfully astroturf, there are enough companies
| specialized in social media marketing.
|
| Take r/mechanicalkeyboards for example, arguably a niche
| community. The enthusiasts there are very motivated to
| buy new things and are willing to pay quite a lot of
| money for them. Place a few of your bots there to promote
| your artisan keycaps and watch people pay top bucks for
| them.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective
| marketing group? Advertisers want to maximize their reach
| and well, it's not like they know these groups even
| exist.
|
| I'm sure it happens a lot regardless, but the vast
| majority of content in those is still just from regular
| people. You can tell by the information posted as it
| tends to be more or less truthful and useful. Once it
| stops being that it'll be obvious enough. Like when
| Russian bots invade your average Ukraine related
| r/worldnews post.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective
| marketing group? A
|
| That's the magic of Reddit, 4Chan and every other
| cesspool where any niche is only a slight URL change away
| from any other niche.
|
| It's trivially easy to add niche subs 2, 3 and 4 to the
| list of places that you target.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Except that there is a culture of looking for and outing
| shills in a lot of subs, and since you can see someone's
| entire post history it's usually not hard to confirm or
| at least provide solid evidence for it once you suspect
| it. I had someone out an astroturfer who posted a banal
| non-response to one of my comments just the other day.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah and then any mod with half a brain sees you're
| spamming things everywhere and bans you.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| 1) That's a whack-a-mole exercise when the astrorufer
| buys accounts in bulk.
|
| 2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable
| from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance.
| Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their
| product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI
| generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a
| couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether
| you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some
| product.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| > Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new
| post you try to make.
|
| User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms.
| Post _score_ is, and that influences karma, but not the other
| way around.
|
| edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the
| ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In
| that case, the misunderstanding was mine.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's not part of the ranking algorithm, it's part of the
| anti spam system. If you make a new account and comment,
| it's almost never visible to anyone else.
|
| You have to warm up accounts with a few comments over a
| week before they start showing up.
| input_sh wrote:
| An alternative: create an account, don't use it for a
| while, use it.
|
| Mods essentially have two variables to work with: account
| age and karma. Some subs do set minimum karma (I've
| stumbled upon some that wouldn't accept below 2k karma),
| but most just go by account age to prevent banned users
| from going around the ban.
|
| And a tip for spotting karma farmers: just go to one of
| those big subs that accept screenshots of tweets. If the
| screenshot has engagements/timestamp cropped, click on a
| profile. Like 8 times out of 10 it's gonna be an older
| account that never posted before reposting one of the
| older popular submissions.
|
| EDIT: Here's an example that took me like 20s to find:
| https://www.reddit.com/user/DepartureSimples/
| SquareWheel wrote:
| That's often true. Individual subreddits may filter new
| accounts or low-karma thresholds to prevent spam. The
| better subreddits will simply flag it for manual review
| rather than remove it outright.
| lincpa wrote:
| [dead]
| pprotas wrote:
| > Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new
| post you try to make.
|
| Are you sure? How do you know this?
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think what they're trying to say is some subreddits auto-
| collapse comments from users with low karma and recent date
| of creation to combat bots. If reddit gives any more weight
| to high karma users I can tell you as one that it
| definitely doesn't seem noticeable at all. Right time and
| right place comments are always the ones that end up on
| top.
| ta8903 wrote:
| On most big subs if you have a fresh account your posts are
| hidden by default. Maybe they have to be manually approved?
| Not sure.
|
| Source: Don't have a persistent reddit account, just made a
| new one for the few times I wanted to post something.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
|
| Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the
| toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client
| as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them
| interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g.
| /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme
| anyway).
|
| It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms,
| but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised,
| they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.
| anon23432343 wrote:
| I do the same when it comes to products and reviews.
|
| When it comes to programming I limit the search to one or two
| years. This is why my stackoverflow is sorted that the newest
| answer is the last because they don't let me sort in a way the
| the newest answer is the first.
|
| I don't think its google fault in general its just the thing that
| if your first on a specific product you add a link where to buy
| that thing and this is how you make money. Would be fun to see if
| affiliate links were not a thing. By how much search results
| would improve.
| SCdF wrote:
| On the PG tweet[1], posts like this make me feel like I'm losing
| my mind. I cannot get over how the tweet says "Reddit is unique
| in social media" while the Instagram graph is literally identical
| to Reddit's and are right beside each other on the graphic that
| accompanies the words. You cannot miss it. It's also very
| selective, as the Twitch guy points out, and it's also google
| search terms, which aren't really that indicative. But I guess PG
| === default insightful? Wild.
|
| On using reddit as a search engine, I agree that for certain
| types of information it's very helpful, specifically in theory
| authentic user experiences. Twitter is also useful here, though
| not to the level of detail. You could argue that stack exchange
| is the same thing: user generated truth that by and large aren't
| search engine spam.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480
| theloco wrote:
| let this be a lesson not to let your company prioritize
| censorship and propaganda over everyday normal duties expected by
| users.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I have an idea: a search engine where a team of humans adds what
| website they deem important and also ranks it. Website owners who
| aren't in the index and want to submit their site, pay a small
| fee.
|
| The result would be no SEO, no content farms and highly relevant
| content. I don't think the algorithms and even AI will ever keep
| track with people who try to game the engines for profits.
| projektfu wrote:
| Perhaps it could be organized into a hierarchical set of
| categories as well...
| stockhorn wrote:
| Why not let all of humanity upvote/downvote each website and
| flag sites as seo-spam, content-farm if needed?
|
| We could use a web of trust, combined with gov-id verification
| to ensure no bots/AIs manipulate the votes...
| t0bia_s wrote:
| https://crowdview.ai/
| pjmlp wrote:
| Indeed, Altavista, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves would probably give
| better search results than Google as of today.
| pmlnr wrote:
| I upvoted this, but only because of nostalgia. I was there when
| Google started and it was lightyears ahead of the already gamed
| Altavista which relied on human ingenuity and meta tags.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which kind of stresses the point how bad Google has become.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| 2022
| skilled wrote:
| Who needs Google anyway? Forbes is an expert on everything! I
| mean holy fucking shit, is there any topic Forbes _isn 't_ an
| expert on? I wonder who are the brilliant minds at Google Search
| who let shit like that slide. As of the last 2 years, Forbes has
| become an expert in web development, devops, and who knows what's
| coming next - experts on systems architecture?
|
| Link buying is as rampant as ever, too. For one of the blogs I
| own, it's not uncommon to get an out of the blue offer for $500
| to publish an article that includes a link to some product. And I
| have heard those numbers are even crazier in casino, gambling and
| cannabis niches.
|
| For a new site/blogs these days, Google will stall/throttle you
| for 2-3 years before it starts even looking at you as if you
| matter / are a subject expert. All the while, shitty news sites
| like Forbes get pumped to the top not because they produce high-
| quality content but because they're jacked up with backlinks.
| iamshs wrote:
| I am a Sikh, I need to clarify some of my concepts, look for
| meanings etc and nearly all the search terms are polluted by
| Hindu Nationalist and Islamist Dawah guys. There were websites
| started early on, which are now abandoned and hence don't score
| high. It is such a mess honestly using internet being a minority.
| orost wrote:
| The most tragic casualty of this is the ancient wisdom of just
| google your tech issues. It doesn't work any more! All you get is
| page upon page of auto-generated help sites that pretend to have
| solutions for your exact problem but are all actually the same
| list of generic tips (restart your computer! update your
| drivers!)
|
| I can sort through it with enough effort, but it's a disaster for
| non-tech people who could muddle through their computer problems
| before but now just get hopelessly stuck in the Google Search
| swamp every time.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| Look on the bright side; we're the last generation(s) of folk
| capable of operating tech at any level beyond what the UX
| people at FAANG will allow one to reach. The bridge has been
| burned behind us. Yay job security.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Stack Overflow is to blame for that.
|
| With the best of intentions they make their data open,
| resulting in hundreds of clone sites regurgitating the stack
| overflow data, on sites with names like "ProblemGeek" and
| "NerdAnswer".
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I mean, SO is still there... Just limit your search result to
| it, e.g. "java enum ordinal site:stackoverflow.com" (or
| others from stackexchange family).
| pmlnr wrote:
| It's not just Google, it's all of them. DDG used to be rather
| decent, now it's ONLY return "X best Y" when I'm searching for
| anything.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| I feel like the results from Kagi are pretty great. I tend to
| get what I'm looking for in the top few results.
| pmlnr wrote:
| > Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid
| service which requires an account for the transaction.
|
| Right. Definite "no".
| freediver wrote:
| Curious what would you do if you created an ad-free search
| engine?
| pmlnr wrote:
| It's not the money, it's that I'm tired of believing
| companies "we won't track you", especially when it's that
| easy, with login required.
| freediver wrote:
| The companies that have incentives to track you are the
| companies with an ad-supported business model.
|
| The only business model that does not have an incentive
| to track you is a subscription based model. Yes, it is is
| easy to 'track' you but what is the incentive to do that?
| It does not need to monetize your data.
|
| And in order to pay a susbcription, you need an account.
|
| So curious how would you do this differently in Kagi's
| shoes?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Marketing and the ad industry ruin everything they touch.
|
| You throw away most of your mail because of them, both physical
| and the e variety. You don't answer your phone because of them.
| They abused popups so badly they were basically removed from the
| standard. Adblockers are such a necessity for making anything on
| the web usable that they'd be built in if it weren't for the fact
| that Chrome is made by a company that sells ad space.
|
| And of course they ruined search too. And it won't be fixed
| because Google itself is part of the problem, not the solution.
|
| And if you work for them, you're helping make the world a worse
| place. Please stop. I'm not going to go as far as Hicks and say
| you should kill yourself, but you should quit your job and try
| your hand at improving the world instead.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| In September of 2022 I have started collecting links in
| repository. Some articles I find useful, to some I am returning
| back like a turtle into an island.
|
| I have bookmarked 3930 links. The number grows every day. I know
| this will not replace google for me, but it is a place that
| allows me to browse my link history and easily find things I have
| found interesting in the past. My personal filter.
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| As a programmer I often use search to find solution to my
| problems. This works most of the time. Sometimes I search for
| Covid related sites, or related to protests, or to other 'hot'
| topics. It is difficult to find anything interesting in the
| results, as they are monitored, and homogeneous. I would like to
| see what the disinformation is, I would like multiple points of
| view. Even if wrong.
|
| I started creating my own link database, so that I could find
| past links I found interesting. It does not have to be connected
| to ill intention from Google. There are so many pages, links that
| it just could be hard to find stuff there.
|
| It is impossible to find useful data on words that are 'open' to
| interpretation. Search for 'apple'. I would like to receive
| millions, if not billions of news, links, information about the
| company, about types of apples, about anything that relates to
| that word. Instead you can only receive 31 pages in news, and
| around 10 pages in normal query.
|
| This is unacceptable. Google search is like looking through a
| keyhole at the internet.
| taylodl wrote:
| Google is dying because the original internet that it searched is
| dying. That's not necessarily a bad thing and this isn't a "the
| sky is falling" statement - it's just the internet has changed. A
| lot. Nowadays people aren't creating their own websites - they're
| creating content and providing feedback on forums such as Reddit.
| The fact people are searching Reddit for whatever they need is a
| reflection of that new reality.
| jjbickerstaffe wrote:
| I was an early adopter of Google Search around 2000 when it was
| better than Altavista. A few years ago I switched to DuckDuckGo.
| But in the autumn my DDG searches began to have only about 10
| results for terms that should have had thousands of results. A
| couple of months ago I started paying for Kagi search and like it
| because it's like Google used to be 20 years ago - it shows
| interesting results.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Why do I feel like this post is actually a marketing operation
| for kagi?
| narrator wrote:
| I noticed that there are a lot fewer forum results in Google
| search than a couple of years ago. Forum results are often pretty
| good, but I think Google deranks these sites in their quest to
| clean up misinformation. That's why appending reddit has to be
| done, because reddit gets deranked because some wrongthink sneaks
| in despite the best intentions of their moderators. SEO spam
| sites never say anything that strays into misinfo territory and
| are just repeat conventional boring info, so they are always near
| the top. The wrongthink derank is really pronounced if searching
| for controversial political stuff. In fact, if you search for a
| controversial recent event you'll get no results and a message
| that "results are changing quickly."
| londons_explore wrote:
| Whenever you are thinking Google is dying, please instead
| consider what an ideal page of search results would look like...
|
| When you search for "2012 honda civic brake hose burst pressure
| psi", which pages exactly would you wish were at the top...?
|
| Typically, I find that when google search fails me, it's because
| the content I'm looking for actually doesn't exist. I'm seeing
| SEO spam simply because nobody has written a detailed blog post
| about the exact topic I'm after.
|
| The problem isn't Google, the problem is the whole internet (or
| at least the part not behind a login wall)
| litiholofan wrote:
| At the very least I'd like for those keywords to each show up
| on the page I'm looking for.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The internet dying is indirectly googles problem too... And
| they're in a position to solve it.
|
| For example, the bursting pressure of a 2012 honda civics brake
| hose might not be on any public web page... But it is known to
| the engineers who designed the thing. There is masses of non-
| public information, much of it really useful. Not just
| engineering - but the script of every TV show and film ever,
| the things people say in public posts on social media, etc.
|
| Google needs to incentivize companies to publish everything by
| default. That used to be adsense - publish useful info and earn
| a few dollars a month for your trouble. I think they need to
| take that further with some kind of info-sharing platform that
| pays to publish useful info. I'd also like to see a mode where
| a company can sync all their internal documents and members of
| the public can search them and then request to pay to see a
| document, with a company employee checking it first for
| secrets.
| oriolid wrote:
| > When you search for "2012 honda civic brake hose burst
| pressure psi", which pages exactly would you wish were at the
| top...?
|
| A service manual would be nice, but since those probably aren't
| public a well written blog post would be the next choice.
|
| On the other hand, when searching "jni callback function
| arguments" the obvious answer (JNI specification) is public,
| but Google can't find it unless you search explicitly for it
| and even then you get some StackOverflow stuff near the top.
| azangru wrote:
| Reddit? Do people find better answers to programming questions on
| reddit rather than on google?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Not sure how you prove a search engine is dying by posting graphs
| showing search traffic going continuously up.
|
| Reddit is a great source for a certain type of content. Google is
| a search engine for content. They are complementary... Reddit's
| continued strength furthers Google's relevance.
|
| The only way Google can be hurt by Reddit is if Reddit blocks
| Google from indexing it (not likely).
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| I have often wished that there were a search engine that would
| let me filter out pages with monetization (affiliate links, calls
| to action, ads, etc.).
|
| However, every time I consider this idea, I wonder how much of
| the web would be left. Besides social media sites, government
| pages, and technology blogs, is there a lot of authentic content
| out there on arbitrary topics? Perhaps even if Google were
| motivated to deliver a good search experience, they couldn't do
| it.
| account42 wrote:
| Forums, tech documentation, personal websites.
|
| I think for many queries, a non-commercial search engines would
| have plenty of relevant pages to show.
| kajaktum wrote:
| It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in
| Reddit to fake good user experience. For example, who the hell
| knows who mr fart32snap is on this reddit discussion thread
| talking about good cheap microphone? I don't doubt there's
| already some of these out there.
|
| IMO, the only way this can ever be truly fixed is to have a 1 to
| 1 mapping between a person and their online personality. An
| account and their posts need to actually have a weight. It need
| to actually matter what an account's history is across the web.
|
| I think this is what blockchain is supposed to solve. It is not
| fast and efficient enough for all the small monetary
| transactions. But surely is good enough for blogs or things like
| that?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| LinkedIn does that. You don't need blockchain to achieve it.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Or you know instead of invading peoples privacy irreparably you
| can maybe just learn not to take opinions on face value.
| AdamN wrote:
| Another option is a trust network. We already have that within
| the social networks but not across them. I also don't mind
| trusting a bot that has a cohesive brand across the networks -
| there's no need for it to be human as long as I can untrust it.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for a long time. Try
| looking for a backpack, wallet, watch etc.. all top posts have
| a very "sponsored content" smell.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Corporations already do this. Same with NGOs and political
| organizations. They have done this for a long time.
|
| I have a Reddit account that is old with a few thousand of the
| old "link karma," and received several 4-figure offers for the
| account for this purpose.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| So we need an internet without corporations? Sounds obvious
| but how we are supposed to achieve this?
|
| Easy self-hosted solutions, like IPFS or Gemini?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| No, the pseudonymous nature of the platform, combined with
| the voting mechanism surfacing content (rather than a
| mechanism like "following" surfacing the relevant posts to
| you) makes the platform uniquely manipulable. That makes
| running these kinds of consensus-manufacturing campaigns
| easy.
|
| If you get rid of either of those mechanisms, you make it a
| lot harder to astroturf.
|
| HN would be the same way without dang.
| account42 wrote:
| Instead of making astroturfing harder you could also
| increase consequences for being caught and reward
| whistleblowers.
|
| No company is going to risk posting without revealing
| that they are behind the post if doing so would result in
| - to make it extreme - jail time for the poster AND
| company leadership.
|
| Ultimately, this is not really a technical problem but a
| social or legal one. As long as we let people get away
| with fraud - and let's be honest, astroturfing is fraud -
| then enterprising individuals will find ways around
| whatever technical means we put in place.
| chrischattin wrote:
| This has been happening for over a decade. It's very effective
| and hard to spot if done well.
| CJefferson wrote:
| I've had friends at companies ask me to make positive posts to
| both reddit and news.ycombinator -- there are definately
| news.ycombinator upvote/post groups, who help push articles to
| the front page (I'm not sure how successful they are, but I
| know they exist).
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| There are definitely Rust and SQLite astroturfing mafias on
| HN, and they are very powerful :)
| sneak wrote:
| I have seen some weird stuff astroturfed on HN. I think the
| strangest ones were lung pressure trainers and remineralizing
| toothpaste.
| raincole wrote:
| > It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in
| Reddit to fake good user experience.
|
| Uh, it has been like this for _years_. I personally know a
| friend who was hired to post fake comments on reddit 5 years
| ago. It could have been longer and I just don 't know.
|
| I guess the whole thing works very well because people still
| have "doubt" if it happened today.
| neilv wrote:
| Buzz marketing, shilling, astroturfing... were already things
| at almost the very start of dotcoms, and before. (Microsoft
| actually pioneered some of it in online services before the
| Web, but I recall some early Web startups in this space.)
|
| Maybe starting a decade ago, when I'd tell people about Reddit,
| I'd switched to telling them that the front page already
| appeared dominated by marketers and manipulators, but that most
| of the random subreddits were more genuine. Though even some
| subs at the time, such as for groups of interest, were run by
| marketers or in service of marketers. (Many subs seemed
| moderated by the eclectic mix of kinds of people you could find
| to do that thankless task for free. But some were obviously
| effectively working for brands, especially when groups of
| interest were built around buying stuff.)
| girvo wrote:
| I remember when the first piece of advice I was given was to
| unsub from the default reddit subs. Prior to that I never
| quite got it as a site, it seemed like a worse HN to me with
| less topic overlap with what I found interesting.
| willnonya wrote:
| So, your solution is omnipresent tracking and retribution?
|
| The source of information is important which is just one of the
| many reasons why sites like reddit are poorly suited to be used
| as a reference.
| Felminor wrote:
| Weird analysis from someone who has no data.
|
| What gives?
| kstenerud wrote:
| The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics.
| Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded
| what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay
| that you must now slog through in order to get the information
| you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose
| over bullet points.
|
| The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of
| computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit
| your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be
| flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual
| "real-user" SEO.
| echelon wrote:
| Even if Google had been good stewards, they failed to
| diversify.
|
| AI AdBlock is going to kill whatever is left of Google within
| the year.
|
| AI content spam is absolutely going to kill social media and
| search results, but AI adblock will be worse to Google's bottom
| line.
|
| It's coming, and it's going to be brutal.
| phreeza wrote:
| Last I checked, non AI AdBlock already works pretty well, why
| would you need AI?
| greyman wrote:
| In what sense will it kill social media?
| echelon wrote:
| Unless social media websites begin to require ID
| verification, they'll be flooded with LLM-powered bots.
| Humans will tire of this.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I simply cannot imagine being willing to provide identity
| documents to any of the social media/advertising
| companies. They would have to somehow demonstrate they're
| trustworthy first.
| regularfry wrote:
| We can't be far off the state where any captcha-style
| humanity test that can be implemented is immediately
| vulnerable to bots, too.
| drowsspa wrote:
| Not captchas, OP probably means actual IDs. And to be
| honest, with some cryptography surely we can find a way
| to make it work and be anonymous
| michaelt wrote:
| The bit of social media people use to talk to their IRL
| friends and family will be fine.
|
| But the bit of social media where people are listening to
| celebrities, getting their news, sharing memes, discussing
| common interests? It _might_ get flooded with bots so
| convincing as to be indistinguishable from normal users.
| worrycue wrote:
| So Facebook is the one most likely to survive. Reddit,
| Twitter, Hacker News, ... etc. soon to be flooded with
| LLM generated spam.
| happymellon wrote:
| It's as soon as it learns that X celebrity is dead
| generates clicks.
|
| Then folks will learn not to trust it just because it is
| a computer once everyone is announced dead, and everyone
| will have to make claims that they aren't.
| maleldil wrote:
| Why do you believe that users will start using this "AI
| AdBlock"? Regular ad blockers are enough to cover current
| ads. Google also controls the main browser in the biggest
| mobile OS (Chrome on Android), and it doesn't support ad
| blockers. There are options (Firefox, Brave, Kiwi, etc.), but
| most users don't bother.
| Farow wrote:
| I'm guessing that monetizing comments is a lot more difficult
| on reddit as any links can be removed by
| admins/mods/automoderator.
| wslh wrote:
| Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
|
| I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit:
| "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only
| people who don't know that are the team at Reddit". I want to
| add this that just happened at my company, that shows really
| bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit
| management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.
|
| Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US
| based and there was problems using every credit or debit card.
| The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google
| Adwords.
|
| We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads
| were not approved because they were in the crypto space where
| indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and
| also work for Web3 projects.
|
| Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us
| several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong
| Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until
| they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At
| this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the
| CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand
| their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.
|
| BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google
| back in 2013 in the same vein [1].
|
| [1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-
| challeng...
| kingkawn wrote:
| What could possibly motivate them to drop the ball on crypto
| ads? Hmmm...
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
|
| Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while
| been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the
| main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed
| comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary
| clues.
|
| Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.
|
| When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it
| worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very
| short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I
| need to go manually into each review set and compare the
| quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a
| primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts
| giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using
| Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is
| quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically
| avoid shopping there for entire categories.
|
| Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we
| can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| People have been astroturfing on reddit for a long time,
| the only reason it's not a cesspool is that reddit has a
| hardcore anti-marketing bent in a lot of subs and they'll
| aggressively out shills. I expect that GPT powered reddit
| bots will make the shills a lot harder to identify though.
| lamontcg wrote:
| The humans on reddit are often indistinguishable from
| bots as well.
| codexon wrote:
| It has always been a cesspool for a long time though.
| Only fit for consuming memes, cat pics, and financially
| motivated stunts like when Keanu Reeves was there the
| other day, using the social media account of the company
| for his upcoming film in a few weeks.
|
| Each subreddit is controlled by a few essentially random
| people that likely have personal gain as one of their
| motivations.
|
| If you think you aren't being advertised to on reddit
| just because the spam isn't as obvious as elsewhere,
| think again. The advertising there is more sophisticated
| than bots dropping links in comments.
|
| There was a leak a while ago showed one of the moderators
| of wallstreetbets that was posting fake options gains,
| and it still gave him a massive following which he used
| to sell them a newsletter or something.
|
| There are many subreddits where there will be a link in
| the sidebar to a monetized website affiliated with one of
| the mods.
|
| And even 10 years ago, I remember at least 1 moderator of
| the programming subreddit somehow always had his blog
| posts highly voted and ending up on the front page, while
| any other submissions, especially ones that might counter
| his claims, would end up being stuck in the "spam
| filter". And if you messaged to have it unblocked, they'd
| only respond 1 day later, which means it would never show
| up on the front page due to the age factor of the ranking
| algorithm.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The
| only people who don't know that are the team at Reddit"
|
| It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things
| that were there at the organic distributed web didn't
| completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is
| the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.
|
| It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full
| link quality enumeration.
| Phemist wrote:
| So, assuming that this "mismanagement" is not just happening
| in the crypto space, but across the board in other spaces
| too, they are missing out on short-term money, but are more
| valuable for the searches that users are now doing (including
| me). So.. is it actually bad execution?
| wslh wrote:
| The mismanagement is not between quotes since all
| compliance was filled and acknowledged.
|
| Could you please elaborate on your question? Since our
| issue was supposely solved filling all the requirements
| there is no difference about the different spaces. This is
| bad execution by the book.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| To me all signs point to Reddit never having been a
| commercial venture, but rather an influence and propaganda
| machine for United States government agencies. So they
| already have their budget paid.
| zzbzq wrote:
| What are "all signs"? Shit you made up in your head? It's
| owned by China for godsakes, what a half-baked conspiracy
| theory
| brookst wrote:
| It's well known that the US government outsourced psyops
| to China! Because, uh, you see, there are these lizard
| people...
| treeman79 wrote:
| Nearly all of Reddit is ultra left wing. No opposing view
| points are tolerated.
|
| Individual topic sub Reddit's are okay if they are strict
| about keeping on topic.
|
| Anything front page is insanity.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I'm sure government agencies all over the world are quite
| popular on Reddit.
| tjpnz wrote:
| The CCP even has its own subreddit. It's called
| /r/worldnews.
| djkivi wrote:
| Don't forget Maxwell Hill.
| stockerta wrote:
| So because its a three letter agency hustle, thats why
| Tencent bought in to it? ... JFC
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Where's the conflict? Do you think American and Chinese
| interests never align?
|
| And to be clear, I think large parts of Reddit is of no
| interest to government agencies.
| ptsneves wrote:
| > Do you think American and Chinese interests never
| align?
|
| You know that is impossible to prove or disprove so that
| argument is worthless.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I don't see Chinese communist party buying Reddit stocks
| as proof against US government agencies using Reddit to
| influence the population, that's what I mean.
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| [dead]
| ilyt wrote:
| > Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The
| only people who don't know that are the team at Reddit"
|
| Which is funny as builtin search is so utter shit you pretty
| much need to use google to find anything
| dematz wrote:
| Maybe this is giving reddit too much credit, but I do see
| people say "append reddit to searches" literally every time
| the topic of search is brought up, so what if reddit is
| aware people do that but doesn't _want_ to be a search
| engine?
|
| Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human
| content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat
| and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't
| really envy it. So imagine telling the world hey, reddit is
| the new google, everyone come do your searches (and spam)
| here, gl mods.
| altdataseller wrote:
| I disagree with that. It doesn't matter if Reddit doesn't
| _want_ to be a search engine. People are _already_ using
| it a search engine and they simply will _never_ stop no
| matter what those ppl in Reddit are thinking. Better to
| embrace the search use case and make it search friendly.
| rsaesha wrote:
| With big power comes greater responsability.
| Cpoll wrote:
| This doesn't ring true to me. Reddit has clearly
| demonstrated a desire/mandate to monetize, even at the
| expense of its users. If they thought they had a viable
| Google competitor they wouldn't look that gift horse in
| the mouth.
|
| The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the
| spam problem is an upside.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Is this phenomenon also happening in the markets were
| Google is not dominant? Like Yandex, Baidu or Naver?
| foobarian wrote:
| This is a major reason I think LLMs could help with SERPs -
| presumably it will be a lot harder to do SEO effectively
| because now it involves the model training barrier.
| brookst wrote:
| Model training is already trivial, just expensive. As LLM
| optimized HW appears the expense will drop. By 2030, I'd
| expect decent consumer hardware to be both faster and two
| orders of magnitude cheaper than what's in use today for
| model training.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Since word heuristics and pagerank are useless nowadays, which
| signals should Google prioritize instead? Bounce rate ?
| Engagement ?
|
| Which metrics can proxy user satisfaction without turning into
| clickbait-land?
| j_crick wrote:
| And the worst of SEO pages are cooking recipes, where you have
| to scroll down screens of badly written meaningless text before
| you actually get to ingredients list. At least Google still
| keeps indexing recipe microformats.
| fnord123 wrote:
| I haven't used Google in ages. Do they convert stupid recipes
| using volume for flour to use mass?
| j_crick wrote:
| I haven't noticed, but I usually hang around King Arthur's
| website for bread recipes and they use mass and bakers'
| percentages, so do other baker blogs that I may find. Maybe
| it's different for things other than bread, but I can't
| say. Hail Eris!
| JohnFen wrote:
| I use this pretty often: https://www.traditionaloven.com/co
| nversions_of_measures/flou...
| saberience wrote:
| Even worse, I've found myself directed to long recipe pages
| with a huge amount of prose about the history of the recipe,
| how the author developer it etc, BUT THEN THERE IS NO ACTUAL
| RECIPE! This has happened multiple times in the past year.
| And this was often the first or second result when Googling
| the recipe. wtf?
| account42 wrote:
| I've seen some where the recipe was vissible on desktop but
| hidden behind a button on mobile which can be easy to miss.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| It's so bad someone wrote a Chrome Extension to just give you
| the dang recipe. It was posted here a while back.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Search your recipes on YouTube. It is a better way of getting
| the information and higher quality.
|
| Edit: To the friendly people downvoting me: Try for yourself
| and you'll be surprised how much good and informative content
| you can find on YouTube.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Hi guys! Last month I was visiting my grandma... (3 minutes
| of this) ...so don't forget to like and subscribe this!
| Now, i usually use this kind of flour, but I decided to
| replace it with this special kind from my local farmers
| market, which is great, because it's sold by this old lady
| who works... (5 more minutes of that) ... so if you like
| putting ginger into your cookies, write it down in a
| comment (3 more minutes of this) ... now you have to fold
| in the cheese... i have a separate video (15 minutes) just
| explaining how to fold it in, so I won't show that here,
| but click the link in the description to see that ...
|
| Yeah... i prefer text. It's even wors with tech stuff....
| do they expect me to retype the commands/code from the
| video?!
| carlosjobim wrote:
| For recipes I've had good results with YouTube. Short
| videos, to the point, with a leaflet in the beginning
| showing ingredients needed. YouTube for tech stuff is the
| worst, I agree.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| :D
| kjs3 wrote:
| You're getting downvoted because those of us who have tried
| for ourselves often find videos _vastly_ less useful,
| efficient or relevant than a bit of text. _Especially_ in
| the world of the 'influencer'. Now you have half a video
| pimping their dozens of YouRedTwitTok accounts you just
| _have_ to click on, the other influencers they 're mutually
| shoveling traffic to, the products they're being paid to
| pimp...and if you're lucky you might get some information
| tacked onto the end.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| We all have to sift. No matter if the content is text,
| video or audio. If I'm undertaking a project of some
| magnitude - like cooking a new dish or changing my brakes
| - then I don't mind spending a little time to find the
| highest quality information. And for many things, that
| will be inside a YouTube video. Even if you have 100
| million low quality content creators, you have at least a
| million high quality content creators.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I can look at a blob of text and have an idea if it's
| worth looking deeper at in a glance, _especially_
| something structured like a recipe. I have to _watch_ the
| video. That doesn 't scale, and I frankly have better
| things to do than vet content creators via several or
| many minutes of inane video at a time, much less
| 'millions' of creators. In fact, the most efficient way
| I've found to find a new recipe that isn't a waste of
| time is to start with "ignore video sites" and "ignore
| influencer infested sites" (e.g. Instagram).
|
| Not that everything on YouTube is crap, just most things.
| Sometimes seeing a video of someone doing something is
| the only way I can figure it out. There are many
| particularly useful videos of how to use complicated test
| and measurement gear. And tying knots. But the video
| isn't efficient enough for me to start there.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I frankly have better things to do
|
| This is what I'm trying to say: Sometimes you don't have
| better things to do, because you need the knowledge that
| is in the video. If you're doing something important and
| somebody comes up to offer to show you a much better way
| of doing the task, does this have to be the response? "I
| have better things to do".
|
| Some YouTube videos are worth the time to watch, and I
| would argue that for recipes you'll spend your time
| better starting with videos vs search engines. Unless
| it's something you already know how to make and just need
| a reminder of the measurements of the recipe.
|
| Talking about cooking, you have the BBQ channels on
| YouTube, with people showing you how to best cut and
| prepare different cuts of meat. If you don't personally
| know somebody to show you these techniques you'd be lost
| with only text content and no video.
|
| I think it's easier for people to rage at an annoying
| YouTube video when trying to find information, than to
| rage at worthless SEO spam. But the solution is the same:
| close the tab and go back. It doesn't take many seconds
| to notice if a YouTube presenter is an idiot.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > We all have to sift.
|
| Sifting videos is tedious and time-consuming. Sifting
| text is much more efficient.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes, but sometimes the nugget you need might not be in
| the text at all.
| account42 wrote:
| No thanks, not going to watch a whole video to get an
| overview of what I need to prepare.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If you're already adept or not looking into things that
| are challenging to you, then you might just need a list
| of ingredients. If somebody who has never cooked needs to
| dice onions for the dish and doesn't know how to do that,
| YouTube will help much more than any text. There are so
| many things and aspects that we don't have vocabulary for
| and is just faster showing.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Videos to teach technique make a lot of sense. Videos to
| convey a recipe, not so much.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Try for yourself
|
| I have, and I really dislike it a lot. I think video is one
| of the worst formats to convey a recipe in.
|
| I have seen some that write the recipe in the video
| description, and that's fine. But not enough do it to make
| YouTube a place I go to get recipes.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Videos are far less useful than text.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Not at all! It depends greatly on the content and the
| person. For recipes it is actually useful to see with
| your own eyes how to do something. The same thing with
| many other things, such as for example carpentry and
| mechanics. I agree that text is better for tech content
| and for a lot of other things that are mostly text based,
| or more abstract.
|
| We've been conditioned into thinking text is better
| because we've all been through schooling, which consists
| of text books and a person yelling in front of a
| blackboard. If you let kids watch high quality YouTube
| videos instead, they would get a much better education.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Well, I should have said "text is better for me".
| Especially for recipes, which are a list of instructions.
| I just need to see the list, not have someone tell it to
| me.
|
| Videos aren't dense enough, information-wise. I can't
| just put them up on a screen as a reference, and they
| require too much interaction as I have to back up, play,
| back up, play, back up, etc. in order to use the
| information being relayed.
|
| If I only have a video telling me something, it's better
| than nothing, but it's going to slow me down, reduce my
| understanding, and will inevitably leave out detail that
| is important to me.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The computer generated essay and the fake stackoverflow clones
| are the worst thing ever. It's harder to code now than just a
| few years ago because of all the BS people put on the internet.
|
| I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers,
| but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy
| for juniors to do either.
| carrja99 wrote:
| A few years back I heard a startup pitch for an application
| that would crawl all those recipe short stories and extract the
| recipe for you.
| treeman79 wrote:
| While nice. The copyright lawyers would have a field day.
| brookst wrote:
| Fun fact: recipes are not copyrightable. The text around
| them can be, but that's what you'd be stripping out or
| summarizing.
|
| If you have an amazing recipe you want to keep control of,
| trade secret is the way. And then it can't very well be
| posted to the internet.
| theclansman wrote:
| Yeah this, if I want to know how many chapters are there in a
| game, I have to real an entire article telling me useless stuff
| before I can get the info I want. Witj ChatGPT I can avoid
| this. I would say most of my Google searches were for answering
| questions, not to find articles related to a topic.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the
| internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be
| trimmed to bullet points removing useful info.
|
| The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it's
| that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
| inductive_magic wrote:
| That sounds like it makes sense - but if human readers know
| what's a good search result and what isn't, why would Google
| not be able to optimize their algo accordingly? If the
| results for a query don't match the "nature of the query",
| it's a bad result. If the algo can be gamed, it isn't aiming
| for the actual goal, i.e. it fundamentally fails at
| information retrieval.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Because anything google can detect, the spammers can
| generate to match. We will soon enter an era of GPT
| generated spam which not even humans can tell if it's real
| info or just garbage that looks real.
| thr717272 wrote:
| Luckily on Kagi I can just block sites the moment I
| realize it is nonsense.
|
| Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra
| valuable.
|
| Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop
| containing domains with a minus in front, llke
| -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so
| that I could post them on the end of every contested
| search.
|
| After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those
| as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it
| up.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I have never used anything but google, duckduckgo and
| startpage. I always end up coming back to google because
| the results are not as good.
|
| Well startpage has the same results as google, but i
| stopped using it for reasons I forgot.
|
| What made you chose Kagi?
| thr717272 wrote:
| Tested it and found it realized doublequotes something
| none of the big ones that I can access (bing, ddg,
| google) does.
|
| That was it.
|
| And the first time I saw a reported bug in the search
| results getting serious attention and a fix I was sold.
| onion2k wrote:
| _if human readers know what 's a good search result and
| what isn't_
|
| That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a
| "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a
| lot of factors, from the context of _why_ the user is
| searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I
| search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight
| facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing
| else. My mother would want some background about the
| recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You
| can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot
| more context.
|
| It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search'
| based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it
| would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Recipes are a pain in general, even without google,
| doubly so for baking.
|
| Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a
| cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to
| me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless
| to many american grandmas.
|
| On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a
| large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of
| us.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Nowadays a cup and a tablespoon are standard unities of
| volume. They are not any worse than milliliters. There
| are a few people that insist on ignoring the standards,
| but those also tend to not publish their recipes.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The issue is that for a lot of ingredients -- flour
| notably among them -- you can't measure accurately by
| volume. If you're looking for reproducibility, you have
| to measure by weight.
|
| And once you start measuring some things by weight, you
| quickly realize that most things are easier to measure
| out by weight than volume (particularly sticky
| ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure
| everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.
|
| I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram
| measurements for this reason.
| treeman79 wrote:
| I have given up on web pages for recipes. Videos are
| still mostly fine. Often a nice condensed version of the
| recipe will be in the comment section.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a
| "good result" looks like
|
| Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm
| sure we can agree on is what people _don 't_ want. I
| don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were _more_
| ads in the content I 'm consuming".
|
| So we could at least start with that.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Yes, and now turn that sentiment into a metric that can
| be measured as input to the model.
|
| At first it was click-through rate, but that turned SEO
| into sites into clickbait to get high click scores. Then
| they switched to time spent on the site, and as a
| consequence we get recipes that are filled with 2h of
| prose above them just so people stay longer on the site.
| owisd wrote:
| I disagree that whatever ranking system google uses will just
| be gamed to the same extent. If google downgraded the rank of
| pages with lots of ads and trackers it would substantially
| reduce the incentive to game the system, the reason it won't
| is because most of those pages are running Adsense so there's
| every incentive for google to keep the status quo.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| No, the reason they won't is that trackers and ads have
| little to do with the value of the content.
|
| As long as there are any ads, the incentives stay the same.
| You're saying an internet completely free of monetary
| incentives would be better. I doubt that's true but it
| really doesn't matter, because it won't be happening.
| Retric wrote:
| You misunderstand, if you penalize excessive advertising
| then the revenue generated per page view decreases. This
| will reduce but not eliminate the amount of effort spent
| on these projects resulting in fewer such webpages.
|
| So 'How to unclog a toilet' is always going to get SEO
| optimized spam. However, most topics don't get that many
| views making them less viable for this business model.
| brookst wrote:
| > the revenue generated per page view decreases
|
| That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that
| fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would
| work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The
| value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing
| out revenue, not increasing net.
| Retric wrote:
| If every single website on the planet had fewer ads then
| the new equilibrium might be roughly equivalent revenue,
| but many websites only have a single banner
| advertisement. So much of the redistribution of revenue
| would end up on those websites.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I use search engines for two reasons:
|
| - to gather compressed information quickly
|
| - to navigate the web
|
| The first point is best served by sources that I like and
| trust, often authoritative to some degree. If they already
| have a good search (like MDN or Wikipedia) I will often use
| that directly or go via DDG: !mdn keyords..., !wiki
| keywords... If not, I type the name of the website as a
| keyword in front (like reddit...)
|
| The second is really more about finding specific types of
| websites. For example John Smith's blog that I don't
| remember etc.
|
| What I'm saying is that to fix the web, we need more sites
| that can act as the first point above. Whether they are
| wikis or not is more of a practical consideration. The
| point is that they don't suck and that there's not enough
| of them IMO.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Those sites will demand a % of sales to let anybody into
| their garden, while search engines demand nothing. That
| can work for digital products that are of unlimited
| supply.
| frankzander wrote:
| That is exactly the point!
| blfr wrote:
| Page publishers would still have the same incentive to game
| the system, only putting a smaller numer of ads, perhaps
| then more expensive and more carefully selected.
|
| If you want to live in that world, you can today by running
| an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one.
| Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated
| with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of
| ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly
| bad.
| account42 wrote:
| > If you want to live in that world, you can today by
| running an adblocker.
|
| That misses the entire point: Google search results will
| still be manipulated to push those low quality results
| higher because even if you don't see the ads enough
| people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.
| blfr wrote:
| That was my point: if Google rewarded sites with fewer
| ads, you would get all the same manipulation and low-
| quality content but with fewer (but perhaps more
| expensive and carefully selected) ad blocks. You can have
| that today.
| yunohn wrote:
| If you provide less monetisation for content creators, you
| end up with less content too. This is not as simple as you
| think...
| piaste wrote:
| You could reward the type of monetization that is
| correlated to high-quality content and penalize the type
| that is associated with spam.
|
| Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes
| donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on
| type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank _way_ down.
| tazard wrote:
| Less content is fine when the issue is too much junk
| content. Content would then be created by enthusiasts
| instead of businesses
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > enthusiasts instead of businesses
|
| Those are more and more the same person - especially when
| it comes to online ventures.
| Loic wrote:
| You end up with less trash/monetization content and more
| content from passionate people writing about what they
| love/like/do for the joy of sharing.
|
| But this does not sustain the chocolate factory.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| We can't even answer out fucking phones because of these
| people and an ad blocker is pretty much a requirement to
| make the web even remotely usable.
|
| They're already pushing out content to replace it with
| more fucking ads!
|
| There is legitimately nothing good about them. At all.
| nottorp wrote:
| > If you provide less monetisation for content creators
|
| But I don't want to "consume content", I want to "get
| information". Most "content creators" don't provide any
| info. Or at best there is some info there but you have to
| watch an hour worth of video for the 20 useful seconds.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I don't want "content", some generic attention grabbing
| placeholder around which they spam ads. I don't want some
| professionally made lowest common denominator product
| designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. I
| want creations with heart and soul. I want to read the
| opinions and writings of real human beings, not corporate
| PR articles with cleverly disguised pitches at the end.
|
| People who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to
| create regardless of financial reward probably aren't
| producing anything of value. That basically excludes
| every for profit website out there that would be "killed"
| by less monetization. Killing them off is a good thing.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Agreed. If content creators are more interested in
| getting something back (money) then they are creating
| something of value to society and disseminating it in a
| simple and clean way then I'm forced to think twice about
| their motives.
|
| If you put the cart (making money) before the horse
| (creating value) then you are not really a productive
| member of society. Takers are like irresponsible
| children, they take without any awareness of the
| ramifications their behavior has on society.
|
| This kind of attitude is similar to colonialism, an
| attitude representative of most of commercial enterprises
| today. Givers give value knowing that when they give,
| they receive, without any need to unnaturally focus on
| the end result.
| thegginthesky wrote:
| The real problem is that Google holds an effective monopoly
| in search, so any digital marketer worth a salt will optimize
| the crap out of their blogs and pages to get higher and
| higher rank within Google alone. This will, in turn, lead to
| what we see today: a race to the bottom in terms of quality
| to get the best SEO results.
|
| I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best
| results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I
| want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use
| Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything
| else I use Kagi or DDG.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Why do people even care about views? Because of advertising.
| It is the root cause of all problems on the web today. All
| Google has to do to fix the web is put itself out of business
| by delisting pages with ads including its own. Search and the
| web at large would be fixed in days.
| gniv wrote:
| > Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin
| the internet.
|
| That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a
| proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
|
| But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess
| the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information?
| In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer
| queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > But now with these AI models Google should be able to
| assess the true value of a page
|
| That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons.
| Not the least of which is that where Google has already
| applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.
| ekianjo wrote:
| bullet points would be an improvement over bullshit useless
| prose
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Maybe I am wrong about this, and maybe the SEO junk sites would
| find a way to evolve, but what I really want from google is a
| plonk button so I can have a personal kill file for sites that
| I never want to see again.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| You could use ublacklist[1], it does filtering of search
| results on the client side. arosh's list is a good place to
| start blocking crap.
|
| [1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
|
| [2] https://github.com/arosh?tab=repositories
| fnord123 wrote:
| Google allowing the blacklisting of sites with lots of ads on
| them and using google analytics?
|
| They have enough information when yiu clock back and select a
| different result. And this hasnt killed SEO spam.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| That's because Google is an ad company. They will never be
| part of the solution.
| squarefoot wrote:
| It would be possible to do that at browser level through
| extensions, for example there is one to filter out Pinterest
| results from search results. I wouldn't however expect that
| potentially great feature to be natively available in Google
| search anytime soon, unless they made it as a analytics
| filled paid service and in a way that gave their advertisers
| and investors the power of circumventing it, that is, both
| plonk and unplonk as a service.
| jmillikin wrote:
| Google used to support this[0], and I used it happily for
| blocking low-quality domains such as Experts Exchange,
| certain Wikia subdomains, and Pintrest. The feature was later
| removed[1] in favor of a browser extension, but the extension
| was less functional because it could only filter out results
| from the current page, so heavily-spammed keywords had result
| pages with only one or two links.
|
| Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple
| pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be
| necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get
| page after page of blank SERPs.
|
| [0] https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-
| sit...
|
| [1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-more-personalized-
| resul...
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Wow, yes to this -- your own google blacklist.
| mcherm wrote:
| As a bonus, Google would have access to the list of who had
| blacklisted what sites -- surely that would be useful to
| them as a signal to detect "SEO spam sites".
| impalallama wrote:
| HN perennial hit Kagi is good for this.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Because of a recent HN article on the subject, I was searching
| for "correlation of ACT scores and IQ", and the first 5 hits
| were the _same_ crappy 1500 word essay, where various section
| headers were programmatically changed to include exactly what I
| searched for.
|
| How challenging would it be to just check common searches and
| generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including
| those words right in the page.
|
| I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT
| score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.
| makestuff wrote:
| The industry term for it is "made for advertising". It is a
| constant battle because some people in adtech want to increase
| impressions at all costs, and some people want to block these
| sites from their systems. Guess which one wins out when
| executives see how much money it makes?
| frankreyes wrote:
| Because there's no better neural network for problem solving than
| a human brain.
|
| This joke sums it all up:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ufdprb/sur...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's already dead. I literally can't find a single relevant
| result anymore.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| Perhaps "generative ai" with summarization and citations will
| eventually be the future of search engines.
|
| If a language model or some other methodology can distill
| information from all of these sites and proxy to them in a way
| that a company can still promote advertising revenue, there
| should be a clear path away from blog spam. One could imagine it
| might even disincentivize copying original works.
|
| There are so many paths for using information once it can be
| transformed reliably.
|
| If natural language understanding continues to improve, it would
| seem that there is a very bright future for existing search
| engines.
| izacus wrote:
| Why would you think that? The issue is spammers taking over top
| results with advertised content, why do you think generative AI
| will actually fix this in any way? Besides just preventing you
| from actually finding the real information on the bottom of the
| results?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| If the summarizer does a good job it will probably identify
| the spam as what it is -- junk intended to funnel you into an
| affiliate link.
| candiodari wrote:
| Anyone else notice that general solutions to problems just aren't
| on Google ... _and_ aren 't on the internet at all?
|
| We used to have blogs, even twitter and facebook, even things
| like phpbb and the many internet fora, which was "normal". These
| have disappeared, either entirely or behind a pay- or
| registration wall, and are clearly not accessible to Google.
|
| I wonder if the problem is Google, or the web in general.
| brandon272 wrote:
| I don't know if Google Search is dying. What I do know:
|
| 1) In March 2023, I am relying less and less on Google Search.
| When I do, it is for extremely targeted search queries where I am
| battling Google's matching criteria to find something that I know
| exists. This almost always requires creative use of quotation
| marks and applying suffixes to the end of queries.
|
| 2) I am relying more on ChatGPT for a lot of queries. Is it
| perfect? Hell no. Does it give me wrong information sometimes?
| Hell yes. But even with that, the answers and solutions given are
| so much better than trawling through Google search results and
| trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
|
| 3) I was having a conversation with a family member yesterday. I
| wanted to direct her to a page on a local government website. I
| instructed her to Google it. After the phone call I realized that
| she was likely to search Google for this page and be completely
| unable to find it, so I just manually sent her the link the page.
|
| 4) When I ditched Lycos and Excite and Altavista for Google over
| 20 years ago it was because of it's simplicity and accuracy. It
| was because when they decided to start displaying ads, the ads
| were clearly and transparently demarcated as ads so that no one
| was confused about what they were looking at. Today, the ads are
| very clearly intended to blend in with everything else, the
| simplicity is gone, and the accuracy is no longer there either.
|
| I do think Google has lost its way. And I do think there is a
| massive market opportunity for someone to develop a "search
| engine for 2023" that nicely blends what is available to us
| through LLMs and what is available to us through reputable, clean
| web sources on the WWW so that someone in search of information
| can simply find what they are looking for.
| ddalex wrote:
| I used to think this too, until I tried Bing, with and without
| its new GPT chat, and if you think Google is rubbish, wait until
| you need to search MS dev documentation (very factual!) using
| Bing.
|
| Truth is, it's all astroturfing all the way, all the web. Even
| reddit.
|
| Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on search. My views are my
| own, etc.
| georgehill wrote:
| I use Bing GPT and think it's better than Google for answering
| simple questions. Bing's search results may not be as good as
| Google's, but the information I need is usually buried inside
| SEO text. Bing's use of GPT to extract precise answers makes me
| feel impressed compared to Google.
|
| Edit: Bing GPT is getting better, but it still makes mistakes
| sometimes. If anyone wants to stay updated on its development,
| you can follow the team on Twitter
| https://twitter.com/MParakhin.
| api wrote:
| I've been paying for Kagi for over a year. It's getting better
| and better and has no ads.
| dools wrote:
| [flagged]
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| The other HN post has 3636 points and 1582 comments.
|
| How you could get the number "about 1000" from either of those
| is beyond me.
| dools wrote:
| Oh well, "about 5,000" then.
|
| Whatever, it's a rounding error.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I mean, no. It's not just a rounding error, it's literally
| ignoring the real numbers and pulling something out of your
| ass to try and sound snarky.
|
| Very few people upvote stories around here so that number
| is actually very large. Considering the current top thing
| on the news feed is a magnitude lower points, that actually
| means a lot.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives
| for search engines.
|
| The obvious spoken out so openly.
| jmclnx wrote:
| This was posted awhile ago too, and since I saw it I started
| doing the same.
|
| Results ? I get more concise answers.
| Maxburn wrote:
| On some topics you can get a different version reality in google
| search results and what other search engines produce. Any A/B
| testing on this regardless of your position on the topics should
| be an eye opener. I'm not a fan of googles activism for
| influencing political or technical topics and I've attempted to
| get them out of my life.
| seydor wrote:
| I m glad that GPTs are kicking SEOed content out of the internet.
| Using bing is much much better for researching health related
| stuff , even considering possible inaccuracies because it 's
| faster. You can hone in on the subject fast, then verify your
| result by checking the source. The google model was users ->
| google -> SEOed aggregator -> primary sources. If this is dead,
| the value of the primary sources will go up up up in price, and
| SEO farming (which includes a ton of news websites) will be dead.
| And that will be for the better
| nodomain wrote:
| Mods: Article is from Feb 15, 2022
| JCM9 wrote:
| The two biggest problems I've seen develop with Google are that:
|
| 1. The quality of the search algorithm's ability to sift through
| nonsense to find "the good stuff" seems to have gotten
| progressively worse, and that's largely fueled by:
|
| 2. Google is only really searching the "public" Internet but
| that's increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the
| "good stuff" is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doesn't
| report on. For example, rather than finding an amazing article
| written by experts in a long-standing publication you'll get some
| rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to
| opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate
| nonsense. Sure there are exceptions to that, but it's clear what
| direction the tide is going.
|
| The "good old days of the internet" where the best stuff was just
| a Google search away seem long gone.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Google is only really searching the "public" Internet but
| that's increasingly a wasteland full of garbage
|
| Have you tried other search engines because you might be
| surprised that the problem is more to do with Google than the
| internet.
| ilyt wrote:
| Might actually be SEO optimizing for google mostly so less
| popular engines get saved by having differing algorithms
| senttoschool wrote:
| Part of this is because of tools like Discord which is not
| indexable by Google.
|
| We need something better than Discord for community discussions
| and support.
|
| Reddit is indexable.
| girvo wrote:
| Discord as the go-to community hub for things like
| programming languages makes a little bit sad, knowing it's
| all ephemeral and locked up.
|
| At least the Nim team has a Matrix bridge I guess, so it's a
| solvable problem somewhat. But I find joining yet another
| Discord group just obnoxious.
|
| I long for the async-only text forums of yore. I'm getting
| old, aren't I.
| luckylion wrote:
| It's very different content though, isn't it? I've never
| used Discord, but it's mostly chat as far as I understand,
| and I always found chat somewhat difficult to use for
| referencing later. You'll have topics shifting, multiple
| topics going on at once, everything being more informal
| (and people spending less time on finding the solution
| instead of jumping on Discord).
|
| I imagine it's harder to get useful content out of that vs
| forums where topics are pretty contained in threads and
| it's more formal so there's less noise and pretty much all
| posts are relevant to the topic.
|
| Maybe if forums had fancy apps for local display and reply
| etc, and you could sync them between servers, and it could
| be kind of decentralized. Someone should build something
| like that and come up with a good name. It would be a
| useful net of news. Just a thought!
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| How would you even index something like Discord? It's
| mostly a chat app, where discussions are casual and often
| mixed togheter with others... It's not like a forum where
| each post is at least a somewhat coherent thought written
| out properly.
| polski-g wrote:
| Discord should be publishing chat logs in HTML format,
| like how FreeNode did for their IRC logs.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| I would dislike that. Imagine if every single thing you
| say to your friends while being in a public space was
| recorded for everyone to see in the future... The point
| of a chat _is_ to be ephemeral. Otherwise it would just
| be a forum with really bad and chaotic content.
| postalrat wrote:
| Archiving and indexing public IRC or Discord isn't the
| same as putting up microphones everywhere to listen to
| conversations between friends.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > For example, rather than finding an amazing article written
| by experts in a long-standing publication you'll get some
| rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to
| opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate
| nonsense.
|
| That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the
| amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of
| anything which make money for someone and who pays Google
| addwords fees is presented prominently while the rant is
| buried.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| Can you tell us what value you get out of rants from
| unqualified people? What actionable thing comes out of
| consuming such information? Because I can't imagine why
| anyone would do that, since "experts" are hardly ever a
| homogenuous crowd and disagree even among themselves. Why not
| just look at another side but one that is still made by a
| qualified expert?
| account42 wrote:
| Someone "unqualified" may have a viewpoint that the
| "experts" have not considered or are unwilling to state
| publicly for various reasons. Of course what value you can
| derive from such an article depends on the value of
| "unqualified" here for which we only have gp's labels in
| this example. The only other mentioned difference is the
| format - a blog "rant" vs. something published in an
| established publication and I don't think that is enough to
| go on to discard the former.
|
| > "experts" are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd
|
| Except when they are. The community of so-called experts
| discarding what eventually turned out to be the truth
| because it goes against their thinking is hardly unheard
| of.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What value do you get? You're here reading and commenting
| on things from anonymous people on a web site that hasn't
| existed for a hundred years.
|
| > still made by a qualified expert?
|
| It is pretty common that an expert who disagrees with the
| consensus will not be qualified, because the principal
| requirement for getting qualified is that you agree with
| the consensus.
| tyingq wrote:
| I would add a "3." that Google has less incentive than they
| used to to fix it.
|
| If they can supply enough relevant ads,"rich snippets",
| shopping widgets, or links to content they pulled from
| wikipedia (that keeps you surfing google-owned
| properties)...the organic search results don't matter.
|
| Actually, if the organic results are low quality, then maybe
| you're more likely to use the content above. So the organic
| content optimal quality is just "better than Bing", but worse
| than the ads.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't know if it's Google that is dying. It's more like a large
| segment of the public facing internet is wilting. The user
| experience without an adblocker is almost nothing but ads,
| popovers, permission requests and chat boxes, sign-up-to-the-
| newsletter requests. And these are the websites that aren't
| trying to bait-and-switch you
|
| For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to
| www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you
| can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own
| logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or
| marketing. It's not a good first impression.
|
| There are healthy websites out there but they're really
| struggling to punch through all the crap.
|
| It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once
| before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where
| you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads
| and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is
| very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first
| popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also
| cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't
| good search results.
|
| I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is
| their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these
| websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the
| most intrusive ads are google ads.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run
| competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of
| blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little
| war happening in real time on our screens.
|
| AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away
| from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them
| irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here,
| et al) remain high when most of the people we're talking with
| are algorithmic?
|
| Media companies create new shows and pull them away more
| quickly than we can finish consuming them, as realtime
| engagement metrics quickly show their bosses which must be most
| profitable, most popular, most attention grabbing.
|
| It makes a good case for going back: watching shows from
| decades earlier, that have a beginning middle and end. Dropping
| social media time for books. And the missing analogue, how to
| give up on google searches because they too, are at a parity of
| value with their offering and their attention stealing
| properties.
|
| I'm just an angry person shaking his fist at the sky from an
| armchair. I love these threads because I always come away with
| a new perspective.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Media companies pulling shows so quickly makes me sad. It's
| one of those cases where I think they constantly misread the
| data. "People don't watch shows with a long story arc as they
| come out, so we should cancel them" is really "people don't
| trust us to continue shows with a long story arc until a good
| stopping place, so they don't want to invest the time in
| starting new ones"
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Part of it is they don't want to renegotiate pay with the
| cast of a successful show so they cut them off before that
| becomes an issue.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| That's usually solved by multi-year initial contacts.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run
| competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of
| blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny
| little war happening in real time on our screens.
|
| This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you
| want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the
| distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems
| misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the
| expense of maintaining it.
| brookst wrote:
| It's more about selling someone's attention than holding
| it. The best possible outcome for both websites and Google
| is for a user to click on on a website from search and then
| immediately click on an ad. To the extent you find the site
| useful and don't need what's being advertised, that's a
| fail for both of them.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| That's if you want to capture someone's focus, not their
| attention.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If you capture their focus, are you not also capturing
| their attention?
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Yes, but not necessarily the other way around.
|
| I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other,
| but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different
| goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I
| don't think most websites are predicated on the notion
| that the average user is committed, at least initially.
| Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to
| your product you can safely prioritize focus because you
| now have that commitment.
|
| I think engineers generally are above average on the
| skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order
| to perform math, analysis, and logic.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| More like they monetise it at the expense of maintaining
| it.
| danaris wrote:
| > Our attention is the only valuable thing left.
|
| That's...just not true, though.
|
| You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our
| money.
|
| The only reason they _want_ our attention is to _get_ our
| money.
|
| A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't
| _have_ enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and
| the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher
| education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable
| amount of disposable income, as is true in a _healthy_
| society /economy, it would be much, much more viable for many
| websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than
| being ad-supported.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't
| have enough money
|
| Sounds like money isn't valuable as a target if it doesn't
| exist.
|
| But fwiw the scarcity of disposable income is why there is
| such an arms race with advertisers- they're all chasing the
| same fleeting dollars across the internet.
| auggierose wrote:
| Nah, that's not true. People just don't like to spend
| money, _especially_ when they are rich.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Most people in the US _love_ spending money. It 's
| considered a recreational activity.
| auggierose wrote:
| Hmmh, so why do so many people complain about paying for
| all the different streaming services like Disney plus,
| Netflix, Amazon prime, etc.? It's really peanuts compared
| to the value delivered.
| JohnFen wrote:
| "Value" is a very personal thing, though. You may find
| something is great value for money, and others may not,
| and neither is wrong.
|
| Personally, I don't find that the streaming services are
| good value. I don't complain about it, though. I just
| don't subscribe to them.
|
| Also, buying services doesn't satisfy the "shopping as a
| recreational activity" itch. A big part of the recreation
| is the actual shopping, and coming home with physical
| stuff.
| auggierose wrote:
| That's true. And that's why people having enough money is
| not an alternative solution to software / digital content
| financed by ads.
| code_architect wrote:
| Because the ones who enjoy paying for them do not
| complain so you believe the complainers are a majority.
| ldhough wrote:
| Eh it _was_ great value when it was just Netflix or just
| two services but now I feel like there 's often only 0-1
| shows on a given platform that I'm interested in at any
| one time. It isn't "good value" to pay $15+ a month each
| for Netflix/Prime/Disney/HBO/Hulu/AppleTV and only use
| one or two of them in a given month. Because Prime Video
| is bundled with regular Amazon Prime I keep that active
| and activate and deactivate the others based on when they
| come out with seasons of shows I care to watch. I also
| think a lot of complaints are about the platforms
| increasingly making the experience worse like making me
| pay to remove ads when I'm already paying for the
| service, or what Netflix is pulling with their family
| plans.
| tsgagnon wrote:
| About a decade ago I used to pay $45+ a month for a very
| basic cable package that contained mostly public stations
| and a few of the standard stations that you get a hotels,
| etc. At the same time my parents paid around $100+ a
| month for their cable package with a better channel
| selection.
|
| So, to me, even paying $60-$80 for various streaming
| services that are all on-demand (which wasn't the case
| for the cable I used to have) is still an amazing deal.
|
| Oh, and I don't have to sit through ads every 5 minutes.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think it depends. All else being equal in terms of your
| daily commute, owning a big and expensive car is often
| seen as better than owning a more affordable smaller car.
| danaris wrote:
| If you consider "the value delivered" to be the totality
| of all the content on the platforms, then sure. But
| that's not actually valuable to most of the people
| subscribing, so it's ultimately a useless way of looking
| at it.
|
| Any given person is only going to care about some small
| fraction of the media available for watching, and when
| that fraction is spread out across 6 different streaming
| services, the "value" they're _getting_ from any single
| one of those is fairly small.
|
| Furthermore, similar to what ldhough says, many of us
| _remember_ when we could get basically all that content
| on Netflix, and we know perfectly well that a) the
| content providers could be making reasonable amounts of
| money through a streaming deal like that, and b) the
| reason they decided to launch their _own_ service is one
| part insatiable desire for ever increasing profit, one
| part unrelenting crusade for absolute control over
| everything they own. Nowhere in there is "value to the
| customer".
|
| There's a quote that I've seen go 'round a few times, to
| the effect of "the streaming services really need to
| remember that their entire value proposition is being
| slightly more convenient than piracy."
| izacus wrote:
| > I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is
| their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these
| websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the
| most intrusive ads are google ads.
|
| The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term
| as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is
| destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers,
| C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision
| to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off
| the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well how would you fix Google's predicament? I think it's
| easy enough to conclude they're harming themselves, but what
| are their options?
| randcraw wrote:
| This is basically a pricing problem. G needs to strike a
| balance between the naked profitability of selling more
| ugly and dysfunctional ads versus increasing user delight
| by delivering more useful search results. While adding more
| ads boosts their revenue per search, the concomitant loss
| in value to the user is driving us away per result. The
| consequence: the user is increasingly looking elsewhere to
| escape the imbalance between Google's single minded focus
| on boosting revenue, damn the user.
|
| Many of us have blunted the worst of G search's ugliness
| using ad blockers, but the polluting of their results by
| hiding useful content behind myriad lines of useless SEO
| detritus still dominates, and this loss of value as a
| utility inescapably poisons their life blood.
|
| Until G's management realizes that their salvation lies NOT
| in blithely driving away customers, and instead strike a
| better balance by employing filters that better reject the
| more irrelevant and less profitable noise among their
| results, they will continue their current march toward
| oblivion -- as smarter competitors serve up more palatable
| search fare, and eat Google's lunch.
| hahamaster wrote:
| I'd shut it down and give the money back to the
| shareholders.
| brookst wrote:
| Their only Hope at long term viability is something like
| the wall between advertising and editorial at old school
| media companies. Yes, it's fashionable to be jaded but it
| really did work that way.
|
| Google needs its product people to not know or care about
| as revenue. They need to make search as efficient as
| possible, without regard for whether a good search result
| reduces ad clicks.
|
| Revenue would go do, but not catastrophically. And they'd
| have a sustainable business that would be hard to disrupt.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Honestly the problem is that Google has been _trying_ to
| fix it. Alternative and diverse incomes is the solution.
|
| Everyone wants to make a good product, but ads make a
| product worse. Everyone wants to make a heavily used
| product but pay-per-use or subscriptions are limiting.
|
| Google Cloud+Workplace, YouTube Premium, Play Store, Nest,
| _ahem_ Stadia. Google has plenty of attempts at building
| products that make money without ads. The problem is that
| they're expensive and not nearly as profitable.
|
| LLM are bad at search, but people seem to like they. It
| gives them a clean re-start of search and maybe they'll use
| it to do a search subscription where they can retry
| building their one good product without ads. Probably not
| though.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Everyone wants to make a good product
|
| Well, most do, but certainly not everyone. What almost
| everyone wants to make is a _profitable_ product.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I don't know if it's Google that is dying.
|
| I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to
| replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a
| couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were
| helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms"
| trick.
|
| Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer
| reports style review of different brands at different price
| points.
|
| The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized
| for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Google used to have a "Forums" tab right on the top that
| would filter results to random PHPbb instances and the like.
| It was generally pretty great. As far as I'm concerned, the
| decision to remove that was when Google started dying.
| Jensson wrote:
| It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads
| very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do
| they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the
| helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on
| reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be
| so good at indexing useful reddit threads.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| I would think they apply their normal algorithms.
|
| If it's a good article that's upvoted a lot, it should also
| be linked in some places and thus get a higher search
| score.
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| Though it's not finding the article. It's finding a link
| to the article on Reddit. I hope people aren't linking to
| the Reddit thread...
| comfypotato wrote:
| The way the original pagerank algorithm works, links to
| the original article would increase the score of a Reddit
| post linking to the article. Why Reddit posts are ranked
| higher in a default search I'm not sure, but this would
| definitely explain why site:Reddit works.
| Jensson wrote:
| Do people link to reddit threads a lot? I'd assume such a
| signal would be very noisy and not very reliable, so spam
| sites would just link a lot to their content spam on
| reddit.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| I've found that Google is willing to return one or two
| Reddit links but then reverts to its usual SEO crapspam for
| the rest of the results. Even "site:reddit.com" only
| returns only a fraction of the discussions related to the
| topic. The site's been around for over a decade, and most
| topics have been discussed dozens of times or more.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Like giving Reddit a higher "page score" than other
| websites?
| Jensson wrote:
| No, I mean why does it find the right reddit thread
| instead any of the billions of other reddit threads? That
| can't be trivial to do since reddit themselves don't do
| it well.
| codexon wrote:
| It was probably linked to by other websites. I've been
| seeing more news organizations directly linking to
| reddit, and I believe Google manually boosted reddit
| results a few years ago. You used to never see them in
| search results, but now they have started showing up.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Gotcha. Google search ranking threads versus Reddit
| search ranking threads.
|
| I'd posit that Google counts the upvotes and other
| signals on the thread to calculate EAT or whatever.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| The Reddit trick is increasingly less viable as marketers are
| astroturfing Reddit.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| That's been a significant factor on reddit since 2008 or
| so. It may be getting worse or the dynamics changing, idk,
| but it's nowhere near new.
| VHRanger wrote:
| One advantage is that Reddit has a distributed network of
| volunteer mods whos incentives align with that of their
| own subreddit.
|
| Google on the other hand has automated centralized
| content moderation.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Agreed. What I've seen become more common is the following:
|
| * They'll start by having <5 real comments that seem like a
| legitimate person wrote them
|
| * Account suddenly starts just re-posting very popular
| older posts, and other bots chime in that _also_ copy the
| top comments from that post letter-for-letter
|
| * Account goes on to shill some product
| euos wrote:
| It's just the state of the web. Google search uses metrics
| for the web sites (number of links, etc) so Reddit threads do
| not rank high compared to real web sites.
| mehdix wrote:
| This is my experience too, every time I'm looking for
| meaningful results, after searching my bookmarks of course.
| schaefer wrote:
| Try the search engine kagi.com It just works.
|
| Google stopped being a search company, and is an advertisement
| company now.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I tried my test search "California style burrito in Austin"
| and the first page was entirely reddit results. Clicking over
| to "map" resulted in a single wrong result.
|
| phind.com and new bing do this better.
| georgehill wrote:
| I tried the same query using phind.com, still the most
| answers came from reddit.
|
| https://www.phind.com/search?cache=5a93485f-b029-45bf-
| ade1-b...
| kjs3 wrote:
| Must create account to use a search engine. Hard Nope.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Ah...it's not at all clear from the Kagi front page that
| it's a pay service. That does change things.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I find the syllogism here a little hard to follow, because
| here is what the first bit looks like to me:
|
| 1. Web search is useful, both for work/productivity and
| recreation.
|
| 2. Running servers to index the internet is a scale of
| compute beyond the effort and expense of most or all of
| home users.
|
| 3. Web search has distinct economies of scale when applied.
|
| 4. Said economies must be funded in some way.
|
| 5. There are two proposed models: ad-supported and
| subscription.
|
| 6. We do not like the effects of ad-support in the context
| of Google.
|
| So the options are to either choose a different add-
| supported method (with the understanding that it may well
| meet Google's fate) or else pay for the product directly
| (subscription).
|
| Frankly, the only reason I haven't signed up for something
| like this is that DuckDuckGo has been good enough for me
| lately. It might not always be, but it has been so far.
|
| So I take the view after step 6 that, for the time being,
| I'm willing to jump from ad supported platform to ad
| supported platform, but I say that while admitting I'm a
| bad search stretch away from switching.
| Version467 wrote:
| In case you need a nudge from another very happy kagi
| user, consider trying it out.
|
| I used kagi for a few months when it was still in beta
| (and thus free) and had to decide if I wanted to pay for
| it to keep using it, or go back to ad supported internet
| search.
|
| After wincing at the price for a bit I realised that my
| expectations for how much search should cost were all
| based on free ad supported search engines. The value I
| derive from a good search engine is enormous, and easily
| visible if you imagine the internet without it.
|
| This makes paying for kagi a nobrainer. Their search
| results are really good and they have an incentive to
| keep it that way. It's a solid product, with a great
| value proposition (if you recalibrate your expectation)
| and I am also regularly reminded that this is how to
| actually vote with your wallet. I feel like we need kagi
| (or something like it) to succeed. If it turns out that
| paid search is not a viable business, then what chance do
| we have left for a search engine that has its intentions
| aligned with its users?
|
| But it's first and foremost a great experience. Fast,
| great results, clean layout and a bunch of nice user-
| centric features on top. The idealism just helps to
| accept a cost.
| disqard wrote:
| Seconding (as a paying consumer) -- sign up for a month
| and try the experience for yourself.
|
| It shows you the alternative Internet (ad-free, spam
| free, SEO-crap listicles _not_ on the results page) that
| everyone here is constantly carping about missing.
|
| If you want this reality, _pay for it to help it exist_.
| Else, put up with ads.
| francis-io wrote:
| Isn't this the exact problem? How can websites stay afloat
| unless you pay for it in one way or another? I guess the
| choice is buy the product or be the product.
|
| I've been paying for Kagi for 8 months and it's been fine
| for me. I can live with it in a way I could never live with
| DDG.
| smrq wrote:
| When I navigated to your link I first got a full screen popover
| from Imgur and briefly thought that was the point. And, in a
| sense, it was.
| auggierose wrote:
| So what about a search engine that penalises ads heavily? Would
| that not be interesting to companies like Wikipedia or Apple
| that don't need ads to survive? Sounds to me like such a search
| engine could gain market share rapidly. Is there such a search
| engine already out there?
| Havoc wrote:
| Real question is how is reddit's own search still so utterly
| useless despite sitting on a treasure trove of high quality info
| (comparatively speaking)
|
| I'm literally navigating away from reddit, then doing a
| site:reddit.com google search to go back to reddit
| b800h wrote:
| They seem to have fallen into the Yahoo! trap of attempting to
| keep you on their properties for as long as possible. Search for
| a basic word definition or simply answer and they'll offer you a
| YouTube video which takes 60 seconds to get to the point.
| 100011_100001 wrote:
| I was telling my wife that internet of today is how p0rn sites
| looked in the late 90s. Popups, ads everywhere, miss-direction,
| can't go back, click this link to go here which might or might
| not take you there, links that look like site links but are
| actually ads.
|
| It's making everything suck.
| yalogin wrote:
| Google had a problem, it couldn't think outside of the search
| box. They had so much technology but they tried to fit everything
| behind that search box. Now they are scrambling to figure out a
| plan to counter chat gpt, which truly poses a threat to them. It
| may not pose a threat right away but the writing is on the wall.
| Of course it doesn't mean google is dying. It will be a trillion
| dollar company for years to come and they will plenty time to
| figure it out.
| zackmorris wrote:
| It's dead, Jim.
|
| I tried looking up a picture of the shakras to help track the
| evolution of my mood from burnout to peace and where I feel that
| in my body. But it's so filled with sponsored links that I found
| myself squinting at blurred out preview images before I finally
| snapped out of it, perhaps 20 minutes later.
|
| Information wants to be free. There should be glorious high-
| resolution images front and center that enthusiasts drew of their
| own accord and uploaded for free soon after the internet came
| online around 1995. Instead, we're funneled down the commercial
| carnival as marks. Sure, I'm a programmer, I know how to find
| what I'm looking for through various tricks. But I shouldn't have
| to.
|
| Monetized search is one of the great blunders of the Information
| Age. Paid internet service is another. Walled gardens, the DMCA
| (using FUD and the threat of litigation to turn BitTorrent into
| the devil), scientific papers locked behind paywalls, even the
| capture of programming itself by centralized repositories and the
| trend towards microservices and the concentration of wealth away
| from programmers who could actually fix the tools we use.. just
| on and on and on, so much nonsense designed to trap our minds
| within the framework of profit for exploitation. The more I look
| around, the more it all looks like hot garbage.
|
| It's frustrating to have a sense of knowing exactly what to do to
| fix things, even the knowledge and experience to pull off much of
| it, but spend the entirety of one's time running the rat race to
| survive. All while remembering a time not too long ago when it
| wasn't like that. I feel that central issue of wealth
| concentration and the dilution of disposable income and leisure
| time is what we're really fighting here. The loss of Google is
| just a symptom of that steady decline towards subservience.
| kh_hk wrote:
| And yet, I mistrust most product reviews that are on Reddit too,
| since marketers have found ways to control the hivemind
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My pet beef: why Google hasn't done anything to downrank
| Pinterest, specifically? It's a pit into which search terms for
| all sorts of subjects take you, but they (unethically) try their
| best to stop you from finding the original source content.
| Instead taking you deeper and deeper into their own recursively
| self-defined world of internal pins, hiding the outlinks and
| original attribution.
|
| (Also: vile because it's full of self-harm and eating disorder
| content that played its part in irrevocably damaged a loved one.)
| 63 wrote:
| Everyone loves to complain about how bad Google has gotten, but
| nobody wants to do anything about it. If you hate the SEO spam
| and cookie banners and newsletters, make a website without those.
| Any time you struggle to find information in a Google search but
| finally figure it out, write a no-nonsense article. Link your
| article in places it's relevant so people might see it. If we
| want this to get better, we need to put in some effort and fix
| it.
| wildmanx wrote:
| (Feb 2022)
| Exendroinient00 wrote:
| As the web business model is based on ads user experience isn't
| that important. I'm curious on the monetization model of new
| prompt based search engines. Ads dominating first pages of search
| won't be possible anymore. The adoption of new engines also
| wouldn't be as fast as many think, people habits die slow. So
| they still have time to think of a way to make money. Alphabet
| needs some competition. They became stale in the last 10 years.
| jhoelzel wrote:
| There are entire subreddits that are completely bot driven and no
| human creates any input.
|
| I am using some subreddits very frequently (like r/hackernews)
| but boy has it become obvious how many bots there really are.
|
| I think though, that we will not see a startup solving this any
| time soon, that will not succumb to bots itself.
|
| I'm breaking my head since January (as a hobby) to create some ai
| driven semantic search index, but the problem starts with trust.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post
| is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News.
| There must be a lot of people who resonate with it this time
| around.
|
| Unless, of course, this other part of the article is true:
|
| > 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.
|
| ... in which case one must ask the question as to whether stories
| like this being upvoted on HN are organic behavior or the result
| of botfarming.
| thadt wrote:
| People keep repeating the mantra that Google search is dying -
| but I think it's more that many just haven't yet understood that
| communities of people are the small oases in an otherwise vast,
| noisy information space. Of course Reddit, Hacker News, and Stack
| Overflow are where many (in this community) are going to find the
| most relevant information - that's where the people are.
|
| I remember clearly when I switched to using Google in the early
| 2000's. It wasn't because they were so much better at searching
| the Internet - it's because they acquired the Usenet index. There
| was knowledge in Usenet archives that couldn't be found anywhere
| else - because that's where the people were.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| Maybe something like the original Yahoo would be good to have
| again? E.g. if I know Reddit exists, how do I easily find out
| that hackernews or stackoverflow also exits and are good sites?
| stinos wrote:
| > Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post
| is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News
|
| Is that some kind of easter egg, just expressing hope, or is this
| pointing to some other post, or am I missing something? This post
| has 33 points at the time I'm writing this and doesn't seem to be
| a repost (according to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dkb.blog)?
| Dachande663 wrote:
| The original HN article[0] has 3636 points as I write this
| comment.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
| stinos wrote:
| Oh, right. i should have searched for the title, not the
| site.
| willnonya wrote:
| I find the notion that Reddit is being used as a search engine
| abhorrent.
|
| Reddit is a showcase of the worst tendencies on the internet. It
| is mismanaged by the company as well as the users ruling their
| fifedoms and emphasizes popularity of opnion over the reality of
| fact.
| kernal wrote:
| Google Search Is Dying (2025)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2024)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2023)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2022)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2021)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2020)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2019)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2018)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2017)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2016)
|
| Google Search Is Dying (2015)
|
| Do we see a pattern here?
| dbttdft wrote:
| [dead]
| college_physics wrote:
| Requiem for a dream
| [deleted]
| baxtr wrote:
| From the last paragraph:
|
| _> Long live Google + "site:reddit.com"._
| fbn79 wrote:
| The same article could be wroten in 2010 replacing Reddit with
| Facebook. But Google search is still here.
| danpalmer wrote:
| From the example image half way through this article...
|
| > "retool slack integration"
|
| I've just googled this and the top hit was literally the
| instructions to set up the slack integration. Not a link to it,
| the _actual_ instructions, although the link to the source page
| in the Retool docs was there. The rest of the hits were all hits
| in the Retool docs, except for the last result, which was someone
| making an HN comment making exactly my point on the last time
| this was discussed.
|
| Google search isn't broken or dying.
| thiht wrote:
| Google Search is broken for subjective searches. If you search
| "best xxx", Google will only return crap. "best xxx reddit"
| still gives relevant information.
| mastodon_acc wrote:
| How is that Google's fault? are you expecting a "Search"
| engine to perform qualitative analysis on your specific topic
| and generate a list for you?
|
| "best xxx reddit" that's google working as intended, you
| searched for a topic on reddit.
|
| I swear with the proliferation of LLMs most people have
| completely forgotten what a "search" in a search engine
| means.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| Because it's not that the sites it finds just has a bad or
| wrong opinion. Instead the whole site itself is usually a
| complete fraud or generated nonsense and it should be
| Googles job to kinda filter those out or rank them down. It
| would even help a lot if they just added a button to allow
| me to ban certain domains from my results.
| thiht wrote:
| > How is that Google's fault
|
| Because the top results are complete crap, and obvious SEO
| spams in most cases. If Google just allowed me to blacklist
| some sites from my search results I could actually get good
| results.
|
| Also maybe they shouldn't not rewrite my queries for me, I
| don't need them to helpfully remove 3 words out of 5 from
| my search.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Here's what I get (with content blockers disabled) - similar to
| TFA. Three large ads, interestingly now labelled "Sponsored"
| rather than "Ad", and then the actual instructions.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/2OKnAtb
| fdeage wrote:
| The same happened to me.
|
| Actually, I begin to wonder if maybe Google might be switching
| to some "high-quality" mode when it detects that you are a
| "technical" user?
|
| Seems like a bit of competition was all Google needed to be
| good again.
| codingdave wrote:
| I've never seen anything beyond anecdotes that appending 'reddit'
| to you query is common. Yet the article claims it is now the most
| popular way to search. Does anyone have the data to support this
| claim?
| einpoklum wrote:
| > the first few non-ad results
|
| ... and ...
|
| > sites filled with affiliate links and ads.
|
| ... suggest the poster is, for some reason, not using an ad-
| blocker. Strange.
|
| > What it actually means is that the amount of people using
| Reddit as a search engine is growing.
|
| I don't understand this claim. If reddit search is Google search
| + the keyword reddit, then either people are finding non-reddit
| results that way, which seems reallyt weird and unlikely; or
| they're finding reddit results that way - meaning that they
| really are using reddit.
| gertrunde wrote:
| Previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
|
| (managing to clock up 3600+ points and 1500+ comments...)
| huy77 wrote:
| It's not dying for me. My Google + Youtube usage is still as high
| as ever if not higher because of Youtube. ChatGPT/OpenAI/other
| models makes Google Lens more noticeable. Do you know you can
| generate the interior of your room using AI and Google offers the
| search for products based on the generated image just by a right-
| click on Chrome?
| [deleted]
| znpy wrote:
| Didn't anyone consider that google was extremely good at indexing
| websites, i mean normal websites (webs of interlinked hypertexts)
| but nowadays few people publish their content on regular websites
| but do so in the form of posts on reddit/instagram/youtube etc?
|
| That might explain a lot...
| unxdfa wrote:
| The entire of Google is dying. Starting with search, the moment
| you turn off your adblocker you will see why. It's literally a
| complete crapfest of badly moderated advertising and ranking
| manipulation. Then there's the default Android experience which
| literally shovels garbage down you with the Google app and via a
| version of Chrome with no ad blocking capability. The www is
| unusable unless you install another browser. Then all their
| immature web based apps propositions which people are finally
| tiring of due to the bugginess and being almost completely
| unusable if you're offline. Then the invasive tracking and
| privacy issues. You can tell how bad it's getting because nearly
| all my searches suggest autocomple with "reddit" on the end
| because people are more likely to get human generated results.
| And of course the ramped up YT advertising recently.
|
| It's a classic death spiral.
|
| They don't have a product other than crap search and invasive
| data collection.
| gl-prod wrote:
| Not only Google, but also the other day I was trying to
| download Chrome using Edge. Bing had an ad along these lines:
| Title: "Google Chrome - Download the Fast, Secure Browser from
| ..." URL:"https://google.com". I was just about to visit this
| site until I hovered over it and saw that the actual link's URL
| was very much not google.com.
| ushtaritk421 wrote:
| Google could get me to come back if it: 1. Offered a paid version
| without sponsored results 2. Let me block sites from my results
| (bonus points if it penalizes sites with lots of users blocking
| their results)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| If google indexes Reddit properly and timely I'm not sure why I
| would go specifically to Reddit to search there for the subset.
| Same goes with stack overflow, I hardly need to go there to
| search
| naizarak wrote:
| SEO spam is gonna be nothing compared to the AI-generated web.
| And it's going to be the perfect excuse to finally mandate
| internet-ID.
| jonplackett wrote:
| > Early adopters aren't using Google anymore.
|
| OK guys - what are you all using instead?
| bouvin wrote:
| In my case, Kagi.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The article overlooks that "ads" goes beyond just ads on the
| search results page. Ads is the main problem, in the form of
| Google's business model which dissuades them from actually
| improving search result quality.
|
| Spam/SEO/etc sites are very easy to detect - use the presence of
| ads, analytics, affiliate links, newsletter signup forms, etc as
| a negative ranking signal, and the problem will be resolved
| quickly. This can't be evaded, because the same techniques used
| to evade search engine detection would be abused by ad
| fraudsters.
|
| The reason they don't do that is that those spam sites help
| Google in multiple ways - not only do they increase engagement
| with the search result page ads (the ads might actually be better
| than the "organic" but spammy results), but the ads/analytics on
| the spam sites are likely to be Google's which helps them too.
|
| This would not be a problem with any search engine whose
| incentives are aligned with the users' (Kagi has a "non-
| commercial" feature for example that I suspect roughly implements
| the above).
| ACV001 wrote:
| Even if it is dying, it is a very slow death..
| projektfu wrote:
| "How do I fix some odd setting in Windows, Mac, whatever"
|
| 2007: results include documentation, a couple forums, if you're
| unlucky there's a potentially malware tool that's discovered
| people need to fix this.
|
| 2012: results include Reddit and Stack Exchange, documentation
| has disappeared, forums have opened that are full of "support
| specialists" telling you to reset your windows install.
|
| 2023: top results are just blogspam pushing malware tools and the
| above-mentioned useless support forums. It's hard to know if
| Microsoft and Apple even know what their software does.
|
| Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.
|
| Mostly if you add an specific distro on your terms. It doesn't
| have to be your distro, just one that cares about what you are
| searching.
|
| If you just ask for "how do I do X in linux", you will get
| plenty of spam and a few wrong answers here or there.
| worrycue wrote:
| Am I the only one still searching Google primarily though
| keywords/phrases (and the exclusion of keywords/phrases)? I
| don't see much degradation in Google's results.
| flenserboy wrote:
| I keep trying, but the result quality continues to degrade.
| Most such searches either return _nothing_ , one or two
| links, or a host of spam. Google is useless except for
| business phone numbers and hours they are open.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| You're not the only one.
|
| If you ask one of those people complaining here to share the
| query they use, it becomes very quickly very apparent that
| Google doesn't have a problem at all.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.
|
| Kinda... but it then gets broken by the developers of the
| distros.
|
| Static ip on raspberrypi? Sure... /etc/network/interfaces!
|
| Nope, not anymore, it's dhcpcd.conf now.
|
| It took literally a year for the "new way" to get on top of
| google search results.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| See I understand that, with Microsoft and Apple support you
| would get a response along the lines of:
|
| "I see you are trying to find the Static IP of your Raspberry
| Pi, a static IP is a .....<long paragraph describing static
| ips>. You also have a raspberry pi which is....<long
| paragraph describing raspberry pi's>. Given all of that I
| think you should really start by resetting your Raspberry Pi
| and ensure that your Windows license is up to date.
| ilyt wrote:
| /etc/network/interfaces works just fine tho
|
| but yeah, the stuff where "right thing to do" changes often
| can be hard to find.
|
| Also "simple stuff" brings more "not really right way but
| kinda sorta works" answers
| moffkalast wrote:
| > forums have opened that are full of "support specialists"
| telling you to reset your windows install
|
| God this is such a pet peeve, those stupid Microsoft forums
| especially where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment
| apologizing and wishing a good day and suggest fuck all. They
| ought to just pull the plug on the site and let reddit handle
| their support for free.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Apple's official support website is the same. 100% useless
| feedback from the "Support Specialist". Yet it always shows
| up at the top of the search result.
| paleotrope wrote:
| Most of that support is free. It's some weird universe where
| Microsoft gives out fake credentials (forum badges and crap)
| to people that don't know what they are doing. These poor
| people in India and other places are spamming tons of useless
| "fixes" for internet cred.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| Hello moffkalast,
|
| I'm Kevin from the Microsoft Customer Support Team. I'm sorry
| to hear you're having a problem with Windows 10 support
| forums today. We're here to help and would like to get this
| problem resolved for you!
|
| I understand that the issue you're currently facing is that
| "Microsoft forums where the customer reps spend 80% of the
| comment apologizing" are appearing on your Windows 10 forum
| search results?
|
| Oftentimes unwanted ads or other unexpected configuration
| changes are caused by unintended software being installed on
| your computer, or from other errors.
|
| Please try the following steps to resolve your issue:
|
| 1. Log into your computer. Click on the Start Menu and click
| Shutdown. Then click reboot. Allow any pending updates to
| install.
|
| If this doesn't work, you can try the following solutions:
|
| 1. Log into your computer and click the Start Menu
|
| 2. Type "update" into the Search Bar and click Windows
| Updates
|
| 3. Click "check for updates now" and follow the instructions
| to install any pending updates.
|
| If this still doesn't resolve your situation, you can check
| the following KBs for further help:
|
| KB: 324829 - Restore from a System Restore Point
|
| KB: 293111 - Update Windows Defender
|
| KB: 299024 - Check for Errors using Windows Network
| Troubleshooter
|
| I hope this has helped resolved your problem today.
|
| Sincerely, Kevin
| qrio2 wrote:
| triggering lol
| izacus wrote:
| You missed the expertsexchange era when they spammed all of
| Google ^^
| xnx wrote:
| expertsexchange is on of my favorite ambiguous site names
| kristofferR wrote:
| volkswagenitalia
| kjs3 wrote:
| The Pen Island web site is also a fav.
| account42 wrote:
| Not a fan of Pen Island?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well you wouldn't want any amateurs doing that for sure.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Amateurs can be experts! Amateur just means non-
| professional
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Oh that's cool, didn't knew that amateur surgeons were a
| thing :)
| nicoburns wrote:
| You may also be interested in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_surgeon
|
| "The barber surgeon, one of the most common European
| medical practitioners of the Middle Ages, was generally
| charged with caring for soldiers during and after battle.
| In this era, surgery was seldom conducted by physicians,
| but instead by barbers, who, possessing razors and
| coordination indispensable to their trade, were called
| upon for numerous tasks ranging from cutting hair to
| amputating limbs."
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| They were arguably professionals.
| moffkalast wrote:
| How barberic.
| test1235 wrote:
| along with pen island
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Apple forums are also quite bad. Every suggestion is to reset
| SMC and thats it.
|
| The Stack overflow / stack exchange websites are often the only
| ones where you get useful answers when having any sort of
| problems regarding the user facing part of the OS.
|
| (And also for anything else to be honest. I think 30% of my
| questions on google are answered by stack exchange websites)
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Apple's dev forums are actually useful but only because of
| the mind-bending efforts of superhuman Quinn "The Eskimo!",
| who appears to have been at Apple since forever, is an actual
| programmer, gives real answers with meaty information and can
| even look things up in the source code for you. I've lost
| track of how often I've needed to learn something obscure
| about Apple's platforms and ended up at a thread where Quinn
| gives an answer. I've also filed a DTS incident in the past
| asking a _seriously_ obscure question I wasn 't even meant to
| ask (to do with their code signing system), and got a
| detailed and correct response back from Quinn+colleagues very
| quickly. It was by far the best support experience I ever had
| from a tech firm.
|
| Quinn, if you're out there reading this, I really hope Apple
| has a succession plan in place for when you take a well
| deserved retirement!
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Today, ChatGPT gives you an instant step by step guide which
| may or may not be correct but will likely get you there.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| For the last five technical questions I asked ChatGPT every
| single one yielded an answer that was either wrong or
| uselessly vague :( I've now given up. You have to cross-check
| everything against Google anyway so why not just skip
| straight to that point.
| pcrh wrote:
| User: How do I fix large pdf files?
|
| ChatGPT: delete system32
| MikusR wrote:
| Had to finally register there to check. This was the
| answer.
|
| "There are a few things you can try to fix large PDF files:
| Compress the PDF: You can use online or offline tools to
| compress the PDF file. This will reduce the file size and
| make it easier to work with. Some popular tools for
| compressing PDFs include Adobe Acrobat, Smallpdf, and PDF
| Compressor. Remove unnecessary elements: If
| the PDF file contains images, graphics, or other non-
| essential elements, you can try removing them. This can
| significantly reduce the file size. You can use Adobe
| Acrobat or other PDF editing tools to do this.
| Split the PDF: If the PDF file contains multiple pages, you
| can split it into smaller files. This can be done using
| Adobe Acrobat or other PDF editing tools.
| Optimize PDF: Many PDF viewers have the option to optimize
| PDF files. This may include reducing the quality of images
| or fonts to reduce the file size. You can try using the
| built-in optimization tools in Adobe Acrobat or other PDF
| viewers. Use a different file format: If the
| PDF file is still too large, you may consider using a
| different file format, such as JPG or PNG for images, or
| DOCX or RTF for text. This may not always be possible, but
| it can be a good alternative if the PDF file is causing too
| many issues. "
| moffkalast wrote:
| You no longer have any broken large pdf files, ergo the
| problem is solved.
| throwaway742 wrote:
| Technically they are still there.
| [deleted]
| treyhuffine wrote:
| The recent success of ChatGPT shows that the current search
| experience is likely deprecated. With LLMs, you can get
| information immediately that directly answers your query.
|
| ChatGPT has its limits too though - it's not always right, you
| don't have options other than to re-ask or regenerate if the one
| answer doesn't satisfy what you need, we're limited to only text,
| and the experience may be just a bit too contained/convergent. It
| feels like it's going to take another product or iteration to
| really get there.
|
| The question I keep asking - what does the future of problem-
| solving and finding knowledge on the internet look like in an
| ideal world given the tools that we have or could now build?
| flir wrote:
| > With LLMs, you can get information immediately that directly
| answers your query.
|
| Not as long as they're relying on humans to write pages with
| that information in. When nobody visits, what's the point in
| writing a page?
| twelve40 wrote:
| I keep looking for a coherent answer to that question, but
| have never seen one so far, these are unimportant details
| that are swept under the AI enthusiasm rug.
| flir wrote:
| Someone (I wish I could remember who) once argued that if
| you're trying to create an ecosystem around your product,
| you can't hoover up _all_ the value, you have to leave some
| for the little guy. I 've felt for a while that Google,
| with its various attempts to put the answer on the search
| results page, might be skirting dangerously close to that
| problem. It feels like the only value they're leaving on
| the table is the chance to sell stuff.
| twelve40 wrote:
| so... how much value does ChatGPT as proposed solution
| leave to the little guy?
| flir wrote:
| My expectation is "not much", because if the fact is
| utterly divorced from the source, there's not even any
| point writing near-spam pages to attract people to the
| site where you're selling something. But I think we'd
| need to see a working implementation to know for sure.
| franze wrote:
| In the German market for any product related query where you want
| a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies,
| which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO
| optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly
| newspapers).
|
| i.e.: https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/
| https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/
| https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/
|
| These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all
| SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden
| behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines.
| And are constantly updated.
|
| And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of
| products get recommended, and win these "tests".
|
| They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google
| clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about
| them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution.
| Well, it does not work.
|
| And Product search for popular every day technical products has
| become unusable for years now.
|
| Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let
| this go on for so long.
| bsenftner wrote:
| And the number of ordinary people that try to gas light me for
| stating that Google has failed in their most basic mission.
| It's been years, and unless you work in tech or marketing,
| you're apparently obvious to the situation, and still think of
| Google as one may have during the 90's.
| bityard wrote:
| A lot of people are using this term incorrectly lately.
| Gaslighting isn't simply telling someone that they are wrong
| about something. It's a specific, sustained, and intentional
| form of psychological abuse, most often found in a domestic
| setting. The origin is the play Gas Light and the plot
| revolves around a man trying to steal from his wife by making
| her think she is going insane.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I know what gaslighting is, and I am using the term
| correctly. When I tell people Google Search is not just
| bad, it is overt manipulation of your search to waste one's
| time sifting through prose nonsense because Google promote
| prose over facts, they often don't just disagree, they
| overtly over time try to change my mind, they can't let it
| lie, they have to change my thinking. And they use shallow,
| obvious insulting language, as they is all they know. It is
| the duration of time they spend on this mind changing
| aggression. That's gaslighting
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| For this to be gaslighting the person would have to
| believe google search is terrible, but be engaging in a
| concerted effort to convince you otherwise. That doesn't
| seem like the case?
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is now easier to get Saturn and Media Market ads than
| technical sites when looking for hardware specifications.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| > Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win
| these "tests".
|
| Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How
| many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the
| expected state that the best white goods in any category are
| experiencing constant churn?
|
| I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very
| well created" but spam because you don't believe the
| recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison
| process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide
| if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful,
| and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they
| select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel
| doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two
| use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.
| martin_a wrote:
| I'm totally with you on that, but who, besides us, knows about
| this and understands the inner workings?
|
| Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that
| they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations
| and tests.
|
| They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of
| alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in
| "the old times" (or still have today).
|
| I'm not sure how to solve this, to be honest.
| arbuge wrote:
| > have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind
| javascript)
|
| We have different definitions of zero I think...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Zero as far as the Google spider is concerned
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Not true for very long, their scrapers do use js now and
| read the dom.
| franze wrote:
| yeah, but they do bot execute user interactions. so its
| easy to hide links with JS if intended
| luckylion wrote:
| Google knows, has commented on it that it's fine "but you
| should be careful who you let publish on your domain" and they
| won't do anything about it. It was a somewhat big topic two or
| so years ago, and since then everyone has understood that you
| just need to buy in on media company sites to get ranked.
|
| Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them
| to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.
| gregwebs wrote:
| I switched to Kagi last year and couldn't be happier. The results
| are better for me. No ads (the small amount I pay Kagi is well
| worth it) and a slider to click for programming focused results.
|
| Looking forward to some new great AI search but I doubt it will
| come from Bing. The other day I tried Bing and it had merged
| information across 2 different results such that the page title
| it showed was incorrect and misleading.
| azatom wrote:
| Dying is a harsh word, give them the respect for the good years:
| they killing it deliberatively.
|
| They fed up with people using it without login, and only the
| websites paying. They just want monthly payment from user too.
| [deleted]
| sudeeprg wrote:
| A carefully crafted title to kill google search...
| alex3305 wrote:
| Recently Google started translating some of my English search
| queries into my local language (Dutch). Which doesn't help at
| all. There is a reason I search in English.
|
| For instance I wanted to see if there are new Iberico spareribs
| recipes, so I search for that. The first page has 8 results with
| 7 in Dutch and 1 in English. When I visit the English site, the
| recipe is auto translated in Dutch. And four of those 8 results
| are stores where I have to buy their rub to even follow the
| recipe.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Also, this has been discussed before on HN
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
| coding123 wrote:
| I can't find anything related to what is happening to my dad on
| Google except a bunch of vax deniers. Added reddit and found many
| other people with ALS after vaccine. He's on a bypap now and will
| be dead in a few weeks.
| capybara_2020 wrote:
| I think it is time to stop being nice and treating the entire
| search results page as ads for every single query. Even if you
| have an adblocker, the more nefarious ads are still there, the
| ones masquerading as useful articles that have been SEOed to the
| top.
| thejackgoode wrote:
| The hunt for authentic interaction capture intensifies. Some day
| they will come for HN. Not soon, hopefully
| DeathArrow wrote:
| The correct title would be "Google Search is dying, but we don't
| have a better replacement yet".
| antomeie wrote:
| Didn't the article kind of allude to the fact that the wrong
| search results might be the most profitable? I mean, it makes
| sense to me that Google is promoting the worst websites, since
| they contain the most Google ads...
|
| I'm sure Google employees are well aware of the issues.
| stockhorn wrote:
| Are there any browser extensions that help to filter the noise
| (SEO clones, AI blogspam)?
|
| Could a distributed rating/endorsement system help with that?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285
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