[HN Gopher] Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigatio...
___________________________________________________________________
Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam
in Search [pdf]
Author : DanielleMolloy
Score : 192 points
Date : 2024-01-16 14:21 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (downloads.webis.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (downloads.webis.de)
| barbazoo wrote:
| Kagi allows users to adjust the ranking [0] of certain domains.
| I'm not sure if that's shared among all users but it would
| certainly help.
|
| [0] https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features
| mplanchard wrote:
| Fellow kagi user here. I have been very happy with the service
| so far. Switched over to it when they announced their new
| pricing model a little while ago. It is more than worth the
| cost. Even without tweaking, the quality of results is far
| higher than what I had gotten used to getting from DDG or DDG
| with !g. The ability to rank domains is amazing though.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Every time I see someone talk about this feature on HN
| (almost every day) I get jealous, it's such a good idea. When
| I'm searching (on google) I'm always thinking; when I get
| Kagi I'm gonna downrank this site, uprank that one etc.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| I'm curious, why haven't you switched to Kagi yet?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| For me... I don't want my search tied to my credit card.
| I go through lengths to keep my digital and analog
| domains as separate as possible.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _don't want my search tied to my credit card_
|
| Pay with Bitcoin [1].
|
| [1] https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin
| pants2 wrote:
| Bitcoin is such a bad payment method, even with Lightning
| network, because you need to buy a volatile asset and
| payment processors typically charge huge fees to receive
| BTC payments.
|
| If Kagi supported USDC I would definitely use it.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Could you use a prepaid debit card or is that? And what
| other search engine do you use and what makes you think
| they don't know who you are?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I primarily use DuckDuckGo go. I use account containers.
| I use a VPN.
|
| I'm not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| $
| eviks wrote:
| Good idea indeed, though you could block some sites (on any
| search engine) with a browser script
| pants2 wrote:
| Kagi has improved immensely and I no longer ever feel the
| need to check Google against it. It's a great product that I
| am more than happy to pay $10/mo
|
| I'm so happy that their new pricing scheme has done away with
| search quotas. Their claim that the average user does 100
| searches a month seems absurdly low. I would blow through my
| 300 search quota in a few days.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I average about 60/day since the pricing update. Fewer than
| I expected, but enough to hit the quota in under a week.
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's not shared, but they have a list of most blocked etc.
| domains: https://kagi.com/stats
| zeroCalories wrote:
| That's a very good list. As a programmer I wish many of those
| sites, like geeks for geeks, would disappear forever.
| alias_neo wrote:
| That is an interesting list; I'm not at all surprised to see
| pinterest holding the top ~10 spots, but things like
| facebook, instagram and twitter being so high does surprise
| me; perhaps it's indicative of the type of user they have (I
| too block those domains).
|
| I could take that list, as-is and use it as a block list on
| my entire network.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean when you look at all the raised and pinned domains
| it's almost entirely programming related topics so
| "programmers dislike sites that have terrible browser
| experiences for unauth'd users" is like the least
| surprising thing.
| redrove wrote:
| @vlad I got 429'd here
| hiddencost wrote:
| That is a brutally small user base given how much I hear
| about them on HN.
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's a paid search engine, and not a cheap one. Not exactly
| mass market material ;) and I'd assume the percentage of HN
| users is rather high, hence a lot of comments from us,
| here.
| summerlight wrote:
| I get the reason why Google does not do domain level filtering
| due to antitrust concerns, but at least they should be able to
| adopt this kind of user preference approach. Why aren't they
| doing this years ago?
| jsnell wrote:
| They were doing it years (more than a decade) ago, but the
| feature was eventually removed.
| edgyquant wrote:
| If it's purely user generated and not something with any
| defaults, why would they be subject to antitrust concerns?
| roblh wrote:
| Also a kagi user since they changed their pricing. The results
| have been decent for me for the most part, except for shopping
| which I still use google for. I do wish they'd step up their
| css game though. Maybe it's just safari on iOS, but I get style
| problems constantly. The address bar doesn't behave properly
| with the cursor if you type in a decently long query, and so
| often the search results will overflow the container
| horizontally. It's a small price to pay for good search
| results, but stuff like that should be table stakes for a tool
| like this.
| freediver wrote:
| Can you open an issue on kagifeedback.org with details?
| ahoka wrote:
| ublacklist does this for Google.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| What's Google's incentive to be "good" now?
|
| They own the search market anyway, and the more time you waste on
| their platform searching for what you want to find, the more ads
| you see and the more money Google makes.
|
| What else are those 97% people gonna do, "Google on Bing"
| instead?
|
| So for them, being bad is actually more profitable than being
| good, meaning there's a conflict of interest between what Google
| provides and what their users want, but since there's basically
| no equivalent competition, they get away with it laughing all the
| way to the bank.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| You have to balance being good with maximizing profit. If you
| aren't good, your userbase will go elsewhere.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Where will they go when Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox
| all default to Google and plenty of Edge users also switch to
| Google?
|
| Due to the defaults it's the only search engine most people
| ever heard of. Think of Plato's cave allegory.
|
| If all your life you've only used Google and never anything
| else, making it the ground truth for you, how would you know
| it's bad in order to motivate you to look elsewhere?
| bgirard wrote:
| > Where will they go when Android, Chrome, Safari and
| Firefox all default to Google and plenty of Edge users also
| switch to Google?
|
| LLMs
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| LLMs are still far away from the daily mainstream usage
| Google gets, and since all devices default to Google, and
| people never change those, they'll stay on Google and
| only occasionally switch to LLMs for more advanced tasks.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Honestly, I hate to jump on this bandwagon, but I was
| after some information to help my wife put together some
| notes on a topic; at first I was coming up with questions
| we could answer and I'd search for the answers/sources
| online;
|
| I decided to first try ask an LLM, so I asked Bard some
| targeted questions and asked for sources, and had all of
| the answers I needed, conveniently bullet pointed within
| 3-4 minutes, and all I had to do was go and verify the
| sources, job done.
| drngdds wrote:
| GPT4 is the only one I've used much but it really can be
| good as a Google alternative for certain kinds of
| questions. I wouldn't trust it for anything obscure and
| complicated though - if you ask it about something like
| competitive Pokemon, you'll just get a stream of
| confidently incorrect junk that any beginner could
| disprove. (Asking for sources does help this sometimes
| though.)
| Clent wrote:
| I've done the same for a handful of things I use to
| default to a search engine for.
|
| My favorite is recipes.
|
| The blog spam around recipes is notoriously bad and is a
| direct result of Google Search.
|
| Using these LLMs, all I need to do is tell it what I'm
| looking for in general and it will give me an entire
| recipe with no extraneous information.
|
| It can handle adding or removing ingredients,
| substitutions. It can adjust servings. It can flip the
| recipe to work in a slow cooker or pressure cooker.
|
| I've even had some limited success where I list
| restrictions based on picky eaters in the house for
| creating longer meal plans. No search engine can compete
| with that.
|
| There were apps designed around these use cases. I
| foresee these sort of nuanced and personalized
| interactions being a key to drawing people away from
| search engines.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > You have to balance being good with maximizing profit. If
| you aren't good, your userbase will go elsewhere.
|
| When you have +95% of the market, you can merely be _good
| enough_ that users don 't leave.
|
| In this case, until Google literally starts serving ads-only
| and links to other google products (Hi Chrome!), they are not
| going to lose any money.
| bad_user wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but why hasn't a better search
| engine emerged yet?
|
| Bing's AI shows some promise, but I can't find anything
| better than Google. DuckDuckGo is shit. Classic Bing is
| shit. Brave Search showed promise, but it's also full of
| spam and with a smaller index. Marginalia showed some
| promise for smaller websites, but it's small, too.
|
| All of them are unusable for local searches, except for
| Google, which is where I need search most. That and
| searching for obscure programming-related error messages.
|
| Kagi doesn't even use it's own index, you're basically
| paying for a UI making API calls to Bing and Google. How
| well does changing the ranking work anyway, if you don't
| have your own index?
|
| I want to believe that if Google were more aligned with
| users, search would be better. But where is that better
| search engine to showcase it?
|
| Do a poll on HN. I bet that the vast majority of users here
| still use Google's search, and you can't blame HN users of
| not knowing of alternatives.
|
| If Google really keeps its market share due to their
| monopoly, where is that better option that's being ignored?
| Tell me and I'll jump on it.
| Spivak wrote:
| I know it's been mentioned in this thread but Kagi is a
| gods damn breath of fresh air compared to the current
| public search engines. They had a short outage recently
| and having to go back to Google for 30 minutes was
| painful. I have no idea what their secret sauce is
| (likely just being different from Google's algo that's
| SSO'd to death is enough) but it's now the easiest $10 I
| spend a month.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >I get what you're saying, but why hasn't a better search
| engine emerged yet?
|
| Although Moore's law brought down the price of hardware
| and information processing dramatically in the last 20
| years, it is still fairly expensive to crawl the Web,
| index it and rank it. Hardware cost + engineering cost
| can escalate pretty quickly, unless you decide to have
| smaller index than major search engines but then users
| will complain that search results are not good enough.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| That's what Microsoft was thinking when they, in practice,
| stopped developing Internet Explorer (after version 6).
| That didn't work out too well for them...
| lelanthran wrote:
| > the more time you waste on their platform searching for what
| you want to find, the more ads you see and the more money
| Google makes.
|
| That's not the only way - it's in their best interest to rank
| ad-laden pages higher. That's more ad-impressions, which is how
| they _really_ make their money.
|
| Lets say a user searches for $FOO. Why on earth would google
| return the most relevant result _if that result is ad-free?_
| They can return the second-most relevant result, and get
| impressions on both the search-result page and the page that
| the user sees when they navigate to the first result.
| bad_user wrote:
| Google's Ads (in search) are more profitable for them than
| AdSense, their RTB platform ;-)
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I would also assume they're largely not competitive with
| each other. Adwords ads are mostly valuable when they've
| got intent. I.E. I search "5g home internet" and it passes
| me off to Verizon or AT&T.
|
| Searches that end you up on AdSense (or pages that could
| have AdSense) probably are much less likely to have intent.
| So instead they pass you off to something you will read so
| they can hit you with retargeted ads from the last time you
| searched with the intent of buying you something.
|
| I am sure there's overlap, but probably not a lot.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I thought the same thing and recently ran across perplexity
| mentioned in some random tweet. (I know I am late to the party)
| It blew me away, I use it as my primary search engine now for
| most things.
| GoToRO wrote:
| Today I searched for a product, google found a local site with
| the item, I clicked on the link and I was redirected to
| aliexpress. How they can not catch this?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Internet-scale web crawlers are hard to hide. You can just set
| up a bunch of domains, and flag any IPs that repeatedly visit
| them as likely crawlers; then serve malicious content to the
| rest.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Try going to the URL directly, and try curling the URL with a
| referrer of Google.
|
| There's a thing that's been happening the last year or two
| where compromised web servers serve the intended content unless
| there's a referrer of Google (and maybe Bing?). The site looks
| normal to the owner, or to crawlers, but when a user clicks
| through from Google it redirects them to a spam site.
|
| I mostly see it with restaurants getting hijacked by herbal
| quackery.
| kccqzy wrote:
| You need to learn more about cloaking. This is a fascinating
| topic. There are many techniques to show different results to
| Google and a real web user, like checking the user agent,
| checking the ASN for the originating IP, checking for
| indications of a real browser, etc.
| pants2 wrote:
| > We find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web
| uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results
| do. [...] We further observe an inverse relationship between
| affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all
| search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam
| campaigns.
|
| I think this is an excellent methodology for testing the quality
| of search results. I would love to see a standard search engine
| test and scoring system based on this, maybe similar to some of
| the LLM scoring systems.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Forgive my naivety, but wouldn't a simple way for a search
| engine (like Kagi) to avoid falling victim here to detect
| affiliate link programs? There's got to be a small handful of
| patterns for affiliate link tracking:
|
| 1. Domain Interception & HTTP redirects 2. Tracking codes
| embedded in the URL directly
| pants2 wrote:
| It looks like Kagi does this[1]:
|
| > Kagi surfaces shopping results featuring unbiased reviews
| and no affiliate links to help you identify the best product
| across categories. Top results include discussions focused on
| helping you find the best item to purchase - you are not
| bombarded with affiliate links and ads. Continue to scroll
| and you will see product comparisons across multiple vendors
| so you can pick what best suites you. Kagi's shopping search
| will always return a detailed discussion of which product to
| buy not a competition amongst advertisers promoting where you
| should buy. Kagi is focused on providing you the best results
| to make an informed decision not polluted by affiliate links
| and advertisements.
|
| 1. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Kagi is better than Google, but just yesterday it returned
| the top link to Amazon-linking "check the price for this
| item on Amazon right now" affiliate spam. So it's not
| perfect.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Oh, OK. I thought it was perfect.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| I think it's pretty good. I understand sometimes we root
| for the good guys like Kagi and look at their work with
| rose tinted glasses and even think they're perfect, like
| you did, but it's not really feasible.
|
| A pattern I've noticed from people not working in tech,
| or more junior people in tech, is that they have a
| thinking that software can ever be perfect. If either of
| those categories describe you, I can tell you from
| experience no software is ever perfect!
| rapind wrote:
| Ultimately a site can get around affiliate / referral
| detection with internal links that redirect though I
| suppose. So the crawler would need to follow and track all
| links to detect this. Also sites will surface different
| links / content based on user agents, so I don't know how
| effective this is.
| szundi wrote:
| Maybe there is room for one search engine that does this
| - for paying customers or as an investment to be better
| daveguy wrote:
| Kagi is a paid search engine to avoid the manipulation
| that Google welcomes. To avoid every trick and targeted
| tricks it may be cost prohibitive. Fortunately Kagi isn't
| popular enough yet for targeted manipulations to have a
| noticeable impact.
| KomoD wrote:
| I tried a search and found a site with amazon affiliate
| links in their featured "Shopping" snippet
|
| https://i.imgur.com/vPRpBYJ.mp4 (yes the recording is very
| broken but you can still see)
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe the affiliate stuff is still there but ranked
| lower?
| KomoD wrote:
| Sure but it sounds to me like it shouldn't be featured in
| the "Shopping" widget when it has 9 affiliate links?
|
| When I hover over the "i" icon it says:
|
| > Information provided by Looria, Amazon, Reddit and
| other sources. Shop confidently with Kagi - our results
| have no affiliate links.
|
| The sites featured in the "Shopping" widget were:
|
| - Reddit
|
| - RTINGS: has 8 affiliate links (just from one article I
| picked, it was featured several times)
|
| - NYTimes: has 47 affiliate links (just from one article
| I picked, it was featured several times)
|
| - Techgearlab: has 9 affiliate links
|
| Even if you ignored the widget, the first result was a
| site with 7 amazon affiliate links.
| pants2 wrote:
| On second read, I think what the Kagi doc means is that
| they don't provide first-party affiliate links (i.e. if
| you click on an Amazon.com search result it's not using
| their affiliate). They will still show you search results
| that have affiliate links embedded (but presumably don't
| affect or negatively affect ranking).
| eek2121 wrote:
| I am working on a search engine that checks a site for
| affiliate links from known providers and demotes sites that
| have a large amount of them.
|
| In addition:
|
| * it demotes sites with popups (think newsletter sign ups)
|
| * it demotes sites that block (or complain about) ad blockers
|
| * it demotes sites with a high number of ads and favors sites
| with no ads
|
| * it demotes sites using certain sketchy ad companies.
|
| * It demotes sites that have paywalls
|
| * It detects possible link networks and flags them for human
| review/removal.
|
| * sites with RSS feeds get promoted.
|
| * There is a toggle to hide all sites with ads or external
| trackers, but it is still WIP (The whole project is).
|
| There are many other features. No idea if I am going to make
| it public, I created it to update my skillset. I actually
| thought about setting up a nonprofit and making it open
| source, but I haven't decided.
| AureliusMA wrote:
| Very interested, any way to follow you?
| gopher_space wrote:
| What would be the difference between an affiliate link
| program and a web ring?
|
| I don't know if discovery is actually a bottleneck to be
| automated away. It might be the fun part. I'm thinking back
| to the Napster approach where you could browse other people's
| libraries for music ideas.
| g_p wrote:
| Currently, Kagi has (if you hover/click the shield icon to
| the right of a result) an indication of the information it
| knows about a website (as well as a way for you to rank it
| higher or lower for yourself).
|
| One of these is "ads/trackers". I imagine that it would be
| feasible for this to include some of the more common
| affiliate URL types, or third party lead/affiliate tracking
| bounce hops like awin.
|
| Clearly there will always be some amount of ability to
| "defeat" this kind of measure by obfuscating links, but
| eventually the user needs forwarded to a link that has a
| referral parameter or a site that sets an affiliate cookie or
| similar.
|
| The "tracker category" also can give a bit of extra
| information - things like "invasive fingerprinting,
| advertising"
| schmorptron wrote:
| I don't know if this would be a very long-term solution if
| the big ones (ok, google) did it. Advertisers would catch on
| very quickly, and some legitimate review sites which might
| get funding through affiliate links unrelated to the product
| being reviewed would lose out to straight-up paid for
| "reviews" that are funded wholly by the manufacturer and just
| don't use affiliate links.
| gumby wrote:
| Then the search engines will game the benchmarks. A different
| definition of "Search Engine Optimization" I suppose.
| pants2 wrote:
| I know that tends to happen for LLMs but I don't know if
| Google/MS would care enough about some obscure benchmark
| system to try to game it.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| Their entire business is gaming metrics. Most of those
| metrics are ones they invented for themselves, but if
| there's any advantage at all, they'll game it
| autokad wrote:
| this is one way to do it, but I wouldn't say its sufficient. If
| I search for 'things to do in Seattle', you get many 'blogs'
| and such that a writer gets paid by sources to insert their
| place into the things to do list. I didn't word that well, so
| for example: I own a coffee shop, I pay them moneys, and the
| '25 things to do in Seattle' writer puts my coffee shop in the
| list.
|
| If I do an image search for the word 'strawberry', how many of
| those results are not stock images, images from a store, etc.
| of a strawberry? can you find an actual picture of a strawberry
| sitting in the wild? or just some picture of a strawberry a
| person uploaded without trying to sell you something?
| oakashes wrote:
| This doesn't apply to the content complexity finding, but the
| finding that "product reviews which are in top search results
| are more likely to contain affiliate links than product reviews
| which are not" can also be explained by the fact that if and
| only I am getting a bunch of hits on my product reviews, I'm
| incentivized to monetize that with affiliate links.
| belval wrote:
| We should also ask ourselves if affiliate links are really
| that bad. Someone could be making honest complete reviews and
| monetizing those with affiliate links, does that inherently
| mean that the search results are lower quality?
|
| That approach also misses all the copied-a-github-issue low-
| effort content that seem to crop up on Google.
| thatoneguy wrote:
| It's bad because most of the reviews will be for items you
| can only get on Amazon or another retailer with an
| affiliate link program and not for items available
| elsewhere.
|
| I've seen so many "Best $WHATEVER of $YEAR" and it's really
| "Best $WHATEVER
| $PRODUCED_BY_WEIRDLY_NAME_FLY_BY_NIGHT_COMPANY_ON_AMAZON
| $YEAR"
| delichon wrote:
| How can an affiliate link not be in conflict with an
| unbiased review? They don't get paid if they don't
| recommend the thing.
| anticorporate wrote:
| In theory, if we had truly open marketplaces that offered
| equal monetization of all links to all similar products in
| the same category regardless of the price offered to the
| consumer, sure.
|
| In practice, that is never the case. At best you're getting
| reviews that only compare products available in the same
| marketplace (say, for example, all the table saws you can
| buy on Amazon). At worst, you're getting reviews from
| vendors who offer the highest payout.
|
| Also, a heck of a lot of consumer products are absolute
| garbage. (IMHO, most of them, but others may feel
| differently.) Who is going to write an honest, scathing
| review of a product and then monetize the link to it? Why
| even bother?
| ska wrote:
| > that inherently mean that the search results are lower
| quality?
|
| Almost? There doesn't need to be anything nefarious going
| on, but human beings align to incentives, basically always.
| So the trick with reviews is going to be to avoid any
| incentives coming from the product side, and embrace those
| coming from the consumer side.
| jsnell wrote:
| I don't know, feels like a paper titled "Is Google Getting Worse"
| could have benefited from actually looking at Google results
| rather than only results of other search engines.
|
| Edit: This got downvoted to hell, so let me be more explicit.
| This study did not look at Google results, the title is pure
| clickbait. They used Startpage results as a proxy for Google
| results. I don't think that's a valid assumption, even if
| Startpage is using Google's index.
| j2kun wrote:
| Using a reasonable proxy is not "pure clickbait", though it may
| be misleading. It adds an additional assumption about the
| Google results not being tampered with by Startpage, but it
| seems like a reasonable one, compared to the alternative of
| Google doctoring the search results when detecting a scraper
| and/or doing personalization.
|
| If the authors have done their due diligence and confirmed the
| results from Startpage are actually Google results, then I
| don't see why they couldn't claim so in their title.
| miyuru wrote:
| I recently caught myself that I unconsciously retry my google
| searches by adding more keywords. I also noticed that small
| sites, blogs, forums are gone from google searches.
|
| Now I am using 3 search engines.
|
| Bing for Normal searches. Google for local(country) searches.
| Yandex for small sites, blogs, forums.
| pants2 wrote:
| BTW, Kagi has a dedicated "Forums" toggle at the top of every
| search result page. It's very useful. Google used to have this
| but removed it.
| chikitabanana wrote:
| I've found adding "forum" to my query on Google works
| decently
| talldatethrow wrote:
| I simply add the word forum to most of my Google searches.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Have you tried DuckDuckGo? I find it fantastic -- it does both
| general queries and local country queries well. Anytime I go
| back to Google (e.g. when I'm setting up a new computer) I am
| surprised that anyone still uses Google -- the result I am
| looking for is almost always half way down the page on Google
| yet it is #1 or nearby on DuckDuckGo. Apparently it's based on
| Bing's index but with their own tech on top.
| 101008 wrote:
| Are there stats* of Google Search across the years? I felt I
| don't use Google as much as I used to. And it isn't because "I
| know more stuff", but mainly because the way we use internet has
| changed. I wonder if kids or teens (who most of them don't know
| how to use an email inbox) would use Google... (I guess yeah?)
|
| * Of course, the stats should include the total amount of
| internet users globally, or normalize the amount of searches
| based on that...
| dehrmann wrote:
| Long-term stats are tricky because of how much of the landscape
| has changed. There's the desktop/mobile split, developing
| countries increasing their internet use, heavier use of apps,
| growth and decline of results getting indexed, and change in
| what we search for.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Definitely I think the way we use the internet has changed
| profoundly. There are a lot of apps that provide useful
| information but they may not be made indexable by search
| engines. Much less useful information is simply out there on
| the open web, and much of it are locked behind logins. There
| were previous deals like Twitter sending a completely copy of
| all new tweets to Google, but these are basically dying.
|
| It's especially interesting since you mentioned normalizing
| searches by the number of internet users. The country with the
| largest number of internet users is China, with more than 1
| billion of them. And they don't have access to Google. And
| their local copycat, Baidu, is years behind Google in terms of
| technological sophistication and simultaneously years ahead of
| Google in terms of user hostility. So what do Internet users in
| China do in a post-search world? They simply open various apps
| and use the full text search feature of different apps. For
| general knowledge they might open ZhiHu and search there; for
| something resembling the old-time personal blogs by individual
| users they might open XiaoHongShu and search there; for short
| videos they might open Douyin and for long ones Bilibili. For
| reaching an organization be it a store or a museum or a
| hospital or a government department they might open WeChat and
| search there for an official account or mini program (a mini
| program is a website that uses WeChat APIs and can only be
| opened in WeChat).
|
| I made these observations on a recent trip to China and it's
| clear to me what a post-search world looks like because China
| is already there.
| maxglute wrote:
| > And their local copycat, Baidu, is years behind Google in
| terms of technological sophistication and simultaneously
| years ahead of Google in terms of user hostility.
|
| Baidu search was fine during early days, issue as you hinted
| was PRC internet went mobile first and content got locked
| behind various platforms and made deliberately hard to scrape
| - crawling/indexing got locked much earlier than west. Hence
| now as more gets locked in west behind logins, western
| behaviours also shifting towards that model, how much of
| default search is query + wiki/reddit/youtube or straight
| into short video services like looking up recipes on
| XiaoHongShu. Reddit especially, simply because reddit app has
| horrible search experience. Also technically, Baidu rankdex
| predated Google PageRank which Larry Page referenced for
| Pagerank patents. Eitherway, depending on how ChatGPT
| copyright drama plays out, imo more people will just go the
| lazy route and have AI generate good enough summaries for
| most queries.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >I made these observations on a recent trip to China and it's
| clear to me what a post-search world looks like because China
| is already there.
|
| You are talking like open web is dead but it's not. There are
| millions of blogs and personal sites out there. Walled
| gardens are user hostile and hungry for money, that's why
| enshittification[0] happens.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| kccqzy wrote:
| The open web is not dead. Unfortunately it will be soon,
| where "soon" is roughly a decade or so. If you haven't seen
| the signs of it dying a slow death, you've been hiding
| under a rock. I totally agree with you about walled gardens
| and enshittification; but I see no way to stop them.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I've been in web development and SEO for almost 20 years now.
|
| When I first started out all the veterans of SEO kept telling
| me not to do this, don't do that with things that could get
| your site buried in the SERP's. At the time Google's algorithm
| was really good at ferreting out affiliate links, link farms
| and other nefarious black hat techniques SEO's used to game
| Google.
|
| Now? Complete opposite. I have several freelance clients and
| I've used every dirty SEO trick in the book and all of them
| have worked like magic to get my clients sites ranked on page 1
| or 2 of the SERP's.
|
| I have no idea what changed, but Google is super easy to
| manipulate now to get your site or specific pages ranking
| really high. I haven't heard or seen any of the horror stories
| I read and people blogged about constantly when I first started
| out for years - which tells me they're all probably doing the
| same thing I am and not seeing any repercussions.
|
| Maybe Google doesn't care because users have become so savvy,
| they can filter through a ton of garbage in minutes to find
| what they really want?
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Do you have any writing on this? Would love to learn more.
| charlotte-fyi wrote:
| It's not worse when you append site:reddit.com to every single
| search but this is only a function of the fact that reddit can't
| figure out how to build their own search. Outside of maybe
| programming stuff where I'll still click on links, I don't think
| google has driven me organically to a new site in years.
| azangru wrote:
| > It's not worse when you append site:reddit.com to every
| single search
|
| Could you give some examples of search queries that would
| benefit from filtering by reddit?
|
| (My own example: I've been looking for recommendations for a
| solid Linux laptop. A good result would be a list of reviews
| written from personal experience of owning such laptops. Reddit
| was useless for that.)
| ben30 wrote:
| I've noticed a pattern with 'free' services like Facebook and now
| Google. With simple tasks like checking emails or finding phone
| numbers in contacts, there's no friction. However, Facebook lost
| my trust long ago as it seemed more focused on capturing my
| attention for ad revenue, leading to time wastage.
|
| I initially trusted Google for its efficient and seemingly fair
| service, where smart ad-targeting was the price for speed. But
| now, Google feels similar to Facebook; it's harder to switch to
| alternatives like Kagi on iPhone due to financial ties with
| Apple.
|
| This shift in Google's approach, prioritizing trapping attention
| over genuine service, is frustrating. I'd rather pay for a search
| service that values my time and provides real utility, than
| endure the hidden costs of 'free' services.
| pg_1234 wrote:
| In last 5 years I have noticed a clear decline in the usability
| of Google Maps as ... a Map.
|
| Increasingly you have to pick a destination and blindly follow
| directions, your ability to use it as an informational tool,
| but exercise your own judgement seems to have been
| intentionally crippled.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| I can't even blindly follow it. The last two or three times
| I've tried to use Google maps for directions, it has
| redirected me through walking trails and bike paths. Each
| time I closed it and just used Apple Maps to get where I
| needed to go.
| cj wrote:
| > I'd rather pay for a search service that values my time and
| provides real utility, than endure the hidden costs of 'free'
| services.
|
| How much would you pay for Google search without ads? Or more
| importantly, how much would the average Google user be willing
| to pay?
|
| If you live in the US and click 3-4 ads per month, you're
| generating ~$10-20/mo in revenue for Google from advertisers.
|
| (Like you, I would also love to pay for an ad free Google, but
| sadly advertisers are willing to pay Google a lot more money
| than consumers are willing to)
| Spivak wrote:
| I do pay $10/mo for search. Also lol "and click 3-4 ads per
| month" what? This is HN, who clicks ads? I've _never_ clicked
| an ad. I spend all day trying to teach people to never click
| ads. At this point I actually couldn 't click ads even if I
| wanted to because uBlock hard-blocks all the domains they
| redirect through for conversion tracking.
| error503 wrote:
| I occasionally click on Sponsored search results, if
| they're what I'm looking for and I don't much care for the
| company on the other end of the link. Take that, Big
| Corporate!
| guhcampos wrote:
| 10 years ago I'd pay for ad-free Google if I had the budget.
|
| Today? Nah. Search has become bad enough that I don't believe
| it's worth any cash.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I am not sure if Google has empirically gotten worse or not, but
| I do know that I very often have to use multiple search engines
| more often than not now in order to find the information I am
| looking for.
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| For me, the biggest quality drop literally happened overnight.
| It was when they removed the PLUS operator and any other
| changes that they made that same day. There was many other
| small changes that made it worst, but that's nothing in
| comparison. I think that was the day Google became evil.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Oh, what a methodology. They ran with the meme of "best pants"
| having bad results, when the problem with "best pants" is that
| it's a nonsense query. I personally cannot recall ever doing a
| "best pants" query, and the results of such queries don't factor
| into whether I think a search engine is good.
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| Google is better than Bing and anything else for my day today
| work. Few things I miss though :
|
| 1. Spam is more than in past. The outrage porn, clickbait
| headlines etc. are lot more than in past.
|
| 2. Dominance of few domains despite poor quality content. For lot
| of coding related queries, dev.to, hashnode etc. appear in top
| results despite being clearly spammy.
|
| 3. Paywalled content. Most irritating part is sites like medium
| which appear in top results, have high value content and yet are
| behind paywall.
|
| Internet is growing and so are Google's problems but I think they
| are still on top of things.
| ElonsNightmare wrote:
| it's been garbage for YEARS
| ado__dev wrote:
| Anecdotally, yes.
|
| Google search for topics I'm unfamiliar with/wanting to learn
| about all lead to low quality, SEO-optimized to hell, clik-baity
| sites that are just riddled with ads. I have to add "reddit" to
| most searches just to find semi-relevant content.
|
| But Google search for topics i'm super familiar with and just
| need a transactional search to look something up tend to be much
| better and generally the fastest way to accomplish a task.
| jansan wrote:
| Right, adding "discussion", "forum" and even "reddit" to the
| search term increases quality dramatically. Also, Google is
| still great to search websites. I gave up on Stackoverflow's
| own search but add "site:stackoverflow.com" to my searches on
| google.
|
| BTW, maybe someone wants to create a very simple webpage with a
| search mask that allows adding a few (customizable) terms and
| options and simply forwards that to Google's search when
| pressing enter.
| jsheard wrote:
| Google Images is filling up with AI slop to the point of
| unusability for some purposes, even content that isn't actively
| engaging in SEO shenanigans is getting pushed to the top. In some
| cases even the key image that Google displays first on a normal
| search is fake, like when searching for the "tank man"
| prioritized showing a fake AI selfie from the mans perspective.
| It's still there in fact, just not the first result anymore, but
| Google might have demoted it manually after the backlash.
|
| Looking to browse works by a specific artist? Good luck, Google
| evidently can't tell the difference between a genuine J. C.
| Leyendecker piece and anything shat out by a "Leyendecker style"
| image generation model. Search for "Yoji Shinkawa" and this
| https://i.imgur.com/RYghaoY.png is currently the first thing you
| see, which isn't even close to his style, but Google has somehow
| determined it's the image that best represents him. The full
| images page shows his actual work but interspersed about half-
| and-half with AI imitations.
|
| My speculation is that Google prioritizes showing _recent_
| results, presumed to be the freshest most up-to-date information,
| but of course for a historical event like Tiananmen Square or an
| artist who died in 1951, _nearly all of the fresh results past a
| certain point are AI simulacra._
| KomoD wrote:
| Yeah that is a huge problem.
|
| Another search to try is "hand reference", tons of AI garbage
| fouc wrote:
| I dislike the recency bias so much.
| guhcampos wrote:
| I can't count how many times I needed a "until X" button, but
| it's an ever increasing trend.
| spansoa wrote:
| I find DuckDuckGo's[0] (DDG) images feature to be a brilliant
| replacement for Google Images/Lens. Google Images doesn't let
| you view the actual resource anymore and disabled that feature
| years ago. DDG's image feature is crucial since it doesn't
| bring you to the site itself, it just points to the raw URL of
| where the asset resides and you can easily download it, without
| hunting the graphics down on the site itself, although DDG does
| offer a link to the page where the image was found. The
| important bit is pressing the 'View File' button.
|
| [0] https://duckduckgo.com/
| spacephysics wrote:
| I think google got into legal trouble for doing this (linking
| directly to the source image, instead of to the site)
|
| Or they were at least threatened with legal action. I
| remember when it happened many of my friends were annoyed
| overnight
| skywhopper wrote:
| I doubt a legal case would succeed, and Google would know
| that. But the types of companies who threaten to sue over
| deep image linking are also the most likely to threaten not
| to sign contracts for content sharing with YouTube etc or
| for ad services. In other words, Google's other businesses
| create a liability for their search effectiveness.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| If I recall right, it was over Getty Images, who were upset
| that people were right-clicking their images to save them
| from the image search (with the watermark) instead of
| clicking through to the page to be prompted to buy it
|
| So rather than just delist Getty and solve the problem,
| they decided to make their product objectively worse
| AlienRobot wrote:
| It's a trifecta of lies:
|
| 1. Domain-specific engines is too complicated. Let's have a
| general purpose search engine.
|
| 2. Too many buttons is too complicated. Let's have a single
| search box.
|
| 3. Guessing what you want when you are anonymous is too
| complicated. We need your search history to tailor your search
| for you.
|
| Please, search engines, hear me: you can not simplify the needs
| and wants of 7 billion people and zettabytes of online content
| into a single little shitty search box! It's too complicated!
|
| At this point the only thing these search engines are good for
| is for finding the URL of something you already know the name
| of. It's a phone book. I type Hacker News on google, it tells
| me its phone number: https://news.ycombinator.com/
| josefritz wrote:
| Comically, when I google hackernews or even "Hacker News" I
| often get the other Hacker news first.
|
| Finding my preferred UI https://hckrnews.com/ that's not even
| in the first page of results. Rajat's version
| https://hckrnws.com/... nowhere to be seen.
|
| Google is becoming a mediocre phone book.
| RespectYourself wrote:
| #3 is certainly bullshit, but Yahoo failed because of #1.
| Forcing a user to drill down through hundreds or thousands of
| categories to do a search is absurd, don't you think?
|
| What other buttons do you want?
|
| But for sure Google has crippled its core product. First they
| removed the + option, which forced the inclusion of words
| (their excuse was that it "interfered" with their stupid
| "Google Plus" product which is now gone). Yes you can use
| "allintext:" but come on. I'm not even sure that's honored
| anyway.
|
| And the removal of the ability to exclude certain sites from
| results.
| slater wrote:
| > Forcing a user to drill down through hundreds or
| thousands of categories to do a search is absurd, don't you
| think
|
| Are you saying that's how Yahoo worked? IIRC, that was
| optional, they always had the search box:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19961023235123/http://www10.yah
| o...
| AlienRobot wrote:
| For output to be accurate, input has to be precise. But
| there's a trend of dumbing down and minifying interfaces
| and then tacking AI to guess what the user really means
| from the little input he is allowed.
|
| It will never work. It can't work. Anyone who thinks this
| can work is delusional. And with Google it's particularly
| obvious how stupid the trend is.
|
| Look at the "tabs" Google has for search: all, images,
| videos, shopping, news, etc. This is things users can
| input. But wait! What if an user wants news about
| something? And they have to reach all the way out to the
| news tab. That's too much for our bubbling moronic users to
| manage! They can't into computers. They have room
| temperature IQ. They have never used Google before, so they
| don't know where the tab is. They probably don't know what
| tabs or links are either. I know what I'll do. I'll put an
| AI to reorder the TABS of my users based on their search
| history, query input, season of the year, and their zodiac
| sign based on what birth day they used when they signed up
| for a Google account. That should solve it.
|
| And now the order of the tabs is all over the place and
| when you want to click the "images" tab it's sometimes not
| the second tab and when you want to click the "videos" tab
| it's sometimes not the third tab.
|
| I think this is very interesting because you have to think.
| If Google can fail this hard at tabs, which is not really a
| complicated thing to program, imagine how hard they are
| failing at indexing the entire interweb. Imagine if they
| are doing to search results the same nonsense bullshit they
| are doing to the tabs. Just imagine it. It's clear they
| have absolutely no idea what they're doing with the tabs.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >And now the order of the tabs is all over the place and
| when you want to click the "images" tab it's sometimes
| not the second tab and when you want to click the
| "videos" tab it's sometimes not the third tab.
|
| I also noticed this; they redesigned their search tabs
| few months ago and now it's sort of bad and user
| unfriendly. Sometimes there is "News" tab, sometimes
| there is no news tab and tabs look all the same and
| generic(white rectangles with black text).
|
| >I think this is very interesting because you have to
| think. If Google can fail this hard at tabs, which is not
| really a complicated thing to program, imagine how hard
| they are failing at indexing the entire interweb. Imagine
| if they are doing to search results the same nonsense
| bullshit they are doing to the tabs.
|
| God knows what is in their index and what is not in their
| index. I think every search engine needs to make its
| index open and transparent. And yea Google can fail with
| all sort of things, they are not ubermensch or something
| like that.
|
| Google's ranking algorithms and search technology are
| millions of LOC and not even Google engineers know how
| exactly Google Search works.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| This one was fun:
|
| > like when searching for the "tank man" prioritized showing a
| fake AI selfie from the mans perspective
|
| In this case the label is that it's a AI-generated and the
| source is an article talking about that AI-generated picture.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I wonder if "affiliate links" is a reasonable proxy for page
| quality? I wouldn't use it directly in a ranking function but it
| might be a nice automated way to estimate whether results are
| good.
| dehrmann wrote:
| In a good way or bad way? Affiliate links might bias reviews,
| but their presence might mean the review was high enough
| quality that enough people see it and click on affiliate links.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I mean the presence of affiliate links indicates the page is
| likely spam. I bet that's a good heuristic more often than
| it's a bad one.
| pembrook wrote:
| Google created this problem by slurping up all advertising money
| from open web activity for themselves.
|
| The more market share of online display advertising they gained,
| the worse their results got.
|
| Why? Because the only way to have a large volume of authentic
| content being produced at scale is to have a healthy ecosystem of
| independent sites that are profitable based on display ads.
|
| As much as HN-types hate advertising, it was literally the only
| thing that made the web of yesteryear so special. Things like
| Adsense enabled blogs on tons of niche topics to be monetized and
| thus we had better open web content.
|
| When Google decided there was more money to be made off ads
| before you even clicked on a search result, that ironically was
| what ended up killing search.
|
| Now the only way to monetize content from search is via shill
| company blogs, affiliate marketing listicles (10 best dog toys),
| etc. So that's what we get.
|
| For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic,
| amazing content about dogs, they wouldn't even crack page 1 on
| any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >For example, if there was a passionate person creating
| authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn't even crack
| page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their
| content is.
|
| So basically the problem of search engines and Google in
| particular is discovery. All early Google adapters say that
| they loved Google because it gave them relevant results and
| because they discovered new websites on Google. Nowadays they
| "discover" SEO spam, ads and the usual suspects like the most
| popular sites in that search category.
|
| That's why we need "discovery engine" for Web, something like
| TikTok but adapted to Web. If search engines were the evolution
| of web directories, we need to think about how we can evolve
| search engines.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I visited a small country in my last vacation. I ended up
| bringing a bit of money back because I was in a hurry I thought
| it would be easy to exchange back at home, even at worse rates. I
| live in a big city after all. Of course, I was very wrong.
|
| I spent an afternoon Googling every possible incantation only to
| get useless AI generated text, travel agency sites or simply
| unrelated content.
|
| I was about to accept my loss when I tried Kagi. The first page
| showed an exchange that accepted the currency. Very far from me
| and with terrible rates, but still.
|
| Anecdata and all, but the fact is that I'm using Kagi more and
| more and it's winning my trust and good will fast.
| odysseus wrote:
| What many people do in this case is to keep the money for the
| next time you visit the country. (or as souvenirs)
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It would have been an expensive souvenir. And I don't travel
| all that much. Also, inflation and even outright currency
| replacements are somewhat common in smaller economies.
| mike_hock wrote:
| This sounds like an ad for Kagi, though.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| You mean my comment? It's not. I have no relation with them
| other than a free account.
|
| I think 2005-2010 Google was peak web search. It would have
| given me an obscure blog with the top 5 currency exchange
| offices. Kagi gave me one single crappy result, but it was
| still, sadly, better than what 2024 Google can do.
| withzombies wrote:
| As an aside, many full service banks can exchange foreign
| currency for you. For example, Bank of America does
| (https://www.bankofamerica.com/foreign-exchange/exchange-
| rate...). You can also order foreign currency prior to your
| trip and they'll mail it to you.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Interestingly in my country many full service banks have
| dropped foriegn currency services. They did that during the
| panademic but never returned back to offering that again. I
| suspect they make so much money from Visa/Mastercard
| commissions that they'd prefer people paid with card rather
| than cash.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Yeah, a decade or so ago I'm sure I could have found one
| much easier. The only thing widely accepted is dollars and
| euros, now.
| summerlight wrote:
| I don't know if the overall search quality has degraded or not,
| but SEO has been become definitely a much more severe issue than
| ever before. Google is the main target for this attack for
| obvious reasons but no other search engines are really immune to
| this. I'm skeptical if this can be tackled by any technical
| solutions; the problem is not just a specific type of SEO
| spamming but the structure where the enemies are constantly
| optimizing against your fundamental goal.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| but the structure where the enemies are constantly optimizing
| against your fundamental goal.
|
| Like companies avoiding taxes.
| guhcampos wrote:
| We're back to the pre-Google era and suddenly I'm aggressively
| bookmarking stuff like it's 1995.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I recommend not just bookmarking, but downloading a copy.
| Either a webarchive file or manually extract the main content
| from there (Reader mode in browsers is great help). Link rots
| happen. More than half of my bookmarks don't work.
| guhcampos wrote:
| Yes!!! I've been playing around with SingleFile and other
| similar software to try and hoard as much useful data as I
| can. And I've been mocking preppers for all these years.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| An acquaintance of my second cousin has experimented with
| SingleFile CLI (https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-
| file-cli) and she reports it works great (it is rather
| heavyweight because it does invoke headless Chromium or
| even Firefox if you set it up right).
| no_wizard wrote:
| it also never hurts to throw the URL into archive.org. This
| will archive it for everyone else too
| nostromo wrote:
| Google search went from critical for me to irrelevant overnight
| with ChatGPT 4.
|
| Like, literally irrelevant. I'm still watching YouTube, using
| Gmail, and occasionally checking out something on Google Shopping
| if I want to find something locally instead of on Amazon. But I
| use Google search about 90% less now than I did a year ago.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| The worst thing Google allow phishing sites in sponsors. There
| are many cases of people searching for a website and lands on the
| phishing site instead, getting credit card details stolen.
| araes wrote:
| This paper does not make sense to me. They used Startpage
| (https://www.startpage.com) as a proxy for Google results
| ("result pages of Google (by proxy of Startpage)" in a discussion
| of Google results?
|
| Except, if you put the same search in Startpage and Google, you
| get different results. Image results especially are quite
| different. Text results were mostly just a reorganization on my
| quick tests. (Tried the title of the paper as its own search "Is
| Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in
| Search")
|
| Edit: One other notable result is from Figure 3, that a huge
| percentage of the results now are Amazon and Youtube. Many orders
| of magnitude in most cases. Amazon (3000-4000), NYTimes (1000),
| Walmart (~500?), Insider/PCMag/Tomsguide (~50?)
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Since google search is highly personalized and localized, this
| may not matter, and may be why you see different results.
|
| > Startpage delivers Google search results via our proprietary
| personal data protection technology.
| gniv wrote:
| It seems that the answer from their study is mostly no (reading
| the conclusion), but they seem reluctant to admit it, so they
| focus mostly on results being mediocre and spammy.
| j2kun wrote:
| If the answer was yes, the title wouldn't be phrased as a
| question
| vlark wrote:
| The TL;DR = Not really, according to our methods & analysis. But
| maybe.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Quite likely underreporting affiliate links due to obfuscation
| like cloaking, hiding redirects behind javascript (they mention
| in the paper not rendering the page), using JS and a POST, other
| URL minifiers etc.
|
| One interesting solution to the problem is to have more than one
| dominant search engine and its algorithmic choices, having half a
| dozen web-scale engines with some variation at least gives the
| user a choice into other avenues of information discovery. (There
| isn't really much point in using Startpage and DDG here since
| they're effectively meta search engines of Google and Bing). For
| SEOs in English speaking countries there is not much point in
| thinking beyond pleasing Google.
|
| Clearly AI and whack-a-mole spam sites have been a problem for a
| while due to the prevalance of people tacking on 'reddit' to
| their query to find other humans talking about stuff.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| Consider using ublacklist[1]. I don't see SEO junk like
| Pinterest, Tutorialspoint, Javatpoint, geeksforgeeks, etc at all
| in my searches.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
| agubelu wrote:
| I didn't know this exists, thanks. Every time I google anything
| programming-related looking for the docs, and the official docs
| are buried under a pile of SEO shit, I die inside a little.
|
| This is particularly egregious with Python, and I suppose it
| must be just as bad or worse in the JS ecosystem.
| bluish29 wrote:
| And here are some lists for ublacklist that can help you use
| it easily [1]
|
| [1] https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
| hotep99 wrote:
| One of my biggest complaints about Google is the prioritization
| of pop culture slop over everything else. I feel like I'm
| frequently getting auto-corrected because some Netflix show is
| titled with a pun of a phrase or there is a dramatization of some
| historical figure that Google considers more relevant than the
| real person.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Google "Queen Cleopatra" is a good example for me. 95% of the
| results are about the Netflix documentary. There is bodies of
| work dedicated to the history and legacy of this queen. Quality
| content, produced by leading academics, historians and
| universities. And yet Google insists I should know everything
| about this poor production (a bit of an understatement) and
| nothing else, except for a wiki article as one of the results
| (Good job Google, you at least got this bit right).
|
| Google knows so much about me. And yet it continues to act as
| though it doesn't.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >The study finds an inverse relationship between a page's
| optimization level and its perceived expertise
|
| What if Google flipped its SEO weights from positive to negative?
| maxglute wrote:
| I wonder what percent of wiki entries are being taken over by AI
| writing. I feel like I wouldn't know with wiki style language.
| There was at least a few TV tropes entries that I suspected, only
| because the humor and observation felt off.
| Gud wrote:
| Yes. Google used to be amazing, then it turned into an
| advertisement company. Slowly at first, then about a decade ago
| the pace increased.
|
| But the worst part is, Google SEO has infected the entire web and
| made it into complete garbage. Hopefully, this last decade or so
| will just be a blip before we return to baseline, where it can be
| wild and free again.
| andai wrote:
| Tried using Google Bard. It gave me complete nonsense. It cited
| the sources for the nonsense, so I checked them: AI generated SEO
| spam pages. Gave me a good laugh.
|
| (By comparison, Phind gave the correct answer, and high quality
| sources.)
| frantic2821 wrote:
| I knew I wasn't the only one thinking this lol - glad it's proven
| by an investigation How does one think Google is planning to
| change it's ranking system?
| gumballindie wrote:
| It is. My suspicion is that they are using ai for search results
| considering how inreliable it's become. That's why searching for
| "sinus inflammation" used to yield results for penis inflammation
| for a while. That one seems to have been resolved. However I am
| still getting completely unrelated results every now and then,
| indicating they are having serious unresolved search engine
| issues.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Google, YouTube, etc., they're all getting worse. I'm finding it
| ever more difficult to learn anything anymore from the internet.
| Whether it's learning how to play the guitar, how to fish, weight
| lifting or how to do mostly anything, I get trash results. Google
| results are exclusively shallow content, most of which are trying
| to sell me on something. YouTube is full of short videos with
| click baity subjects entirely irrelevant to what I actually
| entered: "Don't make this {topic} mistake!", "This one trick will
| make you better at {topic}!", "Top 10 ways to become a pro at
| {topic} in two weeks!".
|
| Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding me,
| which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-down of
| society, I've naturally gravitated towards books. Books are
| leagues better in terms of quality of content. They are more
| detailed and thorough. It's a richer experience so far.
| robotnikman wrote:
| >Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding
| me, which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-
| down of society
|
| This part really worries me right here. We don't know the long
| term ramifications of the modern day internet, but so far they
| do not look good.
| toss1 wrote:
| And the people making the algorithms & internet interfaces
| could not give a flying fork less about those long term
| external consequences . . .
| digitalsushi wrote:
| Steel that was formed before we started making nuclear
| contamination, known as low-background steel or pre-war steel,
| often in the form of old naval vessels and other large, old,
| steel infrastructure, has a special value to us. It can be used
| for building instruments with high sensitivity to radiation, as
| the steel made since becomes polluted with what is now part of
| the world.
|
| I see a strong metaphor for literature authored before a
| specific time, roughly when the web came to be, or certainly
| when two way discourse on a page, or aggregation, became
| prevalent. And certainly far before bespoke communications
| targeted at us, as individuals or interest groups.
|
| If the modern web were air it would taste of metal; I have a
| fear that I will become biased that older texts are superior
| for the sole reason that modern texts can be assumed inferior.
| stef25 wrote:
| You're right about the trash results.
|
| Recently I was thinking about getting a dog and was trying to
| find as much information about certain breeds as I could.
| Everything was just the same stuff repeated over and over, very
| little substance.
|
| It took me a few days to realise but a lot of the Youtube
| results were actually entirely created by AI. Not just the
| voice over and what it was saying but the actual video was as
| well.
|
| You can get AI to spew out content on whatever topic and as
| long as there's money to be made from said content, this does
| not bode well at all.
|
| Repeating a comment I read here a while back - Google has lost,
| perhaps even given up, the fight against spam content.
| phoerious wrote:
| Funny you mention YouTube. We did another study on this as
| well. https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendor
| ff_20...
| Andrex wrote:
| SEO, including video SEO, is constantly in tension with people
| who want to make money vs. people who want information.
|
| Even if Google were incentivized to clean up their algorithms,
| the people who want to make money will necessarily always be
| one step ahead in the cat-and-mouse.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| In the case of YouTube, it's not trash videos that frustrate
| me, it's YouTube's UI.
|
| First, they have been injecting unrelated recommendations
| into search results, under headers like "For you" and "People
| also watched". I don't want to see a pimple-popping video
| when I'm searching for something related to woodworking.
| (That's an extreme example, but I have actually seen those
| types of videos injected into completely unrelated search
| results. In fact, I just did a search for "hand cut
| dovetails" as a test and YT recommended two different
| disgusting pimple/pore videos in the first few dozen
| results.)
|
| Second, they don't admit that they are out of results.
| Instead, when search results dry up they coughing up
| unrelated recommendations so that you can keep scrolling
| forever. This makes it look like there are more results than
| there actually are, which is completely unhelpful.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| I still feel like the Youtube recommendations are A+
|
| I watch only certain channels and a lot of long form
| documentary and gaming content. So that is what I get
| recommended. The few times I use the "dont recommend" button it
| never pops up again.
| 65 wrote:
| I used some custom CSS to block out my YouTube home page, so
| I never clicked on anything on the home page. I was getting
| god awful "content" suggested to me on the sidebar of videos.
| Once I disabled the CSS and started watching some of the
| recommended videos my recommendations got instantly better.
| It seems the recommendation system gets better the more you
| interact with it.
|
| It also is helpful to search for videos and click on those.
| If I search for long form podcasts or interviews, I will get
| more of those kinds of videos recommended to me.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| How do you get rid of the trash Shorts?
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| I just tested now and
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-
| youtube-...
|
| works.
| lolinder wrote:
| At some point YouTube broke it with an update, but for a while
| I had uBlock Origin configured to block the Home page of
| YouTube entirely, so I'd just see a black screen. I still have
| it blocking the recommended videos sidebar and the comments.
|
| YouTube actually has a lot of decent content still, if you can
| find it. I've found that jumping over to look at channels that
| do collabs with channels that you already know is a good way to
| discover new content.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| If you deactivate the video history, Youtube's homepage stays
| empty
| boznz wrote:
| It did not matter how many times I read the Haynes Manual to
| bleed the clutch on my 1989 pickup truck, having someone show
| me on video was the only way it was going into my thick skull.
| However it worries me that the way google works anything useful
| like this with only a few hundred views will eventually be
| deleted to make room for the next funny cat video or
| 'influencer' pulling shit out of their asses.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| Did you pay for the video proportional to the value that you
| received? Most people don't, so why expect the services to
| not get worse, and be forever subsidized by another cash cow?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Whether it's learning how to play the guitar
|
| I don't know about other topics, but it should still be pretty
| easy to find quality content if you want to learn guitar. Spend
| a couple of hours to find the channel that suits you best and
| stick to it.
|
| Overall, there's still lots of great content on youtube, but
| you need to look it up yourself. The recommendations are
| useless and make you lose time, and the suppression of the
| dislike count makes it much harder to filter bad stuff. Also
| most professional YouTubers don't have much to say. They repeat
| themselves over and over.
|
| Maybe someone should come up with a custom recommendation
| algorithm. Don't know if that's doable.
| bunsenhoneydew wrote:
| I gave up on Google a couple of years ago. I used DDG for a while
| but often had to jump back (!g) to Google for some things. Now I
| pay for Kagi (been a year or two) and there's no going back for
| me. I hardly ever even need to scroll down to find what I need,
| it's just there. Saves me so much time.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It's AI, people using it vs not. And the AI is ever changing,
| trained on the internet, so it will be a self fulfilling
| constructive interference thing. If people keep using AI to write
| articles based on their competitors websites, eventually it will
| just be ai talking to ai.
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