[HN Gopher] The deterioration of Google
___________________________________________________________________
The deterioration of Google
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 273 points
Date : 2024-11-29 22:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.baldurbjarnason.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.baldurbjarnason.com)
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| _ML experts at Google (El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi at least, if I recall
| correctly) who has since left warned that LLMs should be avoided
| because they made products chaotic and hard to control..._
| tomrod wrote:
| What has happened to cause Google to get so bad at search?
| nothercastle wrote:
| It's bad when their shitty ai implantation can find the answer
| but none of the links that it pumps out have anything relevant
| just seo spam.
| readams wrote:
| The web is just much more hostile now. It's not a conspiracy by
| Google. Over the years the bad actors are chipping away. Now
| with LLM content it's going to be even harder to pick out the
| actually useful content, since even humans will have a hard
| time discerning.
| eitland wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| Kagi and search.marginalia.nu are both proof that it is
| possible to deliver very good results - if you don't stack
| the incentives against it.
| flenserboy wrote:
| This is only to repeat what has been said by many, numerous
| times, but --
|
| 1. The point of search was no longer to provide requested data,
| but to generate clicks for Google's ad service.
|
| 2. Generating clicks for Google's ad service required that
| exact text search, boolean searches, & everything else useful
| had to be excised because giving what was asked for reduced
| engagement.
|
| 3. Ads had to be stuck on the top half of the results page, &
| the second half of the search results, for more clicks to be
| earned, had to be filled with garbage sites that did not
| provide what was sought. This encouraged the proliferation of
| scrapers & bot-generated text sites. Hand-in-hand with this was
| the elimination of long-tail results, as digging into results
| might give useful results.
|
| 4. It appears that a decision was made at some point to curate
| & direct answers toward particular results. While much has been
| made about certain political leanings being almost disappeared
| by this move, it appears to be much more likely that this was a
| result of returning results which generated more ad revenue &
| clicks (which may say more about the sorts of sites Google runs
| ads on than anything else).
|
| 5. In parallel with the dominance of ad-revenue mining, data
| mining became a major purpose of receiving search requests.
| Thus the requests for location information on every search,
| tied in with the drive to personalize results not for the
| purpose of giving good results, but to give identified users
| results they were more likely to interact with to both interact
| with Google ads & give Google more data to suck down & use.
|
| If we could get them to revert back to the 2006-era search
| engine, where more than just major sites & bot farms are
| indexed, we would have something useful. But that's not going
| to happen.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Value extraction.
| eitland wrote:
| > Morgan: Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with
| examples of people in the room and said why aren't they showing
| up and they did their "debugging process" and couldn't figure it
| out.
|
| Meanwhile a single Swede with a single desktop class machine in
| his living room created a search engine so good that I would
| often switch to it when Google failed.
|
| These days I use Kagi, which has prioritization and block lists
| (which I don't use because the results are good out of the box).
|
| Wanna know what is really interesting about the Kagi story?
|
| While Kagi is building its own index, for a long time they were
| kind of reselling a wrapped version of Google + Bing results, but
| still were extremely much better IMO.
|
| I have two theories:
|
| - either Kagi has some seriously smart systems that read in the
| first tens of results and reshuffle them
|
| - or more likely in my opinion the reason why results have been
| so good is because kagi has api access which bypass the "query
| expander and stupidifier"[1] on the way in to Google and the
| personalization thing on the way out. That way they just interact
| with the core of Google search which somehow still works.
|
| [1]: "stupidifier" the thing in the Google pipeline that rewrites
|
| - "obscure-js-lib" (think one that a previous dev used, that I
| now need to debug
|
| - to "well-knowm-js-lib-with-kind-of-similar-name".
|
| Or decide that when I search for Angular "mat-table" I probably
| want some tables with mats on even if they don't have anything to
| do with Angular.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| The stupidifier also rewrites searches for SmartOS, Illumos et
| al as Solaris just to make sure you get nothing but irrelevant
| results.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Ugh, that thing.
|
| Me: "exactly-this-thing.py"
|
| Google: You misspelled "sorta-related.js". Here you go.
|
| Me: Did I stutter?!
| araes wrote:
| Have one of those I actually thought was kind of funny, and
| bit like having a conversation with an AI.
|
| Tried searching for quotes from the Matrix because of all
| these AI issues and asked:
|
| "Quote of Agent Smith to Mr. Neo 'How will you speak with no
| mouth?'"
|
| and got back:
|
| "You're wrong. Agent Smith never refers to Neo as anything
| other than Mr. Anderson." Completely did not even try to
| answer the question.
|
| Course, these days it's more Harlan Ellison "I Have No Mouth,
| and I Must Scream" [1]. Kind of went beyond the Matrix to
| total thought control and constant machine torture. "How will
| you search if all results are false?"
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must
| _Sc...
| jayd16 wrote:
| If you get to scrape competitor results then all you need to do
| to improve them is strip out the ads. It's not exactly rocket
| science if that's allowed.
| mattkevan wrote:
| It's been talked about here before, but fundamentally it's when
| the advertising guys won the power struggle over the search
| engine guys. Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool
| technology (and also get filthy rich).
|
| Now it's just a way to make the number perpetually go up, sucking
| every last drop of value out of the system.
|
| Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google's senior
| leadership.
| kibwen wrote:
| The paperclip maximizer reports steady and heartening progress
| on converting all available matter in the Earth system to
| paperclips. Shares of $PCLIP are up 20% on the news.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Universal Paperclips was my favorite piece of art I
| interacted with this year (so far). It really affected how I
| think about what I'm doing, and what humanity is doing as a
| whole.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Ultimately I think humans are innate optimizers. It's the
| reason why I stay playing factorio until late at night,
| because I want to see those production graphs go up up up.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Ugh, but having to grind fish, _fish!_ just to get a
| spidertron with a reasonable amount of lasers...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Does the spidertron cost increase on the space expansion
| or anything?
|
| I've always built as many as I wanted from the fish I get
| by accident while building other stuff.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You can even cultivate fish in the Space Age. It involves
| interplanetary logistics though.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I just built my first fish farm and it appears that one
| cannot improve the quality of fish. Anyway, I had enough
| bits lying around to build 5 spidertron as soon as I
| unlocked the tech so I guess it's pretty simple. I copied
| Nilaus' parameterized mini-mall and then adapted that for
| assemblers and biochambers so maybe it just seemed
| easier.
| cen4 wrote:
| Most importantly Content keeps exploding. Total available human
| Attention does not grow.
|
| So how does Adtech generate more and more revenue and sells
| more and more ads year on year?
|
| Simple answer - Fraud.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Advertisers are locked into an arms race for attention with
| each other. Even if you were stuck with the same slice of
| eyeball time, you can still grow by selling it for more, and
| in many ways that's what google's auctions are set up to do.
| But google's investment in youtube in particular has steadily
| grown the eyeball-time they have access to as well. I'm not
| ruling out fraud but I don't see how these facts _prove_
| fraud, it seems more like google continuing to naturally
| benefit from the decline of traditional print and television
| media.
| causality0 wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder what fraction of people employed in
| advertising think they're making the world better by
| exposing customers to good products and what percentage
| aren't in denial about the fact they're weaving dollars out
| of human misery.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Never worked in ad tech so no incentive to see things one
| way or the other. I do think it's sad that so much brain
| power has gone into it, but "weaving dollars out of human
| misery" is a bit much.
| walleeee wrote:
| Indeed, it's not fair to lay all the blame at the feet of
| the middling adtech worker. Plus a good fraction of the
| fibers are certified non-human.
| araes wrote:
| Similar to my own thoughts on the issue.
|
| It's a lot like the credit card issuing banks. Two notable
| big names, Wells Fargo and Bank of America both "illegally
| used or obtained consumers' credit reports, and then applied
| for and enrolled consumers in credit card accounts without
| consumers' knowledge or authorization." [1][2]
|
| Banks had each employee need to sell 50 credit cards a month.
| Employees sold 50 a month.
|
| Banks needed "line goes up" for every quarter. Banks had each
| employee sell 100 a month. Employee's tried to sell 100 a
| month.
|
| Banks needed "line goes up." Eventually market was saturated,
| yet banks said sell 1000 credit cards a month. Employees
| replied, "we cannot, market is saturated." Bank said "sell
| 1000 a month." Employee's responded with "make shit up, open
| accounts without consumers knowledge." Fraud.
|
| [1] (Wells Fargo, millions of accounts, $3B civil settlement,
| $3.7B CFPB judgement, 2020),
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-
| pay-3-bill...,
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/07/11/bank-of-
| ame...
|
| [2] (Bank of America, unspecified # of accounts, 2023)
| https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/bank-of-
| am...
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > Total available human Attention does not grow.
|
| Yes it does. It scales with population, which last time I
| checked is still going up.
| baq wrote:
| The growing population is starved of dollars. You care
| about attention of dollars, not of people.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| https://databank.worldbank.org/reports.aspx?source=2&seri
| es=...
|
| You can click `chart` for an easier visualization
| e6u4u wrote:
| Is total available human attention actually relevant here? It
| implies that all the possible attention is available already
| for advertising purposes which doesn't seem true at all.
| baq wrote:
| If it was the economy would shut down soon after it
| happened.
| jumping_frog wrote:
| Attention has a common resource problem. If you (google)
| don't overgraze your cattle on it, the facebook will because
| they both are getting the same users at the same time. It's a
| race at this point. I am getting ads from same company being
| recommended on both Meta and Google ads real estate.
| panarchy wrote:
| > Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google's
| senior leadership.
|
| I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done
| in the last 15 years.
|
| Search peaked in like 2009
|
| Maps has only become slower and less informative (I remember
| when it use to actually display everything that was in a
| location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since 2009
|
| Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now almost
| 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements, but nothing
| wow worthy.
|
| And it seems everything else they've done has been shuttered
| and/or wasn't all that innovative in the first place and
| usually just trying to copy someone else work but in an
| uninspired way.
| viraptor wrote:
| > can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the
| last 15 years
|
| Android is getting genuinely better. Also AndroidAuto.
| askvictor wrote:
| If, by better, you mean more locked down, and with
| incremental tweaks, sure. I would much rather have Android
| from 5 years ago, and the ability to make it work how I
| want, than what there is now.
| viraptor wrote:
| You still can have seen Android from 5 years ago
| experience. There's lots of custom ROMs for that. On the
| other hand, for an average person, I believe Android is
| better today in most ways.
| Eavolution wrote:
| They exist but I can't use them because I need my bank
| apps to work, and magisk can only trick some of them.
| tim333 wrote:
| I don't know about deep level impressive but I'm finding
| the new Google Lens thing built recently into Chrome pretty
| cool and useful. You click it and highlight part of the
| page and then it figures what the image is or ocr's text in
| it and optional translates or searches it. I use it
| multiple times per day. Also just being able to do that was
| a bit sci-fi 15 years ago.
|
| Deep level impressive but maybe just by a company owned by
| Google is the Deepmind stuff like AlphaFold which recently
| got a nobel prize and AlphaGo and MuZero. Also you may have
| heard of the chatgpt/llm stuff that's trendy now, all based
| on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning
| _arc...
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| +1 for Lens - It can translate manga in near-real time.
| franze wrote:
| Google Photos
| dageshi wrote:
| Google photos is awesome. I genuinely love it, I've been
| uploading my old travel photos to it and every few days
| my phone reminds me of some old memories.
| viraptor wrote:
| Has anything serious changed about photos in the last 15
| years? I've used it before then and can't really think of
| anything apart from embedding search and random
| reminders. But those are really small features.
| dmoy wrote:
| Well Google photos wasn't released 10 years ago, so ...
| that at least?
|
| Unless you're thinking of Picasa, which is a whole
| different conversation lol
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I mean, afaik the standout feature of Picasa was shared
| web albums where you could invite people to add photos
| and permissions were managed via Google accounts, so,
| it's easy to confuse the two. From memory the only thing
| that changed when moving from Picasa to Photos was that I
| no longer had a desktop app where to keep photos on disk
| + Picasa had a neat map of geolocations (maybe Photos
| caught up or can you still not view photos on a map? I
| know apple does this, I just use ACDSee now and keep it
| offline)
|
| Sunsetting blog from 2016 for good measure:
| http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-
| pica...
| tensor wrote:
| Hard disagree, I used Android for years but after they
| removed feature after feature that I found useful, and
| replaced them with features that shovelled ads at me, I
| finally gave up and switch to iOS.
|
| I think the last straw was when I was forced to replace the
| stock launcher just to avoid the built in unblockable
| google search ads. That made me consider why I bothered
| with Google at all anymore if all I do is hacks to work
| around their crappy ad filled UI.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The number one feature I use Google Assistant for (and
| probably most people's most common usage) is to say "Hey
| google, set a timer for X minutes". If I dare do anything
| else with my phone during it's reply of "OK, five minutes,
| starting now" I risk the timer just... disappearing. If I
| can't count on it for one of the most commonly used tasks
| for phones I have zero faith for other things and don't
| even bother to figure out how to use it as more than an
| internet access terminal/music player.
| asah wrote:
| Sorry but no: - maps has had TONS of improvements, including
| mobile, transit, reviews, etc. - docs got serious with Word
| compatibility, added suggest mode, mobile, improved layout
| (100s of bug fixes), Drawing, embedded and updatable gsheets,
| improved print, image layout, etc. - search added song
| lyrics, mobile, calculator, currency conversion incl Bitcoin,
| flights, hotels, embedded maps info, AI summaries, product
| search improvements including more inventory.
|
| I would bet big$ that I could name 1,000 user features across
| gsuite, search, maps, Android, Chrome since 2009.
| saghm wrote:
| Some of that stuff is impressive, but I think you might be
| stretching a bit with lyrics and calculator. They're nice
| quality of life improvements, but I don't think I'd
| classify them as "impressive".
| askvictor wrote:
| Docs and Sheets are still so much better than Word and
| Excel, except that there doesn't seem to be a way to, from
| the desktop, launch a .csv into Sheets (or .doc into Word).
|
| Though I think that, for every minor improvement, I could
| name a regression or product shut-down.
| sirjaz wrote:
| Docs and Sheets would only be impressive if they actually
| released a native desktop app for MacOS and Windows
| qwerpy wrote:
| Maps may have had lots of improvements but they keep
| relentlessly cramming more and more ads and sponsored
| content into it. I now actively avoid using it as much as
| possible.
|
| Which is directly relevant to the topic being discussed
| here. Engineers work hard to make real improvements but the
| product as a whole is sabotaged with the never ending
| pressure to monetize more.
| eesmith wrote:
| Calculator and currency conversion were in Google search
| before 2009.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| Sorry no: maps has gotten way worse for my use cases. On
| mobile, they started agressively trying to get you to use
| the app instead of browser and try to get you to turn on
| your location constantly. They also kneecapped the "near to
| here" query button when looking at an adress on the mobile
| browser, where you need to try to use a roundabout hack to
| get it sort of working. Constantly enshittifying the mobile
| browser in favor of the app is not a bargain with the devil
| I'm willing to accept.
| mksreddy wrote:
| Google photos is an Amazing product.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Until you try to export anything.
|
| Also the search is very lackluster
| ndr wrote:
| What's wrong with https://takeout.google.com/ ?
| pimlottc wrote:
| Google Docs has gotten much slower now that they render
| everything in a canvas [0]. It's fine for some things but for
| large docs it's painful.
|
| 0: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-
| Docs-...
| crazygringo wrote:
| I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, and it wouldn't
| depend on the document size anyways. In fact, I remember
| Docs slowing down on 30-page files a decade ago, whereas
| now it handles 100 pages just as fast as 1.
|
| Only the visible portion of the document is rendered
| (previously in HTML, now in Canvas). Everything
| before/after is just the document data.
|
| Maybe you started working on longer docs coincidentally
| around the same time Docs switched to canvas?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| My "favourite" part about google docs is where if you
| scroll marginally faster than glacial, large sections of
| the page just give up and disappear.
|
| You then have to wait for docs glacial performance to catch
| up and re-render things again.
|
| It's genuinely garbage and the "live collaboration"
| features go unused most of the time.
| N3Xxus_6 wrote:
| They invented the transformer architecture that powers GPT
| and other llms.
| manquer wrote:
| Bell labs and Xerox PARC did great impactful work long
| after their parent companies were relevant and still do .
|
| The fact Google did the initial work on transformers but
| only OpenAI was able to productize is an indictment of
| their stagnation more than an achievement.
| gjvc wrote:
| Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were great improvements on their
| successors.
| dageshi wrote:
| Or they recognised the fundamental problem which is that
| LLM's will kill the motivation for people to upload new
| information to feed the LLM's with.
|
| If websites can't earn a living through ads because LLM's
| don't send them any traffic anymore, where do the LLM's
| ingest new information from?
|
| The web continues to deteriorate because of this and
| nobody has solved this problem.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they were just terrified of the PR impact
| of another "humans classified as gorillas" type incident.
| mu53 wrote:
| And they ended up with "put elmers glue on pizza" type
| incident.
|
| AI is messy
| kweingar wrote:
| > only OpenAI was able to productize
|
| What do you mean? Anthropic and Google both have widely
| used products based on transformers.
| mu53 wrote:
| OpenAI is the market leader by far with the most name
| recognition. Google was the last to market. Its initial
| release of Gemini was a total flop because of the meme
| "Use elmer's glue on pizza to keep the cheese on". It has
| finally become more consistent, and it manages to compete
| with other models though I never see anyone recommending
| Gemini first.
|
| All of these companies are in the red, but OpenAI has the
| most revenue.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| This is a bit of a tangent, but I don't think OpenAI's
| brand is all that durable. You can see that Perplexity.AI
| has been gaining rapidly. At this point they have half as
| much search traffic as OpenAI:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y
| &ge...
| michaelt wrote:
| As I recall, the timeline was:
|
| 2017, seven Google employees invent the transformer
| architecture and publish a paper. Google's investing
| heavily into ML, with their own custom 'TPU' chips and
| their 'Tensorflow' ML framework.
|
| 2019ish, Google has an internal chatbot they decide to do
| absolutely nothing with. Some idiot tells the press it's
| sentient, and they fire him.
|
| 2022, ChatGPT launches. It proves really powerful, a
| product loads of individuals and businesses are ready to
| pay for, and the value of the company skyrockets.
|
| 2023, none of the seven Transformer paper authors are at
| Google any more. Google rushes out Bard. Turns out they
| don't have a sentient super-intelligence after all. In
| fact it's badly received enough they end up needing to
| rebrand it a few months later.
|
| Classic tortoise-and-hare situation - Google spent 5
| years napping, then had to sprint flat out just to take
| third place.
| tnias23 wrote:
| Except tortoise is supposed to win. Maybe we just haven't
| given it enough time?
| OJFord wrote:
| Google is the hare, in GP's comment.
| antupis wrote:
| Google has very research division but productising those
| inventions is the problem.
| cma wrote:
| It was used in Google translate, and BERT was
| incorporated into search in 2019, though I don't think it
| was a clear win for search, I feel like I started having
| to add exact quotes to everything technical/programming
| around then.
| jumping_frog wrote:
| One thing I don't understand is google has so much
| metadata on search sessions to RLHF their search results.
|
| E.g. when I start a search session to solve a programming
| problem (before llms), I will continually search
| different terms to get to my solution webpage. Then stop.
| This session metadata and the path I took is highly
| significant data that can be used to help llms recognise
| what research itself looks like.
| stocknoob wrote:
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-
| relea...
| jebarker wrote:
| I'm guessing lots of people would argue Google doesn't
| really get credit for that.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| YouTube, Google Maps, Google Photos, Android, Gemini, Google
| Cloud, Kubernetes, Google Chrome, Go, Bazel, Google Fiber,
| Google Fi
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| They've been enshittifying YouTube since they bought it,
| and Maps is following the same road.
|
| Gemini is Google saying "look at me, I can jump on the AI
| bandwagon too."
|
| Android has had a bunch of facelifts, but from a user
| perspective isn't much different to what it was a decade
| ago. Same for Google Photos.
|
| Google Fiber is dead and all but buried.
|
| Google Fi is just another MVNO.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I won't comment on Google ruining products, only that
| they have produced impressive things in the last 15
| years.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| They have, but those things are almost all incidental to
| their products.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| > I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has
| done in the last 15 years.
|
| I find that hard to fathom. I think what you meant to say is
| "an impressive right that actually got made into a b2c
| product".
|
| Otherwise you'd have to ignore that they kinda pioneered
| llms, until OpenAI poached their tech, polished into a (for a
| consumer) breathtakingly functional "AI"
|
| They also kept researching self driving via weymo etc
|
| On the business side they've also made a significant mark on
| the programming world via k8s, golang and angular2 among
| other things
|
| But I'd completely agree with the sentiment that they
| completely dropped the ball wrt their original target
| demographic. Beyond the improvements to android, I can't
| really think of anything since 2010 either that really
| improved things.
| beaugunderson wrote:
| > Maps has only become slower and less informative (I
| remember when it use to actually display everything that was
| in a location and not just the popular/paid for stuff) since
| 2009
|
| "Ground Truth" is truly dead... we've been to 25 states in
| the last year and the speed limits displayed in Maps were
| correct about 10% of the time.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| Arguably Google Docs has done the best. It hasn't changed
| much, whereas all the other things you mentioned have got
| significantly worse.
| dijit wrote:
| Meet is also an outlier.
|
| It doesnt have all the features in the world but it has
| some technically impressive ones, least of all the "I can
| tell you're all in a meeting room, so I am going to
| selectively increase the audio where people are speaking
| and prevent echo from all the speakers".
|
| I'd love more love for screen sharing, but meet is the only
| product I see that is getting _materially_ better over
| time.
| bengale wrote:
| Meet is actually surprisingly brilliant tbh.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has
| done in the last 15 years.
|
| Meet team ported advanced audio processing, environmental
| noise cancelling and camera effects to Firefox, and they work
| really well.
|
| It's not impressive of course, but interesting enough to
| notice.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has
| done in the last 15 years.
|
| When you hire an ex McKinsey CEO and get the guy who
| destroyed Yahoo Search to run your search business, this is
| what happens.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > Google Docs was incredibly impressive... in 2006 and now
| almost 20 years later there's been a few QoL improvements,
| but nothing wow worthy.
|
| Give the product owner a raise then. Any time Microsoft tries
| to radically change Office, everyone just gets annoyed, and
| searches like "where is the print button in excel?" will
| suddenly skyrocket for a month or two.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I genuinely can 't think of one impressive thing Google
| has done in the last 15 years._
|
| They invented the technology behind LLM's. So whether you use
| Gemini or ChatGPT, that was pretty impressive.
|
| Also, Waymo is crazy impressive. If you're considering
| Alphabet as a whole (which there's no reason not to, it's all
| under the same stock ticker).
|
| Those are two industry-changing things, so I think Google's
| doing OK.
| fragmede wrote:
| That Waymo thing is pretty cool. Transformers seem like
| pretty foundational work, even if they weren't the ones that
| ultimately popularized it in the market.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool technology
| (and also get filthy rich)."
|
| What is advertising now.
|
| Is it possible that the "technology" being funded is "the
| delivery of advertising over a computer network".
|
| Is that "cool technology". If not, then is the "cool
| technology" serving as bait to lure in ad targets, i.e., is it
| merely a component of the advertising services technology.
|
| Why not sell or license the "cool technology" for fees instead
| of hiring "advertising guys". Why can't this unspecified "cool
| technology" exist on its own. The parent comment implies there
| is "value" in "the system", presumably independent of
| advertising.
| lupire wrote:
| If you've been on the Internet during the last 20 years,
| you'd notice that people in general aren't willing to pay for
| something if something cheaper exists, and the "cost
| equivalent" of advertising exposure is perceived as
| extremely, extremely low, even by people who dislike
| advertising.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but fundamentally it's when the advertising guys won the
| power struggle over the search engine guys_
|
| How would that explain Google search results getting worse
| though?
|
| Ads only get viewed as long as Search is high quality and
| people don't switch to a competitor.
|
| Ads fill up the top with sponsored results, but they don't
| affect the organic results. If by "the advertising guys won"
| you mean they got more sponsored slots, all that means is they
| got more sponsored slots. It doesn't affect the quality of
| organic results.
|
| So I don't understand what your theory is here.
| ayberk wrote:
| Yeah, you can't talk about the deterioration of Google without
| talking about the deterioration of the culture at Google.
|
| I didn't like working at AWS for the most part, but I have
| never seen Google-level dysfunction there. There were a lot of
| times I disagreed with decision, but I could always understand
| the reasoning behind it. On the contrary, I can't explain most
| of the decision being made at Google. The enshittification from
| the very top has been amazing to watch, even for someone like
| me who joined only 3.5 years ago. Both senior and mid-level
| leadership lack a clear vision and the execution has obviously
| been horrible. Google needs a hard reset if they want to be
| successful again. I'm not buying the "too-big-to-fail"
| bullshit.
| Animats wrote:
| Giant Freakin' Robot was an aggregation site. Its "content" is
| links to other web pages with blithering about them. Google seems
| to recognize aggregation sites now, and down-ranks them. Google
| itself is an aggregation site, and there's no reason for it to
| pass traffic to other aggregation sites.
|
| If only they'd down-rank Yelp, etc.
| bl4kers wrote:
| A quick browse through their website shows only links to
| original content as far as I can tell
| riiii wrote:
| Sobering read on how Google was destroyed from the inside.
|
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Yes, 2019. Without any insider knowledge, I remember a Google
| update at the end of 2019 where they really went to shit, gone
| from "don't be evil" all the way to evil
|
| It was actually later than I expected it to happen but it seems
| like distinct enough event that it's had reverberation all the
| way to the present.
| frompdx wrote:
| This article is marred by the author's obvious bias and
| frustration. If they had cut out all of their personal
| interjections and stuck to the facts this would be a far more
| compelling piece. It's also a little rich of the author to
| opine about Google's once heroic effort to exclude spammy
| results while posting to a site that employs all of the
| annoying things spammy sites employ like modals to join the
| newsletter mailing list.
|
| That said, the 2019 timeline tracks. Google search results have
| obviously become terrible compared to what they were. Given the
| threat and possibly now reality of uBlock Origin no longer
| being available on Chrome it's clear what will fall victim
| next.
|
| Sent from Firefox.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >Sent from Firefox
|
| Read using brave (ubo on)
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Every time Ed Zitron is mentioned on this site someone shows
| up with a hateboner, it's getting super old.
|
| Everyone has a bias, it's not a crime to let it show. I know
| it's Silicon Valley's dream to flatten all human experience
| into emotionless 0s and 1s but they need to knock it off and
| you need to stop enabling them.
| frompdx wrote:
| I fail to see what part of my comment constitutes a
| "hateboner". Avoiding bias in journalism predates silicon
| valley by decades, if not centuries.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Does this strike you as a source where one would expect
| unbiased journalism? Does it claim to be such? It strikes
| me as a personal blog of opinion pieces.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Besides clearly being outdated guidance (see election
| 2024 + "substack is the new journalism"), not even
| "unbiased" journalism is merely a bland recitation of
| facts, and there's a world of difference between that, an
| article with an obvious slant, and straight-up dog-
| barbecue levels of bullshit and lies.
|
| It IS frustrating, beyond frustrating, that _Google nuked
| the web for ad money_. The idea that you have to report
| that by neutrally dictating a string of facts or else
| forfeit all credibility is stupid.
| seliopou wrote:
| Are there any paid search engines that the HN hive mind would
| recommend? I pay for my news to ensure quality. It stands to
| reason I should also pay for my search as well.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Kagi. Used it and it is useful.
|
| What is nice, is that it is small enough user base that it is
| not worth it for sites to spend a lot of effort on SEO for it.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Nowadays I use ChatGPT to search the web. I am very impressed.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Does it give you links to pages?
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Yes
|
| https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search/
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Kagi. It's completely replaced Google for me.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Kagi has been mentioned a a half dozen times in this comment
| thread.
| oidar wrote:
| Kagi. Kagi. Kagi. Once you realize how much time you wade
| through garbage results with google, Kagi pays for itself.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| kagi : costs about one Starbucks trip per month, and is
| extraordinarily high signal to noise, unlike Google.
| xvector wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for a few months now and it's getting
| kind of annoying. Maybe I have too many pin/raise/lower/block
| filters, but I've been finding myself adding !g to a lot of
| my queries now.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| i bet it's your "tuning" with the pin raise lower block
| filters. I think once using those it can obfuscate the
| benefits.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| Not paid, but I use bing and qwant. Sometimes Yandex.
| peepeepoopoo92 wrote:
| It's almost as if over a decade of exclusively optimizing for
| employees who are good at leetcode, will lead to a workforce that
| isn't capable of doing things besides solving well-defined
| leetcode problems. Wow, who could have guessed?
| rvz wrote:
| This. When you also bring in employees whose function is to do
| only one specific thing, such as editing a CI system,
| maintaining a google-specific internal tool for decades, they
| cannot easily adapt or are completely inflexible or incapable
| of changing.
|
| Anything that requires a tiny bit of creativity of a new change
| requirement, it is going to be an issue.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| The leetcoders moved into management, and have no product
| vision but immense sway over the direction of the company
| efitz wrote:
| I'm not precisely sure what problem the author is talking about.
| Is it the fact that some sites have built a business model around
| search results or is it that Google changed it search algorithm
| and they don't like the way they are prioritized or is it
| something else?
|
| It seems kind of unreasonable to expect Google to never
| experiment with their algorithm; and unfortunately at its core it
| is a zero sum game. You might be a winner today but a loser
| tomorrow.
|
| if your concern is about revenue, sharing or referrals or ad
| placements or ??? then I would point out that it's very unwise to
| build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of
| another business.
|
| I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover
| content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for
| years has been gamified by SEO.
|
| I think that the right model for content discovery is either
| crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or
| curated; if the curator or community drifts away from your
| interests, then you have to find a new one, but oddly enough,
| this can actually be done within the same framework.
| refulgentis wrote:
| In a sentence, the theory is that as search added optimization
| layer based on ML, after optimization layer based on ML, it's
| nigh-debuggable.
|
| Put another way, Google launched 1000 experiments that got
| +0.2% CTR and seemed innocuous, and now they have a system that
| only wants to give out Reddit and Quora links.
|
| I've seen this story on Google's private Blind section multiple
| times. Usually, coupled to discussion about a more cautionary
| approach taken by the pre-2020 head of search, who was worried
| about this outcome.
|
| IMHO they're feeling out the same outcome without the benefit
| of the above knowledge. I don't see this theory well-understood
| outside Googlers, modulo a pair of popular blog posts, whose
| name I can't recall, that hit the nail on the head.
|
| (disclaimer: xoogler as of oct 2023, didn't work on search)
| Filligree wrote:
| I agree. But it's a tough problem, isn't it?
|
| I don't just mean filtering out the spam; that's a hard
| problem on its own. But the good-click metrics... if serving
| up reddit and quora links at #1 makes more people satisfied
| with the first result, defining satisfied as 'reads the #1
| page and doesn't go back for more', then...
|
| What's wrong with that metric?
|
| That isn't a rhetorical question. It's _tempting_ to claim
| the users are wrong to prefer it, but not very nice. Why do
| they do so?
| refulgentis wrote:
| Users aren't wrong (tangentially, I strongly believe they
| don't like it)
|
| Bravely flattening a root cause analysis to one agreeable-
| sounding villain, I'd do Goodhart's Law. Click-through rate
| not being a great proxy for user satisfaction.
|
| i.e. I always clicked reddit first, I used to append reddit
| to my searches. But I get a very uneasy feeling now that
| _everything_ has reddit 3 times in top ten. Impossible. It
| 's a big world. It'd be like if Encyclopedia Britannica
| started just including the snippet-sized version of
| Wikipedia articles. Not what I'm looking for from that
| product.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| > if serving up reddit and quora links at #1 makes more
| people satisfied with the first result.
|
| It does not, what google is optimizing for is ad click-
| through not organic results click-through. The whole model
| is you will search for X see a couple of ads and a sea of
| bad results and opt to click on the ad.
|
| It's the same reason that if you search for "graphics card"
| on amazon and sort by price you will get 20 pages of
| "Graphics card Holders" and "Graphics Card Elbows". They
| want you to not actually use the search just click on their
| ad.
| baranul wrote:
| This is a good explanation of the method behind the
| madness. The manipulated results are for steering people
| to what they want to serve them. Clicking on their ads or
| corporate preferences.
|
| The problem appears to be it's hard for them to realize
| that people are getting fed up with the antics and are
| seeing through the manipulations. It's like an abuser or
| bully, that thinks they will keep getting away with the
| poor treatment of others, who they think are "below"
| them. At some point, enough people can take a stand, and
| not put up with the lack of transparency and black-box
| manipulations. They are going to keep demanding change or
| find alternatives.
| jumping_frog wrote:
| You have it backwards. People started adding reddit because
| the default google was serving up has gotten so bad. If the
| default was good, I wouldn't need to add reddit or quora.
| 23B1 wrote:
| > it's very unwise to build a business whose success is based
| entirely on the whims of another business.
|
| Show me a business free of dependencies and I'll eat my hat.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Everything exists in a system. I suppose the least (and
| therefore most resistant) to dependency related issues is
| small family farmers that run things like U Pick farms and
| grow a diversity of crops
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Bad argument. Having all of ones business dependencies to be
| that from a single business, subject to its whims, is unwise
| regardless of the fact that no business can exist without
| dependencies at all.
| dangus wrote:
| Also the article did a terrible job by confusing LLM and AI
| query results with Google's not-LLM search engine.
|
| And yes, like you alluded to, search engines aren't the only
| way to acquire your readership or regular customers. Some media
| outlets basically don't even use search engines to drive
| traffic, like so many social media based businesses out there.
| There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that barely have
| a linktree page.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Speaking of which, I would love a curated Android app store. It
| says a lot that you still can't filter by ad-free apps in it.
| colordrops wrote:
| F-droid and Aurora
| nine_k wrote:
| F-droid is good, but where's the curation part?
| colordrops wrote:
| What type of curation are you looking for? F-droid
| curates for open source and "anti-features" which are
| documented on each app page. And Aurora allows you to
| search Google Play while filtering out apps that utilize
| ads. What exactly do you want?
| cyberax wrote:
| It's curated. It clearly marks "anti-features" of the
| apps.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| You can help create one, since unlike iOS, Android doesn't
| have an app market monopoly. There are already many
| alternative app stores.
| mrandish wrote:
| App Finder in the Play Store will filter by ad-free and a
| bunch of other parameters.
| raincole wrote:
| > I think that the right model for content discovery is either
| crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or
| curated
|
| This is how all the subreddits that are remotely related to
| politics or news got so biased.
|
| Of course I don't know what the alternative is. If I did I
| would be making that ideal site instead of scrolling HN.
| nox101 wrote:
| > I think that the right model for content discovery is either
| crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or
| curated;
|
| I'm curious how you'd scale that. Google gets 8.5 billion
| searches per day. 8.5 billion "Ask HN: Where's the best
| resource for X" isn't going to scale to that.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I may be wrong, but I don't think op is responsible for
| scaling their suggestion up to serve everybody on the
| internet.
| nine_k wrote:
| Then it's a model for discovery of a tiny sliver of content
| :shrug:
|
| Google is now moving towards the position AltaVista used to
| have: everybody is using this search engine because of its
| breadth of coverage, the users are often unhappy with
| having to search for a long time and adjust the query many
| times, and complain about the inefficiency of it.
|
| I hope Kagi will grow and attain a large enough market
| share to afford indexing more of the web. Maybe we'll have
| a really useful search engine again, like it's 2001. For a
| few more years at least :-/
| cyberax wrote:
| > Where's the best resource for X"
|
| Reddit is a pretty credible alternative for that.
| nox101 wrote:
| That is not my experience. The mods there close any
| question that's been asked before even if the previous one
| is out of date and is closed to new answers. They also just
| seem to close most questions period.
| romanows wrote:
| Are you sure you're not thinking about Stack Overflow? I
| hate defending reddit ever since the API debacle, but
| there are scads of subreddits, many with different sets
| of mods, and all of the ones that help me with product
| reviews don't seem to have aggressive moderation?
|
| Edit: for example, I was searching for woodworking design
| software this morning and got a lot of helpful-looking
| results from reddit.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > then I would point out that it's very unwise to build a
| business whose success is based entirely on the whims of
| another business.
|
| When that other business is a monopoly, what choice do you
| have? The rise of google has effectively killed all other
| sources of traffic. Web sites used to get their traffic from
| things like webrings, directories and a variety of smaller
| search engines. Now? Google, or one of its properties, and to a
| smaller degree Meta are basically it. The curator and community
| discovery model is a victim of google, not a solution to it.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, even YouTube (Google
| property but not Google the search engine) are all paths to
| discovery. To a lesser degree sites like HN. There's also
| nothing actually stopping anyone from going to Bing or
| something. My Chrome browser takes me to Bing if I type in it
| or change the search engine...
|
| Also de-ranking SEO spammers is a net positive IMO.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, even YouTube
| (Google property but not Google the search engine) are all
| paths to discovery.
|
| Add blogs, News sites, and forums - to that as well.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| They are paths to discovery, but are they actual drivers of
| traffic?
|
| My impression is that if you aren't listed on google, your
| site is pretty close to dead. In any case, if you somehow
| managed to drive traffic via other social media, you are
| one underpaid moderator's hasty decision from ruin.
|
| The point isn't about deranking spammers it is about
| concentrating a huge majority of traffic (and therefore
| power) in the hands of a single entity which is
| unaccountable to anyone.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Another thing to consider is that those sites would
| rather you did you click those links. They don't benefit
| when you leave the platform and they down rank things
| they think will cause users to leave the walled garden
| regardless of the content.
| benrutter wrote:
| I think traffic/discovery patterns are a really good
| distinction. Something like Hacker News, Reddit etc will
| drive a lot of traffic in a short burst. People are
| sharing "cool stuff" and visiting it in one go.
|
| Ideally, we need a fix as well for more regular discory
| of problems people have. If I want "Norwegian cooking
| blogs" google will probably return me mostly spam, and
| waiting for someone on reddit to maybe post something in
| that category obviously isn't an option.
| tempest_ wrote:
| There is nothing stopping people from going to Bing sure
| but I think you are forgetting that most people now a days
| interact with the internet through a mobile device.
|
| Typing w w w . b i n g . c o m on a mobile device is are a
| huge barrier to entry vs just using the google search box
| Google pays the phone manufactures to bake into the the OS.
| hollerith wrote:
| Wait: which manufacturer's OS doesn't let the user switch
| the search engine to Bing in Settings?
| tempest_ wrote:
| They totally let you. How many people do you think go in
| and change the default? Otherwise paying to make Google
| the default would not have any value.
| dismalaf wrote:
| > There is nothing stopping people from going to Bing
| sure but I think you are forgetting that most people now
| a days interact with the internet through a mobile
| device.
|
| If anything I'd say mobile demonstrates that Google
| doesn't have a monopoly... TikTok literally occupies a
| majority of gen Z's app usage... 4 of the most used
| mobile apps (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook)
| all belong to Meta. My wife doesn't even know which
| browser is on her phone (Samsung Internet)...
| rockskon wrote:
| There is absolutely something stopping me from going to
| Bing and I wager it's the same reason with most other
| people:
|
| Despite how _awful_ Google has become in recent
| years...Bing is still consistently worse.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Building a business that relies solely on Web traffic is iffy
| for reasons unrelated to Google. Supply far, far exceeds
| demand, to the point that you have to pay to get people to
| visit your website. Which really explains a lot about the
| current Web ecosystem.
| thayne wrote:
| > it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has
| been gamified by SEO.
|
| I think that is basically what they are complaining about, from
| a content creator's perspective. They are upset that their
| quality content (according to them at least) is losing to ML
| generated garbage, and that google engineers don't even seem to
| be able to understand why that happens.
| emmelaich wrote:
| It's a problem that rankings changed so dramatically and no-one
| really understands why.
|
| Perhaps the ranking was terrible before and now is better. Or
| is it the other way around?
| RA2lover wrote:
| The capability of A/B testing should have made this
| experimentation a one-armed bandit problem, which is far more
| ammenable.
| fallous wrote:
| "I think that the right model for content discovery is either
| crowd sourced by a like-minded community" and now you've re-
| created the original Yahoo search, which was killed off in the
| original Search Engine Wars by the likes of AltaVista and later
| Google because it didn't take long for the amount of new
| content on the web to overwhelm the manual curation process.
|
| A manually curated system can only truly work with a
| constrained domain of content/subject matter and tolerance for
| high lag regarding new information. Wikipedia is an example of
| what that kind of system would look like.
| baranul wrote:
| My take on what the author was getting at, is how Google's
| manipulation of its algorithm has led to poor results and
| backfired on them. Not just for the users of its search engine,
| but small businesses counting on being discovered that way.
|
| Arguably, the problem is black-box algorithms and how they are
| manipulated. The same problem can be faced by any curated
| community, where there is little to no transparency. Curated
| can still mean manipulated. People can jump from place to
| place, but that may not be advantageous, because where they
| want to be or the most likely places for discovery are not
| available.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to
| discover content as it is slowly getting _planted_ by LLMs and
| also for years has been gamified by SEO.
|
| Did you mean supplanted here?
| jumping_frog wrote:
| I think you should read the blogpost again. Google wants these
| smaller websites to come into search results but it can't coax
| the The Algorithm to do it. That's why they are actively trying
| to debug these issues.
| rkagerer wrote:
| The worse Google gets, the bigger the opportunity for someone
| else to displace them and do better. Hopefully, someone who
| actually gives a damn about their users.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Whatever the next version of information retrieval at internet
| scale is, I don't think it will involve indexing the web. I
| think the web's moment has passed.
|
| Maybe the future is something like publishers supplying
| datasets to train models on? Or like how search was built on
| top of the web, it will be something more organic and ad hoc.
| tempest_ wrote:
| The internet is shrinking. The value of indexing the wider
| internet has less and less value to the average person. So
| much sits in walled gardens now and for many people that is
| perfectly fine. If it isnt in tiktok or instagram it doesnt
| exist.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Isn't this just a return to pre-90s internet? Back then the
| internet was only used by a few educated people. The masses
| watched TV etc to fill their time. Now it's tik tok etc.
| The early 2000s was an unusual time when more people
| actually used the internet, but it's going back to normal
| now.
| xvector wrote:
| The future of content is social media. Instagram Reels and
| TikTok. Snapchat and YT Shorts.
|
| People don't want to read articles, they want to watch short
| form videos about what's interesting to them.
|
| An interesting side effect is that I think this will lead to
| more direct-to-consumer sales. Customers will be led straight
| to your website instead of an Amazon order page.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It still needs to be indexed to be searched. Doesn't matter
| if it's articles, books, videos, posts, long or short.
|
| > An interesting side effect is that I think this will lead
| to more direct-to-consumer sales. Customers will be led
| straight to your website instead of an Amazon order page.
|
| That's an excellent outcome if it happens. Businesses
| should produce quality information and content related to
| their product category, instead of purchasing ads on other
| websites. There's a lot of good examples of this.
| lukev wrote:
| Google has clearly transitioned away from prioritizing customer
| value (and content creator value, unless you're an advertiser) in
| favor of some internal opaque KPIs.
|
| After switching to DuckDuckGo years ago, and Kagi last year, it's
| obvious every time I go back to Google how much they have lost
| the plot.
|
| It'll take another decade before they lose dominance, but the
| writing is on the wall. Inertia and market position are the only
| reason they're still on top. Meanwhile, the younger generation
| barely uses web search, and the tech savvy are starting to drain
| away more and more quickly.
|
| Startups should be excited. Rather than being the 800-lb gorilla
| that is going to come take your lunch, Google is the walking dead
| behemoth waiting to be harvested for conceptual parts.
| danjl wrote:
| Google's customers are advertisers. Customers are the people
| who pay you money. Consumers are just the product.
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| google was always by far the best search engine compared to
| the competition, so data harvesting, advertising etc were
| accepted costs of doing business. now search engines all suck
| with the advent of seo, ai pollution, and enshittification -
| so there is no longer an overwhelming benefit to using
| google. interesting to witness control slip from a behemoth.
| v1nvn wrote:
| _Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search_
|
| I might be a little out of touch, but what do they do instead?
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Social media.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| A significant amount also use ChatGPT.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| They use the search box in Telegram, Tiktok, Whatsapp,
| Wechat, etc.
| manquer wrote:
| Seriously ! after switching to Kagi along with recent annoying
| changes to Google search last 2 years , the switch back to
| google unimaginable.
|
| Recently I realized that i only !g to google from kagi just a
| handful of times this year and every time to instant regret .
|
| A marked contrast to couple of years back with DDG !g would
| instinctive and probably half the time and results felt better
| in google . Sticking with DDG felt idealistic and the quality
| second class, not so with Kagi, it feels the $10 pays off every
| month in much improved productivity.
|
| It is to be noted that Kagi uses google search index as a
| source, so it is not like Google cannot improve the results or
| UX technically, just not possible institutionally.
| danjl wrote:
| I understand the frustration, but this article is just conspiracy
| theory based anecdotal data l. The claim that the engineers don't
| understand the Google search algorithm is not backed up by
| anything aside from a casual conversation with one person. These
| are just random thoughts by somebody who doesn't actually
| understand how Google works, who their customers are, and they're
| just frustrated because they are not generating revenue using
| whatever system they had before. And it is feeding off a story
| that has very little basis in fact.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42075387
| transcriptase wrote:
| I doubt many will see this, but Yandex (yes, the Russian Google),
| is basically 2006 Google in the sense that it shows you what you
| want versus what Google's lawyers and a bunch of SF dweebs
| working on their promo packet have in their best interest for you
| to see or not see.
|
| Perhaps there's domestic Russian things that are censored but
| that's far outside my use-case.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Isn't most of Google from 2006 open source, or at least known
| in publicly available papers? So someone in the US should be
| able to re-create Google, and go back to basic page rank.
|
| Is there anything preventing new search engines? Except scale
| and servers. But what most of us want is just plain old
| ordinary search as it existed in 2006, so that is probably
| reproducible.
|
| I know there are some other engines. Like DuckDuckGo, but just
| found out they are really just Bing.
|
| Which I guess begs the question, if Google Sucks so bad, why
| doesn't Bing take over??? It isn't as bad, even if not great.
|
| Edit: After reading more posts. Appears Kagi is doing this.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| > so that is probably reproducible
|
| Is it? How many more pages get published each day? If you
| include each YouTube video and social media post, it's easily
| several orders of magnitude. Organizing this kind of firehose
| isn't easy, neither is prioritizing/ranking it.
|
| 2006 was child's play in comparison.
| transcriptase wrote:
| The difference is 2006 Google just showed you what you were
| searching for. 2024 Google runs your query through 200
| legal, moral, and "benefit to Google" layers of filtering,
| reinterpreting, and reordering before showing you results.
|
| If you don't believe me, search "watch frozen 2" (or
| anything else) on google, then on yandex. Both knew what
| you wanted, but only one is actually going to return the
| relevant results.
| lmkg wrote:
| PageRank relies on pages from one domain linking to pages on
| another domain as the main signal of quality. But no one does
| that anymore, _because of PageRank_. Most cross-domain links
| are from "partnerships" made under the explicit premise of
| boosting PageRank score. The metric became the goal,
| invalidating the metric.
|
| Another factor is that since 2006, social media has displaced
| blogs. Blogs were a rich source of "authentic" cross-domain
| links, and the movement of online discussions to consolidated
| and closed platforms has dried up that well. Some even go so
| far as to pin the downturn of blogging on the demise of
| Google Reader.
| baq wrote:
| The problem with openness has been turned on its head two
| years ago. Nowadays it's the only way to not have your
| thoughts eaten and transformed in inexplicable ways by a
| myriad of LLMs.
| robryan wrote:
| Social media still has a lot of links. They are probably
| all have "nofollow" on them. Assuming google honors that.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Strongly agree. It's like an alternate internet where Google
| stayed cool.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| Yandex is only good if you search in English, because Yandex
| doesn't care about the English market :D. They only care about
| Russian and Turkic makers. (Maybe Vietnam? I forgot.)
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, and Yandex as
| secondary
| bitcurious wrote:
| Yandex is following the same trajectory. Yandex reverse image
| search used to find websites with an image, a la old Google.
| Now it's the same "similar image" crap.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Tangential to the main topic is this quote from the article:
|
| > _I barely getting by, I'm eating at the food bank now, I had
| grossed $250,000 last year_
|
| It's too bad he's in such difficulty that he has to eat at a food
| bank, but where did all that money go? And, presumably, decent
| money earned in previous years?
|
| In a cyclical business, or a business dependent on the vagaries
| of a giant monopolistic corporation that can change the rules
| seemingly arbitrarily, it's prudent to save for a rainy day.
| xvector wrote:
| Could be anything. For example, he may have aggressively been
| paying off a mortgage or student loan debts.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| He stated that he did not have a mortgage.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| He probably eats at a food bank so that he doesn't have to
| touch the money he invested in the stock market when making
| $250 000. Asking him to touch his nest egg would just be cruel,
| so I recommend everybody in the food bank to get out of the
| line and make room when he shows up to fill his duffle bags.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| The difference between theory and practice is that, in practice,
| all theoretical exponentials are eventually sigmoid and, in the
| very long run, bell-shaped.
| hintymad wrote:
| It looks to me that the real problem with Google is that Google
| has become the most bureaucratic company in the past 15 years or
| so. Case in point, how many product managers are in the Infra
| org? Tens since 2019, right? But then, why does an internal Infra
| org need so many PMs? If Infra is like that, we can imagine how
| Google functions.
| voidfunc wrote:
| There's been a pretty massive expansion of bureaucracy in every
| company in the last fifteen years. And government. And
| academia.
|
| It seems like the idea of building a lean company has totally
| fallen by the wayside.
| daft_pink wrote:
| It's incredible that the search results suck so much and then
| this article. They should just let paid users rank their upvote
| and downvote the results they get and feed those into the
| algorithm.
| sberens wrote:
| Does anyone have a set of queries that google returns poor
| results for?
|
| I spent a few minutes looking at my search history (filtering
| chrome history by "google search"), and the vast of my queries
| are quite simple (e.g. people's names) that google does well on
| (in fact I find google search for people better than linkedin
| sometimes).
|
| I also tried a few complex queries and compared them to Kagi:
|
| "How much bitcoin does microstrategy own" -> Google returns the
| correct snippet from here[0] while Kagi only linked to articles
| about how much it acquired in the last few days.
|
| "how to pronounce stratchery" -> Google returns the correct
| snippet from the Stratechery website[1] while Kagi's first result
| is a spam entry[2] with the wrong pronunciation (the second
| result is a tweet with the correct pronunciation).
|
| I'd be curious to see more comparisons!
|
| Edit: I just remembered Dan Luu's post (https://danluu.com/seo-
| spam/) but after looking through my search history, the queries
| he uses are not at all representative of my day to day searches.
|
| [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-
| assets/2024/11/29/micro...
|
| [1]https://stratechery.com/category/about/#:~:text=UPDATE%3A%20..
| ..
|
| [2]https://www.howtopronounce.com/stratechery
| tim333 wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing. I see all these complaints that
| Google is awful and broken but it generally seems to work fine
| for me, apart from stuff that all the search engines struggle
| with.
|
| Some example of something that's hard to find with Google but
| easy with something else?
|
| I mean some recent global use stats are
|
| Google 89.33% bing 4.15% YANDEX 2.8% Yahoo! 1.33% Baidu 0.83%
| DuckDuckGo 0.69% (oct 2024, https://gs.statcounter.com/search-
| engine-market-share)
|
| If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on
| one of the other ones?
|
| I sympathise with Giant Freakin Robot not getting clicks - I'd
| never heard of them. But that's different from Google being bad
| from a user point of view.
|
| I just tried clicking on them all - they all work. Baidu is
| kind of funny as it's all in Chinese and searching The Sound of
| Music came back with Chinese which Google translated to "The
| Nun and the Seven Naughty Children!"
| WalterBright wrote:
| People often say that successful businesses inevitably grow until
| they take over the world. The trouble is, as an organization gets
| larger, it becomes optimized for what it does, and the internal
| bureaucratic inertia becomes impossible to adapt to new business
| realities. And so it eventually collapses.
| kaoD wrote:
| How do you explain Microsoft though? Even though they lost the
| smartphone train they seem to be taking all the right steps
| under Nadella and seem to be adapting well to all the new
| market circumstances.
|
| To me it feels that leadership matters more than we give them
| credit for. It's just that most leadership sucks.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Great question. There's been a boom recently in giant tech
| companies. I suspect that is attributable to AI being a big
| productivity booster, which overcomes creeping calcification.
| For a while.
|
| I agree with you that Nadella has done a spectacular job, and
| that leadership matters more than most people think it does.
| I'd call his performance an outlier.
| notadoc wrote:
| Google search results now are nearly unusable, most look like
| this:
|
| - Top of the page is slow loading AI regurgitation of deeply
| buried real web results, but often wildly inaccurate. No thanks.
|
| - Next are a bunch of YouTube videos you don't want to watch
| where you have to wade through dozens of ads and hours of content
| to get the 3 seconds of information you're looking for. No
| thanks.
|
| - "Related search" nonsense that nobody ever wants to see but if
| you click on those you will get more of the above. No thanks.
|
| - Some useless unrelated shopping links you almost certainly
| don't want. No thanks.
|
| - Way down at the bottom, 2-3 real web search results, non-
| keyword matched, and only from major mainstream outlets that are
| part of the Trusted News Initiative (Orwell?!) that have turned
| into glorified content farms which spit out non-expert written
| content on every conceivable subject for Googlebot (and now most
| of this content is AI written or from the cheapest possible third
| world contractors). No thanks.
|
| Those "real web search results" used to be independent publishers
| that are referenced in this article, which were often topical
| experts with deep knowledge on their respective subjects, and
| those people and businesses have been destroyed over the last few
| years by Google updates that clearly prioritize their own slop
| and their "trusted" corporate ally content farms over the
| independent web.
|
| They also disappears tons of content, and anything critical or
| outside of the mainstream acceptable narrative is nowhere to be
| found, sort of like searching for "tank man" from inside China,
| something everyone in the west used to poke fun of and point to
| as an example of digital totalitarianism.
|
| If I were running Google search I would immediately roll back all
| of their search changes to somewhere around 2014-2016, which was
| roughly the last time you could find true keyword matched web
| results from a hugely diverse array of expert sources, and then
| very cautiously reassess. Obviously they would never do that, so
| I am not sure they can recover from their own demise.
|
| BTW I don't find DuckDuckGo or Bing to be much better, they seem
| to just mimic Google results. Search is in real trouble.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Check out their cloud API dash board it's like the nuclear power
| station control room. 50 toggles, I would have went default to
| simple mode and an advanced mode. But no, they put every dial and
| switch in front
| praptak wrote:
| _" As is the fact that around the same time others also warned
| that one common consequence of mass layoffs is they tend to turn
| internal systems into black boxes because everybody with a deep
| understanding of them has left."_
|
| Direct loss of knowledgeable people is real but it is not the
| main reason for these systems becoming black boxes.
|
| For every knowledgeable person laid off there's twenty who stay
| and adjust to the new reality where their future at the company
| is much less certain. These adjustments vary person to person but
| literally nobody goes to say "Whoa, I better improve the
| documentation and share my knowledge so that I'm easier to fire!"
| jopsen wrote:
| I've seen the opposite effect.
|
| Where people in a large organisations work to make an open
| source project more resistant to organizational changes (and
| priorities).
|
| But yes, layoffs certainly has negative side effects.
| firefoxd wrote:
| When I was leaving a job, I decided to start documenting
| things. I had a solid documentation before I gave my two weeks
| notice. Then I used the remaining time to refine it, it was a
| pretty good documentation.
|
| A month after I left, they contacted me and offered contract
| work, which i declined. For the following year, employees
| reached out to me directly for help. It didn't matter that
| everything I helped with was already documented.
|
| My take is there isn't a solution for proper knowledge transfer
| in companies. That's why I find it fascinating when people get
| fired on a whim. You lose so much more than an employee.
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| I don't feel like this article has much interesting information
| even tho I agree with the premise.
|
| I've been using AI tools to search now. I barely ever use a raw
| search bar anymore.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I appreciated the quotes pulled from people this affects, and I
| hadn't heard of this particular summit.
|
| I've basically moved all my search to perplexity but would like
| to do something on prem now that I can fit the 70B models on my
| machine, I still have to choose a search index (maybe I can
| self host searXNG) but that still relies in part on what Google
| classifies as worthy of ranking, no?
|
| I hope webrings and reputation networks can make a comeback
| somehow so my LLM only has to comb through high quality
| material instead of searching for a needle of useful text in a
| mountain of spam.
| tu7001 wrote:
| "Anybody who has used Google for search over the past year knows
| that it lets a lot of LLM-generated spam" I haven't used google
| for years, so what does it exactly mean?
| Havoc wrote:
| What surprises me is how calm Google is. I'd say my own Google
| usage has drop 80%+ too since LLM arrival. All the Google
| products remaining are likely loss leaders. YouTube w/ Adblock
| etc
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