12 ms·

Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers. Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to

Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers. Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.

jamiek88 5y ago
Ugh Pinterest results.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  I swear, Pinterest must have employees working undercover in the Image Search team for Google to have let them destroy image search results the way they have. It's literally never the original source for anything, but you can bet it's most of the first 10 pages of results. Then it doesn't even let you right click to open the image file, and dumps you to a login prompt if you click on anything. THAT'S NOT EVEN YOUR IMAGE STOP TELLING ME WHAT I CAN DO WITH IT.
  - kemotep 5y ago
    And if it is not a pintrest link it is an amp link which is equally bad in my experience. I just want to link a picture. Not a link to a page that might have the picture but might also have the entire article/reddit discussion and not the image which I was searching for.
    - wlesieutre 5y ago
      When I'm reverse image searching something it's often to find the original artist of an illustration, photo, or whatever. I want to know who made it, see their other work, and find it in its original quality without 15 generations of jpg recompression artifacts. But no, Pinterest has better SEO than the artist does, so it's just endless reposts upon reposts and never the original work. Occasionally you get lucky and it's not the sort of image that Pinterest users share. Then you might actually find where it came from.
      - IggleSniggle 5y ago
        THIS. So much this. Time was when you could actually discover the provenance of an image. Almost every time, when I’m doing a reverse image search, that is my intent. It used to work. It seldom does these days.
        wlesieutre 5y ago
        In my recent experience, Bing, Tineye, and Yandex are all better at finding image sources than Google Images. But who knows how long that will last.
      - tempestn 5y ago
        And the interesting thing about that is, you'd think it would be (relatively speaking) straightforward for Google to keep track of the first place a given image was indexed (or possibly the first few places, or everywhere it was seen over the first X period of time since you couldn't guarantee the very first would always be the original). Assuming that original was still online, it would seem to be the place to direct searchers to, regardless of pagerank or whatever.
      - jsjohnst 5y ago
        Try using tineye.com. It has noise too, but seems to be easier to find the original source than Google these days, at least for me anyway.
    - eythian 5y ago
      I find this helps: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/view-image/ https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/view-image/ It puts the "view image" button back.
  - bobcostas55 5y ago
    Really makes you wonder if the people at google actually use their own product. Anyone who has ever used google image search in the past couple of years will have noticed that it's filled to the brim with garbage results from pinterest.
    - visarga 5y ago
      I have fallen in love with Yandex image similarity search (search by providing a query image, not text). You can find so much more with it, it's like Pinterest but without the crap. For example I could find images for my ML model but also furniture ideas for my house and check if my kid is objectively cuter than average (lol, yeah, objectively!).
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I'd expect a company like google, who tracks what kind of socks you have on everyday, to also track their own search engine... users mistakingly clicks on pinterest link, user immediatly clicks back, and looks for something else... is it so hard to assume, that they don't want pinterest results, because they're useless, and somehow lower their seo score? Nooo, of course not, just put the pinterest results near the top, until users puts "-pinterest" in the search bar.
duskwuff 5y ago
Free WordPress* themes are particularly bad in this regard. Since they're expected to contain HTML anyway, it's altogether too easy for the author of a theme to include a couple of links to a site they want to promote. Some themes take this to the next level by obfuscating the code that generates the promotional links, and/or including other code which makes the site not work properly if the links are removed. *: and themes for other web applications, but mostly WordPress these days
naikrovek 5y ago
google isn't the cesspool, people who want to appear at the top of a list of search results are doing whatever it takes to create a cesspool, because that's what it takes to earn more money. being willing to make other things in order to have more money always creates cesspools.
- Retric 5y ago
  Google is a cesspool because it’s their job to fix it and they failed. I stopped using Google search because of how far it’s fallen.
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  If its the only way to make money, it doesn't really feel like the burden is on the people to make a cleaner pool
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    there is never only a single way to make money. some ways are easier. some ways let you take advantage of others; these are of the variety that create cesspools.
- prepend 5y ago
  Google’s mission was “organize the world’s information and make it useful” and they are doing a poorer job now than historically. Of course there are scammers, that’s part of what makes organizing so hard. Cynically, I think that Google is worse as filtering scammers is because they care less now. Half the page is ads so they make money either way.
wingworks 5y ago
I really don't like how easy it is to fake a "new" article on Google. You can just re-publish an old article and stick a new date on it and Googles takes it on face value and uses the new date.
- BigJono 5y ago
  I ran into this for the first time yesterday when trying to find out new info about a footy player. Some article from 15 years ago talking about how he had a good first game, tagged as 5th june 2021. Like, wtf?
  - lethologica 5y ago
    I have been seeing this a lot recently too. Especially with the first result or two. Or the section up top that gives you a partial answer without having to click through. All of them always seem to have been freshly written like some made to order meal at a restaurant. It’s just too suspicious really.
- sellyme 5y ago
  You can also do the opposite: post something today and say it was up on your site in 2003. Makes it really difficult to find old pages about something that recently exploded in popularity, because the age filter just doesn't work.
XorNot 5y ago
Also phone problems: Google a problem with a phone and the top hit will be a whole bunch of churned out articles with generic copy on the cause (sometimes there are bugs in the software, so reboot your phone).
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Any technical issue, really. There's a ton of autogenerated content out there with low-effort troubleshooting tips. A lot of it is used as lead generation for scammy antivirus/antimalware/"cleaner" software, paid tech support, or outright tech support scams.
  - initplus 5y ago
    These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites. Yes, I clicked the link because it exactly referenced my issue. But it's not helpful to just see the same 5 tips copy pasted from elsewhere by an algorithm.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - minikites 5y ago
      >These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites. Why? Google makes money from advertisements either way, it's not in their interest to improve search results. If anything, terrible search results make users more likely to click on ads, which now look better by comparison.
      - lupire 5y ago
        The entire reason Google is the most successful search engine is that people don't use search engines that behave this way.
        5y ago
newacct583 5y ago
> Google has turned into a cesspool. All these same sites appear near the top of Bing searches too. There's nothing particularly Google-specific to this story. It's about SEO hacking that will work against anyone with a PageRank-style system.
- worble 5y ago
  I think it's high time we had a webring resurgence. It's impossible to get anywhere with plain search anymore, what we need is curated websites that other domain owners are happy to say "I endorse the people running this site, so if like my stuff you'll like them too"
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Isn't that what people go to social media for?
    - bottled_poe 5y ago
      Social media is gamed the same way? Sharebots, etc
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        Do you suppose Web rings wouldn't be when there's money in it? There was plenty of that when they were just for fun.
        IggleSniggle 5y ago
        It’s fundamentally about trust models. That is to say, about the audience. Everybody gave up trusting webrings because Google provided better results. Now that Google results are shit, there’s room for other information vendors to come along, even if it’s in narrow areas. Actually, HN is already this for me in some respects.
aarchi 5y ago
Anecdotally DuckDuckGo seems to have fewer sponsored sites than Google. DDG also makes it easy to block low-quality sites because it adds a data-domain attribute to the root of every search result. I recently started this mini uBlock Origin filter list for that (suggestions welcome!): ! Hide low-quality results on DuckDuckGo duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="w3schools.com"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=".w3schools.com"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="w3schools.in"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=".w3schools.in"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="download.cnet.com"] !! Stack Exchange mirrors duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="exceptionshub.com"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="intellipaat.com"]
- bassdropvroom 5y ago
  Great tip! I've been using DDG's official addon but this means one less addon. Thanks!
- raverbashing 5y ago
  Great idea. Though I've noticed DDG promotes "blogspam" articles more often than the authoritative sources. Let's say, if I search for a python builtin library, I want to go to the python website, not some "Python 101" blog post about it.
- zem 5y ago
  pinterest.com would clean up another large chunk of crap
colordrops 5y ago
Google Search is ripe for disruption. It's been over 20 years now and they are not dynamic or interesting at all anymore.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  It's so easy to do better! Just look at what a rousing success Cuil was.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    Nobody said it would be easy. Industries ripe for disruption are often very hard to break into. Being ripe for disruption is more about giving up on innovating so you stagnate.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  I still think that the "Yahoo!" style web directory is a good model. A catalogue of hand-curated links has increasing value as the quality of Google results goes down. I was briefly going to write "I'm surprised that DMOZ[1] still exists" but it says "Copyright 2017 AOL" at the bottom so maybe it doesn't. Edit: ...and using the search box results in a 404 so I guess it's really dead huh. Edit 2: Apparently this is the successor! https://curlie.org/en https://curlie.org/en [1]: https://dmoz-odp.org https://dmoz-odp.org
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    The creation and maintenance of such a directory might additionally be more feasible now because sadly there are much fewer personal or independent websites instead of content hosted on large platforms.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    I just tried to use both to look up pharmacies via navigation.. With Dmoz after my second try I was able to find CVS, but I wasn't able to find it with Curlie.. It's not a bad idea to have a curated dataset of information. But clearly there are much better ways to navigate said information, which would include search, but also dynamic filters, predictive text, sorting algorithms, context awareness, etc. All of which... is built into modern search engines. So perhaps what we really want is a Wikipedia/OpenStreetMaps of curated, indexed, semantic content/links, that anyone can consume and write their own search interface for. Basically, an open data warehouse of website information.
gerdesj 5y ago
"Google has turned into a cesspool." That's a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came out and destroyed Altavista in a spectacular shower of sparks. Could I tender: "uBlacklist" as a stop gap, amongst others as we await Google being given a right old kicking? Despite being a staunch Arch Linux user I have to deal with rather a lot of MS Windows related stuff. Being able to filter out that bloody awful Microsoft Social thing gets me closer to decent results. The majority of the next 10-100 results will be CnP clones of someone's blog but a human is able to get in reasonably quickly. I'm toying with blocking Stackoverflow and other cough slatwarts to see if results get better for me. In my opinion: the www has hit a crossroads or perhaps a Spaghetti Junction or a Magic Roundabout for the last five years or so and continuing. However the exits are connected to the entrances on these road systems (take a look at them - they are real junctions. The MR is particularly terrifying but it works really well.) I still won't use words like cesspool for this but I am increasingly losing my patience over the standard of results from Google. Those featured things (not the Ads - that's fine) at the top which add #blah_blah to the URL to colour search terms yellow is not working for me. The quality of the returns featured in a box are often rubbish too. It would be nice to be able to turn all that stuff off. I understand that Google are trying to "be" the internet to try and keep the stock ticker pointing north but there seems to be a point when they have overreached themselves and I think that was passed several years ago. I also increasingly feel that Google thinks that it knows best and has removed many choices from their various UIs - that comes across as a bit arrogant. Many years ago I left Altavista behind for Google. I will move again if I feel I have to. Of course that's not much in the grand scheme of things and I'll probably only take around 100,000 people with me but they have friends - still probably not a big deal.
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  I'm amazed that there isn't anything like uBlock Origin for search results.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    "My eyes are bent, my back is grey etc" I think we have loads of tools to play with but fundamentally there is a problem when you are fighting with your search engine to find stuff you want to find. My laptop (Arch) still has Chromium as default with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, uBlacklist and a few others running. I will be moving back to FF and running a sync server because I am that pissed off and able to do so. I'll also take a few others with me (between 2 and rather more) When I say move back to FF, I'm talking about something like reverting a 10-15 years change. I've always had FF available but it fell short back in the day for long enough for me to move to the Goggle thing. Now I think I'll go back. Noone at G will lament their loss, I'm not even a rounding error. I'm sure that all is fine there.
luke2m 5y ago
I don’t like google and don’t really want to defend it, but this is more of a lots of crappy websites problem than a google problem.
- worik 5y ago
  Google, to justify its huge capital worth, should deal with that crap. Why else bother?
paulpauper 5y ago
I wish duckduckgo had better results. google still better
cyanydeez 5y ago
dont forget adding quotes to things to stop the random "did you mean to spell this?" crap basically, like everything in modernity, its a race to the bottom of the infinite dullards of popular
torbital 5y ago
I can't remember the last time I searched on Google without appending "reddit" to the end.
normac2 5y ago
Hmn. I would agree about all crap being mixed in there, but in terms of overall results (both wrt. SEO crap and other irrelevant stuff), my experience has been that the quality troughed something like 2-3 years ago and then came back (my guess is that they're incorporating all of the AI they've been doing throughout the company into search). To me it feels like it's about 80% of its best right now. I bet it's that we do different types of searches.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
elchupanebre 5y ago
The reason for that is actually rational: when Amit Singhal was in charge the search rules were written by hand. Once he was fired, the Search Quality team switched to machine learning. The ML was better in many ways: it produced higher quality results with a lot less effort. It just had one possibly fatal flaw: if some result was wrong there was no recourse. And that's what you are observing now: search quality is good or excellent most of the time while sometimes it's very bad and G can't fix it.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  I wouldn't call that rational. There is no reason you can't apply human weighting on top of ML. Honestly, I don't believe for a minute they "can't fix it." They do this sort of thing all the time, for instance when ML shows dark skinned people for a search for gorilla, they obviously have recourse.
  - htrp 5y ago
    You do know that Google basically slapped a patch on that one right? https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
    - brigandish 5y ago
      I’m confused. I read that article and it has this: > But, as a new report from Wired shows, nearly three years on and Google hasn’t really fixed anything. The company has simply blocked its image recognition algorithms from identifying gorillas altogether — preferring, presumably, to limit the service rather than risk another miscategorization. Is that not an example of human intervention in ML?
    - robbrown451 5y ago
      Yes but then they fixed it right.
      - 5y ago
lupire 5y ago
> Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov A great opportunity for students and public servants to sell premium URLs.
ping_pong 5y ago
Google is a cesspool because the spammers and SEO-hackers are in full force, and Google is only reactive to these threats these days. I mean, does it really matter if they are making hundreds of billions of dollars a year? They seem to be doing something right. The only time something will change is when traffic starts decreasing to their site, but it's good enough such that people won't change. Look at Facebook, I don't know anyone who uses it as much as they used to 10 years ago, but it's making the most money it ever has. Why on earth would any behavior change? From their points of view, everyone is happy with it!
cookiengineer 5y ago
I also noticed that Apple users see way more fake online shop results than Linux users, from the same IP, with regularly cleared browser cache and identical search terms. Those fake shops are part of discussions in politics right now. Usually they're registered in Ireland or Malta as companies due to their specific banking laws. They make millions with those scams and people can't differ between legit online shops and fake ones - because the legit ones actually look crappier than the fake ones when it comes to the website designs. In Germany, we have at least for hardware the "geizhals" website which is kind of an index for all kinds of electronics shops and they try to verify as much as possible. But for other online shop sectors (e.g. clothing or home stuff) I wouldn't trust anything. Even on Amazon I got scammed a lot and heard absurd things from others...like getting packages with no content in them and Amazon refusing to see that the seller is a scammer etc.

jamiek88 5y ago

Ugh Pinterest results.

wlesieutre 5y ago
I swear, Pinterest must have employees working undercover in the Image Search team for Google to have let them destroy image search results the way they have. It's literally never the original source for anything, but you can bet it's most of the first 10 pages of results. Then it doesn't even let you right click to open the image file, and dumps you to a login prompt if you click on anything. THAT'S NOT EVEN YOUR IMAGE STOP TELLING ME WHAT I CAN DO WITH IT.
- kemotep 5y ago
  And if it is not a pintrest link it is an amp link which is equally bad in my experience. I just want to link a picture. Not a link to a page that might have the picture but might also have the entire article/reddit discussion and not the image which I was searching for.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    When I'm reverse image searching something it's often to find the original artist of an illustration, photo, or whatever. I want to know who made it, see their other work, and find it in its original quality without 15 generations of jpg recompression artifacts. But no, Pinterest has better SEO than the artist does, so it's just endless reposts upon reposts and never the original work. Occasionally you get lucky and it's not the sort of image that Pinterest users share. Then you might actually find where it came from.
    - IggleSniggle 5y ago
      THIS. So much this. Time was when you could actually discover the provenance of an image. Almost every time, when I’m doing a reverse image search, that is my intent. It used to work. It seldom does these days.
      - wlesieutre 5y ago
        In my recent experience, Bing, Tineye, and Yandex are all better at finding image sources than Google Images. But who knows how long that will last.
    - tempestn 5y ago
      And the interesting thing about that is, you'd think it would be (relatively speaking) straightforward for Google to keep track of the first place a given image was indexed (or possibly the first few places, or everywhere it was seen over the first X period of time since you couldn't guarantee the very first would always be the original). Assuming that original was still online, it would seem to be the place to direct searchers to, regardless of pagerank or whatever.
    - jsjohnst 5y ago
      Try using tineye.com. It has noise too, but seems to be easier to find the original source than Google these days, at least for me anyway.
  - eythian 5y ago
    I find this helps: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/view-image/ https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/view-image/ It puts the "view image" button back.
- bobcostas55 5y ago
  Really makes you wonder if the people at google actually use their own product. Anyone who has ever used google image search in the past couple of years will have noticed that it's filled to the brim with garbage results from pinterest.
  - visarga 5y ago
    I have fallen in love with Yandex image similarity search (search by providing a query image, not text). You can find so much more with it, it's like Pinterest but without the crap. For example I could find images for my ML model but also furniture ideas for my house and check if my kid is objectively cuter than average (lol, yeah, objectively!).
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I'd expect a company like google, who tracks what kind of socks you have on everyday, to also track their own search engine... users mistakingly clicks on pinterest link, user immediatly clicks back, and looks for something else... is it so hard to assume, that they don't want pinterest results, because they're useless, and somehow lower their seo score? Nooo, of course not, just put the pinterest results near the top, until users puts "-pinterest" in the search bar.

duskwuff 5y ago

Free WordPress* themes are particularly bad in this regard. Since they're expected to contain HTML anyway, it's altogether too easy for the author of a theme to include a couple of links to a site they want to promote. Some themes take this to the next level by obfuscating the code that generates the promotional links, and/or including other code which makes the site not work properly if the links are removed. *: and themes for other web applications, but mostly WordPress these days

naikrovek 5y ago

google isn't the cesspool, people who want to appear at the top of a list of search results are doing whatever it takes to create a cesspool, because that's what it takes to earn more money. being willing to make other things in order to have more money always creates cesspools.

Retric 5y ago
Google is a cesspool because it’s their job to fix it and they failed. I stopped using Google search because of how far it’s fallen.
beepbooptheory 5y ago
If its the only way to make money, it doesn't really feel like the burden is on the people to make a cleaner pool
- naikrovek 5y ago
  there is never only a single way to make money. some ways are easier. some ways let you take advantage of others; these are of the variety that create cesspools.
prepend 5y ago
Google’s mission was “organize the world’s information and make it useful” and they are doing a poorer job now than historically. Of course there are scammers, that’s part of what makes organizing so hard. Cynically, I think that Google is worse as filtering scammers is because they care less now. Half the page is ads so they make money either way.

wingworks 5y ago

I really don't like how easy it is to fake a "new" article on Google. You can just re-publish an old article and stick a new date on it and Googles takes it on face value and uses the new date.

BigJono 5y ago
I ran into this for the first time yesterday when trying to find out new info about a footy player. Some article from 15 years ago talking about how he had a good first game, tagged as 5th june 2021. Like, wtf?
- lethologica 5y ago
  I have been seeing this a lot recently too. Especially with the first result or two. Or the section up top that gives you a partial answer without having to click through. All of them always seem to have been freshly written like some made to order meal at a restaurant. It’s just too suspicious really.
sellyme 5y ago
You can also do the opposite: post something today and say it was up on your site in 2003. Makes it really difficult to find old pages about something that recently exploded in popularity, because the age filter just doesn't work.

XorNot 5y ago

Also phone problems: Google a problem with a phone and the top hit will be a whole bunch of churned out articles with generic copy on the cause (sometimes there are bugs in the software, so reboot your phone).

duskwuff 5y ago
Any technical issue, really. There's a ton of autogenerated content out there with low-effort troubleshooting tips. A lot of it is used as lead generation for scammy antivirus/antimalware/"cleaner" software, paid tech support, or outright tech support scams.
- initplus 5y ago
  These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites. Yes, I clicked the link because it exactly referenced my issue. But it's not helpful to just see the same 5 tips copy pasted from elsewhere by an algorithm.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - minikites 5y ago
    >These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites. Why? Google makes money from advertisements either way, it's not in their interest to improve search results. If anything, terrible search results make users more likely to click on ads, which now look better by comparison.
    - lupire 5y ago
      The entire reason Google is the most successful search engine is that people don't use search engines that behave this way.
      - 5y ago

newacct583 5y ago

> Google has turned into a cesspool. All these same sites appear near the top of Bing searches too. There's nothing particularly Google-specific to this story. It's about SEO hacking that will work against anyone with a PageRank-style system.

worble 5y ago
I think it's high time we had a webring resurgence. It's impossible to get anywhere with plain search anymore, what we need is curated websites that other domain owners are happy to say "I endorse the people running this site, so if like my stuff you'll like them too"
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Isn't that what people go to social media for?
  - bottled_poe 5y ago
    Social media is gamed the same way? Sharebots, etc
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Do you suppose Web rings wouldn't be when there's money in it? There was plenty of that when they were just for fun.
      - IggleSniggle 5y ago
        It’s fundamentally about trust models. That is to say, about the audience. Everybody gave up trusting webrings because Google provided better results. Now that Google results are shit, there’s room for other information vendors to come along, even if it’s in narrow areas. Actually, HN is already this for me in some respects.

aarchi 5y ago

Anecdotally DuckDuckGo seems to have fewer sponsored sites than Google. DDG also makes it easy to block low-quality sites because it adds a data-domain attribute to the root of every search result. I recently started this mini uBlock Origin filter list for that (suggestions welcome!): ! Hide low-quality results on DuckDuckGo duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="w3schools.com"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=".w3schools.com"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="w3schools.in"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=".w3schools.in"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="download.cnet.com"] !! Stack Exchange mirrors duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="exceptionshub.com"] duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="intellipaat.com"]

bassdropvroom 5y ago
Great tip! I've been using DDG's official addon but this means one less addon. Thanks!
raverbashing 5y ago
Great idea. Though I've noticed DDG promotes "blogspam" articles more often than the authoritative sources. Let's say, if I search for a python builtin library, I want to go to the python website, not some "Python 101" blog post about it.
zem 5y ago
pinterest.com would clean up another large chunk of crap

colordrops 5y ago

Google Search is ripe for disruption. It's been over 20 years now and they are not dynamic or interesting at all anymore.

emodendroket 5y ago
It's so easy to do better! Just look at what a rousing success Cuil was.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Nobody said it would be easy. Industries ripe for disruption are often very hard to break into. Being ripe for disruption is more about giving up on innovating so you stagnate.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I still think that the "Yahoo!" style web directory is a good model. A catalogue of hand-curated links has increasing value as the quality of Google results goes down. I was briefly going to write "I'm surprised that DMOZ[1] still exists" but it says "Copyright 2017 AOL" at the bottom so maybe it doesn't. Edit: ...and using the search box results in a 404 so I guess it's really dead huh. Edit 2: Apparently this is the successor! https://curlie.org/en https://curlie.org/en [1]: https://dmoz-odp.org https://dmoz-odp.org
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  The creation and maintenance of such a directory might additionally be more feasible now because sadly there are much fewer personal or independent websites instead of content hosted on large platforms.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  I just tried to use both to look up pharmacies via navigation.. With Dmoz after my second try I was able to find CVS, but I wasn't able to find it with Curlie.. It's not a bad idea to have a curated dataset of information. But clearly there are much better ways to navigate said information, which would include search, but also dynamic filters, predictive text, sorting algorithms, context awareness, etc. All of which... is built into modern search engines. So perhaps what we really want is a Wikipedia/OpenStreetMaps of curated, indexed, semantic content/links, that anyone can consume and write their own search interface for. Basically, an open data warehouse of website information.

gerdesj 5y ago

"Google has turned into a cesspool." That's a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came out and destroyed Altavista in a spectacular shower of sparks. Could I tender: "uBlacklist" as a stop gap, amongst others as we await Google being given a right old kicking? Despite being a staunch Arch Linux user I have to deal with rather a lot of MS Windows related stuff. Being able to filter out that bloody awful Microsoft Social thing gets me closer to decent results. The majority of the next 10-100 results will be CnP clones of someone's blog but a human is able to get in reasonably quickly. I'm toying with blocking Stackoverflow and other cough slatwarts to see if results get better for me. In my opinion: the www has hit a crossroads or perhaps a Spaghetti Junction or a Magic Roundabout for the last five years or so and continuing. However the exits are connected to the entrances on these road systems (take a look at them - they are real junctions. The MR is particularly terrifying but it works really well.) I still won't use words like cesspool for this but I am increasingly losing my patience over the standard of results from Google. Those featured things (not the Ads - that's fine) at the top which add #blah_blah to the URL to colour search terms yellow is not working for me. The quality of the returns featured in a box are often rubbish too. It would be nice to be able to turn all that stuff off. I understand that Google are trying to "be" the internet to try and keep the stock ticker pointing north but there seems to be a point when they have overreached themselves and I think that was passed several years ago. I also increasingly feel that Google thinks that it knows best and has removed many choices from their various UIs - that comes across as a bit arrogant. Many years ago I left Altavista behind for Google. I will move again if I feel I have to. Of course that's not much in the grand scheme of things and I'll probably only take around 100,000 people with me but they have friends - still probably not a big deal.

emptyparadise 5y ago
I'm amazed that there isn't anything like uBlock Origin for search results.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  "My eyes are bent, my back is grey etc" I think we have loads of tools to play with but fundamentally there is a problem when you are fighting with your search engine to find stuff you want to find. My laptop (Arch) still has Chromium as default with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, uBlacklist and a few others running. I will be moving back to FF and running a sync server because I am that pissed off and able to do so. I'll also take a few others with me (between 2 and rather more) When I say move back to FF, I'm talking about something like reverting a 10-15 years change. I've always had FF available but it fell short back in the day for long enough for me to move to the Goggle thing. Now I think I'll go back. Noone at G will lament their loss, I'm not even a rounding error. I'm sure that all is fine there.

luke2m 5y ago

I don’t like google and don’t really want to defend it, but this is more of a lots of crappy websites problem than a google problem.

worik 5y ago
Google, to justify its huge capital worth, should deal with that crap. Why else bother?

paulpauper 5y ago

I wish duckduckgo had better results. google still better

cyanydeez 5y ago

dont forget adding quotes to things to stop the random "did you mean to spell this?" crap basically, like everything in modernity, its a race to the bottom of the infinite dullards of popular

torbital 5y ago

I can't remember the last time I searched on Google without appending "reddit" to the end.

normac2 5y ago

Hmn. I would agree about all crap being mixed in there, but in terms of overall results (both wrt. SEO crap and other irrelevant stuff), my experience has been that the quality troughed something like 2-3 years ago and then came back (my guess is that they're incorporating all of the AI they've been doing throughout the company into search). To me it feels like it's about 80% of its best right now. I bet it's that we do different types of searches.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

elchupanebre 5y ago

The reason for that is actually rational: when Amit Singhal was in charge the search rules were written by hand. Once he was fired, the Search Quality team switched to machine learning. The ML was better in many ways: it produced higher quality results with a lot less effort. It just had one possibly fatal flaw: if some result was wrong there was no recourse. And that's what you are observing now: search quality is good or excellent most of the time while sometimes it's very bad and G can't fix it.

robbrown451 5y ago
I wouldn't call that rational. There is no reason you can't apply human weighting on top of ML. Honestly, I don't believe for a minute they "can't fix it." They do this sort of thing all the time, for instance when ML shows dark skinned people for a search for gorilla, they obviously have recourse.
- htrp 5y ago
  You do know that Google basically slapped a patch on that one right? https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
  - brigandish 5y ago
    I’m confused. I read that article and it has this: > But, as a new report from Wired shows, nearly three years on and Google hasn’t really fixed anything. The company has simply blocked its image recognition algorithms from identifying gorillas altogether — preferring, presumably, to limit the service rather than risk another miscategorization. Is that not an example of human intervention in ML?
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    Yes but then they fixed it right.
    - 5y ago

lupire 5y ago

> Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov A great opportunity for students and public servants to sell premium URLs.

ping_pong 5y ago

Google is a cesspool because the spammers and SEO-hackers are in full force, and Google is only reactive to these threats these days. I mean, does it really matter if they are making hundreds of billions of dollars a year? They seem to be doing something right. The only time something will change is when traffic starts decreasing to their site, but it's good enough such that people won't change. Look at Facebook, I don't know anyone who uses it as much as they used to 10 years ago, but it's making the most money it ever has. Why on earth would any behavior change? From their points of view, everyone is happy with it!

cookiengineer 5y ago

I also noticed that Apple users see way more fake online shop results than Linux users, from the same IP, with regularly cleared browser cache and identical search terms. Those fake shops are part of discussions in politics right now. Usually they're registered in Ireland or Malta as companies due to their specific banking laws. They make millions with those scams and people can't differ between legit online shops and fake ones - because the legit ones actually look crappier than the fake ones when it comes to the website designs. In Germany, we have at least for hardware the "geizhals" website which is kind of an index for all kinds of electronics shops and they try to verify as much as possible. But for other online shop sectors (e.g. clothing or home stuff) I wouldn't trust anything. Even on Amazon I got scammed a lot and heard absurd things from others...like getting packages with no content in them and Amazon refusing to see that the seller is a scammer etc.