25 ms·

Google Search Is Dying (2022)

• ushtaritk421 4y ago
  Google could get me to come back if it: 1. Offered a paid version without sponsored results 2. Let me block sites from my results (bonus points if it penalizes sites with lots of users blocking their results)
• jonplackett 4y ago
  > Early adopters aren’t using Google anymore. OK guys - what are you all using instead?
  • bouvin 4y ago
    In my case, Kagi.
• tzhenghao 4y ago
  > The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses, which is largely the issue with Google ads outlined by author.
  • mstipetic 4y ago
    I never understood how Reddit isn’t an advertising powerhouse. Their users literally voluntarily segregate by interest, but the proper tech never got built out. Last I checked they integrated a 3rd party solution for that.
    • petesergeant 4y ago
      I would guess they have a huge problem with ad blocking
      • margorczynski 4y ago
        Especially that places like Reddit attract more "tech-savvy" people who have a high amount of ad block users. Naive web ads on places like that or e.g. Ars Technica is tricky most probably.
        • hbn 4y ago
          I think that was the case a few years back, but these days a lot of casual users are accessing it through the official app and getting served tons of ads. It was a weird moment seeing a reddit comment where someone referred to the site as "this app." Made me feel old.
      • polski-g 4y ago
        They need to make the ads and relevant HTML look identical to "real" posts so adblocking doesn't work
        • brookst 4y ago
          This devaluing content to humans, thus breaking what makes the site good.
    • oblio 4y ago
      If you look at their software dev efforts it should be painfully obvious why they're not a powerhouse of anything :-) They had great product-market fit early on, were boosted by YN, and inertia is a huge thing.
      • LewisVerstappen 4y ago
        Yeah, it's an absurdly poorly managed company.
        • bigbacaloa 4y ago
          Which is why it's still useful.
    • LegitShady 4y ago
      reddit became massive overnight because digg imploded. digg imploded because they tried to turn into an advertising powerhouse.
    • ilyt 4y ago
      I remember how their idea of paid ad was just a reddit post you can comment on. Which was kinda cool from user side but advertisers didn't like people taking piss on them in the comments so they undoed it
  • fathyb 4y ago
    Reddit definitely has promoted content and native advertising. Perhaps you're not seeing it because you're using the far superior old.reddit.com?
    • imachine1980_ 4y ago
      or download alternative mobile app becouse they allow it, and use adblock
    • pclmulqdq 4y ago
      The biggest form of this advertising isn't actually done with the knowledge of Reddit. Organizations use Reddit accounts to astroturf narratives together, since Reddit is pseudonymous. Companies who need better PR, or just a good controversy, can do this much more cheaply on Reddit than any other internet forum. Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that is authentic can be the most useful stuff on the internet.
      • djtango 4y ago
        True but, for example, I still find that restaurants and travel advice is far superior on Reddit than Google. Reddit is often my starting point for beginning research on purchasing decisions. Although when buying a digital piano, I ended up finding dedicated boards like pianoworld to be better EDIT Ironically, I also find YouTube to be a great source of research, mostly because the cost to produce content is higher and I think it's somewhat harder to produce inauthentic content (at least to me so far for the things I am researching)
  • tokinonagare 4y ago
    > Reddit was Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
    • MrMan 4y ago
      that is great for increasing the quality of search results, moderation is awesome
    • AdamN 4y ago
      There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though. For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.
      • 000ooo000 4y ago
        >There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network I would not characterise a community moulded according to the whims of a few anonymous individuals as high in trust.
        • regularfry 4y ago
          It's high in trust of a very specific type. Not, perhaps, the type we want or need, but the type we have nonetheless.
        • AdamN 4y ago
          I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore. Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times) now have more of my time because I trust them more based on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer low quality articles under click bait headlines).
  • A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
    Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30. > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned. Basically, Reddit's system is terrible.
    • petesergeant 4y ago
      > Reddit's system is terrible This doesn’t match my experience of reading Reddit
      • LewisVerstappen 4y ago
        That's because you're just unaware of how astroturfed it is. I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits and randomly picked an account that posted a top meme https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/ The account has 8 million post karma and every single post it submits to a subreddit ends up on the front page of Reddit... without fail. The account isn't a mod of any of those subs, but they're clearly using upvote manipulation to get every single one of their posts to the front page.
        • DanielVZ 4y ago
          Of course the front-page will look like that. Niche subreddits are a completely different experience.
        • Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
          But in the context of TFA - searching Reddit to get factual answers - what appears on the reddit.com front page from day to day is largely irrelevant, surely?
          • A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
  • masklinn 4y ago
    > Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g. /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme anyway). It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms, but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised, they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Google held control of who they reward using AdWords, they decided who lives and who dies, who goes bancrupt and who prosper It is their system that rewards SEO spam If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam. Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit
    • carlosjobim 4y ago
      You can submit your site to Google and they will index it. If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you! Even if you don't pay Google a dime. Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.
      • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        > If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you! I m sorry, this is like news from a different universe. There is an absolutely world-shattering report on how children have lost all freedom ovet the past 40 years. They used to roam the neighbourhood, then they were allowed to stay in one street, and today we dont let them out of backyard. I have it on my PC, but can't find it in Google. Its impossible now
        • carlosjobim 4y ago
          I can only talk from my own experience, I've launched several websites that became high ranking on Google solely because of content and speed. Without anybody linking to them. Hell, there's still nobody linking to them years later, and Google still keeps them highly ranked. In niches with well established competitors. Without Google, I doubt I would have had any chance to reach a public, because nobody except search engines will give you the time of day when you're not already established. There's many bad things about Google, but they truly allow many people a chance to get their voice out and many small businesses a chance to exist. That is brilliant.
  • RicoElectrico 4y ago
    The advantage of Reddit to the broad internet is that there are always people trying to prove you wrong and call out BS.
• kajaktum 4y ago
  It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in Reddit to fake good user experience. For example, who the hell knows who mr fart32snap is on this reddit discussion thread talking about good cheap microphone? I don't doubt there's already some of these out there. IMO, the only way this can ever be truly fixed is to have a 1 to 1 mapping between a person and their online personality. An account and their posts need to actually have a weight. It need to actually matter what an account's history is across the web. I think this is what blockchain is supposed to solve. It is not fast and efficient enough for all the small monetary transactions. But surely is good enough for blogs or things like that?
  • AdamN 4y ago
    Another option is a trust network. We already have that within the social networks but not across them. I also don't mind trusting a bot that has a cohesive brand across the networks - there's no need for it to be human as long as I can untrust it.
  • Raed667 4y ago
    Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for a long time. Try looking for a backpack, wallet, watch etc.. all top posts have a very "sponsored content" smell.
  • pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Corporations already do this. Same with NGOs and political organizations. They have done this for a long time. I have a Reddit account that is old with a few thousand of the old "link karma," and received several 4-figure offers for the account for this purpose.
    • jhoechtl 4y ago
      So we need an internet without corporations? Sounds obvious but how we are supposed to achieve this? Easy self-hosted solutions, like IPFS or Gemini?
      • pclmulqdq 4y ago
• Felminor 4y ago
  Weird analysis from someone who has no data. What gives?
• kstenerud 4y ago
  The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics. Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay that you must now slog through in order to get the information you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose over bullet points. The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be trimmed to bullet points removing useful info. The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
    • inductive_magic 4y ago
      That sounds like it makes sense - but if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't, why would Google not be able to optimize their algo accordingly? If the results for a query don't match the "nature of the query", it's a bad result. If the algo can be gamed, it isn't aiming for the actual goal, i.e. it fundamentally fails at information retrieval.
      • Gigachad 4y ago
        Because anything google can detect, the spammers can generate to match. We will soon enter an era of GPT generated spam which not even humans can tell if it's real info or just garbage that looks real.
        • thr717272 4y ago
          Luckily on Kagi I can just block sites the moment I realize it is nonsense. Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable. Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search. After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
• ddalex 4y ago
  I used to think this too, until I tried Bing, with and without its new GPT chat, and if you think Google is rubbish, wait until you need to search MS dev documentation (very factual!) using Bing. Truth is, it's all astroturfing all the way, all the web. Even reddit. Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on search. My views are my own, etc.
  • georgehill 4y ago
    I use Bing GPT and think it's better than Google for answering simple questions. Bing's search results may not be as good as Google's, but the information I need is usually buried inside SEO text. Bing's use of GPT to extract precise answers makes me feel impressed compared to Google. Edit: Bing GPT is getting better, but it still makes mistakes sometimes. If anyone wants to stay updated on its development, you can follow the team on Twitter https://twitter.com/MParakhin https://twitter.com/MParakhin.
• dools 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • mynameisvlad 4y ago
    The other HN post has 3636 points and 1582 comments. How you could get the number “about 1000” from either of those is beyond me.
    • dools 4y ago
      Oh well, "about 5,000" then. Whatever, it's a rounding error.
      • mynameisvlad 4y ago
        I mean, no. It’s not just a rounding error, it’s literally ignoring the real numbers and pulling something out of your ass to try and sound snarky. Very few people upvote stories around here so that number is actually very large. Considering the current top thing on the news feed is a magnitude lower points, that actually means a lot.
• nodomain 4y ago
  Mods: Article is from Feb 15, 2022
• JCM9 4y ago
  The two biggest problems I’ve seen develop with Google are that: 1. The quality of the search algorithm’s ability to sift through nonsense to find “the good stuff” seems to have gotten progressively worse, and that’s largely fueled by: 2. Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the “good stuff” is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doesn’t report on. For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. Sure there are exceptions to that, but it’s clear what direction the tide is going. The “good old days of the internet” where the best stuff was just a Google search away seem long gone.
  • tyingq 4y ago
    I would add a "3." that Google has less incentive than they used to to fix it. If they can supply enough relevant ads,"rich snippets", shopping widgets, or links to content they pulled from wikipedia (that keeps you surfing google-owned properties)...the organic search results don't matter. Actually, if the organic results are low quality, then maybe you're more likely to use the content above. So the organic content optimal quality is just "better than Bing", but worse than the ads.
  • senttoschool 4y ago
    Part of this is because of tools like Discord which is not indexable by Google. We need something better than Discord for community discussions and support. Reddit is indexable.
    • girvo 4y ago
      Discord as the go-to community hub for things like programming languages makes a little bit sad, knowing it’s all ephemeral and locked up. At least the Nim team has a Matrix bridge I guess, so it’s a solvable problem somewhat. But I find joining yet another Discord group just obnoxious. I long for the async-only text forums of yore. I’m getting old, aren’t I.
• kh_hk 4y ago
  And yet, I mistrust most product reviews that are on Reddit too, since marketers have found ways to control the hivemind
• wildmanx 4y ago
  (Feb 2022)
• jhoelzel 4y ago
  There are entire subreddits that are completely bot driven and no human creates any input. I am using some subreddits very frequently (like r/hackernews) but boy has it become obvious how many bots there really are. I think though, that we will not see a startup solving this any time soon, that will not succumb to bots itself. I'm breaking my head since January (as a hobby) to create some ai driven semantic search index, but the problem starts with trust.
• stinos 4y ago
  > Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News Is that some kind of easter egg, just expressing hope, or is this pointing to some other post, or am I missing something? This post has 33 points at the time I'm writing this and doesn't seem to be a repost (according to https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dkb.blog https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dkb.blog)?
  • Dachande663 4y ago
    The original HN article[0] has 3636 points as I write this comment. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
    • stinos 4y ago
      Oh, right. i should have searched for the title, not the site.
• baxtr 4y ago
  From the last paragraph: >Long live Google + “site:reddit.com”.
• fbn79 4y ago
  The same article could be wroten in 2010 replacing Reddit with Facebook. But Google search is still here.
• danpalmer 4y ago
  From the example image half way through this article... > "retool slack integration" I've just googled this and the top hit was literally the instructions to set up the slack integration. Not a link to it, the actual instructions, although the link to the source page in the Retool docs was there. The rest of the hits were all hits in the Retool docs, except for the last result, which was someone making an HN comment making exactly my point on the last time this was discussed. Google search isn't broken or dying.
  • thiht 4y ago
    Google Search is broken for subjective searches. If you search "best xxx", Google will only return crap. "best xxx reddit" still gives relevant information.
    • mastodon_acc 4y ago
      How is that Google's fault? are you expecting a "Search" engine to perform qualitative analysis on your specific topic and generate a list for you? "best xxx reddit" that's google working as intended, you searched for a topic on reddit. I swear with the proliferation of LLMs most people have completely forgotten what a "search" in a search engine means.
      • thiht 4y ago
        > How is that Google's fault Because the top results are complete crap, and obvious SEO spams in most cases. If Google just allowed me to blacklist some sites from my search results I could actually get good results. Also maybe they shouldn't not rewrite my queries for me, I don't need them to helpfully remove 3 words out of 5 from my search.
      • Double_a_92 4y ago
        Because it's not that the sites it finds just has a bad or wrong opinion. Instead the whole site itself is usually a complete fraud or generated nonsense and it should be Googles job to kinda filter those out or rank them down. It would even help a lot if they just added a button to allow me to ban certain domains from my results.
• einpoklum 4y ago
  > the first few non-ad results ... and ... > sites filled with affiliate links and ads. ... suggest the poster is, for some reason, not using an ad-blocker. Strange. > What it actually means is that the amount of people using Reddit as a search engine is growing. I don't understand this claim. If reddit search is Google search + the keyword reddit, then either people are finding non-reddit results that way, which seems reallyt weird and unlikely; or they're finding reddit results that way - meaning that they really are using reddit.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  The article overlooks that "ads" goes beyond just ads on the search results page. Ads is the main problem, in the form of Google's business model which dissuades them from actually improving search result quality. Spam/SEO/etc sites are very easy to detect - use the presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links, newsletter signup forms, etc as a negative ranking signal, and the problem will be resolved quickly. This can't be evaded, because the same techniques used to evade search engine detection would be abused by ad fraudsters. The reason they don't do that is that those spam sites help Google in multiple ways - not only do they increase engagement with the search result page ads (the ads might actually be better than the "organic" but spammy results), but the ads/analytics on the spam sites are likely to be Google's which helps them too. This would not be a problem with any search engine whose incentives are aligned with the users' (Kagi has a "non-commercial" feature for example that I suspect roughly implements the above).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• franze 4y ago
  In the German market for any product related query where you want a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies, which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly newspapers). i.e.: https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/ https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/ https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/ https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/ https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/ https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/ These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated. And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests". They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work. And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now. Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.
  • martin_a 4y ago
    I'm totally with you on that, but who, besides us, knows about this and understands the inner workings? Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests. They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today). I'm not sure how to solve this, to be honest.
  • luckylion 4y ago
    Google knows, has commented on it that it's fine "but you should be careful who you let publish on your domain" and they won't do anything about it. It was a somewhat big topic two or so years ago, and since then everyone has understood that you just need to buy in on media company sites to get ranked. Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.
  • pjmlp 4y ago
    It is now easier to get Saturn and Media Market ads than technical sites when looking for hardware specifications.
• jonplackett 4y ago
  Also, this has been discussed before on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
• znpy 4y ago
  Didn’t anyone consider that google was extremely good at indexing websites, i mean normal websites (webs of interlinked hypertexts) but nowadays few people publish their content on regular websites but do so in the form of posts on reddit/instagram/youtube etc? That might explain a lot…
• azatom 4y ago
  Dying is a harsh word, give them the respect for the good years: they killing it deliberatively. They fed up with people using it without login, and only the websites paying. They just want monthly payment from user too.
• capybara_2020 4y ago
  I think it is time to stop being nice and treating the entire search results page as ads for every single query. Even if you have an adblocker, the more nefarious ads are still there, the ones masquerading as useful articles that have been SEOed to the top.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  The correct title would be "Google Search is dying, but we don't have a better replacement yet".
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  I have an idea: a search engine where a team of humans adds what website they deem important and also ranks it. Website owners who aren't in the index and want to submit their site, pay a small fee. The result would be no SEO, no content farms and highly relevant content. I don't think the algorithms and even AI will ever keep track with people who try to game the engines for profits.
  • projektfu 4y ago
    Perhaps it could be organized into a hierarchical set of categories as well...
  • stockhorn 4y ago
    Why not let all of humanity upvote/downvote each website and flag sites as seo-spam, content-farm if needed? We could use a web of trust, combined with gov-id verification to ensure no bots/AIs manipulate the votes...
• orost 4y ago
  The most tragic casualty of this is the ancient wisdom of just google your tech issues. It doesn't work any more! All you get is page upon page of auto-generated help sites that pretend to have solutions for your exact problem but are all actually the same list of generic tips (restart your computer! update your drivers!) I can sort through it with enough effort, but it's a disaster for non-tech people who could muddle through their computer problems before but now just get hopelessly stuck in the Google Search swamp every time.
  • 000ooo000 4y ago
    Look on the bright side; we're the last generation(s) of folk capable of operating tech at any level beyond what the UX people at FAANG will allow one to reach. The bridge has been burned behind us. Yay job security.
  • andrewstuart 4y ago
    Stack Overflow is to blame for that. With the best of intentions they make their data open, resulting in hundreds of clone sites regurgitating the stack overflow data, on sites with names like “ProblemGeek” and “NerdAnswer”.
    • ivanjermakov 4y ago
      I mean, SO is still there... Just limit your search result to it, e.g. "java enum ordinal site:stackoverflow.com" (or others from stackexchange family).
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• throwaway1851 4y ago
  I have often wished that there were a search engine that would let me filter out pages with monetization (affiliate links, calls to action, ads, etc.). However, every time I consider this idea, I wonder how much of the web would be left. Besides social media sites, government pages, and technology blogs, is there a lot of authentic content out there on arbitrary topics? Perhaps even if Google were motivated to deliver a good search experience, they couldn’t do it.
  • account42 4y ago
    Forums, tech documentation, personal websites. I think for many queries, a non-commercial search engines would have plenty of relevant pages to show.
• frankreyes 4y ago
  Because there's no better neural network for problem solving than a human brain. This joke sums it all up: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ufdprb/sure_fire_way_to_get_programming_help/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ufdprb/sur...
• jhoechtl 4y ago
  > It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines. The obvious spoken out so openly.
• projektfu 4y ago
  "How do I fix some odd setting in Windows, Mac, whatever" 2007: results include documentation, a couple forums, if you're unlucky there's a potentially malware tool that's discovered people need to fix this. 2012: results include Reddit and Stack Exchange, documentation has disappeared, forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install. 2023: top results are just blogspam pushing malware tools and the above-mentioned useless support forums. It's hard to know if Microsoft and Apple even know what their software does. Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.
  • andrewstuart 4y ago
    Today, ChatGPT gives you an instant step by step guide which may or may not be correct but will likely get you there.
    • pcrh 4y ago
      User: How do I fix large pdf files? ChatGPT: delete system32
      • MikusR 4y ago
        Had to finally register there to check. This was the answer. "There are a few things you can try to fix large PDF files: Compress the PDF: You can use online or offline tools to compress the PDF file. This will reduce the file size and make it easier to work with. Some popular tools for compressing PDFs include Adobe Acrobat, Smallpdf, and PDF Compressor. Remove unnecessary elements: If the PDF file contains images, graphics, or other non-essential elements, you can try removing them. This can significantly reduce the file size. You can use Adobe Acrobat or other PDF editing tools to do this. Split the PDF: If the PDF file contains multiple pages, you can split it into smaller files. This can be done using Adobe Acrobat or other PDF editing tools. Optimize PDF: Many PDF viewers have the option to optimize PDF files. This may include reducing the quality of images or fonts to reduce the file size. You can try using the built-in optimization tools in Adobe Acrobat or other PDF viewers. Use a different file format: If the PDF file is still too large, you may consider using a different file format, such as JPG or PNG for images, or DOCX or RTF for text. This may not always be possible, but it can be a good alternative if the PDF file is causing too many issues. "
• gregwebs 4y ago
  I switched to Kagi last year and couldn’t be happier. The results are better for me. No ads (the small amount I pay Kagi is well worth it) and a slider to click for programming focused results. Looking forward to some new great AI search but I doubt it will come from Bing. The other day I tried Bing and it had merged information across 2 different results such that the page title it showed was incorrect and misleading.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• anon23432343 4y ago
  I do the same when it comes to products and reviews. When it comes to programming I limit the search to one or two years. This is why my stackoverflow is sorted that the newest answer is the last because they don't let me sort in a way the the newest answer is the first. I don't think its google fault in general its just the thing that if your first on a specific product you add a link where to buy that thing and this is how you make money. Would be fun to see if affiliate links were not a thing. By how much search results would improve.
• pjmlp 4y ago
  Indeed, Altavista, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves would probably give better search results than Google as of today.
  • pmlnr 4y ago
    I upvoted this, but only because of nostalgia. I was there when Google started and it was lightyears ahead of the already gamed Altavista which relied on human ingenuity and meta tags.
    • pjmlp 4y ago
      Which kind of stresses the point how bad Google has become.
• Invictus0 4y ago
  2022
• skilled 4y ago
  Who needs Google anyway? Forbes is an expert on everything! I mean holy fucking shit, is there any topic Forbes isn't an expert on? I wonder who are the brilliant minds at Google Search who let shit like that slide. As of the last 2 years, Forbes has become an expert in web development, devops, and who knows what's coming next - experts on systems architecture? Link buying is as rampant as ever, too. For one of the blogs I own, it's not uncommon to get an out of the blue offer for $500 to publish an article that includes a link to some product. And I have heard those numbers are even crazier in casino, gambling and cannabis niches. For a new site/blogs these days, Google will stall/throttle you for 2-3 years before it starts even looking at you as if you matter / are a subject expert. All the while, shitty news sites like Forbes get pumped to the top not because they produce high-quality content but because they're jacked up with backlinks.
• pmlnr 4y ago
  It's not just Google, it's all of them. DDG used to be rather decent, now it's ONLY return "X best Y" when I'm searching for anything.
  • JackMorgan 4y ago
    I feel like the results from Kagi are pretty great. I tend to get what I'm looking for in the top few results.
    • pmlnr 4y ago
      > Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid service which requires an account for the transaction. Right. Definite "no".
      • freediver 4y ago
        Curious what would you do if you created an ad-free search engine?
        • pmlnr 4y ago
          It's not the money, it's that I'm tired of believing companies "we won't track you", especially when it's that easy, with login required.
          • freediver 4y ago
            The companies that have incentives to track you are the companies with an ad-supported business model. The only business model that does not have an incentive to track you is a subscription based model. Yes, it is is easy to 'track' you but what is the incentive to do that? It does not need to monetize your data. And in order to pay a susbcription, you need an account. So curious how would you do this differently in Kagi's shoes?
• api 4y ago
  I’ve been paying for Kagi for over a year. It’s getting better and better and has no ads.
  • phendrenad2 4y ago
    Wow, finally a paid search engine. Now all we need is a paid web browser.
• jjbickerstaffe 4y ago
  I was an early adopter of Google Search around 2000 when it was better than Altavista. A few years ago I switched to DuckDuckGo. But in the autumn my DDG searches began to have only about 10 results for terms that should have had thousands of results. A couple of months ago I started paying for Kagi search and like it because it's like Google used to be 20 years ago – it shows interesting results.
  • thesuitonym 4y ago
    Why do I feel like this post is actually a marketing operation for kagi?
• azangru 4y ago
  Reddit? Do people find better answers to programming questions on reddit rather than on google?
• snowwrestler 4y ago
  Not sure how you prove a search engine is dying by posting graphs showing search traffic going continuously up. Reddit is a great source for a certain type of content. Google is a search engine for content. They are complementary… Reddit’s continued strength furthers Google’s relevance. The only way Google can be hurt by Reddit is if Reddit blocks Google from indexing it (not likely).
• bobmaxup 4y ago
  Perhaps "generative ai" with summarization and citations will eventually be the future of search engines. If a language model or some other methodology can distill information from all of these sites and proxy to them in a way that a company can still promote advertising revenue, there should be a clear path away from blog spam. One could imagine it might even disincentivize copying original works. There are so many paths for using information once it can be transformed reliably. If natural language understanding continues to improve, it would seem that there is a very bright future for existing search engines.
  • izacus 4y ago
    Why would you think that? The issue is spammers taking over top results with advertised content, why do you think generative AI will actually fix this in any way? Besides just preventing you from actually finding the real information on the bottom of the results?
    • dpkirchner 4y ago
      If the summarizer does a good job it will probably identify the spam as what it is -- junk intended to funnel you into an affiliate link.
• Maxburn 4y ago
  On some topics you can get a different version reality in google search results and what other search engines produce. Any A/B testing on this regardless of your position on the topics should be an eye opener. I'm not a fan of googles activism for influencing political or technical topics and I've attempted to get them out of my life.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ACV001 4y ago
  Even if it is dying, it is a very slow death..
• treyhuffine 4y ago
  The recent success of ChatGPT shows that the current search experience is likely deprecated. With LLMs, you can get information immediately that directly answers your query. ChatGPT has its limits too though - it's not always right, you don't have options other than to re-ask or regenerate if the one answer doesn't satisfy what you need, we're limited to only text, and the experience may be just a bit too contained/convergent. It feels like it's going to take another product or iteration to really get there. The question I keep asking - what does the future of problem-solving and finding knowledge on the internet look like in an ideal world given the tools that we have or could now build?
  • flir 4y ago
    > With LLMs, you can get information immediately that directly answers your query. Not as long as they're relying on humans to write pages with that information in. When nobody visits, what's the point in writing a page?
    • twelve40 4y ago
      I keep looking for a coherent answer to that question, but have never seen one so far, these are unimportant details that are swept under the AI enthusiasm rug.
      • flir 4y ago
        Someone (I wish I could remember who) once argued that if you're trying to create an ecosystem around your product, you can't hoover up all the value, you have to leave some for the little guy. I've felt for a while that Google, with its various attempts to put the answer on the search results page, might be skirting dangerously close to that problem. It feels like the only value they're leaving on the table is the chance to sell stuff.
        • twelve40 4y ago
          so... how much value does ChatGPT as proposed solution leave to the little guy?
• thejackgoode 4y ago
  The hunt for authentic interaction capture intensifies. Some day they will come for HN. Not soon, hopefully
• SCdF 4y ago
  On the PG tweet[1], posts like this make me feel like I'm losing my mind. I cannot get over how the tweet says "Reddit is unique in social media" while the Instagram graph is literally identical to Reddit's and are right beside each other on the graphic that accompanies the words. You cannot miss it. It's also very selective, as the Twitch guy points out, and it's also google search terms, which aren't really that indicative. But I guess PG === default insightful? Wild. On using reddit as a search engine, I agree that for certain types of information it's very helpful, specifically in theory authentic user experiences. Twitter is also useful here, though not to the level of detail. You could argue that stack exchange is the same thing: user generated truth that by and large aren't search engine spam. [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480
• iamshs 4y ago
  I am a Sikh, I need to clarify some of my concepts, look for meanings etc and nearly all the search terms are polluted by Hindu Nationalist and Islamist Dawah guys. There were websites started early on, which are now abandoned and hence don't score high. It is such a mess honestly using internet being a minority.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Marketing and the ad industry ruin everything they touch. You throw away most of your mail because of them, both physical and the e variety. You don't answer your phone because of them. They abused popups so badly they were basically removed from the standard. Adblockers are such a necessity for making anything on the web usable that they'd be built in if it weren't for the fact that Chrome is made by a company that sells ad space. And of course they ruined search too. And it won't be fixed because Google itself is part of the problem, not the solution. And if you work for them, you're helping make the world a worse place. Please stop. I'm not going to go as far as Hicks and say you should kill yourself, but you should quit your job and try your hand at improving the world instead.
• londons_explore 4y ago
  Whenever you are thinking Google is dying, please instead consider what an ideal page of search results would look like... When you search for "2012 honda civic brake hose burst pressure psi", which pages exactly would you wish were at the top...? Typically, I find that when google search fails me, it's because the content I'm looking for actually doesn't exist. I'm seeing SEO spam simply because nobody has written a detailed blog post about the exact topic I'm after. The problem isn't Google, the problem is the whole internet (or at least the part not behind a login wall)
  • londons_explore 4y ago
    The internet dying is indirectly googles problem too... And they're in a position to solve it. For example, the bursting pressure of a 2012 honda civics brake hose might not be on any public web page... But it is known to the engineers who designed the thing. There is masses of non-public information, much of it really useful. Not just engineering - but the script of every TV show and film ever, the things people say in public posts on social media, etc. Google needs to incentivize companies to publish everything by default. That used to be adsense - publish useful info and earn a few dollars a month for your trouble. I think they need to take that further with some kind of info-sharing platform that pays to publish useful info. I'd also like to see a mode where a company can sync all their internal documents and members of the public can search them and then request to pay to see a document, with a company employee checking it first for secrets.
  • litiholofan 4y ago
    At the very least I'd like for those keywords to each show up on the page I'm looking for.
  • oriolid 4y ago
    > When you search for "2012 honda civic brake hose burst pressure psi", which pages exactly would you wish were at the top...? A service manual would be nice, but since those probably aren't public a well written blog post would be the next choice. On the other hand, when searching "jni callback function arguments" the obvious answer (JNI specification) is public, but Google can't find it unless you search explicitly for it and even then you get some StackOverflow stuff near the top.
• jmclnx 4y ago
  This was posted awhile ago too, and since I saw it I started doing the same. Results ? I get more concise answers.
• unxdfa 4y ago
  The entire of Google is dying. Starting with search, the moment you turn off your adblocker you will see why. It's literally a complete crapfest of badly moderated advertising and ranking manipulation. Then there's the default Android experience which literally shovels garbage down you with the Google app and via a version of Chrome with no ad blocking capability. The www is unusable unless you install another browser. Then all their immature web based apps propositions which people are finally tiring of due to the bugginess and being almost completely unusable if you're offline. Then the invasive tracking and privacy issues. You can tell how bad it's getting because nearly all my searches suggest autocomple with "reddit" on the end because people are more likely to get human generated results. And of course the ramped up YT advertising recently. It's a classic death spiral. They don't have a product other than crap search and invasive data collection.
  • gl-prod 4y ago
    Not only Google, but also the other day I was trying to download Chrome using Edge. Bing had an ad along these lines: Title: "Google Chrome - Download the Fast, Secure Browser from ..." URL:"https://google.com https://google.com". I was just about to visit this site until I hovered over it and saw that the actual link's URL was very much not google.com.
• sudeeprg 4y ago
  A carefully crafted title to kill google search…
• coding123 4y ago
  I can't find anything related to what is happening to my dad on Google except a bunch of vax deniers. Added reddit and found many other people with ALS after vaccine. He's on a bypap now and will be dead in a few weeks.
• t0bia_s 4y ago
  https://crowdview.ai/ https://crowdview.ai/
• narrator 4y ago
  I noticed that there are a lot fewer forum results in Google search than a couple of years ago. Forum results are often pretty good, but I think Google deranks these sites in their quest to clean up misinformation. That's why appending reddit has to be done, because reddit gets deranked because some wrongthink sneaks in despite the best intentions of their moderators. SEO spam sites never say anything that strays into misinfo territory and are just repeat conventional boring info, so they are always near the top. The wrongthink derank is really pronounced if searching for controversial political stuff. In fact, if you search for a controversial recent event you'll get no results and a message that "results are changing quickly."
• b800h 4y ago
  They seem to have fallen into the Yahoo! trap of attempting to keep you on their properties for as long as possible. Search for a basic word definition or simply answer and they'll offer you a YouTube video which takes 60 seconds to get to the point.
• thadt 4y ago
  People keep repeating the mantra that Google search is dying - but I think it's more that many just haven't yet understood that communities of people are the small oases in an otherwise vast, noisy information space. Of course Reddit, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow are where many (in this community) are going to find the most relevant information - that's where the people are. I remember clearly when I switched to using Google in the early 2000's. It wasn't because they were so much better at searching the Internet - it's because they acquired the Usenet index. There was knowledge in Usenet archives that couldn't be found anywhere else - because that's where the people were.
  • Double_a_92 4y ago
    Maybe something like the original Yahoo would be good to have again? E.g. if I know Reddit exists, how do I easily find out that hackernews or stackoverflow also exits and are good sites?
• willnonya 4y ago
  I find the notion that Reddit is being used as a search engine abhorrent. Reddit is a showcase of the worst tendencies on the internet. It is mismanaged by the company as well as the users ruling their fifedoms and emphasizes popularity of opnion over the reality of fact.
• mark_l_watson 4y ago
  I believe that Google could easily, from a technical point of view, lower the search ranking of web pages that have a lot of affiliate links. However, I also believe that this might be against their business interests. When I am in a patient mood, I now just use the Edge Browser on my Macs and iPads, and jump right into Bing AI/ChatGPT chat mode. It is really important to make it clear that you want the system to research, follow web links, and summarize results for you. However, I see no advertisements, so how are they going to monetize this? I pay for OpenAI API use and also pay (for now) for ChatGPT, so I guess that I would also pay for an ad-free Bing AI search. I have always been a Google fan, still love GCP, YouTube, YouTube Music, and Play Books. But they do make their money off of search and advertisements, so it will be really interesting to see how they protect their business.
  • NBJack 4y ago
    Don't forget this is how Google started. It was originally a plain search page by design; minimally invasive ads didn't even come until later. Given that it is estimated that 'AI' chat costs about 10X to run per query vs. traditional search, please enjoy this honeymoon period while it lasts. I personally suspect that the real cost is much higher; GPUs are power hungry and these models aren't small.
• gertrunde 4y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 (managing to clock up 3600+ points and 1500+ comments...)
• alex3305 4y ago
  Recently Google started translating some of my English search queries into my local language (Dutch). Which doesn't help at all. There is a reason I search in English. For instance I wanted to see if there are new Iberico spareribs recipes, so I search for that. The first page has 8 results with 7 in Dutch and 1 in English. When I visit the English site, the recipe is auto translated in Dutch. And four of those 8 results are stores where I have to buy their rub to even follow the recipe.
• matheusmoreira 4y ago
  It's already dead. I literally can't find a single relevant result anymore.
• marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I don't know if it's Google that is dying. It's more like a large segment of the public facing internet is wilting. The user experience without an adblocker is almost nothing but ads, popovers, permission requests and chat boxes, sign-up-to-the-newsletter requests. And these are the websites that aren't trying to bait-and-switch you For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or marketing. It's not a good first impression. There are healthy websites out there but they're really struggling to punch through all the crap. It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't good search results. I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.
  • digitalsushi 4y ago
    Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens. AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here, et al) remain high when most of the people we're talking with are algorithmic? Media companies create new shows and pull them away more quickly than we can finish consuming them, as realtime engagement metrics quickly show their bosses which must be most profitable, most popular, most attention grabbing. It makes a good case for going back: watching shows from decades earlier, that have a beginning middle and end. Dropping social media time for books. And the missing analogue, how to give up on google searches because they too, are at a parity of value with their offering and their attention stealing properties. I'm just an angry person shaking his fist at the sky from an armchair. I love these threads because I always come away with a new perspective.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  > Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News. There must be a lot of people who resonate with it this time around. Unless, of course, this other part of the article is true: > Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products. ... in which case one must ask the question as to whether stories like this being upvoted on HN are organic behavior or the result of botfarming.
• theloco 4y ago
  let this be a lesson not to let your company prioritize censorship and propaganda over everyday normal duties expected by users.
• taylodl 4y ago
  Google is dying because the original internet that it searched is dying. That's not necessarily a bad thing and this isn't a "the sky is falling" statement - it's just the internet has changed. A lot. Nowadays people aren't creating their own websites - they're creating content and providing feedback on forums such as Reddit. The fact people are searching Reddit for whatever they need is a reflection of that new reality.
• 100011_100001 4y ago
  I was telling my wife that internet of today is how p0rn sites looked in the late 90s. Popups, ads everywhere, miss-direction, can't go back, click this link to go here which might or might not take you there, links that look like site links but are actually ads. It's making everything suck.
• codingdave 4y ago
  I've never seen anything beyond anecdotes that appending 'reddit' to you query is common. Yet the article claims it is now the most popular way to search. Does anyone have the data to support this claim?
• naizarak 4y ago
  SEO spam is gonna be nothing compared to the AI-generated web. And it's going to be the perfect excuse to finally mandate internet-ID.
• college_physics 4y ago
  Requiem for a dream
• ruszki 4y ago
  Yesterday I wanted to figure out whether some languages are more difficult than others as a native language. Google failed miserably. Nowadays, there are things, simple things like that, for which Google is increasingly useless. I encounter such every week. This definitely didn’t happen 10 years ago. In this case, it gave me results about bullshit ad sites, random barely related Quora questions, what languages are more difficult for native English speakers. Nothing helped. Zero proper result in 10 minutes. There were none which I could use as a reference, or had any proper reference.
• brandon272 4y ago
  I don't know if Google Search is dying. What I do know: 1) In March 2023, I am relying less and less on Google Search. When I do, it is for extremely targeted search queries where I am battling Google's matching criteria to find something that I know exists. This almost always requires creative use of quotation marks and applying suffixes to the end of queries. 2) I am relying more on ChatGPT for a lot of queries. Is it perfect? Hell no. Does it give me wrong information sometimes? Hell yes. But even with that, the answers and solutions given are so much better than trawling through Google search results and trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. 3) I was having a conversation with a family member yesterday. I wanted to direct her to a page on a local government website. I instructed her to Google it. After the phone call I realized that she was likely to search Google for this page and be completely unable to find it, so I just manually sent her the link the page. 4) When I ditched Lycos and Excite and Altavista for Google over 20 years ago it was because of it's simplicity and accuracy. It was because when they decided to start displaying ads, the ads were clearly and transparently demarcated as ads so that no one was confused about what they were looking at. Today, the ads are very clearly intended to blend in with everything else, the simplicity is gone, and the accuracy is no longer there either. I do think Google has lost its way. And I do think there is a massive market opportunity for someone to develop a "search engine for 2023" that nicely blends what is available to us through LLMs and what is available to us through reputable, clean web sources on the WWW so that someone in search of information can simply find what they are looking for.
• yalogin 4y ago
  Google had a problem, it couldn’t think outside of the search box. They had so much technology but they tried to fit everything behind that search box. Now they are scrambling to figure out a plan to counter chat gpt, which truly poses a threat to them. It may not pose a threat right away but the writing is on the wall. Of course it doesn’t mean google is dying. It will be a trillion dollar company for years to come and they will plenty time to figure it out.
• antomeie 4y ago
  Didn't the article kind of allude to the fact that the wrong search results might be the most profitable? I mean, it makes sense to me that Google is promoting the worst websites, since they contain the most Google ads... I'm sure Google employees are well aware of the issues.
• candiodari 4y ago
  Anyone else notice that general solutions to problems just aren't on Google ... and aren't on the internet at all? We used to have blogs, even twitter and facebook, even things like phpbb and the many internet fora, which was "normal". These have disappeared, either entirely or behind a pay- or registration wall, and are clearly not accessible to Google. I wonder if the problem is Google, or the web in general.
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  My pet beef: why Google hasn't done anything to downrank Pinterest, specifically? It's a pit into which search terms for all sorts of subjects take you, but they (unethically) try their best to stop you from finding the original source content. Instead taking you deeper and deeper into their own recursively self-defined world of internal pins, hiding the outlinks and original attribution. (Also: vile because it's full of self-harm and eating disorder content that played its part in irrevocably damaged a loved one.)
• dbttdft 4y ago
  [dead]
• huy77 4y ago
  It's not dying for me. My Google + Youtube usage is still as high as ever if not higher because of Youtube. ChatGPT/OpenAI/other models makes Google Lens more noticeable. Do you know you can generate the interior of your room using AI and Google offers the search for products based on the generated image just by a right-click on Chrome?
• m3kw9 4y ago
  If google indexes Reddit properly and timely I’m not sure why I would go specifically to Reddit to search there for the subset. Same goes with stack overflow, I hardly need to go there to search
• renegat0x0 4y ago
  As a programmer I often use search to find solution to my problems. This works most of the time. Sometimes I search for Covid related sites, or related to protests, or to other 'hot' topics. It is difficult to find anything interesting in the results, as they are monitored, and homogeneous. I would like to see what the disinformation is, I would like multiple points of view. Even if wrong. I started creating my own link database, so that I could find past links I found interesting. It does not have to be connected to ill intention from Google. There are so many pages, links that it just could be hard to find stuff there. It is impossible to find useful data on words that are 'open' to interpretation. Search for 'apple'. I would like to receive millions, if not billions of news, links, information about the company, about types of apples, about anything that relates to that word. Instead you can only receive 31 pages in news, and around 10 pages in normal query. This is unacceptable. Google search is like looking through a keyhole at the internet.
• 63 4y ago
  Everyone loves to complain about how bad Google has gotten, but nobody wants to do anything about it. If you hate the SEO spam and cookie banners and newsletters, make a website without those. Any time you struggle to find information in a Google search but finally figure it out, write a no-nonsense article. Link your article in places it's relevant so people might see it. If we want this to get better, we need to put in some effort and fix it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stockhorn 4y ago
  Are there any browser extensions that help to filter the noise (SEO clones, AI blogspam)? Could a distributed rating/endorsement system help with that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285
• Havoc 4y ago
  Real question is how is reddit's own search still so utterly useless despite sitting on a treasure trove of high quality info (comparatively speaking) I'm literally navigating away from reddit, then doing a site:reddit.com google search to go back to reddit
• zackmorris 4y ago
  It's dead, Jim. I tried looking up a picture of the shakras to help track the evolution of my mood from burnout to peace and where I feel that in my body. But it's so filled with sponsored links that I found myself squinting at blurred out preview images before I finally snapped out of it, perhaps 20 minutes later. Information wants to be free. There should be glorious high-resolution images front and center that enthusiasts drew of their own accord and uploaded for free soon after the internet came online around 1995. Instead, we're funneled down the commercial carnival as marks. Sure, I'm a programmer, I know how to find what I'm looking for through various tricks. But I shouldn't have to. Monetized search is one of the great blunders of the Information Age. Paid internet service is another. Walled gardens, the DMCA (using FUD and the threat of litigation to turn BitTorrent into the devil), scientific papers locked behind paywalls, even the capture of programming itself by centralized repositories and the trend towards microservices and the concentration of wealth away from programmers who could actually fix the tools we use.. just on and on and on, so much nonsense designed to trap our minds within the framework of profit for exploitation. The more I look around, the more it all looks like hot garbage. It's frustrating to have a sense of knowing exactly what to do to fix things, even the knowledge and experience to pull off much of it, but spend the entirety of one's time running the rat race to survive. All while remembering a time not too long ago when it wasn't like that. I feel that central issue of wealth concentration and the dilution of disposable income and leisure time is what we're really fighting here. The loss of Google is just a symptom of that steady decline towards subservience.
• seydor 4y ago
  I m glad that GPTs are kicking SEOed content out of the internet. Using bing is much much better for researching health related stuff , even considering possible inaccuracies because it 's faster. You can hone in on the subject fast, then verify your result by checking the source. The google model was users -> google -> SEOed aggregator -> primary sources. If this is dead, the value of the primary sources will go up up up in price, and SEO farming (which includes a ton of news websites) will be dead. And that will be for the better
• Exendroinient00 4y ago
  As the web business model is based on ads user experience isn't that important. I'm curious on the monetization model of new prompt based search engines. Ads dominating first pages of search won't be possible anymore. The adoption of new engines also wouldn't be as fast as many think, people habits die slow. So they still have time to think of a way to make money. Alphabet needs some competition. They became stale in the last 10 years.
• renegat0x0 4y ago
  In September of 2022 I have started collecting links in repository. Some articles I find useful, to some I am returning back like a turtle into an island. I have bookmarked 3930 links. The number grows every day. I know this will not replace google for me, but it is a place that allows me to browse my link history and easily find things I have found interesting in the past. My personal filter. https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database
• kernal 4y ago
  Google Search Is Dying (2025) Google Search Is Dying (2024) Google Search Is Dying (2023) Google Search Is Dying (2022) Google Search Is Dying (2021) Google Search Is Dying (2020) Google Search Is Dying (2019) Google Search Is Dying (2018) Google Search Is Dying (2017) Google Search Is Dying (2016) Google Search Is Dying (2015) Do we see a pattern here?
• josephjrobison 4y ago
  For the longest time I’ve been against this train of thought. Even resisted this when GPT-3 was announced and then ChatGPT was said to replace Google. But I’m slowly coming around to the camp that for specific searchers where you want a quick answer, ChatGPT beats Google hands down and my searching habits are changing. Interesting times.
• smsm42 4y ago
  In the last year by coincidence I had to buy several quite expensive items that I either never bought before or bought last time quite a while ago. So, I wanted reviews. That's when I learned just searching for reviews is pretty much useless now. It's all blanketed by marketing spam. What you do instead is find a place where real humans discuss the topic, and read it. Doesn't have to be reddit, though it often works. Pretty soon you encounter mentions of review sites that people mention. Once you see some site mentioned repeatedly, go there and search. Or, if they have sulky search - happens more often than it should - go to the search engine and search on that specific site. This gives much better results without wasting time digging through piles of crap.
• thetis 4y ago
  I believe one of the big point missed is that community contribution totally disapeared of the public internet. In the past you were able to find anything you want by just typing anything in google, on all the forums & microblogs. That content disapeared from internet, replaced by discord & instagram, which are not public. Reddit is the main community remaining public, this is why people are typing "pizza reddit" while the main contributions are not on the reddit community but on the the discord from the pizza reddit. So now, when you want to go deep into the topic pizza, you have to: --> go to the pizza reddit --> get the discord adress --> connect to the redditPizza discord --> search "mozzarella" on the shitty discord search
• gaia 4y ago
  Countdown until someone builds a site that only appends "inurl:reddit.com" to every query and calls it Roogle.
• kazinator 4y ago
  Google has no motivation to improve Google Search until a runner-up makes serious inroads into its popularity. Running a search engine probably isn't like a marathon, where if you're a front-runner by 800 meters, you still care about setting a personal best or breaking a record.