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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

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.
- marginalia_nu 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. This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.
  - bick_nyers 4y ago
    That's if you want to capture someone's focus, not their attention.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      If you capture their focus, are you not also capturing their attention?
      - bick_nyers 4y ago
        Yes, but not necessarily the other way around. I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I don't think most websites are predicated on the notion that the average user is committed, at least initially. Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to your product you can safely prioritize focus because you now have that commitment. I think engineers generally are above average on the skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order to perform math, analysis, and logic.
  - brookst 4y ago
    It’s more about selling someone’s attention than holding it. The best possible outcome for both websites and Google is for a user to click on on a website from search and then immediately click on an ad. To the extent you find the site useful and don’t need what’s being advertised, that’s a fail for both of them.
izacus 4y ago
> I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads. The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Well how would you fix Google's predicament? I think it's easy enough to conclude they're harming themselves, but what are their options?
  - brookst 4y ago
    Their only Hope at long term viability is something like the wall between advertising and editorial at old school media companies. Yes, it’s fashionable to be jaded but it really did work that way. Google needs its product people to not know or care about as revenue. They need to make search as efficient as possible, without regard for whether a good search result reduces ad clicks. Revenue would go do, but not catastrophically. And they’d have a sustainable business that would be hard to disrupt.
  - hahamaster 4y ago
    I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    Honestly the problem is that Google has been trying to fix it. Alternative and diverse incomes is the solution. Everyone wants to make a good product, but ads make a product worse. Everyone wants to make a heavily used product but pay-per-use or subscriptions are limiting. Google Cloud+Workplace, YouTube Premium, Play Store, Nest, ahem Stadia. Google has plenty of attempts at building products that make money without ads. The problem is that they’re expensive and not nearly as profitable. LLM are bad at search, but people seem to like they. It gives them a clean re-start of search and maybe they’ll use it to do a search subscription where they can retry building their one good product without ads. Probably not though.
GeekyBear 4y ago
> I don't know if it's Google that is dying. I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick. Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points. The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.
- Jensson 4y ago
  It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be so good at indexing useful reddit threads.
  - davidkuennen 4y ago
    I would think they apply their normal algorithms. If it's a good article that's upvoted a lot, it should also be linked in some places and thus get a higher search score.
    - grumpy_coder 4y ago
      Though it's not finding the article. It's finding a link to the article on Reddit. I hope people aren't linking to the Reddit thread...
      - comfypotato 4y ago
        The way the original pagerank algorithm works, links to the original article would increase the score of a Reddit post linking to the article. Why Reddit posts are ranked higher in a default search I’m not sure, but this would definitely explain why site:Reddit works.
    - 4y ago
auggierose 4y ago
So what about a search engine that penalises ads heavily? Would that not be interesting to companies like Wikipedia or Apple that don't need ads to survive? Sounds to me like such a search engine could gain market share rapidly. Is there such a search engine already out there?
schaefer 4y ago
Try the search engine kagi.com It just works. Google stopped being a search company, and is an advertisement company now.
- thefourthchime 4y ago
  I tried my test search "California style burrito in Austin" and the first page was entirely reddit results. Clicking over to "map" resulted in a single wrong result. phind.com and new bing do this better.
  - georgehill 4y ago
    I tried the same query using phind.com, still the most answers came from reddit. https://www.phind.com/search?cache=5a93485f-b029-45bf-ade1-b70a77c76a3a https://www.phind.com/search?cache=5a93485f-b029-45bf-ade1-b...
- kjs3 4y ago
  Must create account to use a search engine. Hard Nope.
  - mmcdermott 4y ago
    I find the syllogism here a little hard to follow, because here is what the first bit looks like to me: 1. Web search is useful, both for work/productivity and recreation. 2. Running servers to index the internet is a scale of compute beyond the effort and expense of most or all of home users. 3. Web search has distinct economies of scale when applied. 4. Said economies must be funded in some way. 5. There are two proposed models: ad-supported and subscription. 6. We do not like the effects of ad-support in the context of Google. So the options are to either choose a different add-supported method (with the understanding that it may well meet Google's fate) or else pay for the product directly (subscription). Frankly, the only reason I haven't signed up for something like this is that DuckDuckGo has been good enough for me lately. It might not always be, but it has been so far. So I take the view after step 6 that, for the time being, I'm willing to jump from ad supported platform to ad supported platform, but I say that while admitting I'm a bad search stretch away from switching.
smrq 4y ago
When I navigated to your link I first got a full screen popover from Imgur and briefly thought that was the point. And, in a sense, it was.
XCSme 4y ago
> a large segment of the public facing internet is wiltin I noticed that many teenagers today, despite the abundance of technology around them, are a lot less technological than the previous generation. When I was young, almost everyone in my school knew how to download (pirate) stuff from the internet, burn CDs, copy cracks, modify config files, etc. Nowadays, I see some young people not knowing how to use the maps' functionality on their phones, and only be "proficient" in a few apps like Email, TikTok and Instagram. I do think that the PC/internet being less accessible before forced people to learn more about computers. Because everything is so fast and easy nowadays and there are so many sources of information, no one really needs to spend that time.
penguinvondoom 4y ago
Completely agree. I think the fundamental problem, is that the public facing internet is kind of like electricity or water - it is a utility, that isn't inherently monetizeable. So the only way to make money off of it is to advertise. And then advertisement itself is a cancer upon humanity ...
CRConrad 4y ago
> 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 Jaha du, Google pratar svenska med dig.

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.

marginalia_nu 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. This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  That's if you want to capture someone's focus, not their attention.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    If you capture their focus, are you not also capturing their attention?
    - bick_nyers 4y ago
      Yes, but not necessarily the other way around. I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I don't think most websites are predicated on the notion that the average user is committed, at least initially. Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to your product you can safely prioritize focus because you now have that commitment. I think engineers generally are above average on the skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order to perform math, analysis, and logic.
- brookst 4y ago
  It’s more about selling someone’s attention than holding it. The best possible outcome for both websites and Google is for a user to click on on a website from search and then immediately click on an ad. To the extent you find the site useful and don’t need what’s being advertised, that’s a fail for both of them.

izacus 4y ago

> I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads. The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Well how would you fix Google's predicament? I think it's easy enough to conclude they're harming themselves, but what are their options?
- brookst 4y ago
  Their only Hope at long term viability is something like the wall between advertising and editorial at old school media companies. Yes, it’s fashionable to be jaded but it really did work that way. Google needs its product people to not know or care about as revenue. They need to make search as efficient as possible, without regard for whether a good search result reduces ad clicks. Revenue would go do, but not catastrophically. And they’d have a sustainable business that would be hard to disrupt.
- hahamaster 4y ago
  I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Honestly the problem is that Google has been trying to fix it. Alternative and diverse incomes is the solution. Everyone wants to make a good product, but ads make a product worse. Everyone wants to make a heavily used product but pay-per-use or subscriptions are limiting. Google Cloud+Workplace, YouTube Premium, Play Store, Nest, ahem Stadia. Google has plenty of attempts at building products that make money without ads. The problem is that they’re expensive and not nearly as profitable. LLM are bad at search, but people seem to like they. It gives them a clean re-start of search and maybe they’ll use it to do a search subscription where they can retry building their one good product without ads. Probably not though.

GeekyBear 4y ago

> I don't know if it's Google that is dying. I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick. Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points. The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.

Jensson 4y ago
It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be so good at indexing useful reddit threads.
- davidkuennen 4y ago
  I would think they apply their normal algorithms. If it's a good article that's upvoted a lot, it should also be linked in some places and thus get a higher search score.
  - grumpy_coder 4y ago
    Though it's not finding the article. It's finding a link to the article on Reddit. I hope people aren't linking to the Reddit thread...
    - comfypotato 4y ago
      The way the original pagerank algorithm works, links to the original article would increase the score of a Reddit post linking to the article. Why Reddit posts are ranked higher in a default search I’m not sure, but this would definitely explain why site:Reddit works.
  - 4y ago

auggierose 4y ago

So what about a search engine that penalises ads heavily? Would that not be interesting to companies like Wikipedia or Apple that don't need ads to survive? Sounds to me like such a search engine could gain market share rapidly. Is there such a search engine already out there?

schaefer 4y ago

Try the search engine kagi.com It just works. Google stopped being a search company, and is an advertisement company now.

thefourthchime 4y ago
I tried my test search "California style burrito in Austin" and the first page was entirely reddit results. Clicking over to "map" resulted in a single wrong result. phind.com and new bing do this better.
- georgehill 4y ago
  I tried the same query using phind.com, still the most answers came from reddit. https://www.phind.com/search?cache=5a93485f-b029-45bf-ade1-b70a77c76a3a https://www.phind.com/search?cache=5a93485f-b029-45bf-ade1-b...
kjs3 4y ago
Must create account to use a search engine. Hard Nope.
- mmcdermott 4y ago
  I find the syllogism here a little hard to follow, because here is what the first bit looks like to me: 1. Web search is useful, both for work/productivity and recreation. 2. Running servers to index the internet is a scale of compute beyond the effort and expense of most or all of home users. 3. Web search has distinct economies of scale when applied. 4. Said economies must be funded in some way. 5. There are two proposed models: ad-supported and subscription. 6. We do not like the effects of ad-support in the context of Google. So the options are to either choose a different add-supported method (with the understanding that it may well meet Google's fate) or else pay for the product directly (subscription). Frankly, the only reason I haven't signed up for something like this is that DuckDuckGo has been good enough for me lately. It might not always be, but it has been so far. So I take the view after step 6 that, for the time being, I'm willing to jump from ad supported platform to ad supported platform, but I say that while admitting I'm a bad search stretch away from switching.

smrq 4y ago

When I navigated to your link I first got a full screen popover from Imgur and briefly thought that was the point. And, in a sense, it was.

XCSme 4y ago

> a large segment of the public facing internet is wiltin I noticed that many teenagers today, despite the abundance of technology around them, are a lot less technological than the previous generation. When I was young, almost everyone in my school knew how to download (pirate) stuff from the internet, burn CDs, copy cracks, modify config files, etc. Nowadays, I see some young people not knowing how to use the maps' functionality on their phones, and only be "proficient" in a few apps like Email, TikTok and Instagram. I do think that the PC/internet being less accessible before forced people to learn more about computers. Because everything is so fast and easy nowadays and there are so many sources of information, no one really needs to spend that time.

penguinvondoom 4y ago

Completely agree. I think the fundamental problem, is that the public facing internet is kind of like electricity or water - it is a utility, that isn't inherently monetizeable. So the only way to make money off of it is to advertise. And then advertisement itself is a cancer upon humanity ...

CRConrad 4y ago

> 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 Jaha du, Google pratar svenska med dig.