5 ms·

Google should be nervous about all of its ads system because their search engine is becoming increasingly trash

by spaceman_2020 4y ago

echelon 4y ago
1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars. 2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up. 3) Google Search tech / product itself sucks. Power queries no longer work. This might be hard to unwind from as revenue numbers are propped up by answering "dumb queries" with ads. 4) AI will eat search's lunch. You'll increasingly ask LLMs, and these LLMs will push search ad revenue to a much lower margin, especially if the goal is to gain a reputation for quality. Google has to figure this out quick. 50% of their revenue is from search. I think they're checkmated. There's no way out except to build something new and hope it works. That wouldn't be easy for anyone, but Google especially hasn't shown a history or aptitude for doing this.
- w-ll 4y ago
  > You find information on TikTok Am I old? What kind of information. Not to be on Googles side here but, for information in video form... YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still. Right?
  - echelon 4y ago
    TikTok is a holy grail of distilled information. In two short years of TikTok recipes, my wife has learned how to cook better than almost any restaurant we eat at, and we're serious foodies. Zero to one hundred, just from TikTok. There's everything from OSint TikTok to finance TikTok to archeologist TikTok... It's crazy, and it's good. Once you find your niche, the information density approaches that of a black hole. It's really high quality.
    - w-ll 4y ago
      Is it information or inspiration, a la Pinterest? I get some cooking youtubers can be long winded like cooking blogs of before, but I feel like you find people you like, and can way easier scrub the video to important parts on YT. And I get us on HN are a particular cohort, but is there really as much depth of information? Literally had to help a family member fix their jeep over the holidays and "replace fuel pump jeep Cherokee 1998" is just not something I think Tiktok would be good at. Idk I should try and install it sometime i guess. And then also, at least i've noticed on Instagram (and occasionally FB), that like sometimes I see something. Forget about it, click elsewhere, and then cant go back to find it again? Vs /feed/history and even browser history on Youtube? Edit: Is this normal? I cant even search for videos on tiktok.com without an account?
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill. it only requires that you do it. you don't need to study hard to learn to cook. The average person can learn to cook from someone who already can do it (usually it's your parents...) in a week. It usually happens at the age of 15. From then on it's only a matter of practicing and experimenting. It doesn't require a tutor, contrary to what TV shows like master chef wants to sell to you. I learned how to cook looking at my mom doing it and then tried some recipe from this book series from the '60s that were very popular in many homes when I was a kid. It's easier than learning how to bike or walk. https://www.ibs.it/in-cucina-con-fantasia-10-libri-vintage-wilma-de-angelis/e/2560043178107 https://www.ibs.it/in-cucina-con-fantasia-10-libri-vintage-w...
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        > it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill So? Millions of people lack basic skills, like 1/3 of the population struggles with digital skills. Some skills are basic but obscure - maintenance of a bicycle is a basic, but if you never has a bicycle, you won't have it. Or maybe prepping a live fish for cooking.
        peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  - kenhwang 4y ago
    YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts, life updates, sponsorships, etc. Basically content that added no value to the user and only exists to make the video long enough to qualify for more ad pods. A 10 minute video would often only have 2 minutes of relevant content. TikTok encourages the opposite: so content creators cram in as much information as possible, often speeding up music and talking. Sometimes with supercuts to even minimize the natural pauses between words. The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s and shares more similarities with a lightning talk and slide deck than a video.
    - w-ll 4y ago
      TikTok encourages fast consumable content (fast fashion), not information. And yes there could be fluff in longer form videos? But that also can included context, and allow the viewer to skip or watch at their own pace. You could listen to an audio book at 10x speed, but would you retain much of it? I guess i would say, TikTok information is the personification of the meme of "How to Draw an Owl" quick and short. But does it convey enough information, could a longer form be better? https://i.imgur.com/H7U6Bn2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/H7U6Bn2.jpg
      - achenet 4y ago
        from my recollection of Scott Young's blog and to a certain extent my personal experience, you can generally up the video speed to 1.5x-2x and retain the same amount of comprehension - people generally talk much slower than you you can understand, because it takes more effort to say something than understand it.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts I can watch YouTube on a television though. And, just like a book, I can skip the parts I'm not interested in. Are we at the point that research has become something that should be so effortless that even the tiniest annoyance is considered bad? > so content creators cram in as much information as possible > The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s which is exactly the opposite of good information. A lightning talk it's not information, it's an hint to something that should sparkle your interest, nobody actively search for lightning talks as a form of research. At school I studied Roman history for ever, it's not like that Roman history is really that complicated (it is vast, it spans a very long time and there are many names and many battles, but still not complex stuff) it's that persistence of knowledge requires time, repetition and going into details. You can cram Roman history in two paragraphs, but that's not information, that's trivia. But mostly, good information requires reputation: you can't just take a 2 minute video crammed into 30 seconds chipmunk high pitch voice and call it "information". That's just someone talking about stuff, as far as the use knows, it could be 100% bullshit (and probably is).
  - bakuninsbart 4y ago
    I had a small problem with my dishwasher, and wanted to look up how to fix it. Youtube video was ~15 minutes long and in the end somehow contained less relevant information than the 1 minute TikTok. Youtube shorts is trying to get in the mix, but no matter how I try to curate my feed, there's always around 30% bald men bullshitting mixed in (Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and a bunch of bad comedians). Their algorithm is strongly geared towards controversy, and I guess it works to increase engagement, but only for people who don't realize how toxic and unhealthy it is to watch stuff like that.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    >YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still Not really. YouTube is a mess due to advertising. You have to wade through tons of trash to find good content.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Ironically, if they had focused more on delivering a good search experience instead of delivering ads and low-value "AI" features, they might have better prospects looking forward.
- calderknight 4y ago
  How does finding info on TikTok work? Is it like, vidoes of teens talking about the subject you search?
- missedthecue 4y ago
  I've heard much fuss about 4), but i'm still skeptical. Google makes most their money on commercial searches such as "what is the best TV", or "where to buy football tickets", not "please do my homework". And AI will have a hard time returning superior results on the former, because many people are looking for human reviews rather than an AI output. In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but not some future edition of ChatGPT.
  - foepys 4y ago
    > human reviews rather than an AI output AI will very soon be perfectly capable of generating human sounding reviews. It just needs to "dumb down" the tone a bit to be believable.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      But no one wants that. ChatGPT can already produce a good 500 word review of a TV, I can ask it to do that right now, but that's totally non-valuable.
      - foepys 4y ago
        Definitely but would you be able to tell if a review you see is generated or written by a human? We will have to face a reality where nothing on the internet can be trusted. Ironically traditional news outlets will probably become more relevant again.
        arky527 4y ago
        Unless those traditional news outlets use LLMs to write stories for them in order to keep up with the internet/lower salary cost
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    >In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but not some future edition of ChatGPT. Maybe a future edition of ChatGPT can discern a real human review from a content farm returned by Google Search.
- dclusin 4y ago
  I disagree with the implicit assumption that llms can’t be gamed. There’s simply too much money to be made for that to remain true.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    Yeah it's still too early for us to know for sure but I'd expect LLMs getting pretty bad pretty quick. Once ads are added there is, again, a motivation to make replies very long and rambly. Even now I begin getting "annoyed": Yes it's grammatically correct and "humanly" sounding but all I really want is five dashes with ingredients and instructions for an apple pie. Given enough time, I'm confident the "Certainly I can help you. Here's what you need to..." will once again turn into a paragraph or two to have more opportunities to sell to advertisers. The economics still don't seem to favor brief responses.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Outside of basic data like figuring out the cast of a movie, practically all of my searches now have "reddit" appended to them. Medical and health-related queries are particularly screwed. Every top result is practically the same gamified SEO trash with filler content. I also don't know who told Google to ignore the keywords in my search query and show me a cluttered page that targets "topics" instead of keywords.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    The cool thing about Reddit is you might just be able to ask for a recommendation and someone will give it to you. Either someone else has asked before, or you find the right sub where the people with the answer are.
    - everdrive 4y ago
      Just imagine what AI will do this in 4 years. You can no longer trust the recommendations, there are whole threads written by bots to push specific products.
- ajb 4y ago
  I agree except for "there is no way out" - for a company with Google's bankroll, there's always the option of an acquisition. That's the usual way for monopolists to stay relevant.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Google is still king of the traditional web. There are so many products and services that you cannot sell through Amazon and that you do not want to sell on Amazon. Social media is a joke when it comes to online sales, you have to invest 100 hours into social media to get the same results as investing 1 hour in a normal web site. The search engine of Google has rapidly deteriorated, but people still go mainly to Google when they want or need to purchase something. AI can not make contracts with humans and make a sale. People selling online instead of making free content seem to be the most protected against AI right now. An AI can never deal with money responsibilities. Google's strongest arm right now are maps, where they are superior. Apple is finally catching up, and could compete with Google if they changed some of their truly idiotic maps policies. For what it's worth, Apple could probably easily destroy Google as a search engine, and they have the conservative attitude to make them a good candidate.
- brutusurp 4y ago
  > you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. I'm not sending my purchase intent to Amazon. In fact I am ensuring I don't give them ads results via SEO (e.g., -site:amazon.com). I don't want Amazon ads in my results which I know were forcibly generated at runtime by overriding competitors (i.e., breaking/hacking Google Search). I don't want to purchase an item from Amazon knowing it could contain an empty box and/or defective product (i.e., no quality control), will take 5x as long to arrive, and I may not even receive a refund in the event I try to return the item. Give me a service better than Amazon. I'm tired of being served subpar everything by them. Especially when they treat their employees and customers like trash. No thanks.
DeathArrow 4y ago
The positive news is that if Google search dies, so will the SEO websites and content farms that litter the web.

Google should be nervous about all of its ads system because their search engine is becoming increasingly trash

1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars. 2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up. 3) Google Search tech / product itself sucks. Power queries no longer work. This might be hard to unwind from as revenue numbers are propped up by answering "dumb queries" with ads. 4) AI will eat search's lunch. You'll increasingly ask LLMs, and these LLMs will push search ad revenue to a much lower margin, especially if the goal is to gain a reputation for quality. Google has to figure this out quick. 50% of their revenue is from search. I think they're checkmated. There's no way out except to build something new and hope it works. That wouldn't be easy for anyone, but Google especially hasn't shown a history or aptitude for doing this.

w-ll 4y ago
> You find information on TikTok Am I old? What kind of information. Not to be on Googles side here but, for information in video form... YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still. Right?
- echelon 4y ago
  TikTok is a holy grail of distilled information. In two short years of TikTok recipes, my wife has learned how to cook better than almost any restaurant we eat at, and we're serious foodies. Zero to one hundred, just from TikTok. There's everything from OSint TikTok to finance TikTok to archeologist TikTok... It's crazy, and it's good. Once you find your niche, the information density approaches that of a black hole. It's really high quality.
  - w-ll 4y ago
    Is it information or inspiration, a la Pinterest? I get some cooking youtubers can be long winded like cooking blogs of before, but I feel like you find people you like, and can way easier scrub the video to important parts on YT. And I get us on HN are a particular cohort, but is there really as much depth of information? Literally had to help a family member fix their jeep over the holidays and "replace fuel pump jeep Cherokee 1998" is just not something I think Tiktok would be good at. Idk I should try and install it sometime i guess. And then also, at least i've noticed on Instagram (and occasionally FB), that like sometimes I see something. Forget about it, click elsewhere, and then cant go back to find it again? Vs /feed/history and even browser history on Youtube? Edit: Is this normal? I cant even search for videos on tiktok.com without an account?
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill. it only requires that you do it. you don't need to study hard to learn to cook. The average person can learn to cook from someone who already can do it (usually it's your parents...) in a week. It usually happens at the age of 15. From then on it's only a matter of practicing and experimenting. It doesn't require a tutor, contrary to what TV shows like master chef wants to sell to you. I learned how to cook looking at my mom doing it and then tried some recipe from this book series from the '60s that were very popular in many homes when I was a kid. It's easier than learning how to bike or walk. https://www.ibs.it/in-cucina-con-fantasia-10-libri-vintage-wilma-de-angelis/e/2560043178107 https://www.ibs.it/in-cucina-con-fantasia-10-libri-vintage-w...
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill So? Millions of people lack basic skills, like 1/3 of the population struggles with digital skills. Some skills are basic but obscure - maintenance of a bicycle is a basic, but if you never has a bicycle, you won't have it. Or maybe prepping a live fish for cooking.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
- kenhwang 4y ago
  YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts, life updates, sponsorships, etc. Basically content that added no value to the user and only exists to make the video long enough to qualify for more ad pods. A 10 minute video would often only have 2 minutes of relevant content. TikTok encourages the opposite: so content creators cram in as much information as possible, often speeding up music and talking. Sometimes with supercuts to even minimize the natural pauses between words. The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s and shares more similarities with a lightning talk and slide deck than a video.
  - w-ll 4y ago
    TikTok encourages fast consumable content (fast fashion), not information. And yes there could be fluff in longer form videos? But that also can included context, and allow the viewer to skip or watch at their own pace. You could listen to an audio book at 10x speed, but would you retain much of it? I guess i would say, TikTok information is the personification of the meme of "How to Draw an Owl" quick and short. But does it convey enough information, could a longer form be better? https://i.imgur.com/H7U6Bn2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/H7U6Bn2.jpg
    - achenet 4y ago
      from my recollection of Scott Young's blog and to a certain extent my personal experience, you can generally up the video speed to 1.5x-2x and retain the same amount of comprehension - people generally talk much slower than you you can understand, because it takes more effort to say something than understand it.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts I can watch YouTube on a television though. And, just like a book, I can skip the parts I'm not interested in. Are we at the point that research has become something that should be so effortless that even the tiniest annoyance is considered bad? > so content creators cram in as much information as possible > The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s which is exactly the opposite of good information. A lightning talk it's not information, it's an hint to something that should sparkle your interest, nobody actively search for lightning talks as a form of research. At school I studied Roman history for ever, it's not like that Roman history is really that complicated (it is vast, it spans a very long time and there are many names and many battles, but still not complex stuff) it's that persistence of knowledge requires time, repetition and going into details. You can cram Roman history in two paragraphs, but that's not information, that's trivia. But mostly, good information requires reputation: you can't just take a 2 minute video crammed into 30 seconds chipmunk high pitch voice and call it "information". That's just someone talking about stuff, as far as the use knows, it could be 100% bullshit (and probably is).
- bakuninsbart 4y ago
  I had a small problem with my dishwasher, and wanted to look up how to fix it. Youtube video was ~15 minutes long and in the end somehow contained less relevant information than the 1 minute TikTok. Youtube shorts is trying to get in the mix, but no matter how I try to curate my feed, there's always around 30% bald men bullshitting mixed in (Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate and a bunch of bad comedians). Their algorithm is strongly geared towards controversy, and I guess it works to increase engagement, but only for people who don't realize how toxic and unhealthy it is to watch stuff like that.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still Not really. YouTube is a mess due to advertising. You have to wade through tons of trash to find good content.
nerdponx 4y ago
Ironically, if they had focused more on delivering a good search experience instead of delivering ads and low-value "AI" features, they might have better prospects looking forward.
calderknight 4y ago
How does finding info on TikTok work? Is it like, vidoes of teens talking about the subject you search?
missedthecue 4y ago
I've heard much fuss about 4), but i'm still skeptical. Google makes most their money on commercial searches such as "what is the best TV", or "where to buy football tickets", not "please do my homework". And AI will have a hard time returning superior results on the former, because many people are looking for human reviews rather than an AI output. In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but not some future edition of ChatGPT.
- foepys 4y ago
  > human reviews rather than an AI output AI will very soon be perfectly capable of generating human sounding reviews. It just needs to "dumb down" the tone a bit to be believable.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    But no one wants that. ChatGPT can already produce a good 500 word review of a TV, I can ask it to do that right now, but that's totally non-valuable.
    - foepys 4y ago
      Definitely but would you be able to tell if a review you see is generated or written by a human? We will have to face a reality where nothing on the internet can be trusted. Ironically traditional news outlets will probably become more relevant again.
      - arky527 4y ago
        Unless those traditional news outlets use LLMs to write stories for them in order to keep up with the internet/lower salary cost
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but not some future edition of ChatGPT. Maybe a future edition of ChatGPT can discern a real human review from a content farm returned by Google Search.
dclusin 4y ago
I disagree with the implicit assumption that llms can’t be gamed. There’s simply too much money to be made for that to remain true.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Yeah it's still too early for us to know for sure but I'd expect LLMs getting pretty bad pretty quick. Once ads are added there is, again, a motivation to make replies very long and rambly. Even now I begin getting "annoyed": Yes it's grammatically correct and "humanly" sounding but all I really want is five dashes with ingredients and instructions for an apple pie. Given enough time, I'm confident the "Certainly I can help you. Here's what you need to..." will once again turn into a paragraph or two to have more opportunities to sell to advertisers. The economics still don't seem to favor brief responses.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Outside of basic data like figuring out the cast of a movie, practically all of my searches now have "reddit" appended to them. Medical and health-related queries are particularly screwed. Every top result is practically the same gamified SEO trash with filler content. I also don't know who told Google to ignore the keywords in my search query and show me a cluttered page that targets "topics" instead of keywords.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  The cool thing about Reddit is you might just be able to ask for a recommendation and someone will give it to you. Either someone else has asked before, or you find the right sub where the people with the answer are.
  - everdrive 4y ago
    Just imagine what AI will do this in 4 years. You can no longer trust the recommendations, there are whole threads written by bots to push specific products.
ajb 4y ago
I agree except for "there is no way out" - for a company with Google's bankroll, there's always the option of an acquisition. That's the usual way for monopolists to stay relevant.
carlosjobim 4y ago
Google is still king of the traditional web. There are so many products and services that you cannot sell through Amazon and that you do not want to sell on Amazon. Social media is a joke when it comes to online sales, you have to invest 100 hours into social media to get the same results as investing 1 hour in a normal web site. The search engine of Google has rapidly deteriorated, but people still go mainly to Google when they want or need to purchase something. AI can not make contracts with humans and make a sale. People selling online instead of making free content seem to be the most protected against AI right now. An AI can never deal with money responsibilities. Google's strongest arm right now are maps, where they are superior. Apple is finally catching up, and could compete with Google if they changed some of their truly idiotic maps policies. For what it's worth, Apple could probably easily destroy Google as a search engine, and they have the conservative attitude to make them a good candidate.
brutusurp 4y ago
> you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. I'm not sending my purchase intent to Amazon. In fact I am ensuring I don't give them ads results via SEO (e.g., -site:amazon.com). I don't want Amazon ads in my results which I know were forcibly generated at runtime by overriding competitors (i.e., breaking/hacking Google Search). I don't want to purchase an item from Amazon knowing it could contain an empty box and/or defective product (i.e., no quality control), will take 5x as long to arrive, and I may not even receive a refund in the event I try to return the item. Give me a service better than Amazon. I'm tired of being served subpar everything by them. Especially when they treat their employees and customers like trash. No thanks.

DeathArrow 4y ago

The positive news is that if Google search dies, so will the SEO websites and content farms that litter the web.