26 ms·

Google search's death by a thousand cuts

• AtNightWeCode 3y ago
  I think the article is mostly incorrect. The deep web has been way larger than the open Internet for a very long time. I see other problems with Google search like it does not work as well as it did some years ago.
• peterhung 3y ago
  A slightly too simplistic analysis.
• not_your_vase 3y ago
  Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems. Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of info I guess, but it is far from being the only website on the internet. However seemingly google stopped indexing more than the top 150-200 websites on the internet (and even those results are often lacking the searched words).
  • monsieurgaufre 3y ago
    I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.
    • BestGuess 3y ago
      that makes a lotta sense even to my ignorant mind. so everyone got login'd prompted since companies make the most money data gatherin or what have you, plus reducing bots, stuff like that, it all makes individual sense and then amounts to search engines not working good anymore. Plus real blogs or websites with real human writing get buried or never shown because of bot or that SEO thing I tried to understand? I'm just trying to wrap my head around it but I think I'm making sense of it now and it's kinda like that race to the bottom I see sometimes mentioned here? Do I got it right?
      • npsimons 3y ago
        I'm all for reducing bots and spam, but registration doesn't seem to have solved that problem for reddit. On top of this, siloing adds the extra bonus that it breaks things like The Internet Archive. There are a lot of communities on Slack and Discord that are just prime for vaporising without a trace. A TON of knowledge will just disappear once someone decides to turn it off, for whatever reason.
    • underlipton 3y ago
      I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction in Google Search efficacy was when they introduced Instant Search (or whatever they called the feature that presented results as users typed, rather than waiting for users to submit a full query). Even when they got rid of it, they never backtracked on whatever back-end changes enabled it (and degraded results in the service of presenting them faster). My suspicion is that this was the beginning of the public presentation of corporate infighting, where what the public saw from Google began to be less about good products and more about the products that particular execs, managers, and developers needed to "win" in order to bolster their careers (or what they perceive as such). This is why Google has developed a reputation for killing useful products, often replacing them with flashier and more frustrating alternatives (if at all). I don't like putting this on external factors. I think Google is doing this to themselves. It's a more private and stretched-out version of what's happening very publicly with Twitter right now.
      • atlantic 3y ago
        One of the applications I used to use on a daily was Google Reader. Then one day, they just shut it down for no apparent reason, and that was that. They don't seem to be focused on customer satisfaction. Hard to understand.
        • cout 3y ago
          I think you meant to say user satisfaction? Or did you pay for google reader?
          • underlipton 3y ago
            Google Reader, like many other Google products, was developmentally mature (read: relatively cheap to maintain) and drove users to profit centers. An example that more closely fits your criteria is Google Play Music, which was superior to its replacement, Youtube Music, and which I paid monthly for. I cancelled my subscription when they sunset it.
    • nostromo 3y ago
      It’s easy to be mad at Facebook, newspapers, Pinterest, Discord, etc. for locking the internet away behind a login or paywall. But it’s also the result of Google capturing all the value from the free internet. The end result is companies trying to capture more of that value for themselves and not letting Google eat their lunch, which required moving content and communities behind closed doors.
      • Andrex 3y ago
        Google didn't invent the idea of a web crawler or search engine. Because of how the web was designed, I think it was always an inevitability that the internet would start open but trend closed.
        • _Algernon_ 3y ago
          You could say that google started it. They ate everyone's lunch by including what people were looking for in a box at the top of the search results. Of course sites will respond in kind.
          • robertlagrant 3y ago
            They were better than the incumbents. The incumbents allowed people to buy search ranking.
            • dgroshev 3y ago
              Google now does effectively the same with their in-search ads. Most of the time the entire space above the fold is just ads.
              • robertlagrant 3y ago
                Agree it's not great, but it's not as bad as silently reordering the actual search results.
    • bdw5204 3y ago
      This happened because a few corporations were able to capture most of the internet due to a mix of laziness on the part of users and also the death of independent blogs and fan sites. I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or your family. Evil people use the internet to harass other people and to attack their livelihood or put the safety of their family at risk. Many employers now discriminate against employees or even just people applying for jobs who openly express opinions on the internet. And even posting pseudonymously isn't completely safe because it is usually possible to deanonymize posters if an attacker is obsessed enough. The sad reality is that many people do inauthentic things for the sake of career advancement (think of all the college students who do extracurriculars or projects for the sole purpose of "resume padding") and refuse to do things they actually believe in for the sake of their career. When creating quality online content becomes a risk to career advancement, people are going to stop doing it. In the long term, that means a siloed internet full of corporate propaganda, SEO optimized blogspam and clearly inauthentic posts. In short, I believe Google search is getting worse because the internet is getting worse. And the internet is getting worse because our society permits employers to have a chilling effect on the online speech of their employees and those who might be their employees someday. And because the independent internet has shrunk dramatically, the handful of corporations that control almost the entire internet can now get away with siloing it off so that's what they're doing.
      • tommica 3y ago
        Most people just don't have anything interesting to say
      • pseudalopex 3y ago
        > I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or your family. Evil people use the internet to harass other people and to attack their livelihood or put the safety of their family at risk. Many employers now discriminate against employees or even just people applying for jobs who openly express opinions on the internet. And even posting pseudonymously isn't completely safe because it is usually possible to deanonymize posters if an attacker is obsessed enough. Discussions moved from independent forums to Facebook groups and Reddit. Discord later. Facebook and Reddit are not more anonymous than independent forums.
  • x0x0 3y ago
    They broke it intentionally for money. The second they paid people to game their search engine (ie adsense), the entire thing was on the road to uselessness. There always would have been that incentive, but Google turbocharged it, with $33B of incentive in 2022.
  • ramraj07 3y ago
    Google search is broken because the internet has evolved in the AdWords era. Every person with a heartbeat has realized the monetary potential of making money from page views and SEO, so there’s a race to the bottom to capture the top spot for every search term in Google. Even if Google comes at it from an objectively user centric perspective this seems like an insurmountable problem to solve. But adding insult to the injury, post Sundar Google is just IBM/oracle at this point. So it’s just circling the drain at double the acceleration.
  • HelloNurse 3y ago
    > Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. From the point of view of a shortsighted company this might be a false dichotomy because if ad revenue from search grows, search is fine: neither rotting nor broken. You are assuming that Google treats users as customers rather than as an exploitable natural resource.
• Proven 3y ago
  [dead]
• peepeepoopoo14 3y ago
  They need to stop trying to so heavily curate what users are allowed to see in their searches. Since 2020, Google's attempts to operate as the internet's ideological censor have had a noticeable negative impact on the quality of their search results.
  • 1970-01-01 3y ago
    >Since 2020 Way before 2020. Circa 2008 it began, and it simply continues to the present. ChillingEffect's downfall in 2015 was a massive blow to the public. https://searchengineland.com/anti-censorship-database-chilling-effects-censors-removing-domain-search-212567 https://searchengineland.com/anti-censorship-database-chilli...
    • peepeepoopoo14 3y ago
      This is broader than DMCA takedown notices. For example, if you tried to look up the origins of covid, for a long time Google would try to shepherd you away from the lab leak hypothesis, since apparently that's dangerous wrongthink.
• foobarbecue 3y ago
  Doing planetary science, I used to be in the habit of searching for image IDs on google. Usually particular orbital images of the moon which had been mentioned in a paper. There are of course specific archives to search for this stuff, but google used to give surprisingly good results. Now I get literally zero results when I search an image ID. What changed? Did they remove their index of the Planetary Data System? Did they remove the indexes of planetary science papers?
  • moultano 3y ago
    Can you give an example query and the page it should return?
    • foobarbecue 3y ago
      Sure. Searching M1104273380R should return https://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR-V1.0/M1180855200RE https://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR-V1.... and this paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19829 https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19829 . Interestingly, when I tried this just now, I did get the paper as a result. I could swear I tried this same search yesterday and had zero results.
      • Kye 3y ago
        I've heard that Google will process queries that don't seem to get results for the searcher and they improve if you come back to it. I never test this because I've usually given up (wasn't important) or moved on to other ways to find the information.
        • ItsBob 3y ago
          Not sure about Google but DDG changes the results when I come back to them. So, for example, if you search for something, click on one of the links to open it and then go back to the search results, there will be a couple of new ones added. Not sure if some are removed also but it definitely changes.
      • 3y ago
• shalmanese 3y ago
  Google's death is deeper than just the corpus, their ranking algorithm is also deeply degrading. A week ago, a search for < James Palmer manchester foreign policy > wouldn't return https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/23/i-love-manchester-but-please-stop-celebrating-my-hometown/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/23/i-love-manchester-but-p... on the first page while < James Palmer manchester site:foreignpolicy.com > would [1] [2]. This appears to be fixed as of today but this kind of kindergarten level search intent not being fulfilled would have been unthinkable for Google even just a few years ago. [1] https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1670904508191322112 https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1670904508191322112 [2] https://twitter.com/shalmanese/status/1670973880637493249 https://twitter.com/shalmanese/status/1670973880637493249
  • underlipton 3y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+good+song+reddit https://www.google.com/search?q=pieces+of+me+is+actually+a+g... Still waiting on an explanation of fix for this one.
    • hnbad 3y ago
      As you can see from the highlighted results, most are not actually exact matches. They're not even fuzzy matches. They're mostly synonyms. The search query also contains a lot of words that would be considered stopwords (i.e. ignored) in a simple keyword search and don't provide much semantic value in a natural language query (i.e. if it is parsed as a question), so those are probably deprioritized. My assumption would be that the search results are garbage because the query is extremely ambiguous in the search engine's eyes, especially if you omit or modify any of the words (which it is allowed to do because it is not a search for an exact phrase).
      • underlipton 3y ago
        It could just find documents with the exact terms, like a search engine is supposed to.
    • 3y ago
• cma 3y ago
  In the TPUv4 paper it sounded like Google search moved over to some really crude AI embedding vector stuff. If you search "book of master system" it gives only results for "book of genesis" because it mixes up the biblical book of Genesis with the Sega Master System. Searching any programming terms, like camel-case variable names from a system library without exact quotes, just gives random results about Katy Perry and stuff now.
  • oneshtein 3y ago
    Google search results are driven by clicks. There are much more non-programmers than programmers, so they pop non-programming topics to top of the list. Average user don't care about programming languages. Google is a general search engine, not a specialized one. There was attempt to spy on users and split them into different buckets, but it's dangerous to population, because a government can just ask Google for the list of «wrong-thinkers».
  • supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    I looked for “book of master system” and it gave me results about the SEGA book. Granted, vectorization could be one of the issues plaguing search, but it isn’t the primary issue.
    • seri4l 3y ago
      I get results for the Bible book when I search for "book of megadrive". Genesis and Megadrive are different names for the same SEGA console. Master System is a different console altogether. What would you say is the primary issue? Personally I see vectorization and similar fuzzy techniques as the things that have most affected search results in the last <10 years, both positively and negatively. On one hand it allows me to search really dumb queries and still get sort of relevant results, on the other it makes well thought query tuning for more specific results seem futile. I don't know what goes on internally, but it's as if Google just discards as noise most of the words in the search query. "Verbatim" mode seems to tune that down somewhat.
    • cma 3y ago
      Yeah it was book of megadrive that gave the biblical genesis results, not master system, I misremembered. It was going around on Twitter a few weeks back.
• superasn 3y ago
  The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google would show me the actual domain registrars instead (like chatgpt does when i ask it). Google has been gamed so badly and they have been doing nothing about it just because the spam blog posts contains their ads. There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. There is only so much an adblocker can do to fix search. And right now all the useful content is getting blocked while the spam content is not only allowed but ranking on top of everything.
  • xbkingx 3y ago
    The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, and abandoned). If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s.
    • cout 3y ago
      I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.
      • Quekid5 3y ago
        Yup, same for me. It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)
• SoftTalker 3y ago
  I use DuckDuckGo now almost exclusively for search. It's the default in all my browsers. A few years ago Google still did better for some searches but now I don't feel that to be the case.
  • TX81Z 3y ago
    It’s a skinned version of Bing and Microsoft has forbade them from introducing any chat-based functionality. Hence their little demo going away quickly and quietly. I also use it, but if Bing starts to make real gains and Microsoft thinks more DDG users will go to Bing than Google if they kill DDG, they will kill DDG. They’ve been playing a very risky game for a long time.
    • mdekkers 3y ago
      Have a look at Kagi
  • omoikane 3y ago
    I am not sure a different search engine does any better in the face of reddit and twitter outages, if those places held the content I want to find. In the old days, we ran our own personal websites and we want our content to be discovered, in contrast with today where someone else host our content and wants to have a lot more say on what is discoverable. I think we need to have less reliance on centralized hosts if we want more control over searchability of content.
  • zirgs 3y ago
    Google still returns better results in my language, unfortunately. This is why I still add !g to my queries from time to time.
  • acheron 3y ago
    I’ve used DDG regularly for over a decade now, but unfortunately it’s gotten noticeably worse in the past couple years too.
• zokier 3y ago
  completely tangential, but this thread triggered a wave of nostalgia reminiscing how good the few years around 2010 were (or rather seemed to be through rose-tinted glasses) in tech. Among all else it was an era when it really felt that google did just great on almost all fronts, search included. Web in general was lot less app- and mobile-centric because those things were still pretty new things comparatively.
  • pulvinar 3y ago
    Well, maybe not that good (2011): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073737
    • mmmmmbop 3y ago
      This really adds some perspective. Has there been any actual analysis showing that Google Search is getting worse nowadays? All I'm seeing are anecdotal reports and feelings, and your link shows that this sentiment has been around for more than a decade.
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    In 2010, I worked for a company that was active in SEO spam. Google began putting a stop to it with Panda in 2011. Search results were pretty bad back then, too.
• hospitalJail 3y ago
  This post doesnt seem frontpage worthy, but I'll join in on the google bashing whenever I have a chance. The other day I tried to google search 4chan, imgur and reddit came up before 4chan. heck 4chan wasnt even on the first page... On a similar note, they are trying their best to hide wikipedia, now I have to specifically mention wiki most of the time. I have the best website for a specific thing, I do well in quite a few SEO searches. However, the generic term, (which I'm still the best in), I am nowhere to be found. Blogspam and lower quality advice are all over the first 2 pages. Heck, there is actually terrible advice in the first 2 pages, like dis/misinformation. The other day I was searching something I knew existed, I knew the page, and google would not give me the page. Ended up typing in the website. Whatever is going on at google is in the major red flag territory. We need to perma fork android, we need to get off chromimum, find an alternative to Pixel. We are near the end times of google, they are going to be AOL taking advantage of old people and those who refuse to change their ways.
  • hackerbeat 3y ago
    > I have the best website for a specific thing, I do well in quite a few SEO searches. However, the generic term, (which I'm still the best in), I am nowhere to be found. Can confirm. Same for me.
    • jamesash 3y ago
      Similar situation here.
  • stevenicr 3y ago
    I've written many times that the consistent censoring results makes it ripe for competition. I firmly believe that many of the algorithm changes for choosing results are based upon ideology, and a desire to push commercial things down below the first page as a money grab forcing people to pay the ppc auction extortion. Which means worse results for most searches beyond 'local shop open / phone number' - google, the new yellow pages. New smaller, niche engines; less censored, more federated is what I'm looking forward to.
• HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  Google has lots of smart employees, why can't they just "fix" search?
  • a_nop 3y ago
    "Fixing" search is, at this point, to Google, "getting people to click on more ads"
  • TX81Z 3y ago
    Don’t worry, the brain drain is in progress.
  • oneshtein 3y ago
    Google services are paid for by advertisers. On the fair market, there is competition that forces prices to decrease. Google is forced to sell more ads at the same price, or competitors will displace it from the market.
  • realusername 3y ago
    Because their revenue don't depend on search quality, they get paid for the top spots regardless of what's on the bottom and they are at a near monopoly.
  • reportgunner 3y ago
    They are all working on ads and adblocker arms race.
  • hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    What is the incentive for "fixing" anything? Removing 1 ad improves the search experience but decreases revenue. On the other hand, adding 1 ad increases revenue. At this stage that's all the innovation I see google doing.
  • Marazan 3y ago
    Because what Google considers a good search result is not what users consdier a good search result. Why is every search result for even the simplest yes/no question a 1500 word article with 2-3 picture and an embedded video? Because that's what Google thinks is a good search result! Google penalises your search ranking if users quickly navigate away from your page - this means if you have a page that quickly an efficiently answers a searchers question you get penalised whilst the site that buries the answer two thirds of the way through pure blog spam gets rewarded.
• jerzyt 3y ago
  Google's Search is dying because of Thousands of self-inflicted cuts. A couple of years ago there were about 3 or clearly marked ads on the first page, followed by generally useful results. Right now, I don't have the patience to scroll past the ads which are almost indistinguishable from useful links.
  • TX81Z 3y ago
    The really messed up part for me is that the “real” results are getting so bad the ads are increasingly what I’m searching for. It’s not a web search engine, it’s an ads search engine.
• labster 3y ago
  The cut that hurt the deepest for me is when negated search terms stopped working. You used to be able to get subsets of data, finding things without a homonym, but now the algorithm just gives you the most common results and the most paid ads.
  • npsimons 3y ago
    They retired "links:" (or something named similar) to find websites that linked to a given one. Was very useful, and I've been fearing ever since that they will do away with "site:" next. There was also a time you could paste a URL to a .GPX file into Google Maps and have it loaded. Quick and easy, well before OSM and Leaflet.
    • suddenclarity 3y ago
      Wasn't "links:" mostly (ab)used by SEOs while "site:" is really useful for real users?
  • flyinghamster 3y ago
    I've been noticing that on DDG as well. Gentleman's agreement, perhaps? I hope not.
• choas 3y ago
  Since Google collects a lot of personal data from each user, search results for the same query are different and personalized. This seems like a perfect solution - beside the tracking. For example, if someone searches for ‘python’, Google can use the context to show results about either a snake or a programming language. But what happens if someone wants to learn to program in Python as first programming language and has previously searched for a frog and visited the zoo last week? In my opinion, the information that Google collects is useless and doesn’t enhance the search results.
• troymc 3y ago
  Unlike the author, I'm not very worried about Wikipedia. Yes, they ask for donations, but that's not a sign that they're dying; donations are their main revenue source. That might be unusual among the web's top sites, but it's not in the grander scheme of things, i.e. there are lots of charities and nonprofits. I didn't know that LLM training sets used Wikipedia. I would have thought that the CC-BY-SA license (on all text) would keep them away. It's not like Chatbot-4000 can cite all the Wikipedia articles used to train it, nor is Chatbot-4000 going to license all its output under a CC-BY-SA license (as required by the license terms).
  • ramraj07 3y ago
    Wikipedia has assets north of 100MM last I read about it. They don’t need donations to run the core wiki media products for a real long time. Their appeal for donations is absolutely distasteful and misleading. All the money they get they use for projects a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with. Such disingenuous behavior from supposedly the “best of us” is why public loose trust in all of modern progressive movement.
    • McSwag 3y ago
      Is it just me? 100m doesn’t seem like “a lot” of money to cover legal, rent, infrastructure, engineers, administration, for a “really long time” to me. Having a reasonable buffer seems like a responsible thing to do.
      • ramraj07 3y ago
        To run just Wikipedia it seems quite sufficient. It’s KTLO on multidecade old technology with no real upgrade or new feature added in as much time and no exponential scaling needs. They should be set for a decade if not More even if their engineering stack is shit (which it’s not). They publish their spending. They are not spending on their website.
    • wintermutestwin 3y ago
      Honest question: What projects are potentially disagreeable? Are you suggesting that: "free knowledge, open source and open data, transparency, privacy, and collaboration" are ideas that "a lot of folks might not necessarily agree with?" (I fully admit that I may be missing something from the few minutes of research) I am interested in this because I believe that the users of social platforms are far better served by non-profits like Wikipedia instead of the enshitification that is fueled by the profit motive.
• enos_feedler 3y ago
  For the years I worked at Google I always wondered when they would update the “organize the worlds information” mission. The reason was simple: information eventually will reorganize itself around everyone trying to make their own money. Not money for Google. It felt like a mission that would only decrease in urgency not bc they are solving it but the world (internet) would get better at it over time
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• nottorp 3y ago
  Is the article's author worrying about Google specifically or search generally? Because Google specifically has been degrading from self inflicted cuts for years. Agreed that reddit going dark and machine generated "content" will only make it worse, but perhaps he should have talked about search generally then?
• megablast 3y ago
  In the very early days of google, you could search for a simple problem, and the result would be on the search page. No point in clicking. I guess a few people clicked the other answers, so they rose to the top. So now it is very rare to get the answer on the search page, because it makes no money for google.
• nullc 3y ago
  Already everyone and their brother rate limits everything except googlebot (or everything except googlebot and bing)-- it's already a big part of what creates a search lock-in for google.
• stevage 3y ago
  I would really love to read a deep dive on why Google Search quality has declined so much. There's a lot of anecdotes but I haven't read much that sounds particularly authoritative.
  • danpalmer 3y ago
    On why, or on whether. I personally find Google Search to be pretty great, and recently switched back from DuckDuckGo which I had been using for ~4 years, because I found I was having to use !g in half my searches. It's also noticeable faster. When I'm looking for an answer, I find Google much more likely to give me the answer. So I'm not convinced that search quality is declining. I'd love to see a deep dive on whether it actually is declining. Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on anything to do with search, and used DDG for my first year here out of habit. I have no inside info on search.
    • pravus 3y ago
      What's interesting is that I find Google's search quality today to be on par with the quality that existed before Google showed up and changed everything. Whether it is better than all the other garbage isn't really important to me. I want the good Google back.
      • flyinghamster 3y ago
        It's the Circle of Tech. Earlier search engines such as AltaVista and Excite began to return what they thought you were searching for rather than what you were searching for, and Google was the fast, uncluttered alternative. Now the circle has turned, and today's Google looks an awful lot like yesterday's AltaVista.
    • mitchell209 3y ago
      This is more the fault of DDG / Bing being awful, than it is Google doing a good job. I’ve found Kagi and Brave at worst are on par with Google without being bloated with ads. And oftentimes they’re simply better.
• stevage 3y ago
  >What if Wikipedia started charging or restricting API access? Wikipedia does charge Google. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-business/google-agrees-to-pay-for-wikipedia-content/articleshow/92400157.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-b...
• danpalmer 3y ago
  > What if Wikipedia started charging or restricting API access? Wikipedia has a downloadable data dump that would cost almost nothing to serve to Google, and it has an organisational mandate to make that data available. If they decide to charge for access to that I'm sure Google can afford it. Let's not throw around completely unrealistic hypotheticals.
  • adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    Selling "consumable" data access is called Wikimedia Enterprise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise
    • danpalmer 3y ago
      Great, this shows that they are unlikely to restrict as they already have a working business model for it with seemingly reasonable pricing (free for non-commercial, free monthly dumps, etc).
  • throwaw12 3y ago
    > If they decide to charge for access to that I'm sure Google can afford it Sure, Google can afford it. How about asking for 10% of revenue when Wikipedia data is used to show search results? Would Google agree or starts another rival to wikipedia and kill it after 4 years? Systems are so complex that, it is very difficult to predict how they would behave given parts of system gets impacted by other constraints (Reddit vs OpenAI data scraping, Reddit's urge to make money, Reddit moderators protesting against rules, 2 day blackout extending to infinite, Google releasing LLM papers, which are impacting its own business through ChatGPT and so on)
    • danpalmer 3y ago
      Well that would just be obviously against their mandate. They're a not-for-profit dedicated to providing an open encyclopedia, requiring billions from likely their main distribution channel would be nonsensical. Despite the recent actions of Twitter and Reddit, last ditch attempts to maintain any relevance in the public consciousness, most organisations act relatively rationally at a high level, and Wikimedia has the added bonus of not needing to make a profit or being publicly traded.
• zpeti 3y ago
  What is the motivation of anyone to make a website at this point? I don't see it. I've not seen very much discussion about the issues these LLMs are going to cause, this article is sort of talking about it - twitter and wikipedia could restrict their content, but - what about the millions of webmasters who ultimately created what the web is today? What is the motivation of anyone to really create content any more, apart from for actual social discussions on social media? LLMs will steal the content, and no one will read it. I really don't know what this will bring in the future. Will online content fizzle out in 2-3-5 years and fresh content will just disappear? Will LLM only be good up to 2025 data? This is a massive problem that changes the web as we know it, yet I don't see any discussion of this. Mark Andreeson bought it up for a sentence on lex Friedman, but that was it. He didn't know the answer.
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    > What is the motivation of anyone to make a website at this point? I don't see it. Making websites to sell stuff and services for example, ie a business. You'll find some of the best information on websites that are a business, because it's in their direct monetary interest to get you that information. As opposed to ad-supported websites.
• d--b 3y ago
  What changed? Just an asumption here. But could it be the fault of the web rather than Google's? Could it be that the web itself is being so flooded with SEO-ed crap content that even Google can't sort through it all?
  • tome 3y ago
    Kagi gives good results, so it's not a question of being technically infeasible.
  • Drakim 3y ago
    Chicken & Egg problem, the reason the web is so flooded with SEO-ed crap content is because of Google Search.
  • pravus 3y ago
    It's both, really. I seem to recall somewhere around 2006 Google changed to providing personalized search results based on your history. Since then the quality of search has declined horribly and my assumption is that it's a side-effect of the combination of hyper-SEO and a narrow focus on individual interest rather than categories. I'm starting to believe that some sort of Yahoo model is the best solution because you want a lot of source material to search through, but it needs to be context-aware so that searches are meaningful. I am vastly more effective in my job when search results return reference information rather than blog articles about somebody's weekend hobby project that only explores the most basic parts of a problem I'm working on. And this extends to other categories in my searching as well. I'm also personally wondering if Google has realized (even implicitly) that because of all of this, it no longer has to do deep searching anymore and can save tons of money by regurgitating cached copies of "related" garbage because people will give up before any expensive operations take place. It makes me wonder if Google's internal resource accounting has anything to do with it but that's just pure speculation on my part.
  • tjpnz 3y ago
    It's quite common for some queries to return a few pages when they might've previously yielded dozens. I'm not sure when it happened but couldn't have been more than 1-2 years ago. There's also less balance (ultimately results) for topics some might deem political, I may be on the left but I'm not blind. Here's something to try: think of a really obscure TV show you watched when you were young, even better a specific quote. In my experience Google was pretty good at finding sources on where it came from. But now it's incredibly rare.
• chwa982 3y ago
  [dead]
• thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
  This is the Internet version of the tragedy of the commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons So many people and groups want to profit with as little effort as possible that the commons (freely available data, open APIs, FLOSS software, etc.) is being overrun with little to no regard for the long term effects. Data can be copied endlessly, but it has to be generated the first time and updated or else it becomes stale and its usefulness decays. If no one is willing or able to generate or update it, there is nothing good and the signal-to-noise ratio falls off sharply. Everything is noise and it sucks.
  • noizejoy 3y ago
    In the history of humanity, intellectual property is a relatively recent phenomenon. A lot of technology and culture was built without such “protection”. I sometimes wonder how recent history would have played out without copyrights and patents.
    • dash2 3y ago
      Yes, but in the history of humanity, economic growth of above 0.1% a year is also relatively recent. One of the things that C18 radicals insisted upon was a decent system of IP.
      • Grimblewald 3y ago
        Id argue we're likely relating economic growth (which is measured by contended metrics) to the boom in quality of life we've seen. The problem with this is that the improvements in materials chemistry that have allowed for all these magical things was on the cusp of happening with or without IP. The drive for developing an IP system was more out of necessity in order to capitalize on the coming boom than it was to help that boom occur. Case in point: look how far LLM's have come since llama hit the public sphere vs. how far organisations like google managed to get, with more time and more resources at their disposal.
        • 3y ago
• daniel-cussen 3y ago
  [dead]
• adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  You can't even Google for issue titles and find them in public GitHub/Lab/Jira instances.
• hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  This is Google's inability to innovate. Google stated goal was the "organize the world's information". Nevertheless, they didn't come up with Wikipedia, the highest quality curated human-readable information repository. They also didn't come up with ChatGPT, arguably the first LLM good enough that can perform non trivial tasks of data recall and organization. Google had early success with search. Then decided to cement their lead by just throwing money at "all the smartest people"[1] so that their competitors would have difficulty hiring. This put Google in the situation where it's better to spend its resources fighting to keep the advantage that they have (by controlling the Internet infrastructure; android, chrome, email, etc) than innovating. Google is dead man walking, unless something very substantial changes. [1] "all the smartest people", read, "academically successful but rule-obeying, unimaginative, and risk-averse people".
  • tgv 3y ago
    A few days ago, some people were discussing Schumpeter's idea that (very) large companies drive innovation. I'm curious what they would make of Google Search.
    • consilient 3y ago
      The core of Schumpeter's position here is that innovation requires making large long-term capital investments in risky projects, which small firms can't afford. Things are somewhat different today then when Schumpeter was writing. On the one hand, governments and venture capital firms are now major sources of R&D funding. On the other hand, the growth of the financial sector has to some degree crowded out higher-risk investments within large firms.
      • dmvdoug 3y ago
        The financialization of like, literally everything, makes most of that “classic” work of political economics people like to cite wobble badly. Hell, so does advertising if you look at the classic Austrian Econ stuff. It’s invisible in Mises’ Human Action (because it barely existed at the time! no fault of his I guess), and it causes massive tensions if you try to confront his framework with it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• wslh 3y ago
  Google problem now is not Reddit nor Twitter. Google converted in just a brand with really awful results and full of AdWords campaigns where it is not clear what marketers are paying for. It seems like they need to return to the original Brin and Page paper [1]. Google continue to do amazing things (e.g. AlphaZero, Project Zero) may be in the same way as Xerox Parc did amazing things in the past but nothing really new cames from the organization. BTW Google Workspace (e.g. Sheets, Docs, etc) is a good competitor in the office space. Good business execution, the search in Google Drive is awful. [1] https://research.google/pubs/pub334/ https://research.google/pubs/pub334/
• hooby 3y ago
  I feel that Google search has been slowly dying for many years now. Where in the past I could find documentation, forum-posts, wikis - concise information - these days I find SEO-optimised marketing fluff, link-farms, clickbait, long-form articles with thousands of words that ultimately say nothing, political tirades that don't make sense for any non-U.S.-citizen, and ads - tons and tons of ads. It would seem that it was Google ads and Google search's own algorithm - which directly led to this state of affairs. And that's the main reason why asking some LLM for answers is so much more attractive than using search: the AI cuts through all that crap, and extracts the actual information. If it's not hallucinating, that is. The web is no longer for humans or for finding information. It's for bots, crawlers, for the Google algorithm and for marketing. Humans simply can no longer digest it - we need AI to generate something more concise, more to the point, more digestible. Without the marketing, fluff and bait and filler.
  • joelanman 3y ago
    They very much killed the golden goose. It's a real failure to think in terms of systems. Google relies on a healthy open web, yet as arguably the biggest single influencer of the web it has completely failed to maintain that let alone improve it.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • amelius 3y ago
      Perhaps you are simply not the target audience any longer ... I mean, if they can make billions by serving 99% of people, why would they spend billions on making the remaining 1% happy?
      • BirAdam 3y ago
        Clicks and impressions do not necessarily need to be human clicks or human impressions.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  >Large models are trained on public data scraped via API. Content-heavy sites are most likely to be disrupted (why post on StackOverflow?) by models trained on their own data. Naturally, they want to restrict access and either (1) sell the data or (2) train their own models. This restriction prevents (or complicates) Google’ automatic scraping of the data for Search (and probably for training models, too). I've seen the other side of the coin, far too frequently. Many websites allow Googlebot to index for free, but once a person clicks on Google serach results, they ask for money.
• tantalor 3y ago
  > What if Wikipedia started charging or restricting API access? Easy, rehost it.
• fidotron 3y ago
  The true meta problem here is the age old question of how to fund services, including search, on the web. Google, Twitter, Reddit, Gfycat are all immediate variants of the same problem, which does not have a technological solution. The naive idea that all these things can be free, especially when promoted by those in an ecosystem as propped up as it is by ad revenue, is ridiculous. Someone has to pay for these things to be developed and operated and typically when they do they get to call the shots, which leads to the modern UX disaster. At least now the VC situation means we have a lot less product-dumping-by-any-other-name intended to destroy the market for legitimate participants.
  • courseofaction 3y ago
    I agree, and people's unwillingness to pay for the things they value causes the thing to no longer be 'for' them. It's for those who are willing to pay for it (investors).
    • DeathArrow 3y ago
      Once someone had something for what he perceived as free, it's hard to convince that person to pay.
      • CoastalCoder 3y ago
        The evolution of cable television in the U.S. might be instructive. At first, TV (broadcast) was free, with ads. IIUC, when cable TV later rolled out, it was ad-free. Viewers paid for it instead. But eventually even those paying for cable TV were shown ads. So one lesson is that paying for a service might only delay its enshitification. EDIT: It seems I was wrong about cable TV starting out ad-free [0]. So my example isn't strong evidence for my enshitification claim. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18409942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18409942
        • thfuran 3y ago
          I think the lesson is that unsolicited advertising should be banned because it corrupts everything it can touch.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  If large websites like Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia ban Google Search, maybe they die, too along with Google search. Which means we return to late '90s and early 2000s situation when there were no behemoths hoarding data and knowledge and there were many specialized websites. I am happy with checking tech news on HN, checking stuff about cars on a car website, read about photography on a photography website and so on, instead of searching countless Facebook groups and subreddits.
• dhfbshfbu4u3 3y ago
  From an DTC advertiser’s perspective, Google’s made so many hostile decisions of late: selling remnant space through Performance Max, ditching UA for GA4 without porting data, releasing Bard… Just failure after failure while the end consumer search experience just goes down the tubes. Lots of smart people making very bad products that get in the way of other smart people making good products. It’s shocking to look at the wreckage of their decades of poor decision-making.
• RamblingCTO 3y ago
  While that's very true, I actually like searxng for that. And thanks to Googles slow death and the (it feels like that at least) Google's slow death, we'll see more of that and improvement to existing projects in the future, imho.
• Gremblin 3y ago
  Over 50% of searches don't end up to being a click to a site which means less and less traffic is gained from Google who still monetizes the data they have scraped and the answer they give to users who search. For content creators this has meant they need to find more and most importantly more agressive ways to monetize their content since less and less traffic means you need to show more ads to keep the money flowing. If google lowered the amount of answers it actually gives and would lead people to click on the sites more there would be less ads and users would be happier as well and there would be less paywalls as well.
• correlaroate 3y ago
  > Google will lose results, site by site The author is overlooking that Google can cut a deal with Twitter and Reddit and everybody else. That's for mutual benefit. It keeps driving traffic to them which is great PR and it keeps Google relevant.
• quench 3y ago
  in the 90's one search engine after another went this way. Each new engine worked for a while then advertisers started to game it and it gradually became useless. It actually impressive that google has managed to avoid this flaw for so long. The only thing I am not sure of is have advertisers finally found ways to game the system or is google doing it to themselves having forgotten why we all started using it in the first place. I reckon that chat GPT will end up like the Douglas Adams HHGTG dystopian elevators at some point too :)
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  What if an ISP decides to block ads and spam at DNS level? That theoretically can clean up the Internet a bit. It would be good not only for the customers, but also for the ISP since it has less junk to travel through its network.
• imranq 3y ago
  Seems like a lot of confirmation bias on this thread, but I've found google search to be fine for most of the search queries I've used. The real threat seems to be chatGPT which has been a great timesaver for information that needs to be customized
• ot1138 3y ago
  Google has sucked as a company from the very beginning. Not necessarily the technology, but the founders and the culture. How many of you remember back in 2005 or so, when the first lawsuit for delisting was brought against Google by a small business owner? The Google attorney showed up with a complete history of this person's searches and proceeded to demean him in court. Probably not many of you, because Google buried the story. Today it can't be found (I can't anyway). It was written about in a highly critical book of Google a few years later. Think Reddit's API story is bad? Google did the same thing back in 2010-2012, slowly tightening the clamps on anyone monitoring them to put them out of business. My company was saved by a call from a famous billionaire to Matt Cuts, after which our little problem promptly disappeared.
  • Capricorn2481 3y ago
    Well at least link the book
    • ot1138 3y ago
      I believe it's "Search & Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google" by Scott Cleland but I haven't read the book in years (and I'm not about to buy another one). The reason I remember this is because I wrote three books about Google, and I was sorely tempted to include the story but my publisher decided it would wiser to not include it.
• tim333 3y ago
  Reports of Google's death seem greatly exaggerated. The still have 95% share on mobile and 84% on desktop, the latter because Microsoft can make Windows try to force Bing upon you. Google probably have like 99% of the profits in search. The idea of sites making their data inaccessible is not new. Experts Exchange is still out there siloing the answers but Stack Overflow has all the market share though being open. Google will be fine.
  • n4te 3y ago
    I switched to Bing recently. It looks exactly like Google with a few extra features and is slightly better at providing relevant results. What Google does is no longer good or unique. As for non-search, Google has killed so many products I will never invest in something new they make.
    • tim333 3y ago
      Well maybe. But Google dying links on HN are as old as HN yet it endures. Some past links: Is google's search business dying? (thepoc.net) 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1217737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1217737 Is Google slowly dying? 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7779020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7779020 Is Google Dying a Slow Death? 2010 (http://brooksreview.net/2010/11/death-google/ http://brooksreview.net/2010/11/death-google/) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929821
• fallingfrog 3y ago
  What google is no doubt trying to do right now as their highest priority is train their AI bot to sell products to you as part of its responses. I guarantee they are putting 100 times as much effort into that as they are into AI safety.
• barrysteve 3y ago
  Probably should save/download whatever you want to keep now...
• dahwolf 3y ago
  LLMs cause quite the paradigm shift. Before, there was a very strong if not existential incentive to get indexed by scrapers, in particular search engines. Now the situation is flipped where there's a strong incentive to put up ever higher walls, in particular for LLM scrapers. The difference is obvious: LLMs don't give back. They just rob your life's work and monetize it locally. Why would a platform or its users open up to that?
• netrap 3y ago
  I am starting to wonder more if Google search died or if the web did. You read a lot of comments about how in the past you could find a lot more information, but the reality is that no one is posting that information outside of the walled gardens. It's no wonder Google search sucks, if they don't have direct access to these walled gardens the information is locked behind the door...
• agumonkey 3y ago
  the ui is really getting worse, you know it's bad when your brain tells you to use bing f
• abramN 3y ago
  >> Large models are trained on public data scraped via API. Content-heavy sites are most likely to be disrupted (why post on StackOverflow?) by models trained on their own data. Naturally, they want to restrict access and either (1) sell the data or (2) train their own models. This restriction prevents (or complicates) Google’ automatic scraping of the data for Search (and probably for training models, too). This is going to be the interesting part to me - one HUGE usage scenario for AI would be doing automated searches and distilling results from the web - if sites start preventing that then AI innovation could be stifled - OR we'll see a scenario where the average person is very limited with that their AI subscription can access. We could have a situation where e.g. Fandango prevents AI from searching its site to help people plan their movie outing, but instead has their own model that they'll charge for access. We could have models talking to each other, deals made between the owners of the models for access, and the average citizen uses a search engine optimized for monetization, that may have data that's months out of date but they can pay extra for the model that provides current data.
• nipperkinfeet 3y ago
  No longer can Google find anything. Nowadays, Yandex is similar to the old Google, which I have been using exclusively.
• sh34r 3y ago
  Y’all know there are other search engines, right? Yandex is becoming increasingly more useful for politically incorrect content and DMCA violating content. Bing has always been the best for porn. DuckDuckGo is great for many things as well. SEO becomes a lot more difficult to pull off when there isn’t one search algorithm used by 99% of users.
• ags1905 3y ago
  It doesn't matter, google's search is not as effective as it was until 3-4 years back. Financial interests destroyed a useful tool.