5 ms·

It's hard to tell if it's Google's dominance causing search to suck or just the web ecosystem naturally optimizing for clicks. I will say most queries with eve

It's hard to tell if it's Google's dominance causing search to suck or just the web ecosystem naturally optimizing for clicks. I will say most queries with even vaguely commercial intent do seem to get the max or nearly a full page of sponsored links. I don't recall what it was like years ago but I'm pretty sure it is worse. I also think it's pretty clear the platform take-rate needs to be generally lowered across the board, likely making it illegal to lock customers to a store or require payments go through the same store. This is a tax on basically everyone and provides very little value.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago
The problem here is authority. What makes you an authority on a subject? Books written? Credentials (diploma?)? References? These things aren't all true in real life, and on the internet it's even easier to fake all of that. In the beginning Google went by 'amount of text' (which is why you read everybody's life story on how they had sex next to a magma flow in Hawaii which created the idea of doing burnt ends on a pizza stone), references (remember all those backlinks which would boost your page). Credentials are a lot harder to track. There is no API at my school where you can put in my name and see my credentials (and all you'd see is 'we got governments subsidies for this person, which is why we let him pass'). And all of this worked at the start. Knowledgeable people naturally had references on the web, as only knowledgeable people were on the web. Now we literally have people writing text purely to make it look like their website has more content on them, even if it is remotely related to what they serve. Great example, even posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740400 Or any coding problem where you end up on logrocket / some partitioning app / some generated website with which has an 'answer' for KB0000000 -> KB9999999...
- rolph 3y ago
  >>What makes you an authority on a subject<< the ability to make accurate predictions of outcome by way of knowledge, observation, and logical deliberation.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    You seem to have misread the question. How does Google, an automated service, "make accurate predictions of outcome by way of knowledge, observation, and logical deliberation"?
    - rolph 3y ago
      they dont, and thats a major issue.
- RubyRidgeRandy 3y ago
  I work (partly) in SEO. One of the main issues that affects search and will get even worse in the future is the post-scarcity environment of the web when it comes to information. Say you had five websites for that each have identical cookie recipes. If you optimize search rankings by click-through rating, eventually all the sites will have similar copy, titles, and page descriptions. If you optimize for bounce rate, you knock out sites that get to the point but also knock out sites that crappy and have bad ui/ux. What about core web vitals? Well again, everyone will catch up eventually. Anything that can be gamified will eventually be gamed. Now instead of 5 sites with identical recipes, what about 500? 5,000? 5,000,000? How can you even rank them in a meaningful way and does it matter to the end user? There will be too much of a supply of information, especially when ai ramps up, that no one website will have unique value outside of local significance or if it was made by your mom or someone you like. I think it will be crazy to see what the web looks like 10 years from now. It could be vastly different.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    This expectation that everything can be automatically done by algoryths is the core if the problem. its like a form of insanity, it doesn't work but we keep trying. Why are top 10 results for 'apply for visa to Moldova' a scam? Is it really impossible to give government officials an ability to provide input for official business, like applying for a passport? Could you not hire like 2 people in each makor country to keep track of websites for important government services? Could you not take community input like reddit does, or wikipedia? seriously sometimes i think the people making the smartest algorythms are tge ones with biggest tonnel vision, and are incapable of examining alternative solutions.
    - salawat 3y ago
      ...It isn't the algorithm that's the problem. It's people invested in becoming a value extracting diversion for an answer that'll be around. Lets take your problem. Applying for a visa for Moldova. Let's say that there's a site hosted at visa.moldova.gov with a form to apply. Eventually, someone is going to integrate a bunch of data broker services to auto-fill that form, then data broker to other tourism related businesses trying to compete to plan your stay. It is very much in their interest to ensure that no one sees visa.moldova.gov, but instead sees one of their onboarding funnels. Thus the well around a well known onboarding point to a critical government service is poisoned.
i_am_jl 3y ago
>I don't recall what it was like years ago but I'm pretty sure it is worse. It's absolutely worse today, how much worse depends on how far back you go. Before 2005 Google didn't put ads in search results, AdWords results were separated off to the right side of the page to make them clearly distinct from organic search results.
svaha1728 3y ago
After switching to Kagi, I absolutely see this as Google intentionally making search awful. They are catering to the web ecosystem that is optimized for clicks.
bl4ckh0l3 3y ago
It's hard to tell if any given technology has led to real productivity increases, or just led us to hallucinate productivity increases given the number of little tasks we can fire off with technology. This has been studied; there's too many variables to say "email increased profits 500%!" If it's too complicated to say one technology is where all the value lie, it's going to be extremely complicated to say Google's existence is meaningful. We can lean on the fundamental social truism; it's a front to act as a bloom filter for the US dollar, and busy work for people that might otherwise topple the government.
lolinder 3y ago
Kagi stands to me as proof that search can be better if it isn't run by an ad company. Kagi deliberately downranks sites that are loaded with ads and trackers, and the quality of their results is much higher, with much less SEO blogspam. Unsurprisingly, having a high concentration of ads and trackers is highly correlated with having content that is intended to maximize views rather than provide utility. Google has a conflict of interest here: on the one hand their users need information, but on the other Google is the primary vendor of advertisements on these garbage clickbait sites. It would not surprise me if Google intentionally upweighted results that have their ads in them, and they certainly are not downweighting them the way Kagi does.
- jonex 3y ago
  If Kagi were as popular as Google, you'd quickly see pages appear "without ads", that looks suspiciously like what an ad would say. The problem is SEO, and it affects the mainstream search engine because that's what's worth optimising for. For instance, Google product search results would likely be greatly improved by always showing relevant reddit posts first. But this would last a very short amount of time until reddit would be completely drowned in junk. (I've seen people argue that this is already the case, but searching reddit still tends to work well for the products I search for) We can be happy that Google search hasn't gone this way, and as a Kagi user you should be glad that it's not a more popular engine, as the quality of results likely highly depend on that just fact. In a way the ads-filled product search results are better, because at least they're honestly trying to sell you the product you are searching for rather than making fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > that looks suspiciously like what an ad would say ... fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content. This is already a thing under Google's system: if a result isn't an ad-ridden mess, it's content marketing trying to sell an adjacent product. You haven't addressed the conflict of interest that Google has as the largest vendor of ads on the internet. Right now, Kagi's sole job is to help me find what I'm looking for. If SEO started to game their current algorithm, the incentive would be for Kagi to improve their algorithm and win the meta game. If they fail to do so, their payments will dry up as people look for an engine that will. Google has no such incentive. If their algorithms consistently drive traffic to pages that have their ads on them, Google is incentivized to keep that traffic flowing, regardless of how SEO'd the content is. The user isn't Google's customer, the advertiser is.
mertd 3y ago
The old Internet is dead. There used to be people building web pages just because they are passionate about something. Now any imaginable niche subject is drowned by a deluge of blogspam articles. Interesting people moved behind walled gardens because who is going to bother building a webpage when you can just post a pic or 140 characters on a whim and move on with life.
- eitland 3y ago
  Please try search.marginalia.nu or even Kagi. I was about to give up but these to have given me hope that search isn't unsolvable.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  well building the webpage is easy, but paying hosting and keeping it updated is a side jobby i dont need once I've reached 30 and have kids
mordae 3y ago
Try Kagi. They are weeding out the bad results waaaay more aggressively than Google. It helps a lot. They even allow me to immediately boost or block whole websites! Something absolutely trivial Google just refused to do.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

The problem here is authority. What makes you an authority on a subject? Books written? Credentials (diploma?)? References? These things aren't all true in real life, and on the internet it's even easier to fake all of that. In the beginning Google went by 'amount of text' (which is why you read everybody's life story on how they had sex next to a magma flow in Hawaii which created the idea of doing burnt ends on a pizza stone), references (remember all those backlinks which would boost your page). Credentials are a lot harder to track. There is no API at my school where you can put in my name and see my credentials (and all you'd see is 'we got governments subsidies for this person, which is why we let him pass'). And all of this worked at the start. Knowledgeable people naturally had references on the web, as only knowledgeable people were on the web. Now we literally have people writing text purely to make it look like their website has more content on them, even if it is remotely related to what they serve. Great example, even posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740400 Or any coding problem where you end up on logrocket / some partitioning app / some generated website with which has an 'answer' for KB0000000 -> KB9999999...

rolph 3y ago
>>What makes you an authority on a subject<< the ability to make accurate predictions of outcome by way of knowledge, observation, and logical deliberation.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  You seem to have misread the question. How does Google, an automated service, "make accurate predictions of outcome by way of knowledge, observation, and logical deliberation"?
  - rolph 3y ago
    they dont, and thats a major issue.
RubyRidgeRandy 3y ago
I work (partly) in SEO. One of the main issues that affects search and will get even worse in the future is the post-scarcity environment of the web when it comes to information. Say you had five websites for that each have identical cookie recipes. If you optimize search rankings by click-through rating, eventually all the sites will have similar copy, titles, and page descriptions. If you optimize for bounce rate, you knock out sites that get to the point but also knock out sites that crappy and have bad ui/ux. What about core web vitals? Well again, everyone will catch up eventually. Anything that can be gamified will eventually be gamed. Now instead of 5 sites with identical recipes, what about 500? 5,000? 5,000,000? How can you even rank them in a meaningful way and does it matter to the end user? There will be too much of a supply of information, especially when ai ramps up, that no one website will have unique value outside of local significance or if it was made by your mom or someone you like. I think it will be crazy to see what the web looks like 10 years from now. It could be vastly different.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  This expectation that everything can be automatically done by algoryths is the core if the problem. its like a form of insanity, it doesn't work but we keep trying. Why are top 10 results for 'apply for visa to Moldova' a scam? Is it really impossible to give government officials an ability to provide input for official business, like applying for a passport? Could you not hire like 2 people in each makor country to keep track of websites for important government services? Could you not take community input like reddit does, or wikipedia? seriously sometimes i think the people making the smartest algorythms are tge ones with biggest tonnel vision, and are incapable of examining alternative solutions.
  - salawat 3y ago
    ...It isn't the algorithm that's the problem. It's people invested in becoming a value extracting diversion for an answer that'll be around. Lets take your problem. Applying for a visa for Moldova. Let's say that there's a site hosted at visa.moldova.gov with a form to apply. Eventually, someone is going to integrate a bunch of data broker services to auto-fill that form, then data broker to other tourism related businesses trying to compete to plan your stay. It is very much in their interest to ensure that no one sees visa.moldova.gov, but instead sees one of their onboarding funnels. Thus the well around a well known onboarding point to a critical government service is poisoned.

i_am_jl 3y ago

>I don't recall what it was like years ago but I'm pretty sure it is worse. It's absolutely worse today, how much worse depends on how far back you go. Before 2005 Google didn't put ads in search results, AdWords results were separated off to the right side of the page to make them clearly distinct from organic search results.

svaha1728 3y ago

After switching to Kagi, I absolutely see this as Google intentionally making search awful. They are catering to the web ecosystem that is optimized for clicks.

bl4ckh0l3 3y ago

It's hard to tell if any given technology has led to real productivity increases, or just led us to hallucinate productivity increases given the number of little tasks we can fire off with technology. This has been studied; there's too many variables to say "email increased profits 500%!" If it's too complicated to say one technology is where all the value lie, it's going to be extremely complicated to say Google's existence is meaningful. We can lean on the fundamental social truism; it's a front to act as a bloom filter for the US dollar, and busy work for people that might otherwise topple the government.

lolinder 3y ago

Kagi stands to me as proof that search can be better if it isn't run by an ad company. Kagi deliberately downranks sites that are loaded with ads and trackers, and the quality of their results is much higher, with much less SEO blogspam. Unsurprisingly, having a high concentration of ads and trackers is highly correlated with having content that is intended to maximize views rather than provide utility. Google has a conflict of interest here: on the one hand their users need information, but on the other Google is the primary vendor of advertisements on these garbage clickbait sites. It would not surprise me if Google intentionally upweighted results that have their ads in them, and they certainly are not downweighting them the way Kagi does.

jonex 3y ago
If Kagi were as popular as Google, you'd quickly see pages appear "without ads", that looks suspiciously like what an ad would say. The problem is SEO, and it affects the mainstream search engine because that's what's worth optimising for. For instance, Google product search results would likely be greatly improved by always showing relevant reddit posts first. But this would last a very short amount of time until reddit would be completely drowned in junk. (I've seen people argue that this is already the case, but searching reddit still tends to work well for the products I search for) We can be happy that Google search hasn't gone this way, and as a Kagi user you should be glad that it's not a more popular engine, as the quality of results likely highly depend on that just fact. In a way the ads-filled product search results are better, because at least they're honestly trying to sell you the product you are searching for rather than making fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > that looks suspiciously like what an ad would say ... fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content. This is already a thing under Google's system: if a result isn't an ad-ridden mess, it's content marketing trying to sell an adjacent product. You haven't addressed the conflict of interest that Google has as the largest vendor of ads on the internet. Right now, Kagi's sole job is to help me find what I'm looking for. If SEO started to game their current algorithm, the incentive would be for Kagi to improve their algorithm and win the meta game. If they fail to do so, their payments will dry up as people look for an engine that will. Google has no such incentive. If their algorithms consistently drive traffic to pages that have their ads on them, Google is incentivized to keep that traffic flowing, regardless of how SEO'd the content is. The user isn't Google's customer, the advertiser is.

mertd 3y ago

The old Internet is dead. There used to be people building web pages just because they are passionate about something. Now any imaginable niche subject is drowned by a deluge of blogspam articles. Interesting people moved behind walled gardens because who is going to bother building a webpage when you can just post a pic or 140 characters on a whim and move on with life.

eitland 3y ago
Please try search.marginalia.nu or even Kagi. I was about to give up but these to have given me hope that search isn't unsolvable.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
well building the webpage is easy, but paying hosting and keeping it updated is a side jobby i dont need once I've reached 30 and have kids

mordae 3y ago

Try Kagi. They are weeding out the bad results waaaay more aggressively than Google. It helps a lot. They even allow me to immediately boost or block whole websites! Something absolutely trivial Google just refused to do.