15 ms·

So google's shitty search now economically incentivizes sites to destroy information. Can there be any doubt that Google destroyed the old internet by becoming

So google's shitty search now economically incentivizes sites to destroy information. Can there be any doubt that Google destroyed the old internet by becoming a bad search engine? Could their exclusion of most of the web be considered punishment for being sites being so old and stable that they don't rely on Google for ad revenue?

demizer 3y ago
Google is destroying the internet is a good way to put it. AD dollars are their only priority. I hope Google dies because of it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- zx8080 3y ago
  What a fantasy. It does not show any sign of profit decrease. How would a company die with $279.8B revenue, steadily increasing yearly?
  - mxkopy 3y ago
    I suspect that the revenue increases have more to do with the addition of new users in developing markets rather than actual value added. Once all potential users have been reached, Google will have to actually improve their product.
    - dereg 3y ago
      No such suspicion is necessary. Google's revenue from the United States has only increased as a share of its total revenue over the past decade. https://abc.xyz/assets/4c/c7/d619b323f5bba689be986d716a61/34ac6dab5f586b2e6e008b99fe683e35.html https://abc.xyz/assets/4c/c7/d619b323f5bba689be986d716a61/34...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - nicechianti 3y ago
    [dead]
  - chongli 3y ago
    I think the theory of Google's death is that they are "killing the golden goose." The idea is that they are killing off all the independent websites on the internet. That is, all the sites besides Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/NetFlix/Reddit/etc. that people access directly (either through an app or a bookmark) and which (barring Reddit) block GoogleBot anyway. These are all the sites (like CNET) that Google indexes which are the entire reason to use search. They are having their rankings steadily eroded by an ever-rising tide of SEO spam. If they start dying off en masse and if LLMs emerge as a viable alternative for looking up information, we may see Google Search die along with them. As for why their revenues are still increasing? It's because all the SEO spam sites out there run Google Ads. This is how we close the loop on the "killing the golden goose" theory. Google uses legitimate sites to make their search engine a viable product and at the same time directs traffic away from those legitimate sites towards SEO spam to generate revenue. It's a transformation from symbiosis/mutualism to parasitism. Edit: I forgot to mention the last, and darkest, part of the theory. Many of these SEO spam sites engage in large-scale piracy by scraping all their content off legitimate sites. By allowing their ads to run on these sites, Google is essentially acting as an accessory to large-scale, criminal, commercial copyright infringement.
    - water-your-self 3y ago
      Directs traffic away not to generate revenue but to generate revenue faster this quarter in time for the report. They could make billions without liquifying the internet but they would make billions slowly
    - Denzel 3y ago
      > Google uses legitimate sites to make their search engine a viable product and at the same time directs traffic away from those legitimate sites towards SEO spam to generate revenue. [Disclosure: Google Search SWE; opinions and thoughts are my own and do not represent those of my employer] Why do you assume malicious intent? The balance between search ranking (Google) and search optimization (third-party sites) is an adversarial, dynamic game played between two sides with inverse incentives, taking place on an economic field (i.e. limited resources). There is no perfect solution; there’s only an evolutionary act-react cycle. Do you think content spammers spend more or less resources (people, time, money) than Google’s revenue? So then the problem becomes how do you win a battle with orders of magnitude less people, time, and money? Leverage, i.e., engineering. You try your best and watch the scoreboard. Some people think Google is doing a great job; some think we couldn’t be any worse. The truth probably lies across a spectrum in the middle. So it goes with a globally consumed product. Also, note, Ads and Search operate completely independent. There’s no signals going from Ads to Search, or vice versa, to inform rankings; Search can’t even touch a lot of the Ads data, and Ads can’t touch Search data. Which makes your theory misinformed.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    What a fantasy. It does not show any sign of profit decrease. How would a company die with $279.8B revenue, steadily increasing yearly? At one time both buggy whips and Philco radios had hockey stick growth charts, too. You must not bet old enough to remember when people thought MySpace would always drive the internet.
    - gretch 3y ago
      > You must not bet old enough to remember when people thought MySpace would always drive the internet. You know there's a difference between "people thought" and dollars. Some people think the earth is flat. Opinions can change very quickly - like 5 years ago, people thought elon musk was the hero of the internet. Here's the stats on MySpace revenue: It generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year.
      - verve_rat 3y ago
        And MySpace generates about 10% of that now. Google could be generating $27 billion in revenue in 2038 and be considered a massive failure compared to what it is now. I fail to see the point you are trying to get at?
  - chinchilla2020 3y ago
    Their search results are declining rapidly in quality. "<SEARCH QUERY> reddit" is one of their most common searches. Their results are filled with SEO spam and bots now. At some point a competitor will emerge. The tech crowd will notice it and begin to use it. Then it will go widespread.
- mathstuf 3y ago
  I'm reminded of the 00's era joke that Microsoft could burn billions of dollars, pivot to becoming a vacuum cleaner manufacturer, and finally make something that doesn't suck. I don't think Google dying would be good (lots of things would have to migrate infra suddenly), but the adtech being split off into something else would certainly be a welcome turn of events, IMO. I'm tired of seeing promising ideas killed because they only made 7-figure numbers in a spreadsheet where it'd have been viable on its own somewhere it wasn't a rounding error.
bagacrap 3y ago
I'll just assume you neglected to read TFA, because if you had, you would have discovered that it links to an official Google source that states CNET shouldn't be doing this.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  [flagged]
- kccqzy 3y ago
  This is another problem of the entire SEO industry. Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself. Somehow, it becomes widely accepted that the best information on Google ranking is from those third parties but not Google.
  - 88913527 3y ago
    It could be premature to place fault with the SEO industry. Think about the incentives: Google puts articles out, but an SEO specialist might have empirical knowledge from working for a various number of web properties. It's not that I wouldn't trust Google's articles, but specialists might have discovered undocumented methods for giving a boost.
    - bagacrap 3y ago
      They certainly want you to believe that.
      - linkjuice4all 3y ago
        The good ones will share the data/trends/case studies that would support the effectiveness of their methods. But the vast majority are morons, grifters, and cargo culters. The Google guidance is generally good and mildly informative but there’s a lot of depth that typically isn’t covered that the SEO industry basically has to black box test to find out.
ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
Even if we pretend for a moment that your statement, that google's search is "shitty", is universally accepted as truth, you can't blame this one on Google. People have been committing horrifying atrocities in the name of SEO for years. I've seen it firsthand. And it spectacularly backfired each time. This can very probably be yet another one of such cases.
joshuahaglund 3y ago
Aren't they both doing the economically incentivized thing tho? Are you saying maybe some things should be beyond economic incentives?
- selfhoster11 3y ago
  Yes, some things should be beyond economic incentives. Destroying the historical record, for instance. We have plenty of precedent around that, now that we realised it's bad.
weird-eye-issue 3y ago
They could just noindex them.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  Google still needs to crawl them to see the noindex tag. And when Google is crawling a lot of pages on your site, it'll be slow.
  - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
    This is only an issue if you have millions of pages Also, it will slow down the crawl frequency if you noindex it So it's a non problem
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      >This is only an issue if you have millions of pages You know, like a news website that's been on the internet since the 90s
      - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
        > Also, it will slow down the crawl frequency if you noindex it Eventually Google stops crawling noindexed pages.
kristopolous 3y ago
I feel like they presume I'm a gullible person they need to protect who is just on the Internet for shopping and watching entertainment. Wasn't the point of them tracking us so much to customize and cater our results? Why have they normalized everything to some focus group persona of Joe six-pack? *** Let's try an experiment Type in "Chicago ticket" which has at least 4 interpretations, a ticket to travel to Chicago, a citation received in Chicago, A ticket to see the musical Chicago and a ticket to see the rock band Chicago. For me I get the Rock band, citation, baseball and mass transit ticket in that order. I'm in Los Angeles, have never been to Chicago, don't watch sports, and don't listen to the rock band. Google should know this with my location, search and YouTube history but it apparently doesn't care. What do you get?
- bhawks 3y ago
  Going deep into personalization on Google.com (answering queries using your signed in data across other google properties) feels like high risk low reward. In a post gdpr & right to be forgotten environment they know they have targets on their back. Is super deep personalization really worth getting slapped with megafines? Where you'll see integrations like this used to be assistant, but is now bard. Both of which have lawyer boggling Eulas and a brand they can sacrifice if need be.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  I get four top results for paying a parking ticket in Chicago, a city I’ve never been to.
  - johnnyworker 3y ago
    Same here. Never been to Chicago, live in Germany. https://imgur.com/a/BXRnqIB https://imgur.com/a/BXRnqIB
- strbean 3y ago
  Are you ignoring the ads? My ads are: - Flights - Chicago the Musical - Flights - More Flights My search results are: - Citation - Citation payment plan - News report on lawsuit regarding citations in Chicago - Baseball I also live very far from Chicago, and the only time I was there was for a connecting flight some time in the '90s.
ransom1538 3y ago
I stopped using search, I have switched 90% over to chatgpt.
digitcatphd 3y ago
This is interesting, as I am actually doing the same thing with a site I have as I noticed my crawl budget has gotten less especially this year and fewer new articles are being indexed. I suspect this is a long-term play for Google to phase out this search and replace with Bard. Think about it all these articles are doing now is writing a verbose version of what Bard gives you directly unless it’s new human content. Google has in essence stolen all their information by scraping and storing in a database for its LLM and is offering its knowledge of this directly to users, so in a way, this is akin to Amazon selling its own private label products.
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
To be fair, the old internet wasn't killed. It just passed away. The curious voices that were prevalent back then are buried now.
DocTomoe 3y ago
In all fairness, there is some old information I would love to disappear eventually. Nothing quite as frustrating than having a question and all the tutorials are for a version of a software that is 15 years old and behaves completely different than the new one.
hliyan 3y ago
Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing. Perhaps it's time to try again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Directory
- black_puppydog 3y ago
  I don't think we need any "AI" in the modern sense of that word. It would be an improvement to bring google back to its ~2010 status. Not sure if the kagi folks are willing to share, but I get the impression that pagerank, tf-idf and a few heuristics on top would still get you pretty far. Add some moderation (known-bad sites that e.g. repost stackoverflow content) and you're already ahead of what google gives me.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing. False. Google Directory (and many other major name, mostly now defunct, web directories) were powered by data from DMOZ which was crowdsourced (and kind of still is, through Curlie [0] and while some parts of the website show updated as recently as today, enough fairly core links are dead or without content that its pretty obviously not a thriving operation.) Also, it was not pre-Wiki: WikiWikiWeb was created in 1995, DMOZ in 1998. It was pre-Wikipedia, but Wikipedia wasn’t the first Wiki. [0] https://curlie.org/ https://curlie.org/
  - hliyan 3y ago
    Interestingly, a static snapshot of DMOZ is still out there: https://dmoztools.net/ https://dmoztools.net/ | https://web.archive.org/web/20180126194656/http://dmoztools.net/Computers/Artificial_Intelligence/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180126194656/http://dmoztools....
dep_b 3y ago
Did you notice that nowadays a lot of websites have a lot of uninteresting drivel giving a "background" to whatever the thing was you were searching for before you get to read (hopefully) the thing you were searching for? People discovered that Google measures not only how much time you stay on a webpage but also how much you scroll to define how interesting a website is. So now every crappy "tech tips" website that has an answer that fits in a short paragraph now makes you scroll two pages before you get the thing you actually wanted to read.
- CivBase 3y ago
  > Did you notice that nowadays a lot of websites have a lot of uninteresting drivel giving a "background" to whatever the thing was you were searching for before you get to read (hopefully) the thing you were searching for? I know you came here looking for a recipe for boiled water, but first here's my thesis on the history and cultural significance of warm liquids.
  - dep_b 3y ago
    Also you might want look into beer as a replacement for water, or mineral oil
    - HumblyTossed 3y ago
      Tea made with mineral oil is awful.
  - brookst 3y ago
    It’s interesting that water is often boiled in metal pots. There are several kinds of metal pots. Aluminum, stainless steel, and copper are often used for pots to boil water in. Water boils in pots with different metals because only temperature matters for boiling water. If the water is 100c at sea level, it will boil.
    - bobajeff 3y ago
      Finally, that SA writing skill we learned in school can be put to practice!
raxxorraxor 3y ago
An article about reduced quality was pretty popular on HN a few years ago, that Google results looks like ads. But I believe we have hit a new low recently. Perhaps that is true for the overall quality of publications on the net. The amount or either approved news sites without significant content or outright click farms is immense. Even for topics that should net results. A news site filter would already help a lot, but even then the search seems to only react on buzzwords. Sometimes even terms you didn't search at all that were often associated with said buzzwords.
dannysullivan 3y ago
Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend. We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 This also documents the many times over the years we've also pushed back on this myth: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpful-content-35846.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpfu...
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  It doesn't matter if your guidance discourages it, your SEO algorithm is encouraging it. What you call "helpful" in your post is what is financially helpful to Google, not what's helpful to me. There's no denying Google encourages long rambling nonsense over direct information
  - dannysullivan 3y ago
    No one has demonstrated getting rid of "old" content somehow makes the rest of the site "fresh" and therefore ranks better. What's likely the case is that some people have updated content to make it more useful -- more up-to-date -- and the content being more helpful might, in turn, perform better. That's a much different thing that "if you have a lot of old content, the entire site is somehow old." And if you read the CNET memo, you'll see there's a confusion with these points.
    - Capricorn2481 3y ago
      But there's the rub, you're not making content more helpful. You're making it longer and more useless so we have to scroll down more so Google can rake in more ads. The fact that you're calling it more "helpful" is insidious. That's why garbage SEO sites are king on the internet right now. It's the same thing you guys do with Youtube, where you decreased monetization for videos under a certain length. Now every content creator is encouraged to artificially inflate the length of their video for more ads. You're financially rewarding people for hiding information.
neycoda 3y ago
Can Google tell the difference between old relevant information and old irrelevant (or outdated) information? I'm not seeing any evidence of that. A search engine is not a subject matter expert of everything on the Internet, and it shouldn't be.
throw10920 3y ago
> Can there be any doubt This is such terrible, low-quality, manipulative content. It does not belong on HN.
6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
I don’t see why google gets the blame when spam is what forces google to search how it searches.

demizer 3y ago

Google is destroying the internet is a good way to put it. AD dollars are their only priority. I hope Google dies because of it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zx8080 3y ago
What a fantasy. It does not show any sign of profit decrease. How would a company die with $279.8B revenue, steadily increasing yearly?
- mxkopy 3y ago
  I suspect that the revenue increases have more to do with the addition of new users in developing markets rather than actual value added. Once all potential users have been reached, Google will have to actually improve their product.
  - dereg 3y ago
    No such suspicion is necessary. Google's revenue from the United States has only increased as a share of its total revenue over the past decade. https://abc.xyz/assets/4c/c7/d619b323f5bba689be986d716a61/34ac6dab5f586b2e6e008b99fe683e35.html https://abc.xyz/assets/4c/c7/d619b323f5bba689be986d716a61/34...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- nicechianti 3y ago
  [dead]
- chongli 3y ago
  I think the theory of Google's death is that they are "killing the golden goose." The idea is that they are killing off all the independent websites on the internet. That is, all the sites besides Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/NetFlix/Reddit/etc. that people access directly (either through an app or a bookmark) and which (barring Reddit) block GoogleBot anyway. These are all the sites (like CNET) that Google indexes which are the entire reason to use search. They are having their rankings steadily eroded by an ever-rising tide of SEO spam. If they start dying off en masse and if LLMs emerge as a viable alternative for looking up information, we may see Google Search die along with them. As for why their revenues are still increasing? It's because all the SEO spam sites out there run Google Ads. This is how we close the loop on the "killing the golden goose" theory. Google uses legitimate sites to make their search engine a viable product and at the same time directs traffic away from those legitimate sites towards SEO spam to generate revenue. It's a transformation from symbiosis/mutualism to parasitism. Edit: I forgot to mention the last, and darkest, part of the theory. Many of these SEO spam sites engage in large-scale piracy by scraping all their content off legitimate sites. By allowing their ads to run on these sites, Google is essentially acting as an accessory to large-scale, criminal, commercial copyright infringement.
  - water-your-self 3y ago
    Directs traffic away not to generate revenue but to generate revenue faster this quarter in time for the report. They could make billions without liquifying the internet but they would make billions slowly
  - Denzel 3y ago
    > Google uses legitimate sites to make their search engine a viable product and at the same time directs traffic away from those legitimate sites towards SEO spam to generate revenue. [Disclosure: Google Search SWE; opinions and thoughts are my own and do not represent those of my employer] Why do you assume malicious intent? The balance between search ranking (Google) and search optimization (third-party sites) is an adversarial, dynamic game played between two sides with inverse incentives, taking place on an economic field (i.e. limited resources). There is no perfect solution; there’s only an evolutionary act-react cycle. Do you think content spammers spend more or less resources (people, time, money) than Google’s revenue? So then the problem becomes how do you win a battle with orders of magnitude less people, time, and money? Leverage, i.e., engineering. You try your best and watch the scoreboard. Some people think Google is doing a great job; some think we couldn’t be any worse. The truth probably lies across a spectrum in the middle. So it goes with a globally consumed product. Also, note, Ads and Search operate completely independent. There’s no signals going from Ads to Search, or vice versa, to inform rankings; Search can’t even touch a lot of the Ads data, and Ads can’t touch Search data. Which makes your theory misinformed.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  What a fantasy. It does not show any sign of profit decrease. How would a company die with $279.8B revenue, steadily increasing yearly? At one time both buggy whips and Philco radios had hockey stick growth charts, too. You must not bet old enough to remember when people thought MySpace would always drive the internet.
  - gretch 3y ago
    > You must not bet old enough to remember when people thought MySpace would always drive the internet. You know there's a difference between "people thought" and dollars. Some people think the earth is flat. Opinions can change very quickly - like 5 years ago, people thought elon musk was the hero of the internet. Here's the stats on MySpace revenue: It generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year.
    - verve_rat 3y ago
      And MySpace generates about 10% of that now. Google could be generating $27 billion in revenue in 2038 and be considered a massive failure compared to what it is now. I fail to see the point you are trying to get at?
- chinchilla2020 3y ago
  Their search results are declining rapidly in quality. "<SEARCH QUERY> reddit" is one of their most common searches. Their results are filled with SEO spam and bots now. At some point a competitor will emerge. The tech crowd will notice it and begin to use it. Then it will go widespread.
mathstuf 3y ago
I'm reminded of the 00's era joke that Microsoft could burn billions of dollars, pivot to becoming a vacuum cleaner manufacturer, and finally make something that doesn't suck. I don't think Google dying would be good (lots of things would have to migrate infra suddenly), but the adtech being split off into something else would certainly be a welcome turn of events, IMO. I'm tired of seeing promising ideas killed because they only made 7-figure numbers in a spreadsheet where it'd have been viable on its own somewhere it wasn't a rounding error.

bagacrap 3y ago

I'll just assume you neglected to read TFA, because if you had, you would have discovered that it links to an official Google source that states CNET shouldn't be doing this.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800

Brian_K_White 3y ago
[flagged]
kccqzy 3y ago
This is another problem of the entire SEO industry. Websites trust these SEO consultants and growth hackers more than they trust information from Google itself. Somehow, it becomes widely accepted that the best information on Google ranking is from those third parties but not Google.
- 88913527 3y ago
  It could be premature to place fault with the SEO industry. Think about the incentives: Google puts articles out, but an SEO specialist might have empirical knowledge from working for a various number of web properties. It's not that I wouldn't trust Google's articles, but specialists might have discovered undocumented methods for giving a boost.
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    They certainly want you to believe that.
    - linkjuice4all 3y ago
      The good ones will share the data/trends/case studies that would support the effectiveness of their methods. But the vast majority are morons, grifters, and cargo culters. The Google guidance is generally good and mildly informative but there’s a lot of depth that typically isn’t covered that the SEO industry basically has to black box test to find out.

ahmedfromtunis 3y ago

Even if we pretend for a moment that your statement, that google's search is "shitty", is universally accepted as truth, you can't blame this one on Google. People have been committing horrifying atrocities in the name of SEO for years. I've seen it firsthand. And it spectacularly backfired each time. This can very probably be yet another one of such cases.

joshuahaglund 3y ago

Aren't they both doing the economically incentivized thing tho? Are you saying maybe some things should be beyond economic incentives?

selfhoster11 3y ago
Yes, some things should be beyond economic incentives. Destroying the historical record, for instance. We have plenty of precedent around that, now that we realised it's bad.

weird-eye-issue 3y ago

They could just noindex them.

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
Google still needs to crawl them to see the noindex tag. And when Google is crawling a lot of pages on your site, it'll be slow.
- weird-eye-issue 3y ago
  This is only an issue if you have millions of pages Also, it will slow down the crawl frequency if you noindex it So it's a non problem
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    >This is only an issue if you have millions of pages You know, like a news website that's been on the internet since the 90s
    - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
      > Also, it will slow down the crawl frequency if you noindex it Eventually Google stops crawling noindexed pages.

kristopolous 3y ago

I feel like they presume I'm a gullible person they need to protect who is just on the Internet for shopping and watching entertainment. Wasn't the point of them tracking us so much to customize and cater our results? Why have they normalized everything to some focus group persona of Joe six-pack? *** Let's try an experiment Type in "Chicago ticket" which has at least 4 interpretations, a ticket to travel to Chicago, a citation received in Chicago, A ticket to see the musical Chicago and a ticket to see the rock band Chicago. For me I get the Rock band, citation, baseball and mass transit ticket in that order. I'm in Los Angeles, have never been to Chicago, don't watch sports, and don't listen to the rock band. Google should know this with my location, search and YouTube history but it apparently doesn't care. What do you get?

bhawks 3y ago
Going deep into personalization on Google.com (answering queries using your signed in data across other google properties) feels like high risk low reward. In a post gdpr & right to be forgotten environment they know they have targets on their back. Is super deep personalization really worth getting slapped with megafines? Where you'll see integrations like this used to be assistant, but is now bard. Both of which have lawyer boggling Eulas and a brand they can sacrifice if need be.
Mistletoe 3y ago
I get four top results for paying a parking ticket in Chicago, a city I’ve never been to.
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  Same here. Never been to Chicago, live in Germany. https://imgur.com/a/BXRnqIB https://imgur.com/a/BXRnqIB
strbean 3y ago
Are you ignoring the ads? My ads are: - Flights - Chicago the Musical - Flights - More Flights My search results are: - Citation - Citation payment plan - News report on lawsuit regarding citations in Chicago - Baseball I also live very far from Chicago, and the only time I was there was for a connecting flight some time in the '90s.

ransom1538 3y ago

I stopped using search, I have switched 90% over to chatgpt.

digitcatphd 3y ago

This is interesting, as I am actually doing the same thing with a site I have as I noticed my crawl budget has gotten less especially this year and fewer new articles are being indexed. I suspect this is a long-term play for Google to phase out this search and replace with Bard. Think about it all these articles are doing now is writing a verbose version of what Bard gives you directly unless it’s new human content. Google has in essence stolen all their information by scraping and storing in a database for its LLM and is offering its knowledge of this directly to users, so in a way, this is akin to Amazon selling its own private label products.

dumpsterdiver 3y ago

To be fair, the old internet wasn't killed. It just passed away. The curious voices that were prevalent back then are buried now.

DocTomoe 3y ago

In all fairness, there is some old information I would love to disappear eventually. Nothing quite as frustrating than having a question and all the tutorials are for a version of a software that is 15 years old and behaves completely different than the new one.

hliyan 3y ago

Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing. Perhaps it's time to try again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Directory

black_puppydog 3y ago
I don't think we need any "AI" in the modern sense of that word. It would be an improvement to bring google back to its ~2010 status. Not sure if the kagi folks are willing to share, but I get the impression that pagerank, tf-idf and a few heuristics on top would still get you pretty far. Add some moderation (known-bad sites that e.g. repost stackoverflow content) and you're already ahead of what google gives me.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing. False. Google Directory (and many other major name, mostly now defunct, web directories) were powered by data from DMOZ which was crowdsourced (and kind of still is, through Curlie [0] and while some parts of the website show updated as recently as today, enough fairly core links are dead or without content that its pretty obviously not a thriving operation.) Also, it was not pre-Wiki: WikiWikiWeb was created in 1995, DMOZ in 1998. It was pre-Wikipedia, but Wikipedia wasn’t the first Wiki. [0] https://curlie.org/ https://curlie.org/
- hliyan 3y ago
  Interestingly, a static snapshot of DMOZ is still out there: https://dmoztools.net/ https://dmoztools.net/ | https://web.archive.org/web/20180126194656/http://dmoztools.net/Computers/Artificial_Intelligence/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180126194656/http://dmoztools....

dep_b 3y ago

Did you notice that nowadays a lot of websites have a lot of uninteresting drivel giving a "background" to whatever the thing was you were searching for before you get to read (hopefully) the thing you were searching for? People discovered that Google measures not only how much time you stay on a webpage but also how much you scroll to define how interesting a website is. So now every crappy "tech tips" website that has an answer that fits in a short paragraph now makes you scroll two pages before you get the thing you actually wanted to read.

CivBase 3y ago
> Did you notice that nowadays a lot of websites have a lot of uninteresting drivel giving a "background" to whatever the thing was you were searching for before you get to read (hopefully) the thing you were searching for? I know you came here looking for a recipe for boiled water, but first here's my thesis on the history and cultural significance of warm liquids.
- dep_b 3y ago
  Also you might want look into beer as a replacement for water, or mineral oil
  - HumblyTossed 3y ago
    Tea made with mineral oil is awful.
- brookst 3y ago
  It’s interesting that water is often boiled in metal pots. There are several kinds of metal pots. Aluminum, stainless steel, and copper are often used for pots to boil water in. Water boils in pots with different metals because only temperature matters for boiling water. If the water is 100c at sea level, it will boil.
  - bobajeff 3y ago
    Finally, that SA writing skill we learned in school can be put to practice!

raxxorraxor 3y ago

An article about reduced quality was pretty popular on HN a few years ago, that Google results looks like ads. But I believe we have hit a new low recently. Perhaps that is true for the overall quality of publications on the net. The amount or either approved news sites without significant content or outright click farms is immense. Even for topics that should net results. A news site filter would already help a lot, but even then the search seems to only react on buzzwords. Sometimes even terms you didn't search at all that were often associated with said buzzwords.

dannysullivan 3y ago

Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend. We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 This also documents the many times over the years we've also pushed back on this myth: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpful-content-35846.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpfu...

Capricorn2481 3y ago
It doesn't matter if your guidance discourages it, your SEO algorithm is encouraging it. What you call "helpful" in your post is what is financially helpful to Google, not what's helpful to me. There's no denying Google encourages long rambling nonsense over direct information
- dannysullivan 3y ago
  No one has demonstrated getting rid of "old" content somehow makes the rest of the site "fresh" and therefore ranks better. What's likely the case is that some people have updated content to make it more useful -- more up-to-date -- and the content being more helpful might, in turn, perform better. That's a much different thing that "if you have a lot of old content, the entire site is somehow old." And if you read the CNET memo, you'll see there's a confusion with these points.
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    But there's the rub, you're not making content more helpful. You're making it longer and more useless so we have to scroll down more so Google can rake in more ads. The fact that you're calling it more "helpful" is insidious. That's why garbage SEO sites are king on the internet right now. It's the same thing you guys do with Youtube, where you decreased monetization for videos under a certain length. Now every content creator is encouraged to artificially inflate the length of their video for more ads. You're financially rewarding people for hiding information.

neycoda 3y ago

Can Google tell the difference between old relevant information and old irrelevant (or outdated) information? I'm not seeing any evidence of that. A search engine is not a subject matter expert of everything on the Internet, and it shouldn't be.

throw10920 3y ago

> Can there be any doubt This is such terrible, low-quality, manipulative content. It does not belong on HN.

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago

I don’t see why google gets the blame when spam is what forces google to search how it searches.