21 ms·

The End of the Googleverse

218 points by CharlesW 3y ago

fooblat 3y ago
I imagine that (at least) 2 things have happened to Google Search. 1. SEO content farmers have filled it up with low quality results. 2. Google used ML to tune the system and it optimized for the lowest common denominator, incompetent searchers. The average person never learned how to construct succinct search queries and so habitually enters too little or too much into the search box. Current Google Search wants to help the poor searcher so it adjusts their entry, or in some cases rewrites it completely, before processing it and returning results it has decided that they really want. edit for clarity
Dudester230602 3y ago
Whatever culture they were trying to build with their interviewing approach, politics engagement and staff promotions, that is not a culture to aim for it turns out.
- oneepic 3y ago
  I suspect there is a large difference between "old Google" and "new Google" (maybe there is a cutoff year, like... 2012? I don't know.). I would love to compare people who passed the old interviews and worked at old G, to the new ones, and just see what kind of culture, personality, and technical competency each side had. Then you get to see how those people shaped the company and how public opinion changed.
  - plogborp 3y ago
    I think you’re on the wrong track. Let the blame where it belongs… management. Sundar, Ruth, and Thomas are simply corporate ghouls working to enrich themselves. Sundar is a billionaire… all that money came as an employee of Google. They don’t understand branding or trust, or if they do, they simply don’t care. The reputation for cancelling products to the point of untrustworthiness demonstrates this. Google is a classic case of the fish rotting from the head down.
  - avita1 3y ago
    Did Google interviews change dramatically around 2012?
    - oneepic 3y ago
      I'm guessing 2012 because I thought that was the year they stopped doing brain teaser interviews, which were very controversial at the time. Googling it now, the exact year is fuzzy -- like, they originally stopped in 2006, but only fully stopped around... 2011-2012? My evidence is this thread and its linked article: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gq72n/comment/campmyb/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gq72n/comment...
      - thedougd 3y ago
        I received an offer from Google around May 2012. My interviews were long and numerous with interactive coding and whiteboard sessions. No brain teasers. Larry Page was still giving final yes or no on hiring.
    - jpadkins 3y ago
      no, but that is about when Larry and Sergey checked out (wasn't an overnight thing, took a few years).
enumjorge 3y ago
Their fall from grace, at least when it comes to the tech community, has been quite a sight. Has any other big tech company seen such a change in opinion? I’m not sure Microsoft was ever beloved and even though Apple might have lost some of its sheen, there are definitely a lot of fans left.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Microsoft was pretty loved back "in the day" (80s to 90s). Maybe not as much as an enterprise OS company but their developer support was pretty awesome before most people had access to "everything" via the Internet. I'm not sure anyone else really qualifies as a big very consumer-facing tech company in the modern sense from that era or before though, of course, there were many once popular companies like MySpace that just flamed out. Yahoo! might be an example.
  - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
    > developer support was pretty awesome It was truly amazing. MSDN on CDs.
  - orev 3y ago
    Microsoft was one of the most hated companies by both IT people and users in the 80s - 90s. About the only thing people liked was the developer support (which I give them credit for; Visual Studio is great). Computers running their software needed daily reboots and quarterly re-installs. Every single thing they did was to force people to get locked-in to them. They single-handedly slowed web progress by close to a decade (IE11). Anti-competitive that eventually resulted in government prosecution. The only thing that was ever revered about them was Bill Gates, who was more loved by business schools as a case study in how to run an extremely aggressive company.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Though what didn't suck in the 80s/90s from a computer user experience perspective? Terminals connected to minicomputers--which is what I used at work through most of that period? DOS-based word processing and spreadsheets were pretty nice by comparson. Macs? They were fine in the mid-80s although I didn't use them in school unless my group was using them for some project. Unix workstations were getting pretty nice by the mid-90s but those weren't something for a home user.
teslashill 3y ago
[dead]
pessimizer 3y ago
They forgot to mention Google Code. It was a nice place for a while, made Google seem like a really nice company.
PurpleRamen 3y ago
[..]There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was.[..] This is always a strange claim for me, because it does not even remotely match my experience. And now we have the rise of Chat-AIs, and people who claim it's so much better than google, which also does not even remotely match my experience. And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? Do I search just too different things from what others search that I can't see it? And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people, and I wonder whether this is the reason for those claims. Do those claims all come from young people, who live in a very different world and are just very clueless about those things? So at the end, does Google end, because it's not cool with the youth anymore? Not hipster enough and getting lost in the difference between the culture of the generations?
- fernandotakai 3y ago
  i.... 100% agree. google still is king for every single type of search i do. specially code related. i've tried again and again to use "Chat-AIs" and they get so much shit wrong while implying they are correct that i just gave up.
- cityofdelusion 3y ago
  Depends on what you Google. If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. Google is still fairly good for very technical stuff, but anything of monetary value has been captured by professional advertisers and their affiliate link filled content farms.
  - gtowey 3y ago
    Basically, the more popular a topic is, the more its search results are infested with SEO spam. Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.
jasfi 3y ago
I think this is premature. Google is still a huge force in tech. Google search, GMail, DeepMind and more are huge and aren't going anywhere. I have the same experience as PurpleRamen, I truely don't see the decrease in search quality. I think people just expect perfection every time. That's how high the bar is.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Google's biggest problem is that they're a huge force. Google search directs an absurd amount of traffic to where-ever they point their search ranking. The bigger they've gotten the stronger the observer effect has grown. Search engine spam isn't something that's happened to Google, it's a consequence of their dominance in directing web traffic. No matter which beautiful flower you find, point a power washer at it and all you get is dirt and mud.
- worrycue 3y ago
  I think people’s GoogleFu has also gotten worse. A lot of examples on this page of bad google results have natural language queries. Google is a traditional search engine. Traditional search engines run on keywords. You enter the keywords you want on the webpage and press “search”. Didn’t find what you were looking for? Add more keywords to make it more specific. Things you don’t want polluting the search results? Exclude a keyword by adding a “-“ in front of it to remove those specific results. Rinse and repeat until you find what you need or give up.
taylodl 3y ago
I still remember the day when I read the Slashdot article announcing this new incredible search engine called Google. I was an AltaVista user at the time, along with most IT professionals, and for those who don't know, it essentially had its own search query language. The claim was Google returned back even better results WITHOUT having to specify all those query parameters. I tried it - it was unbelievable! A simple search box, type in your keyword(s) you're interested in, no query syntax and - voila! Good, relevant results! It was simply amazing! AltaVista essentially died overnight. But really, Google's biggest technology was AdSense. It's how they make their money. It's why all their other services, save for gmail and google docs, have come and gone. Search has become less and less relevant in today's world. But there was a time when it seemed magical!
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  > But really, Google's biggest technology was AdSense. In my more cynical moments, I feel like people got it backwards: DoubleClick acquired Google.
  - kridsdale2 3y ago
    Not as far as who the two majority voting shareholders are.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I think I was in a middle school computer lab (could have been high school) when one of the other students said, "hey, you should try this new search engine out, it has millions of sites and works really well". And it did - this comment brings me back.
- dekhn 3y ago
  Yep, me too- I remember reading about Google (actually a friend read the article and told me I'd like it because they ran on Linux). At the time, AltaVista would often take 30 seconds and then time out, or return pages of spammy results, while Google was super-fast and accurate.
- aikinai 3y ago
AdamH12113 3y ago
I never know how to interpret statements like this: > More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users. What does it mean to use an entertainment-based video site as a "primary search engine"?
- canadianwriter 3y ago
  People will search on Tiktok for things like "how to get game working on linux" or "how to fix a computer" or whatever. They wont bother with Google and go straight to tiktok.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Right, a sort of generational divide. Old people (like me) looking for how-to information go to youtube; young(er) people go to tiktok. Tiktok is 100% blocked from my system but from what i've seen leak into twitter, it's hard for me (an old person) to imagine how it could compete with youtube for how-to. But then maybe that's just growing old.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > Old people (like me) looking for how-to information go to youtube I'm old, but I would never search YouTube for how-to information. Videos are too light on solid information and are too hard to use as references. Tiktok is worse, though, having even less information.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        I have found youtube videos that are simply superb for tasks as diverse as: * replacing the steering rods on my Sprinter van * restoring factory state on an ancient Garmin watch * mixing adobe plaster * tying a prince of wales knot in a necktie and lots, lots more.
chickenpotpie 3y ago
Did the verge seriously cite a single hackernews comment as a source? "There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was" The word "growing" is a link to hackernews
- kipchak 3y ago
  I saw a funny song on YouTube about it, if that counts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
- paxys 3y ago
  This is how a lot of online journalism works today. Come up with an agenda you want to push that is sure to start flame wars (and drive advertising traffic), search for it on Twitter, find a single Tweet posted by anyone that agrees with your view (or just post it yourself from an alt account), and write a clickbait title and short article linking to that Tweet. "Subscribers quitting Netflix in droves over new policy." "No one uses Google anymore." "AI replacing 80%+ of programmers at software companies." "People outraged over [latest nothingburger]." You can come up with an unlimited amount of catchy content, and most of it makes it to the front page of sites like HN and Reddit.
- rvz 3y ago
  The Verge has always been considered a tabloid source. No different to the Daily Mail, since they both have heavy use of ads and affiliate links in every section and corner of their articles.
- freeone3000 3y ago
  In one sense, that’s how people talk to each other. The reporter is based “growing” off of people talking about it. It’s sort of unclear how many people need to talk about a thing for it to be part of culture? Or if these articles should even exist in the world of interconnectivity? But our lives are online now — this is a quote from a “man on the street”.
stephc_int13 3y ago
When this happen, there is always a lot of inertia at first, it can take years or maybe even decades, but almost every time the denial leads to a pernicious internal erosion and a sudden collapse at the end.
deleted 3y ago
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hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I enjoyed this article, and I found myself nodding through the parts that discussed Google's history over the past couple decades. However, the last couple concluding paragraphs, and the comparison to AltaVista, I found to be extremely weak. It was as if the author had diagnosed all these problems, and felt like they couldn't just end the article but had to wrap it up with something they felt was a potential solution. In my opinion, there is no potential solution, and that's both a good and bad thing. At worldwide scale, I find it hard to believe that any company wouldn't fall down the path Google has: they are pretty fundamentally a victim to Goodhart's Law [1], and that dynamic is inevitable. I think the bad thing about that is it does kind of make me yearn for some of "the good old days" when not everything was just teeming with SEO nonsense and blogspam. For example, when looking for particular software solutions, I've found it impossible to use Google to do "ProductA vs. ProductB" type searches anymore - all the top links are just some sort of affiliate link spam, the analysis (if there is any) flat out sucks. So the good news is that it's made me step away from the Internet more: e.g. for the example above, I don't even do a search: I'll ask for recommendations from friends and colleagues, post to a helpful employee alumni mailing list, etc. You know, the way we used to do things "in the good old days". If anything the complete disgust and enshittification I find with so much online content and algorithms these days has actually led to me being mentally healthier - I just spend less time online (HN being the bad habit I'm trying to break) and more time in "the real world". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
politelemon 3y ago
I've read through the post and this reads more of a memory lane of Google, rather than getting into the statement "Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question." There are a few links scattered about on relatively minor topics , but nothing substantial showing that it's in question. Either that's clickbait, which I'm now starting to associate with the verge, or it's far too early days to tell. Like other comments here my impression is not the same as the post. And the slivers of reasoning given are weak at best.
- onthecanposting 3y ago
  [flagged]
- dimator 3y ago
  this was my take as well. about 3/4 of the way through, i was wondering when they'd make the point, or if there was a second page to the article.
maximinus_thrax 3y ago
Interestingly enough, this has dropped off the frontpage. Not insinuating anything, I just find it weird.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  8 hours after posting, it is on the frontpage Not insinuating anything, I just find it not weird
  - maximinus_thrax 3y ago
    When I read the article, it was on the front page. An hour later, when I wrote the comment, I was talking to a friend of mine from Google and wanted to share it but couldn't find it on the frontpage anymore. It was on the 4th page.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Sounds like they're in need of some Hacker News Optimization
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Doesn't the Verge see they have reached their end of life, already?
- rvz 3y ago
  Yes. Just watched their journalism degrade to tabloid status in the past few years. But won't be surprised to see layoffs happen in ad hungry articles such as the Verge thanks to GPT-4 being a candidate to replace them.
karaterobot 3y ago
> The word SEO “kind of sounds like spam when you say it today,” said Lenssen, in a slightly affected voice. “But that was not how it started.” That is not my recollection. I was blogging at the time they're talking about, and I think the first time I heard about SEO was in the context of trying to get your site ranked higher than everybody else. I grant that the techniques for early SEO came out of good, semantic-web intentions, but I feel like the time between them being implemented and the time they were misused for personal gain was like 3 minutes, max.
- chasd00 3y ago
  I remember SEO being all about keeping up with Google’s search algorithm tweaks and attempting to game it.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Right? Version 1 SEO was to cram as many words as possible into the page. There's a reason why meta keywords attribute has been useless. For years [1] [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/meta/name https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/me...
  - msla 3y ago
    Early early SEO was cramming keywords into the bottom of the page with a foreground color the same as the background.
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      I made my first million this way in the days of Altavista. 30,000 "Beanie Babies" can't be wrong.
readyplayernull 3y ago
I first heard "Google" more than 10 years before the search engine, when my uncle (who later worked for IBM) was explaining my grandmother about this huge number. Then a decade later I got the joke at the bottom of the result pages that said "gooooooooogle" and each of the o's was a result page link. I've been on the Internet for that long and now I do ChatGPT queries before anything else. They lost the SEO wars long ago, but more important they lost to their own perverse incentives. Same will happen to LLMs as public knowledge engines. Just enjoy while it last.
- next_xibalba 3y ago
  > they lost to their own perverse incentives This, IMO, is actually a good thing. If Google stayed really great (and thus dominant), there might be less incentive for new info retrieval and knowledge/"cognitive" tech. But the decay of Google makes consumers far more likely to experiment with alternatives. It sort of feels like the circle of (tech) life.
PostOnce 3y ago
Total tangent but did anyone notice the floating hair on the cherub on the header image (the top right one)? Stable Diffusion in the wild? It looks composited by a human (i.e. use SD to generate "cherubs" and then use photoshop to arrange the final image). It says "Illustrations by Michelle Rohn" but maybe it should say "Illustrations by Michelle Rohn and an AI"
- Anarch157a 3y ago
  It's not floating. If you open the image on a new tab and zoom in, at about 350% you can see a few faint pixels connecting it to the nearby loop of hair.
chupchap 3y ago
A company in search business need to evoke a sense of trust which I don't associate with Google any more. The word Google now stands for flippant attitude to products and services, disregard for privacy, and bloated interfaces combined with a degrading search experience. They need to dig deep and do better to change this attitude
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
skkdhfke 3y ago
[flagged]
smogcutter 3y ago
The problem is that the internet we remember from when google was good no longer exists. Blogs are dead. Personal websites are dead. Noncommercial, informational or niche interest websites are dead. Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore. Yes, we can most of us name real websites that we still read & rely on. When did those sites start publishing? How many of the creator-controlled, non-commercial websites/blogs you read began less than say 5 years ago? I bet the number rounds down to 0. Google search sure as hell played their part in creating this world, but fixing search isn’t going to bring back an internet worth searching.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore. I thought the same until recently. Google doesn't appear to be indexing/prioritizing anything that's old, infrequently updated, or noncompliant with AMP, even if it's an authoritative source. People blame SEO gaming but I'd sooner accuse them of alignment tweaking (all old/outdated beliefs are purged; my queries were religious and controversial in nature). For some topics, there is still an entire other internet out there they pretend doesn't exist...that starts on page 1 of fucking Yandex. Not advocating for Yandex specifically (I don't trust them) but...try other options (Kagi, Bing, etc.).
- xnx 3y ago
  A lot of what I liked about the fun quirkiness of the old web can be found on TikTok. Huge variety of things I would not have encountered on my own. Recently: footwear suggestions for the Appalachian trail, an absolutely massive ceramic raku firing, 1x1 meter 3D printer, calisthenics tips, clips of the Twilight Zone, handsfree bareback horseriding, independing one-woman Daily Show-style political commentary, synthesizer tutorials, Chinese underground mall walkthrough (psyops propaganda?), glacial pool swimming, etc. All that with no unskippable ads. There have been some enshittification changes: TikTok live and TikTok shop, but overall, it's still great.
- sdsd 3y ago
  I spend a lot of time on Urbit and there are plenty of blogs and nothing is commercial. They're even working on an Urbit search engine now. Not trying to promote Urbit, just saying that whether the internet is like this depends on how you use it. Using Google to access the web now, is like using the Yahoo portal to access the internet in the early 2000s.
IAmGraydon 3y ago
This article reminds me of how everyone seems to think the USD is on the way out as the world reserve currency while nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes people hope to see the end of the status quo so badly that they convince themselves that their delusions are true.
- baryphonic 3y ago
  Lyin' ChatGPT being a replacement for Google is about as credible as a BRICS reserve currency. The analogy checks out.
  - IAmGraydon 3y ago
    There's an overarching theme in the world today of the existing power structures being challenged by new power hopefuls. It almost never works out in favor of the new power, however. It doesn't stop the hopefuls from engaging their cognitive biases, and reality distortion soon follows.
mshaler 3y ago
"Only 5 websites each mostly screenshots of the other 4" makes signal to noise more than difficult. Amplify the mutually adverse forces of SEO and advertising dark patterns and here we are, alas
Mathnerd314 3y ago
Clickbait title? The window title is "How Google made the world go viral" which is IMO a much better title.
bowsamic 3y ago
This article is too long winded and bloated with historical retelling to be useful imo
8fingerlouie 3y ago
I find it somewhat ironic that DuckDuckGo returns more relevant results for me than Google does. Some years ago, i would occasionally have to prefix my query with !g to get the Google results, but these days, if DDG cannot find it, chances are Google cannot find it, but will happily return a bunch of spam pages instead.
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  I use DDG as my daily driver but I get better results with Google. Often it does find stuff that DDG cannot. The use of "matching terms" is good for example. Google is more flexible with its advanced search techniques. It's a choice like Linux vs Apple. I choose to use something (DDG) that is a less good generally but better overall. Privacy is better than search results.

218 points by CharlesW 3y ago

I imagine that (at least) 2 things have happened to Google Search. 1. SEO content farmers have filled it up with low quality results. 2. Google used ML to tune the system and it optimized for the lowest common denominator, incompetent searchers. The average person never learned how to construct succinct search queries and so habitually enters too little or too much into the search box. Current Google Search wants to help the poor searcher so it adjusts their entry, or in some cases rewrites it completely, before processing it and returning results it has decided that they really want. edit for clarity

Dudester230602 3y ago

Whatever culture they were trying to build with their interviewing approach, politics engagement and staff promotions, that is not a culture to aim for it turns out.

oneepic 3y ago
I suspect there is a large difference between "old Google" and "new Google" (maybe there is a cutoff year, like... 2012? I don't know.). I would love to compare people who passed the old interviews and worked at old G, to the new ones, and just see what kind of culture, personality, and technical competency each side had. Then you get to see how those people shaped the company and how public opinion changed.
- plogborp 3y ago
  I think you’re on the wrong track. Let the blame where it belongs… management. Sundar, Ruth, and Thomas are simply corporate ghouls working to enrich themselves. Sundar is a billionaire… all that money came as an employee of Google. They don’t understand branding or trust, or if they do, they simply don’t care. The reputation for cancelling products to the point of untrustworthiness demonstrates this. Google is a classic case of the fish rotting from the head down.
- avita1 3y ago
  Did Google interviews change dramatically around 2012?
  - oneepic 3y ago
    I'm guessing 2012 because I thought that was the year they stopped doing brain teaser interviews, which were very controversial at the time. Googling it now, the exact year is fuzzy -- like, they originally stopped in 2006, but only fully stopped around... 2011-2012? My evidence is this thread and its linked article: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gq72n/comment/campmyb/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gq72n/comment...
    - thedougd 3y ago
      I received an offer from Google around May 2012. My interviews were long and numerous with interactive coding and whiteboard sessions. No brain teasers. Larry Page was still giving final yes or no on hiring.
  - jpadkins 3y ago
    no, but that is about when Larry and Sergey checked out (wasn't an overnight thing, took a few years).

enumjorge 3y ago

Their fall from grace, at least when it comes to the tech community, has been quite a sight. Has any other big tech company seen such a change in opinion? I’m not sure Microsoft was ever beloved and even though Apple might have lost some of its sheen, there are definitely a lot of fans left.

ghaff 3y ago
Microsoft was pretty loved back "in the day" (80s to 90s). Maybe not as much as an enterprise OS company but their developer support was pretty awesome before most people had access to "everything" via the Internet. I'm not sure anyone else really qualifies as a big very consumer-facing tech company in the modern sense from that era or before though, of course, there were many once popular companies like MySpace that just flamed out. Yahoo! might be an example.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  > developer support was pretty awesome It was truly amazing. MSDN on CDs.
- orev 3y ago
  Microsoft was one of the most hated companies by both IT people and users in the 80s - 90s. About the only thing people liked was the developer support (which I give them credit for; Visual Studio is great). Computers running their software needed daily reboots and quarterly re-installs. Every single thing they did was to force people to get locked-in to them. They single-handedly slowed web progress by close to a decade (IE11). Anti-competitive that eventually resulted in government prosecution. The only thing that was ever revered about them was Bill Gates, who was more loved by business schools as a case study in how to run an extremely aggressive company.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Though what didn't suck in the 80s/90s from a computer user experience perspective? Terminals connected to minicomputers--which is what I used at work through most of that period? DOS-based word processing and spreadsheets were pretty nice by comparson. Macs? They were fine in the mid-80s although I didn't use them in school unless my group was using them for some project. Unix workstations were getting pretty nice by the mid-90s but those weren't something for a home user.

teslashill 3y ago

[dead]

pessimizer 3y ago

They forgot to mention Google Code. It was a nice place for a while, made Google seem like a really nice company.

PurpleRamen 3y ago

[..]There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was.[..] This is always a strange claim for me, because it does not even remotely match my experience. And now we have the rise of Chat-AIs, and people who claim it's so much better than google, which also does not even remotely match my experience. And now I ask myself: am I just too stupid to see it? Or are the people too stupid to not see it? Do I search just too different things from what others search that I can't see it? And then I also remember the claim that the youth is insanely uneducated about technology and the modern world, even worse than old people, and I wonder whether this is the reason for those claims. Do those claims all come from young people, who live in a very different world and are just very clueless about those things? So at the end, does Google end, because it's not cool with the youth anymore? Not hipster enough and getting lost in the difference between the culture of the generations?

fernandotakai 3y ago
i.... 100% agree. google still is king for every single type of search i do. specially code related. i've tried again and again to use "Chat-AIs" and they get so much shit wrong while implying they are correct that i just gave up.
cityofdelusion 3y ago
Depends on what you Google. If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. Google is still fairly good for very technical stuff, but anything of monetary value has been captured by professional advertisers and their affiliate link filled content farms.
- gtowey 3y ago
  Basically, the more popular a topic is, the more its search results are infested with SEO spam. Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.

jasfi 3y ago

I think this is premature. Google is still a huge force in tech. Google search, GMail, DeepMind and more are huge and aren't going anywhere. I have the same experience as PurpleRamen, I truely don't see the decrease in search quality. I think people just expect perfection every time. That's how high the bar is.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Google's biggest problem is that they're a huge force. Google search directs an absurd amount of traffic to where-ever they point their search ranking. The bigger they've gotten the stronger the observer effect has grown. Search engine spam isn't something that's happened to Google, it's a consequence of their dominance in directing web traffic. No matter which beautiful flower you find, point a power washer at it and all you get is dirt and mud.
worrycue 3y ago
I think people’s GoogleFu has also gotten worse. A lot of examples on this page of bad google results have natural language queries. Google is a traditional search engine. Traditional search engines run on keywords. You enter the keywords you want on the webpage and press “search”. Didn’t find what you were looking for? Add more keywords to make it more specific. Things you don’t want polluting the search results? Exclude a keyword by adding a “-“ in front of it to remove those specific results. Rinse and repeat until you find what you need or give up.

taylodl 3y ago

I still remember the day when I read the Slashdot article announcing this new incredible search engine called Google. I was an AltaVista user at the time, along with most IT professionals, and for those who don't know, it essentially had its own search query language. The claim was Google returned back even better results WITHOUT having to specify all those query parameters. I tried it - it was unbelievable! A simple search box, type in your keyword(s) you're interested in, no query syntax and - voila! Good, relevant results! It was simply amazing! AltaVista essentially died overnight. But really, Google's biggest technology was AdSense. It's how they make their money. It's why all their other services, save for gmail and google docs, have come and gone. Search has become less and less relevant in today's world. But there was a time when it seemed magical!

0xcde4c3db 3y ago
> But really, Google's biggest technology was AdSense. In my more cynical moments, I feel like people got it backwards: DoubleClick acquired Google.
- kridsdale2 3y ago
  Not as far as who the two majority voting shareholders are.
hotpotamus 3y ago
I think I was in a middle school computer lab (could have been high school) when one of the other students said, "hey, you should try this new search engine out, it has millions of sites and works really well". And it did - this comment brings me back.
dekhn 3y ago
Yep, me too- I remember reading about Google (actually a friend read the article and told me I'd like it because they ran on Linux). At the time, AltaVista would often take 30 seconds and then time out, or return pages of spammy results, while Google was super-fast and accurate.
aikinai 3y ago

AdamH12113 3y ago

I never know how to interpret statements like this: > More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users. What does it mean to use an entertainment-based video site as a "primary search engine"?

canadianwriter 3y ago
People will search on Tiktok for things like "how to get game working on linux" or "how to fix a computer" or whatever. They wont bother with Google and go straight to tiktok.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Right, a sort of generational divide. Old people (like me) looking for how-to information go to youtube; young(er) people go to tiktok. Tiktok is 100% blocked from my system but from what i've seen leak into twitter, it's hard for me (an old person) to imagine how it could compete with youtube for how-to. But then maybe that's just growing old.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Old people (like me) looking for how-to information go to youtube I'm old, but I would never search YouTube for how-to information. Videos are too light on solid information and are too hard to use as references. Tiktok is worse, though, having even less information.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      I have found youtube videos that are simply superb for tasks as diverse as: * replacing the steering rods on my Sprinter van * restoring factory state on an ancient Garmin watch * mixing adobe plaster * tying a prince of wales knot in a necktie and lots, lots more.

chickenpotpie 3y ago

Did the verge seriously cite a single hackernews comment as a source? "There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was" The word "growing" is a link to hackernews

kipchak 3y ago
I saw a funny song on YouTube about it, if that counts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
paxys 3y ago
This is how a lot of online journalism works today. Come up with an agenda you want to push that is sure to start flame wars (and drive advertising traffic), search for it on Twitter, find a single Tweet posted by anyone that agrees with your view (or just post it yourself from an alt account), and write a clickbait title and short article linking to that Tweet. "Subscribers quitting Netflix in droves over new policy." "No one uses Google anymore." "AI replacing 80%+ of programmers at software companies." "People outraged over [latest nothingburger]." You can come up with an unlimited amount of catchy content, and most of it makes it to the front page of sites like HN and Reddit.
rvz 3y ago
The Verge has always been considered a tabloid source. No different to the Daily Mail, since they both have heavy use of ads and affiliate links in every section and corner of their articles.
freeone3000 3y ago
In one sense, that’s how people talk to each other. The reporter is based “growing” off of people talking about it. It’s sort of unclear how many people need to talk about a thing for it to be part of culture? Or if these articles should even exist in the world of interconnectivity? But our lives are online now — this is a quote from a “man on the street”.

stephc_int13 3y ago

When this happen, there is always a lot of inertia at first, it can take years or maybe even decades, but almost every time the denial leads to a pernicious internal erosion and a sudden collapse at the end.

deleted 3y ago

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hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I enjoyed this article, and I found myself nodding through the parts that discussed Google's history over the past couple decades. However, the last couple concluding paragraphs, and the comparison to AltaVista, I found to be extremely weak. It was as if the author had diagnosed all these problems, and felt like they couldn't just end the article but had to wrap it up with something they felt was a potential solution. In my opinion, there is no potential solution, and that's both a good and bad thing. At worldwide scale, I find it hard to believe that any company wouldn't fall down the path Google has: they are pretty fundamentally a victim to Goodhart's Law [1], and that dynamic is inevitable. I think the bad thing about that is it does kind of make me yearn for some of "the good old days" when not everything was just teeming with SEO nonsense and blogspam. For example, when looking for particular software solutions, I've found it impossible to use Google to do "ProductA vs. ProductB" type searches anymore - all the top links are just some sort of affiliate link spam, the analysis (if there is any) flat out sucks. So the good news is that it's made me step away from the Internet more: e.g. for the example above, I don't even do a search: I'll ask for recommendations from friends and colleagues, post to a helpful employee alumni mailing list, etc. You know, the way we used to do things "in the good old days". If anything the complete disgust and enshittification I find with so much online content and algorithms these days has actually led to me being mentally healthier - I just spend less time online (HN being the bad habit I'm trying to break) and more time in "the real world". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

politelemon 3y ago

I've read through the post and this reads more of a memory lane of Google, rather than getting into the statement "Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question." There are a few links scattered about on relatively minor topics , but nothing substantial showing that it's in question. Either that's clickbait, which I'm now starting to associate with the verge, or it's far too early days to tell. Like other comments here my impression is not the same as the post. And the slivers of reasoning given are weak at best.

onthecanposting 3y ago
[flagged]
dimator 3y ago
this was my take as well. about 3/4 of the way through, i was wondering when they'd make the point, or if there was a second page to the article.

maximinus_thrax 3y ago

Interestingly enough, this has dropped off the frontpage. Not insinuating anything, I just find it weird.

paulddraper 3y ago
8 hours after posting, it is on the frontpage Not insinuating anything, I just find it not weird
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago
  When I read the article, it was on the front page. An hour later, when I wrote the comment, I was talking to a friend of mine from Google and wanted to share it but couldn't find it on the frontpage anymore. It was on the 4th page.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Sounds like they're in need of some Hacker News Optimization

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

Doesn't the Verge see they have reached their end of life, already?

rvz 3y ago
Yes. Just watched their journalism degrade to tabloid status in the past few years. But won't be surprised to see layoffs happen in ad hungry articles such as the Verge thanks to GPT-4 being a candidate to replace them.

karaterobot 3y ago

> The word SEO “kind of sounds like spam when you say it today,” said Lenssen, in a slightly affected voice. “But that was not how it started.” That is not my recollection. I was blogging at the time they're talking about, and I think the first time I heard about SEO was in the context of trying to get your site ranked higher than everybody else. I grant that the techniques for early SEO came out of good, semantic-web intentions, but I feel like the time between them being implemented and the time they were misused for personal gain was like 3 minutes, max.

chasd00 3y ago
I remember SEO being all about keeping up with Google’s search algorithm tweaks and attempting to game it.
paulddraper 3y ago
Right? Version 1 SEO was to cram as many words as possible into the page. There's a reason why meta keywords attribute has been useless. For years [1] [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/meta/name https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/me...
- msla 3y ago
  Early early SEO was cramming keywords into the bottom of the page with a foreground color the same as the background.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    I made my first million this way in the days of Altavista. 30,000 "Beanie Babies" can't be wrong.

readyplayernull 3y ago

I first heard "Google" more than 10 years before the search engine, when my uncle (who later worked for IBM) was explaining my grandmother about this huge number. Then a decade later I got the joke at the bottom of the result pages that said "gooooooooogle" and each of the o's was a result page link. I've been on the Internet for that long and now I do ChatGPT queries before anything else. They lost the SEO wars long ago, but more important they lost to their own perverse incentives. Same will happen to LLMs as public knowledge engines. Just enjoy while it last.

next_xibalba 3y ago
> they lost to their own perverse incentives This, IMO, is actually a good thing. If Google stayed really great (and thus dominant), there might be less incentive for new info retrieval and knowledge/"cognitive" tech. But the decay of Google makes consumers far more likely to experiment with alternatives. It sort of feels like the circle of (tech) life.

PostOnce 3y ago

Total tangent but did anyone notice the floating hair on the cherub on the header image (the top right one)? Stable Diffusion in the wild? It looks composited by a human (i.e. use SD to generate "cherubs" and then use photoshop to arrange the final image). It says "Illustrations by Michelle Rohn" but maybe it should say "Illustrations by Michelle Rohn and an AI"

Anarch157a 3y ago
It's not floating. If you open the image on a new tab and zoom in, at about 350% you can see a few faint pixels connecting it to the nearby loop of hair.

chupchap 3y ago

A company in search business need to evoke a sense of trust which I don't associate with Google any more. The word Google now stands for flippant attitude to products and services, disregard for privacy, and bloated interfaces combined with a degrading search experience. They need to dig deep and do better to change this attitude

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

skkdhfke 3y ago

[flagged]

smogcutter 3y ago

The problem is that the internet we remember from when google was good no longer exists. Blogs are dead. Personal websites are dead. Noncommercial, informational or niche interest websites are dead. Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore. Yes, we can most of us name real websites that we still read & rely on. When did those sites start publishing? How many of the creator-controlled, non-commercial websites/blogs you read began less than say 5 years ago? I bet the number rounds down to 0. Google search sure as hell played their part in creating this world, but fixing search isn’t going to bring back an internet worth searching.

jstarfish 3y ago
> Search sucks primarily because there’s nothing worth searching for anymore. I thought the same until recently. Google doesn't appear to be indexing/prioritizing anything that's old, infrequently updated, or noncompliant with AMP, even if it's an authoritative source. People blame SEO gaming but I'd sooner accuse them of alignment tweaking (all old/outdated beliefs are purged; my queries were religious and controversial in nature). For some topics, there is still an entire other internet out there they pretend doesn't exist...that starts on page 1 of fucking Yandex. Not advocating for Yandex specifically (I don't trust them) but...try other options (Kagi, Bing, etc.).
xnx 3y ago
A lot of what I liked about the fun quirkiness of the old web can be found on TikTok. Huge variety of things I would not have encountered on my own. Recently: footwear suggestions for the Appalachian trail, an absolutely massive ceramic raku firing, 1x1 meter 3D printer, calisthenics tips, clips of the Twilight Zone, handsfree bareback horseriding, independing one-woman Daily Show-style political commentary, synthesizer tutorials, Chinese underground mall walkthrough (psyops propaganda?), glacial pool swimming, etc. All that with no unskippable ads. There have been some enshittification changes: TikTok live and TikTok shop, but overall, it's still great.
sdsd 3y ago
I spend a lot of time on Urbit and there are plenty of blogs and nothing is commercial. They're even working on an Urbit search engine now. Not trying to promote Urbit, just saying that whether the internet is like this depends on how you use it. Using Google to access the web now, is like using the Yahoo portal to access the internet in the early 2000s.

IAmGraydon 3y ago

This article reminds me of how everyone seems to think the USD is on the way out as the world reserve currency while nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes people hope to see the end of the status quo so badly that they convince themselves that their delusions are true.

baryphonic 3y ago
Lyin' ChatGPT being a replacement for Google is about as credible as a BRICS reserve currency. The analogy checks out.
- IAmGraydon 3y ago
  There's an overarching theme in the world today of the existing power structures being challenged by new power hopefuls. It almost never works out in favor of the new power, however. It doesn't stop the hopefuls from engaging their cognitive biases, and reality distortion soon follows.

mshaler 3y ago

"Only 5 websites each mostly screenshots of the other 4" makes signal to noise more than difficult. Amplify the mutually adverse forces of SEO and advertising dark patterns and here we are, alas

Mathnerd314 3y ago

Clickbait title? The window title is "How Google made the world go viral" which is IMO a much better title.

bowsamic 3y ago

This article is too long winded and bloated with historical retelling to be useful imo

8fingerlouie 3y ago

I find it somewhat ironic that DuckDuckGo returns more relevant results for me than Google does. Some years ago, i would occasionally have to prefix my query with !g to get the Google results, but these days, if DDG cannot find it, chances are Google cannot find it, but will happily return a bunch of spam pages instead.

thinkingemote 3y ago
I use DDG as my daily driver but I get better results with Google. Often it does find stuff that DDG cannot. The use of "matching terms" is good for example. Google is more flexible with its advanced search techniques. It's a choice like Linux vs Apple. I choose to use something (DDG) that is a less good generally but better overall. Privacy is better than search results.