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It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. Thi
by clnq 3y ago
It has become quite difficult to find experts on Google. Google is probably catering to the "entertainment" category of reader now more than it was in 2013. This opinion stems from my experience.
And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearly zero over the weekend.
Over the last 10 years, I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I would say that I get about 20 times fewer readers from Google. However, Google still constitutes about 90% of my readership, down from perhaps 97% to 99%. These are the facts, looking at my analytics.
The other 10% come from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Bitbucket, MS Teams, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Atlassian, Swarm, Ecosia, topical forums, and company domains. The share of readership from sources other than Google used to be closer to 1% - 3% in the past.
From my experience as a user of Google, I also find it much more difficult to find experts in any given field. About a decade ago, I would find so many more hard-boiled technical blogs. Now, the mid-level college essay-style knowledge is much more promoted. This shift makes sense for Google as an ad company, even if it harms everyone, future Google included.
With all that said, here are my conclusions, based in the reality of my own technical blog and its readership -- Google is worse for the technical crowd, which is now more likely to share technical resources by word of mouth (like Atlassian, Swarm, Teams, topical forums and company domains) or find them with other search engines. Google's effectiveness has not significantly diminished, as it still accounts for 90% of the way people reach my technical blog, so it might still be very functional for this purpose. Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd, a contrast to the scenario 10 years ago. But it seems like the decline of Google is a bit catastrophized.
These are only thoughts from my perspective, though they are grounded in some objective metrics.
- nologic01 3y agoA lot of people would corroborate your statistics and observations. The problem is that there is no "entertainment" category of reader. Just different domains and special interests. Nobody likes accessing the internet with a low signal to noise ratio or fighting cut-and-paste "AI" websites that have been engineered to rank on Google.
- clnq 3y agoI think there is an "entertainment" reader in some broad sense. There are many physical tabloids, online tabloids, and buzzfeed-style bloggers online that cater to this reader. I would also lump in the cocktail party knowledge[0] seekers into this category, as they are seeking knowledge for fun or entertainment. And a few other groups that spend time online for no other purpose than their amusement. I want this to not come off as condescending in text, I know that tabloids do not have the best reputation for their content. But I think there is a lot of value in emotional well-being, of which entertainment is a part. So I do not pretend to know whether Google promoting more of this type of content over hard technicals is a change for better or worse, just observing the shift I see from my perspective. [0] https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago>I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I hide as much as i can, and i never link direct, but please top tracking me?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 3y ago> Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd I would say they have risen to a detectable but insignificant stake. The founder of Kagi was up here recently saying they have on the order of thousands of active users, after I suggested some objective evidence indicated only hundreds of active users. Kagi is one of the ones with the biggest memeshare on HN, but it still has an active user base of roughly zero.
- ThrowAwayChris 3y agoI've tried Kagi and I want to love it but the index is just too small to be useful. I come back about once a month and try again. Bing/DDG have never respected quotes or verbatim, not that Google does anymore either. None of the majors, including Kagi, are surfacing community forums that I know exist and have a permissive robots.txt. I've been suspecting orders from on high have been suppressing the discovery of organic content and forums for a while. Ten year old Quora questions and some cherry picked reddit content ranked against a keyword blocklist isn't all there is on the internet. But that's all the Bing/Google based engines show.