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Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

191 points by sonabinu 2y ago

chrisjj 2y ago
> Google's efforts to address this issue aren't always successful. > Often popular search terms are crowded with websites that contain very little useful information, but tonnes of ads Ad-seller Google prefers ad-laden sites?? Who'd have guessed! :)
skilled 2y ago
Honestly, bravo at BBC for whoever green-lighted this story. It puts the finger right on where it hurts for small publishers and illustrates Googles new way of thinking. I am sad but also frightened for small creators and those who simply share interesting information once in a while. Google is bulldozing these people away from anywhere near the AI answers or the ten blue links below it. The article didn’t mention it but people who got hit in September with the helpful update have still not recovered. Not a single site. This is the update that HouseFresh was hit with. It’s insane.
- nycdatasci 2y ago
  This was inevitable. Traditional search is an inefficient way to access information in a world with large AI models. Google is being forced to do this due to competition from openAI, meta.ai, perplexity, etc.
  - hobs 2y ago
    It's really not, they are extremely complementary.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Not necessarily. Internet search algorithms were designed to solve the discoverability problem. LLMs are generative, they're creating content rather than finding it for you. They also serve a different business model. Sure you can have ads in LLM answers similar to Google search results, but Google is also selling clicks. LLMs are designed and used, at least today, to give you the answer so you don't need to see an original source. Beyond that, the idea of a generative algorithm being used in tandem with sponsored results sounds pretty gross in my opinion. I already don't like Google's approach to search results, but if they're also generating the responses on the fly why am I even there? Its only a matter of time before the generative algorithm is trained specifically to drive more sponsorship revenue, maybe by making up content that works better for ad bids or stuffing a reference to a sponsor into a response only because the inline ad pays or converts better.
      - hobs 2y ago
        Seems like the option is constantly retrain an LLM or give it enough tools to interact with new data as needed. For the foreseeable future LLM's are going to need RAG or huge context windows which are effectively equivalent to RAG because you are isolating from some giant corpus your useful information you want the machine to meaningfully interact with.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        It still seems like a different use case to me, but maybe I'm wrong there. I don't mind a search algorithm including a summary as long as its true to the original, but I really don't want any generated content that's trying to predict how someone would answer my question. If LLMs end up replacing most of the use of tools like Google Search we really have moved past the discovery problem and don't necessarily want to find or see the original (human authored) content at all.
  - caseyy 2y ago
    LLMs cannot compete on truthful high-quality information from experts. Only on plausible babble. If that’s the only information you search for, then your perspective makes sense. We shouldn’t be using LLMs for information retrieval at all. They should be summarizing individual web pages at best. That would make search more efficient. But to use plausible text generator without any guaranteed veracity checks in the pipeline for information retrieval is madness.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - ricardo81 2y ago
    It is a bit surreal that you describe sucking up the world's information and spitting it out via a commercial entity and to you as a search result as 'inefficient'. Perhaps it's more inefficient for all those content creators to bother creating anything vs what you actually derive from the search result, especially if they're not attributed/compensated.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  It seems pretty clear that Google's era of search technology has aged out. SEO has been a game of cat and mouse since the web became an ad platform, it was only a matter of time before Google ran out of moves. I'd much prefer a shift back to the earlier, smaller internet approach but it was driven by the enjoyment of exploration and discovery. Today most people prefer instant gratification online and just want answers and content thrown at them faster, with little regard for quality.
  - lolc 2y ago
    > it was only a matter of time before Google ran out of moves. Google is institutionally incapable of offering good search results. They have the tech but shittify it to drive ad spend.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Google didn't get this far without providing much better search results than the competition for a while. I agree result quality has been declining for a while now, and the incentives of an ad and data business don't line up with providing quality search, but that hasn't always been the case. Search before Google was much more rudimentary. Where they are today doesn't change that fact.
- qp11 2y ago
  Small content creators are always going to experience randomness and chaos 'in the current system', cause the Amount of Content far exceeds the amount of Attention available. If the platforms were honest they would signal to everyone how large that gap is. And people would make a more informed call about whether to get into content creation. Instead of doing that the platforms just puts the whole onus on content creator "quality" - hey man if you aren't up in the ranking its your fault, maybe you are a looser, go do something more outrageous, scream a little louder, repeat yourself 24x7, spam everyone. Or buy our ads. Its a nice scam cause you get even large corps and presidents shelling out billions on ads.
- ricardo81 2y ago
  I don't think there's a new element to their thinking. They used to rely on DMOZ's human curated content and then replaced it. Knowledge panels (at least the non-business ones) are reliant on wikipedia. The 10 blue links reliant on the web. They don't mind borrowing until they can replace, and monetise what they borrowed.
david-gpu 2y ago
Over the past several months I find Google search has become completely useless to find anything other than online retailers. I thought it may have been just something about my profile, but this article suggests it may have been an update on their end. Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.
- wand3r 2y ago
  Yeah, I remember how it felt when I first used Google. You could search something like "xck-956-fg" and some obscure part would show up. Obviously they have amazing technology as some of that "magic" is still there when you can search items by just taking a picture, so this is a choice on their part to have horrible search. I use Kagi now as I can tune my searches with rankings and the results are quite good. I am sure Google could create the best and most amazing search experience with little effort. I would happily pay $20 a month for that service. For now, Kagi and LLMs have brought some of the utility back for search and I am optimistic as the technology of AI improves that information retrieval will significantly improve as search providers will be forced to compete and the technology will evolve
- dherikb 2y ago
  I have a different perception, really. They are promoting more the Reddit results in the last months and, at least for me, I'm able to find faster what I want.
  - balder1991 2y ago
    Now it’ll be a matter of time before Reddit gets an order of magnitude more bots and spam.
- beretguy 2y ago
  > Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience. I’ve been using ddg since around 2016, but in the past few months I realize that brave gives me better results and Kagi even still better. So I’m switching to brave/Kagi combo. Brave for when i need to find easy stuff and Kagi when really need to find something.
ungamedplayer 2y ago
Live by the sword, die by the sword
TibbityFlanders 2y ago
Honestly, I use Edge Copilot for almost all my searches now. Google is no longer looking and soon the majority of people will realize that.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Same. This has been a serious productivity booster.
- Aachen 2y ago
  I don't understand what you mean by looking in the sentence "Google is no longer looking". Do you mean they're no longer crawling websites and therefore blind to new content online?
arnklint 2y ago
Who’s gaining traffic right now? Is it just Reddit and a few others that has caught the traffic from this implosion or is the volumes of searches shrinking due to perhaps AI?
- Aachen 2y ago
  See the bar chart in the article, third image (don't know if hotlinking works): https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1024xn/p0j04fnt.jpg.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1024xn/p0j04fnt.jpg.webp Probably besides the ones gaining more traftic, you're probably right the overall click-through rate will be vastly lower than it was before quote answers appeared, and now probably ever lower with the generated text answers
michelb 2y ago
This is good. Because it now will make way more sense to compete with Google on searching the internet, since they screwed it up. They’re are panicking and defending their bottom-line instead of innovating and leading. I think internet search is now ripe for disruption. Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google.
- viraptor 2y ago
  I do like the competition starting to happen again. A lot of the articles seem to concentrate on how Google should do better. But there are so many sites that any change they do will break someone random. With best possible checks, it's just not realistic that there will be no mistakes. We'd be better with 5 players doing things slightly differently. Nobody would get completely wiped by a single change.
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  > Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google. That's the big problem here. All the new search engines rely on the infrastructure of the old ones. It would take very little collusion between Google and Microsoft to crush something like Kagi. And the moment any new competitor gets big, they'll do it. What's needed is an anti-trust breakup. There's simply too big a conflict of interest between Google, the search engine product, and Google, the ad-tech giant earning money off the websites. Google is using their search engine monopoly to control the wider web, and fill it with spammy SEO garbage to juice their advertising revenues.
  - Exuma 2y ago
    How would they crush kagi
    - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
      Kagi relies on data from the search engine giants. Without that data, it's dead in the water. That's the dumbest part of it all; Kagi's not an entirely new search engine. It's Google's index but without the ad-tech juicing, and some clever use of a few other search indices to specialize results. (I.e. Google could unshit itself at any moment, it just doesn't want to.)
predictsoft 2y ago
Didn't Peter Norvig used to be director of search quality? And now Head of research? Maybe they should bring him back to increase that search quality.
- CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
  Or the executive/management team could start using Google search themselves so they can see how bad the results are for their users. Pretty common to dogfeed in the software business yet Google seems to ignore this approach.
  - sp332 2y ago
    What search engine do you think management uses now?
    - hosteur 2y ago
      Probably Kagi.
    - CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
      They probably use some internal version that doesn't optimize for ad revenue but instead for user experience, as is Google tradition.
      - InfiniteVortex 2y ago
        This is the correct answer LOL
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  Shareholder ROI is all you need to know that they won’t let Norvig decide anything outside purely tech stuff.
joshstrange 2y ago
> A spokesperson for Google tells the BBC that the company only launches changes to Search after rigorous testing confirms that the shift will be helpful for users, and that the company gives website owners help, resources and opportunities for feedback on their Search rankings. If you believe this I've got a bridge to sell you. The idea that Google does anything other than to improve its bottom line (in the _shortest_ possible timeline) is lunacy. Just look at Google constant short-sightedness and their parasitic ad team pushing the search team (before taking it over effectively) to find ways to increase the searches (which means a worse user experience). Of course Google doesn't care about quality sites, they care about what makes them the most money, the user be damned. Anyone with an ounce of morality or care about the actual user experience was run out or relegated long ago.
- Aachen 2y ago
  Sell me another bridge then. This is why I believe it: > Google does anything to improve its bottom line (in the _shortest_ possible timeline) If the results suck, people would find alternatives. Look at how many techies installed Chrome for their parents and grandparents when MSIE was pre-installed and this was an easier-to-use, standards-compliant, and more performant option. It further snowballed from there. It takes a few years for word to get around but they're well aware that providing useful results is the only way to stay relevant The problem lies in how Google goes about doing this. People like the (mostly) honest opinions you find on reddit. People like the answer boxes at the top and look no further. My girlfriend is one of the smartest people I know and she doesn't bother reading any further. Any time we look something up together it's a discussion point that I prefer to blindly scroll by the summary and she prefers to not click any result because the answer was already given. One of the most recent times, I could prove the quoted answer was wrong (for once) and that the results clearly gave a better picture in a few more seconds, but it doesn't kill the overall trend where people use this type of summary. Quite the opposite: a friend made a fun little game that got popular tiktok. I talk to players on discord (because of course walled garden discord is their preferred platform). Any time the topic of searching or learning something comes up, most of them demonstrate 100% of their searches start on chatgpt and usually end there, too Google knows better than I do (I'm sure they've done proper studies) what they need to do to stay relevant and their answer as of today is adding generated text output that tries to answer your query without having to even look at any results. The summary box on steroids That this kills small websites is not their problem. All of this may be at the cost of honest content online, but do a Duckduckgo search for comparison: many queries result in pagefuls of content farms that pretend to be review or explanatory websites, looking legit but when you read beyond the first three sentences it's repetitive, baseless, uninsightful, and altogether useless or unreliable at best. I wouldn't know how to distinguish content farms from legit opinion websites at an algorithmic level (perhaps an LLM can make a guess that's often correct, if we think LLM vetting a desirable future), and apparently Google doesn't either because they choose to push sites like reddit and quora instead which, being big brands, everyone already knows are legit sites. I never heard of the air purifier review site the BBC article focuses on, so I can't notice their omission in the search results. Getting content farms is noticeable though and makes me consider which alternative to Duckduckgo I should try out. This thread has been mentioning Kagi, so that'll be something I try later today. Notice how quickly I'm ready to switch away once I find there's something with better results out there In short, scrapping small or even obscure sites (that we all love, if we can find them) in favor of big names, and replacing needing to look at results yourself, is what Google's internal studies apparently show will keep Google Search relevant and I don't see any evidence to cast doubt upon that. Providing what people evidently want allows them to say what you quoted with a straight face
jmyeet 2y ago
So I'm normally skeptical of the anecodata you see on HN and elsewhere ("Google is now useless, I switched to DuckDuckGo 23 years ago") but it seems like Google has done rather big things here: 1. Greatly increased the weight of doamin authority. This... seems desperate; 2. Increased the weight of reddit. Google have probably noticed how many people add "reddit" or "site:reddit.com" to search terms. I do this too. It's true for a lot of topics with all the AI-bot and affiliate astroturfing out there, Reddit can often be the only source for genuine commentary. But Reddit has a dirty little secret: it's really easy to complete change the content and character of a subreddit. You see this on controversial topics. It only takes 100-200 people (or less with bots) to completely transform a subreddit. User generated content sites have techniques to find socket puppets, brigading and the like but it's an arms race. 80% of my Tiktok follows come from crypto scam and p0rn bots. I imagine Twitter is the same way. The bots continue to get better too. Those same algorithms can be used to keep bot activity below the threshold for detecting voting rings. So Google's increased reliance on Reddit will probably escalate the astroturfing and botting on Reddit and honestly, I don't think Reddit is up to the job of defending against this.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > Google is now useless, I switched to DuckDuckGo 23 years ago 7-8 years ago now, i think. Definitely years ago. Yes it started its slide towards useless back then. If you're searching for pizza near you it's probably useful still, if you're searching for say product reviews or niche technical questions it's been completely useless for a while.
- oissla 2y ago
  This. The seo effect on google is just gonna be transferred to reddit, which as of now has very little account fraud detection. Good luck to Reddi's t&s team
coldcode 2y ago
I searched for how to use a massage ball (my back hurts) last week and got a giant page full of ads and ad-like sections for buying one with barely any articles at all. That is not a search engine; it's an ads engine.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Get The Back Mechanic book.
  - gms7777 2y ago
    I appreciate the parent commenter complaining about how they were looking for something just to get ads instead, and getting a response telling them to buy something. That said, I'll also second the back mechanic book for anyone with back pain.
- Varloom 2y ago
  I reduced my google search engine usage by 90% Just Option+Space and get the answer with ChatGPT for MacOS. No ads, no nonsense, just the answer.
  - threeseed 2y ago
    > No ads, no nonsense, just the answer. 5 - 10% of the time that answer will be complete rubbish. We need something better than Google and LLMs e.g. Golden before it was acquired: https://golden.com https://golden.com
    - user3939382 2y ago
      Kagi works great.
      - threeseed 2y ago
        Great is a loaded term. They promote "best headphones" on their home page. 3rd organic link is a 404. And the rest of the links are either not timely e.g. from 2016 or niche e.g. for Telehealth. Also it is not location aware so mention of Bestbuy even when not from US.
hosteur 2y ago
Good news for Kagi then.
throwaway211 2y ago
Two big reasons people add Reddit to search phrases is because Reddit's search isn't functional and to deprioritise Ad Junk from search. It's to fix broken search, which gets more broken - more unwanted Ad Junk. But Google's an advertising company with it's ad search device in everyone's pocket. At least it's reached sufficient post-don't-be-evil to be honestly shameless, even if it does employ people in PR with broken ethics prostituting their names for their mortgages. Getting reflective's hard when you're celebrating yourself.
- jayski 2y ago
  Reddit is the only social network I use. They're really dropping the ball by not having a fantastic search tool. I know search is a difficult problem, but with the kind of budget and engineering power they have it has to be solvable.
  - throwaway211 2y ago
    Before: They were small. It was hard. Defer to Google. Now: By having bad search, Google rewards them.
  - yreg 2y ago
    For me, search is the least of reddit's problems since it is easily worked around by using a search engine. The changes to the API pricing were the final nail in the coffin for me, but the content has been going downhill for a decade anyway.
    - zarathustreal 2y ago
      Reddit is a cesspool, at least the standard subreddits. It’s worse than Twitter. It also has a moderation culture that kind of promotes toxic traits and petty power trips. Used to be pretty good for finding niche info, but most of it for my uses was deleted back when everyone left. Can’t imagine still using Reddit nowadays
      - 2y ago
tsuru 2y ago
Maybe they should get the Twitter treatment anytime they are mentioned: "Google formerly DoubleClick"
- MagnumOpus 2y ago
  99 out of 100 people haven‘t been on the web long enough to dislike DoubleClick as much as it deserves. (And the rest know the work arounds to Google‘s shenanigans already…)
giancarlostoro 2y ago
Imma be real its been deteriorating for a while. Used to be an insanely powerful engine. You could find things with verbatim quotes. I have not seen this work anymore for quite some time. It all started when they started adding rules to suppress results somewhere in the late 2000s or early 2010s. Its only gotten worse and worse. Googles search engine is now just a personal collection of pre approved search results for no valid rhyme or reason.
rsolva 2y ago
We need to make bookmarks a common way to access the web again! So many people use Google or other search engines to access even the most basic sites, instead of storing a bookmark or typing out the whole URL. I have used a simple bookmarking strategy in Firefox for some years now, simply storing everything and anything I suspect I might want to retrieve later. I give each bookmark a few quick keywords and store it all in one folder. No hierarchy. It's surprisingly useful and has helped me retrieve so much stuff from my vague long term memory. In addition, I flush the cache automatically every time I close the browser and curate a list of sites that are exempted from the flush. I have also turned off search words suggestions in the address bar, leaving me with a tidy and usefull experience that helps me find what I'm looking for in seconds. Only saved sites show up when I start typing. But most browsers, including Firefox, need to improve their bookmarking system. I can't add keywords to bookmarks from the mobile browser. Why not? And the bookmark UI has gotten little attention for literally decades. It would not help all smaller sites, but it would help some, if browsers would improve the storing, managing and retrieving of bookmarks.
- machiaweliczny 2y ago
  How about social features like sharing bookmarks or having curated list for specific subjects When I want to share bookmark folder for other collegues I have to go trough hoops (at least on chrome)
  - crucialfelix 2y ago
    That's what https://del.icio.us/ https://del.icio.us/ was. It was very social in the best sense of the word.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  Yeah, and, along the same lines, directories should perhaps also make a comeback -- like the old Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. Just a carefully curated and organized list of trusted sites that are made and managed by humans and for humans. Unlike, say, DMOZ, the directory of the future should be easier to navigate and incorporate "modern" features -- and it should also be easily searchable. (All sites on the directory are indexed; no sites off the directory are indexed.) Searching for B2B products and services has become a lot tougher lately. A good directory could conceivably make a meaningful difference.
ricardo81 2y ago
The article starts with intimating that SEO is the problem. Perhaps to an extent it is, though I'd say with G's massive market share that optimising for one sweet spot with one search engine is really the problem. It makes SEO easier, one search engine and criteria. 20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines you'd be ranking well in some but not others. A good argument for alternative algorithms (and search engines). Generative AI is no doubt useful for simple questions, and perhaps for people who aren't even interested in being sceptical about the answer given, but it seems at too high a cost for the visibility of the actual web and the effort put in by content creators. Obviously with the huge and unrivalled ROI G gets from ads vs any rivals, the fact they're the default on most mobiles etc means any alternatives have a huge uphill battle to get seen. At least there is Bing (and its meta variants), Mojeek (independent, a smaller index but truly independent) and Brave (claims independence but has a historical tie to scraping results)
- hollerith 2y ago
  >20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) Altavista was the dominant engine, which rapidly gave way to Google essentially as soon as Google became available, and since 2000 Google has been the dominant engine. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was getting my info on what engines people were using mostly from Usenet, Slashdot and a non-web-based forum called river.org.
  - ricardo81 2y ago
    Alltheweb was fairly prominent then. The likes of Ask Jeeves and Lycos had a few % market share. Gigablast also had its day back then.
    - hollerith 2y ago
      Before I switched to Altavista, I used Lycos for most of my searches though I did occasionally use Ask Jeeves and Alltheweb just to explore the space of offerings. During those years, I also used DMOZ regularly, which is not a search engine, but rather an index of links organized much like a card catalog in a library is.
gtirloni 2y ago
"Create content for us to train our AI models while we fill the front page only with big websites that pay for our ads. Thank you!"
counterpartyrsk 2y ago
Or is Google prioritizing sites that drive Google ad revenue, and not ranking according to content?
mdavid626 2y ago
Yeah, AI answers is exactly what we need (unamused).
guerrilla 2y ago
I don't know how people still used it for the last years. Sure, DuckDuckGo used to be a bit worse, but not that much worse and then came Brave and I feel like I don't need anything else anymore. It's like having old Google back.
meiraleal 2y ago
That would be exactly the outcome they were expecting with this change. I disagree that Google still holds the power to change the internet tho.
8organicbits 2y ago
I've been thinking more about what we can collectively do to fix what is now broken. One tiny part of the solution may be individual curation. To me that means the return of the blogroll. I've been exploring this, along with others, at https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ It's at an early stage but I've found value from it already.
nottorp 2y ago
<old fart hat on> Note that the article is crying about the poor small businesses that google killed. Not about the good old days when you could find unbiased reviews that were done not-for-profit out of someone's personal experience on a geocities page that hurt your eyes with all those blink tags. </old fart hat off>
- p3rls 2y ago
  You are making distinctions without a difference -- those same geocities admins (like myself) are now the creators of many of these small business websites and webapps that have been being held hostage for years by a malevolent corporation bent on destroying the last few decent websites left on the internet. And then when you complain about this monopoly that controls 90% of the west's internet, and 99% of it when you include Microsoft's collusion you are met with the alums from Harvard Business School "Well maybe you should have thought about that before basing your business on Google traffic" Oh, but that is incorrect, actually what I should have done is send over a few bribes to some struggling entertainment writers like my competitors did. You can check my other comments in this thread for more on that. In an actual just world, (not to immanentize the eschaton that was the early internet but) you'd think so many old farts wearing hats still around that actually remember what the internet was supposed to do and be like that all the Google Search liaisons would have been tarred and feathered years ago by now.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > what the internet was supposed to do Oh no, I'm whining about an even earlier period when the info online was done without commercial gain (small company or Google) in mind and way more trustable :)
post_break 2y ago
I’ve been using bing and ddg so much more. The bing outage actually impacted me and that took me by surprise.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  brave search isn't a bad fallback
KaiMagnus 2y ago
Great article, probably confirming something a lot of people on here have already suspected. But I am honestly shocked at how dire this situation seems. > Reddit isn't the only winner after Google's recent algorithm updates. SEMrush data shows that other user-generated sites such as Quora and Instagram saw similarly astronomical rises, and there were impressive spikes at LinkedIn and Wikipedia as well. How can it be that after 20-30 years, it seems they have no way of knowing which sites produce genuine content and which do not? And what’s worse, in what I can only describe as a frantic search for a solution, they simply turn to the largest players and bump up their weights. They are killing the grassroots of the internet and when places like Reddit continue their inevitable path of enshittification the internet will be truly dead Of course the internet is resilient and it will grow again, but we need to get this monopoly back in check fast.
raytopia 2y ago
I wonder if web directories become more popular again if it would help any of these issues. They seem a lot better for surfing the internet (thus naturally finding new websites) as opposed to searching it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
EcommerceFlow 2y ago
While yes it’s technically “Googles fault”, I feel like the reality is the spammers have won the SEO war. Might be as simple as that,
neilv 2y ago
> A spokesperson for Google tells the BBC that the company only launches changes to Search after rigorous testing confirms that the shift will be helpful for users, and that the company gives website owners help, resources and opportunities for feedback on their Search rankings. When I got an Android tablet, I downloaded some of those free-to-play games in which you build bases and vehicles in a multiplayer world. And then other players come along and destroy what you've built, and steal your stuff. With the game providing not-so-subtle prompts to pay for the various kinds of in-game currencies/tokens, so that you can properly defend yourself or gain advantage over others. The mechanics of the game were mostly a diversion from the real way you win, which was the real point of the game's design. Regarding Google's "help", they helped turn SEO into this kind of game, and even offer gaming guides themselves, because, at the end of the day, people will have to pay real money for in-game resources, if they want to compete. > The second Google algorithm update came in March, and it was even more punishing. House Fresh's thousands of daily visitors dwindled to just hundreds. "We just got absolutely crushed," Navarro says. Over the last few weeks, House Fresh had to lay off most of its team. If nothing changes, she says, the website is doomed. If you want visitors to a Web site, you probably have to pay money to Google or similar big tech company. It's not right, but that's the current situation.
- p3rls 2y ago
  Nah, bribe a NYTimes writer at the beginning of your niches trajectory into the mainstream. That's how they did it in my niche and still making a half million a year almost a decade later. For reference the shocked SEO writer who found the site, but these guys never figure out just how it was done. https://x.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 https://x.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 Why build something that takes work at all in this environment?
  - Hates_ 2y ago
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550532282288508929.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550532282288508929.html
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
marcinzm 2y ago
I find Google worse every day. The latest thing I noticed is a ton of AI generated sites at the top that "summarize" things. Mostly the same format. Except they're usually wrong in many ways. One site kept saying Llama 3 is a Mixture of Experts model despite it not being one.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  the AI sites are what got me off google, DDG, etc. Kagi seems to be a bit better and avoiding that garbage although I still see ones there from time to time. Usually a dumb af site name gives it away.
maram 2y ago
>>It's almost as if Google designed an algorithm update to specifically go after small bloggers. I've talked to so many people who've just had everything wiped out While at the same time small businesses are being killed by the lockdown
pknerd 2y ago
> The Internet will never be the same (bbc.com) Yes, now we can rank by posting crap on Reddit [1] [1] https://imgur.com/a/iMejAF3 https://imgur.com/a/iMejAF3
hulitu 2y ago
> Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same I know we are in the middle of a crysis, but maybe someone at BBC needs an "Internet" training. /s
asadotzler 2y ago
I search Google about 90% less using Firefox because I never have to use Google to find a site I was recently at. In Firefox: Add ^ to show only matches in your browsing history. Add * to show only matches in your bookmarks. Add + to show only matches in bookmarks you've tagged. Add % to show only matches in your currently open tabs. Add # to show only matches where your terms are part of a tag or title. Add $ to show only matches where your terms are part of the address. Add ? to show only search suggestions. Armed with this, and &UDM=14 on my browser's Google Search, I use Google a couple times a day to find new things and without the AI slop, product ads, and other nonsense. That doesn't fix the shitty results themselves, but with a little bit of -quora and -reddit I can usually get what I'm after in the first 5-10 links. Stop feeding that monster. Cut your usage. Find other tools that accomplish your goals (often faster and cheaper too) and then use Google for what it's good for, the occasional web search. With uBlock Origin and &udm=14 Google web search still beats Bing or Kagi or any of the Bing-based products like DDG. Google Search sucking is only really an end user problem if you depend on it for a lot. If you only need to touch it a dozen times a week for a total of 5 minutes, it's not too terrible.

191 points by sonabinu 2y ago

> Google's efforts to address this issue aren't always successful. > Often popular search terms are crowded with websites that contain very little useful information, but tonnes of ads Ad-seller Google prefers ad-laden sites?? Who'd have guessed! :)

skilled 2y ago

Honestly, bravo at BBC for whoever green-lighted this story. It puts the finger right on where it hurts for small publishers and illustrates Googles new way of thinking. I am sad but also frightened for small creators and those who simply share interesting information once in a while. Google is bulldozing these people away from anywhere near the AI answers or the ten blue links below it. The article didn’t mention it but people who got hit in September with the helpful update have still not recovered. Not a single site. This is the update that HouseFresh was hit with. It’s insane.

nycdatasci 2y ago
This was inevitable. Traditional search is an inefficient way to access information in a world with large AI models. Google is being forced to do this due to competition from openAI, meta.ai, perplexity, etc.
- hobs 2y ago
  It's really not, they are extremely complementary.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Not necessarily. Internet search algorithms were designed to solve the discoverability problem. LLMs are generative, they're creating content rather than finding it for you. They also serve a different business model. Sure you can have ads in LLM answers similar to Google search results, but Google is also selling clicks. LLMs are designed and used, at least today, to give you the answer so you don't need to see an original source. Beyond that, the idea of a generative algorithm being used in tandem with sponsored results sounds pretty gross in my opinion. I already don't like Google's approach to search results, but if they're also generating the responses on the fly why am I even there? Its only a matter of time before the generative algorithm is trained specifically to drive more sponsorship revenue, maybe by making up content that works better for ad bids or stuffing a reference to a sponsor into a response only because the inline ad pays or converts better.
    - hobs 2y ago
      Seems like the option is constantly retrain an LLM or give it enough tools to interact with new data as needed. For the foreseeable future LLM's are going to need RAG or huge context windows which are effectively equivalent to RAG because you are isolating from some giant corpus your useful information you want the machine to meaningfully interact with.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        It still seems like a different use case to me, but maybe I'm wrong there. I don't mind a search algorithm including a summary as long as its true to the original, but I really don't want any generated content that's trying to predict how someone would answer my question. If LLMs end up replacing most of the use of tools like Google Search we really have moved past the discovery problem and don't necessarily want to find or see the original (human authored) content at all.
- caseyy 2y ago
  LLMs cannot compete on truthful high-quality information from experts. Only on plausible babble. If that’s the only information you search for, then your perspective makes sense. We shouldn’t be using LLMs for information retrieval at all. They should be summarizing individual web pages at best. That would make search more efficient. But to use plausible text generator without any guaranteed veracity checks in the pipeline for information retrieval is madness.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ricardo81 2y ago
  It is a bit surreal that you describe sucking up the world's information and spitting it out via a commercial entity and to you as a search result as 'inefficient'. Perhaps it's more inefficient for all those content creators to bother creating anything vs what you actually derive from the search result, especially if they're not attributed/compensated.
_heimdall 2y ago
It seems pretty clear that Google's era of search technology has aged out. SEO has been a game of cat and mouse since the web became an ad platform, it was only a matter of time before Google ran out of moves. I'd much prefer a shift back to the earlier, smaller internet approach but it was driven by the enjoyment of exploration and discovery. Today most people prefer instant gratification online and just want answers and content thrown at them faster, with little regard for quality.
- lolc 2y ago
  > it was only a matter of time before Google ran out of moves. Google is institutionally incapable of offering good search results. They have the tech but shittify it to drive ad spend.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Google didn't get this far without providing much better search results than the competition for a while. I agree result quality has been declining for a while now, and the incentives of an ad and data business don't line up with providing quality search, but that hasn't always been the case. Search before Google was much more rudimentary. Where they are today doesn't change that fact.
qp11 2y ago
Small content creators are always going to experience randomness and chaos 'in the current system', cause the Amount of Content far exceeds the amount of Attention available. If the platforms were honest they would signal to everyone how large that gap is. And people would make a more informed call about whether to get into content creation. Instead of doing that the platforms just puts the whole onus on content creator "quality" - hey man if you aren't up in the ranking its your fault, maybe you are a looser, go do something more outrageous, scream a little louder, repeat yourself 24x7, spam everyone. Or buy our ads. Its a nice scam cause you get even large corps and presidents shelling out billions on ads.
ricardo81 2y ago
I don't think there's a new element to their thinking. They used to rely on DMOZ's human curated content and then replaced it. Knowledge panels (at least the non-business ones) are reliant on wikipedia. The 10 blue links reliant on the web. They don't mind borrowing until they can replace, and monetise what they borrowed.

david-gpu 2y ago

Over the past several months I find Google search has become completely useless to find anything other than online retailers. I thought it may have been just something about my profile, but this article suggests it may have been an update on their end. Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

wand3r 2y ago
Yeah, I remember how it felt when I first used Google. You could search something like "xck-956-fg" and some obscure part would show up. Obviously they have amazing technology as some of that "magic" is still there when you can search items by just taking a picture, so this is a choice on their part to have horrible search. I use Kagi now as I can tune my searches with rankings and the results are quite good. I am sure Google could create the best and most amazing search experience with little effort. I would happily pay $20 a month for that service. For now, Kagi and LLMs have brought some of the utility back for search and I am optimistic as the technology of AI improves that information retrieval will significantly improve as search providers will be forced to compete and the technology will evolve
dherikb 2y ago
I have a different perception, really. They are promoting more the Reddit results in the last months and, at least for me, I'm able to find faster what I want.
- balder1991 2y ago
  Now it’ll be a matter of time before Reddit gets an order of magnitude more bots and spam.
beretguy 2y ago
> Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience. I’ve been using ddg since around 2016, but in the past few months I realize that brave gives me better results and Kagi even still better. So I’m switching to brave/Kagi combo. Brave for when i need to find easy stuff and Kagi when really need to find something.

ungamedplayer 2y ago

Live by the sword, die by the sword

TibbityFlanders 2y ago

Honestly, I use Edge Copilot for almost all my searches now. Google is no longer looking and soon the majority of people will realize that.

datavirtue 2y ago
Same. This has been a serious productivity booster.
Aachen 2y ago
I don't understand what you mean by looking in the sentence "Google is no longer looking". Do you mean they're no longer crawling websites and therefore blind to new content online?

arnklint 2y ago

Who’s gaining traffic right now? Is it just Reddit and a few others that has caught the traffic from this implosion or is the volumes of searches shrinking due to perhaps AI?

Aachen 2y ago
See the bar chart in the article, third image (don't know if hotlinking works): https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1024xn/p0j04fnt.jpg.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1024xn/p0j04fnt.jpg.webp Probably besides the ones gaining more traftic, you're probably right the overall click-through rate will be vastly lower than it was before quote answers appeared, and now probably ever lower with the generated text answers

michelb 2y ago

This is good. Because it now will make way more sense to compete with Google on searching the internet, since they screwed it up. They’re are panicking and defending their bottom-line instead of innovating and leading. I think internet search is now ripe for disruption. Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google.

viraptor 2y ago
I do like the competition starting to happen again. A lot of the articles seem to concentrate on how Google should do better. But there are so many sites that any change they do will break someone random. With best possible checks, it's just not realistic that there will be no mistakes. We'd be better with 5 players doing things slightly differently. Nobody would get completely wiped by a single change.
ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google. That's the big problem here. All the new search engines rely on the infrastructure of the old ones. It would take very little collusion between Google and Microsoft to crush something like Kagi. And the moment any new competitor gets big, they'll do it. What's needed is an anti-trust breakup. There's simply too big a conflict of interest between Google, the search engine product, and Google, the ad-tech giant earning money off the websites. Google is using their search engine monopoly to control the wider web, and fill it with spammy SEO garbage to juice their advertising revenues.
- Exuma 2y ago
  How would they crush kagi
  - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
    Kagi relies on data from the search engine giants. Without that data, it's dead in the water. That's the dumbest part of it all; Kagi's not an entirely new search engine. It's Google's index but without the ad-tech juicing, and some clever use of a few other search indices to specialize results. (I.e. Google could unshit itself at any moment, it just doesn't want to.)

predictsoft 2y ago

Didn't Peter Norvig used to be director of search quality? And now Head of research? Maybe they should bring him back to increase that search quality.

CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
Or the executive/management team could start using Google search themselves so they can see how bad the results are for their users. Pretty common to dogfeed in the software business yet Google seems to ignore this approach.
- sp332 2y ago
  What search engine do you think management uses now?
  - hosteur 2y ago
    Probably Kagi.
  - CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
    They probably use some internal version that doesn't optimize for ad revenue but instead for user experience, as is Google tradition.
    - InfiniteVortex 2y ago
      This is the correct answer LOL
anonzzzies 2y ago
Shareholder ROI is all you need to know that they won’t let Norvig decide anything outside purely tech stuff.

joshstrange 2y ago

Aachen 2y ago
Sell me another bridge then. This is why I believe it: > Google does anything to improve its bottom line (in the _shortest_ possible timeline) If the results suck, people would find alternatives. Look at how many techies installed Chrome for their parents and grandparents when MSIE was pre-installed and this was an easier-to-use, standards-compliant, and more performant option. It further snowballed from there. It takes a few years for word to get around but they're well aware that providing useful results is the only way to stay relevant The problem lies in how Google goes about doing this. People like the (mostly) honest opinions you find on reddit. People like the answer boxes at the top and look no further. My girlfriend is one of the smartest people I know and she doesn't bother reading any further. Any time we look something up together it's a discussion point that I prefer to blindly scroll by the summary and she prefers to not click any result because the answer was already given. One of the most recent times, I could prove the quoted answer was wrong (for once) and that the results clearly gave a better picture in a few more seconds, but it doesn't kill the overall trend where people use this type of summary. Quite the opposite: a friend made a fun little game that got popular tiktok. I talk to players on discord (because of course walled garden discord is their preferred platform). Any time the topic of searching or learning something comes up, most of them demonstrate 100% of their searches start on chatgpt and usually end there, too Google knows better than I do (I'm sure they've done proper studies) what they need to do to stay relevant and their answer as of today is adding generated text output that tries to answer your query without having to even look at any results. The summary box on steroids That this kills small websites is not their problem. All of this may be at the cost of honest content online, but do a Duckduckgo search for comparison: many queries result in pagefuls of content farms that pretend to be review or explanatory websites, looking legit but when you read beyond the first three sentences it's repetitive, baseless, uninsightful, and altogether useless or unreliable at best. I wouldn't know how to distinguish content farms from legit opinion websites at an algorithmic level (perhaps an LLM can make a guess that's often correct, if we think LLM vetting a desirable future), and apparently Google doesn't either because they choose to push sites like reddit and quora instead which, being big brands, everyone already knows are legit sites. I never heard of the air purifier review site the BBC article focuses on, so I can't notice their omission in the search results. Getting content farms is noticeable though and makes me consider which alternative to Duckduckgo I should try out. This thread has been mentioning Kagi, so that'll be something I try later today. Notice how quickly I'm ready to switch away once I find there's something with better results out there In short, scrapping small or even obscure sites (that we all love, if we can find them) in favor of big names, and replacing needing to look at results yourself, is what Google's internal studies apparently show will keep Google Search relevant and I don't see any evidence to cast doubt upon that. Providing what people evidently want allows them to say what you quoted with a straight face

jmyeet 2y ago

So I'm normally skeptical of the anecodata you see on HN and elsewhere ("Google is now useless, I switched to DuckDuckGo 23 years ago") but it seems like Google has done rather big things here: 1. Greatly increased the weight of doamin authority. This... seems desperate; 2. Increased the weight of reddit. Google have probably noticed how many people add "reddit" or "site:reddit.com" to search terms. I do this too. It's true for a lot of topics with all the AI-bot and affiliate astroturfing out there, Reddit can often be the only source for genuine commentary. But Reddit has a dirty little secret: it's really easy to complete change the content and character of a subreddit. You see this on controversial topics. It only takes 100-200 people (or less with bots) to completely transform a subreddit. User generated content sites have techniques to find socket puppets, brigading and the like but it's an arms race. 80% of my Tiktok follows come from crypto scam and p0rn bots. I imagine Twitter is the same way. The bots continue to get better too. Those same algorithms can be used to keep bot activity below the threshold for detecting voting rings. So Google's increased reliance on Reddit will probably escalate the astroturfing and botting on Reddit and honestly, I don't think Reddit is up to the job of defending against this.

nottorp 2y ago
> Google is now useless, I switched to DuckDuckGo 23 years ago 7-8 years ago now, i think. Definitely years ago. Yes it started its slide towards useless back then. If you're searching for pizza near you it's probably useful still, if you're searching for say product reviews or niche technical questions it's been completely useless for a while.
oissla 2y ago
This. The seo effect on google is just gonna be transferred to reddit, which as of now has very little account fraud detection. Good luck to Reddi's t&s team

coldcode 2y ago

I searched for how to use a massage ball (my back hurts) last week and got a giant page full of ads and ad-like sections for buying one with barely any articles at all. That is not a search engine; it's an ads engine.

datavirtue 2y ago
Get The Back Mechanic book.
- gms7777 2y ago
  I appreciate the parent commenter complaining about how they were looking for something just to get ads instead, and getting a response telling them to buy something. That said, I'll also second the back mechanic book for anyone with back pain.
Varloom 2y ago
I reduced my google search engine usage by 90% Just Option+Space and get the answer with ChatGPT for MacOS. No ads, no nonsense, just the answer.
- threeseed 2y ago
  > No ads, no nonsense, just the answer. 5 - 10% of the time that answer will be complete rubbish. We need something better than Google and LLMs e.g. Golden before it was acquired: https://golden.com https://golden.com
  - user3939382 2y ago
    Kagi works great.
    - threeseed 2y ago
      Great is a loaded term. They promote "best headphones" on their home page. 3rd organic link is a 404. And the rest of the links are either not timely e.g. from 2016 or niche e.g. for Telehealth. Also it is not location aware so mention of Bestbuy even when not from US.

hosteur 2y ago

Good news for Kagi then.

throwaway211 2y ago

Two big reasons people add Reddit to search phrases is because Reddit's search isn't functional and to deprioritise Ad Junk from search. It's to fix broken search, which gets more broken - more unwanted Ad Junk. But Google's an advertising company with it's ad search device in everyone's pocket. At least it's reached sufficient post-don't-be-evil to be honestly shameless, even if it does employ people in PR with broken ethics prostituting their names for their mortgages. Getting reflective's hard when you're celebrating yourself.

jayski 2y ago
Reddit is the only social network I use. They're really dropping the ball by not having a fantastic search tool. I know search is a difficult problem, but with the kind of budget and engineering power they have it has to be solvable.
- throwaway211 2y ago
  Before: They were small. It was hard. Defer to Google. Now: By having bad search, Google rewards them.
- yreg 2y ago
  For me, search is the least of reddit's problems since it is easily worked around by using a search engine. The changes to the API pricing were the final nail in the coffin for me, but the content has been going downhill for a decade anyway.
  - zarathustreal 2y ago
    Reddit is a cesspool, at least the standard subreddits. It’s worse than Twitter. It also has a moderation culture that kind of promotes toxic traits and petty power trips. Used to be pretty good for finding niche info, but most of it for my uses was deleted back when everyone left. Can’t imagine still using Reddit nowadays
    - 2y ago

tsuru 2y ago

Maybe they should get the Twitter treatment anytime they are mentioned: "Google formerly DoubleClick"

MagnumOpus 2y ago
99 out of 100 people haven‘t been on the web long enough to dislike DoubleClick as much as it deserves. (And the rest know the work arounds to Google‘s shenanigans already…)

giancarlostoro 2y ago

Imma be real its been deteriorating for a while. Used to be an insanely powerful engine. You could find things with verbatim quotes. I have not seen this work anymore for quite some time. It all started when they started adding rules to suppress results somewhere in the late 2000s or early 2010s. Its only gotten worse and worse. Googles search engine is now just a personal collection of pre approved search results for no valid rhyme or reason.

rsolva 2y ago

We need to make bookmarks a common way to access the web again! So many people use Google or other search engines to access even the most basic sites, instead of storing a bookmark or typing out the whole URL. I have used a simple bookmarking strategy in Firefox for some years now, simply storing everything and anything I suspect I might want to retrieve later. I give each bookmark a few quick keywords and store it all in one folder. No hierarchy. It's surprisingly useful and has helped me retrieve so much stuff from my vague long term memory. In addition, I flush the cache automatically every time I close the browser and curate a list of sites that are exempted from the flush. I have also turned off search words suggestions in the address bar, leaving me with a tidy and usefull experience that helps me find what I'm looking for in seconds. Only saved sites show up when I start typing. But most browsers, including Firefox, need to improve their bookmarking system. I can't add keywords to bookmarks from the mobile browser. Why not? And the bookmark UI has gotten little attention for literally decades. It would not help all smaller sites, but it would help some, if browsers would improve the storing, managing and retrieving of bookmarks.

machiaweliczny 2y ago
How about social features like sharing bookmarks or having curated list for specific subjects When I want to share bookmark folder for other collegues I have to go trough hoops (at least on chrome)
- crucialfelix 2y ago
  That's what https://del.icio.us/ https://del.icio.us/ was. It was very social in the best sense of the word.
A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
Yeah, and, along the same lines, directories should perhaps also make a comeback -- like the old Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. Just a carefully curated and organized list of trusted sites that are made and managed by humans and for humans. Unlike, say, DMOZ, the directory of the future should be easier to navigate and incorporate "modern" features -- and it should also be easily searchable. (All sites on the directory are indexed; no sites off the directory are indexed.) Searching for B2B products and services has become a lot tougher lately. A good directory could conceivably make a meaningful difference.

ricardo81 2y ago

The article starts with intimating that SEO is the problem. Perhaps to an extent it is, though I'd say with G's massive market share that optimising for one sweet spot with one search engine is really the problem. It makes SEO easier, one search engine and criteria. 20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines you'd be ranking well in some but not others. A good argument for alternative algorithms (and search engines). Generative AI is no doubt useful for simple questions, and perhaps for people who aren't even interested in being sceptical about the answer given, but it seems at too high a cost for the visibility of the actual web and the effort put in by content creators. Obviously with the huge and unrivalled ROI G gets from ads vs any rivals, the fact they're the default on most mobiles etc means any alternatives have a huge uphill battle to get seen. At least there is Bing (and its meta variants), Mojeek (independent, a smaller index but truly independent) and Brave (claims independence but has a historical tie to scraping results)

hollerith 2y ago
>20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) Altavista was the dominant engine, which rapidly gave way to Google essentially as soon as Google became available, and since 2000 Google has been the dominant engine. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was getting my info on what engines people were using mostly from Usenet, Slashdot and a non-web-based forum called river.org.
- ricardo81 2y ago
  Alltheweb was fairly prominent then. The likes of Ask Jeeves and Lycos had a few % market share. Gigablast also had its day back then.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Before I switched to Altavista, I used Lycos for most of my searches though I did occasionally use Ask Jeeves and Alltheweb just to explore the space of offerings. During those years, I also used DMOZ regularly, which is not a search engine, but rather an index of links organized much like a card catalog in a library is.

gtirloni 2y ago

"Create content for us to train our AI models while we fill the front page only with big websites that pay for our ads. Thank you!"

counterpartyrsk 2y ago

Or is Google prioritizing sites that drive Google ad revenue, and not ranking according to content?

mdavid626 2y ago

Yeah, AI answers is exactly what we need (unamused).

guerrilla 2y ago

I don't know how people still used it for the last years. Sure, DuckDuckGo used to be a bit worse, but not that much worse and then came Brave and I feel like I don't need anything else anymore. It's like having old Google back.

meiraleal 2y ago

That would be exactly the outcome they were expecting with this change. I disagree that Google still holds the power to change the internet tho.

8organicbits 2y ago

I've been thinking more about what we can collectively do to fix what is now broken. One tiny part of the solution may be individual curation. To me that means the return of the blogroll. I've been exploring this, along with others, at https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/ It's at an early stage but I've found value from it already.

nottorp 2y ago

<old fart hat on> Note that the article is crying about the poor small businesses that google killed. Not about the good old days when you could find unbiased reviews that were done not-for-profit out of someone's personal experience on a geocities page that hurt your eyes with all those blink tags. </old fart hat off>

p3rls 2y ago
You are making distinctions without a difference -- those same geocities admins (like myself) are now the creators of many of these small business websites and webapps that have been being held hostage for years by a malevolent corporation bent on destroying the last few decent websites left on the internet. And then when you complain about this monopoly that controls 90% of the west's internet, and 99% of it when you include Microsoft's collusion you are met with the alums from Harvard Business School "Well maybe you should have thought about that before basing your business on Google traffic" Oh, but that is incorrect, actually what I should have done is send over a few bribes to some struggling entertainment writers like my competitors did. You can check my other comments in this thread for more on that. In an actual just world, (not to immanentize the eschaton that was the early internet but) you'd think so many old farts wearing hats still around that actually remember what the internet was supposed to do and be like that all the Google Search liaisons would have been tarred and feathered years ago by now.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > what the internet was supposed to do Oh no, I'm whining about an even earlier period when the info online was done without commercial gain (small company or Google) in mind and way more trustable :)

post_break 2y ago

I’ve been using bing and ddg so much more. The bing outage actually impacted me and that took me by surprise.

EasyMark 2y ago
brave search isn't a bad fallback

KaiMagnus 2y ago

Great article, probably confirming something a lot of people on here have already suspected. But I am honestly shocked at how dire this situation seems. > Reddit isn't the only winner after Google's recent algorithm updates. SEMrush data shows that other user-generated sites such as Quora and Instagram saw similarly astronomical rises, and there were impressive spikes at LinkedIn and Wikipedia as well. How can it be that after 20-30 years, it seems they have no way of knowing which sites produce genuine content and which do not? And what’s worse, in what I can only describe as a frantic search for a solution, they simply turn to the largest players and bump up their weights. They are killing the grassroots of the internet and when places like Reddit continue their inevitable path of enshittification the internet will be truly dead Of course the internet is resilient and it will grow again, but we need to get this monopoly back in check fast.

raytopia 2y ago

I wonder if web directories become more popular again if it would help any of these issues. They seem a lot better for surfing the internet (thus naturally finding new websites) as opposed to searching it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

EcommerceFlow 2y ago

While yes it’s technically “Googles fault”, I feel like the reality is the spammers have won the SEO war. Might be as simple as that,

neilv 2y ago

> A spokesperson for Google tells the BBC that the company only launches changes to Search after rigorous testing confirms that the shift will be helpful for users, and that the company gives website owners help, resources and opportunities for feedback on their Search rankings. When I got an Android tablet, I downloaded some of those free-to-play games in which you build bases and vehicles in a multiplayer world. And then other players come along and destroy what you've built, and steal your stuff. With the game providing not-so-subtle prompts to pay for the various kinds of in-game currencies/tokens, so that you can properly defend yourself or gain advantage over others. The mechanics of the game were mostly a diversion from the real way you win, which was the real point of the game's design. Regarding Google's "help", they helped turn SEO into this kind of game, and even offer gaming guides themselves, because, at the end of the day, people will have to pay real money for in-game resources, if they want to compete. > The second Google algorithm update came in March, and it was even more punishing. House Fresh's thousands of daily visitors dwindled to just hundreds. "We just got absolutely crushed," Navarro says. Over the last few weeks, House Fresh had to lay off most of its team. If nothing changes, she says, the website is doomed. If you want visitors to a Web site, you probably have to pay money to Google or similar big tech company. It's not right, but that's the current situation.

p3rls 2y ago
Nah, bribe a NYTimes writer at the beginning of your niches trajectory into the mainstream. That's how they did it in my niche and still making a half million a year almost a decade later. For reference the shocked SEO writer who found the site, but these guys never figure out just how it was done. https://x.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 https://x.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 Why build something that takes work at all in this environment?
- Hates_ 2y ago
  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550532282288508929.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550532282288508929.html
- southernplaces7 2y ago

marcinzm 2y ago

I find Google worse every day. The latest thing I noticed is a ton of AI generated sites at the top that "summarize" things. Mostly the same format. Except they're usually wrong in many ways. One site kept saying Llama 3 is a Mixture of Experts model despite it not being one.

EasyMark 2y ago
the AI sites are what got me off google, DDG, etc. Kagi seems to be a bit better and avoiding that garbage although I still see ones there from time to time. Usually a dumb af site name gives it away.

maram 2y ago

>>It's almost as if Google designed an algorithm update to specifically go after small bloggers. I've talked to so many people who've just had everything wiped out While at the same time small businesses are being killed by the lockdown

pknerd 2y ago

> The Internet will never be the same (bbc.com) Yes, now we can rank by posting crap on Reddit [1] [1] https://imgur.com/a/iMejAF3 https://imgur.com/a/iMejAF3

hulitu 2y ago

> Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same I know we are in the middle of a crysis, but maybe someone at BBC needs an "Internet" training. /s

asadotzler 2y ago

I search Google about 90% less using Firefox because I never have to use Google to find a site I was recently at. In Firefox: Add ^ to show only matches in your browsing history. Add * to show only matches in your bookmarks. Add + to show only matches in bookmarks you've tagged. Add % to show only matches in your currently open tabs. Add # to show only matches where your terms are part of a tag or title. Add $ to show only matches where your terms are part of the address. Add ? to show only search suggestions. Armed with this, and &UDM=14 on my browser's Google Search, I use Google a couple times a day to find new things and without the AI slop, product ads, and other nonsense. That doesn't fix the shitty results themselves, but with a little bit of -quora and -reddit I can usually get what I'm after in the first 5-10 links. Stop feeding that monster. Cut your usage. Find other tools that accomplish your goals (often faster and cheaper too) and then use Google for what it's good for, the occasional web search. With uBlock Origin and &udm=14 Google web search still beats Bing or Kagi or any of the Bing-based products like DDG. Google Search sucking is only really an end user problem if you depend on it for a lot. If you only need to touch it a dozen times a week for a total of 5 minutes, it's not too terrible.