6 ms·
8-10 years google search was amazing. A well crafted query would hit informational gold most of the time. I've been noticing and commenting on the decline priva
by niobe 2y ago
8-10 years google search was amazing. A well crafted query would hit informational gold most of the time. I've been noticing and commenting on the decline privately for most of the period, but it's only in the oast year this seems to have come to broader awareness. There's an argument that in an information economy, searching for information should be treated like a public utility necessary for the functioning of society. I'm not making that argument but when you experience the long slippery slope of degradation of a service that was near ideal for the technology of the time, it does xome to mind.
That's the thing. It DID work. Really well for a while. But it was always atomic and context-less. We now have the opportunity to make it even better by refining results through dialogue. I hope someone does.. soon.
- zx8080 2y ago> We now have the opportunity to make it even better by refining results through dialogue. I hope someone does.. soon. TBH, I don't want dialog (too long and slow, leave dialogs for human to human comms), I just need my query words to exist in the result pages. Nothing more. Google messed this up long time ago.
- throwaway48476 2y agoI wouldn't mind a dialog that helps me build an advanced query.
- nradov 2y agoHave you tried advanced search? https://www.google.com/advanced_search https://www.google.com/advanced_search
- throwaway48476 2y agoI'm aware of advanced search. I'd like it to be more user friendly and widely used. I think a chat bot would help.
- munificent 2y ago> I just need my query words to exist in the result pages. Nothing more. Google messed this up long time ago. Google didn't mess that up, SEO did. You don't "just need" that. You need the page to be authored by a human with good intentions and end up containing those words because those are meaningfully part of what the human was trying to convey to you without ulterior motives. But those kinds of pages are dwarfed by the millions of pages of content farm nonsense jammed full of every possible keyword and contaning absolutely nothing of value. A search engine like you describe would be like walking in Chernobyl without a radiation suit on. A pleasant stroll in 1985, but not today.
- lazystar 2y agoThe slippery slope began in 2012, when they pledged to start downgrading piracy websites. After the rollout, the followup questions were "well what if we downgrade other topics that [random government] doesnt like" and "what if we sell the ability to boost enterprise company results for certain topics". eventually the number of results that get filtered out or reordered, exceed the results that actually get displayed. creating a new search platform is not a viable solution - any private company will be incentivized in this direction until some kind of "search neutrality" law is introduced.
- equestria 2y agoI'm not convinced this is the explanation. It's true that for some product-centric queries, you get mostly paid results. But for information-seeking queries, Google tries to give you organic results. The problem is simply that there's too much money to be made by capturing these. For years, you had content farms and fake "review" sites stepping up their game. Now, LLMs essentially make it a losing proposition to try and surface the small web. The least-bad option for Google would be to send you to moderated communities, such as Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, and so on. But not all queries can be handled that way. If you look at the article that these guys are complaining about... how do you distinguish it from content-farmed spam? You can't. Now, I think Google is throwing in the towel and just want an LLM to answer info queries instead. That has a ton of problems, but to the average user, probably feels more helpful. At least until the spammers start gaming that.
- throwaway48476 2y ago>If you look at the article that these guys are complaining about... how do you distinguish it from content-farmed spam? You can't You can, Google just hasn't bothered to even try. As an example it's pretty easy to detect affiliate marketing links.
- DrillShopper 2y agoGoogle: We've done nothing and we're all out of ideas, man!
- inquisitor27552 2y agokagi is still far from it.
- throwaway48476 2y agoSearch only works if there exists something valuable to search for. The Google dominated internet has not incentivized a library of quality content. Most quality information exists on long dead domains. The rest is pay walled or unindexed. Google is a library search service but for a gas station convenience store of information.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jojobas 2y ago8-10 years ago the competition for getting stuff before your eyes wasn't as tight. It's not only on google, the quality stuff is objectively harder to find in the ocean of slop today.