5 ms·

Googling Is for Old People. That's a Problem for Google

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I think the big problem is simply that the results are bad. They’re full of spammy links to weird websites with verbose but useless content or just links going to the obvious sources that you could visit yourself like Wikipedia or stack exchange. All the sponsored content and allegations of politically manipulated results don’t help either. Using a chatbot seems more effective most of the time. But Google has one resource that others do not, which genuinely contains a lot of good content. And that is YouTube. If they could simply make the content of videos easier to search, they would be able to offer a unique set of useful answers. At least for now before AI generated garbage takes over YouTube.
- baranul 2y ago
  Agree with you. Problem is more about poor results and lack of good alternatives.
- bl4kers 2y ago
  I wonder what percentage of YouTube videos contain useful information though. I feel like it could be as low as 1%
  - thiagocmoraes 2y ago
    Percentage of "useful content" is likely the same (or better) than the open web, though.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    I don't see YouTube becoming a better place to search stuff, but I think YouTube content being allowed no usefulness is the greatest gift to humanity. That's probably the only reason we're getting the truely creative stuff that was thrown in with no expectation of monetization. Otherwise the useful bits look decently surfaced to me. Albeit not in a searchable or convenient way.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  A search engine having bad result is not a simple problem though. Especially at the position of Google, it's neither a coincidence nor something taking them by surprise. They've been in an arms race with spammers and SEO gurus since the beginning, and had all resources on earth to deal with it. The results being bad as they reached a monopoly position is of their own making, or more precisely a situation they saw as the best tradeoff. That's where I don't see Google turning the ship around: people who were there for decades to make searches relevant have probably already left a long time ago, or they accepted the new direction themselves. And new people with expertise and enough energy to rock the boat are also in a position to do more impactful work in other companies where they won't have to fight an establishment. As a example of how hard it is to change direction, we haven't seen Microsoft suddenly build customer friendly OSes, nor Meta having good taste, nor Apple come up with open ecosystems.
  - recursive 2y ago
    It may be a hard problem, but it gets a lot harder when quality results are not aligned with your companies main source of income.
  - Apreche 2y ago
    It’s not that hard a problem if you have the resources of a Google. They just have to do what they’ve always been unwilling to do. Let actual humans help curate it. It’s obvious when a site is a content farm. It’s obvious when a site has real reviews vs. just pretend reviews and affiliate links. It’s obvious when a site is actual Stack Overflow and when a site is a clone thereof. The rule should be that only good faith web sites are allowed. Web sites with dark patterns are not allowed. Anyone who is doing any SEO shenanigans gets their entire domain de-indexed permanently. If Google does this, and only this, it will return wonderful useful search results.
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      I'm kinda looking at it from the other end of the causation: with all their resource, talent, everyone shouting at them on their garbage results to the point specifying individual sites like reddit in the query has become common knowledge...all of this says that changing course is hard. We might be completely mistaken on the reasons why it's hard, but there's no doubt they can't do it easily. On human curation, this brings other problems that Google is also very bad at solving. Google would need to manage their moderators at scale. Even Meta couldn't do it in a sustainable way, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk model is also deeply problematic. Amazon itself puts a ton of effort into customer service and yet doesn't keep up with the scams. Curation and moderation at Google scale is indeed a crazy hard problem.
- flax 2y ago
  Yes, please make youtube videos easier to search through. And then turn the relevant bits into text with maybe a couple of still images. You know, web pages.
- Euphorbium 2y ago
  And youtube search is extraordinarily horrible. Unimaginably bad.
greesil 2y ago
The open web is dead. Google zero is here. The end is nigh. https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-housefresh-ai-overviews-traffic-data-audience https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h... Except for The Verge of course.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sysmax 2y ago
  I think, they are trying to push back against generated pages. I faced this exact problem myself. We recently published an interactive source code navigation tool [0] where you can find examples for commonly used functions from some embedded SDKs. Google indexed it immediately and almost immediately it got a spike of views. Then, an interesting thing happened. Most pages simply disappeared from the results. Search console shows them as indexed, no problems, no manual actions, but if you google up those functions, there results are not there. It took some statistical analysis to figure out that they appear to be capping the number of pages. Out of all the pages Google crawled, it picked some percentage of the "most important" ones and it's showing those. The importance, by the looks of it, was computed from the number of incoming links, prioritizing pages for common stuff like int32_t that nobody googles. It's not ideal, but it kinda makes sense. It's 2024. You can use AI to generate plausible content for any search query you can think of. And unless they put some kind of limits, we'll get overrun with completely useless LLM-churned stuff. [0] https://sourcevu.sysprogs.com/ https://sourcevu.sysprogs.com/
  - postepowanieadm 2y ago
    You have confirmed my fears: I'm publishing a text heavy webpage with separate articles per page as well as a large single page. Google will not like that.
greenranger 2y ago
[dead]
niyogi 2y ago
actually bing is for old people because it's default search on ms edge which comes with PCs. default PC with default browser and default search.
jimt1234 2y ago
Social media influencers have replaced Google search for the youngs. If there's something you want to know, an influencer will tell you. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's what I've noticed.
- sockcop 2y ago
  Today 80% of that is garbage, it’s like trusting 100% on ChatGPT and its hallucinations, we’re still in an age where we as humans needs to curate the information, or at least has an algorithm that is grounded with truth only coming from books and years of research… we’ll get there eventually but today we’re not yet, social media has other big problems besides crapsourcing, they create knuckleheads with superficial feelings and existencial problems… And still is our way to communicate today.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
paul7986 2y ago
GPT is the new Google at least for me... yesterday at Thanksgiving a cousin wanted to play a game she brought. She taught us but forgot two rules that GPT knew (the Pit). I didnt have do a search, look through results or click thru various sites to find exactly the fringe info I sought about this game. GPT just provided the nitty gritty details immediately and when I needed to ask for another rule GPT retained what i searched for previously so i didnt have type a long query. Google seems to be getting it's butt handed to them with the US government recent ruling and GPT's rise. Im just hoping GPT releases their own AI Phone .. GPT Phone sounds cool to me. A Siri on iPhone that works like GPT won't be available til Spring 2026. GPT and maybe Microsoft have opportunity to take a chunk of the phone market.
- eesmith 2y ago
  I'm curious what game that was. In the olden days, we all had a copy of Hoyle's Games, which covered just about all decently well-known games, and variants. Now people expect search will answer everything, so don't have dedicated and curated resources at-hand anymore.
  - paul7986 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(game) Google searching for the answer would've taken a lot longer ... i and everyone wants their answer immediately in front of them vs. the antiquated Google search riddled with ads compared to GPT's clean in your face instant results! I want this experience from Siri (on my phone when I pick it up) now but Apple is too far behind so look forward to an AI Phone called GPT ;-) in the next 6 to 12 months ( hopefully OpenAI & Microsoft are smart are working on such). It would help kill both Google and Apple at the same time!
    - eesmith 2y ago
      Ahh, I thought 'the pit' referred to an aspect of the game like how tiles for the old Anagrams game might be placed in 'the boneyard.' No, commercial games like that wouldn't be in Hoyle. For what it's worth, official instructions are at https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/pit.pdf https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/pit.pdf . DDG "pit parker brothers game instructions".
artgship 2y ago
I think more people are starting to realize that the search engine content is curated, so they are starting to look at additional search engines and comparing results. Though Google casts such a large net that its hard to see a world where they become a minority player.
- politelemon 2y ago
  That's definitely a niche amplified on reddit and HN, average users don't know or care about their search engine.
renegat0x0 2y ago
More and more I am relying on my own set of domains for navigation, sorry google I am leasing you https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
deafpolygon 2y ago
I imagine that websites with a lot of ads also discourage people from using Google.
impish9208 2y ago
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/googling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-problem-for-google-5188a6ed?st=WF3eNK https://www.wsj.com/tech/googling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-...
OutOfHere 2y ago
Google Search, like Yahoo Search before it, is on its way out of common use, and nothing will stop this tide. I give it ten years, so by 2035, until it becomes a distant memory.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  I mean, it didn't have to be this way. But they decided to go with the enshittification route so why would younger people use it if it ain't that good anymore? Technologies that stay useful keep getting used, generation after generation. We still use spoons for soup. We've had refrigerators in houses since they became available. There are no "Millennials aren't buying refrigerators and don't like spoons" articles in the new york times. Its because these still work and work well for their purpose. If they just made google work well for search and kept it working well, there would be no shift in use.
mancerayder 2y ago
Why is this flagged? This is a rational piece by the WSJ, with numbers and arguments listed numerically. Did sore Googlers do this mass flag?
- julienchastang 2y ago
  Flagging this article seems unjustified to me as well. Also, Christopher Mims is a great columnist.
tim333 2y ago
>Googling Is for Old People seems just to be some nonsense the writer made up. If you look at stats the most frequent users are 16-25 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1000019/individuals-who-use-google-search-in-sweden-in-by-age-and-frequency/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1000019/individuals-who-... And comparing Google/Bing/Yahoo, old folk Bing while youngsters Google https://www.internetmarketingteam.co.uk/who-uses-bing-how-age-demographics-affect-how-someone-searches-on-the-internet/ https://www.internetmarketingteam.co.uk/who-uses-bing-how-ag... I can see how revenues are moving to Amazon. Google is terrible for product search, like what is the best value TV say, compared to Amazon.
WalterBright 2y ago
This fits in with a previous post of mine asserting that, contrary to popular wisdom, companies do not naturally grow to take over the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42279679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42279679
WalterBright 2y ago
> Without the traffic that Google sends across the web, the incentive and resources to continue producing websites attractive to Google’s search algorithm will decline. In the early days, I followed some basic guides about how to make web pages more attractive to Google search. But after a while, gave it up. Now I work on making pages solely useful to the users, and pay no attention to engagement metrics or any of that nonsense.
gargan 2y ago
Also see this report https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-research/online-nation/2024/online-nation-2024-report.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/rese... Google’s use dropped from 86% to 83% in one year in the UK. That's 1.8m people less per month using it

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

I think the big problem is simply that the results are bad. They’re full of spammy links to weird websites with verbose but useless content or just links going to the obvious sources that you could visit yourself like Wikipedia or stack exchange. All the sponsored content and allegations of politically manipulated results don’t help either. Using a chatbot seems more effective most of the time. But Google has one resource that others do not, which genuinely contains a lot of good content. And that is YouTube. If they could simply make the content of videos easier to search, they would be able to offer a unique set of useful answers. At least for now before AI generated garbage takes over YouTube.

baranul 2y ago
Agree with you. Problem is more about poor results and lack of good alternatives.
bl4kers 2y ago
I wonder what percentage of YouTube videos contain useful information though. I feel like it could be as low as 1%
- thiagocmoraes 2y ago
  Percentage of "useful content" is likely the same (or better) than the open web, though.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  I don't see YouTube becoming a better place to search stuff, but I think YouTube content being allowed no usefulness is the greatest gift to humanity. That's probably the only reason we're getting the truely creative stuff that was thrown in with no expectation of monetization. Otherwise the useful bits look decently surfaced to me. Albeit not in a searchable or convenient way.
makeitdouble 2y ago
A search engine having bad result is not a simple problem though. Especially at the position of Google, it's neither a coincidence nor something taking them by surprise. They've been in an arms race with spammers and SEO gurus since the beginning, and had all resources on earth to deal with it. The results being bad as they reached a monopoly position is of their own making, or more precisely a situation they saw as the best tradeoff. That's where I don't see Google turning the ship around: people who were there for decades to make searches relevant have probably already left a long time ago, or they accepted the new direction themselves. And new people with expertise and enough energy to rock the boat are also in a position to do more impactful work in other companies where they won't have to fight an establishment. As a example of how hard it is to change direction, we haven't seen Microsoft suddenly build customer friendly OSes, nor Meta having good taste, nor Apple come up with open ecosystems.
- recursive 2y ago
  It may be a hard problem, but it gets a lot harder when quality results are not aligned with your companies main source of income.
- Apreche 2y ago
  It’s not that hard a problem if you have the resources of a Google. They just have to do what they’ve always been unwilling to do. Let actual humans help curate it. It’s obvious when a site is a content farm. It’s obvious when a site has real reviews vs. just pretend reviews and affiliate links. It’s obvious when a site is actual Stack Overflow and when a site is a clone thereof. The rule should be that only good faith web sites are allowed. Web sites with dark patterns are not allowed. Anyone who is doing any SEO shenanigans gets their entire domain de-indexed permanently. If Google does this, and only this, it will return wonderful useful search results.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    I'm kinda looking at it from the other end of the causation: with all their resource, talent, everyone shouting at them on their garbage results to the point specifying individual sites like reddit in the query has become common knowledge...all of this says that changing course is hard. We might be completely mistaken on the reasons why it's hard, but there's no doubt they can't do it easily. On human curation, this brings other problems that Google is also very bad at solving. Google would need to manage their moderators at scale. Even Meta couldn't do it in a sustainable way, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk model is also deeply problematic. Amazon itself puts a ton of effort into customer service and yet doesn't keep up with the scams. Curation and moderation at Google scale is indeed a crazy hard problem.
flax 2y ago
Yes, please make youtube videos easier to search through. And then turn the relevant bits into text with maybe a couple of still images. You know, web pages.
Euphorbium 2y ago
And youtube search is extraordinarily horrible. Unimaginably bad.

greesil 2y ago

The open web is dead. Google zero is here. The end is nigh. https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-housefresh-ai-overviews-traffic-data-audience https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h... Except for The Verge of course.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sysmax 2y ago
I think, they are trying to push back against generated pages. I faced this exact problem myself. We recently published an interactive source code navigation tool [0] where you can find examples for commonly used functions from some embedded SDKs. Google indexed it immediately and almost immediately it got a spike of views. Then, an interesting thing happened. Most pages simply disappeared from the results. Search console shows them as indexed, no problems, no manual actions, but if you google up those functions, there results are not there. It took some statistical analysis to figure out that they appear to be capping the number of pages. Out of all the pages Google crawled, it picked some percentage of the "most important" ones and it's showing those. The importance, by the looks of it, was computed from the number of incoming links, prioritizing pages for common stuff like int32_t that nobody googles. It's not ideal, but it kinda makes sense. It's 2024. You can use AI to generate plausible content for any search query you can think of. And unless they put some kind of limits, we'll get overrun with completely useless LLM-churned stuff. [0] https://sourcevu.sysprogs.com/ https://sourcevu.sysprogs.com/
- postepowanieadm 2y ago
  You have confirmed my fears: I'm publishing a text heavy webpage with separate articles per page as well as a large single page. Google will not like that.

greenranger 2y ago

[dead]

niyogi 2y ago

actually bing is for old people because it's default search on ms edge which comes with PCs. default PC with default browser and default search.

jimt1234 2y ago

Social media influencers have replaced Google search for the youngs. If there's something you want to know, an influencer will tell you. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's what I've noticed.

sockcop 2y ago
Today 80% of that is garbage, it’s like trusting 100% on ChatGPT and its hallucinations, we’re still in an age where we as humans needs to curate the information, or at least has an algorithm that is grounded with truth only coming from books and years of research… we’ll get there eventually but today we’re not yet, social media has other big problems besides crapsourcing, they create knuckleheads with superficial feelings and existencial problems… And still is our way to communicate today.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

paul7986 2y ago

GPT is the new Google at least for me... yesterday at Thanksgiving a cousin wanted to play a game she brought. She taught us but forgot two rules that GPT knew (the Pit). I didnt have do a search, look through results or click thru various sites to find exactly the fringe info I sought about this game. GPT just provided the nitty gritty details immediately and when I needed to ask for another rule GPT retained what i searched for previously so i didnt have type a long query. Google seems to be getting it's butt handed to them with the US government recent ruling and GPT's rise. Im just hoping GPT releases their own AI Phone .. GPT Phone sounds cool to me. A Siri on iPhone that works like GPT won't be available til Spring 2026. GPT and maybe Microsoft have opportunity to take a chunk of the phone market.

eesmith 2y ago
I'm curious what game that was. In the olden days, we all had a copy of Hoyle's Games, which covered just about all decently well-known games, and variants. Now people expect search will answer everything, so don't have dedicated and curated resources at-hand anymore.
- paul7986 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(game) Google searching for the answer would've taken a lot longer ... i and everyone wants their answer immediately in front of them vs. the antiquated Google search riddled with ads compared to GPT's clean in your face instant results! I want this experience from Siri (on my phone when I pick it up) now but Apple is too far behind so look forward to an AI Phone called GPT ;-) in the next 6 to 12 months ( hopefully OpenAI & Microsoft are smart are working on such). It would help kill both Google and Apple at the same time!
  - eesmith 2y ago
    Ahh, I thought 'the pit' referred to an aspect of the game like how tiles for the old Anagrams game might be placed in 'the boneyard.' No, commercial games like that wouldn't be in Hoyle. For what it's worth, official instructions are at https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/pit.pdf https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/pit.pdf . DDG "pit parker brothers game instructions".

artgship 2y ago

I think more people are starting to realize that the search engine content is curated, so they are starting to look at additional search engines and comparing results. Though Google casts such a large net that its hard to see a world where they become a minority player.

politelemon 2y ago
That's definitely a niche amplified on reddit and HN, average users don't know or care about their search engine.

renegat0x0 2y ago

More and more I am relying on my own set of domains for navigation, sorry google I am leasing you https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

deafpolygon 2y ago

I imagine that websites with a lot of ads also discourage people from using Google.

impish9208 2y ago

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/googling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-problem-for-google-5188a6ed?st=WF3eNK https://www.wsj.com/tech/googling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-...

OutOfHere 2y ago

Google Search, like Yahoo Search before it, is on its way out of common use, and nothing will stop this tide. I give it ten years, so by 2035, until it becomes a distant memory.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
I mean, it didn't have to be this way. But they decided to go with the enshittification route so why would younger people use it if it ain't that good anymore? Technologies that stay useful keep getting used, generation after generation. We still use spoons for soup. We've had refrigerators in houses since they became available. There are no "Millennials aren't buying refrigerators and don't like spoons" articles in the new york times. Its because these still work and work well for their purpose. If they just made google work well for search and kept it working well, there would be no shift in use.

mancerayder 2y ago

Why is this flagged? This is a rational piece by the WSJ, with numbers and arguments listed numerically. Did sore Googlers do this mass flag?

julienchastang 2y ago
Flagging this article seems unjustified to me as well. Also, Christopher Mims is a great columnist.

tim333 2y ago

>Googling Is for Old People seems just to be some nonsense the writer made up. If you look at stats the most frequent users are 16-25 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1000019/individuals-who-use-google-search-in-sweden-in-by-age-and-frequency/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1000019/individuals-who-... And comparing Google/Bing/Yahoo, old folk Bing while youngsters Google https://www.internetmarketingteam.co.uk/who-uses-bing-how-age-demographics-affect-how-someone-searches-on-the-internet/ https://www.internetmarketingteam.co.uk/who-uses-bing-how-ag... I can see how revenues are moving to Amazon. Google is terrible for product search, like what is the best value TV say, compared to Amazon.

WalterBright 2y ago

This fits in with a previous post of mine asserting that, contrary to popular wisdom, companies do not naturally grow to take over the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42279679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42279679

WalterBright 2y ago

> Without the traffic that Google sends across the web, the incentive and resources to continue producing websites attractive to Google’s search algorithm will decline. In the early days, I followed some basic guides about how to make web pages more attractive to Google search. But after a while, gave it up. Now I work on making pages solely useful to the users, and pay no attention to engagement metrics or any of that nonsense.

gargan 2y ago

Also see this report https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-research/online-nation/2024/online-nation-2024-report.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/rese... Google’s use dropped from 86% to 83% in one year in the UK. That's 1.8m people less per month using it