4 ms·

A big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to

A big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to common or profitable. Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation. LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".

dasil003 10mo ago
No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.
echelon 10mo ago
A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel. Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person. They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world. Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front. Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business. They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web. To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us. Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed. Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads. Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this. Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too. Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics. This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
- fancyfredbot 10mo ago
  In mobile I have been upset by the way AOSP is being deprioritised by Google and the fact they've increasingly moved features into Google play services. In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors. In the search space though, competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed. Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.
  - marbro 10mo ago
    [dead]
- Workaccount2 10mo ago
  Thing thing that gets me about people who complain about google (generally, not in just the tech bubble), is that 95% of the people complaining have used Google for decades, maybe even spending 2% of their waking life using a Google product... and have never paid Google a single penny for anything. That's why Google is so dominant. That's why they are so skilled at data collection. The built a system that converts user data into dollars, so users don't have to pay. And users love, absolutely love, like their first born child and high school sweetheart combined into one, not having to pay for things. Google is not the reason google sucks. People's unwillingness to compensate for services they use is. And before you comment with how you use Kagi, and Nebula, and Patreon. Yes, thank you. You are in the <0.1% of internet users who get it.
  - echelon 10mo ago
    This is not something people can change. Good luck explaining any of this to the average person. Even 5% of people won't get it. This is what healthy functioning regulatory bodies are supposed to do. Stop complaining to people and start calling your legislators. HN is one of the few places this message will land. My ask here is that you go to your lawmakers and tell them.
theappsecguy 10mo ago
Well by not opening the blog post or whatever page that nicely explains the JavaScript sort with examples, you just deprived them of page views and probably income. So what will happen in 5 years when you’re searching for human written and thoughtful content on something more complex and all you get is slop?
- mechagodzilla 10mo ago
  You haven't really been getting 'human written and thoughtful content' for a vast swath of search topics for probably 15-20 years now. You get SEO-hyper-optimized (probably LLM-generated for anything in the last 3 years) blog spam. In terms of searching for information and getting that information, there are a lot of topics where an LLM-generated result is vastly better just by virtue of not being buried inside blog spam. The slop ship sailed years ago.
Melatonic 10mo ago
They really could do much better - just look at how much higher quality Kagi results are these days
- ACCount37 10mo ago
  They probably care more about purging SEO slop. But, also, Kagi has a total of 4 active users. Which means they don't have a SEO target the size of the entire Internet painted on their backs. There isn't a small army of adversarial SEO sloptimizers eager to skirt the rules or bypass whatever Kagi does to purge SEO spam and downrank content mills.
  - pbhjpbhj 10mo ago
    So Google are trying lots of things to improve their search results but don't have the ability to out-think the spammers? That sounds like what you're saying?? Any evidence? It seems like they know how to improve (their offerings were way better in the past for me) but have moved to optimise for advertising revenue. IMO they've gone too far, they'll crash out of search in the next couple of years and won't be able to backtrack fast enough to keep their users. Then they won't have cash to burn to fund the other [moonshot?] projects. It feels like when VCs buy a company, coast on the name whilst stripping away all that made that name bankable; then they eventually run it into the ground, latch on to the next victim and on, and on. Except here Google are leeching off themselves.
    - pixl97 10mo ago
      >but don't have the ability to out-think the spammers Out thinking everyone else is very hard. The number of enterprises by spammers these days may exceed legitimate data being put on the internet. Much in the same way attempted spam far exceeded non-spam emails years ago. At the same time who is even close to providing the services google provides?
    - ACCount37 10mo ago
      I'm saying that out-thinking the spammers consistently takes actual effort, and a lot of it, applied continuously. Google isn't willing to put that much effort in.
torben-friis 10mo ago
>Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? That's exactly what Google is implying, isn't it? By placing a redirect to an LLM at the top, and following it with bad search results, Google is saying "don't bother with the web, asking an LLM is better". It is a very shortsighted thing to say, as a company whose moat and expertise is search. Particularly so when LLMs aren't yet proved to be a viable path to profit and there are other players in the game.
- ACCount37 10mo ago
  Google had two choices, and one of them was "bury your head in sand and hope this entire LLM thing goes away". They weren't dumb enough to take that choice.
  - torben-friis 10mo ago
    I don't think it's already clear which is the dumb choice. LLMs are clearly a useful product, I'm not arguing that. That's not sufficient for being the new Search. To be the new Search, they also need LLMs to be performant enough to be profitable. And yet, stay unperformant enough that it isn't feasible to run them locally. And they have to stay useful long term, after the web is flooded by slop or content dries up because people stopped consuming the web directly. And a monetisation path needs to be found and survive legislation. But more importatntly, it's not A or B. Gemini could have been pushed without sacrificing their golden-egg goose for the cause.
- tim333 10mo ago
  Their basic model is a user asks a question and they put up results along with some ads. Maybe it doesn't matter so much if the results are page rank search or LLMs?

dasil003 10mo ago

No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.

echelon 10mo ago

A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel. Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person. They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world. Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front. Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business. They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web. To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us. Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed. Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads. Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this. Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too. Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics. This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.

fancyfredbot 10mo ago
In mobile I have been upset by the way AOSP is being deprioritised by Google and the fact they've increasingly moved features into Google play services. In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors. In the search space though, competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed. Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.
- marbro 10mo ago
  [dead]
Workaccount2 10mo ago
Thing thing that gets me about people who complain about google (generally, not in just the tech bubble), is that 95% of the people complaining have used Google for decades, maybe even spending 2% of their waking life using a Google product... and have never paid Google a single penny for anything. That's why Google is so dominant. That's why they are so skilled at data collection. The built a system that converts user data into dollars, so users don't have to pay. And users love, absolutely love, like their first born child and high school sweetheart combined into one, not having to pay for things. Google is not the reason google sucks. People's unwillingness to compensate for services they use is. And before you comment with how you use Kagi, and Nebula, and Patreon. Yes, thank you. You are in the <0.1% of internet users who get it.
- echelon 10mo ago
  This is not something people can change. Good luck explaining any of this to the average person. Even 5% of people won't get it. This is what healthy functioning regulatory bodies are supposed to do. Stop complaining to people and start calling your legislators. HN is one of the few places this message will land. My ask here is that you go to your lawmakers and tell them.

theappsecguy 10mo ago

Well by not opening the blog post or whatever page that nicely explains the JavaScript sort with examples, you just deprived them of page views and probably income. So what will happen in 5 years when you’re searching for human written and thoughtful content on something more complex and all you get is slop?

mechagodzilla 10mo ago
You haven't really been getting 'human written and thoughtful content' for a vast swath of search topics for probably 15-20 years now. You get SEO-hyper-optimized (probably LLM-generated for anything in the last 3 years) blog spam. In terms of searching for information and getting that information, there are a lot of topics where an LLM-generated result is vastly better just by virtue of not being buried inside blog spam. The slop ship sailed years ago.

Melatonic 10mo ago

They really could do much better - just look at how much higher quality Kagi results are these days

ACCount37 10mo ago
They probably care more about purging SEO slop. But, also, Kagi has a total of 4 active users. Which means they don't have a SEO target the size of the entire Internet painted on their backs. There isn't a small army of adversarial SEO sloptimizers eager to skirt the rules or bypass whatever Kagi does to purge SEO spam and downrank content mills.
- pbhjpbhj 10mo ago
  So Google are trying lots of things to improve their search results but don't have the ability to out-think the spammers? That sounds like what you're saying?? Any evidence? It seems like they know how to improve (their offerings were way better in the past for me) but have moved to optimise for advertising revenue. IMO they've gone too far, they'll crash out of search in the next couple of years and won't be able to backtrack fast enough to keep their users. Then they won't have cash to burn to fund the other [moonshot?] projects. It feels like when VCs buy a company, coast on the name whilst stripping away all that made that name bankable; then they eventually run it into the ground, latch on to the next victim and on, and on. Except here Google are leeching off themselves.
  - pixl97 10mo ago
    >but don't have the ability to out-think the spammers Out thinking everyone else is very hard. The number of enterprises by spammers these days may exceed legitimate data being put on the internet. Much in the same way attempted spam far exceeded non-spam emails years ago. At the same time who is even close to providing the services google provides?
  - ACCount37 10mo ago
    I'm saying that out-thinking the spammers consistently takes actual effort, and a lot of it, applied continuously. Google isn't willing to put that much effort in.

torben-friis 10mo ago

>Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? That's exactly what Google is implying, isn't it? By placing a redirect to an LLM at the top, and following it with bad search results, Google is saying "don't bother with the web, asking an LLM is better". It is a very shortsighted thing to say, as a company whose moat and expertise is search. Particularly so when LLMs aren't yet proved to be a viable path to profit and there are other players in the game.

ACCount37 10mo ago
Google had two choices, and one of them was "bury your head in sand and hope this entire LLM thing goes away". They weren't dumb enough to take that choice.
- torben-friis 10mo ago
  I don't think it's already clear which is the dumb choice. LLMs are clearly a useful product, I'm not arguing that. That's not sufficient for being the new Search. To be the new Search, they also need LLMs to be performant enough to be profitable. And yet, stay unperformant enough that it isn't feasible to run them locally. And they have to stay useful long term, after the web is flooded by slop or content dries up because people stopped consuming the web directly. And a monetisation path needs to be found and survive legislation. But more importatntly, it's not A or B. Gemini could have been pushed without sacrificing their golden-egg goose for the cause.
tim333 10mo ago
Their basic model is a user asks a question and they put up results along with some ads. Maybe it doesn't matter so much if the results are page rank search or LLMs?