Google has also been pushing sites that do on-page SEO right heavily in the SERPs. Which basically means that SERPs are now filled with copycat content that reads like crap but has all the right headings and keyword densities.

The search experience is genuinely bad now. Nothing organic shows up anymore. It's either heavily optimized cookie cutter content, or some big brand name cutting through the clutter on the strength of its domain authority alone.

I've taken to appending "reddit" to my queries just to know what actual people think about an issue

> Google has also been pushing sites that do on-page SEO right heavily in the SERPs.

I can't echo this loud enough - I made great profit by out-ranking heavily established retail outlets for years with super spammy and terrible sites purely with correct on-page SEO and garbage 'keyword optimized' content.

I, as well, now have to append things to searches in order to get real answers. (Or start with a twitter search, depending on the topic)

>I've taken to appending "reddit" to my queries just to know what actual people think about an issue

Woah, thought I might be one of the few that did this. You articulated my reasoning behind it perfectly.

I often have to specifically search for a Wikipedia article in Google to get the result for it. For example, if I search for a pharmaceutical molecule, I will get pages of "health line" type pages listing side effects and uses.

Five to ten years ago, the Wikipedia article for the molecule was always in the top three.

> I've taken to appending "reddit" to my queries just to know what actual people think about an issue

I do the same thing. I want real people's experiences and honest opinions.

If it's tech-related or even music, history, or philosopy-related, I'll append site:ycombinator.com to my DDG search queries. Unfortunately, it's not just Google search that's full of SEO-optimised crap.

DDG's actually worse in many ways. I've just switched back from it to Google because most times I was prepending my searches with !g or rerunning them due to frustration at the crappy results.

Example: in the midst of my house renovation my Hisense TV remote has gone walkabout. After several months of having no idea where it is (I figured it would just turn up - I mean, it has to be in here somewhere, right?), I decided to order a replacement. Amazon is full of knock-offs, but turns out Hisense sell remotes directly.

So I type "Hisense" into DDG and it's the top result, but it's the Chinese site, and I can't figure out how to get to the UK site. The UK site isn't even on the first page of results either. I rerun the search with Google and the Hisense UK site is the top result, and I'm able to quickly find replacement remotes.

Did you have the UK switch on? The top result for me is the UK site: https://imgur.com/5F7nMRP

Since you were looking for the UK version, did you try (no quotes) "Hisense uk" ?

The point is not that in this case with DDG I needed to execute a more specific search (or, by extension, execute two searches to get what I need). The point is that in almost every case where I start with DDG I have to execute more than one search to find what I want. That second search is often with !g.

That's a shame because, as bad as Google has become, it's still better than other options. As an example of how bad Google really is, last night I tried searching for info on how to mount twin slot shelving uprights on an uneven wall - specifically a wall where the otherwise smooth plaster is less than perfectly vertical (there's an undulation reflecting imperfections in the underlying brickwork). The result? Just pages and pages of SEO spam/"content marketing" on the very basics of fitting twin slot shelving, all of which assumes that your walls are perfectly vertical across their entire surface, and none of which has any kind of troubleshooting hints and tips. I probably tried 10 different search query variants before giving up in disgust.

Google is outright terrible, and its much touted AI is laughably poor[1]. But DuckDuckGo is worse. I'm simply choosing the least bad option, which unfortunately isn't saying much.

[1] Or enragingly poor depending on your mood and perspective.

I had an idea last night for a browser extension that hides SEO chaff from search engine results. I don't have much programming experience so who knows if I'll work on this or not though.

I also append forum (or site:forumname.com) if I'm looking for more in-depth review than reddit gives.

Yep. Whenever google autocompletes to "... reddit" I end up choosing that option, because it foretells that the results are going to be crap if I don't.

> I've taken to appending "reddit" to my queries just to know what actual people think about an issue

or appending "site:news.ycombinator.com"

At the moment, it's good for users, as with most increases in competition. Google's hotel search and flight search user interfaces are superior to those provided by many of the task-specific businesses.

Stratechery had a good analysis of the situation not long ago. https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/

There is an alternative and IMO more sustainable model for a search engine, specifically for non-organic results (i.e. instant type answers). It is to create connections with each underlying data provider, and based on the search query provide results from their sites in accordance with their display/usage terms.

It also provides the advantage of being able to curate the sources to provide higher quality for niche search topics. [0]

I have been working on a search engine that works this exact way. The challenge is identifying and integrating the data sources for all the potential search intents.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=hiking+in+boston

This is a step in a good direction but is hard to scale.

A better approach would be to still extract data from websites like Google does (this works), but automatically attribute share (50%?) of search engine's profits proportional to the website's share of appearances in these results. This money would await the webmaster when they eventually verify domain ownership. This is fair for everyone and creates positive feedback loops.

well, it shouldn't be "legal" for one or cartel corporation to mediate between content/data and its users. its downright dystopian.

The "one" part is out fault for not using Bing, but isn't "mediating content" between users and websites essentially the premise of a search engine?

Lots of companies reached monopoly status because they were simply better than the competition.

The point of breaking up monopolies is not to make a moral statement about the company, but because we've found that monopolies are generally bad for society.

Is it really though? Bing has been consistently worse than Google over the years. Maybe our definition of vendor lock-in needs to change.

Honestly at this point it doesn't even matter how good Bing is - we've been unconsciously trained to work with Google's algorithm in particular and they just have a de facto monopoly on the mental process a person goes through to formulate a search. Everyone's workflow everywhere will be worse and take more time if they voluntarily stop using Google, that's not what I consider a fair competitive landscape.

So we think Google is doing a good job, but we also want to dictate to them how they do it?

Seems like a recipe to have a worse product.

The argument that they're so good at what they do, they've created a monopoly, I think is very fragile.

I agree. Google perf is indeed better ...and still use Bing (via Ecosia) for 90% of request

https://www.ecosia.org/

The complaint is not that content is being mediated, but that it is one company or cartel that is doing the mediating.

Those businesses should license their content differently, then.

Wikipedia is CC BY-SA licensed.

Does google "share alike" the rest of the results page? Or is embedding considered enough separation to not need to share alike?

I don't think Google claims any copyright on the Wikipedia snippets. You can share them just like you can share the original. They also give a link back to the source and clearly mark them as Wikipedia content. What more do you think that they should do to satisfy the license terms?

Arguably the entire generated page is a derived work, in which case the whole page should be CC-BY-SA not merely the snippet.

On the other hand, arguably incorporation of the snippet (as the incorporation of context for other pages) is permitted in some way other than licensing (fair use?), in which case the terms of the license wouldn't apply.

I would have to think harder to have a well-formed personal opinion.

> What more do you think that they should do to satisfy the license terms?

Just depends if the snippit is over the fair-use threshold I guess.

If the share-alike license allows segregating content into frames within one page then it is ok too.

Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the creative commons licenses. They allow all kinds of use, as long as (in the case of BY-SA) you mention the original author and share derivative works under the same license.

Fair Use is not a concept in most jurisdictions btw.

Exactly, take "Fastsecret" for example, if you go to the web site and look up calories for something you often get the result in a one box from this site. However if you go to the site you see that they are really trying to get app conversions for their app. As conversions are typically a percentage of page visits, all of those page visits are now "toast" so to speak.

True but part of it is good competition. Google Flights is 100x better than any other flight search site.

If the problem is not that Google is (not) stealing Wikipedia’s clicks but instead is stealing the clicks —- and, more accurately, content — of other, for profit, sites then why go with that headline? Because it’s good clickbait.

I’m pretty sympathetic to the plights of Weather.com, Genius.com, Zagats (oops, Google bought them and then resold them), Yelp, and whomever else Google is appropriating non-public domain and non-Creative Commons content from. But that’s a story that’s already been told, so the site decided to find a heart-string tugging yet intellectually-dishonest angle.

> But in the long term

In long term, there won't be free content for Google to scrape and display in search results knowledge graphs as ad supported / free content businesses shut down. Of course, google can create its own content and does so to feed the knowledge graphs, but it's way more expensive to do so. And the math might not be worth it for google manufacture from scratch all this content.

So then folks won't use google, but will they go direct to Yelp 2030? Will there be Yelp 2030?

Google's ad network provides a lot of support to these "free" content options. Google is not bad at creating own content, the amount of data for example they can slurp up from phones running google maps is pretty darn high.

Our local govt has traffic sensors for the highways - huge bucks to install / maintain etc. I can get more granular traffic that is more current from google for free. If you are going to compete with google in a data management / collection business, you are going to be playing with firm with pretty deep ability to ingest and process data.

>Yelp

You had me feeling bad until I came across this.

If they do it to Yelp, imagine how bad it is for Yelp's less awful competitors. You can't ignore the iceberg just because the tip is a jerk.

So once again, the ownerless open model beats the closed one. Boo hoo.

Any site can control indexing through robots.txt.

You either want this information in the search engine or you don't.

Don't like one of the indexers? Tell it not to index you.

How about if you want the information in a search engine, but you would prefer that the "search engine" didn't just nick the contents and display it on their site, rather than sending searchers to yours?

Yo can tell google (and any other respectable search engine) not to include snippetsin results, either via robots.txt or with meta elements.

How?

Edit: thanks. I see Google makes it really hard to opt out of featured snippet while retaining regular search result snippet support.

I didn't see anything about the robots.txt approach, but this support page discusses the meta tag method.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en

I was specifically asking because I’d never heard of a robots.txt solution for blocking snippets. None of the responses have included that information.

Why don't you try being a little kinder, especially when you don't have all the facts?

It's not as though web design like knowledge of meta tags and robots.txt is the sum total of everything to know about computers. Maybe they've built their own 8-bitter, or are a motherboard PCB designer? I'd argue that'd put them firmly in the 'computer guru' class. But we don't know, so it's probably better to say nothing at all.

Hey, thanks. I've done all those things but tbh the name predates all that. I was an op in a tech support irc channel in the 90s/00s and that was the name I'd picked at the time (I was not comfortable with tying my ID to myself IRL but perhaps even moreso, I was also very sensitive about being pretty much the only minority on all the user groups and mailing lists I frequented. The "guru" half of the moniker was somewhat an homage to being a minority, although I'm not Indian).

I messaged the HN mods many years ago (either pg or dang, can't remember) when things had changed and I had decided to just use my real name online but was told that it would not be possible to change it for posterity purposes.

Isn't this what a search engine is?

Google takes the excerpt which is relevant to your query, displays it to you, along with a link to the resource.

Are we upset that the excerpt is too good? That the link isn't prominent enough? Something else?

In a sense, yes, the engine is too good. If you continue this trend, eventually nobody will have a reason to leave Google because anytime you search for anything Google will have the answer to everything.

Sure, it's convenient but it's also a bit frightening for one company to have that much power and I think that's what people are a little hesitant about.

Google should help the users choose whether to visit the site in question or not, but not flat-out remove the need as everything is directly presented in Google. Often the sentences Google shows in the card excerpts are lacking in context, but you wouldn't know without visiting the site.

This would be comparable to write a scientific paper and only reading the headlines of each source you're using

I’m not sure if you’re being dense on purpose. They are not just excerpt. They are taking full on paragraph of content. We aren’t talking of the meta description here. It’s taking so much content that you don’t need to click anymore. Google is now the encyclopedia, with content they did not create.

Then allow it only to search engines where you have an agreement, or at least they have provided a public commitment, as to how they will present information that aligns with your preferences. You don't have to use “User-agent: *” for your rules.

This is a great argument when the company in question isn't a monopoly.