I wonder what that reason could be.
Why provide the best product when you only have to have a product slightly better than your competition. After that everything is profit.
Couple that with a huge portion of new sites seem to be bot generated shit that's copied from other places on the internet it seems Google has given up on the open web.
Or maybe Google disagrees with my assessment, but I can't imagine what kind of inside information would make them do that. It looks like a very clear and inescapable reality to me.
Given how stupidly common ads are, increasing prices and upping scarcity would be a good thing overall anyway.
How would that make them money? Here, instead have a few links to irrelevant videos that bring in ad revenue!
Please explain this point.
Do you use adblock? I find if adblock is enabled when doing captchas I have to keep clicking pictures over and over.
You don’t need to know the markings used for crosswalks in every place around the world to know what a crosswalk looks like based on its purpose. There’s only so many ways to create a pedestrian crossing across a street, after all.
If anything, that seems like an extremely appropriate choice for something attempting to restrict access for bots that wouldn’t necessarily be able to act on the same context clues and intuition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Iraq_poison_grain_disaste...
You're asked to point out the designated crossing area for pedestrians across a street. Sure, some places use crosswalk stripes perpendicular to the street, others use squiggles, others use lines on the sides, and some don't use any markings at all, but it should be plainly obvious to anyone, anywhere in the world where the designated area is based on there being some marking, or control devices, or literally people walking in the photo.
This isn't rocket science. Using contextual clues to figure something out is literally one of the most basic human abilities.
It's a 'pedestrian crossing' everywhere else English is used - including the Geneva Convention.
I think this is because the primary purpose of the excersise is AI training though.
> Please explain this point.
If Google thinks your searches are unusual, it will force you to answer captchas to see the results. They assume anyone using advanced features must be trying to abuse their service.
No, I think they just don't care if they throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I do use my own VPN, so maybe my IP is flagged or something.
I've noticed this as well. I have a crappy website for my app I need to do better marketing for (not my priority just now), but I've noticed that, for however crap it is, I have received ZERO incoming hits from Google, apart from a couple people that have literally just googled my domain name.
I do not believe for a second there's not a single query done in the 2 months the page has been up, globally, for which my website wasn't a bit relevant. Either that, or the spam problem Google has is much bigger than anyone thinks.
Yet another data point in favour of the Dead Internet theory.
edit: Hah. I notice it suggests using it at the top of the page if you use 'site:..." - and I only get 5 results for my site when the console claims to have indexed 10 times that many!
edit2: Also duckduckgo returns more like 15 hits ...
Who's the silly one now?
"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content, marginalizing human activity. The date given for this "death" is generally around 2016 or 2017."
Not sure I'd call it a conspiracy theory.
What I find funny about that framing is that, regardless of whether or not the theory has merit, a conspiracy theory by definition asserts that there exists two or more people conspiring with the intent to produce the alleged outcome. From what I understand, dead Internet theory alleges no such collusion or intent. I could be wrong but I believe that it merely suggests that the amount of bot-generated activity has come to dwarf human generated content to the point where the Internet is effectively "dead" from the perspective of its original purpose: humans sharing human knowledge.
But what I'm curious about, whichever number is true, is whether people mean "malicious bots" when they say this, or just any kind of autonomous agent. And also whether they are counting volume of data or simply network requests.
Because if by "bot" they just mean "autonomous agent making a network request" then honestly I'm surprised the number isn't higher, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Every search crawler, every service detector, all the financial bots, every smart device (which is now every device) and a thousand other more or less legitimate uses.
Thoughty2: The internet has died
In this video they rename it from 'theory' to 'prophecy'. As in the internet isn't quite dead yet, but its rot filled bloated body is near its dying breath.
Is it more expensive, or do they just wish to prevent people from being able to cache their own results locally?
E.g. I can build a searchbox on mywebsite.com, and if you type "hamster" I'll just query google for "site:mywebsite.com hamster" and return the results to you. That way, my site can be static but still have a search box, and google has all the work but gets no money.
Source? This would be worrisome.
Appalling
As a person who has been a statistical outlier most of my life, I am dreading this. It's bad enough dealing with human impressions and mis-judgment, but now we get it from our computers now, which used to be logical, deterministic havens.
Anomaly detected. Termination authorized.
My big crime is that I live in Romania, I think.
Damn Romanians!
Not even Romanian! (Brit transplant)
I am not sure why I get them but it might be due to using anti-fingerprinting tools.
This is super annoying because it doesn't appear to inform you of this anywhere in the UI, until you click through to page 2 and see what it modified your query to be.
A few years back I used to scoff at people who wrote searches in the form of literal questions instead of boiling things down to key terms, e.g. the "how do i..., what is the largest..." type searches.
Nowadays I not only need to write stupid searches like this to get better results but quite literally find that my brain has adapted the pattern and my past skill at crafting salient key term, operator driven queries is eroding.
No results found for "spill clean big search stain".
Results for spill clean big search stain (without quotes):
This isn't new, I've always seen Google doing something like this. It hasn't always been large on the page but it's always been there.
Perverse incentives at work!
I strongly agree with this bill hicks bit on advertising:
This is one of the most unhinged takes I've read in a while.
Double-clicks were used with icons on the desktop because you could do more with an icon than just open it. You could move it, copy it, etc. Double-click was a convention for a shortcut to open the reference of the icon. A single-click would have not allowed those other actions.
The idea behind this name for ads was: this company makes ads relevant and compelling, so users drill into them and find whatever you want to advertise.
For what it's worth, because of the affordance you mention, even though users didn't have to, they consistently double-clicked banner ads, and most things they wanted to activate, even after they learned they only had to single click the blue underlined things.
I had to swap real quick to my desktop and see if I still had to double click an icon just to be sure.
I mostly access things with the super key / search now and I guess people with phones would just tap an icon.
Yes it would. And did. Windows chose double click to open but other systems managed with a single click while still allowing you to drag around icons and files.
I'm not the only one who thinks this way: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/technology/google-doublec...
But some people take a step farther back than this and blame Congress for the 737 MAX. They basically forced the merger, and unhappy weddings make for unhappy homes.
Kagi (don’t use it personally)
They rolled out a completely new design semi-recently for... half of the pages... and left the other half on the 10+ year old styles.
It just feels like Amazon is happy to take advantage of its dominant position with Goodreads having a more complete catalog than any of the other more open offerings. And yet, they seem to invest no effort in modernizing or improving the site, making it more performant, etc. The moderation tools kinda suck too — doing super common things like merging (incorrect) duplicate listings is a PITA.
Also the app exhibits blatant conflicts of interest like prioritizing buying new books from Amazon over, e.g., digital library loans, with no option for users to configure that.
Nothing I'm saying here is new though - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads#Criticism.
I'm finding Open Library (part of the Internet Archive) is increasingly useful for book search.
You might also have success with a major library (e.g., British Library, Library of Congress, major US city libraries (NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.), and some academic libraries. Watch that these aren't in fact backed by Worldcat though. (Many local library systems are.)
What’s infuriating is how this lying has become normalized in “good” brands. For instance, try to buy a 60” TV. I do not think you can find one. They are all 59.5” and sold as ‘60” class’.
"keyboard non mechanical like cherry switch membrane touch rgb light clicky gaming blogging ergonomic xiaomi redmi arduino android ios windows laptop desktop computer tablet phone", and if you sort by price, the first one is $0.99.
Then you have 5 different colors of plasticky $15 keyboards and a usb card reader for $0.99 to choose.
Don’t reward bad behavior or they’ll keep doing it.
- All your regular non-food needs in one cart.
- No-hassle refunds if there is a problem with the order.
The first one is just convenience and I could do without. The second one is where most other stores fail. Or at least enough of them that I don't want to risk having to phone their hotline or pay for shipping back because they or their delivery contractor fucked up - or is fraudulently claiming they tried to deliver when they made no such attempt at the specified address and instead want you to waste your time picking up the package at a random location accross town.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/sci-fi-writer-greg-egan-and-a...
I don't know if 4chan is included in the google index, but I've never gotten a 4chan result in any search I can recall.
I still don't get how you expect it to work when the content rotates quickly and disappears
If you search 4 Chan on Google it does come up in the results and a safe search warning
Google will remain on top as long as Apple, Mozilla and Samsung take their bribes
I just don't like being in the panopticon
There are enough dead "short" links on forums already.
I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
Think about it - some human element of trust and vouching for someone being added to the ring.
(Ultimately, this is a bad facsimile of human group behavior - all the way up to shunning people who deeply violate group norms. And I don't think it'll scale super-well. )
And I'd still say pagerank did work really well in an Internet where there was overwhelmingly trust. But in a world where default-trust is a bad stance, I believe there needs to be an equivalent of what "You can trust X" does in small in-person groups. (Or, alternatively "Sheesh, X went off and just destroyed all trust")
I do think it'll need to be more than a single metric, too. Trust is multidimensional by topic(E.g. "I trust the NYTs data science folks, I have zero trust for the OpEds"), and it is somewhat personal. (E.g. I might have experienced X lying to me, while they've been 100% honest to you - maybe in/outgroup, maybe political alignment, maybe differing beliefs, etc. Ultimately, what we call trust in an indirect situation is "most of my directly trusted folk vouch for that person)
I miss 90s Internet in general. It wasn't the ugly battleground and desolation planet that the current net has become.
> I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
There's no way this won't get abused, but the SEO stuff is out of control. Not even spammer blogs, but if you have a quick question like "how do I check tire pressure" you will only get articles that start with a treatise on the entire history of car tires and the answer is deeply buried somewhere in the article. My guess is that Google sees that we're on the page for a longer time than we would spend on pages that just return the answer, and they assume that "more time on page" == "better content" or something.
Most egregiously I will search for something very rare (e.g. about programming) and DDG will return me results regarding my city's tourist/visitor info. It's as if it just keeps ignoring words from the search prompt that return no results until it runs out of keywords then it's just the geoIP results.
I want this too, but I think an often understated aspect of this issue is that by this point Google has absolutely trashed the web of that era. In these threads people will say "the content you want isn't out there, it's all on social media now" -- and they're largely right, but I think Google is the party most responsible for mutilating the web to the state it is in now, and users fled to social media partly because it seemed like a safe haven.
What we need is a concentrated effort to rebuild the web. Take the best parts of what we've learned and combine with the best parts of what we've left behind and try to build something better, for humans, not for advertisers and hyper-capitalists.
That will take time, energy, and people who remember what we lost and believe we can build something better. A better search engine alone is not enough.
When rates of change were slower, you might only have to “move” once in your life, but with increasing rates of change in our human experience, staying nimble is arguably of ever increasing importance.
Google just doesn't know that they exist anymore, or rather doesn't want us to know, because those sites are not commercial enough or big enough.
Almost without fail, no matter what you search for, it tries its best to turn it into a search for a product or service. And those content oriented websites don't fit that, so it just pretends they don't exist.
This is sort of what I've been trying to do with Marginalia Search, except I don't really believe a voting system would work. It's far too easy to manipulate. Been playing with the thought of having something like an adblock-list style system where domain shitlists can be collaborated on and shared without being authoritative for the entire search engine.
My search engine is still pretty rough around the edges and limited but I think it works well enough to demonstrate the idea has some merit.
Even just personal shitlists would be golden and make just about everyone happy.
Mojeek seems to be the independent, non-paywalled search engine with the biggest index, for an overview see https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
We know it's not, but expect them to try to tell you you're imagining things.
They don't need to waste the eng resources or infrastructure on rock solid search anymore, they own the market and got all the users into their funnel of products, most locked in for life.
Search results still show sponsored listings, they still have all the users, and all the profit, and a lot less of the profit sucking operational costs it took to be good at what made them a household name, search
The issue isn’t that they are watering down the cream in the milk, it’s that the cream isn’t part of the milk at all now.
So you may see a certain number of pages using the site: command but not or less pages may be indexed.
If you want pages indexed, out then in an xml sitemap file, make sure there are internal links to them on your site, and external links from other sites really helps. Third party indexer tools help as well.
This is your misunderstanding. The fact that a thing was in the index does not ensure it will always be there. Things disappear from the web all the time. Serving fresh docs means not only crawling the new stuff but also deleting the unreachable stuff promptly.
Pretty much any advanced operators seem to do it for me, notably "intitle:" and "inurl:". I'd wager that there are a lot of automated searches using these to look for exposed admin interfaces, but I find them extremely useful for filtering out the crap that clogs up results when a ton of news sites all regurgitate the same viral press release or wire article.
If you want "misinformation," or to just search the web like it's the mid 2000s, you can use http://Yandex.com. They do a pretty good job on controversial queries. Google has gotten so political that they even has this "results are changing rapidly" page they return when there's been some new political hot topic that they haven't gotten the commissars at headquarters to weigh in on yet as to what's going to be the official narrative.[1]
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/25/22550430/google-search-re...
a what now?
Yandex image search also has an infinitely better interface, linking your directly to image sources and not being full of links to sites that want you to sign up before showing anything like Google is. It's still not perfect and IME often groups images to agressively which effectively hides "similar" results.
this is some machine learning stuff they are doing, instead of indexing all the specific keywords they are creating vector embeddings and basically summarizing what's on the page and going on similarity to your query rather than specific keywords. Good for casual searches, but extremely annoying for power users
It's concerning that they're even nerfing site search, which seems like a core feature for a search engine. You could argue that Google isn't really a search engine any more, but rather a general knowledge engine and advertising platform. I hope somebody can build an alternative to Google that does what a search engine is supposed to do, i.e. index the web without all the extra garbage. But maybe SEO has killed that dream at this point.
The site is probably 20 years old and has no SSL, but still... giving me no results is worse then giving me the one correct result.
In terms of breadth and depth, the quality of google search has declined noticeably. They don't have any real competitors in search so they can do whatever they want.
> now it's nearly impossible for anything but the most vapid of queries.
Rather than getting us want we want, they want to gives us what they want. A narrow band of approved results. Youtube is like this as well, but then again, youtube and google are both part of Alphabet. It's like google news was a test run and they slowly exported it to search, youtube, etc.
I've noticed that myself, looking for very precise content, which I know is out there but failed to bookmark. (Most recently, for amateur astronomy and roleplaying.) The solution to finding niche stuff now seems to be digging through relevant reddit or forum threads, hoping someone posted a link to it.
Another "bug" that seems to manifest quite often: if I search for a specific phrase or unique word on a page that I found in a SERP, so I know it's crawled that page, it often doesn't return that page either.
Add to that the automatic CAPTCHA-hellban you get if you use "site:" in anything more than a tiny amount (and the one you still get if you search "too much"), and I realise that there's increasingly huge amounts of information out there on sites that Google may have crawled before and knows about, but doesn't want to show me for some reason. I remember it used to be much easier to find information about obscure topics even if it meant wading through dozens of pages of SEO spam; now it's nearly impossible for anything but the most vapid of queries.