This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search.
But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal.
And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate property. Alphabet won't change unless it's made to do so.
My brother tried to set me up with a girl last week. She has a pretty uncommon name. Googled her. Found... a lot of stuff.
I have a VERY common name. Think multiple (relatively) famous people (photographers, US Medal of Honor winner, enough lawyers to choke a court system for DECADES), but if you google my name and the city I live in (1,000,000+ people), my LinkedIn is like the second result.
For everyone saying that Google has gotten worse over the time they've been using it, these two use cases (which are pretty challenging) do really still work.
All found my LinkedIn in the top 2 slots.
It seems pretty stable to me? How could I make this cleaner?
Now - how should Google satisfy all of those people?
I'll confess that I don't have the answer here. But if you're trying to look up "barber ${my_city}" or "taxi ${my_city}", and there are more than one page of results, everyone but the top 10 (top 20? how many results per page are there on google these days?) is going to be unhappy.
Unless there are 20 (or 40?) or fewer barbers in your city, more than half the barbers are going to be unhappy with google. It sucks, but when x people are clamoring for y resources, x - y people will be unhappy. And if y is significantly smaller than x, a significant amount of people are going to be unhappy.
Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of which are on bizarre domains like "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are festooned with ads, also provided by Google.
Top results (excluding sponsors b/c UBlock Origin):
PC Gamer
The Verge
Games Radar
Youtube (channel: Jarrod's Tech)
A giant ad showing some laptops to buy
Youtube (channel: PC Builder)
RTINGS.com
PC Magazine
Youtube (channel: Top Tech Now)
CNET
Tom's Hardware
Another giant ad showing some laptops to buy
Engadget
PC Magazine
Laptop Mag
TechRadar
These are mainstream tech press sites. And maybe the reason that it's a bunch of similar listicles is because the thing you're looking for (a laptop) is a product with relatively few entries in the market.
What are you expecting here that Google isn't giving you? I'm trying to be as charitable as possible, but, for me, the expected results are about as good as I could hope for.
That's kind of the point. Old Google unearthed things. New Google is where you go to find out what the media (and Google) wants you to know.
If that's what you want, then sure, Google is great.
I used "best gaming laptop" as an example, but you can try "what is the best mayonnaise" if you'd like. My results included Uproxx. Which I guess counts as "unearthing," since I would never go to a clickbait farm like Uproxx for culinary tips.
I'm not suggesting I have an alternative, before you ask. This may be nothing more than the inevitable result of the commercialization and commodification of the Internet. Since all of the search companies are going all-in on AI stuff, you may find yourself in my position in a year or two.
But if these are the complaints about Google - "I only see sites that are so good that they constitute the mainstream" - I'm... ok with that? That seems like a good outcome to me. I don't mind using that tool.
From what I understand of your complaint, sometime in the last 20 years, the Google stopped finding outsider art. I would guess that's due to SEO. And with anything that's known to drive revenue to a business, that sort of thing becomes a target. So people target the Google algorithm to place better. I don't know that there's a solution to that. But I don't think it's because of a change inside Google - more like a change in society.
It is possible that this is a problem that will solve itself. I think a lot (most?) mainstream media outlets are hemorrhaging money, and the gravy train can't go on forever. We'll reach some maximum of Terrible Crap, and it will peter out, and then maybe Google can get back to finding honest content and playing merry hell with Internet standards.
The problem as I see it is that the mainstream websites are not good. Search results that gave a broader range of hits than just that sort of thing would be much, much more useful.
If I want, for example, to find what laptops people consider the best, none of those sites help me.
There are sites that do some good gear reviews for relatively specialized equipment--especially not gadget/electronics. But this isn't the 1990s when PC Magazine would have a 600-page issue with a big chunk devoted to the best printers as evaluated by their on-payroll staff.
I'll occasionally put a review of something up on my site but I have neither the money or interest in doing multi-product comparisons. That's pretty much impractical outside of something like Wirecutter (which I generally think does a pretty good job).
If you can't extrapolate the larger point from that, I don't know what to tell you.
But you are suggesting with "if people link to Tom's hardware" that PageRank is still in play. As far as I know, it isn't anymore. There may be something similar or related to PageRank in the black box Google unhelpfully calls "the algorithm," but it's not counting up the number of links and showing that. Google dropped and/or altered that fairly quickly after people learned to game it.
Perhaps you have never had to alter, tweak, or otherwise fold, spindle and mutilate your search queries in order to get Google to find what you're looking for instead of what seems to be clickfarming nonsense. If so, I'm impressed. I would also say that you are pretty unique, as bashing Google to get it to spit out something useful seems to be more and more difficult these days.
I believe Google is aware of this problem. It's why they're jumping into AI like everybody else. They have reached the end of what they can contort the algorithm into doing, so they are going to replace at least some of their search with AI generated answers.
I have no idea why people are so eager to defend Google either. They are a privacy nightmare, they run roughshod over Internet standards, and they throw their considerable weight around like a bully. It's very weird.
Lots of comments in there about how SO doesn't show up as more (or at all) in Google results, and instead we get geek4geek or whatever other clickfarm sites there are out there for technical questions. It's a great example of exactly the problem I was talking about. Is it still comical to you?
Sure, yeah, anecdata and all that, but until I'm hired to dig through all of the internals of Google, anecdotes are about all we've got. Other than Google's reassurances that Everything Is Going Just Splendidly.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1334:_Second
If you're really going to page 7 of Google... man, that's a desperation I've never known.
It is a violent and windswept place, barren of joy or peace.
Maybe you'll find a blog post from someone who bought a gaming laptop and found it pretty good? Or an old forum thread like this one[1]
Not a lot of actual human beings sitting around buying and comparing various gaming laptops. It's much more likely the content you'll find is from some content mill.
https://www.aisearch.vip?q=what%27s%20the%20best%20gaming%20...
I typed "Joey Hess" into Google.
The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking about him that links me to his Patreon. The search results are, I would say, very relevant and very good.
I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from people who aren't even trying to use it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lfgss
That will return the website as a first result (I run https://www.lfgss.com/ )... but no description or metadata. Lots of tangential results talking about it... the first result is more like a shadow profile, a more fact an exact domain match exists but nothing more.
Two months ago I had almost 7 million pages indexed from that site.
For this community, it was their objection to their content being used to train AI that caused them to request me (the owner / admin) to exclude bots. I surveyed more widely, presented arguments in a balanced way, then when the result was overwhelming I hard blocked all known bots and useragents and pretty much everything that looks like a bot and user agent.
It's early anecdata, but sign-up rates have not been impacted at all.
Several other communities I've run have taken similar decisions.
Defensively with the UK Online Security Bill some of the other communities I run are considering similar things.
Feels like the end of an era, communities seeking to protect themselves from external threats, and search engines providing as little value as search pre-Google.
Let me take the opportunity to thank you. This is a rather amazing forum. Kudos to you for listening to what the community wanted. This is probably my all-time favorite thread: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/172374/
read the end of the thread to get an idea about it: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/172374/?offset=27000
IMO this is inevitable. It's why countries have borders: resources are limited, and access to those resources needs to be moderated. That's true whether you're a country or a server admin.
We already apply this principle to bandwidth in the form of DDOS mitigation. Some forums/social media spaces apply it to moderation capacity in the form of requiring invites.
We're slowly learning that the same thing applies to information. Which sounds ridiculous in an age where you can drown in information overload, but personal information is obviously a precious resource (judging from what advertisers are willing to pay to leverage it) and even content we write like comments on articles take some time and thought to produce even if we've grown accustomed to sharing it freely and voluntarily. Now we're growing more cautious about sharing even that when we see others exploiting it for purposes other than its intended use case.
This is also why I'm arguing that social media content should in general have a legal license attached to it, so that use in violation of the license can be prosecuted. CC is probably a good general starting point. I think most people have the assumption that their social media content/comments can be shared only non-commercially (opinions may differ on attribution), with an exception for the site that hosts the content (which may in fact actually give itself broader permissions in the EULA).
PageRank was brilliant, and worked as expected. It's now been superceded by... whatever is going on over in Googleland. Some of which isn't Google's fault, per se; the Internet is a lot bigger now than it was two decades ago. Some of it is. Their entire profit model depends on people using Google in a way orthogonal to "search and find and move on," as it was back in the 00s. People pay Google to game Google results. No corporation is going to overlook that.
are you referring to ads? cuz Im not aware of a way to pay Google to game search and it doesn't make any sense. Is there some dark alley in Mountain View where I can drop off a bag of cash? to game the search? Really curious now.
Maybe. But I stopped using Google because while it didn't become useless, it did become one of the worse search engines.
Any legacy web entity is at risk of disappearing sooner than later, because most actual web trafic (that isn't bot made) is driven by people born after the web was created, who couldn't care less about why and how the web came to be. They are running with it and breaking it (as well as other things) as they see fit.
Google et al. is already that irrelevant, old, rotting and decrepit thing from ancient history. Unless Alphabet can pull some new trick without killing it first. Thanks for the ride. That's the message here.
If you want your mother to bake you cookies, tell her she only needs to type "duck.com," not "duckduckgo.com."
At least until today. Now I get: Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
*Bing, DuckDuckGo's own indexing is fairly limited compared to other search providers like Brave. Most of DDG's index comes from Bing.
Personally I tried to switch many times and always made my way back, and I'm not even really in the Google ecosystem unlike others.
Anyone who has thought google was doing anything good after they bought doubleclick is living in fantasy land. They pretty much immediately started playing advertising extortion games and they optimize for more viewed google ads with things like AMP and making ads harder to notice. Google stopped caring about "information for all" the second after they made their original research paper and realized they had a significant competitive advantage to make some money with.
DuckDuckGo allows for supplement of Google Search, as does Brave, and other search engines. Google freaked out after the ChatGPT release (rightly so) and padded their hand a bit.
Impact would probably be Ads via Google Search Engine. Which, great, because Google Ads-generated results remain a huge vulnerability in terms of active phishing attacks. Maybe it's gotten better in the last month, however I don't really use Google Search anymore, to avoid phishing attacks.
And, this is one reason why I like Brave, because I can control what content cannot appear in my search results, to better mitigate phishing attacks.
HN has about 1/1000th of that. They do not click every link or make decisions in unison, so the number of people who would interested in such a boycott is probably 1/100th of that. Maybe less.
So, no.
The average person isn’t going to google an individual to find their blogs or whatever. The first stop is figuring out their social media destinations. You would hardly expect to find really anything about a person on Google that isn’t a link to their socials. Or perhaps an article related to some crime.
I guess I'm not the average person but, sure I would. (Though I might look on LinkedIn first especially if I knew their employer.) A Google search would presumably return social media handles among other things.
A lot of tech people have started to use the trick of adding reddit to their query, since it is one of the few bastions of actual human beings talking in volume in the open web. But even that might stop working, if reddit decides to close itself to google, and the way their leadership is doing things, I wouldn't doubt it.
I'm not convinced, though accept that this could be because I am in that bubble.
I can't imagine this average person searching for me on Google, finding nothing (which they won't, because I did the same as the author long ago), and concluding that there is nothing to find. Especially since nobody who has tried to find information about me after real life encounters has stopped at Google.
The more persistent ones did eventual find bits and pieces, but admittedly they were more technically inclined. Even so, none of them — technical or not — presumed that there _wasn't_ anything to find.
I've blocked webcrawlers from my websites for years now, so you can't find them on Google (or most other search engines). But plenty of people find them anyway because my audience shares links with each other, puts links on sites that are indexed by search engines, etc.
If I were addressing a more general audience, this might not work as well.
Yes, we're all looking for information, but should we only consume as a way of life? I'll leave that as an open-ended question.
I mean no harm by this comment, but I think you're the one living in a bubble. Do you watch high school students using the internet? Where do they go for information? Reddit is the first place they look. Then they look for a Discord server. Google is a last resort, but since they know it's probably just going to return crappy SEO spam articles, they may give up entirely without even trying Google.
Your answer is technically accurate, but only in the sense that it disproves the "nobody" part of the statement because of the population of users age 45+. Google has lost their place as the site to use when you want to find information.
If they want to look for something/someone, why would they go to the most unreliable places with totally random people to get gossip instead of reputable sources?
Seems there is a gap. If you're looking for astroturfed opinions a search like "<thing of interest> reddit" works pretty well. If you are looking for scientific content, Scholar is at least a good starting point. In the middle there is a wasteland of listicles, SEO spam, etc.
It's like that IQ bell curve meme template.
[0] Sources:
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-... - https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share - https://kinsta.com/search-engine-market-share/
How? Are there ways to search for discord servers that might have content you want inside of them? Like, directories of discord servers? I'm genuinely curious because that would be very useful.
If you said Instagram or tictoc or snapchat maybe
Source: I'm a highschool student and spend a lot of my time with other highschool students.
Use Google to find a Wikipedia result.
Use Google to find a Reddit result.
Use Google to find YouTube videos.
Use Google to find TikTok videos.
20 years ago it was "Search Google and click on the links it provides".
By poor I mean the results may be relevant but of low quality, thanks to commerce and SEO spam often dominating the results.
In some ways this is actually a decent reflection of the reality of the web. It is mostly spam and ecommerce, with human communities taking refuge in certain platforms.
And how the hell do they "look" Reddit? Don't tell me the high-schoolers actually prefer Reddit's search than Google? If it's true I'm deeply worried about humanity's future.
They're not typing "google.com" into anything, but they're using it all the same.
Not entirely false, I would say. I see more and more non-techies getting tired with their search results, instinctly expecting to see a variety of poorly-formatted, extremely poorly-written, ad-ridden sites.
I believe more and more people will wake as Google pushes the boundaries of good sense. This will lead to a decrease in qualified traffic, but that won't demotivate Google -- anyone who already ran ads targeting a niche public knows that Google will burn your monthly budget, and they won't hesitate to override your parameters to make that happen.
OP states that most of the traffic to his website comes from RSS feeds, not Google.
To suggest removing a site from Google is bad advice for "anyone who wants to help people find their content" is also a "false premise", to use the parent's terminaology. It presumes that for every content owner, Google is always the optimal method of improving discoverability. That of course is not true.
For example, consider a website that gets almost all of its traffic from being submitted to HN. Removing the site from Google is not going stop any significant number of people from discovering the website.
Google is routinely sub-optimal for discoverability. To cite just one example of its many discoverability problems, it is highly localised. Any Google user who has travelled to different countries will notice, for certain types of searches, there is a vast difference between what sites she can discover through Google based on her location.
Both the OP's use of "nobody" and the parent's use of "anyone" are probably figures of speech not to be taken literally. If we take these terms literally, then both the OP's and parent's assertions are false.
Some folks like Google, some don't.
What does categorically false mean?
Here, the category of "no one" is incorrect. Correct category may be, as per the comment, "those taking an ideological stance."
"categorically" in this situation is used to emphasize the absolute, unambiguous, and unconditional nature of the falseness.
People who are not good with tech with certainly use Google especially if they grew up with it.
Yes, search results are bad, but are you using duckduckgo instead? No, you are still using a Google search to get somewhere even if it's just to use it to find a another site with better pages. Maybe you are using Bing though I know some folks were liked Bing...
Now if you want to argue people are using TikTok as a main search engine now that's a bit different (that's of course not accurate as it has terrible search just like reddit)
But yeah even Google knows people are only using it to find Reddit pages now (which is Reddit started the whole API issue) and why Google and Reddit are fighting a little.
This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet.
Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discoverable, but removing yourself from Google is terribly bad advice for anyone who wants to help people find their content.
Many people do use Google to find content and people, even if you don't.