I don't know if it's Google that is dying. It's more like a large segment of the public facing internet is wilting. The user experience without an adblocker is almost nothing but ads, popovers, permission requests and chat boxes, sign-up-to-the-newsletter requests. And these are the websites that aren't trying to bait-and-switch you
For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or marketing. It's not a good first impression.
There are healthy websites out there but they're really struggling to punch through all the crap.
It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't good search results.
I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.
I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick.
Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points.
The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.
It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be so good at indexing useful reddit threads.
Google used to have a "Forums" tab right on the top that would filter results to random PHPbb instances and the like. It was generally pretty great. As far as I'm concerned, the decision to remove that was when Google started dying.
Uh, reddit is 99% influencers influencing these days. You enthusiastically consumed and even recommended an ad and have no idea.
You can't even tell who they are anymore. How do I know? Because I've been paid to post on reddit. I only do it for products I've actually used and things I like, but I got paid nobody has a clue. Not even you.
It's just the state of the web. Google search uses metrics for the web sites (number of links, etc) so Reddit threads do not rank high compared to real web sites.
Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.
AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here, et al) remain high when most of the people we're talking with are algorithmic?
Media companies create new shows and pull them away more quickly than we can finish consuming them, as realtime engagement metrics quickly show their bosses which must be most profitable, most popular, most attention grabbing.
It makes a good case for going back: watching shows from decades earlier, that have a beginning middle and end. Dropping social media time for books. And the missing analogue, how to give up on google searches because they too, are at a parity of value with their offering and their attention stealing properties.
I'm just an angry person shaking his fist at the sky from an armchair. I love these threads because I always come away with a new perspective.
> Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.
This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.
Media companies pulling shows so quickly makes me sad. It's one of those cases where I think they constantly misread the data. "People don't watch shows with a long story arc as they come out, so we should cancel them" is really "people don't trust us to continue shows with a long story arc until a good stopping place, so they don't want to invest the time in starting new ones"
You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our money.
The only reason they want our attention is to get our money.
A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable amount of disposable income, as is true in a healthy society/economy, it would be much, much more viable for many websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than being ad-supported.
> I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.
The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?
> a large segment of the public facing internet is wiltin
I noticed that many teenagers today, despite the abundance of technology around them, are a lot less technological than the previous generation. When I was young, almost everyone in my school knew how to download (pirate) stuff from the internet, burn CDs, copy cracks, modify config files, etc. Nowadays, I see some young people not knowing how to use the maps' functionality on their phones, and only be "proficient" in a few apps like Email, TikTok and Instagram.
I do think that the PC/internet being less accessible before forced people to learn more about computers. Because everything is so fast and easy nowadays and there are so many sources of information, no one really needs to spend that time.
So what about a search engine that penalises ads heavily? Would that not be interesting to companies like Wikipedia or Apple that don't need ads to survive?
Sounds to me like such a search engine could gain market share rapidly. Is there such a search engine already out there?
I tried my test search "California style burrito in Austin" and the first page was entirely reddit results. Clicking over to "map" resulted in a single wrong result.
Completely agree. I think the fundamental problem, is that the public facing internet is kind of like electricity or water - it is a utility, that isn't inherently monetizeable. So the only way to make money off of it is to advertise. And then advertisement itself is a cancer upon humanity ...
The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics. Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay that you must now slog through in order to get the information you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose over bullet points.
The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.
Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.
Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.
We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.
Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.
BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].
> "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"
It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.
It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.
To me all signs point to Reddit never having been a commercial venture, but rather an influence and propaganda machine for United States government agencies. So they already have their budget paid.
>>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!
Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.
Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.
When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.
Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".
So, assuming that this "mismanagement" is not just happening in the crypto space, but across the board in other spaces too, they are missing out on short-term money, but are more valuable for the searches that users are now doing (including me). So.. is it actually bad execution?
Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be trimmed to bullet points removing useful info.
The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
I disagree that whatever ranking system google uses will just be gamed to the same extent. If google downgraded the rank of pages with lots of ads and trackers it would substantially reduce the incentive to game the system, the reason it won’t is because most of those pages are running Adsense so there’s every incentive for google to keep the status quo.
The real problem is that Google holds an effective monopoly in search, so any digital marketer worth a salt will optimize the crap out of their blogs and pages to get higher and higher rank within Google alone. This will, in turn, lead to what we see today: a race to the bottom in terms of quality to get the best SEO results.
I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.
That sounds like it makes sense - but if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't, why would Google not be able to optimize their algo accordingly? If the results for a query don't match the "nature of the query", it's a bad result. If the algo can be gamed, it isn't aiming for the actual goal, i.e. it fundamentally fails at information retrieval.
> Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet.
That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
Why do people even care about views? Because of advertising. It is the root cause of all problems on the web today. All Google has to do to fix the web is put itself out of business by delisting pages with ads including its own. Search and the web at large would be fixed in days.
Maybe I am wrong about this, and maybe the SEO junk sites would find a way to evolve, but what I really want from google is a plonk button so I can have a personal kill file for sites that I never want to see again.
Google used to support this[0], and I used it happily for blocking low-quality domains such as Experts Exchange, certain Wikia subdomains, and Pintrest. The feature was later removed[1] in favor of a browser extension, but the extension was less functional because it could only filter out results from the current page, so heavily-spammed keywords had result pages with only one or two links.
Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.
It would be possible to do that at browser level through extensions, for example there is one to filter out Pinterest results from search results. I wouldn't however expect that potentially great feature to be natively available in Google search anytime soon, unless they made it as a analytics filled paid service and in a way that gave their advertisers and investors the power of circumventing it, that is, both plonk and unplonk as a service.
Because of a recent HN article on the subject, I was searching for "correlation of ACT scores and IQ", and the first 5 hits were the _same_ crappy 1500 word essay, where various section headers were programmatically changed to include exactly what I searched for.
How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.
I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.
The computer generated essay and the fake stackoverflow clones are the worst thing ever. It's harder to code now than just a few years ago because of all the BS people put on the internet.
I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.
And the worst of SEO pages are cooking recipes, where you have to scroll down screens of badly written meaningless text before you actually get to ingredients list. At least Google still keeps indexing recipe microformats.
Even worse, I've found myself directed to long recipe pages with a huge amount of prose about the history of the recipe, how the author developer it etc, BUT THEN THERE IS NO ACTUAL RECIPE! This has happened multiple times in the past year. And this was often the first or second result when Googling the recipe. wtf?
Yeah this, if I want to know how many chapters are there in a game, I have to real an entire article telling me useless stuff before I can get the info I want. Witj ChatGPT I can avoid this. I would say most of my Google searches were for answering questions, not to find articles related to a topic.
The industry term for it is "made for advertising". It is a constant battle because some people in adtech want to increase impressions at all costs, and some people want to block these sites from their systems. Guess which one wins out when executives see how much money it makes?
Why do you believe that users will start using this "AI AdBlock"? Regular ad blockers are enough to cover current ads. Google also controls the main browser in the biggest mobile OS (Chrome on Android), and it doesn't support ad blockers. There are options (Firefox, Brave, Kiwi, etc.), but most users don't bother.
This is a major reason I think LLMs could help with SERPs - presumably it will be a lot harder to do SEO effectively because now it involves the model training barrier.
Model training is already trivial, just expensive. As LLM optimized HW appears the expense will drop. By 2030, I’d expect decent consumer hardware to be both faster and two orders of magnitude cheaper than what’s in use today for model training.
"How do I fix some odd setting in Windows, Mac, whatever"
2007: results include documentation, a couple forums, if you're unlucky there's a potentially malware tool that's discovered people need to fix this.
2012: results include Reddit and Stack Exchange, documentation has disappeared, forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install.
2023: top results are just blogspam pushing malware tools and the above-mentioned useless support forums. It's hard to know if Microsoft and Apple even know what their software does.
Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.
> forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install
God this is such a pet peeve, those stupid Microsoft forums especially where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing and wishing a good day and suggest fuck all. They ought to just pull the plug on the site and let reddit handle their support for free.
I'm Kevin from the Microsoft Customer Support Team. I'm sorry to hear you're having a problem with Windows 10 support forums today. We're here to help and would like to get this problem resolved for you!
I understand that the issue you're currently facing is that "Microsoft forums where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing" are appearing on your Windows 10 forum search results?
Oftentimes unwanted ads or other unexpected configuration changes are caused by unintended software being installed on your computer, or from other errors.
Please try the following steps to resolve your issue:
1. Log into your computer. Click on the Start Menu and click Shutdown. Then click reboot. Allow any pending updates to install.
If this doesn't work, you can try the following solutions:
1. Log into your computer and click the Start Menu
2. Type "update" into the Search Bar and click Windows Updates
3. Click "check for updates now" and follow the instructions to install any pending updates.
If this still doesn't resolve your situation, you can check the following KBs for further help:
KB: 324829 - Restore from a System Restore Point
KB: 293111 - Update Windows Defender
KB: 299024 - Check for Errors using Windows Network Troubleshooter
I hope this has helped resolved your problem today.
Most of that support is free. It's some weird universe where Microsoft gives out fake credentials (forum badges and crap) to people that don't know what they are doing. These poor people in India and other places are spamming tons of useless "fixes" for internet cred.
Apple's official support website is the same. 100% useless feedback from the "Support Specialist". Yet it always shows up at the top of the search result.
See I understand that, with Microsoft and Apple support you would get a response along the lines of:
"I see you are trying to find the Static IP of your Raspberry Pi, a static IP is a .....<long paragraph describing static ips>. You also have a raspberry pi which is....<long paragraph describing raspberry pi's>. Given all of that I think you should really start by resetting your Raspberry Pi and ensure that your Windows license is up to date.
Apple forums are also quite bad. Every suggestion is to reset SMC and thats it.
The Stack overflow / stack exchange websites are often the only ones where you get useful answers when having any sort of problems regarding the user facing part of the OS.
(And also for anything else to be honest. I think 30% of my questions on google are answered by stack exchange websites)
Apple's dev forums are actually useful but only because of the mind-bending efforts of superhuman Quinn "The Eskimo!", who appears to have been at Apple since forever, is an actual programmer, gives real answers with meaty information and can even look things up in the source code for you. I've lost track of how often I've needed to learn something obscure about Apple's platforms and ended up at a thread where Quinn gives an answer. I've also filed a DTS incident in the past asking a seriously obscure question I wasn't even meant to ask (to do with their code signing system), and got a detailed and correct response back from Quinn+colleagues very quickly. It was by far the best support experience I ever had from a tech firm.
Quinn, if you're out there reading this, I really hope Apple has a succession plan in place for when you take a well deserved retirement!
Am I the only one still searching Google primarily though keywords/phrases (and the exclusion of keywords/phrases)? I don't see much degradation in Google's results.
I keep trying, but the result quality continues to degrade. Most such searches either return nothing, one or two links, or a host of spam. Google is useless except for business phone numbers and hours they are open.
If you ask one of those people complaining here to share the query they use, it becomes very quickly very apparent that Google doesn't have a problem at all.
For the last five technical questions I asked ChatGPT every single one yielded an answer that was either wrong or uselessly vague :( I've now given up. You have to cross-check everything against Google anyway so why not just skip straight to that point.
In the German market for any product related query where you want a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies, which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly newspapers).
These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated.
And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".
They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work.
And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now.
Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.
Google knows, has commented on it that it's fine "but you should be careful who you let publish on your domain" and they won't do anything about it. It was a somewhat big topic two or so years ago, and since then everyone has understood that you just need to buy in on media company sites to get ranked.
Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.
And the number of ordinary people that try to gas light me for stating that Google has failed in their most basic mission. It's been years, and unless you work in tech or marketing, you're apparently obvious to the situation, and still think of Google as one may have during the 90's.
A lot of people are using this term incorrectly lately. Gaslighting isn't simply telling someone that they are wrong about something. It's a specific, sustained, and intentional form of psychological abuse, most often found in a domestic setting. The origin is the play Gas Light and the plot revolves around a man trying to steal from his wife by making her think she is going insane.
I'm totally with you on that, but who, besides us, knows about this and understands the inner workings?
Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests.
They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today).
> Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".
Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the expected state that the best white goods in any category are experiencing constant churn?
I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very well created" but spam because you don't believe the recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful, and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.
> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.
Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses, which is largely the issue with Google ads outlined by author.
Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.
User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.
edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.
When two people say ´reddit´ they might be referencing two completely different worlds.
The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and I´d have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for many other people. And some user might only ever be looking at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.
That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it´s difficult to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned ring nothing in my mind, but as there´s subs where you can only submit post titles ´cat´, there sure must be others were karma is everything.
As a reddit-addict this really depends on the subreddit you're using. In /r/askreddit you don't stand a chance that your question will attract serious attention, but there are so many subreddits with small usergroups and enough reactions. In /r/askreddit or other popular subreddits, my answers get reasonable attention, even if I'm not on the reddit timeschedule.
> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is just unfortunate side effect for new users.
Other problem is that karma is global which basically means user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-based filtering is doomed to fail anyway
> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.
Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.
0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.
1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.
Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.
For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.
> Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink
I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough.
And if you disagree, please post some examples.
As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism that is used mainly by the alt-right.
This point is always brought up and it has no relevance in terms of what we're discussing which boils down to opinions on products and services from people who have some expertise in the matter.
You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a question on something related to a product in that hobby.
It's getting a lot worse I agree. It seems like anything that might be offensive to anyone having any emotions under any circumstance is now blurred and labeled "NSFW".
The biggest form of this advertising isn't actually done with the knowledge of Reddit. Organizations use Reddit accounts to astroturf narratives together, since Reddit is pseudonymous. Companies who need better PR, or just a good controversy, can do this much more cheaply on Reddit than any other internet forum.
Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that is authentic can be the most useful stuff on the internet.
I never understood how Reddit isn’t an advertising powerhouse. Their users literally voluntarily segregate by interest, but the proper tech never got built out. Last I checked they integrated a 3rd party solution for that.
Google held control of who they reward using AdWords, they decided who lives and who dies, who goes bancrupt and who prosper
It is their system that rewards SEO spam
If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam.
Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit
You can submit your site to Google and they will index it. If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you! Even if you don't pay Google a dime.
Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g. /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme anyway).
It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms, but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised, they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.
The most tragic casualty of this is the ancient wisdom of just google your tech issues. It doesn't work any more! All you get is page upon page of auto-generated help sites that pretend to have solutions for your exact problem but are all actually the same list of generic tips (restart your computer! update your drivers!)
I can sort through it with enough effort, but it's a disaster for non-tech people who could muddle through their computer problems before but now just get hopelessly stuck in the Google Search swamp every time.
Look on the bright side; we're the last generation(s) of folk capable of operating tech at any level beyond what the UX people at FAANG will allow one to reach. The bridge has been burned behind us. Yay job security.
With the best of intentions they make their data open, resulting in hundreds of clone sites regurgitating the stack overflow data, on sites with names like “ProblemGeek” and “NerdAnswer”.
I mean, SO is still there... Just limit your search result to it, e.g. "java enum ordinal site:stackoverflow.com" (or others from stackexchange family).
The two biggest problems I’ve seen develop with Google are that:
1. The quality of the search algorithm’s ability to sift through nonsense to find “the good stuff” seems to have gotten progressively worse, and that’s largely fueled by:
2. Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the “good stuff” is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doesn’t report on. For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. Sure there are exceptions to that, but it’s clear what direction the tide is going.
The “good old days of the internet” where the best stuff was just a Google search away seem long gone.
> For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense.
That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of anything which make money for someone and who pays Google addwords fees is presented prominently while the rant is buried.
Can you tell us what value you get out of rants from unqualified people? What actionable thing comes out of consuming such information? Because I can’t imagine why anyone would do that, since “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd and disagree even among themselves. Why not just look at another side but one that is still made by a qualified expert?
I would add a "3." that Google has less incentive than they used to to fix it.
If they can supply enough relevant ads,"rich snippets", shopping widgets, or links to content they pulled from wikipedia (that keeps you surfing google-owned properties)...the organic search results don't matter.
Actually, if the organic results are low quality, then maybe you're more likely to use the content above. So the organic content optimal quality is just "better than Bing", but worse than the ads.
I used to think this too, until I tried Bing, with and without its new GPT chat, and if you think Google is rubbish, wait until you need to search MS dev documentation (very factual!) using Bing.
Truth is, it's all astroturfing all the way, all the web. Even reddit.
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on search. My views are my own, etc.
I use Bing GPT and think it's better than Google for answering simple questions. Bing's search results may not be as good as Google's, but the information I need is usually buried inside SEO text. Bing's use of GPT to extract precise answers makes me feel impressed compared to Google.
Edit: Bing GPT is getting better, but it still makes mistakes sometimes. If anyone wants to stay updated on its development, you can follow the team on Twitter https://twitter.com/MParakhin.
Readit News
For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or marketing. It's not a good first impression.
There are healthy websites out there but they're really struggling to punch through all the crap.
It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't good search results.
I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.
I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick.
Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points.
The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.
You can't even tell who they are anymore. How do I know? Because I've been paid to post on reddit. I only do it for products I've actually used and things I like, but I got paid nobody has a clue. Not even you.
AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here, et al) remain high when most of the people we're talking with are algorithmic?
Media companies create new shows and pull them away more quickly than we can finish consuming them, as realtime engagement metrics quickly show their bosses which must be most profitable, most popular, most attention grabbing.
It makes a good case for going back: watching shows from decades earlier, that have a beginning middle and end. Dropping social media time for books. And the missing analogue, how to give up on google searches because they too, are at a parity of value with their offering and their attention stealing properties.
I'm just an angry person shaking his fist at the sky from an armchair. I love these threads because I always come away with a new perspective.
This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.
That's...just not true, though.
You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our money.
The only reason they want our attention is to get our money.
A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable amount of disposable income, as is true in a healthy society/economy, it would be much, much more viable for many websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than being ad-supported.
The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?
Jaha du, Google pratar svenska med dig.
I noticed that many teenagers today, despite the abundance of technology around them, are a lot less technological than the previous generation. When I was young, almost everyone in my school knew how to download (pirate) stuff from the internet, burn CDs, copy cracks, modify config files, etc. Nowadays, I see some young people not knowing how to use the maps' functionality on their phones, and only be "proficient" in a few apps like Email, TikTok and Instagram.
I do think that the PC/internet being less accessible before forced people to learn more about computers. Because everything is so fast and easy nowadays and there are so many sources of information, no one really needs to spend that time.
Google stopped being a search company, and is an advertisement company now.
phind.com and new bing do this better.
The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.
I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.
Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.
We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.
Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.
BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].
[1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
Which is funny as builtin search is so utter shit you pretty much need to use google to find anything
It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.
It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.
Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.
Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.
When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.
Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".
I would love something like swurl [1] but just with those three!
[1] https://swurl.com/
Dead Comment
The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.
That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...
[1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-more-personalized-resul...
[1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
[2] https://github.com/arosh?tab=repositories
They have enough information when yiu clock back and select a different result. And this hasnt killed SEO spam.
How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.
I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.
I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.
Edit: To the friendly people downvoting me: Try for yourself and you'll be surprised how much good and informative content you can find on YouTube.
AI AdBlock is going to kill whatever is left of Google within the year.
AI content spam is absolutely going to kill social media and search results, but AI adblock will be worse to Google's bottom line.
It's coming, and it's going to be brutal.
Which metrics can proxy user satisfaction without turning into clickbait-land?
2007: results include documentation, a couple forums, if you're unlucky there's a potentially malware tool that's discovered people need to fix this.
2012: results include Reddit and Stack Exchange, documentation has disappeared, forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install.
2023: top results are just blogspam pushing malware tools and the above-mentioned useless support forums. It's hard to know if Microsoft and Apple even know what their software does.
Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.
God this is such a pet peeve, those stupid Microsoft forums especially where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing and wishing a good day and suggest fuck all. They ought to just pull the plug on the site and let reddit handle their support for free.
I'm Kevin from the Microsoft Customer Support Team. I'm sorry to hear you're having a problem with Windows 10 support forums today. We're here to help and would like to get this problem resolved for you!
I understand that the issue you're currently facing is that "Microsoft forums where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing" are appearing on your Windows 10 forum search results?
Oftentimes unwanted ads or other unexpected configuration changes are caused by unintended software being installed on your computer, or from other errors.
Please try the following steps to resolve your issue:
1. Log into your computer. Click on the Start Menu and click Shutdown. Then click reboot. Allow any pending updates to install.
If this doesn't work, you can try the following solutions:
1. Log into your computer and click the Start Menu
2. Type "update" into the Search Bar and click Windows Updates
3. Click "check for updates now" and follow the instructions to install any pending updates.
If this still doesn't resolve your situation, you can check the following KBs for further help:
KB: 324829 - Restore from a System Restore Point
KB: 293111 - Update Windows Defender
KB: 299024 - Check for Errors using Windows Network Troubleshooter
I hope this has helped resolved your problem today.
Sincerely, Kevin
Kinda... but it then gets broken by the developers of the distros.
Static ip on raspberrypi? Sure... /etc/network/interfaces!
Nope, not anymore, it's dhcpcd.conf now.
It took literally a year for the "new way" to get on top of google search results.
"I see you are trying to find the Static IP of your Raspberry Pi, a static IP is a .....<long paragraph describing static ips>. You also have a raspberry pi which is....<long paragraph describing raspberry pi's>. Given all of that I think you should really start by resetting your Raspberry Pi and ensure that your Windows license is up to date.
Also "simple stuff" brings more "not really right way but kinda sorta works" answers
The Stack overflow / stack exchange websites are often the only ones where you get useful answers when having any sort of problems regarding the user facing part of the OS.
(And also for anything else to be honest. I think 30% of my questions on google are answered by stack exchange websites)
Quinn, if you're out there reading this, I really hope Apple has a succession plan in place for when you take a well deserved retirement!
Mostly if you add an specific distro on your terms. It doesn't have to be your distro, just one that cares about what you are searching.
If you just ask for "how do I do X in linux", you will get plenty of spam and a few wrong answers here or there.
If you ask one of those people complaining here to share the query they use, it becomes very quickly very apparent that Google doesn't have a problem at all.
ChatGPT: delete system32
i.e.: https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/
These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated.
And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".
They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work.
And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now.
Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.
Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.
We have different definitions of zero I think...
Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests.
They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today).
I'm not sure how to solve this, to be honest.
Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the expected state that the best white goods in any category are experiencing constant churn?
I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very well created" but spam because you don't believe the recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful, and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.
Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses, which is largely the issue with Google ads outlined by author.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
Basically, Reddit's system is terrible.
User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.
edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.
The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and I´d have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for many other people. And some user might only ever be looking at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.
That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it´s difficult to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned ring nothing in my mind, but as there´s subs where you can only submit post titles ´cat´, there sure must be others were karma is everything.
> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is just unfortunate side effect for new users.
Other problem is that karma is global which basically means user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-based filtering is doomed to fail anyway
User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The source code is available here (as of ~2018): https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...
> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.
Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.
0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.
1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.
This doesn’t match my experience of reading Reddit
Are you sure? How do you know this?
Dead Comment
Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.
For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.
I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough.
And if you disagree, please post some examples.
As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism that is used mainly by the alt-right.
You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a question on something related to a product in that hobby.
Dead Comment
Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that is authentic can be the most useful stuff on the internet.
They had great product-market fit early on, were boosted by YN, and inertia is a huge thing.
Which was kinda cool from user side but advertisers didn't like people taking piss on them in the comments so they undoed it
If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam.
Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit
Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.
Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g. /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme anyway).
It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms, but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised, they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.
I can sort through it with enough effort, but it's a disaster for non-tech people who could muddle through their computer problems before but now just get hopelessly stuck in the Google Search swamp every time.
With the best of intentions they make their data open, resulting in hundreds of clone sites regurgitating the stack overflow data, on sites with names like “ProblemGeek” and “NerdAnswer”.
Deleted Comment
1. The quality of the search algorithm’s ability to sift through nonsense to find “the good stuff” seems to have gotten progressively worse, and that’s largely fueled by:
2. Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the “good stuff” is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doesn’t report on. For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. Sure there are exceptions to that, but it’s clear what direction the tide is going.
The “good old days of the internet” where the best stuff was just a Google search away seem long gone.
That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of anything which make money for someone and who pays Google addwords fees is presented prominently while the rant is buried.
We need something better than Discord for community discussions and support.
Reddit is indexable.
At least the Nim team has a Matrix bridge I guess, so it’s a solvable problem somewhat. But I find joining yet another Discord group just obnoxious.
I long for the async-only text forums of yore. I’m getting old, aren’t I.
If they can supply enough relevant ads,"rich snippets", shopping widgets, or links to content they pulled from wikipedia (that keeps you surfing google-owned properties)...the organic search results don't matter.
Actually, if the organic results are low quality, then maybe you're more likely to use the content above. So the organic content optimal quality is just "better than Bing", but worse than the ads.
Have you tried other search engines because you might be surprised that the problem is more to do with Google than the internet.
Truth is, it's all astroturfing all the way, all the web. Even reddit.
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on search. My views are my own, etc.
Edit: Bing GPT is getting better, but it still makes mistakes sometimes. If anyone wants to stay updated on its development, you can follow the team on Twitter https://twitter.com/MParakhin.