I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. (I've pretested that query, and turns out that there are melting houses all over the world, just gotta look in your neighborhood)
so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...
The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works.
The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.
No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week:
- I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed coherent.
- I asked Google Home "How do I make overnight oats". It replied, "I found a result for [...], should I read it?" then "The first ingredient is Nutella". That's it, that's all it said. I tried the same search on the web, and every result Google result was spam that was 20 paragraphs of inane blog content with a recipe tacked on the end. Again, ChatGPT then gave me a sane, baseline, recipe.
- I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" and then a suggestion an alternative search for "Q: How much caffeine is in an average cup of coffee? A: between 80 to 100 milligrams". It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee.
I'm using Google exactly how their product is training me to use it, but the failure modes are all consistent. Google's AI features has not real understanding of the world, so their instant answers are frequently nonsensical. And Google clearly can't filter out SEO garbage.
Even if they could filter out SEO garbage, Google's early success killed the golden goose. 99% of web publishers are publishing content for Google, not for their readers and web publishing has become a cynically commercial affair. Individual publishers have by and large moved on from the web to other creator-focused platforms. So, the quality and experience of web content is absolute rubbish. Results are filled with cookie banners, ads, signup prompts, verbose SEO filler, poor writing, lack of authority, etc.
If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.
I think Google Search "works" in the same way local newspapers "worked": they provide easy access to what most people want to know in their daily life, including gossip, the weather, the popular events and discussion topics ("melting houses")
If you're a German living in Morocco trying to understand Quebec's immigration policies in the original text you'll be fighting the search engine at every turn.
I think perhaps the problem was that when you were growing up, the Internet had a much higher percentage of authoritative writings related to a subject, and today's Internet looks a lot more like ChatGPT-generated drivel. Google's results might has changed, but I suspect less so than the Internet as a whole. Older Internet content was weird, and often wrong, but it wasn't an endless expanse of nothingness camouflaged to resemble human content.
Yeah, gone are the days when you could enter a range of 16-digit numbers that started with "4", filetype:xls, and it would return a bunch of Excel spreadsheets from businesses that were storing credit card numbers in plaintext cells.
Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search.
I’m sorry but are you trying to speak for all highly educated and technical people?
Because as far as I know, I’m both and I find Google just as good as ever, if not much better.
The only place I see people complaining about Google is Hacker News and certain parts of Reddit and by no means are the opinions on these sites anywhere near universally shared by most people.
And by all means, I think calling yourself highly educated but not being able to adapt slightly when a tool isn’t working right a little rich…
Yes, I have SafeSearch turned OFF. This is happening to pretty much anything that's remotely NSFW on both google.com and amazon.com -- it's getting completely impossible to search for perfectly legal things that are NSFW.
>It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want
I don't think so. I've been using the "full sentence questions" and fuzzy questions since forever, and very seldom use "site:" and other such more formal constraints you mention.
Despite that Google results have been getting worse for the past 5 years at least.
Google does this so people will execute more queries, stay longer on the search results, and see more ads. It's classic monopoly exploitation of abusing a captured user for increased profit.
They're perfectly capable of making things better, it's just more profitable if they don't.
Indeed, I've had to force myself to start searching in full sentences much more as the results from the old method of keyword searching have steadily deteriorated.
I disagree, but it depends on your definition of "working well". Yes, Google works better for my mom these days if you measure whether she is happy with the results she gets. However, the results she gets are mostly misinformation or spam. She just doesn't realize that's the case and is happy with the results regardless.
Measuring whether or not results are relevant to the query is the wrong metric to use. You don't want highly relevant misinformation. You want good information.
I don't think it's a question of levels of formality in your search terms, I think whether you find Google useful depends on what topics you typically search for.
Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent.
If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.
That "finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics" needs to actually exist on the Web and not on the dark Web; that is, linked from somewhere so a search engine can crawl it.
That is generally no longer true, due to human nature and the rise of walled platforms and/or non-Web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Medium, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. Most content is either private, or public as part of an offhand comment/discussion thread. Actual public pages with high quality content are near extinct.
In the few cases where it may be true, the results are sorted for the common denominator, especially since most people who would be looking for such niche information have disabled personalization, so Google can only assume that you are an average person who wants common denominator results.
> Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap
I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.
3 months ago, I needed to figure out how to get the UK government to tell a multinational's pension service managers that I am not subject to taxation on a 35 year old pension plan because I am a US tax resident. It involves first getting the US government to certify my residency to the UK. If that's not niche, I don't know what is.
Google was excellent, the process took me about 2-3 hours to get everything clear in my head, the documents went off in the mail, and the certification has been issued in the UK.
So yeah, I don't know what your experience is, but it's not mine.
I think a really perverse form of the Pareto principle has been working against us since at least the Eternal September. But I get it, I’m never the target audience for anything and everything I like is always discontinued. I wouldn’t have it any other way, as the alternative is quite scary.
All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-understood usage... And getting many things faster and easier than I would :)
I had an enlightment moment last night. I usd to run a photography studio so am pretty handy around a digital camera. I was setting up my phone's main camera with long shutter and trying to steady it to take a photo of a Halloween costume in the dark... When my friend just turned the phone to selfie camera, it automatically used it's screen as 6" flash, and he got a better photo faster and with less thought and kerfuffle. Was he "using it wrong", with lower res camera and single point direct flash (big no no!) and just not thinking it through at all? Maybe? No... He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).
(There are still times and areas where understanding the how and why is useful. But in many mundane daily tasks I'll get beat by people who don't bother :)
> He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).
Knowing how to use a camera is not being stuck in the stone age. His photo was good because the phone automatically had a longer shutter time, did post processing HDR and did light light edits.
If you both set up RAW images on your phone, and put it on lightroom, yours will be editable into a perfect photo, his will be a mess of flash and AI generated artifacts by the phone to make it "just work".
Having things that "just work" is great for everyday tasks, but power users and technical people should still have their tools to do things right. Apple allows for RAW image and videofootage while still having many settings by default for most people. Spotify used to have a ton of cool audiophile options in the settings now its like 3 options and they are all terrible. Google has gone that same way, instead of enabling both, they have cut off power users by focusing everything on "everyday use" which makes their product largely useless outside of some scenarios.
In the early years, technically inclined individuals / power users were the early adopters of the Internet and Google and thus arguably a high percentage of users. So it adapted to that user demographic.
The early demographic (as is so often the case) enabled the revolution, and it became mainstream. And the early demographic is left behind.
Google (with all of it's measuring, automation and various generations of algorithmic and machine accelerated learning evolved from being optimized for early adopters to being optimized for the mainstream.
Yes, they visit one of their three daily social networks, and Google is just a fancy way to type the URL. (A sad ncessity, because the OG address bar has no way of showing ads.)
I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites.
Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.
Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.
The problem I have is that I need a way to just get webpage results.
I did a search on my phone for “what’s the best colossal sword in Elden ring?” just now and I got:
- full screen of those “intelligent” answers that is just naming swords from Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3.
- two SEO spam sites
- two decent results
- a full page of YouTube suggestions
- two more SEO pages
- a section of “people also searched for”
- four more YouTube videos
- another “people also searched for”
- a block for Reddit posts discussion this question (finally what I really kind of wanted, maybe I just stop using Google…)
- about 10+ more decent-looking websites.
Perhaps your assistant is just paid enough not to be annoyed by this garbage way of getting to the answer. And perhaps she doesn’t know what great really feels like. I wonder if there’s a generation of people who only know of the Internet as being this bazaar that’s absolutely glowing with neon ads like some blade runner undercity.
Google predicts too much about local things, in that case it works extremely well in that example, it was in your neighborhood google biased the results to something local and that worked specifically for her and that scenario
This works for most people most of the time and is exactly what we’re finding frustrating
But knowing what you can still use it for is 90% of the battle, my latest common use case is just fact checking AI right now but my primary queries are all to sandboxed language models
>While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about.
I've been doing that "informal" since Google existed - surely it's quite common. You describe what you want in fuzzy terms, and add more qualifiers to narrow it down.
So, "melting house halloween" would be my first search, or rather "melting house halloween <city>". Similarly if I wanted to search for say Eugene Levy and didn't remember his name, I'd write something "comedian big eyebrows" (he's the second match after Groucho) or "big eyebrows american pie" (first match), and so on.
Out of curiosity, how would you search for that house?
I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users.
We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!
I’m in my 40s so Google wasn’t my first search engine but it’s definitely been what I’ve used the most. And I do think it has changed similar how to you describe it. But I see the change more as:
You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad.
So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.
Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but for me the poignant part is that she stopped engaging with you and reached for the phone, mid conversation. I've noticed this too. And before they even reach for their phone, it's as if you've lost them already, because they're thinking of searching and which app/keywords to use etc.
It's like their trust of the Internet is 100x higher than someone recounting something they've seen with their own eyes, and the value of knowing a bit of information or getting a dopamine hit is way way higher than having an engaging conversation with someone
DuckDuckGo also suffered from the SEO infection, but recently - the last week or so, perhaps - it has improved. SEO probably still controls it, but when I put in "-Amazon" it does not present Amazon findings - remarkable! I'm also seeing a significant number of "no result" results. It isn't perfect but it's much better than six months ago.
unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive"
so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query"
it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does.
I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.
Is that "advertising" though? Google Maps is an index: you enter a query, like "Thai restaurant near $location", and it shows you Thai restaurants in that location. Then, you can look at some of those restaurants' listings and see photos (usually uploaded by customers, but some from the business), pictures of menus (same), opening hours, a link to their website, etc.
I don't see how any of that qualifies as "advertising"; it's just a business directory. It certainly isn't "unsolicited advertising". The same goes for the old Yellow Pages: it was a business directory (though it had ads too). Businesses had to pay to be listed in it, but that's the cost of doing business: if people can't find you, you're not going to make any money.
I think when people say they hate advertising, what they really mean is unsolicited ads. If you're looking for a particular business, why wouldn't you want some info about them, or about the choices available?
When i'm in my car, the only thing i use google maps for is "yellow pages" - get me the phone number, and about 20% of the time, the hours of operation.
In fact, when i am at home, and i need a phone number, i go to google maps. But i do use the maps as maps when i am not in my car.
I don't google as much, but I regular develop my random thoughts like that with ChatGPT. If I heard about your melting house, I'd try to generate it's picture with Dalle.
SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents.
Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day.
Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.
The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.
I never thought that SEO was dying, quite the contrary, I think a lot people learned how to game Google. That’s one of the reasons why I think helpful results on Google are dying (the other reason is ads, of course).
I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head:
Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong
some exec: It's the same thing!
I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicting Google is going to end - yeah all great companies eventually come to an end - if you want to be insightful, you actually have to be on time with it.
You can’t be ahead of the curve without thinking things that are very different from the current reality.
That said, a lot of different thinking ends up not going anywhere. Only time will sort out the difference.
I will say I agree with the above comment about the current viability of SEO. It’s still very effective. Google is still very heavily used.
One thing to keep in mind is that while organic search might be slipping, other things are slipping at least as much. The slow death of 3rd party cookies is eating away at ad network efficiency. Organic social media reach depends increasingly on influencers, which is a highly fractured and opaque marketplace (inefficient at scale). Email is effective but getting email addresses remains difficult. Trust in press and institutions (aka earned media) is way down. It’s hard out there for marketing!
Politely, and with due respect, I consider myself "out of touch" for most things that I don't do on a day to day basis or those that are NOT my livelihood.
The whole thing about Google selling search terms to the highest bidder is exactly why it doesn't work for me as a user. I want the thing I'm looking for in my area with the best quality and best price. Usually the shops that pays the most for the search term are nothing to do with that.
I've stopped using Google altogether for things I want to buy. I only search directly in the shops now.
Could we speak? I run a bootstrapped company for more than two decades and [natural] SEO explained part of our growth. Nowadays it is not working as expected after trying a lot of stuff and agencies. It feels like we can write articles all day without moving the needle except peaks sharing in Reddit that go down quickly.
It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics. I understand we are in a niche market but we have real work that differentiate for the few competitors.
I unfortunately watched first-hand a company come up with a mediocre "app" that had barely any content. Think short-form content and random videos moderately glued to some topic written by a bunch of low-wage "content writers".
This company then picked a biggish ad-spend budget, spent it on Google, FB and other ad companies (digital agencies). And the users just started rolling in over the course of months. The increase in users, let them "monetize" by convincing "sponsors" to "pay" for content on this new "platform", which netted them a big chunk of profit and more money for more ad-spend which made more users come.
Next up, they will brand and sell this platform which has "X-millions of users", even though most are one-off users, barely any repeat or long-term users, etc.
It's like some sort of endless shit-peddling cycle driven by marketing, and it was frankly disgusting to watch from the sides. Their stated goal was actually noble, uplifting, etc. But all they ended up doing was building a "herd" of users that they could monetize and use for marketing other projects, and helped no one except for their global brand, and their owners.
Sorry about the rant.
In summary: Yes, just get an ad-agency and pay them to help you get users. At least you have a valid product I assume and genuine value to provide in exchange for money.
> still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.
The more Google trains its normal users that “generic queries will get you spoon-fed generic-ness, so you have to be specific to get what you want…” the more valuable placement on long-tail keywords will become. People aren’t going to stop searching, they’ll just hate Google more when doing so. And they’ll begrudgingly adapt.
The SEO industry will be fine. Startups that naturally breathe long-tail SEO will excel. Incumbent advertisers will see keyword costs rising across the board, though, and perhaps pass costs to customers. That’s not inherently a bad thing - but there’s a lot more to the debate there than just this aspect.
I'd be surprised if business wasn't booming. SEO is not a one-time cost. Google continuously changes the algorithm for search results and agencies stay afloat due to this.
Paid ads on the other hand are pretty much set-up once and you feed in the ROAS to Google and they optimize on that. With Performance MAX, users have even less control.
OP's response is akin to a shovel seller saying business is good when people are saying the gold has run dry.
SEO still isn't dying, but low DR niche sites built for Amazon commissions and display ads, where the owner & writers have little- to no domain expertise, have been holed below the waterline by Google's latest updates. Correctly so IMO.
From what I've heard, ecommerce, small business SEO etc. are unaffected.
"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed. And what really did this is mobile devices. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I do miss the old vbulletin discussion days.
There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing new replacement site.
It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.
I think the best path to a "Google replacement" is probably to reinvent Yahoo or dmoz. You'd still have to human curate the worthwhile sites through a ton of SEO spam and, if you go the dmoz route of volunteer curators, that's an attack vector for spammers but I think it'd be much more manageable than trying to build an index of the entire web and search it. A new general purpose web directory would also help mitigate probably the biggest harm that Google's algorithm has caused to the web: the death of the "links" page as a standard part of a web site due to sites trying to increase their pagerank by reducing outbound links.
The only way to make a better replacement is to make a 100 competing replacements each with substantial market share. They don't even have to be better implemented than Google, getting rid of market dominance alone would improve results because SEO assholes wouldn't have time to optimize for all 100.
Your perception is how the vast majority of people see the web. But you're completely wrong about "nothing out there" and "Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed." Just because you're trapped in the gardens doesn't mean there aren't communities of people who never went in them in the first place.
Yes, there's a thick layer of for-profit walled garden crap on top but the actual web of websites (not applications) is still out there and it's bigger than ever despite being proportionally much smaller compared to the smartphone/megacorp users.
It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist everything to do with them, delete all their accounts and salt their persistent data profiles. Most of them are abroad and will struggle to do anything about it. After all, occasional Gmail or Android developer bans are meted out with various levels of capriciousness.
I guess it's good that they're not obviously going Judge Dredd left, right and centre, but it's still surprising to me that you can run up to them, slap them in the virtual face and stay online to do it again.
Or perhaps it is not messing with the short-term bottom line because the SEO sites are crawling with ads? And until ChatGPT what were you going to do? Use Bing?
SEO doesn't mess with the bottom line though. If anything, it could improve the bottom line by making the ads look more attractive if the organic search results have all been polluted to hell.
Unpopular opinion: Without SEO polluting the algorithm, ads would be worthless, as the search algorithm would do a good enough job of finding the correct results.
Their lengthy apology is.... I don't know how to describe it. It reminds me of relationship I had, in a bad way.
The part where they go on to say "We messed up" cracked me up. You don't "mess up" when you are fully aware of your actions, and perform them as planned.
They'll only start noticing when it's too late. For now, I assume, the bling is still flowing enough to be as addictive to them as the SEO spam is for most.
I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI-generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold.
Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall" and I find that spot on.
The Dionysian appetites of adtech will be its own downfall.
People keep saying the Internet is going to be flooded by AI-generated content. Is it going to be any different than the million Wikipedia/StackOverflow re-skins? A bunch of trash sites we learn to ignore in our search results?
Generative AI can also increase the amount of good content, too. If I knew that a particular human vouched for an AI-generated code snippet, I would trust it as much as a hand-written StackOverflow answer. You can bring the entire arsenal of community and reputation-building to have more people vouching for answers and double-checking others.
That's why the future of StackOverflow is more like Phind, the code-specific LLM that looks like a search engine. StackOverflow already has the community. Now, they need to keep people there to check AI-generated answers.
And there's second order benefits, too. You could have AI check old answers, even human ones, on a regular basis. Imagine if an answer is marked "obsolete" because the AI found a more modern solution, or if it found a security issue.
" A bunch of trash sites we learn to ignore in our search results?" Exactly. But when/if that stack shifts the signal to noise ratio at escape velocity into a toilet, behaviors will change.
I'm just curious as to what that might look like. We've already seen plenty of examples as to what folks will do when an online option becomes sour/untenable...new ones arrive. Sometimes they look like old options repackaged. Sometimes they are radically new.
Take as axiom that there exists infinite content of apparently human-readable stuff in the universe at random IP addresses. It is grey static, that maybe at one point in the past used to be ordered information. Now, all entropy.
A human managed and manually curated safe zone of information is the refuge. Real people had real discussions and votes and decisions to result in what you see. This is true with Reddit to a lesser but still useful extent. Democracy can be gamed, but it's 1000x better than Engagement Signal Ranking that drives Google or Meta's products.
The same principles apply to education, science, and political organization of human enterprise.
The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.
Which is ironic, considering the Internet was also "ruined" in 1993 when ISPs gave everyone Usenet access, flooding the Reddit equivalent of the day (if Reddit were the only real forum) with anonymous users who cared not for cultural norms. Prior to that, it was mostly people posting under their real name with their real workplace or college in their email address.
They were using the internet before 2008 or so but mainly for sending and receiving emails. Younger people who weren't that into computers mainly used them to message their friends on AIM and pirate music on Napster then Kazaa then Limewire (the platforms kept getting shut down). In the post-2008 world, Facebook replaced email and AIM and Spotify/Netflix replaced piracy. The difference is, the people who used to just use the internet for email now spend far more time online because Facebook is designed to be addicting.
The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever. Is it universally better in every way ? No. Could it be better in many important ways? Yes. But hyperbolic statements like "the Internet was ruined" is just nostalgia and hyperbole.
Not quite. I think "surfing the web" has become a worse experience now than in the past. There are some "internet connected" experiences such as Wikipedia which work well. But the biggest change is that the internet has moved away from being an exploration space to a push content space. The hyperlinking got reduced because tech companies didn't want people to leave their platform and that just made the culture very pushy and clingy.
> The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever.
Without proof, that's just as hyperbolic as the post you're criticizing.
I remember friends getting harassed online, where it was one of the few places they could be themselves (for instance, a good friend of mine was openly gay online well before he was in person) and the internet seemingly didn't take kindly to this in alot of corners (gaming for starters)
That said, they were able to find some community that didn't exist the same locally, so the vastness is the upside here in that respect.
Absolutely. As a homosexual or transgender you would be ripped apart online. But you also strangely learnt to fight back and stand for yourself. It was easier because you were anonymous and you were not always online.
> You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally.
You can't even really do that on HN without getting your account deleted. I don't think the blame belongs solely on Facebook and Linkedin so much as anyone who has any kind of power online using it on others as they see fit.
Sometimes people want to say some pretty antisocial things, so it's not too surprising if people tasked with "keeping the peace" are trigger happy with bans. Presence in a community is a privilege, not a right.
That said I also believe you are correct, even small degrees of power can corrupt and being granted power over conversation means your biases may lead to abuse if you don't agree with a view point or the person holding that view.
if you want that, go on reddit or 4chan or twitter or hacker news or even instagram to some degree. reddit, instagram and hacker news don't even require email validation afaik
Have you tried running an anonymous Facebook account in the past decade? Facebook lets you use it for a few weeks (or months), then suddenly refuses to let you in unless you provide identifying information that it never asked for before, and refuses to give you your data back until you “verify it's you” (might be quoting Google or Microsoft there, but Facebook has similar wording) even though they have no records with which to compare it to, so that can't possibly be a valid justification.
It is against linkedin's policies to use a fake name. While facebook accounts require a real name you can create additonal profiles that use pseudodnyms and can not be traced back to your real name.
My first job out of college was writing SEO articles for [unnamed failed startup]. It was exactly the sort of daft, fluffy, "let me Google that for you" content you would think a 20 something SEO writer would come up with.
And it's these kinds of fluffy, non-clickbait content that people are complaining about when they talk about Google's search results these days. I don't think the real problem are two-bit hustlers sneaking in bait-and-switch content here and there - it's that Google's own rules encourage mediocre and non-authoritative content.
So one of the reasons people gravitate towards ChatGPT (or, to a similar degree TikTok) is that both will give you strong and authoritative advice (even if it's wrong!)
I don't necessarily believe the internet is worse today (if you have any false nostalgia, try searching a forum for an answer to a technical problem). But experts who were actually putting out good content and information were consistently getting ripped off by knockoffs for decades and we shouldn't be surprised that nobody is contributing anymore.
People are still contributing at a higher rate but google isn't including them. That's the difference not that suddenly professionals are fleeing because of something that has been happened since the beginning.
I dunno. In the few areas I think I know something, I contribute on GitHub and... Thats about it?
Most of what I am interested in has moved to Discord or Telegram, or rotted away in deteriorating subreddits. A few others niches moved to YouTube, a spammy one way window. Any contribution I make just feels like shouting into the void (and not even the satisfying kind like here on HN).
Readit News
so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...
The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.
- I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed coherent.
- I asked Google Home "How do I make overnight oats". It replied, "I found a result for [...], should I read it?" then "The first ingredient is Nutella". That's it, that's all it said. I tried the same search on the web, and every result Google result was spam that was 20 paragraphs of inane blog content with a recipe tacked on the end. Again, ChatGPT then gave me a sane, baseline, recipe.
- I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" and then a suggestion an alternative search for "Q: How much caffeine is in an average cup of coffee? A: between 80 to 100 milligrams". It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee.
I'm using Google exactly how their product is training me to use it, but the failure modes are all consistent. Google's AI features has not real understanding of the world, so their instant answers are frequently nonsensical. And Google clearly can't filter out SEO garbage.
Even if they could filter out SEO garbage, Google's early success killed the golden goose. 99% of web publishers are publishing content for Google, not for their readers and web publishing has become a cynically commercial affair. Individual publishers have by and large moved on from the web to other creator-focused platforms. So, the quality and experience of web content is absolute rubbish. Results are filled with cookie banners, ads, signup prompts, verbose SEO filler, poor writing, lack of authority, etc.
If you're a German living in Morocco trying to understand Quebec's immigration policies in the original text you'll be fighting the search engine at every turn.
I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1].
I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples.
Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449
sighs wistfully
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...
Because as far as I know, I’m both and I find Google just as good as ever, if not much better.
The only place I see people complaining about Google is Hacker News and certain parts of Reddit and by no means are the opinions on these sites anywhere near universally shared by most people.
And by all means, I think calling yourself highly educated but not being able to adapt slightly when a tool isn’t working right a little rich…
No results: "vector plus phallophile" / "vector plus phallophile reviews" / "vector plus phallophilereviews" / "phallophilereviews.com vector plus"
vs.
Correct results: "site:phallophilereviews.com vector plus"
Yes, I have SafeSearch turned OFF. This is happening to pretty much anything that's remotely NSFW on both google.com and amazon.com -- it's getting completely impossible to search for perfectly legal things that are NSFW.
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I don't think so. I've been using the "full sentence questions" and fuzzy questions since forever, and very seldom use "site:" and other such more formal constraints you mention.
Despite that Google results have been getting worse for the past 5 years at least.
This would be true if we could exclude commercial results. SEO is absolutely destroying search quality.
for some definition of better that is not "the results are more relevant than before"
They're perfectly capable of making things better, it's just more profitable if they don't.
uhh....
Measuring whether or not results are relevant to the query is the wrong metric to use. You don't want highly relevant misinformation. You want good information.
They should drop the charade and do a directory listing instead, like the "portal" pages of yore.
Dead Comment
Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent.
If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.
That is generally no longer true, due to human nature and the rise of walled platforms and/or non-Web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Medium, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. Most content is either private, or public as part of an offhand comment/discussion thread. Actual public pages with high quality content are near extinct.
In the few cases where it may be true, the results are sorted for the common denominator, especially since most people who would be looking for such niche information have disabled personalization, so Google can only assume that you are an average person who wants common denominator results.
I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.
Google was excellent, the process took me about 2-3 hours to get everything clear in my head, the documents went off in the mail, and the certification has been issued in the UK.
So yeah, I don't know what your experience is, but it's not mine.
All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-understood usage... And getting many things faster and easier than I would :)
I had an enlightment moment last night. I usd to run a photography studio so am pretty handy around a digital camera. I was setting up my phone's main camera with long shutter and trying to steady it to take a photo of a Halloween costume in the dark... When my friend just turned the phone to selfie camera, it automatically used it's screen as 6" flash, and he got a better photo faster and with less thought and kerfuffle. Was he "using it wrong", with lower res camera and single point direct flash (big no no!) and just not thinking it through at all? Maybe? No... He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-).
(There are still times and areas where understanding the how and why is useful. But in many mundane daily tasks I'll get beat by people who don't bother :)
Knowing how to use a camera is not being stuck in the stone age. His photo was good because the phone automatically had a longer shutter time, did post processing HDR and did light light edits.
If you both set up RAW images on your phone, and put it on lightroom, yours will be editable into a perfect photo, his will be a mess of flash and AI generated artifacts by the phone to make it "just work".
Having things that "just work" is great for everyday tasks, but power users and technical people should still have their tools to do things right. Apple allows for RAW image and videofootage while still having many settings by default for most people. Spotify used to have a ton of cool audiophile options in the settings now its like 3 options and they are all terrible. Google has gone that same way, instead of enabling both, they have cut off power users by focusing everything on "everyday use" which makes their product largely useless outside of some scenarios.
In the early years, technically inclined individuals / power users were the early adopters of the Internet and Google and thus arguably a high percentage of users. So it adapted to that user demographic.
The early demographic (as is so often the case) enabled the revolution, and it became mainstream. And the early demographic is left behind.
Google (with all of it's measuring, automation and various generations of algorithmic and machine accelerated learning evolved from being optimized for early adopters to being optimized for the mainstream.
Maybe some of these links will help? ;-)
https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenage...
We know.
Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.
- full screen of those “intelligent” answers that is just naming swords from Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3.
- two SEO spam sites
- two decent results
- a full page of YouTube suggestions
- two more SEO pages
- a section of “people also searched for”
- four more YouTube videos
- another “people also searched for”
- a block for Reddit posts discussion this question (finally what I really kind of wanted, maybe I just stop using Google…)
- about 10+ more decent-looking websites.
Perhaps your assistant is just paid enough not to be annoyed by this garbage way of getting to the answer. And perhaps she doesn’t know what great really feels like. I wonder if there’s a generation of people who only know of the Internet as being this bazaar that’s absolutely glowing with neon ads like some blade runner undercity.
Top result: article from GameRant on the best colossal weapons (I have no idea what this means)
6 "intelligent" answers, the first of which when expanded lists the "Elden Ring: All 11 Colossal Swords, Ranked By Physical Strength"
Article from The Gamer called "Elden Ring: 14 Best Colossal Swords, Ranked"
4 YT videos
Reddit block
....
The problem is Google monetizes search terms and thus show the highest bidders and not the most relevant results.
This manifests itself the most for things people want to sell (products or services)
This works for most people most of the time and is exactly what we’re finding frustrating
But knowing what you can still use it for is 90% of the battle, my latest common use case is just fact checking AI right now but my primary queries are all to sandboxed language models
I've been doing that "informal" since Google existed - surely it's quite common. You describe what you want in fuzzy terms, and add more qualifiers to narrow it down.
So, "melting house halloween" would be my first search, or rather "melting house halloween <city>". Similarly if I wanted to search for say Eugene Levy and didn't remember his name, I'd write something "comedian big eyebrows" (he's the second match after Groucho) or "big eyebrows american pie" (first match), and so on.
Out of curiosity, how would you search for that house?
I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users.
We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!
Those still work, don't they? I use site: all the time.
You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad.
So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.
It's like their trust of the Internet is 100x higher than someone recounting something they've seen with their own eyes, and the value of knowing a bit of information or getting a dopamine hit is way way higher than having an engaging conversation with someone
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so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query"
it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does.
I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.
But I'm also old and remember that the yellow pages used to bring in billions of revenue. Have things really changed on a fundamental level?
I don't see how any of that qualifies as "advertising"; it's just a business directory. It certainly isn't "unsolicited advertising". The same goes for the old Yellow Pages: it was a business directory (though it had ads too). Businesses had to pay to be listed in it, but that's the cost of doing business: if people can't find you, you're not going to make any money.
I think when people say they hate advertising, what they really mean is unsolicited ads. If you're looking for a particular business, why wouldn't you want some info about them, or about the choices available?
In fact, when i am at home, and i need a phone number, i go to google maps. But i do use the maps as maps when i am not in my car.
> I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc.
Checks out.
Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day.
Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.
The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.
Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?
Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong
some exec: It's the same thing!
I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicting Google is going to end - yeah all great companies eventually come to an end - if you want to be insightful, you actually have to be on time with it.
That said, a lot of different thinking ends up not going anywhere. Only time will sort out the difference.
I will say I agree with the above comment about the current viability of SEO. It’s still very effective. Google is still very heavily used.
One thing to keep in mind is that while organic search might be slipping, other things are slipping at least as much. The slow death of 3rd party cookies is eating away at ad network efficiency. Organic social media reach depends increasingly on influencers, which is a highly fractured and opaque marketplace (inefficient at scale). Email is effective but getting email addresses remains difficult. Trust in press and institutions (aka earned media) is way down. It’s hard out there for marketing!
I've stopped using Google altogether for things I want to buy. I only search directly in the shops now.
Could we speak? I run a bootstrapped company for more than two decades and [natural] SEO explained part of our growth. Nowadays it is not working as expected after trying a lot of stuff and agencies. It feels like we can write articles all day without moving the needle except peaks sharing in Reddit that go down quickly.
It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics. I understand we are in a niche market but we have real work that differentiate for the few competitors.
A 30' call will work. Are you available?
This company then picked a biggish ad-spend budget, spent it on Google, FB and other ad companies (digital agencies). And the users just started rolling in over the course of months. The increase in users, let them "monetize" by convincing "sponsors" to "pay" for content on this new "platform", which netted them a big chunk of profit and more money for more ad-spend which made more users come.
Next up, they will brand and sell this platform which has "X-millions of users", even though most are one-off users, barely any repeat or long-term users, etc.
It's like some sort of endless shit-peddling cycle driven by marketing, and it was frankly disgusting to watch from the sides. Their stated goal was actually noble, uplifting, etc. But all they ended up doing was building a "herd" of users that they could monetize and use for marketing other projects, and helped no one except for their global brand, and their owners.
Sorry about the rant.
In summary: Yes, just get an ad-agency and pay them to help you get users. At least you have a valid product I assume and genuine value to provide in exchange for money.
The plan is working.
So you’re the reason why search results are spam nowadays
The more Google trains its normal users that “generic queries will get you spoon-fed generic-ness, so you have to be specific to get what you want…” the more valuable placement on long-tail keywords will become. People aren’t going to stop searching, they’ll just hate Google more when doing so. And they’ll begrudgingly adapt.
The SEO industry will be fine. Startups that naturally breathe long-tail SEO will excel. Incumbent advertisers will see keyword costs rising across the board, though, and perhaps pass costs to customers. That’s not inherently a bad thing - but there’s a lot more to the debate there than just this aspect.
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I can believe that. But it also has the equivalent of stage 1 or 2 cancer.
Paid ads on the other hand are pretty much set-up once and you feed in the ROAS to Google and they optimize on that. With Performance MAX, users have even less control.
OP's response is akin to a shovel seller saying business is good when people are saying the gold has run dry.
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It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.
Yes, there's a thick layer of for-profit walled garden crap on top but the actual web of websites (not applications) is still out there and it's bigger than ever despite being proportionally much smaller compared to the smartphone/megacorp users.
Games are the place to go and 'show up'.
The internet is no longer used for sharing relatable information. It saturated and walled off valuable information a decade ago.
/hacker news
I guess it's good that they're not obviously going Judge Dredd left, right and centre, but it's still surprising to me that you can run up to them, slap them in the virtual face and stay online to do it again.
Or perhaps it is not messing with the short-term bottom line because the SEO sites are crawling with ads? And until ChatGPT what were you going to do? Use Bing?
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plumm...
The part where they go on to say "We messed up" cracked me up. You don't "mess up" when you are fully aware of your actions, and perform them as planned.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658
That could be because their interests are aligned. Google makes money from ad spend, not from delivering useful results to users.
Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover of Google by DoubleClick is the Fall" and I find that spot on.
The Dionysian appetites of adtech will be its own downfall.
Generative AI can also increase the amount of good content, too. If I knew that a particular human vouched for an AI-generated code snippet, I would trust it as much as a hand-written StackOverflow answer. You can bring the entire arsenal of community and reputation-building to have more people vouching for answers and double-checking others.
That's why the future of StackOverflow is more like Phind, the code-specific LLM that looks like a search engine. StackOverflow already has the community. Now, they need to keep people there to check AI-generated answers.
And there's second order benefits, too. You could have AI check old answers, even human ones, on a regular basis. Imagine if an answer is marked "obsolete" because the AI found a more modern solution, or if it found a security issue.
I'm just curious as to what that might look like. We've already seen plenty of examples as to what folks will do when an online option becomes sour/untenable...new ones arrive. Sometimes they look like old options repackaged. Sometimes they are radically new.
Call it 'airank' maybe?
Take as axiom that there exists infinite content of apparently human-readable stuff in the universe at random IP addresses. It is grey static, that maybe at one point in the past used to be ordered information. Now, all entropy.
A human managed and manually curated safe zone of information is the refuge. Real people had real discussions and votes and decisions to result in what you see. This is true with Reddit to a lesser but still useful extent. Democracy can be gamed, but it's 1000x better than Engagement Signal Ranking that drives Google or Meta's products.
The same principles apply to education, science, and political organization of human enterprise.
Basically, institutionalize your info-world.
probably a "exploit" trigger. hard to think how reality and predictive power are going to be mediated through some kind of source index.
Without proof, that's just as hyperbolic as the post you're criticizing.
I remember friends getting harassed online, where it was one of the few places they could be themselves (for instance, a good friend of mine was openly gay online well before he was in person) and the internet seemingly didn't take kindly to this in alot of corners (gaming for starters)
That said, they were able to find some community that didn't exist the same locally, so the vastness is the upside here in that respect.
You can't even really do that on HN without getting your account deleted. I don't think the blame belongs solely on Facebook and Linkedin so much as anyone who has any kind of power online using it on others as they see fit.
That said I also believe you are correct, even small degrees of power can corrupt and being granted power over conversation means your biases may lead to abuse if you don't agree with a view point or the person holding that view.
The old internet is dead and most people and organizations abhor the idea of anonymity and anonymous (free) speech.
And it's these kinds of fluffy, non-clickbait content that people are complaining about when they talk about Google's search results these days. I don't think the real problem are two-bit hustlers sneaking in bait-and-switch content here and there - it's that Google's own rules encourage mediocre and non-authoritative content.
So one of the reasons people gravitate towards ChatGPT (or, to a similar degree TikTok) is that both will give you strong and authoritative advice (even if it's wrong!)
I don't necessarily believe the internet is worse today (if you have any false nostalgia, try searching a forum for an answer to a technical problem). But experts who were actually putting out good content and information were consistently getting ripped off by knockoffs for decades and we shouldn't be surprised that nobody is contributing anymore.
Most of what I am interested in has moved to Discord or Telegram, or rotted away in deteriorating subreddits. A few others niches moved to YouTube, a spammy one way window. Any contribution I make just feels like shouting into the void (and not even the satisfying kind like here on HN).
Is this not a common sentiment?
Some thoughts about The Verge article on SEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104407