Comment by simula67 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simula67 | Hacker News Reader

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> Even worse are image results.

> The problem is that search engine results – especially on mobile – are not how you find that any longer.

I think the biggest story of the web in the last decade is the slow but steady decline of Google.

Google has fallen victim to spam. Goodhart's Law wins in the end. Almost every site on Google's front page is there because people have spent a lot of time and money optimizing it for search engine ranking. But just because a page is good at gaming Google's algorithm does not mean it is the most useful anymore. Google put up a good fight, but it seems like they have finally lost.

It also seems like the company has lost it's way. I was recently using Yandex mobile browser to browse some Russian sites and it can translate text inside images and now even voice inside videos. Chrome on the other hand often fails to detect other languages and therefore does not translate even text. It feels like even 15 years ago (when I was becoming a Google fanboy, I have since grown out of it) I would have expected Google to get there before some obscure Russian company. I get it, Russian web is smaller than English web and therefore it is probably more useful for Yandex, but Google's revenues are many times that of Yandex, they should ideally be getting there by now.

> Google has fallen victim to spam.

Google is intentionally dropping five year old results from the index and prioritizing five hour old results. They have complete control over whether they're doing this. Part of SEO is making five year old results look like five hour old results, which is something that Google did to spammers, not something that spammers did to google.

Google has decided that it is more profitable to make sure that somebody who types "chicken" into the search box gets either chicken restaurants nearby, or listicles and video covering the story on the news today about a chicken that scared away a bear. They've given up on depth.

lol, on a lark, I did type chicken into Google, and surprise, I got: 4 maps suggestions for local chicken restaurants, 4 news stories suggestions about Wendy's introducing some new chicken food item, a complete sidebar explaining the nutritional properties of chicken, including images of chicken dead, skinned, cooked, fried, battered, recipes for chicken, a link to KFC....and one link buried in the middle: a link to the Wikipedia article on chicken. This is running an adblocker, by the way.

I mean, forgive me for thinking that "chicken" is actually a term referring to live birds. Instead, humanity's view is clearly very distorted by our stomachs.

One does not use the internet for facts. One uses the internet to be directed towards where to spend their money and/or time as sold to the highest bidder, who is just looking to line their pockets with money--a digital sugar rush for digital stomachs. The internet doesn't think with its brain, it doesn't tell you what you want to know, it thinks with its stomach and expects you to as well.

Is the 5 year old result actually still available though? Link rot is real, and there are lots of pages that don't make it 5 years.

These pages die from starvation. If people can't get to your page even if they specifically google the name of your page, eventually you'll shut it down.

I understand why pages disappear. I'm just saying the expecting a search engine to return a result from 5 years ago is kind of a bad metric to be using in whatever point was attempting to be made.

I don't want results to be dropped arbitrarily. It kills all of the good content. I don't need a book to change every week to remain relevant.

edit: and to directly address what you said, excusing a search engine's loss of content because sites have disappeared because the search engine dropped them is circular.

I thought about this too.

After testing with marginalia I found that much of it is still there - it is just suppressed by Google and Bing.

That is interesting. I would have imagined honest link rot being a much larger problem.

My feeling is that the Lindy effect largely holds: The expected lifetime of any given document is proportional to its age. Old websites for the most part seem extremely stable. Young websites change drastically and often.

I’d love to agree with you, but are you sure the depth is there? Where is all the quality content about “chicken”? Where are the legions of chicken experts creating high quality content? We might be starting from the (slightly) false premise that the internet is full of quality content.

There's plenty of quality content about chickens on the internet. Permaculture forums especially love poultry. You can read about how to raise, breed, and slaughter chickens, different varieties of chicken, and how to incorporate chickens into your lifestyle. This type of quality content was easy to find back in the day, now you have to know what you're looking for, and where to look for it.

I feel like people on HN are really detached from reality sometimes. For 99% of people, typing "chicken" into Google search means they want chicken, or don't know what a chicken is. Does anyone here actually expect the average person to be looking for in-depth guides on how to raise a chicken? That's like saying the "hotel" query should return compelling information about the supply chain and inner workings of the hotel industry.

Google's "problem" is that they need to cater to the most common intents per query (see: lowest common denominator), and believe it or not, those intents are usually not biased toward in-depth educational content - isn't this why HN is such a nice niche?

Google could think about adding a different search result sorting option that attempts to prioritize high quality, thought provoking, or otherwise educational content above all else, but it makes sense to me why their primary search ranking algorithm works the way it does.

Spot on. I have an in-depth article about a niche topic and ranked on place 1-3 for many years. Everybody who typed the short keyword would want an in-depth explanation.

These days, the search volume went way up and my article went down to 6-10. The first three spots merely give a rough explanation of my in-depth topic. Quite insulting actually.

But upon further reflection I realized that most people these days only want a rough definition and no in-depth explanation. Google gives this to them.

The people who used to search for my keyword now add 2-3 more words to get to my in-depth article. The typical long tail.

What I find worrisome is that sometimes, the long tail query I use to find quality content gives me the same results as the unspecific short query. Some stuff is close to impossible to find without knowing a very topic-specific thing.

Ah, chicken. The quintessential centerpiece of a weeknight meal. I fondly remember my childhood in Kentucky, rolling in a pile of leaves until the warm, scrumptious smell of roast chicken wafted out from the kitchen into my eager young nostrils. I can go on for hours about this, and I will, but I knew that someday billions of people would lovingly read this long, overcooked story before dinner because it was their inner heart's desire.

Preheat oven, insert chicken.

The second order effect is intense competition to create lowest common denominator content. You're right that it would be nice for Google to separate it from better content, but this leads to the yet deeper problem--there isn't enough money in that idea.

There's no quality content for "chicken," in fact I'd say that local chicken restaurants and funny animal news are the best content for "chicken." That's why I don't want every search to favor new material and drop old material. The problem that I have with Google is that they know that most searches will be simple and timely [edit: and badly phrased and nonspecific], and they've just ignored everything else.

I honestly have no idea what the "best" results would be for chicken. Maybe the Wikipedia entry? Not sure what else. It's sort of just a lazy search.

>It's sort of just a lazy search.

A bad search deserves a bad result. If you walked up to me and just said one word "chicken", I'd be insulted. If you said one word "chicken" while pointing at your mouth, I'd perhaps think you spoke little English and wanted a place to eat chicken. Providing a bit more info is useful to get decent results.

As Jerry Maguire once said, "help me help you"

Well, if not all of humanity’s knowledge is freely and openly available on the web, how can we expect a search engine—any search engine—to provide a meaningful answer? I remember when Google aimed at scanning and indexing entire libraries, but then they had to stop due to copyright laws.

> Where is all the quality content about “chicken”? Where are the legions of chicken experts creating high quality content?

Try something like this (just imagine a word or two that would appear in quality content about chicken and put it into marginalia):

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=poultry+farming&pr...

> We might be starting from the (slightly) false premise that the internet is full of quality content.

Well maybe it isn't but at least using Marginalia I get more of the results I want for these kinds of searches.

(I've also had good luck with a query about git a few weeks ago and yesterday with one about kubernetes.)

You also maybe navigate a larger web with different needs.

What knowledge cant be found with appending "wiki" to any keyword, what person cant you find with linkedin, what movie cant you find on a private bt tracker, what news cant you have from reddit ?

I think people over estimate what the web was before Google and under estimate how much easier it s been to find anything.

Name me one thing you struggled to find on google and Ill probably be able to describe you the nightmare it would have been 20 years ago

Google me up a review of a mechanical keyboard that isn't sponsored, doesn't have ads, isn't on reddit, doesn't have affiliate links, and isn't trying to sell me anything.

Seems pretty useful and non-spammy to me:

Edit: This is a better example: https://www.mechtype.com/category/reviews/

Would you expect someone selling a product to give an accurate review? They have a conflict of interest. Give me a review from someone who does not have a conflict of interest.

I'll show you what I'm looking for:

https://labs.tomasino.org/mechanical-keyboards/

https://www.paritybit.ca/blog/vortex-vibe-keyboard

https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Mechanical_keyboards

https://www.vegard.net/the-ultimate-keyboard-part-2-switches...

http://boxbase.org/entries/2015/nov/30/ergodox/

Where are those types of search results?

They have links for every single mechanical keyboard they review or list. What is their incentive to give better reviews to some than others?

This is probably a better example: https://www.mechtype.com/xiaomi-yuemi-pro-mk02-review/#more-...

There are some basic economic realities underpinning why most people take the time to create content like this. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that just because someone expects to make a small amount of money from creating a review like that (with either affiliate links or buy links), that that person's opinion is inherently at conflict with honesty just because there's a monetary element. It may be true for many sites and many people, but it's pretty straightforward to parse whether someone is writing a review earnestly and passionately rather than for $.

> They have links for every single mechanical keyboard they review or list. What is their incentive to give better reviews to some than others?

Given Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is shit), why are most of the reviews 4/5 or above?

> There are some basic economic realties underpinning why people take the time to create content like this. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that just because someone expects to make a small amount of money from creating a review like that, that that person's opinion is inherently at conflict with honesty just because there's a monetary element.

I updated the post with several examples of the type of content I want you to find.

> This is probably a better example: https://www.mechtype.com/[...]

This one has affiliate links

>I updated the post with several examples of the type of content I want you to find.

The point I'm making is that I think your underlying premise, that all sites which have any kind of monetary element to them are fundamentally corrupt in terms of intention or conflict of intention, is flawed. I've now read multiple reviews on https://www.mechtype.com/category/reviews/ that are quite clearly the work of a keen mechanical keyboard hobbyist with sufficient details, knowledge and effort to lead me to believe the work is genuine and useful rather than merely financially motivated alone or spammy. There are many examples of what you suggest, and I agree that many sites with affiliate links and ad popups are disingenuous and fall much closer to the spam end of the spectrum. But there are still useful results if the user is remotely competent at parsing information. If your argument is that users shouldn't need that competence, and search engines should be kinder to less competent users in that regard, then that's a separate (and probably more interesting) conversation.

That site also has a clear affiliate disclosure along with this:

https://www.mechtype.com/disclosures/

>Paid Reviews/Sponsored Posts. MechType does NOT accept paid reviews or sponsored posts. All thoughts expressed within our reviews are our own opinions. However, MechType may on occasion accept product samples for review. When a product sample is provided for review it will be clearly and fully disclosed in the post along with the company/persons who provided the sample.

You were the one who claimed to be able to find anything on google, so I provided you with something difficult to find. Don't tell me I'm asking for the wrong thing, especially given I've demonstrated that pages matching my criteria do indeed exist.

>You were the one who claimed to be able to find anything on google

I did not in fact claim that. You are confusing me with someone else in this thread. I agree that some things are hard to find on google, but I reject the notion that anything with a financial element is fundamentally corrupt in terms of intention.

Maybe there are good actors but anytime people are spending money the market will arrange for a lot of people to try to fleece uninformed buyers, and on the internet to uninform the buyers.

Ah, my bad. My post was basically intended to call bullshit on that particular claim from the guy I responded to.

>What is their incentive to give better reviews to some than others?

One incentive would be that they earn more money through affiliate (or the company is paying them) to promote one product over the other.

That sort of question you want answered by friends or an organization you pay to represent ypu, like Consumers Union.

Why couldn't a search engine look out for the searcher's interests before the interests of the content-producers?

because you aren't paying them to do that.

> Name me one thing you struggled to find on google

Ad less pages. That provide the content without trying to monetize it.

I don't even mind ads if I get the content. What I get now however is 90% ads and 10% content, and of those 10% about half of that is actually promoted content. Oh and the ads are also spying on me and selling my information to more ads.

I recently had to research and compare analytics services for work. Type in Heap vs MixPanel and look at the results, the entire first page is garbage comparison sites. I really struggled to find any impartial, real reviews.

Reviews of recent consumer scanners with actual samples of scanned images at high resolutions.

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