That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.
But to be honest the internet is still the internet. The web still exists. Any lamentation at the loss of the "old" internet is that you don't have more angry uncles spewing political rhetoric on your motorcycle forum.
Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums? I certainly don't. Seems to me things are working pretty well. I do worry about the next generation but to be honest, the same was said about me.
Instead of complaining about the state of the web just be the change. Host your site, run your forums, live your life. Stop worrying about how other people should live their lives. Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen.
This x1000.
The only way to ensure that future people can continue to maintain things is to teach those who are interested.
While I think we need to scale back the opaqueness of tech to the average user[0], there will always be some who just know more.
[0] By which I don't mean "more configuration options", because the average user doesn't want those.
I mean make it easy to access the source - and just as importantly make it easy to use changes to said source, so those who think, hm, I want this, can learn to fix it themselves, or find someone who can.
Having the choice between "unwashed masses" and "curated to suit political agenda" I would firmly choose the former.
Before I get attacked on political agenda angle, please understand that it takes trained professional actively trying to remain objective to have impartial moderation. Many professional discussion moderators fail here and you just cannot expect neither unpaid volunteers (doing things out of passion which is not impartial in the first place) nor paid employees enforcing company policy (again very much partial) to remain objective.
The goal of moderation should be to allow for multiple angles of thought to emerge and not get drowned. Give me the tools to see those non-mainstream positions.
The unwashed masses are often filthy and malicious (on the internet).
Moderation, of the governance and oversight meaning, is unforunately very necessary to keeping any pool from becoming a cesspit. By some combination of technical, volunteer, and participant effort (membership fee, or service requirement), areas can be kept decent.
Without this, decent and would-be participants are run off by spam, scams, trolls and harrassment, political rants, religious rants, etc.
Admninistration web sites are now forcing you to use google(blink/geeko) or apple(webkit) based browsers. Asking nicely to restore interoperability with noscript/basic (x)html browsers does not seem to work, namely keeping the door open to alternatives requiring a reasonable effort of development, and not the army of devs of big tech.
This requires regulation I guess.
I'm not sure that's true. Just to pick an example, basically any type of product search now leads to auto-generated spam/borderline-spam websites that scrape reviews from Amazon, which are themselves often fraudulent.
I guess you could say that's "good enough" but only in the sense that someone being scammed at some point consents to something that makes them a victim of the scam.
For many searches, you'll see "reddit" autocompleted to the end of the search because Google's organic results are not good enough and people are trying to weed out the spam somehow, albeit in an imperfect way that restricts results to one site.
I guess you could call that good enough.. I call it morally irresponsible.
And the people trying to get their garbage spam sites to rank high are wise to the common tricks people use to attempt to get better results. Just today I accidentally clicked on a result that from the title looked like it would lead me to reddit. I should have paid attention to the URL because instead I was sent through a bunch of redirects to some terrible spam site.
I can't lab it up now, but that is the gist. And DDG has it while Google rarely has the same level of it.
For products, one of the worst offenders is Target. Yes, Target. They show up near the top of about 60% of my searches, including for things they simply do not carry. But hey, they carry a similar product that you might be interested in! (not)
SEO results make Google money, but they also make the results suck.
They could start penalizing sites that show different things to googlebot and a real browser again.
The could do a better job penalizing sites that just copy content from other sites.
They could penalize ad-laden sites.
They could stop prioritizing youtube results over text content.
They could allow you to blacklist sites again.
They could do so many things.
None of this is curation, put priorization of search result is exactly what a search engine does.
Have you read any of Google's advice to site owners? It amounts to "provide your users with what they're looking for, and do it with a fast and easy to use site". If you think SEO is an easy hack to get any site to the position 1 for any search, you're just ignorant of the landscape. All the "SEO" crap you see about keyword density or whatever, is just an industry trying to sound different and like they've got the key to position 1.
> They could start penalizing sites that show different things to googlebot and a real browser again.
Google is ridiculously good at this. Would be keen to see examples of a site that does this in a meaningfully negative way that ranks well for searches that matter.
I don't fully agree with all of your other points but I can see why you'd mention them.
Anyway - you’re right, nothing at all wrong with wanting choice. I think the point being made here though is that “layperson gravity” / mass market appeals / lowest common denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search will be a niche product, forever. Even if we’d both like that niche.
"Elitist" feels pejorative. Also a not-inaccurate way to describe a system which presents high barriers to entry.
Not trying to be awkward, but even back in the early days of Netscape, it wasn't like you had to recall any arcane commands to use most search engines.
Sure, they all had limitations then, such as not necessarily knowing similar word senses to create more nuanced searches, but that was a fairly level playing field.
Is it simply that it was initially a bit obscure and not everyone had found out about it? That's not really a barrier in terms of difficulty - as soon as people got into the "in crowd" they could use it just like the rest of them.
Cost was one. Hardware wasn't cheap and it would seem to have no practical use except to satisfy one's curiosity. A PC for the kids cost about half of our family's monthly gross income. A modem would be 10%. And the phone bill caused tourette's like symptoms more than once.
Why is publishing documents so complex now?
my site is all html, why not.
When netscape came out if you were lucky to have ppp access setting it up on windows 3.1 was difficult but once you were up as long as no one picked up the phone you were fine.
But even this was too difficult for the average person who lived in an aol world where the internet was limited to aol.
Anyone I watch older than 50 years old is constantly frustrated by google, they just don't know what's good, what's not. I think they use it because it's the "norm" and that is the only reason.
And as far as everyone else.. I have no idea to be quite honest. I have a fairly big handful of non-techie friends who think google sucks but is good enough so there is no real incentive to change.
With any habit people don't change it unless they have a huge reason to. No one stops eating double cheeseburgers until their doctor literally tells them they are going to die. I think that's what we're up against here.
Hey, now wait a second there, you young whipper-snapper. I'm sitting here reading HN while I install Debian on an XCP-ng VM, and I hear I can't understand whether Google results are good or not? There are plenty of us over 50 that actually lived the early internet and watched it first-hand transform into what it is today.
Plus the topics were very Linux, DRM focused. Digg had newer more interesting tech topics
And somehow, there is still enough good, new content to keep the conversations fresh. Some of the best are when someone shares a personal story, then there are tens or hundreds of follow-up posts -- generally supportive or inquisitive.
I've had a number of replies get hammered, unfairly in my view.
Yet the signal-to-noise ratio benefits overall if we eat a little Type I error now and then.
Yes, and now imagine these same people, most of whom never bothered with basic google search options (eg. excluding entire domains, mandatory keywords, ...) presented with a search engine with a plethora of knobs and levers to tune it to their liking.
How well will they work with that?
That's an excellent demographic point.
A counter-argument is that the move from port 80 to port 443 is the elitist drift. Instead of innocently putting information out there and sharing in an egalitarian fashion, we now have certificates and gatekeepers and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
I’m sure that’s what Yahoo! used to think about Google before Google replaced it.
I’d say the for the bulk of Google’s visitors the results aren’t merely good enough, they’re insanely great.
Now, that said, the G monopoly is horrible and needs to die.
What pushed Google over the top for me was the sheer size of their index...
AFAICT, quality personalized search results isn't the goal for Google here.
I think the point of all that is generating revenue via advertising sales.
And while providing high quality search results might once upon a time have been a goal, both as a goal in itself and a tool to drive user adoption/engagement, that's no longer necessary as they have a (relatively) captive audience and a (relatively) captive customer base (advertisers). As such, quality search results are no longer all that important.
I'm not a Googler, IMHO, YMMV, etc.
Now they have millions of cell phones collecting data and the GPS location of everyone offline, they run extremely popular DNS servers to see what websites people go to, most websites (including educational and government websites) include google's trackers so on most websites every page loaded will ping at least one of google servers. They've got people uploading their personal and work documents to their cloud. They are swimming in data collected from sources outside of web search. Between that and the lack of actual competition it's no surprise they aren't investing in making searching the internet better for people. In some ways they profit from search results being terrible. If anything beyond the first few results on the first page is filled with spam and irrelevant websites the top few results to any search become even more valuable.
That depends on whether or not you agree with Google's definition of "better". What is better for Google is a set of results that make you most likely to click on an advert. Failing that, they want you to click a link, see the site, and either click an ad there or quickly return to Google where you'll click on an ad. The worst outcome for Google is that you'll click a non-paid search result, like it, and stay on that website.
This is the fundamental problem with search engines - if they work well and give you exactly what you're searching for first time then they won't make any money. A lot of what Google does is subtly trying to give you results that look great but really aren't.