Everyone else in the search space (even paid search - kagi I'm looking at _you_!) seems to be under the impression that it was abandoned because it didn't work but I'm pretty sure it was only abandoned because it didn't drive ad revenue.
Moar power to you mate, if I wasn't busy with other things right now I'd be beating down your door!
Today may look bad for searchers like us but it could be a lot worse. It's a constant battle.
It returned the same results, but with some of the listicles helpfully sorted into a "listicles" section. The rest of the results were also listicles.
It's entirely possible the content I'm looking for doesn't exist, drowned in a sea of SEO spam, but then I have little motivation to pay for a search engine to find it.
On that note, does anyone have a good site and/or strategy for "I would like to buy a [product] with [two features that are uncommonly found together]" searches? Those seem to be the hardest ones to get good results for, because of the number of "BEST [product] OF 2023" lists that aren't filtered to what I actually asked for.
Google would need to break criminal laws (and public trust) in order to look at someone's private gmail address for the purpose of snooping on their plans / their conversations.
"Regardless of their merits, if Google wants to take you to court, they could bury you in legal costs before it ever goes to trial."
All I'm saying is be careful. It might be worth consulting with a lawyer to see if there's anything you need to do to protect yourself.
And honestly, it could be a non-issue. But it'd be better to hear that from legal counsel.
Best of luck, the world needs you to succeed.
> Where are your results coming from?
>
> *Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google* and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs.
> We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.
I suspect you want to ask the decision-makers, not the victims, that question.
Great community. I would love to join something from the start, but now is not the right time.
Google ranking hasn't been very good in the recent years. You must have some ideas to improve it that you plan to use for your startup.
Good luck.
It's a Forum Search Engine I've seen pop up on HN a few times in the past.
Another idea is to basically create LLM's for every city's laws/legislation/codes etc and basically be like an ai lexus nexus.
My friends+colleagues would 100% write bots for that in less than a week. You'd be completely swamped with fake feedback to SEO/game the results. The bots will beat every CAPTCHA you have and have completely normal human-like client fingerprints.
"Laid Off from Google Search?
21 points by gregw134 1 hour ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments
I just got ...
...
... email me at username @ Gmail."
> The email mentioned in the comment is "username@gmail.com"
< What is the email I can use to contact this user? he didn't wrote it explicitly. If it helps, his username is gregw134.
> ... It only says "username@gmail.com" which is not a valid email.
Looks like he dodged this one!
But the tool clearly has some value, which may even reveal itself to be quite significant. I think a useful metric is to look at what happened with Copilot, which is a domain where there has been a lot less media frenzy about, and in which, arguably, this kind of model could've have much more readily made a tremendous impact. I think even in the dev community we went through a small period of folks thinking this was going to be earthshattering, followed by a natural cooldown, followed by a probably much saner interpretation that it is a tool, and in the right contexts might actually be useful.
The question is often very relevant. I'll readily admit that I have a high engagement with that accordion feature, but I can't believe how often I open it to find a disappointing text selection or even page.
And if it is, I wonder where that leaves JSON-LD schema in all of this. Schema is the perfect signal for something like this, but I'm afraid, and I believe I can speak representatively about this from an agency perspective, the trust is kind of broken for that model.
Too many people, myself included, are uneasy about how much information to give to Google since they have an insidious aim to use it to get information to users faster regardless of how much impact it has on a business' ability to remain competitive. Yet, on the other hand, I sympathize with the idea that the more Google reverses course on this and leans into embracing SEO industry-driven control they risk compromising the product. It makes me think that Google has reached a theoretically maximum level of product optimization.
A lot of questions I would have googled, I now ask ChatGPT.
It's not always reliable of course but it's often quicker and somewhat more extensive and specific when I need code snippets for example.
I think it's complimentary technologies. It will definitely eat up search market share.
It's almost as if yesteryear encyclopedias were having their revenge.
"Give me facts about X" there are several decent options for.
"Give me quality reading material about topic X", there's like nobody even trying. Not that an answer doesn't exist for the query, just nobody is able to produce it.
This goes well beyond websites, discovery sucks for streaming video, for shopping, almost everything.
Nice job on marginalia.nu btw. Your site is a good reminder that there is a whole internet out there that just isn't able to rank on Google for various reasons.
I would love to hear about the problem space you are exploring. Here is my linkedin: priyankaja