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Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

In other news Google's search continues to get worse at finding what you want. Randomly dropping words from your query, even when you quote them and + and allintext, even when they claim they haven't ctrl+f shows the word ain't in the result.

They just want to get the easy money of you clicking the ad for $someco that they put in before the "i'm feeling lucky" spot where $someco should be.

Want to find something you know you read a couple of months ago and recall a lot of details about? Good luck. Not sure what the best search engine is for that but it seems it is no longer google.

Are these twin declines, service quality and revenue somehow causally related? If so in which direction?

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I'm trying to pay for Kagi search to see if it's better. Not sure if it is, but at least it's not worse. In my tests they seem to get most of the results from Google, but just jumble them about a bit. They do have a "programming" mode though, which is useful.

If nothing else, it's refreshing to pay for search, to support non-ad-driven revenue models for the most important feature of the web.

I basically just search Reddit now, using Google.

Interesting, I specifically do that in order to get a general feeling of what people think of a topic.

Reddit is moderated and curated. Makes sense that it’s often more useful than say, SEO spam. However please note that there’s a ton of advertising hidden in sheep’s skin.

Thanks, yeah I don't necessarily take it as "the word", but honestly, it's good to as you said, "gauge things", and there's a lot of human experience documented on Reddit ha

One caveat is that you have to pay attention on which subreddit you are to be sure you get a real variety of opinion and are just not in an echo chamber with bot parroting the current "wisdom" of that sub to farm karma. I've seen a lot of small subreddits make full 180 regarding a product or practice after a few months / years when the hype is gone.

Honestly it should be viewed as a utility at this point rather than a private company with too many rights. It's critical to find businesses, medical information, hell, you can say democracy itself can be affected by what happens in search results.

Google is treading a fine line. I imagine the smart people in the room know their days of infinite monopoly are numbered.

for revenue to drop because of that, people have to massively have moved to some other way to search for things. What would that currently be?

What is the proportion of ads revenue is generated from search compared to maps, youtube and their other sources?

It's in the article:

$42.6 billion from search

$8.5 billion from other ads marketplace products (maps, shopping, display)

$7.96 billion from YouTube

$7.3 billion from GCP

$76 billion total

Thanks (the article page wasn't working for me). Seems like it's dominated more by search than I'd have guessed.

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