Google Search Is Dying (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Google Search Is Dying (2022)

dkb.blog

405 pointspunnerud500 comments

I don't know if it's Google that is dying. It's more like a large segment of the public facing internet is wilting. The user experience without an adblocker is almost nothing but ads, popovers, permission requests and chat boxes, sign-up-to-the-newsletter requests. And these are the websites that aren't trying to bait-and-switch you

For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM -- like you can't even tell what website it is, they're covering their own logo with pop overs. This simply can not be good UX, or marketing. It's not a good first impression.

There are healthy websites out there but they're really struggling to punch through all the crap.

It's curious because I feel we've seen this process play out once before. In the late-stage dot com era, there was a moment where you had these websites that were just absolutely plastered in ads and vomited popups at you when you visited them in a way that is very reminiscent of today. It's in part what led to the first popup blockers, and later ad blockers. Search engines were also cracking down on this stuff pretty hard since they just weren't good search results.

I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.

Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.

AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here, et al) remain high when most of the people we're talking with are algorithmic?

Media companies create new shows and pull them away more quickly than we can finish consuming them, as realtime engagement metrics quickly show their bosses which must be most profitable, most popular, most attention grabbing.

It makes a good case for going back: watching shows from decades earlier, that have a beginning middle and end. Dropping social media time for books. And the missing analogue, how to give up on google searches because they too, are at a parity of value with their offering and their attention stealing properties.

I'm just an angry person shaking his fist at the sky from an armchair. I love these threads because I always come away with a new perspective.

> Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.

This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.

That's if you want to capture someone's focus, not their attention.

If you capture their focus, are you not also capturing their attention?

Yes, but not necessarily the other way around.

I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I don't think most websites are predicated on the notion that the average user is committed, at least initially. Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to your product you can safely prioritize focus because you now have that commitment.

I think engineers generally are above average on the skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order to perform math, analysis, and logic.

It’s more about selling someone’s attention than holding it. The best possible outcome for both websites and Google is for a user to click on on a website from search and then immediately click on an ad. To the extent you find the site useful and don’t need what’s being advertised, that’s a fail for both of them.

More like they monetise it at the expense of maintaining it.

Media companies pulling shows so quickly makes me sad. It's one of those cases where I think they constantly misread the data. "People don't watch shows with a long story arc as they come out, so we should cancel them" is really "people don't trust us to continue shows with a long story arc until a good stopping place, so they don't want to invest the time in starting new ones"

Part of it is they don't want to renegotiate pay with the cast of a successful show so they cut them off before that becomes an issue.

That's usually solved by multi-year initial contacts.

> Our attention is the only valuable thing left.

That's...just not true, though.

You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our money.

The only reason they want our attention is to get our money.

A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable amount of disposable income, as is true in a healthy society/economy, it would be much, much more viable for many websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than being ad-supported.

Nah, that's not true. People just don't like to spend money, especially when they are rich.

Most people in the US love spending money. It's considered a recreational activity.

Hmmh, so why do so many people complain about paying for all the different streaming services like Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon prime, etc.? It's really peanuts compared to the value delivered.

"Value" is a very personal thing, though. You may find something is great value for money, and others may not, and neither is wrong.

Personally, I don't find that the streaming services are good value. I don't complain about it, though. I just don't subscribe to them.

Also, buying services doesn't satisfy the "shopping as a recreational activity" itch. A big part of the recreation is the actual shopping, and coming home with physical stuff.

That's true. And that's why people having enough money is not an alternative solution to software / digital content financed by ads.

Eh it was great value when it was just Netflix or just two services but now I feel like there's often only 0-1 shows on a given platform that I'm interested in at any one time. It isn't "good value" to pay $15+ a month each for Netflix/Prime/Disney/HBO/Hulu/AppleTV and only use one or two of them in a given month. Because Prime Video is bundled with regular Amazon Prime I keep that active and activate and deactivate the others based on when they come out with seasons of shows I care to watch. I also think a lot of complaints are about the platforms increasingly making the experience worse like making me pay to remove ads when I'm already paying for the service, or what Netflix is pulling with their family plans.

About a decade ago I used to pay $45+ a month for a very basic cable package that contained mostly public stations and a few of the standard stations that you get a hotels, etc. At the same time my parents paid around $100+ a month for their cable package with a better channel selection.

So, to me, even paying $60-$80 for various streaming services that are all on-demand (which wasn't the case for the cable I used to have) is still an amazing deal.

Oh, and I don't have to sit through ads every 5 minutes.

I think it depends. All else being equal in terms of your daily commute, owning a big and expensive car is often seen as better than owning a more affordable smaller car.

If you consider "the value delivered" to be the totality of all the content on the platforms, then sure. But that's not actually valuable to most of the people subscribing, so it's ultimately a useless way of looking at it.

Any given person is only going to care about some small fraction of the media available for watching, and when that fraction is spread out across 6 different streaming services, the "value" they're getting from any single one of those is fairly small.

Furthermore, similar to what ldhough says, many of us remember when we could get basically all that content on Netflix, and we know perfectly well that a) the content providers could be making reasonable amounts of money through a streaming deal like that, and b) the reason they decided to launch their own service is one part insatiable desire for ever increasing profit, one part unrelenting crusade for absolute control over everything they own. Nowhere in there is "value to the customer".

There's a quote that I've seen go 'round a few times, to the effect of "the streaming services really need to remember that their entire value proposition is being slightly more convenient than piracy."

Seems to me the insatiable desire here is that of the customer for free or nearly free stuff. What is a reasonable amount of money? You know that Amazon spent $465 Million dollars on just one season of Lord of the rings, right?

Because the ones who enjoy paying for them do not complain so you believe the complainers are a majority.

> A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money

Sounds like money isn’t valuable as a target if it doesn’t exist.

But fwiw the scarcity of disposable income is why there is such an arms race with advertisers- they’re all chasing the same fleeting dollars across the internet.

> I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.

The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?

Well how would you fix Google's predicament? I think it's easy enough to conclude they're harming themselves, but what are their options?

Their only Hope at long term viability is something like the wall between advertising and editorial at old school media companies. Yes, it’s fashionable to be jaded but it really did work that way.

Google needs its product people to not know or care about as revenue. They need to make search as efficient as possible, without regard for whether a good search result reduces ad clicks.

Revenue would go do, but not catastrophically. And they’d have a sustainable business that would be hard to disrupt.

I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

Honestly the problem is that Google has been trying to fix it. Alternative and diverse incomes is the solution.

Everyone wants to make a good product, but ads make a product worse. Everyone wants to make a heavily used product but pay-per-use or subscriptions are limiting.

Google Cloud+Workplace, YouTube Premium, Play Store, Nest, ahem Stadia. Google has plenty of attempts at building products that make money without ads. The problem is that they’re expensive and not nearly as profitable.

LLM are bad at search, but people seem to like they. It gives them a clean re-start of search and maybe they’ll use it to do a search subscription where they can retry building their one good product without ads. Probably not though.

> Everyone wants to make a good product

Well, most do, but certainly not everyone. What almost everyone wants to make is a profitable product.

> What almost everyone wants to make is a profitable product

I actually think Google and many tech companies have the opposite problem. They forget about monetization until after they made a desirable product, then they have no way to make money unless they shoe-horn ads into it.

This is basically a pricing problem. G needs to strike a balance between the naked profitability of selling more ugly and dysfunctional ads versus increasing user delight by delivering more useful search results. While adding more ads boosts their revenue per search, the concomitant loss in value to the user is driving us away per result. The consequence: the user is increasingly looking elsewhere to escape the imbalance between Google's single minded focus on boosting revenue, damn the user.

Many of us have blunted the worst of G search's ugliness using ad blockers, but the polluting of their results by hiding useful content behind myriad lines of useless SEO detritus still dominates, and this loss of value as a utility inescapably poisons their life blood.

Until G's management realizes that their salvation lies NOT in blithely driving away customers, and instead strike a better balance by employing filters that better reject the more irrelevant and less profitable noise among their results, they will continue their current march toward oblivion -- as smarter competitors serve up more palatable search fare, and eat Google's lunch.

> I don't know if it's Google that is dying.

I tried to use Google to see what would be good brand to replace a decade old small electrical appliance that failed a couple of months ago. Absolutely none of the results were helpful until I tried the "append Reddit to the search terms" trick.

Immediately, I found a link someone had shared to a consumer reports style review of different brands at different price points.

The content I wanted was out there, but Google is now optimized for ad revenue, not finding the content I asked for.

It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be so good at indexing useful reddit threads.

I would think they apply their normal algorithms.

If it's a good article that's upvoted a lot, it should also be linked in some places and thus get a higher search score.

Though it's not finding the article. It's finding a link to the article on Reddit. I hope people aren't linking to the Reddit thread...

The way the original pagerank algorithm works, links to the original article would increase the score of a Reddit post linking to the article. Why Reddit posts are ranked higher in a default search I’m not sure, but this would definitely explain why site:Reddit works.

Do people link to reddit threads a lot? I'd assume such a signal would be very noisy and not very reliable, so spam sites would just link a lot to their content spam on reddit.

Like giving Reddit a higher “page score” than other websites?

No, I mean why does it find the right reddit thread instead any of the billions of other reddit threads? That can't be trivial to do since reddit themselves don't do it well.

Gotcha. Google search ranking threads versus Reddit search ranking threads.

I’d posit that Google counts the upvotes and other signals on the thread to calculate EAT or whatever.

It was probably linked to by other websites. I've been seeing more news organizations directly linking to reddit, and I believe Google manually boosted reddit results a few years ago. You used to never see them in search results, but now they have started showing up.

I've found that Google is willing to return one or two Reddit links but then reverts to its usual SEO crapspam for the rest of the results. Even "site:reddit.com" only returns only a fraction of the discussions related to the topic. The site's been around for over a decade, and most topics have been discussed dozens of times or more.

The Reddit trick is increasingly less viable as marketers are astroturfing Reddit.

That's been a significant factor on reddit since 2008 or so. It may be getting worse or the dynamics changing, idk, but it's nowhere near new.

One advantage is that Reddit has a distributed network of volunteer mods whos incentives align with that of their own subreddit.

Google on the other hand has automated centralized content moderation.

Agreed. What I've seen become more common is the following:

* They'll start by having <5 real comments that seem like a legitimate person wrote them

* Account suddenly starts just re-posting very popular older posts, and other bots chime in that also copy the top comments from that post letter-for-letter

* Account goes on to shill some product

It's just the state of the web. Google search uses metrics for the web sites (number of links, etc) so Reddit threads do not rank high compared to real web sites.

Google used to have a "Forums" tab right on the top that would filter results to random PHPbb instances and the like. It was generally pretty great. As far as I'm concerned, the decision to remove that was when Google started dying.

This is my experience too, every time I'm looking for meaningful results, after searching my bookmarks of course.

Uh, reddit is 99% influencers influencing these days. You enthusiastically consumed and even recommended an ad and have no idea.

You can't even tell who they are anymore. How do I know? Because I've been paid to post on reddit. I only do it for products I've actually used and things I like, but I got paid nobody has a clue. Not even you.

So what about a search engine that penalises ads heavily? Would that not be interesting to companies like Wikipedia or Apple that don't need ads to survive? Sounds to me like such a search engine could gain market share rapidly. Is there such a search engine already out there?

Try the search engine kagi.com It just works.

Google stopped being a search company, and is an advertisement company now.

Must create account to use a search engine. Hard Nope.

I find the syllogism here a little hard to follow, because here is what the first bit looks like to me:

1. Web search is useful, both for work/productivity and recreation.

2. Running servers to index the internet is a scale of compute beyond the effort and expense of most or all of home users.

3. Web search has distinct economies of scale when applied.

4. Said economies must be funded in some way.

5. There are two proposed models: ad-supported and subscription.

6. We do not like the effects of ad-support in the context of Google.

So the options are to either choose a different add-supported method (with the understanding that it may well meet Google's fate) or else pay for the product directly (subscription).

Frankly, the only reason I haven't signed up for something like this is that DuckDuckGo has been good enough for me lately. It might not always be, but it has been so far.

So I take the view after step 6 that, for the time being, I'm willing to jump from ad supported platform to ad supported platform, but I say that while admitting I'm a bad search stretch away from switching.

In case you need a nudge from another very happy kagi user, consider trying it out.

I used kagi for a few months when it was still in beta (and thus free) and had to decide if I wanted to pay for it to keep using it, or go back to ad supported internet search.

After wincing at the price for a bit I realised that my expectations for how much search should cost were all based on free ad supported search engines. The value I derive from a good search engine is enormous, and easily visible if you imagine the internet without it.

This makes paying for kagi a nobrainer. Their search results are really good and they have an incentive to keep it that way. It's a solid product, with a great value proposition (if you recalibrate your expectation) and I am also regularly reminded that this is how to actually vote with your wallet. I feel like we need kagi (or something like it) to succeed. If it turns out that paid search is not a viable business, then what chance do we have left for a search engine that has its intentions aligned with its users?

But it's first and foremost a great experience. Fast, great results, clean layout and a bunch of nice user-centric features on top. The idealism just helps to accept a cost.

Seconding (as a paying consumer) -- sign up for a month and try the experience for yourself.

It shows you the alternative Internet (ad-free, spam free, SEO-crap listicles not on the results page) that everyone here is constantly carping about missing.

If you want this reality, pay for it to help it exist. Else, put up with ads.

> 5. There are two proposed models: ad-supported and subscription.

For the record, there are many other possible models. (I realize you may be saying that in this thread there are 2 proposed models, but I want to say this because people here seem to think there are only ever 2 possibilities.)

Some other models include:

1. Patronage ala public radio/TV where you are asked to pay for it, but don't have to. If enough people do, everyone can use it for free. (Wikipedia, one of the top 10 sites on the internet by traffic, works this way.)

2. Donations (probably not viable for most businesses, but sometimes works out)

3. Partially or fully funded by some other business which benefits from people using it. For example, if Apple wanted to start their own search engine without ads, but that only worked with their devices, they could probably figure out a way to do that and they would make money from selling the devices, and not ads on the search engine. (Not that they wouldn't try to have ads, too these days. Ugh.)

4. Pay as you go - instead of a subscription that is recurring even if you don't use the product and that you eventually forget about, you just pay whenever you actually use it and pay for only as much as you use. Not sure it work with a search engine, but nobody's ever tried, so it's hard to say.

5. Government funded. I realize this would rub people the wrong way, but a government search engine funded by tax payer dollars that had no ads could be very useful if done correctly. You just wouldn't want to use it to look up illegal things. (And it doesn't necessarily have to be the Federal government. A state government might benefit from running it, as well.)

Edited to add: For the record, I pay for and use Kagi and love it.

Isn't this the exact problem? How can websites stay afloat unless you pay for it in one way or another? I guess the choice is buy the product or be the product.

I've been paying for Kagi for 8 months and it's been fine for me. I can live with it in a way I could never live with DDG.

Ah...it's not at all clear from the Kagi front page that it's a pay service. That does change things.

I tried my test search "California style burrito in Austin" and the first page was entirely reddit results. Clicking over to "map" resulted in a single wrong result.

phind.com and new bing do this better.

I tried the same query using phind.com, still the most answers came from reddit.

https://www.phind.com/search?cache=5a93485f-b029-45bf-ade1-b...

When I navigated to your link I first got a full screen popover from Imgur and briefly thought that was the point. And, in a sense, it was.

> a large segment of the public facing internet is wiltin

I noticed that many teenagers today, despite the abundance of technology around them, are a lot less technological than the previous generation. When I was young, almost everyone in my school knew how to download (pirate) stuff from the internet, burn CDs, copy cracks, modify config files, etc. Nowadays, I see some young people not knowing how to use the maps' functionality on their phones, and only be "proficient" in a few apps like Email, TikTok and Instagram.

I do think that the PC/internet being less accessible before forced people to learn more about computers. Because everything is so fast and easy nowadays and there are so many sources of information, no one really needs to spend that time.

Completely agree. I think the fundamental problem, is that the public facing internet is kind of like electricity or water - it is a utility, that isn't inherently monetizeable. So the only way to make money off of it is to advertise. And then advertisement itself is a cancer upon humanity ...

> For example, this is the screen I'm showed when I navigate to www.producthunt.com: https://imgur.com/a/9GgLIBM

Jaha du, Google pratar svenska med dig.

The worst is the SEO pages, especially for popular how-to topics. Every single first page result will be a page that has expanded what used to be said in bullet point form, into a 1500 word essay that you must now slog through in order to get the information you need. And this is by necessity, because Google values prose over bullet points.

The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.

Yeah this, if I want to know how many chapters are there in a game, I have to real an entire article telling me useless stuff before I can get the info I want. Witj ChatGPT I can avoid this. I would say most of my Google searches were for answering questions, not to find articles related to a topic.

Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet. If they valued shortness then everything would be trimmed to bullet points removing useful info.

The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.

That sounds like it makes sense - but if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't, why would Google not be able to optimize their algo accordingly? If the results for a query don't match the "nature of the query", it's a bad result. If the algo can be gamed, it isn't aiming for the actual goal, i.e. it fundamentally fails at information retrieval.

Because anything google can detect, the spammers can generate to match. We will soon enter an era of GPT generated spam which not even humans can tell if it's real info or just garbage that looks real.

Luckily on Kagi I can just block sites the moment I realize it is nonsense.

Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.

Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.

After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.

I have never used anything but google, duckduckgo and startpage. I always end up coming back to google because the results are not as good.

Well startpage has the same results as google, but i stopped using it for reasons I forgot.

What made you chose Kagi?

Tested it and found it realized doublequotes something none of the big ones that I can access (bing, ddg, google) does.

That was it.

And the first time I saw a reported bug in the search results getting serious attention and a fix I was sold.

if human readers know what's a good search result and what isn't

That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a lot of factors, from the context of why the user is searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing else. My mother would want some background about the recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot more context.

It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search' based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.

> That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like

Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm sure we can agree on is what people don't want. I don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were more ads in the content I'm consuming".

So we could at least start with that.

Yes, and now turn that sentiment into a metric that can be measured as input to the model.

At first it was click-through rate, but that turned SEO into sites into clickbait to get high click scores. Then they switched to time spent on the site, and as a consequence we get recipes that are filled with 2h of prose above them just so people stay longer on the site.

Recipes are a pain in general, even without google, doubly so for baking.

Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless to many american grandmas.

On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of us.

I have given up on web pages for recipes. Videos are still mostly fine. Often a nice condensed version of the recipe will be in the comment section.

Nowadays a cup and a tablespoon are standard unities of volume. They are not any worse than milliliters. There are a few people that insist on ignoring the standards, but those also tend to not publish their recipes.

The issue is that for a lot of ingredients -- flour notably among them -- you can't measure accurately by volume. If you're looking for reproducibility, you have to measure by weight.

And once you start measuring some things by weight, you quickly realize that most things are easier to measure out by weight than volume (particularly sticky ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.

I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram measurements for this reason.

You cannot measure flour, sugar, salt, etc by volume. Cups of flour and *spoins of sugar/salt/cinnamon and even butter are used in (too) many recipes.

I disagree that whatever ranking system google uses will just be gamed to the same extent. If google downgraded the rank of pages with lots of ads and trackers it would substantially reduce the incentive to game the system, the reason it won’t is because most of those pages are running Adsense so there’s every incentive for google to keep the status quo.

That is exactly the point!

If you provide less monetisation for content creators, you end up with less content too. This is not as simple as you think…

You could reward the type of monetization that is correlated to high-quality content and penalize the type that is associated with spam.

Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank way down.

Less content is fine when the issue is too much junk content. Content would then be created by enthusiasts instead of businesses

> enthusiasts instead of businesses

Those are more and more the same person - especially when it comes to online ventures.

You end up with less trash/monetization content and more content from passionate people writing about what they love/like/do for the joy of sharing.

But this does not sustain the chocolate factory.

We can't even answer out fucking phones because of these people and an ad blocker is pretty much a requirement to make the web even remotely usable.

They're already pushing out content to replace it with more fucking ads!

There is legitimately nothing good about them. At all.

> If you provide less monetisation for content creators

But I don't want to "consume content", I want to "get information". Most "content creators" don't provide any info. Or at best there is some info there but you have to watch an hour worth of video for the 20 useful seconds.

I don't want "content", some generic attention grabbing placeholder around which they spam ads. I don't want some professionally made lowest common denominator product designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. I want creations with heart and soul. I want to read the opinions and writings of real human beings, not corporate PR articles with cleverly disguised pitches at the end.

People who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to create regardless of financial reward probably aren't producing anything of value. That basically excludes every for profit website out there that would be "killed" by less monetization. Killing them off is a good thing.

Agreed. If content creators are more interested in getting something back (money) then they are creating something of value to society and disseminating it in a simple and clean way then I'm forced to think twice about their motives.

If you put the cart (making money) before the horse (creating value) then you are not really a productive member of society. Takers are like irresponsible children, they take without any awareness of the ramifications their behavior has on society.

This kind of attitude is similar to colonialism, an attitude representative of most of commercial enterprises today. Givers give value knowing that when they give, they receive, without any need to unnaturally focus on the end result.

Page publishers would still have the same incentive to game the system, only putting a smaller numer of ads, perhaps then more expensive and more carefully selected.

If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one. Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly bad.

> If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker.

That misses the entire point: Google search results will still be manipulated to push those low quality results higher because even if you don't see the ads enough people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.

That was my point: if Google rewarded sites with fewer ads, you would get all the same manipulation and low-quality content but with fewer (but perhaps more expensive and carefully selected) ad blocks. You can have that today.

No, the reason they won't is that trackers and ads have little to do with the value of the content.

As long as there are any ads, the incentives stay the same. You're saying an internet completely free of monetary incentives would be better. I doubt that's true but it really doesn't matter, because it won't be happening.

You misunderstand, if you penalize excessive advertising then the revenue generated per page view decreases. This will reduce but not eliminate the amount of effort spent on these projects resulting in fewer such webpages.

So ‘How to unclog a toilet’ is always going to get SEO optimized spam. However, most topics don’t get that many views making them less viable for this business model.

> the revenue generated per page view decreases

That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing out revenue, not increasing net.

If every single website on the planet had fewer ads then the new equilibrium might be roughly equivalent revenue, but many websites only have a single banner advertisement. So much of the redistribution of revenue would end up on those websites.

I use search engines for two reasons:

- to gather compressed information quickly

- to navigate the web

The first point is best served by sources that I like and trust, often authoritative to some degree. If they already have a good search (like MDN or Wikipedia) I will often use that directly or go via DDG: !mdn keyords..., !wiki keywords... If not, I type the name of the website as a keyword in front (like reddit...)

The second is really more about finding specific types of websites. For example John Smith's blog that I don't remember etc.

What I'm saying is that to fix the web, we need more sites that can act as the first point above. Whether they are wikis or not is more of a practical consideration. The point is that they don't suck and that there's not enough of them IMO.

Those sites will demand a % of sales to let anybody into their garden, while search engines demand nothing. That can work for digital products that are of unlimited supply.

bullet points would be an improvement over bullshit useless prose

The real problem is that Google holds an effective monopoly in search, so any digital marketer worth a salt will optimize the crap out of their blogs and pages to get higher and higher rank within Google alone. This will, in turn, lead to what we see today: a race to the bottom in terms of quality to get the best SEO results.

I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.

Why do people even care about views? Because of advertising. It is the root cause of all problems on the web today. All Google has to do to fix the web is put itself out of business by delisting pages with ads including its own. Search and the web at large would be fixed in days.

> Literally anything google values will be abused and ruin the internet.

That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.

But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.

> But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page

That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that where Google has already applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.

Even if Google had been good stewards, they failed to diversify.

AI AdBlock is going to kill whatever is left of Google within the year.

AI content spam is absolutely going to kill social media and search results, but AI adblock will be worse to Google's bottom line.

It's coming, and it's going to be brutal.

In what sense will it kill social media?

Unless social media websites begin to require ID verification, they'll be flooded with LLM-powered bots. Humans will tire of this.

We can't be far off the state where any captcha-style humanity test that can be implemented is immediately vulnerable to bots, too.

Not captchas, OP probably means actual IDs. And to be honest, with some cryptography surely we can find a way to make it work and be anonymous

I simply cannot imagine being willing to provide identity documents to any of the social media/advertising companies. They would have to somehow demonstrate they're trustworthy first.

The bit of social media people use to talk to their IRL friends and family will be fine.

But the bit of social media where people are listening to celebrities, getting their news, sharing memes, discussing common interests? It might get flooded with bots so convincing as to be indistinguishable from normal users.

It's as soon as it learns that X celebrity is dead generates clicks.

Then folks will learn not to trust it just because it is a computer once everyone is announced dead, and everyone will have to make claims that they aren't.

So Facebook is the one most likely to survive. Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, ... etc. soon to be flooded with LLM generated spam.

Last I checked, non AI AdBlock already works pretty well, why would you need AI?

Why do you believe that users will start using this "AI AdBlock"? Regular ad blockers are enough to cover current ads. Google also controls the main browser in the biggest mobile OS (Chrome on Android), and it doesn't support ad blockers. There are options (Firefox, Brave, Kiwi, etc.), but most users don't bother.

I'm guessing that monetizing comments is a lot more difficult on reddit as any links can be removed by admins/mods/automoderator.

Since word heuristics and pagerank are useless nowadays, which signals should Google prioritize instead? Bounce rate ? Engagement ?

Which metrics can proxy user satisfaction without turning into clickbait-land?

And the worst of SEO pages are cooking recipes, where you have to scroll down screens of badly written meaningless text before you actually get to ingredients list. At least Google still keeps indexing recipe microformats.

I haven't used Google in ages. Do they convert stupid recipes using volume for flour to use mass?

I haven’t noticed, but I usually hang around King Arthur’s website for bread recipes and they use mass and bakers’ percentages, so do other baker blogs that I may find. Maybe it’s different for things other than bread, but I can’t say. Hail Eris!

I use this pretty often: https://www.traditionaloven.com/conversions_of_measures/flou...

Search your recipes on YouTube. It is a better way of getting the information and higher quality.

Edit: To the friendly people downvoting me: Try for yourself and you'll be surprised how much good and informative content you can find on YouTube.

Hi guys! Last month I was visiting my grandma... (3 minutes of this) ...so don't forget to like and subscribe this! Now, i usually use this kind of flour, but I decided to replace it with this special kind from my local farmers market, which is great, because it's sold by this old lady who works... (5 more minutes of that) ... so if you like putting ginger into your cookies, write it down in a comment (3 more minutes of this) ... now you have to fold in the cheese... i have a separate video (15 minutes) just explaining how to fold it in, so I won't show that here, but click the link in the description to see that ...

Yeah... i prefer text. It's even wors with tech stuff.... do they expect me to retype the commands/code from the video?!

For recipes I've had good results with YouTube. Short videos, to the point, with a leaflet in the beginning showing ingredients needed. YouTube for tech stuff is the worst, I agree.

No thanks, not going to watch a whole video to get an overview of what I need to prepare.

If you're already adept or not looking into things that are challenging to you, then you might just need a list of ingredients. If somebody who has never cooked needs to dice onions for the dish and doesn't know how to do that, YouTube will help much more than any text. There are so many things and aspects that we don't have vocabulary for and is just faster showing.

Videos to teach technique make a lot of sense. Videos to convey a recipe, not so much.

Videos are far less useful than text.

Not at all! It depends greatly on the content and the person. For recipes it is actually useful to see with your own eyes how to do something. The same thing with many other things, such as for example carpentry and mechanics. I agree that text is better for tech content and for a lot of other things that are mostly text based, or more abstract.

We've been conditioned into thinking text is better because we've all been through schooling, which consists of text books and a person yelling in front of a blackboard. If you let kids watch high quality YouTube videos instead, they would get a much better education.

Well, I should have said "text is better for me". Especially for recipes, which are a list of instructions. I just need to see the list, not have someone tell it to me.

Videos aren't dense enough, information-wise. I can't just put them up on a screen as a reference, and they require too much interaction as I have to back up, play, back up, play, back up, etc. in order to use the information being relayed.

If I only have a video telling me something, it's better than nothing, but it's going to slow me down, reduce my understanding, and will inevitably leave out detail that is important to me.

You're getting downvoted because those of us who have tried for ourselves often find videos vastly less useful, efficient or relevant than a bit of text. Especially in the world of the 'influencer'. Now you have half a video pimping their dozens of YouRedTwitTok accounts you just have to click on, the other influencers they're mutually shoveling traffic to, the products they're being paid to pimp...and if you're lucky you might get some information tacked onto the end.

We all have to sift. No matter if the content is text, video or audio. If I'm undertaking a project of some magnitude - like cooking a new dish or changing my brakes - then I don't mind spending a little time to find the highest quality information. And for many things, that will be inside a YouTube video. Even if you have 100 million low quality content creators, you have at least a million high quality content creators.

I can look at a blob of text and have an idea if it's worth looking deeper at in a glance, especially something structured like a recipe. I have to watch the video. That doesn't scale, and I frankly have better things to do than vet content creators via several or many minutes of inane video at a time, much less 'millions' of creators. In fact, the most efficient way I've found to find a new recipe that isn't a waste of time is to start with "ignore video sites" and "ignore influencer infested sites" (e.g. Instagram).

Not that everything on YouTube is crap, just most things. Sometimes seeing a video of someone doing something is the only way I can figure it out. There are many particularly useful videos of how to use complicated test and measurement gear. And tying knots. But the video isn't efficient enough for me to start there.

> I frankly have better things to do

This is what I'm trying to say: Sometimes you don't have better things to do, because you need the knowledge that is in the video. If you're doing something important and somebody comes up to offer to show you a much better way of doing the task, does this have to be the response? "I have better things to do".

Some YouTube videos are worth the time to watch, and I would argue that for recipes you'll spend your time better starting with videos vs search engines. Unless it's something you already know how to make and just need a reminder of the measurements of the recipe.

Talking about cooking, you have the BBQ channels on YouTube, with people showing you how to best cut and prepare different cuts of meat. If you don't personally know somebody to show you these techniques you'd be lost with only text content and no video.

I think it's easier for people to rage at an annoying YouTube video when trying to find information, than to rage at worthless SEO spam. But the solution is the same: close the tab and go back. It doesn't take many seconds to notice if a YouTube presenter is an idiot.

> We all have to sift.

Sifting videos is tedious and time-consuming. Sifting text is much more efficient.

Yes, but sometimes the nugget you need might not be in the text at all.

True, and equally, it may not be in the video.

> Try for yourself

I have, and I really dislike it a lot. I think video is one of the worst formats to convey a recipe in.

I have seen some that write the recipe in the video description, and that's fine. But not enough do it to make YouTube a place I go to get recipes.

LOL. Yeah lets all use youtube for our recipe gathering... Thats way better (sacrasm)

Even worse, I've found myself directed to long recipe pages with a huge amount of prose about the history of the recipe, how the author developer it etc, BUT THEN THERE IS NO ACTUAL RECIPE! This has happened multiple times in the past year. And this was often the first or second result when Googling the recipe. wtf?

I've seen some where the recipe was vissible on desktop but hidden behind a button on mobile which can be easy to miss.

That button thing is just the top level of douchebaggery right there. Sad

It's so bad someone wrote a Chrome Extension to just give you the dang recipe. It was posted here a while back.

The computer generated essay and the fake stackoverflow clones are the worst thing ever. It's harder to code now than just a few years ago because of all the BS people put on the internet.

I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.

Maybe I am wrong about this, and maybe the SEO junk sites would find a way to evolve, but what I really want from google is a plonk button so I can have a personal kill file for sites that I never want to see again.

Wow, yes to this -- your own google blacklist.

As a bonus, Google would have access to the list of who had blacklisted what sites -- surely that would be useful to them as a signal to detect "SEO spam sites".

But if they do that, then Goodharts gonna get his law involved and SEO will then involve gaming these lists to blacklist competitors. Arg.

Google allowing the blacklisting of sites with lots of ads on them and using google analytics?

They have enough information when yiu clock back and select a different result. And this hasnt killed SEO spam.

That's because Google is an ad company. They will never be part of the solution.

It would be possible to do that at browser level through extensions, for example there is one to filter out Pinterest results from search results. I wouldn't however expect that potentially great feature to be natively available in Google search anytime soon, unless they made it as a analytics filled paid service and in a way that gave their advertisers and investors the power of circumventing it, that is, both plonk and unplonk as a service.

Google used to support this[0], and I used it happily for blocking low-quality domains such as Experts Exchange, certain Wikia subdomains, and Pintrest. The feature was later removed[1] in favor of a browser extension, but the extension was less functional because it could only filter out results from the current page, so heavily-spammed keywords had result pages with only one or two links.

Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...

[1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-more-personalized-resul...

You could use ublacklist[1], it does filtering of search results on the client side. arosh’s list is a good place to start blocking crap.

[1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

[2] https://github.com/arosh?tab=repositories

HN perennial hit Kagi is good for this.

Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!

I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.

Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.

We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.

Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.

BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].

[1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...

So, assuming that this "mismanagement" is not just happening in the crypto space, but across the board in other spaces too, they are missing out on short-term money, but are more valuable for the searches that users are now doing (including me). So.. is it actually bad execution?

The mismanagement is not between quotes since all compliance was filled and acknowledged.

Could you please elaborate on your question? Since our issue was supposely solved filling all the requirements there is no difference about the different spaces. This is bad execution by the book.

To me all signs point to Reddit never having been a commercial venture, but rather an influence and propaganda machine for United States government agencies. So they already have their budget paid.

So because its a three letter agency hustle, thats why Tencent bought in to it? ... JFC

Where's the conflict? Do you think American and Chinese interests never align?

And to be clear, I think large parts of Reddit is of no interest to government agencies.

> Do you think American and Chinese interests never align?

You know that is impossible to prove or disprove so that argument is worthless.

I don't see Chinese communist party buying Reddit stocks as proof against US government agencies using Reddit to influence the population, that's what I mean.

I'm sure government agencies all over the world are quite popular on Reddit.

The CCP even has its own subreddit. It's called /r/worldnews.

What are "all signs"? Shit you made up in your head? It's owned by China for godsakes, what a half-baked conspiracy theory

Nearly all of Reddit is ultra left wing. No opposing view points are tolerated.

Individual topic sub Reddit’s are okay if they are strict about keeping on topic.

Anything front page is insanity.

How does that relate at all?

It’s well known that the US government outsourced psyops to China! Because, uh, you see, there are these lizard people…

Reddit isn't owned by tencent, where did you get that from?

> In February 2019, a $300 million funding round led by Tencent brought the company's valuation to $3 billion.[16]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit

Don't forget Maxwell Hill.

What could possibly motivate them to drop the ball on crypto ads? Hmmm…

> Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"

Which is funny as builtin search is so utter shit you pretty much need to use google to find anything

Maybe this is giving reddit too much credit, but I do see people say "append reddit to searches" literally every time the topic of search is brought up, so what if reddit is aware people do that but doesn't want to be a search engine?

Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't really envy it. So imagine telling the world hey, reddit is the new google, everyone come do your searches (and spam) here, gl mods.

This doesn't ring true to me. Reddit has clearly demonstrated a desire/mandate to monetize, even at the expense of its users. If they thought they had a viable Google competitor they wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth.

The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the spam problem is an upside.

I disagree with that. It doesn't matter if Reddit doesn't want to be a search engine. People are already using it a search engine and they simply will never stop no matter what those ppl in Reddit are thinking. Better to embrace the search use case and make it search friendly.

With big power comes greater responsability.

Is this phenomenon also happening in the markets were Google is not dominant? Like Yandex, Baidu or Naver?

>>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!

Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.

Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.

When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.

Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".

People have been astroturfing on reddit for a long time, the only reason it's not a cesspool is that reddit has a hardcore anti-marketing bent in a lot of subs and they'll aggressively out shills. I expect that GPT powered reddit bots will make the shills a lot harder to identify though.

The humans on reddit are often indistinguishable from bots as well.

It has always been a cesspool for a long time though. Only fit for consuming memes, cat pics, and financially motivated stunts like when Keanu Reeves was there the other day, using the social media account of the company for his upcoming film in a few weeks.

Each subreddit is controlled by a few essentially random people that likely have personal gain as one of their motivations.

If you think you aren't being advertised to on reddit just because the spam isn't as obvious as elsewhere, think again. The advertising there is more sophisticated than bots dropping links in comments.

There was a leak a while ago showed one of the moderators of wallstreetbets that was posting fake options gains, and it still gave him a massive following which he used to sell them a newsletter or something.

There are many subreddits where there will be a link in the sidebar to a monetized website affiliated with one of the mods.

And even 10 years ago, I remember at least 1 moderator of the programming subreddit somehow always had his blog posts highly voted and ending up on the front page, while any other submissions, especially ones that might counter his claims, would end up being stuck in the "spam filter". And if you messaged to have it unblocked, they'd only respond 1 day later, which means it would never show up on the front page due to the age factor of the ranking algorithm.

> "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit"

It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.

It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.

>Limit your search to Reddit, HN and/or Stack Exchange!

I would love something like swurl [1] but just with those three!

[1] https://swurl.com/

A few years back I heard a startup pitch for an application that would crawl all those recipe short stories and extract the recipe for you.

While nice. The copyright lawyers would have a field day.

Fun fact: recipes are not copyrightable. The text around them can be, but that’s what you’d be stripping out or summarizing.

If you have an amazing recipe you want to keep control of, trade secret is the way. And then it can’t very well be posted to the internet.

Because of a recent HN article on the subject, I was searching for "correlation of ACT scores and IQ", and the first 5 hits were the _same_ crappy 1500 word essay, where various section headers were programmatically changed to include exactly what I searched for.

How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.

I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.

This is a major reason I think LLMs could help with SERPs - presumably it will be a lot harder to do SEO effectively because now it involves the model training barrier.

Model training is already trivial, just expensive. As LLM optimized HW appears the expense will drop. By 2030, I’d expect decent consumer hardware to be both faster and two orders of magnitude cheaper than what’s in use today for model training.

The industry term for it is "made for advertising". It is a constant battle because some people in adtech want to increase impressions at all costs, and some people want to block these sites from their systems. Guess which one wins out when executives see how much money it makes?

"How do I fix some odd setting in Windows, Mac, whatever"

2007: results include documentation, a couple forums, if you're unlucky there's a potentially malware tool that's discovered people need to fix this.

2012: results include Reddit and Stack Exchange, documentation has disappeared, forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install.

2023: top results are just blogspam pushing malware tools and the above-mentioned useless support forums. It's hard to know if Microsoft and Apple even know what their software does.

Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.

Today, ChatGPT gives you an instant step by step guide which may or may not be correct but will likely get you there.

User: How do I fix large pdf files?

ChatGPT: delete system32

Had to finally register there to check. This was the answer.

"There are a few things you can try to fix large PDF files:

    Compress the PDF: You can use online or offline tools to compress the PDF file. This will reduce the file size and make it easier to work with. Some popular tools for compressing PDFs include Adobe Acrobat, Smallpdf, and PDF Compressor.

    Remove unnecessary elements: If the PDF file contains images, graphics, or other non-essential elements, you can try removing them. This can significantly reduce the file size. You can use Adobe Acrobat or other PDF editing tools to do this.

    Split the PDF: If the PDF file contains multiple pages, you can split it into smaller files. This can be done using Adobe Acrobat or other PDF editing tools.

    Optimize PDF: Many PDF viewers have the option to optimize PDF files. This may include reducing the quality of images or fonts to reduce the file size. You can try using the built-in optimization tools in Adobe Acrobat or other PDF viewers.

    Use a different file format: If the PDF file is still too large, you may consider using a different file format, such as JPG or PNG for images, or DOCX or RTF for text. This may not always be possible, but it can be a good alternative if the PDF file is causing too many issues.

"

Thanks for doing that!

It isn't very helpful, though.

Adobe has a method of compressing pdf files that is quite effective while retaining the quality of images, etc, e.g. 50 MB to 3 MB, so you can now email it. However you can only use the free version a few times before it wants all your data as well as the data of your first born. I'm too stingy to pay Adobe...

I haven't (yet) found free pdf compression that doesn't mangle images... (would be glad to try any that HN might suggest!).

Asking it "What is the best open source software to do option 1" it's first suggestion is Ghostscript, which is actually what I use. It can walk you through installing it and describing how to change the quality of the compression.

Or if you prefer the old fashioned way you can just read about it yourself here https://ghostscript.readthedocs.io/en/gs10.0.0/VectorDevices... the settings are modeled around what Adobe does and names them. I've never really messed with any GUI options though.

You no longer have any broken large pdf files, ergo the problem is solved.

Technically they are still there.

For the last five technical questions I asked ChatGPT every single one yielded an answer that was either wrong or uselessly vague :( I've now given up. You have to cross-check everything against Google anyway so why not just skip straight to that point.

> forums have opened that are full of "support specialists" telling you to reset your windows install

God this is such a pet peeve, those stupid Microsoft forums especially where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing and wishing a good day and suggest fuck all. They ought to just pull the plug on the site and let reddit handle their support for free.

Most of that support is free. It's some weird universe where Microsoft gives out fake credentials (forum badges and crap) to people that don't know what they are doing. These poor people in India and other places are spamming tons of useless "fixes" for internet cred.

Hello moffkalast,

I'm Kevin from the Microsoft Customer Support Team. I'm sorry to hear you're having a problem with Windows 10 support forums today. We're here to help and would like to get this problem resolved for you!

I understand that the issue you're currently facing is that "Microsoft forums where the customer reps spend 80% of the comment apologizing" are appearing on your Windows 10 forum search results?

Oftentimes unwanted ads or other unexpected configuration changes are caused by unintended software being installed on your computer, or from other errors.

Please try the following steps to resolve your issue:

1. Log into your computer. Click on the Start Menu and click Shutdown. Then click reboot. Allow any pending updates to install.

If this doesn't work, you can try the following solutions:

1. Log into your computer and click the Start Menu

2. Type "update" into the Search Bar and click Windows Updates

3. Click "check for updates now" and follow the instructions to install any pending updates.

If this still doesn't resolve your situation, you can check the following KBs for further help:

KB: 324829 - Restore from a System Restore Point

KB: 293111 - Update Windows Defender

KB: 299024 - Check for Errors using Windows Network Troubleshooter

I hope this has helped resolved your problem today.

Sincerely, Kevin

triggering lol

Obviously fake, it didn't tell us to run sfc /scannow.

Apple's official support website is the same. 100% useless feedback from the "Support Specialist". Yet it always shows up at the top of the search result.

You missed the expertsexchange era when they spammed all of Google ^^

expertsexchange is on of my favorite ambiguous site names

Well you wouldn't want any amateurs doing that for sure.

Amateurs can be experts! Amateur just means non-professional

Oh that's cool, didn't knew that amateur surgeons were a thing :)

You may also be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_surgeon

"The barber surgeon, one of the most common European medical practitioners of the Middle Ages, was generally charged with caring for soldiers during and after battle. In this era, surgery was seldom conducted by physicians, but instead by barbers, who, possessing razors and coordination indispensable to their trade, were called upon for numerous tasks ranging from cutting hair to amputating limbs."

How barberic.

They were arguably professionals.

I only hire union surgeons. No filthy scabs are going to cut me open!

Not a fan of Pen Island?

along with pen island

volkswagenitalia

The Pen Island web site is also a fav.

Am I the only one still searching Google primarily though keywords/phrases (and the exclusion of keywords/phrases)? I don't see much degradation in Google's results.

I keep trying, but the result quality continues to degrade. Most such searches either return nothing, one or two links, or a host of spam. Google is useless except for business phone numbers and hours they are open.

You're not the only one.

If you ask one of those people complaining here to share the query they use, it becomes very quickly very apparent that Google doesn't have a problem at all.

Apple forums are also quite bad. Every suggestion is to reset SMC and thats it.

The Stack overflow / stack exchange websites are often the only ones where you get useful answers when having any sort of problems regarding the user facing part of the OS.

(And also for anything else to be honest. I think 30% of my questions on google are answered by stack exchange websites)

Apple's dev forums are actually useful but only because of the mind-bending efforts of superhuman Quinn "The Eskimo!", who appears to have been at Apple since forever, is an actual programmer, gives real answers with meaty information and can even look things up in the source code for you. I've lost track of how often I've needed to learn something obscure about Apple's platforms and ended up at a thread where Quinn gives an answer. I've also filed a DTS incident in the past asking a seriously obscure question I wasn't even meant to ask (to do with their code signing system), and got a detailed and correct response back from Quinn+colleagues very quickly. It was by far the best support experience I ever had from a tech firm.

Quinn, if you're out there reading this, I really hope Apple has a succession plan in place for when you take a well deserved retirement!

> Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.

Kinda... but it then gets broken by the developers of the distros.

Static ip on raspberrypi? Sure... /etc/network/interfaces!

Nope, not anymore, it's dhcpcd.conf now.

It took literally a year for the "new way" to get on top of google search results.

    /etc/network/interfaces works just fine tho

but yeah, the stuff where "right thing to do" changes often can be hard to find.

Also "simple stuff" brings more "not really right way but kinda sorta works" answers

See I understand that, with Microsoft and Apple support you would get a response along the lines of:

"I see you are trying to find the Static IP of your Raspberry Pi, a static IP is a .....<long paragraph describing static ips>. You also have a raspberry pi which is....<long paragraph describing raspberry pi's>. Given all of that I think you should really start by resetting your Raspberry Pi and ensure that your Windows license is up to date.

> Thankfully Linux-related searches are still useful.

Mostly if you add an specific distro on your terms. It doesn't have to be your distro, just one that cares about what you are searching.

If you just ask for "how do I do X in linux", you will get plenty of spam and a few wrong answers here or there.

In the German market for any product related query where you want a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies, which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly newspapers).

i.e.: https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/ https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/ https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/

These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated.

And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".

They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work.

And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now.

Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.

I'm totally with you on that, but who, besides us, knows about this and understands the inner workings?

Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests.

They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today).

I'm not sure how to solve this, to be honest.

Google knows, has commented on it that it's fine "but you should be careful who you let publish on your domain" and they won't do anything about it. It was a somewhat big topic two or so years ago, and since then everyone has understood that you just need to buy in on media company sites to get ranked.

Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.

It is now easier to get Saturn and Media Market ads than technical sites when looking for hardware specifications.

And the number of ordinary people that try to gas light me for stating that Google has failed in their most basic mission. It's been years, and unless you work in tech or marketing, you're apparently obvious to the situation, and still think of Google as one may have during the 90's.

A lot of people are using this term incorrectly lately. Gaslighting isn't simply telling someone that they are wrong about something. It's a specific, sustained, and intentional form of psychological abuse, most often found in a domestic setting. The origin is the play Gas Light and the plot revolves around a man trying to steal from his wife by making her think she is going insane.

I know what gaslighting is, and I am using the term correctly. When I tell people Google Search is not just bad, it is overt manipulation of your search to waste one's time sifting through prose nonsense because Google promote prose over facts, they often don't just disagree, they overtly over time try to change my mind, they can't let it lie, they have to change my thinking. And they use shallow, obvious insulting language, as they is all they know. It is the duration of time they spend on this mind changing aggression. That's gaslighting

For this to be gaslighting the person would have to believe google search is terrible, but be engaging in a concerted effort to convince you otherwise. That doesn't seem like the case?

How's about the person's personality is such that whatever it is they use to gaslight does not matter, they take the opposite stance just to be aggressive, as that is their personality. They probably have no opinion on the matter at all, just like to ride me with aggression. That is gaslighting too.

> have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript)

We have different definitions of zero I think...

Zero as far as the Google spider is concerned

Not true for very long, their scrapers do use js now and read the dom.

yeah, but they do bot execute user interactions. so its easy to hide links with JS if intended

> Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".

Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the expected state that the best white goods in any category are experiencing constant churn?

I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very well created" but spam because you don't believe the recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful, and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.

> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.

Reddit was also partly successful in that regard because it catered to niche communities who ask the most interesting questions and, trolls aside, responses from the community that's generally trustworthy. There are literally subreddits with discussions on solutions that are deemed better than what you get from customer support. Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses, which is largely the issue with Google ads outlined by author.

Reddit definitely has promoted content and native advertising. Perhaps you're not seeing it because you're using the far superior old.reddit.com?

or download alternative mobile app becouse they allow it, and use adblock

The biggest form of this advertising isn't actually done with the knowledge of Reddit. Organizations use Reddit accounts to astroturf narratives together, since Reddit is pseudonymous. Companies who need better PR, or just a good controversy, can do this much more cheaply on Reddit than any other internet forum.

Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that is authentic can be the most useful stuff on the internet.

True but, for example, I still find that restaurants and travel advice is far superior on Reddit than Google.

Reddit is often my starting point for beginning research on purchasing decisions.

Although when buying a digital piano, I ended up finding dedicated boards like pianoworld to be better

EDIT

Ironically, I also find YouTube to be a great source of research, mostly because the cost to produce content is higher and I think it's somewhat harder to produce inauthentic content (at least to me so far for the things I am researching)

I never understood how Reddit isn’t an advertising powerhouse. Their users literally voluntarily segregate by interest, but the proper tech never got built out. Last I checked they integrated a 3rd party solution for that.

I would guess they have a huge problem with ad blocking

Especially that places like Reddit attract more "tech-savvy" people who have a high amount of ad block users. Naive web ads on places like that or e.g. Ars Technica is tricky most probably.

I think that was the case a few years back, but these days a lot of casual users are accessing it through the official app and getting served tons of ads.

It was a weird moment seeing a reddit comment where someone referred to the site as "this app." Made me feel old.

They need to make the ads and relevant HTML look identical to "real" posts so adblocking doesn't work

This devaluing content to humans, thus breaking what makes the site good.

If you look at their software dev efforts it should be painfully obvious why they're not a powerhouse of anything :-)

They had great product-market fit early on, were boosted by YN, and inertia is a huge thing.

Yeah, it's an absurdly poorly managed company.

Which is why it's still useful.

reddit became massive overnight because digg imploded. digg imploded because they tried to turn into an advertising powerhouse.

I remember how their idea of paid ad was just a reddit post you can comment on.

Which was kinda cool from user side but advertisers didn't like people taking piss on them in the comments so they undoed it

> Reddit was

Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.

that is great for increasing the quality of search results, moderation is awesome

There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.

For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.

>There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network

I would not characterise a community moulded according to the whims of a few anonymous individuals as high in trust.

It's high in trust of a very specific type. Not, perhaps, the type we want or need, but the type we have nonetheless.

I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.

Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times) now have more of my time because I trust them more based on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer low quality articles under click bait headlines).

> I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.

YOU MUTED is the key here.

"Majority of subreddit didn't like it so it got downvoted" is somewhat democratic will of community.

You muted a user coz you don't want their content is personal choice.

Moderator choosing to do so on a whim is neither of those. You do need moderators coz some people won't behave but many times rules of subreddit are basically there so moderator can point to excuse on banning or removing whatever they don't like, not to ban something people don't want there.

USA Today is the moderator ... and they do a poor job so I muted the entire 'sub'. USA Today is not an analogue for the user.

There's absolutely something wrong. They're not banning people for not adhering to posting rules in a sub, they're literally banning wrongthink, they're often banning political opinions they dislike or don't align with US democrat party hegemony.

They suppress subs or influence mods to suppress them for them.

There's a myriad of ways in which censorship to shape a narrative happens, and that narrative is as true as the narrative a few twitter users can set, if highlighted as "the majority opinion/the people have spoken" by mainstream media.

There's intervention via subterfuge, not an open contract you either adhere or not.

High bar is subjective, you're only filtering by the most superficial aspects: are there swear words? Do they have citations? Do they "sound" smart? Are they saying something "problematic"? Same here. There's no cadence. (I'm not talking about /r/AskHistorians though)

I've found hidden gems in free for all, no-karma, no-upvote forums such as 4chan. And you pay attention there, because people are not trying to sound smart.

> That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.

That's implying that there is a single one-dimensional quality metric. The problem is when moderators of popular subreddits (for a particular niche) or those with the most obvious names for a particular topic start to enforcing their own personal biases in the discussion rather than sticking to keeping the discussion on-topic.

I completely agree with the point that banning/censoring people is necessary in order to operate any internet forum. But I know from firsthand experience that bans are used to stifle valuable discussion both on major subreddits and niche ones. I've seen it happen to me and to others.

For example, on an r/news post a few years ago about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I replied to another comment where my content was basically the following: "If someone threatened to bomb your house, and they had a history of bombing houses, would you respond? What about after they destroyed your house?". That's almost exactly the wording I used (wish the comment hadn't been deleted so I could repost it exactly). This not only got me permanently banned from r/news, but also reported to the admins who censored the account. I suspect I pissed off a reddit admin or power user who followed me around reporting me, as shortly afterwards in a niche sub, I made another post discussing the continuum of force when it came to violent crime, quickly received several reports, and my account was permabanned from reddit. Note that both the content and tone of my posts there were similar to how I post on HN, which I think is generally appropriate.

This sequence of events bothered me a lot, because I think discussion of the use of force continuum and the ethics of preemptive or retributive force are highly relevant to today's world, and that the places where I continued (didn't start) discussion of them were the appropriate places for them. If this conversation can't happen on reddit, which it appears it can't, then we need another forum. It is clear to me today that reddit has hit it's eternal september. I can't bring myself to respond to the multitude of low effort posts that typically bombard you when you post something other than memeing.

> Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink

I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough.

And if you disagree, please post some examples.

As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism that is used mainly by the alt-right.

> And if you disagree, please post some examples.

The Donald

The poster child for vote manipulation? Where front page articles would have 5000 upvotes 10 minutes after posting? The sub that fetishized persecution despite receiving warning by after warning?

There were a huge number of active users there who lobed up voting anything and everything.

It really didn't fetishise persecuting anyone. The warnings were arbitrary and capricious

Orwell's term is crimethink of course. I can only think of one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to say certain things to certain people. Thankfully you're still allowed to actually hold the thoughts in your head.

> I can only think of one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to say certain things to certain people.

No idea as to what you're referring to, but you must know many more examples throughout the world and history, no?

That's probably an US-centric comment. I have no idea what it is either, but the "one party that done X" line is a strong signal of it.

It has always been a felony to say “certain things to certain people”. See for instance fraud against the elderly.

Which certain people are you being unfairly restrained from saying what certain things to?

Looking into it I probably accepted a framing I shouldn't have.

They banned a large Covid sub r/NoNewNormal where the bulk of the content would be accepted as common sense today.

Themes in that sub were that “the cure is worse than the disease” (it was) and that “we shouldn’t throw away our way of life for Covid” (we chose not to in hindsight).

If you are a member of subs like r/lockdownskepticism even today then you frequently get banned from other subs.

"Common sense" indeed. That subreddit was a hotbed of unscientific anti-vaccine lies. However, it was actually banned for breaking Reddit rules on brigading.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covi...

Quote:

  Claims of “brigading” are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods.

no, this is BS. pretty much every big political sub does "brigading" against other subs, it's impossible to stop. a handful of bad actors can ruin it for everyone. reddit admins apply the anti-brigading rules selectively. there are big subs that have gotten away with it forever.

That’s some revisionist history. That sun was a cesspool of bad behavior. It wasn’t banned for believing the wrong thing, it was banned for organized attacks on anyone who dared to believe differently from them.

This point is always brought up and it has no relevance in terms of what we're discussing which boils down to opinions on products and services from people who have some expertise in the matter.

You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a question on something related to a product in that hobby.

Try asking why Aragorn is a black man in the future LotR set on /r/magicTCG and see how long you can ask a question on something related to a product in that hobby after that. There are other swift ways to get ban, like noting that the body shape of some characters were changed drastically in-between old and newer cards. Basically anything going against the pandering of WotC to some twitter users.

I got banned out of /r/games for asking "what rights trans people don't have that other humans do?" under post about someone yelling "trans rights are human rights" about Hogwart's legacy. Not being snarky at all, just curious (as I'm not from US and don't really get what the fuss is about).

Still haven't got a coherent answer out of anyone I asked, just insults

That... sounds like a very well deserved ban considering the topic, the reddit and everything that was happening around it.

As a moderator of online communities I'd do the same in a heartbeat. Take that to Twitter or somewhere.

How is that well-deserved? His comment was literally about the topic of the post, and the post was apparently allowed. "We allow politics but sorry, you're only allowed to have the Right Opinion here. Take all other opinions to Twitter!"

It's a good question, and one that their activists don't like answering because "the right to impose oneself on spaces designated solely for the opposite sex" isn't what most people would accept as a human right. So they ignore or block or ban or attack instead of engaging reasonably.

I don’t think anyone would take you seriously enough to give a coherent answer if you’re echoing the language of the bigots, even just unintentionally. It’s like asking “why should black people be able to use the same restrooms?” during the civil rights movement. Even as a totally honest and not at all disingenuous question, it blends into the rhetoric of the reactionaries.

The whole story related to Rowling supposedly being transphobe is crazy. All that canceling because she stated in a twit that "person who menstruate" is a stupid circumlocution around the word woman. Then, like religious taboo, it extended to whatever was linked to it. The irony is that all these cancelers are acting very 10-100 worst against whoever is the target of the anger than what happened to the people they are supposedly defending.

So you’re saying they have little interest in entertaining someone who just wants to culture war? And that’s somehow bad?

It's getting a lot worse I agree. It seems like anything that might be offensive to anyone having any emotions under any circumstance is now blurred and labeled "NSFW".

Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30.

> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses

It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

Basically, Reddit's system is terrible.

> Reddit's system is terrible

This doesn’t match my experience of reading Reddit

That's because you're just unaware of how astroturfed it is.

I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits and randomly picked an account that posted a top meme

https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/

The account has 8 million post karma and every single post it submits to a subreddit ends up on the front page of Reddit... without fail.

The account isn't a mod of any of those subs, but they're clearly using upvote manipulation to get every single one of their posts to the front page.

Of course the front-page will look like that. Niche subreddits are a completely different experience.

But in the context of TFA - searching Reddit to get factual answers - what appears on the reddit.com front page from day to day is largely irrelevant, surely?

By extension, high-karma accounts that are run by marketing companies can post in a niche subreddit to subtly promote their product or disparage their competition, and they'll end up on the front page of that subreddit. They'll get a lot of views and a lot more engagement than the average unsophisticated user's post would -- and those astroturfed posts would, on average, rank higher in searches.

This is analogous to SEO, but rather more insidious and sneaky. You can spot SEO blogspam from a mile away. You don't know if a Reddit user is a real person, a bot, or a company's representative.

Reddit bots are used for upvote manipulation of legitimate posts by brand ambassadors/etc. The post histories are just to make the bot look legitimate.

I always assumed the botted accounts on Reddit were in the hands of marketing companies, ready to upvote posts saying "My Brand X headphones sound great" or "I changed from Brand Y to Brand Z cigarettes because the smooth taste never leaves me feeling over-smoked" or "I made big gains by putting my life savings into this sketchy investment" or whatever they're being paid to promote at the time.

I'd wager you could do a lot to influence public opinion with just an upvote ring, without the botted accounts actually needing to post messages.

Who cares? The real reddit stuff is not in the front pages.

Someone must care, no? Those threads get a large number of impressions, assumedly from real users.

> I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits

That was your first mistake, the defaults are cesspools full of karma farming bots. Nobody goes to those for advice.

What makes you think that the niche subreddits aren't also full of marketing firms, bots, and upvote networks? With very few exceptions, they are.

They also have an okay s:n ratio in my experience, as the mod team can work the experience. Like for example, q&a type threads tend to be useful. There are folks promoting things but it’s obvious when they are.

Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? Advertisers want to maximize their reach and well, it's not like they know these groups even exist.

I'm sure it happens a lot regardless, but the vast majority of content in those is still just from regular people. You can tell by the information posted as it tends to be more or less truthful and useful. Once it stops being that it'll be obvious enough. Like when Russian bots invade your average Ukraine related r/worldnews post.

>Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? A

That's the magic of Reddit, 4Chan and every other cesspool where any niche is only a slight URL change away from any other niche.

It's trivially easy to add niche subs 2, 3 and 4 to the list of places that you target.

Yeah and then any mod with half a brain sees you're spamming things everywhere and bans you.

1) That's a whack-a-mole exercise when the astrorufer buys accounts in bulk.

2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance. Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some product.

Except that there is a culture of looking for and outing shills in a lot of subs, and since you can see someone's entire post history it's usually not hard to confirm or at least provide solid evidence for it once you suspect it. I had someone out an astroturfer who posted a banal non-response to one of my comments just the other day.

You don't need to be the size of Coca Cola to successfully astroturf, there are enough companies specialized in social media marketing.

Take r/mechanicalkeyboards for example, arguably a niche community. The enthusiasts there are very motivated to buy new things and are willing to pay quite a lot of money for them. Place a few of your bots there to promote your artisan keycaps and watch people pay top bucks for them.

Spoken like someone in a bubble. "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

Well, if "nobody" goes there, how are the bots able to farm karma? Who's giving them the views and upvotes?

I guarantee you anything that's the "default" is being visited by many, many casual visitors, people not "in the know", and people who don't recognize karma farming bots for what they are.

I said nobody goes there for advice because there usually isn't any there, we mainly go to those for arguing nonsense and laughing at memes. And I'm not saying that there aren't many advertisements on those, but they are usually painfully obvious.

That looks just like making content tailored to subreddit it is posted, no shit it's popular.

Also how the fuck "Building a hobby-shelter while camping in Kelowna" or some random funny pictures is "astroturfing"?

> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.

User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.

edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.

It’s not part of the ranking algorithm, it’s part of the anti spam system. If you make a new account and comment, it’s almost never visible to anyone else.

You have to warm up accounts with a few comments over a week before they start showing up.

That's often true. Individual subreddits may filter new accounts or low-karma thresholds to prevent spam. The better subreddits will simply flag it for manual review rather than remove it outright.

An alternative: create an account, don't use it for a while, use it.

Mods essentially have two variables to work with: account age and karma. Some subs do set minimum karma (I've stumbled upon some that wouldn't accept below 2k karma), but most just go by account age to prevent banned users from going around the ban.

And a tip for spotting karma farmers: just go to one of those big subs that accept screenshots of tweets. If the screenshot has engagements/timestamp cropped, click on a profile. Like 8 times out of 10 it's gonna be an older account that never posted before reposting one of the older popular submissions.

EDIT: Here's an example that took me like 20s to find: https://www.reddit.com/user/DepartureSimples/

> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.

Are you sure? How do you know this?

I think what they're trying to say is some subreddits auto-collapse comments from users with low karma and recent date of creation to combat bots. If reddit gives any more weight to high karma users I can tell you as one that it definitely doesn't seem noticeable at all. Right time and right place comments are always the ones that end up on top.

On most big subs if you have a fresh account your posts are hidden by default. Maybe they have to be manually approved? Not sure.

Source: Don't have a persistent reddit account, just made a new one for the few times I wanted to post something.

As a reddit-addict this really depends on the subreddit you're using. In /r/askreddit you don't stand a chance that your question will attract serious attention, but there are so many subreddits with small usergroups and enough reactions. In /r/askreddit or other popular subreddits, my answers get reasonable attention, even if I'm not on the reddit timeschedule.

When two people say ´reddit´ they might be referencing two completely different worlds.

The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and I´d have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for many other people. And some user might only ever be looking at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.

That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it´s difficult to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned ring nothing in my mind, but as there´s subs where you can only submit post titles ´cat´, there sure must be others were karma is everything.

Entirely depends on subreddit in question

> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is just unfortunate side effect for new users.

Other problem is that karma is global which basically means user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-based filtering is doomed to fail anyway

And it's not a great protection system at all. Just like how content generators are gaming Google search, there is a problem now with bots that find what is popular and repost it later (with a wording change) for karma farming.

> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.

User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The source code is available here (as of ~2018): https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...

> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.

Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.

0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.

1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.

> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses

Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g. /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme anyway).

It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms, but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised, they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.

Google held control of who they reward using AdWords, they decided who lives and who dies, who goes bancrupt and who prosper It is their system that rewards SEO spam

If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam.

Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit

You can submit your site to Google and they will index it. If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you! Even if you don't pay Google a dime.

Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.

> If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you!

I m sorry, this is like news from a different universe.

There is an absolutely world-shattering report on how children have lost all freedom ovet the past 40 years. They used to roam the neighbourhood, then they were allowed to stay in one street, and today we dont let them out of backyard.

I have it on my PC, but can't find it in Google. Its impossible now

I can only talk from my own experience, I've launched several websites that became high ranking on Google solely because of content and speed. Without anybody linking to them. Hell, there's still nobody linking to them years later, and Google still keeps them highly ranked. In niches with well established competitors.

Without Google, I doubt I would have had any chance to reach a public, because nobody except search engines will give you the time of day when you're not already established.

There's many bad things about Google, but they truly allow many people a chance to get their voice out and many small businesses a chance to exist. That is brilliant.

You seem to be providing a brilliant explanation why Google has failed -> I don't need to be found, I need to find a specific piece of information. It's a report by a major university about children. It's basically impossible to find. The university probably has crap website, maybe it's slow, it doesn't follow google guidelines - but so what? As a consumer, I don't care if the website is fast, if it's providing wrong information.

Alternatively, if I search for something related to registering a company in UK, the top 3 results are scams. Does Google rate scammers higher because their website is fast? Is it too difficult for Google to identify the .gov domain and rank the result appropriately?

I am not claiming Google is evil, I am claiming Google is incompetent.

They have destroyed their own food supply or they failed to protect it, and that's why now their search results have gone to shit.

It seems the average Joe that used to run their own website or forum has gone bankrupt or is berried under SEO spam. Joe was replaced by Average Tom.

Average Tom doesn't even know how to make a website, instead he registers on 5 different platforms - Instagram, Ticktok, Etsy, whatever else is popular, and pushes their content there. No SEO spam, they get results. Yes, they lose freedom, have to deal with arbitrary rules, moderation, etc. They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.

Users have voted with their feet, and most of the world's content is no longer accessible to Google. Today's teenagers don't even search on Google to find a barber, they search on Instagram, and make a booking right there.

Google search is already dead inside, they just don't know it yet.

Google has seen a massive decline in quality and they are a company of very questionable morals. I think it's fair to say they are evil.

Still, Google is the reason millions of people can make a living, who would have been locked out of their industry by gate keepers if search engines didn't exist.

The standard static HTML website that can be found by Google is vastly superior to social media offerings. Creators and businesses can not sell their products through social media like Instagram, because you can not even put a link unless you purchase their spy ads. With crusty old WordPress you can create great online publications and articles as long as you want - no popular social media offers that.

The general public use the internet exclusively for social media, and at most a couple of web sites for work or other functions. That is because the general public has an insatiable appetite for mindless entertainment. That doesn't mean the traditional web has failed, it's still there and Google is still king on that hill. The social media hordes are the same people who would be glued in front of the TV in the past. Social media attention and likes are close to worthless in the end for creators and businesses. I'd rather have 100 customers brought by Google and a traditional web site, than 1 000 000 Instagram likes from people looking at my post for 0.03 seconds while scrolling. When people are looking for important information or want to make a purchase online, they go by Google almost all of the time, and almost never by social media.

> They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.

Google is not taking anything from anybody. You can index your content with them for free, and they will send visitors to your site. Social media will just use your content to get eyeballs for their own ads.

The average business owner treats their traditional website as an annoying hassle, when it could be a window into the world and massively increase their sales and customer service. They love social media, because Facebook and Instagram feeds them like and heart icons.

The advantage of Reddit to the broad internet is that there are always people trying to prove you wrong and call out BS.

The most tragic casualty of this is the ancient wisdom of just google your tech issues. It doesn't work any more! All you get is page upon page of auto-generated help sites that pretend to have solutions for your exact problem but are all actually the same list of generic tips (restart your computer! update your drivers!)

I can sort through it with enough effort, but it's a disaster for non-tech people who could muddle through their computer problems before but now just get hopelessly stuck in the Google Search swamp every time.

Look on the bright side; we're the last generation(s) of folk capable of operating tech at any level beyond what the UX people at FAANG will allow one to reach. The bridge has been burned behind us. Yay job security.

Stack Overflow is to blame for that.

With the best of intentions they make their data open, resulting in hundreds of clone sites regurgitating the stack overflow data, on sites with names like “ProblemGeek” and “NerdAnswer”.

I mean, SO is still there... Just limit your search result to it, e.g. "java enum ordinal site:stackoverflow.com" (or others from stackexchange family).

The two biggest problems I’ve seen develop with Google are that:

1. The quality of the search algorithm’s ability to sift through nonsense to find “the good stuff” seems to have gotten progressively worse, and that’s largely fueled by:

2. Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage where all the “good stuff” is now behind walled off gardens that Goggle doesn’t report on. For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense. Sure there are exceptions to that, but it’s clear what direction the tide is going.

The “good old days of the internet” where the best stuff was just a Google search away seem long gone.

I would add a "3." that Google has less incentive than they used to to fix it.

If they can supply enough relevant ads,"rich snippets", shopping widgets, or links to content they pulled from wikipedia (that keeps you surfing google-owned properties)...the organic search results don't matter.

Actually, if the organic results are low quality, then maybe you're more likely to use the content above. So the organic content optimal quality is just "better than Bing", but worse than the ads.

Part of this is because of tools like Discord which is not indexable by Google.

We need something better than Discord for community discussions and support.

Reddit is indexable.

Discord as the go-to community hub for things like programming languages makes a little bit sad, knowing it’s all ephemeral and locked up.

At least the Nim team has a Matrix bridge I guess, so it’s a solvable problem somewhat. But I find joining yet another Discord group just obnoxious.

I long for the async-only text forums of yore. I’m getting old, aren’t I.

It's very different content though, isn't it? I've never used Discord, but it's mostly chat as far as I understand, and I always found chat somewhat difficult to use for referencing later. You'll have topics shifting, multiple topics going on at once, everything being more informal (and people spending less time on finding the solution instead of jumping on Discord).

I imagine it's harder to get useful content out of that vs forums where topics are pretty contained in threads and it's more formal so there's less noise and pretty much all posts are relevant to the topic.

Maybe if forums had fancy apps for local display and reply etc, and you could sync them between servers, and it could be kind of decentralized. Someone should build something like that and come up with a good name. It would be a useful net of news. Just a thought!

How would you even index something like Discord? It's mostly a chat app, where discussions are casual and often mixed togheter with others... It's not like a forum where each post is at least a somewhat coherent thought written out properly.

Discord should be publishing chat logs in HTML format, like how FreeNode did for their IRC logs.

I would dislike that. Imagine if every single thing you say to your friends while being in a public space was recorded for everyone to see in the future... The point of a chat is to be ephemeral. Otherwise it would just be a forum with really bad and chaotic content.

Archiving and indexing public IRC or Discord isn't the same as putting up microphones everywhere to listen to conversations between friends.

Why not? The microphones wouldn't be everywhere, just in specific places where people like to go to socialize. Say a study room at Uni for example... imagine all the "good knowledge" we are missing by not recording every single word students say at Uni and making it publicly searchable. Right?

Even if you could always go to another Uni, it's still annoying and bad.

> For example, rather than finding an amazing article written by experts in a long-standing publication you’ll get some rantings from a random blog from someone broadly unqualified to opine on the subject and whose writings are full of inaccurate nonsense.

That's not my experience. I appreciate the rant as much as the amazing article by "experts". What bothers me is in case of anything which make money for someone and who pays Google addwords fees is presented prominently while the rant is buried.

Can you tell us what value you get out of rants from unqualified people? What actionable thing comes out of consuming such information? Because I can’t imagine why anyone would do that, since “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd and disagree even among themselves. Why not just look at another side but one that is still made by a qualified expert?

Someone "unqualified" may have a viewpoint that the "experts" have not considered or are unwilling to state publicly for various reasons. Of course what value you can derive from such an article depends on the value of "unqualified" here for which we only have gp's labels in this example. The only other mentioned difference is the format - a blog "rant" vs. something published in an established publication and I don't think that is enough to go on to discard the former.

> “experts” are hardly ever a homogenuous crowd

Except when they are. The community of so-called experts discarding what eventually turned out to be the truth because it goes against their thinking is hardly unheard of.

What value do you get? You're here reading and commenting on things from anonymous people on a web site that hasn't existed for a hundred years.

> still made by a qualified expert?

It is pretty common that an expert who disagrees with the consensus will not be qualified, because the principal requirement for getting qualified is that you agree with the consensus.

> Google is only really searching the “public” Internet but that’s increasingly a wasteland full of garbage

Have you tried other search engines because you might be surprised that the problem is more to do with Google than the internet.

Might actually be SEO optimizing for google mostly so less popular engines get saved by having differing algorithms

I used to think this too, until I tried Bing, with and without its new GPT chat, and if you think Google is rubbish, wait until you need to search MS dev documentation (very factual!) using Bing.

Truth is, it's all astroturfing all the way, all the web. Even reddit.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on search. My views are my own, etc.

I use Bing GPT and think it's better than Google for answering simple questions. Bing's search results may not be as good as Google's, but the information I need is usually buried inside SEO text. Bing's use of GPT to extract precise answers makes me feel impressed compared to Google.

Edit: Bing GPT is getting better, but it still makes mistakes sometimes. If anyone wants to stay updated on its development, you can follow the team on Twitter https://twitter.com/MParakhin.

It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in Reddit to fake good user experience. For example, who the hell knows who mr fart32snap is on this reddit discussion thread talking about good cheap microphone? I don't doubt there's already some of these out there.

IMO, the only way this can ever be truly fixed is to have a 1 to 1 mapping between a person and their online personality. An account and their posts need to actually have a weight. It need to actually matter what an account's history is across the web.

I think this is what blockchain is supposed to solve. It is not fast and efficient enough for all the small monetary transactions. But surely is good enough for blogs or things like that?

Another option is a trust network. We already have that within the social networks but not across them. I also don't mind trusting a bot that has a cohesive brand across the networks - there's no need for it to be human as long as I can untrust it.

Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for a long time. Try looking for a backpack, wallet, watch etc.. all top posts have a very "sponsored content" smell.

Corporations already do this. Same with NGOs and political organizations. They have done this for a long time.

I have a Reddit account that is old with a few thousand of the old "link karma," and received several 4-figure offers for the account for this purpose.

So we need an internet without corporations? Sounds obvious but how we are supposed to achieve this?

Easy self-hosted solutions, like IPFS or Gemini?

No, the pseudonymous nature of the platform, combined with the voting mechanism surfacing content (rather than a mechanism like "following" surfacing the relevant posts to you) makes the platform uniquely manipulable. That makes running these kinds of consensus-manufacturing campaigns easy.

If you get rid of either of those mechanisms, you make it a lot harder to astroturf.

HN would be the same way without dang.

Instead of making astroturfing harder you could also increase consequences for being caught and reward whistleblowers.

No company is going to risk posting without revealing that they are behind the post if doing so would result in - to make it extreme - jail time for the poster AND company leadership.

Ultimately, this is not really a technical problem but a social or legal one. As long as we let people get away with fraud - and let's be honest, astroturfing is fraud - then enterprising individuals will find ways around whatever technical means we put in place.

This has been happening for over a decade. It's very effective and hard to spot if done well.

I've had friends at companies ask me to make positive posts to both reddit and news.ycombinator -- there are definately news.ycombinator upvote/post groups, who help push articles to the front page (I'm not sure how successful they are, but I know they exist).

I have seen some weird stuff astroturfed on HN. I think the strangest ones were lung pressure trainers and remineralizing toothpaste.

There are definitely Rust and SQLite astroturfing mafias on HN, and they are very powerful :)

> It's only a matter of time until companies start posting in Reddit to fake good user experience.

Uh, it has been like this for years. I personally know a friend who was hired to post fake comments on reddit 5 years ago. It could have been longer and I just don't know.

I guess the whole thing works very well because people still have "doubt" if it happened today.

Buzz marketing, shilling, astroturfing... were already things at almost the very start of dotcoms, and before. (Microsoft actually pioneered some of it in online services before the Web, but I recall some early Web startups in this space.)

Maybe starting a decade ago, when I'd tell people about Reddit, I'd switched to telling them that the front page already appeared dominated by marketers and manipulators, but that most of the random subreddits were more genuine. Though even some subs at the time, such as for groups of interest, were run by marketers or in service of marketers. (Many subs seemed moderated by the eclectic mix of kinds of people you could find to do that thankless task for free. But some were obviously effectively working for brands, especially when groups of interest were built around buying stuff.)

I remember when the first piece of advice I was given was to unsub from the default reddit subs. Prior to that I never quite got it as a site, it seemed like a worse HN to me with less topic overlap with what I found interesting.

LinkedIn does that. You don’t need blockchain to achieve it.

So, your solution is omnipresent tracking and retribution?

The source of information is important which is just one of the many reasons why sites like reddit are poorly suited to be used as a reference.

Or you know instead of invading peoples privacy irreparably you can maybe just learn not to take opinions on face value.

The article overlooks that "ads" goes beyond just ads on the search results page. Ads is the main problem, in the form of Google's business model which dissuades them from actually improving search result quality.

Spam/SEO/etc sites are very easy to detect - use the presence of ads, analytics, affiliate links, newsletter signup forms, etc as a negative ranking signal, and the problem will be resolved quickly. This can't be evaded, because the same techniques used to evade search engine detection would be abused by ad fraudsters.

The reason they don't do that is that those spam sites help Google in multiple ways - not only do they increase engagement with the search result page ads (the ads might actually be better than the "organic" but spammy results), but the ads/analytics on the spam sites are likely to be Google's which helps them too.

This would not be a problem with any search engine whose incentives are aligned with the users' (Kagi has a "non-commercial" feature for example that I suspect roughly implements the above).

There are entire subreddits that are completely bot driven and no human creates any input.

I am using some subreddits very frequently (like r/hackernews) but boy has it become obvious how many bots there really are.

I think though, that we will not see a startup solving this any time soon, that will not succumb to bots itself.

I'm breaking my head since January (as a hobby) to create some ai driven semantic search index, but the problem starts with trust.

On the PG tweet[1], posts like this make me feel like I'm losing my mind. I cannot get over how the tweet says "Reddit is unique in social media" while the Instagram graph is literally identical to Reddit's and are right beside each other on the graphic that accompanies the words. You cannot miss it. It's also very selective, as the Twitch guy points out, and it's also google search terms, which aren't really that indicative. But I guess PG === default insightful? Wild.

On using reddit as a search engine, I agree that for certain types of information it's very helpful, specifically in theory authentic user experiences. Twitter is also useful here, though not to the level of detail. You could argue that stack exchange is the same thing: user generated truth that by and large aren't search engine spam.

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480

The entire of Google is dying. Starting with search, the moment you turn off your adblocker you will see why. It's literally a complete crapfest of badly moderated advertising and ranking manipulation. Then there's the default Android experience which literally shovels garbage down you with the Google app and via a version of Chrome with no ad blocking capability. The www is unusable unless you install another browser. Then all their immature web based apps propositions which people are finally tiring of due to the bugginess and being almost completely unusable if you're offline. Then the invasive tracking and privacy issues. You can tell how bad it's getting because nearly all my searches suggest autocomple with "reddit" on the end because people are more likely to get human generated results. And of course the ramped up YT advertising recently.

It's a classic death spiral.

They don't have a product other than crap search and invasive data collection.

Not only Google, but also the other day I was trying to download Chrome using Edge. Bing had an ad along these lines: Title: "Google Chrome - Download the Fast, Secure Browser from ..." URL:"https://google.com". I was just about to visit this site until I hovered over it and saw that the actual link's URL was very much not google.com.

Google is dying because the original internet that it searched is dying. That's not necessarily a bad thing and this isn't a "the sky is falling" statement - it's just the internet has changed. A lot. Nowadays people aren't creating their own websites - they're creating content and providing feedback on forums such as Reddit. The fact people are searching Reddit for whatever they need is a reflection of that new reality.

Whenever you are thinking Google is dying, please instead consider what an ideal page of search results would look like...

When you search for "2012 honda civic brake hose burst pressure psi", which pages exactly would you wish were at the top...?

Typically, I find that when google search fails me, it's because the content I'm looking for actually doesn't exist. I'm seeing SEO spam simply because nobody has written a detailed blog post about the exact topic I'm after.

The problem isn't Google, the problem is the whole internet (or at least the part not behind a login wall)

The internet dying is indirectly googles problem too... And they're in a position to solve it.

For example, the bursting pressure of a 2012 honda civics brake hose might not be on any public web page... But it is known to the engineers who designed the thing. There is masses of non-public information, much of it really useful. Not just engineering - but the script of every TV show and film ever, the things people say in public posts on social media, etc.

Google needs to incentivize companies to publish everything by default. That used to be adsense - publish useful info and earn a few dollars a month for your trouble. I think they need to take that further with some kind of info-sharing platform that pays to publish useful info. I'd also like to see a mode where a company can sync all their internal documents and members of the public can search them and then request to pay to see a document, with a company employee checking it first for secrets.

At the very least I'd like for those keywords to each show up on the page I'm looking for.

> When you search for "2012 honda civic brake hose burst pressure psi", which pages exactly would you wish were at the top...?

A service manual would be nice, but since those probably aren't public a well written blog post would be the next choice.

On the other hand, when searching "jni callback function arguments" the obvious answer (JNI specification) is public, but Google can't find it unless you search explicitly for it and even then you get some StackOverflow stuff near the top.

I switched to Kagi last year and couldn’t be happier. The results are better for me. No ads (the small amount I pay Kagi is well worth it) and a slider to click for programming focused results.

Looking forward to some new great AI search but I doubt it will come from Bing. The other day I tried Bing and it had merged information across 2 different results such that the page title it showed was incorrect and misleading.

Who needs Google anyway? Forbes is an expert on everything! I mean holy fucking shit, is there any topic Forbes isn't an expert on? I wonder who are the brilliant minds at Google Search who let shit like that slide. As of the last 2 years, Forbes has become an expert in web development, devops, and who knows what's coming next - experts on systems architecture?

Link buying is as rampant as ever, too. For one of the blogs I own, it's not uncommon to get an out of the blue offer for $500 to publish an article that includes a link to some product. And I have heard those numbers are even crazier in casino, gambling and cannabis niches.

For a new site/blogs these days, Google will stall/throttle you for 2-3 years before it starts even looking at you as if you matter / are a subject expert. All the while, shitty news sites like Forbes get pumped to the top not because they produce high-quality content but because they're jacked up with backlinks.

People keep repeating the mantra that Google search is dying - but I think it's more that many just haven't yet understood that communities of people are the small oases in an otherwise vast, noisy information space. Of course Reddit, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow are where many (in this community) are going to find the most relevant information - that's where the people are.

I remember clearly when I switched to using Google in the early 2000's. It wasn't because they were so much better at searching the Internet - it's because they acquired the Usenet index. There was knowledge in Usenet archives that couldn't be found anywhere else - because that's where the people were.

Maybe something like the original Yahoo would be good to have again? E.g. if I know Reddit exists, how do I easily find out that hackernews or stackoverflow also exits and are good sites?

I was telling my wife that internet of today is how p0rn sites looked in the late 90s. Popups, ads everywhere, miss-direction, can't go back, click this link to go here which might or might not take you there, links that look like site links but are actually ads.

It's making everything suck.

I believe that Google could easily, from a technical point of view, lower the search ranking of web pages that have a lot of affiliate links. However, I also believe that this might be against their business interests.

When I am in a patient mood, I now just use the Edge Browser on my Macs and iPads, and jump right into Bing AI/ChatGPT chat mode. It is really important to make it clear that you want the system to research, follow web links, and summarize results for you. However, I see no advertisements, so how are they going to monetize this? I pay for OpenAI API use and also pay (for now) for ChatGPT, so I guess that I would also pay for an ad-free Bing AI search.

I have always been a Google fan, still love GCP, YouTube, YouTube Music, and Play Books. But they do make their money off of search and advertisements, so it will be really interesting to see how they protect their business.

Don't forget this is how Google started. It was originally a plain search page by design; minimally invasive ads didn't even come until later. Given that it is estimated that 'AI' chat costs about 10X to run per query vs. traditional search, please enjoy this honeymoon period while it lasts. I personally suspect that the real cost is much higher; GPUs are power hungry and these models aren't small.

Didn’t anyone consider that google was extremely good at indexing websites, i mean normal websites (webs of interlinked hypertexts) but nowadays few people publish their content on regular websites but do so in the form of posts on reddit/instagram/youtube etc?

That might explain a lot…

They seem to have fallen into the Yahoo! trap of attempting to keep you on their properties for as long as possible. Search for a basic word definition or simply answer and they'll offer you a YouTube video which takes 60 seconds to get to the point.

I've never seen anything beyond anecdotes that appending 'reddit' to you query is common. Yet the article claims it is now the most popular way to search. Does anyone have the data to support this claim?

In September of 2022 I have started collecting links in repository. Some articles I find useful, to some I am returning back like a turtle into an island.

I have bookmarked 3930 links. The number grows every day. I know this will not replace google for me, but it is a place that allows me to browse my link history and easily find things I have found interesting in the past. My personal filter.

https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

I do the same when it comes to products and reviews.

When it comes to programming I limit the search to one or two years. This is why my stackoverflow is sorted that the newest answer is the last because they don't let me sort in a way the the newest answer is the first.

I don't think its google fault in general its just the thing that if your first on a specific product you add a link where to buy that thing and this is how you make money. Would be fun to see if affiliate links were not a thing. By how much search results would improve.

> Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News

Is that some kind of easter egg, just expressing hope, or is this pointing to some other post, or am I missing something? This post has 33 points at the time I'm writing this and doesn't seem to be a repost (according to https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dkb.blog)?

The original HN article[0] has 3636 points as I write this comment.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

Oh, right. i should have searched for the title, not the site.

From the example image half way through this article...

> "retool slack integration"

I've just googled this and the top hit was literally the instructions to set up the slack integration. Not a link to it, the actual instructions, although the link to the source page in the Retool docs was there. The rest of the hits were all hits in the Retool docs, except for the last result, which was someone making an HN comment making exactly my point on the last time this was discussed.

Google search isn't broken or dying.

Google Search is broken for subjective searches. If you search "best xxx", Google will only return crap. "best xxx reddit" still gives relevant information.

How is that Google's fault? are you expecting a "Search" engine to perform qualitative analysis on your specific topic and generate a list for you?

"best xxx reddit" that's google working as intended, you searched for a topic on reddit.

I swear with the proliferation of LLMs most people have completely forgotten what a "search" in a search engine means.

> How is that Google's fault

Because the top results are complete crap, and obvious SEO spams in most cases. If Google just allowed me to blacklist some sites from my search results I could actually get good results.

Also maybe they shouldn't not rewrite my queries for me, I don't need them to helpfully remove 3 words out of 5 from my search.

Because it's not that the sites it finds just has a bad or wrong opinion. Instead the whole site itself is usually a complete fraud or generated nonsense and it should be Googles job to kinda filter those out or rank them down. It would even help a lot if they just added a button to allow me to ban certain domains from my results.

Here's what I get (with content blockers disabled) - similar to TFA. Three large ads, interestingly now labelled "Sponsored" rather than "Ad", and then the actual instructions.

https://imgur.com/a/2OKnAtb

The same happened to me.

Actually, I begin to wonder if maybe Google might be switching to some "high-quality" mode when it detects that you are a "technical" user?

Seems like a bit of competition was all Google needed to be good again.

Recently Google started translating some of my English search queries into my local language (Dutch). Which doesn't help at all. There is a reason I search in English.

For instance I wanted to see if there are new Iberico spareribs recipes, so I search for that. The first page has 8 results with 7 in Dutch and 1 in English. When I visit the English site, the recipe is auto translated in Dutch. And four of those 8 results are stores where I have to buy their rub to even follow the recipe.

Google had a problem, it couldn’t think outside of the search box. They had so much technology but they tried to fit everything behind that search box. Now they are scrambling to figure out a plan to counter chat gpt, which truly poses a threat to them. It may not pose a threat right away but the writing is on the wall. Of course it doesn’t mean google is dying. It will be a trillion dollar company for years to come and they will plenty time to figure it out.

Also, this has been discussed before on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

Everyone loves to complain about how bad Google has gotten, but nobody wants to do anything about it. If you hate the SEO spam and cookie banners and newsletters, make a website without those. Any time you struggle to find information in a Google search but finally figure it out, write a no-nonsense article. Link your article in places it's relevant so people might see it. If we want this to get better, we need to put in some effort and fix it.

I have often wished that there were a search engine that would let me filter out pages with monetization (affiliate links, calls to action, ads, etc.).

However, every time I consider this idea, I wonder how much of the web would be left. Besides social media sites, government pages, and technology blogs, is there a lot of authentic content out there on arbitrary topics? Perhaps even if Google were motivated to deliver a good search experience, they couldn’t do it.

Forums, tech documentation, personal websites.

I think for many queries, a non-commercial search engines would have plenty of relevant pages to show.

I don't know if Google Search is dying. What I do know:

1) In March 2023, I am relying less and less on Google Search. When I do, it is for extremely targeted search queries where I am battling Google's matching criteria to find something that I know exists. This almost always requires creative use of quotation marks and applying suffixes to the end of queries.

2) I am relying more on ChatGPT for a lot of queries. Is it perfect? Hell no. Does it give me wrong information sometimes? Hell yes. But even with that, the answers and solutions given are so much better than trawling through Google search results and trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.

3) I was having a conversation with a family member yesterday. I wanted to direct her to a page on a local government website. I instructed her to Google it. After the phone call I realized that she was likely to search Google for this page and be completely unable to find it, so I just manually sent her the link the page.

4) When I ditched Lycos and Excite and Altavista for Google over 20 years ago it was because of it's simplicity and accuracy. It was because when they decided to start displaying ads, the ads were clearly and transparently demarcated as ads so that no one was confused about what they were looking at. Today, the ads are very clearly intended to blend in with everything else, the simplicity is gone, and the accuracy is no longer there either.

I do think Google has lost its way. And I do think there is a massive market opportunity for someone to develop a "search engine for 2023" that nicely blends what is available to us through LLMs and what is available to us through reputable, clean web sources on the WWW so that someone in search of information can simply find what they are looking for.

I was an early adopter of Google Search around 2000 when it was better than Altavista. A few years ago I switched to DuckDuckGo. But in the autumn my DDG searches began to have only about 10 results for terms that should have had thousands of results. A couple of months ago I started paying for Kagi search and like it because it's like Google used to be 20 years ago – it shows interesting results.

Why do I feel like this post is actually a marketing operation for kagi?

On some topics you can get a different version reality in google search results and what other search engines produce. Any A/B testing on this regardless of your position on the topics should be an eye opener. I'm not a fan of googles activism for influencing political or technical topics and I've attempted to get them out of my life.

Not sure how you prove a search engine is dying by posting graphs showing search traffic going continuously up.

Reddit is a great source for a certain type of content. Google is a search engine for content. They are complementary… Reddit’s continued strength furthers Google’s relevance.

The only way Google can be hurt by Reddit is if Reddit blocks Google from indexing it (not likely).

Because there's no better neural network for problem solving than a human brain.

This joke sums it all up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ufdprb/sur...

I am a Sikh, I need to clarify some of my concepts, look for meanings etc and nearly all the search terms are polluted by Hindu Nationalist and Islamist Dawah guys. There were websites started early on, which are now abandoned and hence don't score high. It is such a mess honestly using internet being a minority.

In the last year by coincidence I had to buy several quite expensive items that I either never bought before or bought last time quite a while ago. So, I wanted reviews. That's when I learned just searching for reviews is pretty much useless now. It's all blanketed by marketing spam. What you do instead is find a place where real humans discuss the topic, and read it. Doesn't have to be reddit, though it often works. Pretty soon you encounter mentions of review sites that people mention. Once you see some site mentioned repeatedly, go there and search. Or, if they have sulky search - happens more often than it should - go to the search engine and search on that specific site. This gives much better results without wasting time digging through piles of crap.

I believe one of the big point missed is that community contribution totally disapeared of the public internet. In the past you were able to find anything you want by just typing anything in google, on all the forums & microblogs. That content disapeared from internet, replaced by discord & instagram, which are not public. Reddit is the main community remaining public, this is why people are typing "pizza reddit" while the main contributions are not on the reddit community but on the the discord from the pizza reddit.

So now, when you want to go deep into the topic pizza, you have to: --> go to the pizza reddit --> get the discord adress --> connect to the redditPizza discord --> search "mozzarella" on the shitty discord search

Marketing and the ad industry ruin everything they touch.

You throw away most of your mail because of them, both physical and the e variety. You don't answer your phone because of them. They abused popups so badly they were basically removed from the standard. Adblockers are such a necessity for making anything on the web usable that they'd be built in if it weren't for the fact that Chrome is made by a company that sells ad space.

And of course they ruined search too. And it won't be fixed because Google itself is part of the problem, not the solution.

And if you work for them, you're helping make the world a worse place. Please stop. I'm not going to go as far as Hicks and say you should kill yourself, but you should quit your job and try your hand at improving the world instead.

Indeed, Altavista, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves would probably give better search results than Google as of today.

I upvoted this, but only because of nostalgia. I was there when Google started and it was lightyears ahead of the already gamed Altavista which relied on human ingenuity and meta tags.

Which kind of stresses the point how bad Google has become.

> Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News. There must be a lot of people who resonate with it this time around.

Unless, of course, this other part of the article is true:

> Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

... in which case one must ask the question as to whether stories like this being upvoted on HN are organic behavior or the result of botfarming.

Yesterday I wanted to figure out whether some languages are more difficult than others as a native language. Google failed miserably. Nowadays, there are things, simple things like that, for which Google is increasingly useless. I encounter such every week. This definitely didn’t happen 10 years ago. In this case, it gave me results about bullshit ad sites, random barely related Quora questions, what languages are more difficult for native English speakers. Nothing helped. Zero proper result in 10 minutes. There were none which I could use as a reference, or had any proper reference.

Perhaps "generative ai" with summarization and citations will eventually be the future of search engines.

If a language model or some other methodology can distill information from all of these sites and proxy to them in a way that a company can still promote advertising revenue, there should be a clear path away from blog spam. One could imagine it might even disincentivize copying original works.

There are so many paths for using information once it can be transformed reliably.

If natural language understanding continues to improve, it would seem that there is a very bright future for existing search engines.

Why would you think that? The issue is spammers taking over top results with advertised content, why do you think generative AI will actually fix this in any way? Besides just preventing you from actually finding the real information on the bottom of the results?

If the summarizer does a good job it will probably identify the spam as what it is -- junk intended to funnel you into an affiliate link.

I m glad that GPTs are kicking SEOed content out of the internet. Using bing is much much better for researching health related stuff , even considering possible inaccuracies because it 's faster. You can hone in on the subject fast, then verify your result by checking the source. The google model was users -> google -> SEOed aggregator -> primary sources. If this is dead, the value of the primary sources will go up up up in price, and SEO farming (which includes a ton of news websites) will be dead. And that will be for the better

My pet beef: why Google hasn't done anything to downrank Pinterest, specifically? It's a pit into which search terms for all sorts of subjects take you, but they (unethically) try their best to stop you from finding the original source content. Instead taking you deeper and deeper into their own recursively self-defined world of internal pins, hiding the outlinks and original attribution.

(Also: vile because it's full of self-harm and eating disorder content that played its part in irrevocably damaged a loved one.)

> Early adopters aren’t using Google anymore.

OK guys - what are you all using instead?

In my case, Kagi.

As the web business model is based on ads user experience isn't that important. I'm curious on the monetization model of new prompt based search engines. Ads dominating first pages of search won't be possible anymore. The adoption of new engines also wouldn't be as fast as many think, people habits die slow. So they still have time to think of a way to make money. Alphabet needs some competition. They became stale in the last 10 years.

> the first few non-ad results

... and ...

> sites filled with affiliate links and ads.

... suggest the poster is, for some reason, not using an ad-blocker. Strange.

> What it actually means is that the amount of people using Reddit as a search engine is growing.

I don't understand this claim. If reddit search is Google search + the keyword reddit, then either people are finding non-reddit results that way, which seems reallyt weird and unlikely; or they're finding reddit results that way - meaning that they really are using reddit.

Anyone else notice that general solutions to problems just aren't on Google ... and aren't on the internet at all?

We used to have blogs, even twitter and facebook, even things like phpbb and the many internet fora, which was "normal". These have disappeared, either entirely or behind a pay- or registration wall, and are clearly not accessible to Google.

I wonder if the problem is Google, or the web in general.

For the longest time I’ve been against this train of thought. Even resisted this when GPT-3 was announced and then ChatGPT was said to replace Google.

But I’m slowly coming around to the camp that for specific searchers where you want a quick answer, ChatGPT beats Google hands down and my searching habits are changing. Interesting times.

And yet, I mistrust most product reviews that are on Reddit too, since marketers have found ways to control the hivemind

Google has no motivation to improve Google Search until a runner-up makes serious inroads into its popularity.

Running a search engine probably isn't like a marathon, where if you're a front-runner by 800 meters, you still care about setting a personal best or breaking a record.

The correct title would be "Google Search is dying, but we don't have a better replacement yet".

Are there any browser extensions that help to filter the noise (SEO clones, AI blogspam)?

Could a distributed rating/endorsement system help with that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285

Didn't the article kind of allude to the fact that the wrong search results might be the most profitable? I mean, it makes sense to me that Google is promoting the worst websites, since they contain the most Google ads...

I'm sure Google employees are well aware of the issues.

> It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines.

The obvious spoken out so openly.

I find the notion that Reddit is being used as a search engine abhorrent.

Reddit is a showcase of the worst tendencies on the internet. It is mismanaged by the company as well as the users ruling their fifedoms and emphasizes popularity of opnion over the reality of fact.

I think it is time to stop being nice and treating the entire search results page as ads for every single query. Even if you have an adblocker, the more nefarious ads are still there, the ones masquerading as useful articles that have been SEOed to the top.

Real question is how is reddit's own search still so utterly useless despite sitting on a treasure trove of high quality info (comparatively speaking)

I'm literally navigating away from reddit, then doing a site:reddit.com google search to go back to reddit

I’ve been paying for Kagi for over a year. It’s getting better and better and has no ads.

Wow, finally a paid search engine. Now all we need is a paid web browser.

It's dead, Jim.

I tried looking up a picture of the shakras to help track the evolution of my mood from burnout to peace and where I feel that in my body. But it's so filled with sponsored links that I found myself squinting at blurred out preview images before I finally snapped out of it, perhaps 20 minutes later.

Information wants to be free. There should be glorious high-resolution images front and center that enthusiasts drew of their own accord and uploaded for free soon after the internet came online around 1995. Instead, we're funneled down the commercial carnival as marks. Sure, I'm a programmer, I know how to find what I'm looking for through various tricks. But I shouldn't have to.

Monetized search is one of the great blunders of the Information Age. Paid internet service is another. Walled gardens, the DMCA (using FUD and the threat of litigation to turn BitTorrent into the devil), scientific papers locked behind paywalls, even the capture of programming itself by centralized repositories and the trend towards microservices and the concentration of wealth away from programmers who could actually fix the tools we use.. just on and on and on, so much nonsense designed to trap our minds within the framework of profit for exploitation. The more I look around, the more it all looks like hot garbage.

It's frustrating to have a sense of knowing exactly what to do to fix things, even the knowledge and experience to pull off much of it, but spend the entirety of one's time running the rat race to survive. All while remembering a time not too long ago when it wasn't like that. I feel that central issue of wealth concentration and the dilution of disposable income and leisure time is what we're really fighting here. The loss of Google is just a symptom of that steady decline towards subservience.

As a programmer I often use search to find solution to my problems. This works most of the time. Sometimes I search for Covid related sites, or related to protests, or to other 'hot' topics. It is difficult to find anything interesting in the results, as they are monitored, and homogeneous. I would like to see what the disinformation is, I would like multiple points of view. Even if wrong.

I started creating my own link database, so that I could find past links I found interesting. It does not have to be connected to ill intention from Google. There are so many pages, links that it just could be hard to find stuff there.

It is impossible to find useful data on words that are 'open' to interpretation. Search for 'apple'. I would like to receive millions, if not billions of news, links, information about the company, about types of apples, about anything that relates to that word. Instead you can only receive 31 pages in news, and around 10 pages in normal query.

This is unacceptable. Google search is like looking through a keyhole at the internet.

Google could get me to come back if it: 1. Offered a paid version without sponsored results 2. Let me block sites from my results (bonus points if it penalizes sites with lots of users blocking their results)

If google indexes Reddit properly and timely I’m not sure why I would go specifically to Reddit to search there for the subset. Same goes with stack overflow, I hardly need to go there to search

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719

(managing to clock up 3600+ points and 1500+ comments...)

It's not just Google, it's all of them. DDG used to be rather decent, now it's ONLY return "X best Y" when I'm searching for anything.

I feel like the results from Kagi are pretty great. I tend to get what I'm looking for in the top few results.

> Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid service which requires an account for the transaction.

Right. Definite "no".

Curious what would you do if you created an ad-free search engine?

It's not the money, it's that I'm tired of believing companies "we won't track you", especially when it's that easy, with login required.

The companies that have incentives to track you are the companies with an ad-supported business model.

The only business model that does not have an incentive to track you is a subscription based model. Yes, it is is easy to 'track' you but what is the incentive to do that? It does not need to monetize your data.

And in order to pay a susbcription, you need an account.

So curious how would you do this differently in Kagi's shoes?

I noticed that there are a lot fewer forum results in Google search than a couple of years ago. Forum results are often pretty good, but I think Google deranks these sites in their quest to clean up misinformation. That's why appending reddit has to be done, because reddit gets deranked because some wrongthink sneaks in despite the best intentions of their moderators. SEO spam sites never say anything that strays into misinfo territory and are just repeat conventional boring info, so they are always near the top. The wrongthink derank is really pronounced if searching for controversial political stuff. In fact, if you search for a controversial recent event you'll get no results and a message that "results are changing quickly."

From the last paragraph:

>Long live Google + “site:reddit.com”.

SEO spam is gonna be nothing compared to the AI-generated web. And it's going to be the perfect excuse to finally mandate internet-ID.

Countdown until someone builds a site that only appends "inurl:reddit.com" to every query and calls it Roogle.

The hunt for authentic interaction capture intensifies. Some day they will come for HN. Not soon, hopefully

The same article could be wroten in 2010 replacing Reddit with Facebook. But Google search is still here.

Weird analysis from someone who has no data.

What gives?

This was posted awhile ago too, and since I saw it I started doing the same.

Results ? I get more concise answers.

It's not dying for me. My Google + Youtube usage is still as high as ever if not higher because of Youtube. ChatGPT/OpenAI/other models makes Google Lens more noticeable. Do you know you can generate the interior of your room using AI and Google offers the search for products based on the generated image just by a right-click on Chrome?

Reddit? Do people find better answers to programming questions on reddit rather than on google?

Mods: Article is from Feb 15, 2022

It's already dead. I literally can't find a single relevant result anymore.

Dying is a harsh word, give them the respect for the good years: they killing it deliberatively.

They fed up with people using it without login, and only the websites paying. They just want monthly payment from user too.

A carefully crafted title to kill google search…

let this be a lesson not to let your company prioritize censorship and propaganda over everyday normal duties expected by users.

Even if it is dying, it is a very slow death..

https://crowdview.ai/

(Feb 2022)

Requiem for a dream

I can't find anything related to what is happening to my dad on Google except a bunch of vax deniers. Added reddit and found many other people with ALS after vaccine. He's on a bypap now and will be dead in a few weeks.

2022

Google Search Is Dying (2025)

Google Search Is Dying (2024)

Google Search Is Dying (2023)

Google Search Is Dying (2022)

Google Search Is Dying (2021)

Google Search Is Dying (2020)

Google Search Is Dying (2019)

Google Search Is Dying (2018)

Google Search Is Dying (2017)

Google Search Is Dying (2016)

Google Search Is Dying (2015)

Do we see a pattern here?

I have an idea: a search engine where a team of humans adds what website they deem important and also ranks it. Website owners who aren't in the index and want to submit their site, pay a small fee.

The result would be no SEO, no content farms and highly relevant content. I don't think the algorithms and even AI will ever keep track with people who try to game the engines for profits.

Perhaps it could be organized into a hierarchical set of categories as well...

Why not let all of humanity upvote/downvote each website and flag sites as seo-spam, content-farm if needed?

We could use a web of trust, combined with gov-id verification to ensure no bots/AIs manipulate the votes...

The recent success of ChatGPT shows that the current search experience is likely deprecated. With LLMs, you can get information immediately that directly answers your query.

ChatGPT has its limits too though - it's not always right, you don't have options other than to re-ask or regenerate if the one answer doesn't satisfy what you need, we're limited to only text, and the experience may be just a bit too contained/convergent. It feels like it's going to take another product or iteration to really get there.

The question I keep asking - what does the future of problem-solving and finding knowledge on the internet look like in an ideal world given the tools that we have or could now build?

> With LLMs, you can get information immediately that directly answers your query.

Not as long as they're relying on humans to write pages with that information in. When nobody visits, what's the point in writing a page?

I keep looking for a coherent answer to that question, but have never seen one so far, these are unimportant details that are swept under the AI enthusiasm rug.

Someone (I wish I could remember who) once argued that if you're trying to create an ecosystem around your product, you can't hoover up all the value, you have to leave some for the little guy. I've felt for a while that Google, with its various attempts to put the answer on the search results page, might be skirting dangerously close to that problem. It feels like the only value they're leaving on the table is the chance to sell stuff.

so... how much value does ChatGPT as proposed solution leave to the little guy?

My expectation is "not much", because if the fact is utterly divorced from the source, there's not even any point writing near-spam pages to attract people to the site where you're selling something. But I think we'd need to see a working implementation to know for sure.

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