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> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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 ...