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Comment by O__________O | Hacker News Reader

Author mixes two topics, that being searching content they control and content they don’t control.

While understand desire to search content created by yourself, in my opinion vast majority of valuable content is created by others, in part because the most valuable content created by yourself is rapidly internalized into your brain.

Meme of Google is getting worse fails to acknowledge that Google is free and makes money from advertisers. More to the point, more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal. This has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with value of the information itself.

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> rapidly internalized into your brain

I'm not sure how old you are/how long you have been working at your job, but I can tell you that over 10 years or so there are tons of things that I "internalized" for a while, then did other stuff for a while, and now only have vague memories of. This is the use case for searching your own content.

I'm wondering to this day why web browsers don't run a full text search index locally. Only saving urls and titles is not enough. Especially if I spend more than a minute on a page I would like it indexed. And today being today, I would also like a LLM on top.

> More to the point, more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal.

This sounds like an argument of, The worse Google Search becomes the more time a user has to spend their and therefore see more ads.

But it has a very large hole in that the worse Google Search becomes the easier it is for a user to switch to Bing/DDG/Apple Search. It may seem unfathomable that people wouldn't use Google Search but people felt the same way about Google Maps which lost a huge moat to Apple Maps/Waze (albeit the latter was purchased by Google).

I think the argument is that whatever search option you choose to use will inherently have the same problems

Noise isn't just the paid ads, it's the websites gaming SEO for valuable searches. And that is not isolated to Google

> more valuable the related search is per amount spent on advertising, the more the noise and as result, more resources user will need to spend to enhance the signal

Sums it quite well really

I'm not sure that most of those are any better. I think that DDG is the only one of those that still respects modifiers like +, -, and "". However, I've had mixed success with it. It seems like maybe it's web crawler isn't as effective or something?

That or maybe Google has poisoned the well so much that even with a good search engine you can't find good results because everything is SEOed for Google.

IMHO, you're talking about 2 very different things. I would guess that the maps difference was due to devices (not sure if MacOS users even use Apple Maps with any frequency compared to opening up maps.google.com in a browser, but I'm guessing most iOS users are too lazy and complacent to use google maps). Also, it's hard to recognize and understand the differences in the various mapping apps.

OTOH, it's pretty easy to tell the difference in the first few minutes (or first few searches) between various search sites. Heck, the difference in the search engine having a better idea of what you're looking for based on previous searches (or ad related data) alone can make it more compelling to continue using the same search engine.

My personal example is that I try to switch to DDG every so often (maybe several months in between), but I get dissatisfied with the results and start wondering if I'm just getting bad at search or Google knows me better or Google is just better at finding the things that people want in general.

Just the fact (for me) that I consider that Google generally gives me better results makes me wonder if all the talk of Google search getting worse is just complaints based on heightened expectations, feelings or the landscape of content on the internet in general instead of "is Google search getting worse?"

Noting that Google being "free" isn't so "free" when low-quality or made-up results make my job more difficult and error-prone, or lead me to make suboptimal decisions in my personal life.

> in part because the most valuable content created by yourself is rapidly internalized into your brain

What if the content is created by your coworkers?

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