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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago, Google was very useful without Reddit. There is a reason why they are such a behemoth: they actually used to create very usable tools and services. People wanted to use them, because their products were good. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate (etc)... all of them are (were) gems.

Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally. But it got broken regardless of Reddit. Reddit has a lot of info I guess, but it is far from being the only website on the internet. However seemingly google stopped indexing more than the top 150-200 websites on the internet (and even those results are often lacking the searched words).

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I believe it was also caused by the silo-ing of the internet and that a lot of the « public space » is now behind a login.

that makes a lotta sense even to my ignorant mind. so everyone got login'd prompted since companies make the most money data gatherin or what have you, plus reducing bots, stuff like that, it all makes individual sense and then amounts to search engines not working good anymore. Plus real blogs or websites with real human writing get buried or never shown because of bot or that SEO thing I tried to understand?

I'm just trying to wrap my head around it but I think I'm making sense of it now and it's kinda like that race to the bottom I see sometimes mentioned here? Do I got it right?

I'm all for reducing bots and spam, but registration doesn't seem to have solved that problem for reddit.

On top of this, siloing adds the extra bonus that it breaks things like The Internet Archive. There are a lot of communities on Slack and Discord that are just prime for vaporising without a trace. A TON of knowledge will just disappear once someone decides to turn it off, for whatever reason.

I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction in Google Search efficacy was when they introduced Instant Search (or whatever they called the feature that presented results as users typed, rather than waiting for users to submit a full query). Even when they got rid of it, they never backtracked on whatever back-end changes enabled it (and degraded results in the service of presenting them faster).

My suspicion is that this was the beginning of the public presentation of corporate infighting, where what the public saw from Google began to be less about good products and more about the products that particular execs, managers, and developers needed to "win" in order to bolster their careers (or what they perceive as such). This is why Google has developed a reputation for killing useful products, often replacing them with flashier and more frustrating alternatives (if at all).

I don't like putting this on external factors. I think Google is doing this to themselves. It's a more private and stretched-out version of what's happening very publicly with Twitter right now.

One of the applications I used to use on a daily was Google Reader. Then one day, they just shut it down for no apparent reason, and that was that. They don't seem to be focused on customer satisfaction. Hard to understand.

I think you meant to say user satisfaction? Or did you pay for google reader?

Google Reader, like many other Google products, was developmentally mature (read: relatively cheap to maintain) and drove users to profit centers. An example that more closely fits your criteria is Google Play Music, which was superior to its replacement, Youtube Music, and which I paid monthly for. I cancelled my subscription when they sunset it.

I tend to equate the two. Especially in the case of Google, where you had to register, so they were in effect letting you use the product in exchange for personal data.

Take a look at Miniflux. Works amazing.

Thanks, I will.

In case you're an iPhone user, I can also recommend NetNewsWire. It's a great application to read your feeds on the go.

And surprisingly it's free.

It’s easy to be mad at Facebook, newspapers, Pinterest, Discord, etc. for locking the internet away behind a login or paywall. But it’s also the result of Google capturing all the value from the free internet.

The end result is companies trying to capture more of that value for themselves and not letting Google eat their lunch, which required moving content and communities behind closed doors.

Google didn't invent the idea of a web crawler or search engine. Because of how the web was designed, I think it was always an inevitability that the internet would start open but trend closed.

You could say that google started it. They ate everyone's lunch by including what people were looking for in a box at the top of the search results. Of course sites will respond in kind.

They were better than the incumbents. The incumbents allowed people to buy search ranking.

Google now does effectively the same with their in-search ads. Most of the time the entire space above the fold is just ads.

Agree it's not great, but it's not as bad as silently reordering the actual search results.

This happened because a few corporations were able to capture most of the internet due to a mix of laziness on the part of users and also the death of independent blogs and fan sites.

I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or your family. Evil people use the internet to harass other people and to attack their livelihood or put the safety of their family at risk. Many employers now discriminate against employees or even just people applying for jobs who openly express opinions on the internet. And even posting pseudonymously isn't completely safe because it is usually possible to deanonymize posters if an attacker is obsessed enough.

The sad reality is that many people do inauthentic things for the sake of career advancement (think of all the college students who do extracurriculars or projects for the sole purpose of "resume padding") and refuse to do things they actually believe in for the sake of their career. When creating quality online content becomes a risk to career advancement, people are going to stop doing it. In the long term, that means a siloed internet full of corporate propaganda, SEO optimized blogspam and clearly inauthentic posts.

In short, I believe Google search is getting worse because the internet is getting worse. And the internet is getting worse because our society permits employers to have a chilling effect on the online speech of their employees and those who might be their employees someday. And because the independent internet has shrunk dramatically, the handful of corporations that control almost the entire internet can now get away with siloing it off so that's what they're doing.

Most people just don't have anything interesting to say

> I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or your family. Evil people use the internet to harass other people and to attack their livelihood or put the safety of their family at risk. Many employers now discriminate against employees or even just people applying for jobs who openly express opinions on the internet. And even posting pseudonymously isn't completely safe because it is usually possible to deanonymize posters if an attacker is obsessed enough.

Discussions moved from independent forums to Facebook groups and Reddit. Discord later. Facebook and Reddit are not more anonymous than independent forums.

Reddit do have a sense of being more anonymous since you can edit and soft delete your content. This is very rare for forums and most of the things I wrote 20 years ago still show up on Google. All my comments on Reddit are "gone".

The decision to limit the API might therefore actually be a good for the average user if it stops archives such as ceddit and unreddit to show your posts after you've edit or removed them. Most people probably don't know about them though and believe their content is gone just because they click delete.

Facebook and Discord groups have been private since as long as I can remember. Sure, someone might leak if you invite the wrong people but compare it with Twitter where you can find all posts from user X including keyword Y. Or even do it through Google cache. It takes minutes to find something to use against anyone if you really want to. Based on the last election in my country, it can be something as simple as listening to the wrong artist when you're 14.

Possibly, but when I think of "old internet" I think of people posting under pseudonymous handles for basically this reason.

> our society permits employers to have a chilling effect on the online speech of their employees

More generally than that. Dylan Mulvaney made one beer advert while being trans and got death threats. She would be counted as a "contractor" rather than an employee.

Google search is broken because the internet has evolved in the AdWords era. Every person with a heartbeat has realized the monetary potential of making money from page views and SEO, so there’s a race to the bottom to capture the top spot for every search term in Google. Even if Google comes at it from an objectively user centric perspective this seems like an insurmountable problem to solve. But adding insult to the injury, post Sundar Google is just IBM/oracle at this point. So it’s just circling the drain at double the acceleration.

They broke it intentionally for money.

The second they paid people to game their search engine (ie adsense), the entire thing was on the road to uselessness. There always would have been that incentive, but Google turbocharged it, with $33B of incentive in 2022.

> Don't know if they let search rot or they broke it intentionally.

From the point of view of a shortsighted company this might be a false dichotomy because if ad revenue from search grows, search is fine: neither rotting nor broken.

You are assuming that Google treats users as customers rather than as an exploitable natural resource.

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