The Deterioration of Google | Hacker News Reader

The Deterioration of Google

baldurbjarnason.com

20 pointsrapnie18 comments

On one of my sites I received a million requests from Googlebot before lunchtime today. Those requests were spread over hundreds of IPs. I get similar traffic from them and other hyper scalers daily. I'm just one guy. I don't have load balancers and endless engineering budget. I'm sick of this.

Do they not respect the crawl-delay directive in robots.txt?

Surely if you're dependent on search, you don't HAVE organic business no matter that they call it organic search traffic? "that thing I get from whosit but I don't recall them yea them" is kind of always going to be very variable.

That said a colleague said when his brother-in-law stopped paying for placement his printer/toner supply business tanked, despite him believing they knew who he was. Nobody knows anyone.

Maybe Google doesn't want people to reach businesses from search results and they want businesses to pay for ads so people can reach them.

Maybe?

Search hasn't been search for a long time. It's been a dynamic feed masquerading as search results.

If you can afford it, please try kagi[0]. It's not a panacea. It IS a lot better than Google and has been for some time.

[0] https://kagi.com/welcome

Speaking of which, they're just no better.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

There's a postmortem update at the end of this post.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314

The search is better. That is what I pay for. And the summarization is actually quite useful.

My gut feeling is that you didn't even read the piece. Read first then get back at me.

Wrong gut feeling then. It complains about Kagi not focusing on what their unique proposition is, and then about the t-shirts. That can all be true, at the same time as their core product is still also great.

I read this in a previous discussion of kagi.

Not going to read it again but if I recall it was more than half complaining about things not at all related to kagi search. Stuff like how they manage their finances and administration.

Sure that effects how well they can deliver search at some level but ultimately if their search is better than alternatives then I'm gonna keep paying them.

Machine learning is by definition a black box. Nonlinear statistical models with huge numbers of parameters to be estimated.

Explainability towards users is essential if there is any sort of responsibility for what the model produces.

But explainability at a deeper level is also critical towards developers, to close the feedback loop and iterate towards better models.

Not all machine learning. Neural networks.

Everyone is complaining about Google since years ago. But no one has built a good alternative. Is it a bad business idea?

Good alternatives exist, like Yandex. But it's close to impossible to compete with google's resources and platform lock in Android and chrome.

At some point, their business model being replicable, they plant the seeds for their own future compeition.

Goggle stock is rising, executive pay is some of the highest in the world.

What is the "deterioration" of which you speak?

Search results, either reading them, or getting listed in them, is a user experience.

Why should goggle, or any for-profit company, care at all about user experience outside of the compainy's profit margins and growth?

Once again, let's refer to Dr. Frankenfurter's famous quote:

"I didn't make it for you!"

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