Googling Is for Old People. That's a Problem for Google
wsj.com
wsj.com
seems just to be some nonsense the writer made up. If you look at stats the most frequent users are 16-25 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1000019/individuals-who-...
And comparing Google/Bing/Yahoo, old folk Bing while youngsters Google https://www.internetmarketingteam.co.uk/who-uses-bing-how-ag...
I can see how revenues are moving to Amazon. Google is terrible for product search, like what is the best value TV say, compared to Amazon.
Did sore Googlers do this mass flag?
Google seems to be getting it's butt handed to them with the US government recent ruling and GPT's rise.
Im just hoping GPT releases their own AI Phone .. GPT Phone sounds cool to me. A Siri on iPhone that works like GPT won't be available til Spring 2026. GPT and maybe Microsoft have opportunity to take a chunk of the phone market.
In the olden days, we all had a copy of Hoyle's Games, which covered just about all decently well-known games, and variants.
Now people expect search will answer everything, so don't have dedicated and curated resources at-hand anymore.
Google searching for the answer would've taken a lot longer ... i and everyone wants their answer immediately in front of them vs. the antiquated Google search riddled with ads compared to GPT's clean in your face instant results!
I want this experience from Siri (on my phone when I pick it up) now but Apple is too far behind so look forward to an AI Phone called GPT ;-) in the next 6 to 12 months ( hopefully OpenAI & Microsoft are smart are working on such). It would help kill both Google and Apple at the same time!
No, commercial games like that wouldn't be in Hoyle.
For what it's worth, official instructions are at https://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/pit.pdf . DDG "pit parker brothers game instructions".
Did you compare the two sets of rules to see if they are the same?
Did it tell you the Bull and Bear rules, or just the basic rules?
My underlying point is you didn't learn the correct name, didn't read the full information you got the first time, and seem either incurious or blasé about proving a side-by-side comparison of the two information sources.
The second DDG hit is https://gamerules.com/rules/pit/ which is a summary of only the base game rules, without the bear and bull.
The third is https://www.boardgamecapital.com/pit-rules.htm which has different rules! The one claims bids can include '"Two wheat for one sugar!" or "Three corn for one soybean!"' but link #2 says 'They may not announce the suit that the cards are, but only the number of cards they are trying to get rid of.' matching the Hasbro rules that bids are only based on number, like '“Trade One! One! One!“'.
That third link is highly suspect as it mentions sugar and soybean as possible commodities while listing only 'Hay, Corn, Rye, Barley, Oats, Wheat and Flax'.
So, how does GPT describe the rules?
If you go and use GPT for this query you will see what rules it lists instantly and as a UX professional less steps/clicks/etc is more and usually wins the game. The rules it provided in a few seconds allowed me to quickly tell them and us to start a new game that we were able to finish to completion. Our first we were not trading 2 or 3 or 4 of the same commodity and had to stop.
You asked for "the rules" so GPT gave you some rules, fitting your preconceptions.
You asked about 'the Pit' and presumably didn't get from the answer that it's simply "Pit", suggesting again that it's fitting to your preconceptions.
I don't use GPT for several reasons, one being that every time I've seen GPT output on any non-trivial topic where I am competent enough to judge it, it's done a poor job, and the more so when you don't know enough to pose the question correctly.
For another example, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39483825 I noted how ChatGPT's response used 'Sydney', matching the question posed, while the character's name is actually spelled 'Sidney'.
I don't like systems which re-enforce false preconceptions, no matter how nice the UX.
https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...
Except for The Verge of course.
Then, an interesting thing happened. Most pages simply disappeared from the results. Search console shows them as indexed, no problems, no manual actions, but if you google up those functions, there results are not there.
It took some statistical analysis to figure out that they appear to be capping the number of pages. Out of all the pages Google crawled, it picked some percentage of the "most important" ones and it's showing those. The importance, by the looks of it, was computed from the number of incoming links, prioritizing pages for common stuff like int32_t that nobody googles.
It's not ideal, but it kinda makes sense. It's 2024. You can use AI to generate plausible content for any search query you can think of. And unless they put some kind of limits, we'll get overrun with completely useless LLM-churned stuff.
But Google has one resource that others do not, which genuinely contains a lot of good content. And that is YouTube. If they could simply make the content of videos easier to search, they would be able to offer a unique set of useful answers. At least for now before AI generated garbage takes over YouTube.
That's probably the only reason we're getting the truely creative stuff that was thrown in with no expectation of monetization.
Otherwise the useful bits look decently surfaced to me. Albeit not in a searchable or convenient way.
Especially at the position of Google, it's neither a coincidence nor something taking them by surprise. They've been in an arms race with spammers and SEO gurus since the beginning, and had all resources on earth to deal with it. The results being bad as they reached a monopoly position is of their own making, or more precisely a situation they saw as the best tradeoff.
That's where I don't see Google turning the ship around: people who were there for decades to make searches relevant have probably already left a long time ago, or they accepted the new direction themselves. And new people with expertise and enough energy to rock the boat are also in a position to do more impactful work in other companies where they won't have to fight an establishment.
As a example of how hard it is to change direction, we haven't seen Microsoft suddenly build customer friendly OSes, nor Meta having good taste, nor Apple come up with open ecosystems.
The rule should be that only good faith web sites are allowed. Web sites with dark patterns are not allowed. Anyone who is doing any SEO shenanigans gets their entire domain de-indexed permanently. If Google does this, and only this, it will return wonderful useful search results.
We might be completely mistaken on the reasons why it's hard, but there's no doubt they can't do it easily.
On human curation, this brings other problems that Google is also very bad at solving. Google would need to manage their moderators at scale. Even Meta couldn't do it in a sustainable way, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk model is also deeply problematic. Amazon itself puts a ton of effort into customer service and yet doesn't keep up with the scams.
Curation and moderation at Google scale is indeed a crazy hard problem.
In the early days, I followed some basic guides about how to make web pages more attractive to Google search. But after a while, gave it up. Now I work on making pages solely useful to the users, and pay no attention to engagement metrics or any of that nonsense.
Google’s use dropped from 86% to 83% in one year in the UK. That's 1.8m people less per month using it
Technologies that stay useful keep getting used, generation after generation. We still use spoons for soup. We've had refrigerators in houses since they became available. There are no "Millennials aren't buying refrigerators and don't like spoons" articles in the new york times. Its because these still work and work well for their purpose.
If they just made google work well for search and kept it working well, there would be no shift in use.