Hacker News Reader

Comment by niobe | Hacker News Reader

8-10 years google search was amazing. A well crafted query would hit informational gold most of the time. I've been noticing and commenting on the decline privately for most of the period, but it's only in the oast year this seems to have come to broader awareness. There's an argument that in an information economy, searching for information should be treated like a public utility necessary for the functioning of society. I'm not making that argument but when you experience the long slippery slope of degradation of a service that was near ideal for the technology of the time, it does xome to mind.

That's the thing. It DID work. Really well for a while. But it was always atomic and context-less. We now have the opportunity to make it even better by refining results through dialogue. I hope someone does.. soon.

View on HN

The slippery slope began in 2012, when they pledged to start downgrading piracy websites. After the rollout, the followup questions were "well what if we downgrade other topics that [random government] doesnt like" and "what if we sell the ability to boost enterprise company results for certain topics". eventually the number of results that get filtered out or reordered, exceed the results that actually get displayed. creating a new search platform is not a viable solution - any private company will be incentivized in this direction until some kind of "search neutrality" law is introduced.

I'm not convinced this is the explanation. It's true that for some product-centric queries, you get mostly paid results. But for information-seeking queries, Google tries to give you organic results.

The problem is simply that there's too much money to be made by capturing these. For years, you had content farms and fake "review" sites stepping up their game. Now, LLMs essentially make it a losing proposition to try and surface the small web. The least-bad option for Google would be to send you to moderated communities, such as Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, and so on. But not all queries can be handled that way.

If you look at the article that these guys are complaining about... how do you distinguish it from content-farmed spam? You can't.

Now, I think Google is throwing in the towel and just want an LLM to answer info queries instead. That has a ton of problems, but to the average user, probably feels more helpful. At least until the spammers start gaming that.

>If you look at the article that these guys are complaining about... how do you distinguish it from content-farmed spam? You can't

You can, Google just hasn't bothered to even try. As an example it's pretty easy to detect affiliate marketing links.

Google: We've done nothing and we're all out of ideas, man!

Not really? The vast majority of helpful websites monetizes the same way the spammers do.

Plus, even without affiliate links, purchase attribution is already scary good. Did you know that credit card issuers and ad tech companies collaborate to attribute brick-and-mortar purchases to online ad views? You have untold billions of dollars at stake. The industry is not banging rocks together.

You could make a search engine for non-commercial content only, and I would actually love to have that, but (a) it would be a woefully tiny sliver of the internet; and (b) Google is obviously not the right company to do it.

At its scale google could just hire a big group of diverse internet-aware professionals (two of each kind) who would do random searches and simply manually ban sites that restyle or spam content. It’s absolutely easy for a searcher to tell if it’s spam.

This is actually an interesting rabbit hole. Their other constraint is that they are trying to be transparent and fair, for some definition of that word. They need that for Section 230 protections, they need it to fend off antitrust lawsuits, etc.

So, there is a huge problem with hiring experts and telling them to make subjective decisions. Instead, Google publishes guidelines for webmasters and then enforces them rigidly. This usually ends up penalizing some good sites, while spammers swiftly discover workarounds.

then make it a gov position, like the "Beer and Malt Beverage Labeling and Formulation Approval" position, which consists of a single guy approving or rejecting the graphic designs of beer bottles/cans. there was an NPR segment a while back about the one guy that held that position for 40 years.

> The least-bad option for Google would be to send you to moderated communities, such as Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, and so on. But not all queries can be handled that way.

There's a wide gulf between "path of least resistance" and "least-bad". I don't think it's productive to conflate the first path with the second.

We are approaching a digital Kessler syndrome, or perhaps a Deepwater Horizon info-oilspill event, where there is so much useless SEO-driven slop (soon to be taken webscale with the advent of genAI) to sift through on the internet that it's growing increasingly difficult to find the signal amidst the noise. Google, once a prestigious company which prided themselves on "organizing the world's information" and "not being evil," eventually became a target for those wanting to peddle their wares and make a quick buck - a departure from the days of the early Internet which was mostly computer geeks, hobbyists, and forward thinkers sharing organic content they thought was interesting or useful. Because search was Google's entire business, they needed to develop countermeasures to combat spammers and pages gaming Google's algorithm with questionable SEO techniques in order to preserve the signal-to-noise ratio of the search engine results page.

This is now a bygone era - after discarding their original motto of "don't be evil," search and "organizing the world's information" are no longer Google's business, it's hawking advertisements [0]:

    When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three
    of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the
    company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new
    reality of their jobs.” 

    On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close
    to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all
    that Google was thinking about.”

Hence questionable grey UX patterns like blurring the distinction between ads and organic content, and sometimes cramming the page so full of ads that all the actual results are "below the fold." Remember the old Internet adage - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product - and like cattle we are all just herded into digital pens to be served marketing slop to serve the real customer - the advertisers.

If you want to be treated as a customer instead of cattle, you ought then to pay for your services, including search, to align the financial incentives with your own. Advertising needs to die, for it is a root cause of most of the ills of the modern internet [1]. If you can pay for streaming services or music, you can certainly pay for access to high quality organic information that actually aligns with your interests - not that of the advertisers. I've been using Kagi for a few years now and it really does hearken back to Google SERP quality maybe not at its peak, but rounding near to it.

At the risk of sounding elitist (and so what), this is just another consequence of the recurring Eternal September phenomenon - highly focused communities with a strong concentration of geeks, hobbyists, and experts were the norm back then, when computers were still new and arcane devices that were difficult to operate. The bar to entry was much higher, and one had to do a little bit of "reading the fucking manual" simply to get online and understand how to navigate the net effectively. Now that all the balls have been poured into the Galton board we have regressed to the mediocrity of content that exists on the contemporary Web, absent those pressures that once selected for high quality content online.

[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41940718

>If you want to be treated as a customer instead of cattle, you ought then to pay for your services, including search, to align the financial incentives with your own. Advertising needs to die, for it is a root cause of most of the ills of the modern internet. If you can pay for streaming services or music,

People pay for their Windows license, yet Windows now has ads baked into the start menu. People pay for Youtube Premium, but most videos now have "sponsor segments" -- yet more ads (though admittedly not controlled by or directly profiting YT). People pay for streaming services, but last I heard, Netflix was adding ads. Ages ago, people paid for cable television, and it wasn't long before it had ads too.

These companies are going to treat you like cattle whether you're paying them directly or not.

bingo, this is why i mentioned (in the skip level comment) that all private companies will go through this sequence until a "search neutrality" law is introduced.

after MBA's start to get diminishing returns on new subscriptions per month, the focus shifts to advertisements.

Then vote with your feet and your wallet by leaving. You need to send monetary signals that the service is undesirable by withdrawing your subscription. I don't understand why people continue to use tools that don't serve them and assume, by default, that because everyone else is on some platform, that I must be there too, or don't go into an actual cost-benefit analysis of whether or not the utility of the platform outweighs the drawbacks. Cal Newport comments on this default herd mentality in Deep Work:

    The Any-Benefit Approach to Network Tool Selection: You’re justified in
    using a network tool if you can identify any possible benefit to its use,
    or anything you might possibly miss out on if you don’t use it.

In the case of Google the diminishing utility of search began to be outweighed by the increasing morass of SEO slop and advertisements, so I degoogled. After W7 when it was clear Windows was going to progress into a cloud-based ad delivery platform, I installed Linux on all my devices as a daily driver. If Netflix ever serves me ads, I am immediately terminating my subscription.

Maybe it's too hard for some people.

>Then vote with your feet and your wallet by leaving.

Yep, that's what I keep saying too, but I always either get ignored, downvoted to oblivion, or responses about how X is "necessary" because of Y (which isn't really very critical anyway, but I guess to them is, like "I must be able to play game Z!!!"). You can lead a horse...

Sometimes I lose track of a bookmark and google a phrase from it verbatim and in quotes. Guess what I get most of the times? Not even a verbatim search spam, just nonsense with almost no original words. It doesn’t even try and I doubt it even has a database where a direct path exists from a phrase to it with a link. Google is not “I found this for you” anymore, it is “I think you meant this”.

I thought this was just me! Even if I use double quotes to search for a 1:1 phrase I often get bad results and nothing linking back to the source I was looking for. If you happen to remember the site something was on, adding "site:example.com" still produces decent results fortunately.

You have to go into search options and select verbatim. But since they stopped indexing many sites it might not even be there anyways.

> "But for information-seeking queries, Google tries to give you organic results."

No, often it absolutely doesn't, and I posted two epic fails here previously. Worse still, Google organic results no longer understand(/distinguish) the difference between information-seeking queries vs product searches (or else, SEO people have been gaming it for years, and Google search rankings have made this worse):

____________________________________________________________

1) Google search relevance fail: result for “Africa longitude” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337563

Googling for "Africa longitude" should return a range of longitudes, like: "17.5°W - 51.5°E" or "["17°31′13″W - 51°27′52″E"]" [1], or for the A+ answer: *"Africa lies between 17°33'22" W, (Cape Verde, westernmost point) and 51°27'52" E, (Ras Hafun, Somalia, easternmost projection).

But it doesn't. Moreover these coordinates haven't substantially changed in 10,000 years (other than political/territorial disputes about islands, but the coords for the mainland certainyl haven't).

Googling returns the grossly misleading "Africa/Coordinates 8.7832° S, 34.5085° E". When you dig into why this so, it seems to be "optimized" for the SEO activities of a digital map storefront, MapsofWorld.com, acquired by MapSherpa Inc., based in Ottawa. And those mystery nonsense coordinates ("8.7832° S, 34.5085° E") bizarrely point not even to the geographical centre of Africa but to a random rural location 2400km ESE away, in southern Tanzania, which appears to have been deceptively mislabeled, in Cyrillic, as a Russian store (by Russian SEO?). For a pin dropped in rural Tanzania. No QA!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30337563

____________________________________________________________

Similarly:

2) Google search for "How many landings on dark side of moon" is grossly incorrect https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862146

(Update: the AI overview factbox has at least since been corrected to give Two: "Chang'e 4 (January 3, 2019) and Chang'e 6 (2024), instead of repeating what jagranjosh.com says).

However the #1 organic search hit is still the woefully inaccurate unauthoritative page: https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/list-of-all-suc... which cheerfully claims "Aug 23, 2023 — There are over 21[!!] moon missions that have been launched successfully on the dark side of the moon by 4 countries."

This is hopelessly wrong, even if we utterly misunderstood the key word "landing" and also count any mission which merely photographed the dark side (Luna 3, 1959) or human overflight over it (Apollo 8, 1968). But not "landing".

And why on earth did Google decide jagranjosh.com was more authoritative than any reference website or wiki?

____________________________________________________________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa#Geology,_geography,_eco...

Well to be fair there is no "dark side" to the Moon, so it's not really an answerable query.

And searching google.com for "longitudes continent africa" returns "Africa's geographical coordinates span from Latitude 37˚21'N to 34˚51'15"S and Longitude 51˚27'52"E to 17˚33'22"W"

It seems that GIGO still holds true.

> what if we sell the ability to boost enterprise company results for certain topics

Maybe I'm naive but... has Google even considered doing that? Re the first one, I know top management had a project to reenter China back in the teens.

You are really naive if you think that first one is about China.

That was a concrete example of eagerness to submit to an especially censorious government. I did not say it was the only case. Save your insults.

Exactly, the organic nature of search ceased to exist that very moment when they started human intervention in a purely machine based (crawler/indexing logic) algorithm.

> any private company will be incentivized in this direction

From the earliest papers on Google PageRank, Brin and Page warned, "we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." <http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html>

once the new subs per month metric starts to decline, even subscription funded engines will move in that direction.

> We now have the opportunity to make it even better by refining results through dialogue. I hope someone does.. soon.

TBH, I don't want dialog (too long and slow, leave dialogs for human to human comms), I just need my query words to exist in the result pages. Nothing more. Google messed this up long time ago.

I wouldn't mind a dialog that helps me build an advanced query.

Have you tried advanced search?

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

I'm aware of advanced search. I'd like it to be more user friendly and widely used. I think a chat bot would help.

> I just need my query words to exist in the result pages. Nothing more. Google messed this up long time ago.

Google didn't mess that up, SEO did.

You don't "just need" that. You need the page to be authored by a human with good intentions and end up containing those words because those are meaningfully part of what the human was trying to convey to you without ulterior motives.

But those kinds of pages are dwarfed by the millions of pages of content farm nonsense jammed full of every possible keyword and contaning absolutely nothing of value.

A search engine like you describe would be like walking in Chernobyl without a radiation suit on. A pleasant stroll in 1985, but not today.

Search only works if there exists something valuable to search for. The Google dominated internet has not incentivized a library of quality content. Most quality information exists on long dead domains. The rest is pay walled or unindexed. Google is a library search service but for a gas station convenience store of information.

8-10 years ago the competition for getting stuff before your eyes wasn't as tight. It's not only on google, the quality stuff is objectively harder to find in the ocean of slop today.

kagi is still far from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com