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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

I think the big problem is simply that the results are bad. They’re full of spammy links to weird websites with verbose but useless content or just links going to the obvious sources that you could visit yourself like Wikipedia or stack exchange. All the sponsored content and allegations of politically manipulated results don’t help either. Using a chatbot seems more effective most of the time.

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.

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A search engine having bad result is not a simple problem though.

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.

It may be a hard problem, but it gets a lot harder when quality results are not aligned with your companies main source of income.

It’s not that hard a problem if you have the resources of a Google. They just have to do what they’ve always been unwilling to do. Let actual humans help curate it. It’s obvious when a site is a content farm. It’s obvious when a site has real reviews vs. just pretend reviews and affiliate links. It’s obvious when a site is actual Stack Overflow and when a site is a clone thereof.

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.

I'm kinda looking at it from the other end of the causation: with all their resource, talent, everyone shouting at them on their garbage results to the point specifying individual sites like reddit in the query has become common knowledge...all of this says that changing course is hard.

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.

Google could add a "relevant" and "garbage" button on search results that only logged in users can click on.

I wonder what percentage of YouTube videos contain useful information though. I feel like it could be as low as 1%

Percentage of "useful content" is likely the same (or better) than the open web, though.

I don't see YouTube becoming a better place to search stuff, but I think YouTube content being allowed no usefulness is the greatest gift to humanity.

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.

Agree with you. Problem is more about poor results and lack of good alternatives.

Yes, please make youtube videos easier to search through. And then turn the relevant bits into text with maybe a couple of still images. You know, web pages.

And youtube search is extraordinarily horrible. Unimaginably bad.

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