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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

This is the thesis, I understand the thesis, I remain skeptical of it. In my view, search sucks now primarily because there just isn't much worth searching for on the open web anymore. I think the "it's Google's fault" thesis is mostly an unwillingness to admit this.

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To large extend, that content stopped dying after Google deprioritized it in search results. People stopped being able to find it, sites/communities stopped having views, authors gave up.

I stopped caring about my blog about that time - after I was unable to google my own postd. I remembered the name and some of the content, but it was just not coming up in the search. There was also noticeable drop in views. I kind of concluded it is pointless when it is not coming up in searches unless I SEO hard.

I could be convinced of this narrative. Like, if someone writes a book about this, with good evidence of what caused this to happen, I might find that persuasive.

But to me, what happened was social media and video becoming the locus of attention. I don't think people stopped putting content on independent websites because their traffic from search results went down, I think they just started putting content on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok instead. To me, the whole way the web is used just changed over this period of time, in ways that mostly had very little to do with Google's search algorithm.

You remain skeptical of something proven through leaked emails?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-execs-scheme-to-i...

The thing those emails demonstrate is not the thing I'm skeptical of!

I don't see why it can't be both. The web has less good content AND Google has altered their search results such that results are worse generally for us, but better for them and their bottom line.

I'm not saying it isn't both, what I'm saying is that the thesis of the newer Google competitors is that the problem is mostly that Google has chosen to suck, so they can do a lot better just by choosing to not suck. But I think that thesis is wrong, that it is mostly that the web sucks now, and that these search engines are ultimately likely to be unsatisfying because they can't actually solve that underlying problem.

But if I'm wrong, that would be great! The comment that started this thread made me think that it seems like I'm not wrong though.

I think the counterargument would be that the web sucks in large part because of the way it’s been shaped by Google. Most of the hyperwordy blogspam is driven by sites trying to optimize their SEO for Google. So websites like Kagi could potentially push the underlying web in a positive direction

I don't buy this at all. There is no way for any search provider to avoid the arms race dynamic. Marketers will always have an incentive to appear first in results in order to capture an audience to monetize. "Just win the arms race then" sounds nice but it's wishful thinking, IMO.

And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get.

And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden.

IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites.

(NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.)

¿Por qué no los dos?

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