There is plenty they can do. They created this mess with their algorithm. They can undo it by changing it, again.
Google does not objectively score or rank a site based on what you are actually looking for. They rank based on how much time other people spend on the site. How many other sites link back to the site. They rank based on how many words are on the page, regardless of if that actually matters.
This is why when you google a recipe, all the top results are blog posts from soccer moms telling a life story about food. You don’t care about that stuff - you just want the recipe. But that’s what google cares about.
I don’t think the algorithm is the problem. The problem is that sites started to capitalize on your attention. Everybody wants your sweet little attention so they can earn money from it. Internet also moved into walled gardens of money making machines (like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok).
It doesn’t matter which algorithm is used. Somebody will crack it and abuse it for their own good.
It doesn’t matter which algorithm is used. Somebody will crack it and abuse it for their own good.
If the algorithm gives a bigger shit about giving the answer people are actually looking for, and doesn’t emphasize length, formatting, and other bullshit… And people crack the algorithm by giving exactly that answer I’m looking for, I’d be ok with that.
That’s easily abused. Search engines before Google were pure keyword search, but those were quickly abused. People just made websites with all types of keywords just to get on top of search results. Google’s PageRank fixed this - temporarily. People were quick to abuse it too.
It doesn’t matter what you try to do. Somebody will figure out how to abuse it.
This is exactly right but assumes the nature of the internet must remain the same. The problem is the content and people wanting your sweet little attention. The internet described in the article - the blogosphere and Usenet and the rest, was an internet created by people for people and existed for its own sake. What google has access to now is 3 billion people all trying to scam the others for money. Its a fundamentally different user base and there’s no way a better algorithm can find content that isn’t there
Thanks. The only one left for me is YouTube now. On a WAN show Linus asked Luke what product released less than 10 years ago by google he was using and they couldn’t think of one. It was the same thing for me. I’ve been asking friends and colleagues ever since, the answers are interesting.
They simply need to change the way relevancy is measured. They need to implement some mechanism that can evaluate the quality of the page. The algorithm should penalize sites that have content very similar to other sites (like those that scrape github or stackoverflow), low effort sites, or sites that are infested with too many ads.
And since so much quality information is in youtube videos, and they already generate transcripts, why can’t you search through those?
Yeah. The whole ‘search engine optimization’ scam has really messed things up.
I feel like, aside from a top few sites, most results just spit out content mill bullshit.
Ever notice how just about every explanatory article is structured the same way? They’re trying to repeat the same shit as much as possible to get higher in search results.
“What is X?”
“Why would you want to do X?”
“Here’s how to do X.”
I just want to know how to do X, guys. Enough with the fluff.
there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users.
I hate when journalists use data from Arse Research Institute to boost sensation
But if that last 25 years of Google’s history could be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb, it is now starting to feel that the search engine is finally losing pace with the hijackers. Or as Marwick put it, “Google has gotten shittier and shittier.”
“To me, it just continues the transformation of the internet into this shitty mall,” Marwick said. “A dead mall that’s just filled with the shady sort of stores you don’t want to go to.”
Worth citing
Dash is one of the web’s earliest bloggers. In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.”
I always wondered if "using X app instead of Google as search engine should be interpreted as sign of generalized computer illiteracy (not being able to distinguish between two different contexts/products) or a product of our own doing (convergence between desktop and mobile, interfaces harder to visually differenciate between apps and its functions).
I hope it's true, but honestly I don't believe sites and opinions that have to do with google from sites like the verge.
Because sites like the verge are in reality rivals to google. For example verge is owned by voxmedia which has an advertising company and a web advertsing platform. They are rivals to google which also is an advertising company. They hate google because they want google's money lol. I seriously doubt they can be objective especially to google.
The fact is hardly anyone publishes on the web anymore. Every time someone complains about Google search I look them up and discover they don’t have a website.
They have an Instagram and a YouTube and a Facebook and a Twitter account, all of which may or may not be accessible to some degree to a logged out web browser. Never a website though.
What do they think is going to show up in a search when all the content these days is published in walled garden social media apps?
I don’t have an Instagram, a YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter account, and I still hate Google search. It’s nearly useless unless I’m specifically trying to find something to purchase.
It’s not about what you as the searcher has. It’s about where the content you’re searching for is located. If the entity or company you’re searching for has only published within walled gardens such as Instagram or Facebook, then you are less likely to successfully find that information in Google. If they had published a normal website, then Google would be better able to index that information and provide you the result you want.
I feel that, but also, the content I am looking for is indeed typically posted on regular websites without walled gardens, and Google still seems to want to show me a whole page of garbage before the site I’m looking for, whereas on DuckDuckGo(bing), my desired sites are usually the first or second result. Google is better if I’m looking to buy something, or find local restaurants etc, but ddg gives me better results in my academic and flight of fancy searches.
I just hate the google search UI 😊 but of course this is not the only reason that DDGO is my default private and bing my default while working. We are a full on Microsoft software company with all the teams stuff etc. So using bing allows to search not only in the internet, but in the company SharePoints as well.
It’s even bad for finding something to purchase honestly. I’ll search for a specific part number, and most of the results are other similar but not interchangeable products. No Google I cannot just shove this random other battery pack into my UPS, but thanks anyway.
I tried searching for airtight drawers and all the results were either airtight or drawers. Only one was both and it was a ten thousand dollar museum specimen cabinet.
It’s especially terrible if you care about the fiber content of your clothes. Searching for linen or even 100% linen gets me linen blend, linen-look, linen color. 100% wool gets mostly acrylic wool blends. Wool toe socks gets me either wool socks or toe socks but again, not both.
Plus I can’t block Amazon and Walmart from the results anymore, so that’s a ton of extra junk to filter through manually.
You would think so wouldn’t you? But Google usually still tries to be “helpful” about everything. “100 linen” does work better, although still not perfect.
That also doesn’t fix the issue with being unable to ignore Amazon and Walmart. On the standard search, the dash to ban a specific term makes it not the first result but it still shows up further down the page. On the dedicated product search it doesn’t seem to do anything at all.
Oh, you’re looking for a part number for something relatively common? No can do. However, I’m sure you’d be interested in pages of Chinese phone numbers that carry 3 digits in a similar order to your search.
Google’s ranking algorithms are also to blame. If you publish anything on a new website it will take you eternity to rank up against copycat sites and websites that have nothing to do with the search query, they will outrank your publication just because their websites have had 5+ more years presence than you, have paid their way through the ranker, and their article has only one of the six keywords mentioned in the search query but isn’t relevant to the whole search query, your article will linger on page 10. you will put 5 times more work to move your post to the 9th page than the time it took you to research and write the post.
google has shaped the internet into what American democracy is, those with more money get more exposure
I use it for ice cream. There’s a place that makes their own flavors in house and one of the best ways to find out what they have besides checking in (they’re not exactly super local to me) is to check their Facebook page. That and occasionally family contact in the event that someone loses a phone or something. That’s literally it.
The only thing I still use from Google is their Pixel phones, and then I immediately flash them with GrapheneOS. That, and Google maps which I can’t find a good replacement. I’ve tried every single OSM app and none of them remotely compare.
For me it’s mostly for looking of businesses. I can pull them up, see pictures, check their website, even check their menu if it’s a restaurant, and also their phone number. Also with my gym I can see how busy they are on average at different times of the day so I know when to go when it’s less busy.
Yeah. I still do most of that through Google Maps in a browser. Google’s solutions to those are really nice.
If Google blocks those services behind an app, I’ll stop using them, because the (if experience so far continues) app likely won’t work in the GrapheneOS privacy sandbox.
I use GrapheneOS and can confirm it works. It even works if you don’t have sandboxed play services installed. If you do install it, I’d set the battery usage to restricted, and disable background data in network settings.
We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo… Now it’s just Google, or slightly worse versions.
I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.
They said as useful as Google. Not that Google gives objectively very useful results. And I agree with them. I use DuckDuckGo every day and pretty much every time I have to add !g to send my query to Google because the DDG results are shit in comparison.
I’m talking about on the desktop btw. With adblocking and script blocking. I accidentally used Google on my phone yesterday and I think I got cancer.
DDG just just performs a simple redirect to Google with the query, where the latter has access to cookies, past usage (especially if one is logged in to Google), etc.
Yes. The !bangs in DDG are for convenience and not for privacy. The convenience of not opening the intended website, and typing/pasting the query to perform the search.
There is brave search, which seemed pretty good to me, even though i am using kagi search now. And to be honest, so far kagi seems really solid, and if you go past the fact that you have to pay for it (on most other search engines you are the product) then give it a try, the first 100 searches are free.
I avoid Google products as much as possible these days, especially anything launched within the last 2-3 years, because it will soon be abandoned and unsupported. Their search results are worse than they have ever been. The only Google app I actually like is Google Maps.
Yeah, I find Maps the best for getting around regardless of the mode of transportation.
Only thing I really dislike about Maps is that it doesn’t make it very easy to explore businesses. Like, try to look at a random strip mall and it won’t show you what all the store fronts are. Some things only seem to show up if you search for them (not if you look at exactly where they are).
I’ve always wondered, does Google Maps link into each city’s public transport API manually after contacting the city, or do they have some sort of AI scraper?
Google Maps saved me when I had to work in Japan for several months without knowing not a lick of Japanese. I just bought a Suica card and just stood on which color Google Maps told me.
Yeah the search has gone to shit. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go but I guess that is Bing based?
Also been trying out Kagi. The format is unsettling at first but it is nice to see the results I am looking for at the top instead of a bunch of bullshit ads / sponsored results and whatever along with crappy results below the fold.
I’ve been using Kagi for two months now and I can’t recommend it enough. Whatever I search is always on the first results, no need to filter SEO crap.
Also it’s incredibly fast.
I’m not a heavy search user so their lowest tier (5$, 300 searches) is more than enough for me. I can see how the costs can add up for someone that is a heavier user tho
It works OK if you know a name, but not the location, but not the other way around. If there’s any concentration of businesses, you can zoom in all you want but it will only show 1 in 2 places.
Many search terms now result in residential places near the top results. I suppose these are mostly small webshops run out of homes for the same terms, but that isn’t usually what one is looking for when using maps.
Google SEO has homogenized the internet with vapid marketing content. The internet is one big commercial. The reason Reddit got popular was because communities found and shared good content and created more by talking about it. Now ads are disguised as posts and memes.
Let’s not romanticize the old web too much. It had its problems too:
Half-done html pages with under_construction.gif or cliparts copypasted from Word. Some went through multiple editors like Frontpage and Dreamweaver which ended up producing spaghetti HTML.
Autoplaying midi from songs probably from Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Blink 182, etc. Did I mention that MIDI volumes count as separate from normal ‘Media’ volumes, and were often cranked to the MAX?
It was a time when HTML/CSS/JS would chaotically intertwine with proprietary plugins like Flash and ActiveX. “Best viewed from Internet Explorer at 800x600” was a thing. Readability? Accessibility? Forget about it.
You paid by minute on dial-up connection until ADSL appeared. Good luck trying to download that tenchi_muyo_hentai.jpg.
That was more the 90s - the time of things like Geocities - than the 2000s.
By the 2000s there had already been one Internet Boom & Bust and things on the Internet were way more comercialized than is earlier times of handmade sites, pre-CSS webpages and ActiveX components.
That generational ‘designation’ has been changed so many times it’s not credible.
Gen X was originally they ‘children of the baby boomers’. If someone was born in 1981, they were young Gen X for most of their life, now they are told they are ‘Millennials’
I grew up around cousins who were all older than me, so I think I was influenced more by 90s culture than most of my peers. I think you and I are the awkward in-between.
1997 is a funny birthyear 😀 on one hand you grow up in “traditionell way” and thus you understand older folks who don’t understand new slang but on the other hand you understand the digital natives who grow up with all that attention grabbing BS.
Imagine content creation that was done purely for the fun of creating content and sharing info, albeit with literally zero hope of receiving any money. Better in some ways, worse in others.
Eh, I’d be careful with this sentiment. A significant part of internet’s decline comes from people who think of themselves as too smart and rationalize their own nonsense.
It makes me wonder tho: is Lemmy sustainable? I never want to get invested in something like Reddit again when there’s no proper and respectful end game for all the communities that make up their lifeblood.
Yeah. I’m noticing when things get too big, undesirables start creeping in.
‘Undesirable’ in this sense would be people with more money than sense and incredibly low standards for what they spend it on. They are the kinds that are proud to be ripped off and businesses will cater to them over smarter folk.
There was a thread on the android community recently about that, I think. If you want to dig through there. I think the consensus though was that it is pretty hard to replace.
Syncing within a server so I can use it flawlessly cross platform.
Biggest issue though is that I’m also trying to figure out how to export all of the data I’ve put on there over time. Once I have that all exported, I can move elsewhere.
I went with obsidian which has several ways to sync across platforms. My preference is with git so that I can back everything up at the same time, but there’s also a built-in sync service
Completely agree. I try not to use it but don’t really have a similar replacement. For some reason there are tons of notes apps, but the ones that kind of resemble keep fall short of the easiness and practicality of it.
Right now I’m just waiting for Quillpad to add sync capabilities to see if we are finally there.
The only REAL replacement I’m still looking for is YouTube. Sure, Peertube and proxy sites for YouTube exist. But the amount of content I am interested in is by dozens of decimals larger an YouTube than on any other alternative combined.
I wish it was true. My strategy is to use ddg in first try to find something and switch to google when ddg ducks in wrong way. Currently google is better in images and searching for “this particular site” instead of answer on any site
I tried DDG many times for work. Often I don’t find the result I want at all. I try different queries and all, but I only find barely relevant shit. I switch to Google, and immediately the top result is exactly what I want.
I’m hoping that as the fediverse grows it will start to accrue enough capacity to sustain a strong video hosting platform like peertube.
Social media has a network effect where the more people use it the more attractive it gets, and because the fediverse can interconnect between different formats I see it as inevitable that eventually it will take over, because it can manage a much more comprehensive network than any centralised site.
Once it becomes more mainstream, server capacity should increase until it can handle the world’s video sharing as well.
I’m still skeptical whether the fediverse will get as big as the current social media now. We already had a big problem with the recent CSAM spamming by trolls.
Not to say it’s a bad thing. I think having a contraction of social media is better for our mental health because it fosters a better sense of community. Like when you live in a smallish town vs living in a big city. Each has its own drawbacks. But with the loneliness epidemic we’re experiencing right now, it’s better to have something that we can use to feel like we belong to something.
Maybe it’s not like that for everyone. I’m a person who’s always valued quality over quantity interactions. I kept my social circles small but I kept in touch with everyone. Especially now with the abundance of tools, like Discord. Even after having my own family I still show up at the Discord call with my friends after the kids are all asleep just to check in with my friends.
Yes the CSAM attack is a problem, but there are already tools to automatically flag potential CSAM, we just need to integrate them. Unfortunately social media is a natural monopoly, and there are corporate entities that currently make up that monopoly, and that is causing a lot of social problems. The only way to combat those problems is to create something that displaces those monopolies.
Like facebook released a report that compared different personal feeds, one that creates an algorithmically generated mix of all the crap that facebook currently shows you and selectively ignores friend updates, versus one that just gives you just your friends’ updates.
They found people stayed on the site longer with the algorithmic feed than the simple friends feed, and they inperpreted that as meaning people like the algorithm better. Of course they ignored the fact that maybe people like seeing the updates they asked for and then getting on with the rest of their day because they are sated.
Facebook doesn’t care about that, they want retention, so they interpret retention as user “desire” to justify pushing this algorithm on them. There’s a whole spiel here about how capitalism operates on addiction but this comment is long enough already.
It’s enough to say that these algorithms contributed to a genocide in Myanmar because facebook established themselves as the de facto internet. They knew the algorithm was exacerbating racial tensions, but also turning down the genocide dial would make them less money, so they kept it turned up.
I think it’s worth creating an alternative where people have control of their own feeds because the algorithms are open source, and it’s worth working hard on. The information ecosystem is maybe one of the most important things we need to fight things like climate change. Like the stakes are more than just our personal comfort.
Try Nebula! It’s a bunch of YouTube creators who got together to make their own platform for video content. The price is quite reasonable and the videos are the same you would see on YouTube but often a few days early and with the sponsorship ads removed.
I hope alternatives to youtube like Nebula and peertube find their footing, but I can’t help but suspect that youtube has and will continue to find the successful path in this social media era. I’m not a youtuber or anything, so I don’t really know any details about how it works, but the way they seem provide a platform with monetisation and brand building possibilities built in seems pretty effective/pragmatic for a platform that needs to find someway to work within capitalism.
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