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The end of the Googleverse
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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I like Google products but the search engine really has become shit. I'm not sure there's anything they can do about it though.
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.
Google can change this.
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.
There’s no reversing this.
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.
But it all starts with the algorithm
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.
But to do that, the algorithm has to know the right answer in the first place. Meaning a human has to tell it what's right and what's wrong.
Have you seen Google's generative AI tests? They're trying to do exactly that and it's mostly useless.
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
Bro. I'll never understand why recipes have taken the blog-first, recipe-last approach.
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?
Any metric that isn't direct human curation can be gamed.
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.
Just out of curiosity what google products do you use?
I guess it's gmail, drive, calendar and YouTube mainly
Edit - and maps
I personally want to degooglify as much as I can, just saying what the other person probably uses
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.
Most of the big ones. Gmail, calendar, maps, YouTube, YouTube music, photos, tasks, pixel...
It's more interesting to say the ones I don't use tbh: Drive and Chrome.