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[michaelplzno]

I've noticed this google decay SO MUCH.

[michaelplzno]

Actually I've started using Bing's AI search of all things, its just faster at getting results and it cuts through the bullshit much better than google.

[oliver123]

Hm.. I don't think Google is dying, it's doing a great job with its functions.

[Golds]

Is Google Dying video posted on Google's YouTube platform. Hmm.

It is under threat from the good AI services a bit, but you'd think Google would be able to figure out their own AI product. They definitely have great, unique treasures of data to train on.

Actually I've started using Bing's AI search of all things, its just faster at getting results and it cuts through the bullshit much better than google.

Bing AI search with GPT-4 is really good! Fun to get into weird conversations with it

[Schoq]

Google the company is probably doing fine, but re: the google search engine having become progressively less useful because of SEO spam: yes, definitely, and recent AI developments have exacerbated this (very few man-hours are now required to rewrite the same fake listicle or review or recipe to look (to the google crawler) like it's coming from 50 independent blogs).
For the most part it's unusable when not used to search a specific website.
A useful function these days would be the ability to set up your own whitelist of sites to search that aren't part of some south asian spam factory which will otherwise clog up the first 18 pages of result.

[michaelplzno]

Just to post my mantra yet again: if google had some humans who sifted through and removed the most egregious spam sites that would fix it.

[MKMILQUETOAST]

Just to post my mantra yet again: if google had some humans who sifted through and removed the most egregious spam sites that would fix it.

I agree that a lack of human or "common sense" solutions has always eluded Google, but it's also impossible to overstate the sheer scale they work at. They could employ a ten thousand people whose only job is to sort out spam, SEO trollings, etc., and they'd barely make a dent in a single region's worth of indexed data, let alone the new stuff that's rolling in on a hourly basis

I'm really not sure how you can fix Google. Any changes they make will be studied and reversed engineered within a month, and unfortunately for us they're not profit-motivated to deliver us accurate results, so it's not a high priority for them. I've also seen their other efforts to curate results via Google Images and it's always been a net negative

I guess I'm pretty negative on Google's ability to do anything about it at all

[s0]

Shit is just gonna get worse with AI I feel, because AI allows you to create spam at an unprecedented scale. At some point the web is gonna consist of nothing but bots generating content for other bots to scrape.

[Find_the_Fabulist]

It's the most visited site on the entire internet with tens of billions of monthly visits, so...no. The fact that a handful of people have made videos dunking on a widely used service (or company, or franchise) doesn't mean it's "dying."

Strip away the hyperbole and I do get your point - the dark art of SEO has simply spread too far and made general-purpose searches less useful. However, I suspect that the majority of Google users haven't really noticed. SEO pollution is a problem that primarily affects heavy users and/or anyone using searches in a professional capacity.

Mainly, it's another factor making it awful to be a writer. Going forward, I think that most writers (and other creative types, but especially writers) are going to need to get out of the vast open spaces of the internet and gravitate to walled-off areas. I'm not happy about this, but until someone gets the bots under control it's probably a necessary move.

[michaelplzno]

but it's also impossible to overstate the sheer scale they work at. They could employ a ten thousand people whose only job is to sort out spam, SEO trollings, etc., and they'd barely make a dent in a single region's worth of indexed data, let alone the new stuff that's rolling in on a hourly basis

I'm not so sure, because as much as a ton of new data comes in, it's currently difficult to get to any new data of quality, so what is the point of indexing stuff that just becomes crusty crap? Google's goal to index everything is not so golden. Google's real goal, along with most algo curated platforms, should be to find quality work that people want to see.

When you cut away the crap, with 10k employees if each one could fix one hundred search topics in a month (A low estimate) that's 1mil search topics every month, which would cover 90-95% of searches people do in a region. Then more esoteric topics would be the wild west, but most things people search for in volume could be cleaned up quickly with much less than 10k people working full time.

Also, some searches don't really change too much, so over time there is a cumulative effect of cleaning out the search gunk. It's the same as cleaning a physical space: once you start getting the extremely nasty bits clean, the rest of it falls into place.

Also also, it's the broken window principle: Meaning that since google isn't taking care of cleaning their search results, more spammers and trolls feel empowered to keep dumping their garbage.

If spamming garbage weren't so darn effective, people would not do it as often as they do.

[michaelplzno]

Strip away the hyperbole and I do get your point

I agree with your post and am making my own personal walled garden network to cover my needs, where one doesn't need to hyperbolically shout at the top of their lungs to get on top of the weeds that have taken over the internet.

It's a shame I'm too weird to have big box websites work for me. If I'm in the phantom realm with Zod, then there are a lot of good people who are stuck there too.

[Steve Matthew]

There is currently no evidence to suggest that Google is dying. The company continues to be a dominant force in the [spam link removed] industry, with a wide range of products and services. While it faces challenges and competition, it remains a key player in the digital landscape.

[michaelplzno]

you get good search results from them?

[ProgramGamer]

My one wish wrt search engines is that they'd just let you block domains entirely from your results. Can't fathom why none of them have a feature like that yet, especially considering google accounts exist. Why the fuck would I want a google account other than for storing my search engine preferences, you know?

That being said, alphabet isn't dying, even if google the search engine eventually gets shut down or something. They're too big to fail.

[Pineapple]

My one wish wrt search engines is that they'd just let you block domains entirely from your results. Can't fathom why none of them have a feature like that yet, especially considering google accounts exist. Why the fuck would I want a google account other than for storing my search engine preferences, you know?

I use Kagi. One of its best features is the option to prioritize, de-prioritize, or block certain domains entirely. The catch is that it's not free, but I think of that as an overall good thing. It means I can be sure that I'm the customer, not advertisers (there are none) or data brokers (their privacy policy promises they don't share search data).

[Golds]

I've also found Kagi to be very good. Not a paying customer, but have been impressed with the free results whenever I've tried it.

[michaelplzno]

I often find stories that Google's working environment is hyper-political. I don't know if it's true, but if everyone is fighting over ideological issues then no one is really doing any actual work. And my successful political game "Strategery" shows that people love playing would be politicians, even when genuine issues are ignored in favor of meaningless rhetoric.

My understanding is that a lot of big companies are in sort of Vietnam with their employees over petty personal disputes where there is no higher authority to tell people to focus on work rather than political beefs.

I wonder why valve hasn't made many games lately, or why YouTube doesn't make its own shows. Or why Facebook is obsessed with "meta" instead of creating new artistic stuff. Facebook has billions of users, but they don't have anything to say to the masses? Zuck wants to talk about some BBQ sauce he invested in? That's it, that's the big reason to get everyone on earth to sign up?

Making tech work, or making art, or making anything valuable to the world takes a lot of tedious work. I know spammers, and other bad actors will erode the work, and I know there is a chance that you'll make something that people don't relate to, but Google's primary job is to fight spammers. That is their mission: to get the answer to search queries. If their attitude is that, "It's just too hard to beat SEO experts, the boner pill websites and fake crap are simply too powerful for a billion-dollar company to combat." then, yes, Google is dying.

I saw a great post from X (Twitter) that fake Elon Musk was saying "P*ssy in bio bots are simply too powerful, I wish I didn't spend 46 billion on this site." It's embarrassing that the spammers are so obvious on twitter, and they can't nuke them, or hire moderators, or something. No one wants to pay for a janitor.

Most everyone, it seems, is more interested in playing some kind of game of thrones BS where they fight each other in the office over who gets to use the coffee machine first instead of making stuff.

[mega mega mega]

I've been using SearXNG the open source meta search engine. Noticed that lately Google does not index a lot of my own sites but DDG and Bing do, very weird. Google will list trillions of results but will only show you 2 pages of SEO spam. Looks like the data spigot only flows one way for Google nowadays. I've had to change my search habits a little bit but the results are much closer to what I'm looking for. Found a few fringe sites that I never would have been spoonfed by Google's nanny algorithm.