Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-how-googles-new-algorithm-will-shape-your-internet

by sonabinu • 2 years ago

191 179 2 years ago

chrisjj• 2 years ago

Google's efforts to address this issue aren't always successful.
Often popular search terms are crowded with websites that contain very little useful information, but tonnes of ads

Ad-seller Google prefers ad-laden sites?? Who'd have guessed! :)

skilled• 2 years ago

Honestly, bravo at BBC for whoever green-lighted this story. It puts the finger right on where it hurts for small publishers and illustrates Googles new way of thinking.

I am sad but also frightened for small creators and those who simply share interesting information once in a while. Google is bulldozing these people away from anywhere near the AI answers or the ten blue links below it.

The article didn’t mention it but people who got hit in September with the helpful update have still not recovered. Not a single site. This is the update that HouseFresh was hit with.

It’s insane.

nycdatasci• 2 years ago

This was inevitable. Traditional search is an inefficient way to access information in a world with large AI models. Google is being forced to do this due to competition from openAI, meta.ai, perplexity, etc.

hobs2• 2 years ago

It's really not, they are extremely complementary.

caseyy• 2 years ago

LLMs cannot compete on truthful high-quality information from experts. Only on plausible babble. If that’s the only information you search for, then your perspective makes sense.

We shouldn’t be using LLMs for information retrieval at all. They should be summarizing individual web pages at best. That would make search more efficient. But to use plausible text generator without any guaranteed veracity checks in the pipeline for information retrieval is madness.

ricardo816• 2 years ago

It is a bit surreal that you describe sucking up the world's information and spitting it out via a commercial entity and to you as a search result as 'inefficient'.

Perhaps it's more inefficient for all those content creators to bother creating anything vs what you actually derive from the search result, especially if they're not attributed/compensated.

_heimdall4• 2 years ago

It seems pretty clear that Google's era of search technology has aged out. SEO has been a game of cat and mouse since the web became an ad platform, it was only a matter of time before Google ran out of moves.

I'd much prefer a shift back to the earlier, smaller internet approach but it was driven by the enjoyment of exploration and discovery. Today most people prefer instant gratification online and just want answers and content thrown at them faster, with little regard for quality.

lolc• 2 years ago

it was only a matter of time before Google ran out of moves.

Google is institutionally incapable of offering good search results. They have the tech but shittify it to drive ad spend.

qp11• 2 years ago

Small content creators are always going to experience randomness and chaos 'in the current system', cause the Amount of Content far exceeds the amount of Attention available.

If the platforms were honest they would signal to everyone how large that gap is. And people would make a more informed call about whether to get into content creation.

Instead of doing that the platforms just puts the whole onus on content creator "quality" - hey man if you aren't up in the ranking its your fault, maybe you are a looser, go do something more outrageous, scream a little louder, repeat yourself 24x7, spam everyone. Or buy our ads. Its a nice scam cause you get even large corps and presidents shelling out billions on ads.

ricardo816• 2 years ago

I don't think there's a new element to their thinking.

They used to rely on DMOZ's human curated content and then replaced it. Knowledge panels (at least the non-business ones) are reliant on wikipedia. The 10 blue links reliant on the web.

They don't mind borrowing until they can replace, and monetise what they borrowed.

david-gpu• 2 years ago

Over the past several months I find Google search has become completely useless to find anything other than online retailers. I thought it may have been just something about my profile, but this article suggests it may have been an update on their end.

Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

wand3r• 2 years ago

Yeah, I remember how it felt when I first used Google. You could search something like "xck-956-fg" and some obscure part would show up. Obviously they have amazing technology as some of that "magic" is still there when you can search items by just taking a picture, so this is a choice on their part to have horrible search.

I use Kagi now as I can tune my searches with rankings and the results are quite good. I am sure Google could create the best and most amazing search experience with little effort. I would happily pay $20 a month for that service.

For now, Kagi and LLMs have brought some of the utility back for search and I am optimistic as the technology of AI improves that information retrieval will significantly improve as search providers will be forced to compete and the technology will evolve

dherikb• 2 years ago

I have a different perception, really. They are promoting more the Reddit results in the last months and, at least for me, I'm able to find faster what I want.

balder19913• 2 years ago

Now it’ll be a matter of time before Reddit gets an order of magnitude more bots and spam.

beretguy2• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

I’ve been using ddg since around 2016, but in the past few months I realize that brave gives me better results and Kagi even still better. So I’m switching to brave/Kagi combo. Brave for when i need to find easy stuff and Kagi when really need to find something.

sedatk• 2 years ago

Agree on that Kagi's better.

NayamAmarshe• 2 years ago

I don't see the point in using DDG. Brave Search is a superior replacement.

Hikikomori• 2 years ago

Switched to DDG a few months ago and find myself having to switch to Google for many searches. Going to give kagi a try after trialing it.

sersi• 2 years ago

I first switched to ddg but kept using !g because I often wasn't satisfied. Since I've switched to kagi, I barely ever fallback to google (only sometimes for very local results)

pinapplepony• 2 years ago

I switched to DDG a while ago because Google thought I was a bot.

Capchas, every single search! It kept telling me I was wrong when I tried to solve them.

I'm on a popular ISP in India, my guess is that one of their IP ranges got blacklisted somehow.

Between DDG and ChatGPT, I haven't looked back.

dmix2• 2 years ago

Part of the pitch for using DDG is that you can easily query Google or Google images (!g !gi etc) or tons of other search engines or just use the regular bing search for basic stuff

It’s more of a privacy friendly search platform than a total replacement for Google

steve1977• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.

As long as Bing is running

rutierut• 2 years ago

DDG was such an absolutely subpar experience for me (used it for 6-8 months) that it wouldn't surprise me if nobody would _actually_ say it's better in a blind test. They just don't like Google.

Kagi on the other hand really blew me away, I have no idea how they're doing it, but I'm only using Google for one thing these days (besides G Shopping & G Maps) which is when I want to use ad spend as proxy for quality/reliability of the company (for example when I'm looking for a local moving company in my city).

Nevolihs• 2 years ago

I only use Google for local search results (news or businesses) as well. Otherwise I'm also very happy with the quality of results I get from Kagi.

oidar• 2 years ago

That is a great idea. What have you used it for? How do you get the spend data?

dmix2• 2 years ago

I use both DDG and Google (via ddg shortcuts)

DDG is best for literal quick searches and Google for open ended questions or complicated queries

Never had issues with either really

rldjbpin2• 2 years ago

having used ddg for more than 5 years, i'd only agree with your sentiments in the first year or so. at first, i'd just use the bangs feature and do real search on google using !g bang. but for past few years i am exclusively searching on ddg. the only exception being searching travel directions.

a lot of search people do can be done in domain-specific websites, which ddg bangs allow you to do with ease. i am surprised to see that people are driven enough to pay for search before fully making the most of ddg.

culebron21• 2 years ago

Since 2015 I made some futile attempts to switch to DDG, and mostly used google, but last year I noticed myself using DDG 90% of times, because DDG got far better, and G turned in a page of junk, or showing generic stuff instead of specific. G spectacularly shot itself in the foot.

mdhen• 2 years ago

Kagi is miles better then google, i've been using it for nearly a year now. Worth the subscription.

p3rls3• 2 years ago

Duckduckgo is garbage for my niche (entertainment). SEO wordpressed articles up at the top of every search. Looks like it puts even more weight on backlinks in its algorithm to me and as such is even more vulnerable to gaming/timing.

ungamedplayer• 2 years ago

Live by the sword, die by the sword

TibbityFlanders• 2 years ago

Honestly, I use Edge Copilot for almost all my searches now. Google is no longer looking and soon the majority of people will realize that.

datavirtue2• 2 years ago

Same. This has been a serious productivity booster.

Aachen3• 2 years ago

I don't understand what you mean by looking in the sentence "Google is no longer looking". Do you mean they're no longer crawling websites and therefore blind to new content online?

arnklint• 2 years ago

Who’s gaining traffic right now? Is it just Reddit and a few others that has caught the traffic from this implosion or is the volumes of searches shrinking due to perhaps AI?

Aachen3• 2 years ago

See the bar chart in the article, third image (don't know if hotlinking works): https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1024xn/p0j04fnt.jpg.webp

Probably besides the ones gaining more traftic, you're probably right the overall click-through rate will be vastly lower than it was before quote answers appeared, and now probably ever lower with the generated text answers

michelb• 2 years ago

This is good. Because it now will make way more sense to compete with Google on searching the internet, since they screwed it up. They’re are panicking and defending their bottom-line instead of innovating and leading. I think internet search is now ripe for disruption. Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google.

viraptor• 2 years ago

I do like the competition starting to happen again. A lot of the articles seem to concentrate on how Google should do better. But there are so many sites that any change they do will break someone random. With best possible checks, it's just not realistic that there will be no mistakes.

We'd be better with 5 players doing things slightly differently. Nobody would get completely wiped by a single change.

ADeerAppeared4• 2 years ago

Still need deep pockets but it’s now increasingly easier to be much better at search than Google.

That's the big problem here. All the new search engines rely on the infrastructure of the old ones. It would take very little collusion between Google and Microsoft to crush something like Kagi. And the moment any new competitor gets big, they'll do it.

What's needed is an anti-trust breakup. There's simply too big a conflict of interest between Google, the search engine product, and Google, the ad-tech giant earning money off the websites.

Google is using their search engine monopoly to control the wider web, and fill it with spammy SEO garbage to juice their advertising revenues.

Exuma3• 2 years ago

How would they crush kagi

ricardo816• 2 years ago

Agree, intervention is needed.

Any new entrant sort-of has to prove itself also as crawling sites can be hard, e.g. Cloudflare which fronts an appreciable portion of the web. Also large sites like Reddit you need to crawl them at 100s of pages a second to keep up to date with content, not something they're generally going to appreciate without a recognisable benefit to them.

no_identd• 2 years ago

I know there exist whole fields of people out there sitting on content crawls

predictsoft• 2 years ago

Didn't Peter Norvig used to be director of search quality? And now Head of research? Maybe they should bring him back to increase that search quality.

CaptainOfCoit2• 2 years ago

Or the executive/management team could start using Google search themselves so they can see how bad the results are for their users. Pretty common to dogfeed in the software business yet Google seems to ignore this approach.

sp332• 2 years ago

What search engine do you think management uses now?

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

Shareholder ROI is all you need to know that they won’t let Norvig decide anything outside purely tech stuff.

joshstrange2• 2 years ago

A spokesperson for Google tells the BBC that the company only launches changes to Search after rigorous testing confirms that the shift will be helpful for users, and that the company gives website owners help, resources and opportunities for feedback on their Search rankings.

If you believe this I've got a bridge to sell you. The idea that Google does anything other than to improve its bottom line (in the _shortest_ possible timeline) is lunacy. Just look at Google constant short-sightedness and their parasitic ad team pushing the search team (before taking it over effectively) to find ways to increase the searches (which means a worse user experience).

Of course Google doesn't care about quality sites, they care about what makes them the most money, the user be damned. Anyone with an ounce of morality or care about the actual user experience was run out or relegated long ago.

Aachen3• 2 years ago

Sell me another bridge then. This is why I believe it:

Google does anything to improve its bottom line (in the _shortest_ possible timeline)

If the results suck, people would find alternatives. Look at how many techies installed Chrome for their parents and grandparents when MSIE was pre-installed and this was an easier-to-use, standards-compliant, and more performant option. It further snowballed from there. It takes a few years for word to get around but they're well aware that providing useful results is the only way to stay relevant

The problem lies in how Google goes about doing this. People like the (mostly) honest opinions you find on reddit. People like the answer boxes at the top and look no further. My girlfriend is one of the smartest people I know and she doesn't bother reading any further. Any time we look something up together it's a discussion point that I prefer to blindly scroll by the summary and she prefers to not click any result because the answer was already given. One of the most recent times, I could prove the quoted answer was wrong (for once) and that the results clearly gave a better picture in a few more seconds, but it doesn't kill the overall trend where people use this type of summary.

Quite the opposite: a friend made a fun little game that got popular tiktok. I talk to players on discord (because of course walled garden discord is their preferred platform). Any time the topic of searching or learning something comes up, most of them demonstrate 100% of their searches start on chatgpt and usually end there, too

Google knows better than I do (I'm sure they've done proper studies) what they need to do to stay relevant and their answer as of today is adding generated text output that tries to answer your query without having to even look at any results. The summary box on steroids

That this kills small websites is not their problem. All of this may be at the cost of honest content online, but do a Duckduckgo search for comparison: many queries result in pagefuls of content farms that pretend to be review or explanatory websites, looking legit but when you read beyond the first three sentences it's repetitive, baseless, uninsightful, and altogether useless or unreliable at best. I wouldn't know how to distinguish content farms from legit opinion websites at an algorithmic level (perhaps an LLM can make a guess that's often correct, if we think LLM vetting a desirable future), and apparently Google doesn't either because they choose to push sites like reddit and quora instead which, being big brands, everyone already knows are legit sites. I never heard of the air purifier review site the BBC article focuses on, so I can't notice their omission in the search results. Getting content farms is noticeable though and makes me consider which alternative to Duckduckgo I should try out. This thread has been mentioning Kagi, so that'll be something I try later today. Notice how quickly I'm ready to switch away once I find there's something with better results out there

In short, scrapping small or even obscure sites (that we all love, if we can find them) in favor of big names, and replacing needing to look at results yourself, is what Google's internal studies apparently show will keep Google Search relevant and I don't see any evidence to cast doubt upon that. Providing what people evidently want allows them to say what you quoted with a straight face

joshstrange2• 2 years ago

If the results suck, people would find alternatives. Look at how many techies installed Chrome for their parents and grandparents when MSIE was pre-installed and this was an easier-to-use, standards-compliant, and more performant option. It further snowballed from there. It takes a few years for word to get around but they're well aware that providing useful results is the only way to stay relevant

The results often do suck and people are actively finding alternatives (mostly techies). No search engine I've tried has really reached the bar where I'd push my friends/family to switch but they are getting closer and closer. MSIE had a lot of momentum and it wasn't FF that techies installed, it was Chrome, all that to say just because we haven't seen a Google replacement yet doesn't mean we won't. Furthermore people's frustration with Google search is directly what has lead to the alternatives that have been gaining popularity (again, mostly in techie groups so far). With your logic I could have said back in 2009 that "If IE sucked people would find alternatives", momentum is hard to fight but it can be done.

they're well aware that providing useful results is the only way to stay relevant

If this post [0] is to be believed then providing useful results is (now) a side effect of wanting to drive traffic to show ads and it's completely valid to degrade the search results if it means people spend more time searching (and thus see more ads). No doubt they have to provide value still but there is nothing saying that's what they are optimizing for, if it happens as a side-effect then so be it.

I really have no idea how to reply to the rest of your post which can be summed up to "Google knows best" which I reject completely.

I currently use Kagi but I'm not over the moon with it and it has its own issues [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314

asadotzler4• 2 years ago

If the results suck, people would find alternatives.

Not if Google's moat (selling ads to sites and then sending users to those same sites) is strong because there will be no good alternatives.

You seem to have missed about a century of US companies abusing monopolies and the antitrust efforts to prevent that.

jmyeet• 2 years ago

So I'm normally skeptical of the anecodata you see on HN and elsewhere ("Google is now useless, I switched to DuckDuckGo 23 years ago") but it seems like Google has done rather big things here:

1. Greatly increased the weight of doamin authority. This... seems desperate;

2. Increased the weight of reddit. Google have probably noticed how many people add "reddit" or "site:reddit.com" to search terms. I do this too. It's true for a lot of topics with all the AI-bot and affiliate astroturfing out there, Reddit can often be the only source for genuine commentary.

But Reddit has a dirty little secret: it's really easy to complete change the content and character of a subreddit. You see this on controversial topics. It only takes 100-200 people (or less with bots) to completely transform a subreddit.

User generated content sites have techniques to find socket puppets, brigading and the like but it's an arms race. 80% of my Tiktok follows come from crypto scam and p0rn bots. I imagine Twitter is the same way. The bots continue to get better too. Those same algorithms can be used to keep bot activity below the threshold for detecting voting rings.

So Google's increased reliance on Reddit will probably escalate the astroturfing and botting on Reddit and honestly, I don't think Reddit is up to the job of defending against this.

nottorp3• 2 years ago

Google is now useless, I switched to DuckDuckGo 23 years ago

7-8 years ago now, i think. Definitely years ago. Yes it started its slide towards useless back then.

If you're searching for pizza near you it's probably useful still, if you're searching for say product reviews or niche technical questions it's been completely useless for a while.

oissla• 2 years ago

This. The seo effect on google is just gonna be transferred to reddit, which as of now has very little account fraud detection. Good luck to Reddi's t&s team

coldcode• 2 years ago

I searched for how to use a massage ball (my back hurts) last week and got a giant page full of ads and ad-like sections for buying one with barely any articles at all. That is not a search engine; it's an ads engine.

datavirtue2• 2 years ago

Get The Back Mechanic book.

gms7777• 2 years ago

I appreciate the parent commenter complaining about how they were looking for something just to get ads instead, and getting a response telling them to buy something.

That said, I'll also second the back mechanic book for anyone with back pain.

Varloom• 2 years ago

I reduced my google search engine usage by 90%

Just Option+Space and get the answer with ChatGPT for MacOS.

No ads, no nonsense, just the answer.

threeseed2• 2 years ago

No ads, no nonsense, just the answer.

5 - 10% of the time that answer will be complete rubbish.

We need something better than Google and LLMs e.g. Golden before it was acquired: https://golden.com

whstl2• 2 years ago

ChatGPT is also becoming a victim of SEO. Not purely at the crawling level, but also at the answer level.

But as a default, it gives mostly "SEO-optimized" answers in a SEO-optimized format. Even simple question are answered with bullet points. Some descriptions look like advertisements and it's all very authoritative, even when it's just bullshitting/guessing and doesn't really know the answer for sure. This is what I was escaping from.

EDIT: For example the last thing I asked was how Brendan O'Brien did sample replacement in drums in Blood Sugar Sex Magic. It answered something that was 90% plausible but most of the content was walls and walls of text about the equipment it assumed it was used (plus info on more equipment unrelated to sample replacement), rather than actually answering the question itself.

dmje5• 2 years ago

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. It might be unpopular to use or like ChatGPT among the users of HN but - it’s true, this is one of the quickest ways to get answers for something

A_D_E_P_T3• 2 years ago

That's by design. I'm reminded of this from a month ago: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Discussed with nearly 900 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

kriops• 2 years ago

Kagi costs Spotify money, has zero ads, and lets you customise the results.

mkroman3• 2 years ago

It also can't fetch more than 2 pages of results for either web or image search. Reverse image search just straight up doesn't work. I don't know why they have it.

With searxng, searching at least works. It also has plugins that I think can do some of what Kagi is useful for (but it depends on the instance)

booleandilemma• 2 years ago

I just did the same search and the first result was how to use a massage ball. I scrolled down a bit and saw a reddit thread titled "using a massage ball for back pain".

The declining quality of Google's search results is greatly over exaggerated.

jascha_eng• 2 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I also am using an ad blocker, but aside from that the pages that are returned work perfectly fine for me for the most part. Yes sometimes there is some useless blogs taking up top spots but then I tried the so hyped alternatives like kagi and they don't filter these out either so eh...

mike_hearn• 2 years ago

It depends partly on where in the world you are and what language you use. I just tried that query in English and an answer callout was the first result, specifically highlighted. Then there is a "people ask" refiner widget, some videos in which the first is titled "How to use a massage ball (tutorial)" and then a WikiHow page. No ads.

I tried again in the local language and now I see some product ad results for buying a massage ball, but then it's back to the video results and sports blogs showing how to use them. That seems OK. Probably most people searching for massage balls do want to buy one or are very likely to do so soon.

I dunno, seems like they're both pretty good pages of results.

drivebycomment3• 2 years ago

I just tried "how to use a massage ball" and I don't see any ads, and links seem to be all legit articles, with YouTube video tutorials at the top.

shzhdbi09gv8ioi2• 2 years ago

Google results are tailored on a number of factors such as location, your past searches and whatnot.

The same deal with the ads. Advertiser wouldn't pay for advertising of their product in a region or to a demograph they don't care for.

I'd be more surprised if you did get the same result as parent.

aragonite2• 2 years ago

At the very least Google (or any search engine for that matter) should consider implementing a feature that allows users to explicitly signal query intent. For instance, a 'noshop:' prefix could be used to signal that the user is not looking to buy anything. There are two distinct groups of users searching for terms like "massage ball" or (in my own case) "managed switch": those looking to buy the product and those who looking to learn about the technology. Serving ads to the latter group is not just irritating but also ineffective since those queries were never going to lead to purchases in the first place.

rasz• 2 years ago

Which Google user would want to pay for ads about things you cant buy ('noshop')?

Oh wait, you meant Google _product_. You want Google to cater to its product needs by sacrificing own money making potential and limiting its actual users.

hosteur2• 2 years ago

Good news for Kagi then.

throwaway2112• 2 years ago

Two big reasons people add Reddit to search phrases is because Reddit's search isn't functional and to deprioritise Ad Junk from search.

It's to fix broken search, which gets more broken - more unwanted Ad Junk.

But Google's an advertising company with it's ad search device in everyone's pocket. At least it's reached sufficient post-don't-be-evil to be honestly shameless, even if it does employ people in PR with broken ethics prostituting their names for their mortgages. Getting reflective's hard when you're celebrating yourself.

jayski• 2 years ago

Reddit is the only social network I use.

They're really dropping the ball by not having a fantastic search tool. I know search is a difficult problem, but with the kind of budget and engineering power they have it has to be solvable.

throwaway2112• 2 years ago

Before: They were small. It was hard. Defer to Google.

Now: By having bad search, Google rewards them.

yreg2• 2 years ago

For me, search is the least of reddit's problems since it is easily worked around by using a search engine.

The changes to the API pricing were the final nail in the coffin for me, but the content has been going downhill for a decade anyway.

tmccrary55• 2 years ago

I've been switching to Lemmy.

It's like Reddit but not owned by a public corp.

Reddit still has more users but Lemmy is more like old school distributed web, not just an ad product pushed by coked out MBA accountants.

rjh29• 2 years ago

There's no money in it. It's expensive in both compute and storage to provide the tool, and they want most users to just be mindlessly consuming the front page or popular subreddits.

mlrtime• 2 years ago

Why would they, google does it for free. Spend money making google crawlers more efficient, not copying google.

orev• 2 years ago

Reddit benefits from having bad search because it increases engagement with the site. If you can’t find it by searching, people start a new post, even if it’s just rehashing something that’s been discussed 100s of times before. The new post brings new comments, and more page views. There’s also a user benefit as the information has less chance to become outdated (a new discussion might bring new information, avoiding the Stack Overflow problem).

pants2• 2 years ago

Reddit had a great search engine called PushShift which was maintained and run by one guy. That service doesn't work since their API changes, unfortunately.

dmje5• 2 years ago

Back again to say Kagi - where you can promote Reddit results. I have this, and it means the first result I normally get back for search is a Reddit answer.

jb3689• 2 years ago

It's odd. How did search engines trick us into thinking that our home page should be a search engine? The only reason I add "reddit" to searches is because a search engine is my entrypoint on my browser. Even then though, I find that Google tends to pin a particular threads. The most humorous ones are when it pins to a thread with "this has been asked already a zillion times" with no actual meaningful content in the particular thread.

Google search was never really good at finding meaningful opinions in the first place. Facts? Reference? Pretty good. Meaningful tradeoff analysis of non-academic subjects? Product rankings and reviews? Opinions? Really poor.

It's odd that Google decided to cannibalize the things it was good at. Finding recipes, for example, is terrible through Google because of the emphasis on SEO at the expense of user experience. AI search results are simply Google opting to make itself less relevant.

asadotzler4• 2 years ago

How did search engines trick us into thinking that our home page should be a search engine?

The browser makers started in the mid-90s with web search and news called "portals", either their own or licensed from a third party. By the early 2000s the portals had all gone to shit but we still needed them for web search because we still cared about the web and not just a couple of social media apps. As a result, Google's pristine search and search results pages became popular. When we were deciding on a Firefox start page in mid-2004, Google search eventually won because it was simple and effective, like the rest of Firefox.

(My proposal to our tiny team at the time was to make Firefox Start a page of instructions on how to easily change the start page to what ever you wanted, but that was reasonably shot down as asking the user to do extra work.)

rldjbpin2• 2 years ago

on the contrary, i have stopped using reddit due to how most communities work there since past few years. i wish every subreddit was full of nuanced, balanced discussions but it is rarely the case from my experience.

ironically the recent ai overviews results are partially referencing sarcastic reddit posts, like cheeze and glue.

tsuru• 2 years ago

Maybe they should get the Twitter treatment anytime they are mentioned: "Google formerly DoubleClick"

MagnumOpus2• 2 years ago

99 out of 100 people haven‘t been on the web long enough to dislike DoubleClick as much as it deserves. (And the rest know the work arounds to Google‘s shenanigans already…)

giancarlostoro• 2 years ago

Imma be real its been deteriorating for a while. Used to be an insanely powerful engine. You could find things with verbatim quotes. I have not seen this work anymore for quite some time. It all started when they started adding rules to suppress results somewhere in the late 2000s or early 2010s. Its only gotten worse and worse. Googles search engine is now just a personal collection of pre approved search results for no valid rhyme or reason.

rsolva• 2 years ago

We need to make bookmarks a common way to access the web again! So many people use Google or other search engines to access even the most basic sites, instead of storing a bookmark or typing out the whole URL.

I have used a simple bookmarking strategy in Firefox for some years now, simply storing everything and anything I suspect I might want to retrieve later. I give each bookmark a few quick keywords and store it all in one folder. No hierarchy. It's surprisingly useful and has helped me retrieve so much stuff from my vague long term memory.

In addition, I flush the cache automatically every time I close the browser and curate a list of sites that are exempted from the flush. I have also turned off search words suggestions in the address bar, leaving me with a tidy and usefull experience that helps me find what I'm looking for in seconds. Only saved sites show up when I start typing.

But most browsers, including Firefox, need to improve their bookmarking system. I can't add keywords to bookmarks from the mobile browser. Why not? And the bookmark UI has gotten little attention for literally decades.

It would not help all smaller sites, but it would help some, if browsers would improve the storing, managing and retrieving of bookmarks.

machiaweliczny• 2 years ago

How about social features like sharing bookmarks or having curated list for specific subjects

When I want to share bookmark folder for other collegues I have to go trough hoops (at least on chrome)

crucialfelix• 2 years ago

That's what https://del.icio.us/ was. It was very social in the best sense of the word.

A_D_E_P_T3• 2 years ago

Yeah, and, along the same lines, directories should perhaps also make a comeback -- like the old Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. Just a carefully curated and organized list of trusted sites that are made and managed by humans and for humans. Unlike, say, DMOZ, the directory of the future should be easier to navigate and incorporate "modern" features -- and it should also be easily searchable. (All sites on the directory are indexed; no sites off the directory are indexed.)

Searching for B2B products and services has become a lot tougher lately. A good directory could conceivably make a meaningful difference.

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

Could work. We have databases behind PiHole, could have something similar to filter search results.

cageface• 2 years ago

I’ve been saying for two years now that curated directories are poised to make a comeback on the web. It just needs a critical mass of curators.

I think this is why those awesome-$tech lists are so popular.

renegat0x0• 2 years ago

I have been collecting personal sites for some time. Format JSON files. Links have tag 'personal'.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

6510• 2 years ago

You could make the topical hierarchy as deep as possible and build a search that only searches the current category.

I recon LLM's, with minimal oversight, could file websites as well as articles on websites under all the appropriate categories.

Google is highly confused about articles vs websites about a topic. There should be a distinction. Sometimes I want a website, sometimes just an article.

Making it into a distributed index complete with cached copies seems fun. Have the hosted giant monolith mirror to fail back on but attempt to do everything p2p.

Maybe it should bluntly show a dialog in the corner of the screen with closest related websites (or pages) and a button to further browse the index using the current page as the query. Basically contextual advertisement only for free.

mejutoco2• 2 years ago

Regarding desktop bookmarks: Adding tags on Firefox is so natural (ctrl+D and maybe tab for comma separated tags). In Chrome it is not possible without an extension.

EasyMark6• 2 years ago

can't you just save them on the end of the title? doesnt it search through the titles when searching the bookmarks? It's all just a big grep through your bookmarks anyway whether it's in tags or titles

bimodalblitz• 2 years ago

I just started using BookmarkOS: https://BookmarkOS.com

balder19913• 2 years ago

Interesting. I’ve been sort of using Notion but by creating pages of concepts I want to save interesting quotes, links etc. It makes searching later very easy and also helps me build my own knowledge over time.

ricardo816• 2 years ago

The article starts with intimating that SEO is the problem. Perhaps to an extent it is, though I'd say with G's massive market share that optimising for one sweet spot with one search engine is really the problem. It makes SEO easier, one search engine and criteria. 20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines you'd be ranking well in some but not others. A good argument for alternative algorithms (and search engines).

Generative AI is no doubt useful for simple questions, and perhaps for people who aren't even interested in being sceptical about the answer given, but it seems at too high a cost for the visibility of the actual web and the effort put in by content creators.

Obviously with the huge and unrivalled ROI G gets from ads vs any rivals, the fact they're the default on most mobiles etc means any alternatives have a huge uphill battle to get seen.

At least there is Bing (and its meta variants), Mojeek (independent, a smaller index but truly independent) and Brave (claims independence but has a historical tie to scraping results)

hollerith3• 2 years ago

20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines

That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) Altavista was the dominant engine, which rapidly gave way to Google essentially as soon as Google became available, and since 2000 Google has been the dominant engine.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was getting my info on what engines people were using mostly from Usenet, Slashdot and a non-web-based forum called river.org.

ricardo816• 2 years ago

Alltheweb was fairly prominent then. The likes of Ask Jeeves and Lycos had a few % market share. Gigablast also had its day back then.

whstl2• 2 years ago

Altavista was very popular in tech circles. But I remember "normies" mostly using and talking about Yahoo, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and even lots of local, country-specific, search engines. And after that moving to Google.

MagnumOpus2• 2 years ago

In those years from 97 to 99, Altavista might have been your first stop, but you had to ask Excite, Yahoo, Jeeves and Lycos for a full picture or even to get a single good answer.

As you say, once Google Beta appeared it was the first and last stop for any of its users.

gtirloni• 2 years ago

"Create content for us to train our AI models while we fill the front page only with big websites that pay for our ads. Thank you!"

counterpartyrsk• 2 years ago

Or is Google prioritizing sites that drive Google ad revenue, and not ranking according to content?

mdavid626• 2 years ago

Yeah, AI answers is exactly what we need (unamused).

guerrilla• 2 years ago

I don't know how people still used it for the last years. Sure, DuckDuckGo used to be a bit worse, but not that much worse and then came Brave and I feel like I don't need anything else anymore. It's like having old Google back.

meiraleal• 2 years ago

That would be exactly the outcome they were expecting with this change. I disagree that Google still holds the power to change the internet tho.

nottorp3• 2 years ago

Note that the article is crying about the poor small businesses that google killed. Not about the good old days when you could find unbiased reviews that were done not-for-profit out of someone's personal experience on a geocities page that hurt your eyes with all those blink tags.

</old fart hat off>

p3rls3• 2 years ago

You are making distinctions without a difference -- those same geocities admins (like myself) are now the creators of many of these small business websites and webapps that have been being held hostage for years by a malevolent corporation bent on destroying the last few decent websites left on the internet.

And then when you complain about this monopoly that controls 90% of the west's internet, and 99% of it when you include Microsoft's collusion you are met with the alums from Harvard Business School "Well maybe you should have thought about that before basing your business on Google traffic"

Oh, but that is incorrect, actually what I should have done is send over a few bribes to some struggling entertainment writers like my competitors did. You can check my other comments in this thread for more on that.

In an actual just world, (not to immanentize the eschaton that was the early internet but) you'd think so many old farts wearing hats still around that actually remember what the internet was supposed to do and be like that all the Google Search liaisons would have been tarred and feathered years ago by now.

nottorp3• 2 years ago

what the internet was supposed to do

Oh no, I'm whining about an even earlier period when the info online was done without commercial gain (small company or Google) in mind and way more trustable :)

post_break• 2 years ago

I’ve been using bing and ddg so much more. The bing outage actually impacted me and that took me by surprise.

EasyMark6• 2 years ago

brave search isn't a bad fallback

8organicbits• 2 years ago

I've been thinking more about what we can collectively do to fix what is now broken. One tiny part of the solution may be individual curation. To me that means the return of the blogroll. I've been exploring this, along with others, at https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/

It's at an early stage but I've found value from it already.

KaiMagnus• 2 years ago

Great article, probably confirming something a lot of people on here have already suspected. But I am honestly shocked at how dire this situation seems.

Reddit isn't the only winner after Google's recent algorithm updates. SEMrush data shows that other user-generated sites such as Quora and Instagram saw similarly astronomical rises, and there were impressive spikes at LinkedIn and Wikipedia as well.

How can it be that after 20-30 years, it seems they have no way of knowing which sites produce genuine content and which do not?

And what’s worse, in what I can only describe as a frantic search for a solution, they simply turn to the largest players and bump up their weights.

They are killing the grassroots of the internet and when places like Reddit continue their inevitable path of enshittification the internet will be truly dead

Of course the internet is resilient and it will grow again, but we need to get this monopoly back in check fast.

raytopia• 2 years ago

I wonder if web directories become more popular again if it would help any of these issues. They seem a lot better for surfing the internet (thus naturally finding new websites) as opposed to searching it.

EcommerceFlow• 2 years ago

While yes it’s technically “Googles fault”, I feel like the reality is the spammers have won the SEO war. Might be as simple as that,

neilv• 2 years ago

A spokesperson for Google tells the BBC that the company only launches changes to Search after rigorous testing confirms that the shift will be helpful for users, and that the company gives website owners help, resources and opportunities for feedback on their Search rankings.

When I got an Android tablet, I downloaded some of those free-to-play games in which you build bases and vehicles in a multiplayer world. And then other players come along and destroy what you've built, and steal your stuff. With the game providing not-so-subtle prompts to pay for the various kinds of in-game currencies/tokens, so that you can properly defend yourself or gain advantage over others. The mechanics of the game were mostly a diversion from the real way you win, which was the real point of the game's design.

Regarding Google's "help", they helped turn SEO into this kind of game, and even offer gaming guides themselves, because, at the end of the day, people will have to pay real money for in-game resources, if they want to compete.

The second Google algorithm update came in March, and it was even more punishing. House Fresh's thousands of daily visitors dwindled to just hundreds. "We just got absolutely crushed," Navarro says. Over the last few weeks, House Fresh had to lay off most of its team. If nothing changes, she says, the website is doomed.

If you want visitors to a Web site, you probably have to pay money to Google or similar big tech company. It's not right, but that's the current situation.

p3rls3• 2 years ago

Nah, bribe a NYTimes writer at the beginning of your niches trajectory into the mainstream. That's how they did it in my niche and still making a half million a year almost a decade later.

For reference the shocked SEO writer who found the site, but these guys never figure out just how it was done.

https://x.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929

Why build something that takes work at all in this environment?

Hates_• 2 years ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550532282288508929.html

southernplaces7• 2 years ago

Asking for a friend. how much would this hypothetical bribe to an NY Times writer cost? Or perhaps to some other high profile writer at some high profile digital paper?

marcinzm• 2 years ago

I find Google worse every day. The latest thing I noticed is a ton of AI generated sites at the top that "summarize" things. Mostly the same format. Except they're usually wrong in many ways. One site kept saying Llama 3 is a Mixture of Experts model despite it not being one.

EasyMark6• 2 years ago

the AI sites are what got me off google, DDG, etc. Kagi seems to be a bit better and avoiding that garbage although I still see ones there from time to time. Usually a dumb af site name gives it away.

maram• 2 years ago

>It's almost as if Google designed an algorithm update to specifically go after small bloggers. I've talked to so many people who've just had everything wiped out

While at the same time small businesses are being killed by the lockdown

pknerd• 2 years ago

The Internet will never be the same (bbc.com)

Yes, now we can rank by posting crap on Reddit [1]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/iMejAF3

hulitu• 2 years ago

Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

I know we are in the middle of a crysis, but maybe someone at BBC needs an "Internet" training. /s

asadotzler4• 2 years ago

I search Google about 90% less using Firefox because I never have to use Google to find a site I was recently at.

In Firefox:

Add ^ to show only matches in your browsing history. Add * to show only matches in your bookmarks. Add + to show only matches in bookmarks you've tagged. Add % to show only matches in your currently open tabs. Add # to show only matches where your terms are part of a tag or title. Add $ to show only matches where your terms are part of the address. Add ? to show only search suggestions.

Armed with this, and &UDM=14 on my browser's Google Search, I use Google a couple times a day to find new things and without the AI slop, product ads, and other nonsense. That doesn't fix the shitty results themselves, but with a little bit of -quora and -reddit I can usually get what I'm after in the first 5-10 links.

Stop feeding that monster. Cut your usage. Find other tools that accomplish your goals (often faster and cheaper too) and then use Google for what it's good for, the occasional web search. With uBlock Origin and &udm=14 Google web search still beats Bing or Kagi or any of the Bing-based products like DDG.

Google Search sucking is only really an end user problem if you depend on it for a lot. If you only need to touch it a dozen times a week for a total of 5 minutes, it's not too terrible.

Google just updated its algorithm. The Internet will never be the same

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