Google Search Is Dying (dkb.io)

That is not reasonable, if I go on private mode on youtube homepage I am not surprised to find the most popular music that my countrymen are watching, stuff I dislike, so I bookmarked my youtube subscription page and subscribe to stuff I enjoy and use the search.

Quoting works perfectly for me dunno.

Or just quote the words in regular mode then use our before/after commands: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272

A truly thoughtful search requires an understanding of:

- What you're searching for, which as you mention means terminology and knowing that information exists. (If you don't know that there's a country called Burkina Faso, it's never going to occur to you to search for its capital)

- How each of your search tools works, its benefits and drawbacks. It's similar to selecting a programming language or framework: If I need to know a holiday date (e.g. I can never remember when the fuck President's Day is), I'll Google it because that's something even a normal person would notice if they screwed up. On the other hand, when I'm looking for current events information, I use a search tool that specializes in news searches for journalists and researchers because I don't want my search results biased by what Google thinks I want to see.

- The domain in which you're searching, so you can evaluate what the search tools provide for you and use the tools iteratively.

- Your own abilities and desires, which requires self-knowledge. A search is only a success if it produces something helpful to the searcher, and something they can't understand or won't use = not a successful search

- What information is and is not available. It sounds like a silly thing, but this is how a lot of scams work: They're testing for people who lack a certain subset of common knowledge. For example, I've seen articles talking about local elections that imply nefarious intent behind some information not being provided online, and they're obviously written by people who don't commonly work with local election data. Because if they did, they'd know that when working with local election data, the default is 'idk we have it in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere'.

Search is HARD and Google has figured out one tiny, tiny part. It's just the part that was the easiest to build with what they had and that was easiest to monetize.

Congratulations on recognizing the true morons.

I suspect they know the sound they want to make but they don't know how to articulate it. They make an approximation and we can encourage them repeating the correct version, so they realize we understood what they're trying to do: "you're half way" but repeating their approximation is misleading.

I would put a lot more of it to having (seemingly) engaged parents. Even a backwards strategy enacted by a loving parent who is consistently trying their best is likely to outperform the result that most can manage (owing to time/money/education/etc).

Compare a toddler living in a ghetto concrete jungle to one who takes daily strolls through Central Park or Suburbia. The enrichment of parents teaching about the trucks and the trees and the lady with a purple hat pays massive returns.

Then, after that, what's the point in showing drill ads to me for two weeks?

And from what it seems to me, there is a giant bubble. The vast majority of companies doing "data science" jobs are things that a smart undergrad can do with a month or two of training. And this is because I believe C-suites have completely gulped down the data is oil mantra. There are entirely charlatan companies with unicorn, even decacorn valuations now being built on this mantra - for example, CRED in India.

Yet, as you said, and as I believe too, most of the data is worthless.

I've had a supposition for a while now that the targeted advertising industry should be closing the consumer cashflow loop by advertising effective self- and employment improvement, with the objective of increasing the disposable income people have so they can then make more brokering traditional sales

Apparently now I'm into baseball, flowers, boating, celebrities, country music, credit cards, geology, event ticket sales, fishing, and windows OS. Among a couple hundred other things. It even gets some rather basic facts (marital status, company size, education) wrong. I seriously wonder how they generate this profile?

Something about my actual interests and activity apparently makes youtube think I'm into Fox news and all the crazy shit found there.

Now, who else has this same value judgement about me? This assessment that I neither declared for myself nor even ratified.

It's annoying but ultimately harmless that youtube shows me conservative wackjob stuff.

But is that same profile in someone else's database that marks me as someone to watch or something? Does it affect my insurance rates, my liklihood to get extra scrutiny when travelling, my ability to purchase or register a firearm, my access to jobs that might be extra sensitive or responsible, basically any of the things where someone either private or the state does any sort of background or credit check on you for any reason, and there are really many of those when you think a out it.

I'm guessing, today, it's probably not really affecting my life in any real way, but, there is no way it makes any sense to say that will still be true tomorrow.

Better to just follow people's interests, instead of using their interests to incorrectly pigeonhole them and then drawing incorrect generalisations from that.

At the time I was a late 20s, college educated, South Asian male. I’m very cis and very straight. And yeah my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, but that was a weird profile to settle me on.

So the question is this: if they're not (and never were) using that data for what they say they were, what are they doing with it?

Disagree there. About 75% of the things I buy on Amazon are repeating purchases that I nevertheless don't want to be automatically scheduled. It used to be a real pain in the neck to reorder something manually, so I'm glad they made that easier.

But yes, in general, Amazon is full of low-hanging fruit that's been neglected on the tree for a decade or more. Buying clothes from Amazon still manages to be a worse experience than going to the mall, for instance, which is really saying something.

They may also be optimizing for revenues as opposed to recommendation quality (homegrown content being cheaper than licensed)

There may be others, but off the top of my head: Bojack Horseman.

I think Netflix has two big issues. The first is the way they drop seasons all at once prevents the natural cycle of pre-episode hype, post-episode interviews, speculation and leaks, fan anticipation, fan arguments (ship wars, etc), etc. Fan culture can't develop around this content as easily because there's never any breathing space for fans to collectively sit with the story so far. The shows that become a cultural force like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones need us to keep coming back to the conversation every week. They have us talking about what happened last week and will happen this week with our colleagues at work and around the dinner table. How can these Netflix IPs enter stable orbit in the cultural zeitgeist when they're once-a-year events? It devalues the work, positioning it more like a movie that you watch and then forget rather than a story you become invested in over a long period of time.

Full season drops also allow people to binge a whole season of content for a single month's subscription and then immediately churn (ask me how I know). I assume they have some data-driven reasons for doing this, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.

Besides that, I think they should put more wood behind fewer arrows. They've developed a reputation for aggressively cancelling smaller shows with passionate followings which makes a lot of people not even want to bother until something has become an established mainstream success. I think of them now as the Google of content-creation, putting out a lot of solid (but not amazing) products and then cancelling them once people start to grow attached.

That's not how the entertainment business works. If I had to guess, Netflix's data-driven approach to content production is like card-counting in blackjack. It only gives them a slight edge on the house. A net positive outcome over hundreds or thousands of hands but offering no guarantee over the outcome of any single hand.

> HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix

Netflix did win the most Emmys in 2021.[1] And they only started producing original content in 2013 or so. That's pretty good.

1. https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/netflix-emmys-the-crown-que...

Ironically, it seems like AmazonPrime is far better at that.

As for then top ten being bottom barrel stuff, I think you overestimate how popular mad men was vs. something like king of queens.

I will say, Netflix seems to fail in many cases, and I don't understand how they think content discovery is supposed to work.

I don't follow this argument. Knowing what people like has very little to do with the quality of original creative content; surely you don't expect Goodreads to put out Shakespearean novels, or Spotify to be producing original hits on par with the Rolling Stones? Should ESPN have better pro sports scouting and coaching talent than the professional leagues?

Knowing what people like, however, _does_ have to do quite a bit with selling those people a product - which Netflix just reported 15% YoY growth to $7.7B yearly revenue, they're clearly very successful to this end. I think you actually have it backwards - if anything, Netflix represents a total fulfillment of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Despite mediocre original content, this is a $200B company with 200M subscribers growing revenues by double digits two decades after IPO.

If Netflix paid $450k+ salaries to screenwriters instead of engineers, you'd very likely get better movies on a worse streaming platform. And when Netflix has shelled out for Hollywood talent, like Mindhunter which has David Fincher and Charlize Theron, the results are quite good.

Regardless, to take the fact that Netflix pays for premium engineering and analytics talent, but does not pay for premium filmmaking talent, and then spin that fact into Netflix being "a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization" is a questionable criticism.

This is exactly what their data analytics has told them to do.

Have a few popular, quality tv shows with star-studded casts as loss-leaders to bring in new viewers. Otherwise the model is to produce and recommend the shows that get them the most eyeballs per dollar; the bare-minimum to keep their subscribers there:

- Stand up specials are dirt-cheap, quite popular, and provide never-ending variety.

- Ditto with 'reality' shows, bake-offs, make-offs, expose documentaries, etc.

- Old sitcoms and b-movies that have a proven re-watch-rate.

Throw in a handful of first seasons to keep the FOMO up, and you've got a captive audience on the cheap. Maybe one or two will catch on and become the next loss-leaders.

They may not have the quality shows that are 'running laps around' HBO and AMC, but by any of the metrics Netflix cares about they are simply running laps around HBO, AMC and everyone else.

Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted part and the other things are optional. So when you see that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably has one or more of the other words or related words you didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those non-quoted words at all."

And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted words.

Totally agree it would help if we did a better job bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't include them if there's better text to describe the page overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.

What you're talking about is probably a case where there's a quoted word or phrase as well as other words that aren't quoted. In such a case, we're going to absolutely look for content that matches the quoted parts. That's a must. The other words, we'll look for them, but we'll also look for related words and sometimes, we might find content that doesn't match one of them.

Because those other words aren't quoted, we'll tell you if we find a match that seems helpful but doesn't contain those non-quoted words. That's what the message is about. But it should never be telling you we omitted a quoted word or phrase because we won't -- with one exception.

If there's literally nothing on the web we know of that matches a quoted word or phrase, then we're not going to show anything at all and say we couldn't match any documents.

Looking at all 22 results (without opening the "omitted results" section or image results), the phrase became harder to find off the first page, but I tended to find it in the source code, or the DOM, or the cached version of the page, or by disabling JS (sometimes requiring a combination of those techniques). I found it in 21 out of the 22. The one page I couldn't find it in (the dolls one) looks like a frequently updating page, and it was highlighted in the snippet, so it looks like it was there at the time of crawling but not now; the cache isn't there for that page.

Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.

1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)

In the [eggzackly this], you found matches of those words separated by punctuation -- which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched.

I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.

I just tested "eggzackly this" and every result on the first page contains the string "eggzackly this", albeit usually with different punctuation ("Eggzackly. This [...]", "Eggzackly, this.", "Eggzackly! This [...]")

when I search "inventors", 7/39 images are from articles specifically about overlooked black inventors. all searches relating to inventors are poisoned by american (i.e. foreign) culture war topics.

>probably it is keying to the second half of "African-American"

I refuse to believe that google can be so stupid as to do this after over two decades of development in natural language processing.

https://www.buttercookie.de/temp/AI/GPT-J%20stained%20yak.tx...

I've seen a few of those wine documentaries about sommeliers, and they certainly made it seem like it was a legitimate ability to identify stuff. I'd be interested to see how close they are in a more neutral, measured environment.

I especially like the scan function where brother web connect OCR’s the document and saves it as a pdf directly in your Box/Dropbox/OneDrive/GoogleDrive folder. Just wish it worked with iCloud Drive.

It's a shame. I've really enjoyed a lot of the well written responses there but I can't be bothered to create another account.

Not that I'm convinced it will keep working, since reddit isn't really a vendor in the same sense, and doesn't have those incentives.

The thing about users getting entirely banned from a platform is that they aren't able to complain anywhere near to the forum about unfairness. It's all done in stealth.

Platform algorithms now often do a lot to keep dissent about platforms themselves and partner companies out of sight. It's pretty crazy how companies that publicly advocate equality and fairness serve to undermine speech when it's about their business.

IIRC for Facebook American users the average revenue was 50+ dollars per year. Furthermore, if you're the type of person for whom saving a few dollars doesn't matter, you're likely worth more than that average; and for FB to break even on your ads an appropriate price is likely to be closer to $100 per year.

I think most of the search startups are doing their own mobile app. On iOS, the system search and browser remains Google/Safari (and the App is essentially just a wrapper on Safari for browsing). But at least it is something. I think you'll see more people doing desktop apps, although the dominance of Google through Chromium forks for this isn't a coincidence. It feels like the bad old days of re-packaging Internet Explorer with a custom homepage all over again.

Hell, I'd love to have the option to make the search results be completely language agnostic.

Which, of course, means that it is yet another barrier to entry for any would-be competitors.

On Firefox it makes it easier to talk a non-technical user through how to change their default search engine, and at least they aren't entering search pattern strings into a settings field as with Chrome.

Unfortunately, while OpenSearch is great where it's supported, outside of Firefox, the only real support is for in-site-search on other platforms (where you type a site name and then a search string), and not for changing your browser search engine. And it doesn't work at all on iOS even for site search.

So unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem of how a consumer can easily change their search engine to something new on Chrome or Safari or an iPhone.

I don't want to sidetrack the discussion, but if you want to confirm the opensearch description, you can open our site in Firefox, then click the "..." in the browser address bar and then click "Install Andi Search". Or reach out and very happy to talk you through it.

But let's try it. Go to Safari > Preferences > Search and choose the "Search engine" dropdown, and you'll see you have a dropdown with only five options.

Google reportedly pays $15B per year for that top spot.

Let's start pitting the searches against each other again.

Even though I loathe ads, I wouldn't mind one simple, clearly designated ad spawned from keywords in the search. No tracking and no cross site linking. No result promoting, etc...

And yes, I believe that the current iteration of the web requires human moderation to be usefully searched.

Shelf space refers to the market with which someone competes, not whether people are thinking of a candy bar or finding a bathroom or a facebook post. Your argument commits survivor bias because it's ignoring the millions of other websites that exist and are being used. Being popular does not mean something is a monopoly, nor does it mean there's limited shelf space.

Following your example, if Google spammed Pixel ads on it's home page, the page would become less popular. One of the reasons it became so popular was it's strict adherence to focusing on utility.

It was the largest Donald Trump fan site in the world (/r/thedonald before it was shut down for being so big its brigading tactics were damaging the site) and now /r/conservative takes that role. Before it was the biggest Ron Paul fan site. Its deeply pro-guns in nearly every comment section and any mention of Hillary or AOC is an invitation for angry comments and downvotes. Random subs are full of transphobic content and misogyny is near everywhere. /r/conspiracy is a right-wing paradise catering to right wing views.

You cannot talk about money or finance without being yelled at about how bad fiat and the fed are, which are right-wing talking points. You can't have a covid discussion without an army of covid skeptics yelling at everyone. You can't discuss police brutality without dishonest "but both sides" types full of racist dog whistles.

Its absolutely right leaning and token "liberal" positions like legal pot or better healthcare doesn't really change that. I know GOP voters with those positions but they always vote GOP for culture-war related reasons. Not to mention, being able to do drugs in your home is really neither liberal or conservative, its just in the USA only the liberal party is making any effort to make that happen.

Covid skepticism, which spez defends, is extremely coded right-wing, so even leadership acknowledges who reddit users really are.

The few liberal and feminist spaces that exist on reddit have draconian mod rules because of the constant brigading and some of them just give up and lock discussions because mods are exhausted and tired of fighting it. Just running a liberal or feminist or queer sub is a lot of work because reddit conservatives are constantly bridaging. This is not the sign of a liberal community. I mod a few subs and its just a nightmare out there. Just keeping conservatives from trolling and fighting with everyone is a big job. If you see "liberalism" its because the mods are keeping the everyday redditors away and trying to keep up the values and themes of that specific sub and its relatively tiny audience compared to the conservative majority.

Cherry picking AI spammed Bernie posts doesn't change the culture in the comments or what visitors receive when they post. I'm in a lot of Democratic, liberal, feminist, queer, socialist, etc spaces and I can guarantee you reddit is absolutely nothing like those spaces.

Also you are taking my comment out of context, not only is reddit conservative, but as a hypothetic competitor to google its extremely conservative. I can google for things without being hit with Ron/Rand Paul narratives, Trump worship, pro-gun narratives, covid skepticism, transphobia, or racist dog whistles. So just the idea that Reddit is as welcoming as a Google search is very, very questionable. Google will transparently present you ads. Reddit will drown you in propaganda, culture war politics, and harassment. As the meme says, we are not the same.

So we're definitely planning to share what we're building with the community here soon. Andi's very much an alpha and a few things are broken, but we're working on a new release that fixes them, and then we're going to share it and learn as much as we can from the feedback and wisdom here.

I doubt this. I'm guessing that 90% of Google Search's development effort is concentrated on defeating SEO, and as soon as a new competitor succeeds well enough to attract SEO attention, their results will suddenly turn to custard.

The competitor then has to combat the extremely sophisticated SEO practises developed against Google over the years. This is likely to be an even bigger barrier to disruption than building market share against Google.

One of the secrets with Google is search is that the top searches aren't searches at all. Number one search on google? "facebook" - it's people navigating. So the idea behind that is to let people navigate directly when they want to go somewhere specific, like "go youtube cute cats".

let's see:

> spent most of his time working on "default search engine" (or "default web browser") deals before taking the CEO job

even if we take your convenient assumption as correct ("it's reasonable to say that those deals would have fallen under his ambit"), it's still wouldn't be a true statement. But feel free to point out which part is true if we relax any more assumptions.

No, I thought more about my comment a day later. I don't know what a fair answer is. Being ranked on page 216 by an algorithm or de-listed manually is basically the same outcome.

I have sort of got stuck in this bubble of reddit and not much else and... the way people behave has really sapped my desire to contribute anything to the world. I'm looking around me at the opinions a lot of people are expressing and I think... no, these people don't deserve nice things. It seems sometimes like the whole world is full of venal, bitter and divisive people that do nothing but snap bitterly at the heels of anyone that makes something of themselves or strays too far from safe consensus.

https://downloads.marginalia.nu/good-domains.txt

A search engine finds 50 pages that are exact matches for the search. Which one does it present as the top of the list? How does it decide? Unless it decides literally by a random number generator, however it decides, someone will try to discover the algorithm, and exploit it. This is true whether or not the search engine allows or displays ads.

> I'm not interested in a pedantic argument. If you didn't understand what I meant then you should have asked for clarification.

I don't think it was a pedantic argument or a misunderstanding. I think Lascaille understood your position and disagreed with you, not just pedantically but over the substance.

Paul Graham has been pushing for someone to disrupt web search on and off for at least the last 10 years: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

(he tweeted about it more recently, but I couldn't dig it up since I'm not much of a tweet man)