It’s been talked about here before, but fundamentally it’s when the advertising guys won the power struggle over the search engine guys. Previously, advertising was a means to fund cool technology (and also get filthy rich).
Now it’s just a way to make the number perpetually go up, sucking every last drop of value out of the system.
Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
> Morgan: Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren’t they showing up and they did their “debugging process” and couldn’t figure it out.
Meanwhile a single Swede with a single desktop class machine in his living room created a search engine so good that I would often switch to it when Google failed.
These days I use Kagi, which has prioritization and block lists (which I don't use because the results are good out of the box).
Wanna know what is really interesting about the Kagi story?
While Kagi is building its own index, for a long time they were kind of reselling a wrapped version of Google + Bing results, but still were extremely much better IMO.
I have two theories:
- either Kagi has some seriously smart systems that read in the first tens of results and reshuffle them
- or more likely in my opinion the reason why results have been so good is because kagi has api access which bypass the "query expander and stupidifier"[1] on the way in to Google and the personalization thing on the way out. That way they just interact with the core of Google search which somehow still works.
[1]: "stupidifier" the thing in the Google pipeline that rewrites
- "obscure-js-lib" (think one that a previous dev used, that I now need to debug
- to "well-knowm-js-lib-with-kind-of-similar-name".
Or decide that when I search for Angular "mat-table" I probably want some tables with mats on even if they don't have anything to do with Angular.
I’m not precisely sure what problem the author is talking about. Is it the fact that some sites have built a business model around search results or is it that Google changed it search algorithm and they don’t like the way they are prioritized or is it something else?
It seems kind of unreasonable to expect Google to never experiment with their algorithm; and unfortunately at its core it is a zero sum game. You might be a winner today but a loser tomorrow.
if your concern is about revenue, sharing or referrals or ad placements or ??? then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated; if the curator or community drifts away from your interests, then you have to find a new one, but oddly enough, this can actually be done within the same framework.
Does anyone have a set of queries that google returns poor results for?
I spent a few minutes looking at my search history (filtering chrome history by "google search"), and the vast of my queries are quite simple (e.g. people's names) that google does well on (in fact I find google search for people better than linkedin sometimes).
I also tried a few complex queries and compared them to Kagi:
"How much bitcoin does microstrategy own" -> Google returns the correct snippet from here[0] while Kagi only linked to articles about how much it acquired in the last few days.
"how to pronounce stratchery" -> Google returns the correct snippet from the Stratechery website[1] while Kagi's first result is a spam entry[2] with the wrong pronunciation (the second result is a tweet with the correct pronunciation).
I'd be curious to see more comparisons!
Edit: I just remembered Dan Luu's post (https://danluu.com/seo-spam/) but after looking through my search history, the queries he uses are not at all representative of my day to day searches.
Google has clearly transitioned away from prioritizing customer value (and content creator value, unless you're an advertiser) in favor of some internal opaque KPIs.
After switching to DuckDuckGo years ago, and Kagi last year, it's obvious every time I go back to Google how much they have lost the plot.
It'll take another decade before they lose dominance, but the writing is on the wall. Inertia and market position are the only reason they're still on top. Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search, and the tech savvy are starting to drain away more and more quickly.
Startups should be excited. Rather than being the 800-lb gorilla that is going to come take your lunch, Google is the walking dead behemoth waiting to be harvested for conceptual parts.
mattkevan ·7 days ago
Now it’s just a way to make the number perpetually go up, sucking every last drop of value out of the system.
Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.
Show replies
eitland ·7 days ago
Meanwhile a single Swede with a single desktop class machine in his living room created a search engine so good that I would often switch to it when Google failed.
These days I use Kagi, which has prioritization and block lists (which I don't use because the results are good out of the box).
Wanna know what is really interesting about the Kagi story?
While Kagi is building its own index, for a long time they were kind of reselling a wrapped version of Google + Bing results, but still were extremely much better IMO.
I have two theories:
- either Kagi has some seriously smart systems that read in the first tens of results and reshuffle them
- or more likely in my opinion the reason why results have been so good is because kagi has api access which bypass the "query expander and stupidifier"[1] on the way in to Google and the personalization thing on the way out. That way they just interact with the core of Google search which somehow still works.
[1]: "stupidifier" the thing in the Google pipeline that rewrites
- "obscure-js-lib" (think one that a previous dev used, that I now need to debug
- to "well-knowm-js-lib-with-kind-of-similar-name".
Or decide that when I search for Angular "mat-table" I probably want some tables with mats on even if they don't have anything to do with Angular.
Show replies
efitz ·7 days ago
It seems kind of unreasonable to expect Google to never experiment with their algorithm; and unfortunately at its core it is a zero sum game. You might be a winner today but a loser tomorrow.
if your concern is about revenue, sharing or referrals or ad placements or ??? then I would point out that it’s very unwise to build a business whose success is based entirely on the whims of another business.
I think search in general is becoming a very poor way to discover content as it is slowly getting planted by LLMs and also for years has been gamified by SEO.
I think that the right model for content discovery is either crowd sourced by a like-minded community, like hacker news or curated; if the curator or community drifts away from your interests, then you have to find a new one, but oddly enough, this can actually be done within the same framework.
Show replies
sberens ·7 days ago
I spent a few minutes looking at my search history (filtering chrome history by "google search"), and the vast of my queries are quite simple (e.g. people's names) that google does well on (in fact I find google search for people better than linkedin sometimes).
I also tried a few complex queries and compared them to Kagi:
"How much bitcoin does microstrategy own" -> Google returns the correct snippet from here[0] while Kagi only linked to articles about how much it acquired in the last few days.
"how to pronounce stratchery" -> Google returns the correct snippet from the Stratechery website[1] while Kagi's first result is a spam entry[2] with the wrong pronunciation (the second result is a tweet with the correct pronunciation).
I'd be curious to see more comparisons!
Edit: I just remembered Dan Luu's post (https://danluu.com/seo-spam/) but after looking through my search history, the queries he uses are not at all representative of my day to day searches.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/29/micro...
[1]https://stratechery.com/category/about/#:~:text=UPDATE%3A%20....
[2]https://www.howtopronounce.com/stratechery
Show replies
lukev ·7 days ago
After switching to DuckDuckGo years ago, and Kagi last year, it's obvious every time I go back to Google how much they have lost the plot.
It'll take another decade before they lose dominance, but the writing is on the wall. Inertia and market position are the only reason they're still on top. Meanwhile, the younger generation barely uses web search, and the tech savvy are starting to drain away more and more quickly.
Startups should be excited. Rather than being the 800-lb gorilla that is going to come take your lunch, Google is the walking dead behemoth waiting to be harvested for conceptual parts.
Show replies