[sneak]

I miss Google Search being good and useful and not covered in intrusive ads much more than I miss something easily replaced with local software or Feedly.

Almost everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care. Google's problem is not that they cancel stuff, it's the everpresent need to grow revenue and embed annoying ads into more and more of everyone's daily lives. I'd love for them to cancel Gmail with a very short notice period.

The endgame for Google is every Google user loaded full of energy drinks watching ads continuously for 20 hours a day. Every lifestyle that's less profitable than that is something Google will eventually try to engineer away.

[Galanwe]

It's not really the ads that killed Google search for me. it's more the over agressive minmaxed SEO that makes most of results garbage.

[brianshaler]

For me it's when they stopped showing results that include your keywords and instead a random smattering of anything broadly related to the topic being searched for.

[jvolkman]

You can use quotes around keywords.

https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...

[jdgoesmarching]

I’ve had google searches disregard my quoted query.

[dekhn]

even quotes don't work 100% of the time- if there is strong signal to show another result, it will be shown even if it isn't a quote-match. Previous user clicks are the top ranking signal.

IIUC "verbatim mode" is supposed to do something like this. https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...

[zbrozek]

When I use Google search-which is rare these days-I exclusively use verbatim mode.

[geraldcombs]

This shifted from "can" to "absolutely have to" a long time ago for my use cases.

[otabdeveloper4]

Often it's not even related at all.

For example, Google often prioritizes obscure music bands or albums even for generic or well-known terms.

[gjvc]

Can you explain "minimaxed" in this context, please?

[ok123456]

Not bad enough to be outright spam with just enough relevance to be shown in the top ten search results. Try finding product reviews, or product comparison articles. It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed.

[HeckFeck]

It's obvious LLM tripe when you click into the article and it begins with several worthless paragraphs describing why someone would be interested in the topic and how things can sometimes go wrong...

Yes, I already knew that. That's why I'm here.

It might be an attempt to copy customer service 'empathy' but it has the opposite effect: angering me because my time is wasted with this crap, and I have to scroll several screens to find what I need.

[chrisweekly]

Tangent: your use of the word "tripe" here is spot-on.

The secondary definition (nonsense) works, but I'm talking about the apt metaphor of its primary definition: offal that's technically edible but comes from low-quality parts of the digestive system which are literally filled with feces.

LLM-generated SEO spam should always be called "tripe".

[moomin]

Honestly, a lot of this isn't LLM stuff. It's "people being paid pittance".

[mschuster91]

> It will likely be LLM garbage that doesn't say anything, but uses the right keywords and enough coherency to be indexed.

Or some site that "aggregates" Stackoverflow, Quora and whatnot. Pure hell and I wish everything bad possible on this planet to the people who have implemented this kind of scam.

[saaspirant]

I block them using uBlacklist in Firefox. My blacklist is growing.

[swader999]

And the content itself is just a reflection of the search. Whole web is turning to rot such that the only few remaining great sites don't even need indexing because well there's so few left.

[thesuperbigfrog]

Not OP.

I believe "minimaxed" in this context refers to optimizing profits while trying to keep search results useful to users.

The term comes from game theory where a player tries to maximize their gains while minimizing their losses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax

[moomin]

But Reader _wasn't_ easily replaced by local software. They centralised social usage of RSS, then killed it. Yes, you can still run an RSS reader, but RSS and blogs as a a model of social networking? Never came back.

[sneak]

That wasn't Reader, that was apps. Nobody uses the web anymore except as API transport for native apps. Blame Android and Apple for that.

[Kuinox]

I started to use Kagi instead of google search. Since, it's difficult to get back on google, the results are so much worse.

[xnx]

What's an example search that's better on Kagi?

[recursive]

"Radiator". I just picked a word at random. All the other ones are better too.

[freeAgent]

Funny enough, I just tried it and I agree. I have pinned Wikipedia in Kagi, so that came out on top rather than a link to Autozone at Google. Google's "Places" results were also (significantly) farther away yet no more relevant than Kagi's.

So...yes. Radiator.

[kibwen]

> everything Google does outside of GCP, Maps, Search, and YouTube could evaporate for all I care

Honestly, even YouTube could evaporate and it really wouldn't make a difference. 99.9999% of YouTube is just mindless entertainment, which is 100% fungible with every other form of entertainment. The amount of actually unique, insightful, worthwhile content on YouTube is a rounding error, and will find other places to live.

[nine_k]

AFAIK more than 95% of all email traffic is spam. I still consider email an absolutely vital tool, despite the efficiency below a steam engine.

Same with YouTube: the small sliver of content I care about is important enough for me to pay for YouTube premium.

Sometimes people compare something to a gold mine, to emphasize how rich that is. A typical gold mine extracts several grams of good per tonne of rock, that is, a few parts per million.

Don't cry about the Sturgeon's law; embrace it and celebrate what you can extract.

[kibwen]

YouTube isn't analogous to email, it's analogous to Gmail. We were hosting video in the 90s, and the cost of storage, bandwidth, and compute have become orders of magnitude cheaper since then. Video hosting is not magic that only YouTube can pull off.

[nine_k]

Unlike Gmail, YouTube is a large public repository of media.

Pulling your email account from Gmail affects you. Pulling a video from YouTube affects potentially huge numbers of people.

[macintux]

If the useful YouTube content scattered to multiple alternatives, it would immediately become far less useful. Discovery is a big part of YouTube’s value proposition for me.

[RektBoy]

What ADs? Install uBlock.