Comment by jader201
2 years ago
Yeah, the problem is that there is so much low quality content, that search doesn’t (or can’t) do a good job of surfacing it above the noise. There is still some signal left, but it’s such a small fraction that it’s much more difficult to filter it out.
Having said that, I’m usually still able to find what I’m looking for, if I know that it likely exists, and know the keywords to use to find it. But it’s much harder nowadays for sure.
i have a radio that can "hear" down to -130dBm, i've proven this empirically. Cellular signals work at -12dB or more below the noise floor, wspr works even lower than that. Lightning is broadband noise, and yet i can still use digital stuff when there's lightning storms.
I don't buy the signal to noise argument. For example, whenever i get on youtube and get fed some content, i can immediately tell if it's had AI involved anywhere, and thumbs it down. I won't recommend it, i've called people out for linking such tripe to me (or others).
Hear me out - google got bad about 11 years ago when the dorking stopped being effective, right around the time of the spotlight search results and the sponsored junk taking the top results. Around this time, various agencies (news, etc) started gaming the SEO to respond to any remotely related search with whatever the news was currently. Google chose not to "fix" this, because we're not the customer. DDG was better for a few years for real results, too, but that has gone downhill as well.
The current zeitgeist uses stuff like tiktok and facebook for "web searches" - "food trucks near Austin, TX" or so. No one really uses web search like people on this site do, and google couldn't care less if we don't like the search results.
I wonder how much influence google had in lowering the content quality over the years? After all, most SEO spam was a direct response to all the ludicrous requirements they've forced the whole web into, which eventually only SEO spam were willing to commit to.
I also wonder if google just stopped existing, would the web heal over time?