> a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers
Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want better than I do.
Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google.
I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search results no longer actually returning real web results.
The death of the web is because most people don't want what you want. They don't mind walled gardens, so long as they are easy to use and have the content and connections that they want to see.
The audience of HN is extremely skewed towards preferring systems that allow tinkering but that's not what the market wants.
This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online. And, as you said, most people simply don't care about the stuff we care about.
That's also why "Google's search results are soo bad." They're not. For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough.
But to be honest the internet is still the internet. The web still exists. Any lamentation at the loss of the "old" internet is that you don't have more angry uncles spewing political rhetoric on your motorcycle forum.
Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums? I certainly don't. Seems to me things are working pretty well. I do worry about the next generation but to be honest, the same was said about me.
Instead of complaining about the state of the web just be the change. Host your site, run your forums, live your life. Stop worrying about how other people should live their lives. Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen.
FYI: Wiki says: <<Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993[2] when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.>>
> Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen.
This x1000.
The only way to ensure that future people can continue to maintain things is to teach those who are interested.
While I think we need to scale back the opaqueness of tech to the average user[0], there will always be some who just know more.
[0] By which I don't mean "more configuration options", because the average user doesn't want those.
I mean make it easy to access the source - and just as importantly make it easy to use changes to said source, so those who think, hm, I want this, can learn to fix it themselves, or find someone who can.
> Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums?
Having the choice between "unwashed masses" and "curated to suit political agenda" I would firmly choose the former.
Before I get attacked on political agenda angle, please understand that it takes trained professional actively trying to remain objective to have impartial moderation. Many professional discussion moderators fail here and you just cannot expect neither unpaid volunteers (doing things out of passion which is not impartial in the first place) nor paid employees enforcing company policy (again very much partial) to remain objective.
The goal of moderation should be to allow for multiple angles of thought to emerge and not get drowned. Give me the tools to see those non-mainstream positions.
The unwashed masses are often filthy and malicious (on the internet).
Moderation, of the governance and oversight meaning, is unforunately very necessary to keeping any pool from becoming a cesspit. By some combination of technical, volunteer, and participant effort (membership fee, or service requirement), areas can be kept decent.
Without this, decent and would-be participants are run off by spam, scams, trolls and harrassment, political rants, religious rants, etc.
Hence what happened to Usenet. I was active on comp.lang.c comp.lang.c.moderated comp.sys.3b1 comp.sys.3b2 back in the mid 1990s, by 1998, it had become a total hot mess. The moderated groups imploded, or shutdown, when the moderators just gave up. In particular, comp.lang.c.moderated was a fountain of knowledge on C language implementation specifics, then a few really pedantic asshats joined, and their MO was purely slandering and shouting. They had agendas, and they had no interest in sharing knowledge. I think a couple of them thought they could affect the evolution of the language, from outside ANSI, to suit their own personal opinions. Nasty little dictators. I completely dropped off usenet around 1998. In retrospect, I hung on for to long, hoping for a return to rational behavior.
Wonderfully put. I would add that we need to see things for their scale and proportion. Yes, the simple walled web is bigger than ever. So is the hacker community, and this website (so far as I can tell), Reddit (for all its faults), etc.
Admninistration web sites are now forcing you to use google(blink/geeko) or apple(webkit) based browsers.
Asking nicely to restore interoperability with noscript/basic (x)html browsers does not seem to work, namely keeping the door open to alternatives requiring a reasonable effort of development, and not the army of devs of big tech.
> For the bulk of Google's visitors, they're good enough
I'm not sure that's true. Just to pick an example, basically any type of product search now leads to auto-generated spam/borderline-spam websites that scrape reviews from Amazon, which are themselves often fraudulent.
I guess you could say that's "good enough" but only in the sense that someone being scammed at some point consents to something that makes them a victim of the scam.
For many searches, you'll see "reddit" autocompleted to the end of the search because Google's organic results are not good enough and people are trying to weed out the spam somehow, albeit in an imperfect way that restricts results to one site.
I've been using Kagi search and I find the same stuff there. I can block them from my personal results as I encounter the garbage, but it's there by default.
And the people trying to get their garbage spam sites to rank high are wise to the common tricks people use to attempt to get better results. Just today I accidentally clicked on a result that from the title looked like it would lead me to reddit. I should have paid attention to the URL because instead I was sent through a bunch of redirects to some terrible spam site.
DuckDuckGo is horrendous for spam and malware distribution. I have stopped recommending it to non-technical people because they can't recognize the obviously evil/bad-pattern sites that are on the first page of many DDG searches I do
User manuals for stereo systems, specs for old hardware. Anything that can be generically referenced, maybe a bit harder to find. Someone can throw up a webpage that SEO's on "manual" or "user guide" and when I type in "Sony DTH-345 user guide" I'll see results like "manualsonline.xyz" that are clearly bogus.
I can't lab it up now, but that is the gist. And DDG has it while Google rarely has the same level of it.
That's my understanding. And while I appreciate that Bing is the "baseline", I would be interested in what it would take for them to do additional cleanup on results. Blacklisting domains should be a no-brainer. "Safe search" for suspicious sites, not adult theme.
Part of it is, that everyone already has heard about Google. Trying to get another search engine that people trust and have heard about is hard, not to mention it has to work decently.
Worse than that are the SEO results that don't give you what you want at all.
For products, one of the worst offenders is Target. Yes, Target. They show up near the top of about 60% of my searches, including for things they simply do not carry. But hey, they carry a similar product that you might be interested in! (not)
SEO results make Google money, but they also make the results suck.
Thats the advantage Facebook has, people trust each other if they know them or a recommendation comes from a friend of a friend, but you cant really see who is recommending something on Amazon, Reddit and other sites.
What exactly is Google supposed to do here? They're returning what's available. Beyond that it goes from search engine to active curation and recommendation - and they are actively moving in that direction by replacing results with "answers", which I find to be much worse.
Have you read any of Google's advice to site owners? It amounts to "provide your users with what they're looking for, and do it with a fast and easy to use site". If you think SEO is an easy hack to get any site to the position 1 for any search, you're just ignorant of the landscape. All the "SEO" crap you see about keyword density or whatever, is just an industry trying to sound different and like they've got the key to position 1.
> They could start penalizing sites that show different things to googlebot and a real browser again.
Google is ridiculously good at this. Would be keen to see examples of a site that does this in a meaningfully negative way that ranks well for searches that matter.
I don't fully agree with all of your other points but I can see why you'd mention them.
Nothing, really. It's the "what's available" that's the problem. Quality paid services can't gain market share because free is a anticompetitive. Consumers will almost always choose it if it's not complete garbage. This throws all the metrics off for search because quality paid services become a statistical anomaly.
Desiring choice isn’t elitist. Early web adopters were passionate and willing to put in more work. Nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with liking simple default settings either.
Wondering if, by “elitist”, GP meant more like “out of reach to many laypeople because of learning curve.” Is there a good single word for that? “Difficult” and “complex” aren’t quite right.
Anyway - you’re right, nothing at all wrong with wanting choice. I think the point being made here though is that “layperson gravity” / mass market appeals / lowest common denominator is going to mean that tuneable web search will be a niche product, forever. Even if we’d both like that niche.
Not trying to be awkward, but even back in the early days of Netscape, it wasn't like you had to recall any arcane commands to use most search engines.
Sure, they all had limitations then, such as not necessarily knowing similar word senses to create more nuanced searches, but that was a fairly level playing field.
Is it simply that it was initially a bit obscure and not everyone had found out about it? That's not really a barrier in terms of difficulty - as soon as people got into the "in crowd" they could use it just like the rest of them.
Cost was one. Hardware wasn't cheap and it would seem to have no practical use except to satisfy one's curiosity. A PC for the kids cost about half of our family's monthly gross income. A modem would be 10%. And the phone bill caused tourette's like symptoms more than once.
there are so many options, many complex, but many too are simple. One of my personal favorites is using github pages, you can host a plaintext html document for free in about 10 minutes (including downloading a text editor and github desktop)
When I started all modem calls required remembering 'atdt'
When netscape came out if you were lucky to have ppp access setting it up on windows 3.1 was difficult but once you were up as long as no one picked up the phone you were fine.
But even this was too difficult for the average person who lived in an aol world where the internet was limited to aol.
Anyone I watch older than 50 years old is constantly frustrated by google, they just don't know what's good, what's not. I think they use it because it's the "norm" and that is the only reason.
And as far as everyone else.. I have no idea to be quite honest. I have a fairly big handful of non-techie friends who think google sucks but is good enough so there is no real incentive to change.
With any habit people don't change it unless they have a huge reason to. No one stops eating double cheeseburgers until their doctor literally tells them they are going to die. I think that's what we're up against here.
Hey, now wait a second there, you young whipper-snapper. I'm sitting here reading HN while I install Debian on an XCP-ng VM, and I hear I can't understand whether Google results are good or not? There are plenty of us over 50 that actually lived the early internet and watched it first-hand transform into what it is today.
This is a great reply. Real question: Why hasn't the same happened to HN? To be fair, there are some arguments that play out over and over again: SF crime & homelessness, Bay Area housing, US taxes, central banks "printing money", office vs work-from-home, feeling forced to adopt liberal social views / stances at a tech company (Black Lives Matter, LGBTIQ+), etc.
And somehow, there is still enough good, new content to keep the conversations fresh. Some of the best are when someone shares a personal story, then there are tens or hundreds of follow-up posts -- generally supportive or inquisitive.
> Anyone I watch older than 50 years old is constantly frustrated by google, they just don't know what's good, what's not.
Yes, and now imagine these same people, most of whom never bothered with basic google search options (eg. excluding entire domains, mandatory keywords, ...) presented with a search engine with a plethora of knobs and levers to tune it to their liking.
It isn't elitism. It's competence. A system designed by competent users for competent users are going to be different from one made for general masses. There's nothing elitist about that.
> This. People don't realize that the early web was elitist. Now, the entire population is online.
That's an excellent demographic point.
A counter-argument is that the move from port 80 to port 443 is the elitist drift. Instead of innocently putting information out there and sharing in an egalitarian fashion, we now have certificates and gatekeepers and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
In an age of free SSL/TLS certificates, and built-in support in pretty much anything, is this really true? Making your content available via port 443 really isn't impeding anything at all.
not us yahoo / Altavista / or whatever else was around at the time users. Google was so clearly better right out of the gate that I distinctly remember having conversations conveying the shock and awe at the quality of the results. Before Google everything was mediocre at best.
I’d say the for the bulk of Google’s visitors the results aren’t merely good enough, they’re insanely great.
Now, that said, the G monopoly is horrible and needs to die.
>Er, isn’t the whole point of Google tracking you and knowing your mothers blood type so they can give you better search results tailored to you ?
AFAICT, quality personalized search results isn't the goal for Google here.
I think the point of all that is generating revenue via advertising sales.
And while providing high quality search results might once upon a time have been a goal, both as a goal in itself and a tool to drive user adoption/engagement, that's no longer necessary as they have a (relatively) captive audience and a (relatively) captive customer base (advertisers). As such, quality search results are no longer all that important.
I think this is exactly why Google's search has become trash. They don't need it. Even when their goals changed from "making searching the internet better" to "Making money and collecting data on everyone" they still depended on search to see what people were doing both online and offline.
Now they have millions of cell phones collecting data and the GPS location of everyone offline, they run extremely popular DNS servers to see what websites people go to, most websites (including educational and government websites) include google's trackers so on most websites every page loaded will ping at least one of google servers. They've got people uploading their personal and work documents to their cloud. They are swimming in data collected from sources outside of web search. Between that and the lack of actual competition it's no surprise they aren't investing in making searching the internet better for people. In some ways they profit from search results being terrible. If anything beyond the first few results on the first page is filled with spam and irrelevant websites the top few results to any search become even more valuable.
so they can give you better search results tailored to you
That depends on whether or not you agree with Google's definition of "better". What is better for Google is a set of results that make you most likely to click on an advert. Failing that, they want you to click a link, see the site, and either click an ad there or quickly return to Google where you'll click on an ad. The worst outcome for Google is that you'll click a non-paid search result, like it, and stay on that website.
This is the fundamental problem with search engines - if they work well and give you exactly what you're searching for first time then they won't make any money. A lot of what Google does is subtly trying to give you results that look great but really aren't.
What the market has produced is not ipso facto what the people want. The market is simultaneously optimizing many things. Walled gardens are much better explained by companies benefitting from not having to allow their competitors access to their customers than by "being what the people want".
People don't mind walled gardens because for a while they've been good enough if not better than the previous status-quo. However, those walled gardens are decaying such that there might actually be demand for something better if it existed.
> However, those walled gardens are decaying such that there might actually be demand for something better if it existed.
Some walled gardens, like facebook, are decaying. Others, like tiktok, are vibrant, still fresh and new.
Walled gardens are a natural result of the pursuit of capital. If you burn VC money, but create no moat (it turns out the walls of a walled garden are also a moat, weird huh), then as soon as you introduce a clever algorithm that introduces 50% more ads to extract profit, your users will all leave.
As such, a business is incentivized to build these walls and moats.
How do we avoid this?
Well, we do have examples. Mastodon and other open source projects eschew walled gardens in favor of free software ideals. Web3 embraces a certain "decentralized" vibe which lends itself in this direction. Universities, and other public-ish institutes like DARPA, created the original internet and many of its technologies.
Unfortunately, open source projects will struggle to advertise or find users. They do not have the initial capital to get as much momentum as the VC-funded alternatives. Web3 seems surely doomed to end up also building walled gardens for the crypto-anarcho-vibe is only skin-deep, and many a regular business is now highly involved.
This leaves government entities. The government is the one group that is both well funded enough, and has motive to create protocols which prioritize the user's freedom over profit (after all, the users will pay taxes regardless of how high the walls are).
It seems to be out of fashion these days for the government to actually do anything though, so perhaps there is no more chance of that than of a free software project managing the same.
Yep. Imagining nontechnical users would endure paths of greater resistance to avoid shady privacy and openness practices is magical thinking. Privacy and openness are important, but having tools designed to maximally reduce the overhead of solving your problems is more important.
I know I get on people's nerves on HN by harping on user needs and FOSS usability and interface design and such, but I think we as a group need to start taking user needs much more seriously. Open-source alternatives will always be alternatives until without taking usability and the overall experience seriously.
Many, if not most FOSS software developers choose some commercial tools— count how many MacOS and Windows laptops you see at OSCON or FOSDEM. Consider how different the cost/benefit analysis would be for people without the most basic requisite knowledge to reason about software problems, let alone troubleshoot, or throw in a PR to address them directly. Commercial companies don't get these seamless experiences by magic— it involves research, design, development and testing to deliberately remove friction and stumbling blocks rather than assuming your use case is universal, or that docs are a suitable replacement for fixing usability problems. There's nothing stopping any open source project from doing any of it. Volunteering isn't unique to coding— people volunteer to cook and build houses and clean up trash, too. But developers run FOSS and developers need to deliberately incorporate those other perspectives into their projects to get the benefit.
I think you’re conflating “tinkering” with simply desiring a different feature set. In my case I actually want “less” from Google in terms of number of features. I don’t want to tinker either, but we naturally reach for toggles as a way to tell the system we want different (not necessarily more) features.
Most of my search results at this point look like a spam ridden inbox from the mid-2000s.
This is absolutely true; however there are riches in niches.
The % of internet users who want X probably is lower, but I’d gander the absolute number of people who would want something like this is much bigger than it was a decade ago.
This community forgets that because we’re told by investors, the media we read, etc. to go after the biggest markets possible. “Hunt for elephants, not field mice,” they say.
Don’t forget that a niche market on the web can still be massive and small fortunes can be made building products and services for them. You might not even need to have investors on your cap table to bring products to market to sell to those niches if you know what you’re doing, but shhhh… don’t tell them I told you that.
I think you’ve touched on an interesting point here with respect to connection. Content naturally lives inside a walled garden and is often created there whether by users or professional studios. Users expect and dont care about this. However _connection_ is naturally between things and is a source of user friction when things dont connect well together.
Imagine a commenter in a walled garden complaining about the walled garden's audience. "Facebook's audience is extremely skewed toward..., but that's not what...." How long before some Facebook reader asks, "Then why are you using it?"
If one dislikes systems that allow tinkering then why read and comment on HN. I do not understand.
Apparently "the market" dislikes systems that allow tinkering. Presumably "the market" refers to some people who said they dislike systems that allow tinkering. Either that or the commenter is inferring "the market" dislikes systems that allow tinkering even though no person has actually made a statement to that effect.
Maybe HN is not the ideal forum for discussions of "the market" (due to lack of interest and/or understanding), but maybe HN is a decent forum for discussing systems that allow tinkering.
The best example of this is having a Google Home device and just being like, "Hey Google, how many ounces are in a cup?" as you're standing in the kitchen with your hands covered in flour.
There are no more websites worth linking to anymore... If you filter out all SEO spam there is barely few webpages left...
Google is desperately trying to hide that fact. Most of the web 1.0 can nowadays fit into small town telephone directory... You do not need mulitibilion dolar business to run web directory...
Try search.marginalia.nu (especially https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random but try some searches for git commands or history too, just remember it is a search engine, not a conversation partner so only include words that should be in the article you search for) and come back to me afterwards.
I thought like you that if even Google couldn't find anything it was not there, but after discovering marginalia I now know it is just Google that has become unusably bad.
For day to day searching I now use Kagi and for me it is easily worth 10 or maybe 20 dollars a month since it "just works" unlike Google and has a larger index than Marginalia.
For now though Marginalia gets the money since Kagi is still in beta.
Just searched for "linux users" in marginalia and google. Google's first answer seemed spot on. (users command usage); Marginalia provided me with in comparison _marginal_ results.
Maybe it is because google knows me better then i am aware of. I really don't notice google results getting worse, while i read so several times in HN comments...
Yeah it's not a search engine for answering questions, but for finding documents. You'll get along with it better if you see it as something like grep for the web. This is something I'm very intentionally trying to accomplish, as it's something I feel Google has gotten worse at.
This is just retrieving articles when I search, not actual websites. Interesting if you're looking for article related to search keywords I guess, but genuinely unusable for actually finding something specific.
Gave it another try with "ssh scp". Google's first result explains me how to use scp (ssh provides a hint about the context), which was what i would be looking for. Marganilla... not so much it seems
The second hit links to a man page of scp. It is a formal description of the syntax, not what I was looking for... I'd rather have a short intro and a few examples of typical usage instead, am I being pedantic? If i wanted a formal description i would google 'scp cli', 'scp options' or even 'man scp'. Also, on a tangent, to be honest -- I find searching simply for 'scp' not a very clever approach. How did Marginalia guess it would be the cli tool and not one of the other acronyms?
Yeah that's not the sort of search engine this is. If you search for SCP, it will show you documents where that term is relevant, using domain ranking as a tiebreaker. It's quite intentionally not trying to read your mind.
I think it showed the man page first because that domain is highly ranked.
Google still searches forums pretty decently - I think what you are describing are two separate phenomena
1. Yes Google search has gone to shit - even putting stuff in quotes now does not do an exact search (there is another checkbox you ALSO need to use for that). It tries to be too smart even when no user is logged in.
2. Giant mega forums like Reddit have really taken over. Instead of a dedicated forum people just go to subreddits. Personally I think it is good and bad and I still try to actively participate in both.
> I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search results no longer actually returning real web results.
I think you have the cause and effect reversed. (Though I disagree with the meme that Google's results have gotten worse. For me, it's more useful than it's ever been. I often find the information I need without even needing to click on a result.)
> this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google".
You don't want that, I don't want that, and I am sure many people here on HN and similar gathering places for powerusers agree with us.
But "the next google" doesn't have to replace google for us, it would have to replace google for the average consumer (AC). And the AC likes the "simple box". The AC doesn't want to fiddle with customization options. The AC is used to walled gardens, advertising, "Apps" that are just wrappers around webpages.
So any "next google" will have to compete exactly at the "simple box" game to get the attention of the masses.
>I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search results no longer actually returning real web results.
You are wrong; Open Web died or almost died because of walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Billions of people who hang out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter would hang out instead on Open Web e.g. websites, blogs, forums etc. if walled gardens didn't exist.
The "we answer your question" thing could be useful, but:
1. It should be in addition to (not instead of) the web search results.
2. The answers can't be wrong. Google often gives such a low quality answer that I no longer want to use it for this, besides asking about the weather and sunset/sunrise.
"Word for a bad scientist" gives me results as if I had searched for "Mad scientists fun stories", and it wasn't even offered as a correction. Google can't even accept that I'm typing the word I want anymore, I must surely want something else.
A lot of search results pointing to independent forums are about people asking the same question I have only to be told to use Google to find the answer.
Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want better than I do.
Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google.
I'm convinced the death of the web and independent forum communities is largely the fault of Google's lousy search results no longer actually returning real web results.