Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Do Search Engines Suck Now?”.
Why do search engines suck now wait before we get ahead of ourselves? Do search engines suck now? Are they actually getting worse or have they just changed in a way that I personally hate just by glancing at the first page of a Google or being searched? It’S easy to find a long list of potential complaints, paid sponsors crowd out the first few search results, there’s annoying little widgets everywhere, and it keeps giving you barely related suggestions for what to search next, like a lame Choose Your Own Adventure book. But why does this search page have so many ads? Isn’T an interesting question? It’S because money? The more interesting question is why it feels like it’s gotten harder to find the information you want, despite all those supposedly helpful widgets. The answer is also because money, but it’s worth unpacking, why it’s difficult to get a lot of rigorous data on this subject, but at least a few researchers have tried to answer whether or not search engines are in fact getting worse. One. Recent German study did a survey of over 7,000 product review, Searchers on being Google and duck Dogo over the course of a year and concluded that you could still find useful information. But it was being drowned out by a torrent of lowquality content, especially SEO spam top ranked Pages typically were heavily optimized and littered with affiliate marketing links, and they also showed clear markers of lower content quality. There’S not a ton of academic papers on this issue, but there’s plenty of data on the web, showing how users have changed their behavior to sidestep lowquality highly optimized results. One possible indicator that search engines suck now is the growing use of Reddit as a defacto search engine. Sadly, reddit’s own internal search function has long been considered what the experts call absolute trash, but that hasn’t stopped Savvy users from just sticking the word Reddit on otherwise unrelated Google search queries. It’S a well-known tactic for cutting out SEO, ified garbage and vapid listicles because it effectively bypasses the weaknesses of both search engines and Reddit itself. Self Reddit isn’t perfect, just ask any redditor, but on the modern internet it does a rare and special thing. It allows users to direct their question to a bunch of big old nerds who care more about being right than they care about making money off the interaction. If you search site colon, reddit.com search engine, bad you’ll find plenty of posts complaining about the decaying state of modern search engines going back over a decade.
There has, however, been a pretty major uptick in such posts over the last 2 years separately. Google Trends data shows that Reddit has been steadily gaining popularity as a search term since 2010, when news aggregator dig shot themselves in the foot with a controversial redesign and started bleeding users that growth remained steady until December 2021, when users started appending Reddit to their searches. At an increased rate, over 40 % of reddit’s growth as a Google search term since 2010 is from the end of 2021 onward a bit over 2 years now there are are a lot of potential confounding factors here, but this could be, at least in part, a Consequence of widespread dissatisfaction with search engines, an interesting contrast to reddit’s Upward Trend as a search term, is Wikipedia which long predated Reddit. As the kind of word you add to the end of a search query in order to cut through the noise Wikipedia is a far more popular website, currently ranked seventh for Global traffic to reddits 16th.
But it’s been on the decline as a search term since 2010. In part, because Google heavily priori izes Wikipedia already, both in search results and as part of its knowledge panel widget, but this might also indicate that the decline in quality for search engine results isn’t hitting every search subject. Equally, there’s not a ton of money writing on a search query like when was the War of 1812, so the top results are mostly authoritative, reliable history sources, but if the most important goal of search engines is to find useful results, why haven’t they fixed the problem? We’Ll tell you right after after we thank delete me. Here’S your issue. Your personal info is floating around online without you saying so, it’s totally not cool right delete me is here to save you from scammers blowing up your phone with Robo calls and sketchy emails manually. Removing all your accounts from the web is tedious, but delete me. Software and expert Squad can wipe out all that info in a jiffy on average they’re removing over 2,000 pieces of data for customers in their first two years. That’S some serious cleanup! So if you’re, tired of your personal info playing hide-and-seek online, go to join delet, me.com, tequi and use code Tech quickie for a sweet, 20 % off, it’s not that search engine companies, don’t care that spam is cluttering up. The first few pages of results they’ve been in an arms race with spam since the very beginning. It’S just that the spam is now apparently winning. According to the authors of the German study that we mentioned earlier, search engine companies Banning spam sites and readjusting their parameters had a positive but ultimately temporary impact.
There was still a general downward Trend in terms of text, quality and relevance for for all three search engines studied which could imply that this isn’t a problem with search engines, but a problem with the internet itself. Appearing on the first page of Google can be life or death for a company, so there’s massive Financial incentive to game that system, the same as how there’s a massive Financial incentive to game ratings on sites like Amazon, where fake reviews are notoriously rampant companies, both big And small have realized that word of mouth personal recommendations from a financially disinterested human being are far more effective than traditional advertising, which means that the shadier among them put a lot of effort and resources into infiltrating so-called organic user generated systems of validation, drowning out authentic User reviews not to get too metaphorical, but the only way to be heard in a room where everybody’s already yelling is to scream even louder. Everyone’S incentive is to make more and better garbage large vertically integrated companies like Google, don’t really help this hyper competitive l, low effort environment when they leverag their platform to prioritize their own products over competitors. Google has had long-standing beef with Yelp since at least 2011, when the FTC investigated allegations that Google search algorithm consistently favored Google Places over Yelp. That allegation was serious enough that Google actually agreed to allow online services to opt out of data scraping Yelp further contributed data to a 2015 academic paper, claiming that Google manipulate search results to favor itself.
Small companies perceive often accurately that the platform they essentially have to use is a potential competitor that can and will replace them with a storebrand version at any time. Those fancy, widgets and Rich Snippets exist so that the engine that can take you anywhere you want to go is now a place that you never have to leave. So what are you going to do? Build a better product pay for your position at the top or find a louder way to scream. That’S why, even though we said earlier that it’s not necessarily search engine company fault that they’ve gotten worse, it also kind of, is you know how captas have gotten harder and harder over time? Well, that’s in part because they were used to train machine learning which then led to the Bots becoming more sophisticated, which then led to the need for stronger and stronger captas and so on. What we’re seeing here is likely something similar Only Internet wide where search engines are struggling to distinguish between quality content and spam from AI systems trained on traditionally trusted sources like Wikipedia The increasing cheapness of relatively sophisticated spam tools has resulted in numerous odd Trends. Some funny like when Oodles of products on Amazon wound up being named, I’m sorry. I cannot fulfill that request. It goes against open AI use policy and others disturbing like the rise of procedurally generated clickbait obituaries, often for private citizens, many of whom aren’t even dead.
You used to have to be at least a dless celebrity in order to get that kind of treatment. Search engines have not lost the fight against spam, at least not yet, but as machine generation continues to progress and proliferate, your search experience probably isn’t going to get any better thanks for watching guys. If you like this video, maybe you like another video, have about how streaming is basically becoming cable. You can click on it. It’S somewhere, .