‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search.

From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.

Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers.

If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?

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wood_spirit an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You get what you measure.

It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?

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imron 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well.

Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans

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crazygringo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Again, then why are people using Google more than ever?

I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.

	▲	imron 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase? Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing. For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead. That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely. This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.