[HN Gopher] If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? ___________________________________________________________________ If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? Author : abhinavsharma Score : 41 points Date : 2022-03-18 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (abhinavsharma.com) (TXT) w3m dump (abhinavsharma.com) | hobz22 wrote: | i use opera on android, firefox in windows, safari on mac and | duckduckgo for everything and have been for YEARS. I'm offended | you're including me in your cohort. lol | TechBro8615 wrote: | Give it time. | Shadonototra wrote: | because it is good, the only people who complain about it are on | pro-mozilla mediums, even though mozilla sells their users to | google, the irony :) | dkersten wrote: | I actually don't use google (search or other services aside form | YouTube) very often. As for "everyone", I assume habit and | momentum. People are used to it so it's hard to change to | something else. Many people also don't know what alternatives | there are. | turbinerneiter wrote: | Im so used to the UI (down to the fonts, things I can't even | name), that DuckDuckGo looks off to me. So although it is set as | my standar search engine, I g! most of the time. | cruelty2 wrote: | Maybe you could write a Greasemonkey extension to redirect | requests from Googles page to DuckDuckGo | ncann wrote: | - It's free | | - It's better than most alternatives, and in many cases there | isn't even an alternative | | - People have amassed too much data on Google services and the | cost of moving/switching is too high | | - People don't care | frenchy wrote: | This article is really not that good, it suggests a bunch of | obvious reasons why Google has a moat (Chrome, everyone's | personal data) and misses some others (brand recognition). Then | it goes and an explains reason why OP thinks Google sucks (to be | fair I agree with him, but they're pretty subjective). Finally, | OP claims that people are abandoning Google. Their single data | point is that since 2009 there have been fewer searches for | mortgages, because that couldn't possibly have been the result of | an mortgage-driven recession in 2008. | cryptica wrote: | I stopped using Google search. The only Google product I use now | are Maps and Android. I used DuckDuckGo for a while and more | recently I switched to Qwant. They're all approximately the same. | | I don't think that PageRank or similar algorithms provide any | competitive edge at this stage. The real advantage of PageRank in | the past is that it was difficult to game, but nowadays, | backlinks are all about money and SEO anyway. | kauguste281 wrote: | Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly | superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost | all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window | dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they | have all the same holes in the search results. | | Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I | don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that | organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text | search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for | websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, | Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out | everything that requires a login or whatever). | | I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by | just trying to be a Google search clone. | LeoPanthera wrote: | Google _had_ a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated | when they took it away. | | You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with | "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that | doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. | | Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing | this back. | vopi wrote: | idk if you know this but kagi has a "discussion" filter | (among other filters) | thrwawy283 wrote: | You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search | accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further | than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no | complex filtering to do things like removing search results | that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to | specifically refine your search. Google still has the most | useful search, but they've taken away methods to get better | results. I remember I was pretty upset when i couldn't search | for images by exact dimensions anymore. Bing allows this. | | Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a | decade. | thereare5lights wrote: | > Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. | | Came here to write exactly that | | Why are we still using it? | | There's nothing better out there. | GeekyBear wrote: | For the same reason that Google pays Apple and Mozilla huge sums | every year. | | Most people won't change the default settings for their search | engine. | frb wrote: | I don't think that most people care about using Google or quality | of search results at all. | | I'd agree that the average HN user and certain professions like | developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to | Google and recently stuck with Kagi. | | If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter | words into their browser's navigation/search bar and are happy to | get useful results. | | It's worth to remember that Google is the default search engine | in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). | | Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new | Windows computer from work. She didn't notice that she was using | Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at | her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as | unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change | the browser as well as the search engine. | Havoc wrote: | Recently managed to finally de-google my search. | | SearXNG funneled through protonVPN | post_break wrote: | I use DDG most of the time, then when I cant find technical stuff | I g!. And let's be honest, bing is the king for porn. | dddnzzz334 wrote: | > bing is the king for porn. | | I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same | things on the same search result forever. That is not something | that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have | some amount of randomization. | post_break wrote: | All I know is that I've fed bing some of the most obscure | keywords to find what I'm looking for and it's been like "oh | I know exactly the video you're looking for I've got you". | traceroute66 wrote: | Just use Startpage, its Google without the tracking. | | DuckDuckGo is ok too. | | TL;DR there's no reason to default to direct Google. | disintegore wrote: | You still get Google results in the end, which are growing more | full of blogspam and affiliate link farms every year. | spiderice wrote: | Google results are the one thing keeping me on Google. Not | sure why getting the almost indisputably best results would | be bad. Even if they are getting worse, they're still miles | ahead of anyone else. | | I've been waiting for a Kagi invite for a while because I've | heard good things on HN about it. Finally got one a couple | weeks ago. Finally switched off of it and back to Google | yesterday. The results weren't even in the same ballpark, | despite me really wanting it to succeed. | freediver wrote: | > The results weren't even in the same ballpark, despite me | really wanting it to succeed. | | Have you posted feedback about bad results on | kagifeedback.org? | dleslie wrote: | It's the bad default of the devices that most people use. | | This is basically the outcome that antitrust prosecutors were | concerned for with Microsoft. | | Imagine if Android couldn't bundle a browser, or integrate any of | Google's SAAS products. | Jean-Philipe wrote: | I tried switching to DDG a few times over the past few years and | always found that it got in my way, especially when working. So I | usually got annoyed enough after a few weeks and switched back to | google. | | About two months ago, the opposite happened. Google gave me so | much spam and advertising, the search got worse, now I ended up | using DDG. It still sucks, for sure, but somehow it sucks less | than google now. | SllX wrote: | My standard line on this is that Google today is not as good as | Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago, but it is still | the best available option _today_ because nothing is as good as | or better than Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago. | | That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on | HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once | I've had a chance to actually investigate the new options. | | EDIT: Maybe I should note that I've also been relying a lot more | on Reddit too in the past year since Apollo has a decent search | interface for Reddit and I've gotten used to processing new subs | quickly and getting information out of them. If nothing else I | usually at least have a stack of new terminology to feed my | search queries elsewhere. | dariusj18 wrote: | Also, the internet is a far better and worse place than it was | 10 years ago. So much more content, but astronomically more bad | actors. | 93po wrote: | I think it's also only going to get worse when the amount of | bad content and blog spam is 1000 times the ratio it is today | due to really human-like AI writing. I am sure Google will | find ways to detect this, but it will be a cat and mouse game | for decades because at some point we won't be able to tell | apart bad, lazy human writing from AI writing. | | At some point the internet _has_ to go to a circle of trust | model with real identities tied to online content of any | sort. I see no other way to curb this pending disaster than | being able to block bad actors and bad actors having very | limited means to publish under an alias. | helph67 wrote: | Because `common sense' ain't! | moltke wrote: | The truth is that normal people _like_ abusive software. Using | software that gives them freedom also gives them the | responsibility to understand the behavior of the machine which is | something they do not want. No amount of evangelism or possibly | even education will fix this. IMO for their own good people who | behave this way should not be allowed to use computers and should | delegate the task to people who are willing to think through the | consequences of using a particular piece of software. | | Allowing normal people to use computers is cruel in the same way | making a dog order its food over the telephone is. | andrewstuart wrote: | Because people stick with something thats "good enough". | | The biggest barrier to any competitor for any product/service | anywhere is a "good enough" incumbent. | scotty79 wrote: | I had trouble switching to DuckDuck Go search previously. | | It changed when I installed DucDuckGo browser on my phone. It has | really good internet decrapifying features and it uses ddg search | by default and so far I didn't have a single reason to change | that default. | | I hope ddg will relese similar browser for desktop. Maybe I'll be | able to switch to it then. | karaterobot wrote: | By the end of the article, this is full-on marketing the OPs | product, so be aware of that when thinking about how the problem | and solution are framed. | | It's an interesting question though. I think the answer is that | most people don't really care? The bubble we live in is filled | with other people who, like us , are very knowledgeable about | this domain, pay attention to what's going on behind the scenes, | and have very strong opinions on it. 99% of the rest of the world | doesn't give the quality and nature of Google search a second | thought. | nightski wrote: | I'm not using it directly. Have been using DDG for about 10 years | now. | ct0 wrote: | If you're referring to google search specifically, a major tool | to combat the spammed ads in search that has helped me is | available here: | | https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt... | | https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs | anothernewdude wrote: | Inertia | johndfsgdgdfg wrote: | I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using | Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for | money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's | tyrannical regime on internet ends. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | How, exactly, does Google keep users hostage for money? | johndfsgdgdfg wrote: | G Suite Workspace users are being kept hostages by Google | unless the users pay more money[1]. | | [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g- | suite-le... | tssge wrote: | Can't they just migrate off of it? I guess the only part | being held hostage according to the article are their Play | Store purchases, if even that (the article says the | purchases' fate is unclear). | | To me it seems Google has given ample time to either | migrate off of it or to become a customer. | sithadmin wrote: | Amazon did build one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com | johndfsgdgdfg wrote: | Oh thank you. We should definitely promote this more. | Gualdrapo wrote: | I still use it mainly for non "standard" search: | | - Its location feature is better than DDG or anything else - It | has gotten worse a bit, but if I tell it to show me results from | Colombia, 95% of the results it will return are from actual | websites from Colombia. DDG will throw anything from Latin | America, for example. Not to mention the disaster with Bing. | | - Its image search feature is still more precise than others. | Reverse search won't return sometimes what I'm looking for and I | have to resort to Yandex/TinEye/Bing, but still. Oh, and it can | search for SVGs, which others can't. | | - Double quotes aren't returning exact matches, but other | operators are working fine as far as I can tell. Filetype | operator is great and way bigger than DDG's, cache operator is | great for looking for a cached version of a website that is not | working at the moment, the minus operator still works (sans the | advertisements). | nyx_land wrote: | Because there is effectively no alternative. Bing and engines | that are different frontends for Bing results aren't | alternatives, don't kid yourself; it only exists still because | Microsoft is another company like Google that shoves their subpar | product onto people (by making it the default search on their | subpar OS that took over the world) and hopes they never seek out | alternatives. Most people are too dumb and lazy to seek out | better alternatives, so they stick with the default search | engines for Edge or Chrome. For everyone else, there is no real | alternative, so while Google's search results are getting | objectively worse, it doesn't matter because it's at least a | lesser of two evils. They don't need to worry about becoming more | mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position | where they basically have no competition. | penjelly wrote: | i use brave and brave.search, havent had search issues since | switching over. | [deleted] | falcolas wrote: | The moat is worse than we think. New search engines are not only | hobbled by the bandwidth and processing power and storage | required to spider the web, but by the websites who will | preemptively disallow them _because_ they 're not Google. | | I can't imagine trying to build a new search engine when the | landscape is intentionally (if justifiably) hostile to new search | engines. | ALittleLight wrote: | Can't you just set your user agent to Google bot? | nr2x wrote: | robots.txt is a joke tho. | sithadmin wrote: | I'm defaulting to Brave, then falling back on DuckDuckGo, then | Bing, then Google these days. Feels a lot like the early web | again. | fdgsdfogijq wrote: | Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the | difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years | ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End | of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. | There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by | hacking search. | | These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a | fantasy. Its like saying that democracy has failed so lets | replace it, replace with what? Its the best we can get given the | alternatives, and its flaws will always be exploited. | DantesKite wrote: | I don't think these posts should be blocked, because they | create discussion, which creates interest, which incentivizes | for problem solving. | | Humans are incredibly good at solving engineering problems they | can see from a mile away, although it takes time to solve. | taysix wrote: | Not sure if you read the post. They don't advocate for | replacing Google. They want to add onto Google and other search | engines. | joering2 wrote: | Democracy would be best replaced with cashless society. Society | based on everyone value of doing what they love doing most (aka | hobbyist), and virtually everything else replaced by robots and | technology we already have. This is what's coming eventually, | but its not something that can be installed on the top of your | "operating system"; you will have to format the whole hard- | drive (civil war) | xboxnolifes wrote: | I don't understand how any of that has anything to do with | democracy. | FastMonkey wrote: | I suppose in the absence of cash we would just force some | people to do the necessary tasks that aren't anyone's | favourite hobbies? | zargon wrote: | No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without | adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by | Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for | 90% of my queries. | | It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search | engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be | banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with | existing competing search engines.) | Kuinox wrote: | I disagree, Kagi is not yet "better in 90% of the queries" | than google, it's good enough to not have to launch google in | 90% of it's query. | zargon wrote: | This is probably true for me, if we also say that 50% of | the queries are orders of magnitude higher quality on Kagi. | omnicognate wrote: | Kagi's better than Google for me. Proof is that initially I | only had it set up as default search on one device but I've | progressively switched them all over out of annoyance with | crap google results. I haven't yet had to go to google once | to finish a search I started on Kagi. | fdgsdfogijq wrote: | I think that with current technology, beating google at the | scale they run at is impossible. I think with advances it | NLP, its possible. But right now, its pie in the sky. | black_puppydog wrote: | Came here to mention kagi. Very happy user here. The no-spam | results make it so much more useful as a tool. Also, "block | this site from myresults forever" gives so much more agency | to the user than anything Google has release in years. | Googles "we know better" just reads as a big middle finger to | me. | tartoran wrote: | Wow, they have that? That's what I always wanted from | Google and they never delivered. Im sure they had reasons. | I really don't think they want to empower their users, they | are even hostile to search users and content creators, amp | comes to mind and am glad it dissapeared already. Meanwhile | I'be been using duckduck but i'll give kagi a go. | lordnacho wrote: | What happens when you ask it how many Ukrainian generals | have died? Does it insist on giving you pages and pages | about Russian generals, like Google? | | I was looking for this and it really annoys me how it | thinks it knows what I want. | [deleted] | sltkr wrote: | Kagi requires users to sign up (even though it's currently | free?) which is 1000x more user-hostile than anything Google | does and makes it a nonstarter as far as I'm concerned. | omnicognate wrote: | Kagi is intended to be a paid service when it launches. | This is something I actively want. It should make them the | opposite of user-hostile. Their users will be the source of | their revenue so they will need to provide value or lose | them. Login is a necessary part of that. I'm happy to take | both that inconvenience and the cost. | buildbot wrote: | +1 kagi was the first alternative engine that has passed all | of my random tests, mostly weird cameras and python coding | searches... | joe_the_user wrote: | I'd say you're half right. Things are harder now and the | success of Google has contributed to this. | | However, I think Google has severely degenerated from just two | years ago, when most of the problems were fully in effect. | | Google is a bit of a product of the situation of scams being | the easiest way anyone makes online. | RC_ITR wrote: | The progression that people almost always forget: | | 1) New system comes out that indexes/controls/regulates a | naively created dataset | | 2) Data consumers adopt that system and experience benefits | | 3) Data suppliers learn rules of system and take advantage of | it to improve the positioning of their data, thus breaking the | rules of a system built on the assumption of naive creation | | 4) Users complain about the broken system | | 5) New entrants realize that the original system actually | solved the core problem really well, and there are no easy ways | to solve the 'gaming the system' problem | | 6) Flawed system remains the best available option indefinitely | | It's like entropy, there's just no fighting it. | | EDIT: And to extend this beyond Google - do you see a lot of | long text blocks in 7 second tik tok videos? That's because the | creator found a way to game the algorithm. | bsder wrote: | > Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the | difficulty of a good search engine. | | No, they are underestimating the difficulty of _funding_ a good | search engine. | | I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my | friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down. | | Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it | would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you | searched for "python", it would show your results but would | also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are | two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then | click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster | would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff | _really_ quickly. | | Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders | of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph | algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ... | | (/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a | feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO | garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.) | Kye wrote: | People said this about pre-Google search engines. Someone will | figure out the next PageRank and give us another 10-20 years of | useful search. | thomassmith65 wrote: | Honestly I think people are completely underestimating | the difficulty of a good search engine | | I suspect that is not difficult so much as expensive. | | Boutique search engines pop up all the time here on HN, but | they can't compete fairly against Google, without the resources | to crawl a billion webpages day after day. | kodah wrote: | > Nobody is coming along with a better search engine | | https://neeva.com/ better than pretty much any solution (Qwant, | DDG, etc) I've personally tested. It also indexes specific | websites like StackOverflow, GitHub, and GMail. | | Edit: | | Neeva does require an account to create because eventually the | product is going to require a subscription. | sokoloff wrote: | "See results for '<my search term>' Create your free Neeva | account." | | "To continue searching and access all of Neeva's features, | create your free account. Already a Neeva member? Sign in" | | Yeah, no. | kodah wrote: | Ah, Neeva is eventually going to be a paid product, that's | why it's that way. That said, their membership is pretty | cheap for what you get. | sokoloff wrote: | I don't mind giving my email or making an account after I | have any inkling that the product might be worth deleting | a few spam emails. Neeva was giving me a modal popup in | my first minute; that's never going to get my email. | AlexCoventry wrote: | I experimented with neeva, because I'd really like an | alternative to Google, even a paid one. However, I found its | results pretty disappointing. At least for my work, I had to | go back to Google, because I don't want to waste time "on the | clock." | jeffbee wrote: | We have to have this discussion daily, apparently, but nobody, | absolutely nobody in this thread and certainly not the article, | has established an objective basis for "Google sucks". The most | likely alternate theory, which the article doesn't bother | discussing, is that Google does not in practice "suck" at all. | np- wrote: | We're all just searching Reddit anyway and it's just easier to | use Google to search Reddit than to use Reddit's own search tool. | compiler-guy wrote: | The web itself sucks more and more, and Google results reflect | that. Much good discussion migrated to siloed locations like | facebook groups. There are thousands of pages of technical | content that are barely redone versions of each other. Each SEO'd | to within an inch of its life. These are quite similar to the | dozens of identical off-brand products one finds on amazon. | | I would love to see Google results get better. But the web itself | is a mess. | RSHEPP wrote: | This has a what seems to be a positive effect in my life | though. I use the library much more than I used to. Instead of | finding blogs using Google like the first part of my career, I | find books at the local library. | HstryrsrBttn wrote: | Koshkin wrote: | Paraphrasing Stroustrup, there are only two kinds of services: | the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. | mountainriver wrote: | The "google search sucks" rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works | really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with | it. | | I think it's just getting trendy to dog on | ikiris wrote: | Its only even really trendy here on HN. This place is getting | less and less useful over time. | dash2 wrote: | I use search.brave.com and it's usually OK. It fails on some | complex queries. Unfortunately SEO spam for Google also catches | Brave. | ncmncm wrote: | Because Microsoft sucks too? Because browsers default to | connecting to it? | alligatorplum wrote: | This feels like one of those things where people only notice the | bad experiences, bad search results, and ignore all the times it | was right, good/neutral search results. | | One of google search's biggest advantages is the ability to save | a click for the user. If I search for "NCAA scores" google will | show me the live scores directly instead of showing me a link to | the ncaa website which also shows me the score but at the expense | of me having to click on the link. | | IMO, the right way to dethrone google search would be to have | better (or more) QOL features. | gumby wrote: | Is that a notion page? I couldn't use space to go to the next | page (the oldest pagination system in the (computing) world). | | So I stopped reading at the end of the page. | richardsocher wrote: | They don't know yet about you.com? - No spam, no ads, you control | the ranker with your source preferences, hardcore private mode | that doesn't save anything nor uses your location (even DDG saves | your queries and gives location-based results), many developer | apps that include what you want - eg code snippets in a | StackOverflow app, AI apps like you.com/write that would write | essays for you, etc. | | Also, many folks (outside the hackernews crowd) never change | their defaults and Google pays Apple 15B per year, as well as | Samsung and many others, to be that default. | | Disclaimer: I work at you.com | timothylaurent wrote: | You's been a refreshing break from the Google-sphere - and it | gets better and better - The mobile browser is also great! | ubvhgidft wrote: | > If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? | | If prison food sucks why do prisoners eat it? | dymk wrote: | https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+alternate+search+eng... | philovivero wrote: | If Vladimir Putin sucks, why is everyone letting him be in | charge over there? If Donald Trump sucks why did we ele-- If | Barack Obama sucks-- The FBI sucks. Facebook sucks. C sucks. | The WWW sucks. Fiat currency sucks. | | Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?" | mcbutterbunz wrote: | The truth is, everything sucks. The more you use something | the more you see its faults. The grass is always greener... | dariusj18 wrote: | Rule 44 of the internet | | http://web.archive.org/web/20070110035128/http://www.encyclo. | .. | | Edit: NSFW ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-18 23:00 UTC)