[HN Gopher] Three areas where Google Search lags behind competit...
___________________________________________________________________
Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code,
cooking, travel
Author : swethmandava
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-04-13 21:03 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.surgehq.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.surgehq.ai)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For Python programming I would say 100% of the time you should
| look the answer up in the official manual for a well-defined
| problem (delete a file) because the manual is correct, well-
| written, etc. It's astonishing how often Google and Bing snatch
| defeat from the jaws of victory on queries like this.
|
| If you go looking in splogs, spam overflow and other spam sites
| at best you are going to get wrong answers, at worse you will get
| answers that "aren't even wrong".
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I wish the python manual was the default search for function
| references too...
| twelvechairs wrote:
| I agree yet in the article google is criticised for having the
| official docs as search result 1.
|
| I guess I just want different results to the same query than
| the author
| noizejoy wrote:
| > ... maybe I'm not asking the right questions,
|
| You're holding it wrong :-)
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| An interesting observation is that over the years, I've sort of
| found that if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not
| asking the right questions, or I'm not thinking about the problem
| the right way. For example, you come up with some weird
| programming idea to solve a problem and no results are found --
| I'm almost always headed down the wrong path. This has been
| proved to me over and over again as sort of a canary in the
| search coal mine.
|
| Google still solves all my questions, if I'm asking the right
| questions, I guess is what I'm getting at.
| DancesWTurtles wrote:
| > For example, you come up with some (...) idea (...) and no
| results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong
| path.
|
| And by that you mean, Google is telling you how to think, and
| that you should think in some way and not in some other way.
| I'm quite sure I am not comfortable with that.
| [deleted]
| devteambravo wrote:
| And what do you do about this discomfort? Asking for a friend
| who is also uncomfortable with that "guidance".
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| This resonated a lot with me. Often if I'm learning a language
| and I see no one is doing what I'm querying for, I take a step
| back and try to ask a more basic question
| KMag wrote:
| Be careful. Maybe it's a useful rule of thumb, but be careful
| of the "searching for your keys under the light pole" problem.
|
| I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more
| than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really
| cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs
| getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn
| to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, means that lots
| of long-tail queries don't do very well on Google.
| mort96 wrote:
| This is a great way to describe it. Google still gives me
| good results for the common stuff, but really fails me when
| I'm looking for something in the "long tail".
|
| I just wish I could find obscure things again.
| flenserboy wrote:
| I wish there was a way to get rid of all sellers from
| results. Of late I have had to dig 2-3 pages in to get to
| _anything_ which wasn 't an online store.
| cryptoz wrote:
| I googled a phone number recently. It was the first result, got
| my answer. _The rest of the results were websites for physical
| locations I had been recently, including a hospital, none of
| which had any relationship to the phone number._
|
| Google is _not_ a good guideline for asking the right
| questions. It is trying to make as much money as possible and
| it will scramble anything it can think of to do that. Don't use
| that as a guideline for how you are thinking about questions.
| jsnell wrote:
| 1. Show visited locations in search results
|
| 2. ???
|
| 3. Make as much money as possible
| cryptoz wrote:
| > 2. ???
|
| oh Haha, funny old meme. Step 2 though is very clearly to
| show more ads and more content, to show more 'full results
| pages', etc, rather than just show me the 1 thing I needed
| and be on my way.
|
| I should include that Google said next to each result
| ('"555-555-555" is not on this page') and then show the
| page. Totally knows that the results are unrelated to my
| query, but shows them anyway. Why?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the
| right questions"
|
| I used to think this way too, but I've come to realize that
| Google has turned from a search engine that returns results
| based on my input to an answer engine that actively tries to
| reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query -
| usually with the intent of selling me something or returning
| SEO spam. I've also found that the old google-fu techniques are
| now so unreliable that they must have been deprecated. I can't
| tell you how often I use quotes in my query and see results
| that don't contain that text at all.
| vasco wrote:
| Nowadays you should google using what in 2005 would be
| considered "the wrong way to search". Back then it was all
| about keywords, quotes and so on. For example if you wanted
| to know if dogs could eat apples you'd search:
|
| > dog apple dangerous
|
| Today you should search:
|
| > can dogs eat apples
|
| And you get way better results with the second form. I've
| noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way
| to google is still the former overlap a lot with the crowd
| that keeps complaining google is worse now than it was
| before.
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| Another thing for us on HN to note. _This is how most
| people ask questions_. It is not just that the other way is
| wrong - it is also less common.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| "you're thinking about it wrong" isn't really that great a
| defense of Google, you know? I'm not being flippant. The
| two examples you gave are different searches, with
| different goals.
| jakejarvis wrote:
| I've noticed the same, and it's an incredibly hard habit to
| break!
| savanaly wrote:
| I'm in the awkward middle area I think where I'm almost a
| digital native, and what you said maps perfectly to my
| experience. In middle school and high school I got pretty
| good at the first type of search you mentioned. I was young
| enough that I was almost learning how to "speak" google and
| it came easily, I was fluent. Throughout the end of high
| school and into college I had more and more issues finding
| what I wanted and one day after I had failed to search
| several times I thought to myself "Fuck it. I'm just going
| to type in exactly what I want in plain English, as if I
| was a moron, and see what happens." And it worked, and that
| day a lightbulb went off in my head.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I'd argue that it's not a "better way", but rather a
| regression: I assume Google genuinely wants to understand
| my query, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't still
| be obvious to Google what kind of results it should return.
|
| Otherwise, it there truly is a "right way of asking Google
| questions", why doesn't Google release and promote a guide
| about it so people can be more successful in their search?
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| If "you're doing it wrong" didn't fly with Apple. It
| doesn't fly with Google.
| KMag wrote:
| I could very well be biased, but the first example still
| seems more useful than the second.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dog%20apple%20dangero
| u...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=can%20dogs%20eat%20ap
| p...
|
| Also worth comparing (seems to focus more on diabetes than
| cyanoglycosides. Diabetes is the bigger chronic problem,
| and cyanoglycosides are the bigger acute problem, so which
| is a bigger danger largely depends on how disciplined the
| owner is.):
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+dangerous+about+fee
| d...
| KMag wrote:
| Back when I started at Google, they at least said they
| actively targeted "long-tail" queries to gain market share.
| The thinking was that people would use a search engine until
| they hit some query that their usual search engine failed on.
| Then they'd give another search engine (perhaps Google) a
| try, so if you really targeted those tough queries and were
| at least decent at the common queries, you'd gain market
| share.
|
| Though, even when I was doing indexing changes at Google, the
| common practice was to do A/B testing with both the most
| common queries and a uniformly random sample (see reservoir
| sampling) of queries in order to justify a go-live of
| indexing changes. The former explicitly over-weights common
| queries, and the latter still optimizes for the common case.
| (In case you're wondering, the worst query I had to manually
| check in A/B testing was [flesh hook suspension].)
|
| Google used to turn off some of the query re-writing logic
| (that tries to fix your query) if you used a query operator.
| (It has been a while, but I think maybe even their "Kansas"
| user info database kept track of the last time you used an
| operator, and would turn off some of the cleverness if you
| had recently used a search operator, as it was a good signal
| that you were a power user capable of optimizing your own
| queries.) My understanding is that they don't disable any of
| the too-clever bits for power users any more, and that
| everything uses all of the cleverness of learn-to-rank all
| the time.
|
| I suspect it has gotten even worse with learn-to-rank, as it
| must be incredibly difficult to intentionally under-weight
| the uncommon/difficult queries.
|
| They did keep track of when users re-issued similar queries
| in a short period, as a signal that the ranking algorithm
| wasn't doing well. I think an optimal system would use learn-
| to-rank for the first query in a related sequence of queries,
| and then switch to turning some of the smarts off, and
| finally switching to a learn-to-rank algorithm trained only
| on later queries in these related query sequences. That way,
| they can avoid the secondary learn-to-rank instance from
| over-fitting the median/easy queries.
| abraae wrote:
| The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to
| blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months).
|
| So damn annoying when the top search results _all_ lead to shitty
| SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on,
| leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just
| excellent SEO scamming.
|
| As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets
| less and less useful.
|
| When I see a site like that, I can be quite sure there is no
| value to me from that site. I want to blacklist it - not forever
| (though I'd settle for that) but so I don't see it in search
| results again.
|
| The crazy thing is that this could even be a benefit for Google
| themselves. They could aggregate these signals and use them to
| identify SEO scammers, since their algorithms clearly can't. I'm
| sure that Google aren't happy with the lacklustre performance of
| their search in modern times.
| flenserboy wrote:
| A HOSTS file for search would be most welcome.
| erichurkman wrote:
| Google used to allow you to block individual domains right
| from the search UI. It was discontinued in 2011.
|
| There are numerous extensions to block domains, like
| uBlacklist: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublackl
| ist/pncfbmi... (not affiliated)
| mulmen wrote:
| This used to be a feature of Google Search. It then moved from
| the Google Account to Chrome. I'm not sure if it still exists
| in the Chrome browser. It can be done with addons but of course
| that doesn't feed back to Google.
|
| It does surprise me that Google wouldn't want to capture this
| signal. Maybe it is too susceptible to abuse?
| version_five wrote:
| That was a weird example to me. Google, although it ends up
| returning seo spam like w3schools, usually surfaces good SO
| answers, which are imo (and I think generally recognized as) the
| best answers that also contain discussion and caveats, if
| warranted. It's considered bad practice already to just cut/paste
| the SO answer unthinkingly. The only thing worse would be to do
| the same thing with whatever this search engine dragged out of
| w3schools.
|
| There are lots of criticisms of google search, but in this case,
| I think the Google result is better - anyone looking regularly
| for answers is conditioned to tune out the Geeksforgeeks and
| w3schools and other spam, so as long as good SO answers are from
| and center, I think google wins
| hattmall wrote:
| What's wrong with w3schools, never get the hate, it's an ok
| site, code on it seems fine.
| version_five wrote:
| It's a middle man is all imo. I have actually used it for css
| stuff, but for python (as a python programmer), I want SO or
| the actual documentation , so its annoying when what I
| consider ad-driven content gets in the way of my search.
| bstar77 wrote:
| I can tell you why I hate them... explanations are usually
| incomplete or wrong in some cases. Examples often use
| antiquated browser code when the answer should just be
| vanilla JS. They don't use best practices... like ever. They
| don't generally use modern code (don't use arrow functions or
| continute to use var). MDN is pretty much better in every
| way.
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| When it comes to programming it is not really due to superior
| work by the competition, but by so many people gaming the Google
| PR flooding the front pages with content-farm level crap.
| Generally for any search string producing 3-4 pages of spam, the
| competition would give a better results, without necessarily
| having any technological superiority. I cannot believe Google
| have not recognised this as a key risk.
| victor106 wrote:
| Also noticed a recent change that Google did, if I search for
| e.g:- Volvo XC 60, it does not show me the Volvo XC 60 page on
| Volvo.com, it instead shows the ad that Volvo paid for and a
| bunch of other ads.
|
| So they essentially don't want you to click on the organic link
| that points to Volvo.com.
|
| They want Volvo to know that all the traffic to them is being
| sent due to the Ad and not from any organic links.
|
| This is what the not so evil company is doing, imagine if they
| are actually evil..
| paxys wrote:
| This is not a recent change but exactly how Google has worked
| since 1999.
| spullara wrote:
| It is the first organic result after the ads. This has
| basically always been the case.
| belter wrote:
| Still broken after 7 months.
|
| "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730
| tshaddox wrote:
| "Broken" is a stretch. It gives the only result that could be
| reasonably expected by anyone making that query in good faith.
| If you're genuinely expecting a result like "never," then I
| wonder, would you also expect a result of "never" for the query
| "When did Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon?" (notice the
| misspelling of his name)
| wdevanny wrote:
| At the very least I would expect a "Did you mean..." message
| at the top. In fact, it correctly does this for the "Neal"
| query. The lack of one indicates a failure on google's part
| to understand the answer it gives.
|
| Yes, people probably don't make this exact query in good
| faith very often, but it raises significant concerns for
| other queries where google tries to supply an answer.
|
| See for example: https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-
| lying-to-you-about-...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| What is "good faith" in that case though ? Some people will
| really not know (think kids for instance, but not only)
|
| The interesting part to me is that Google will show
| redirected queries from typos ("Did you mean "When did *Neil*
| Armstrong set foot on Mars" ?") but not disclose the term it
| completely ignored.
|
| I makes it look like it parsed and validated all the search
| terms before coming up with the prominently displayed date,
| which makes it worse.
|
| On your point, it's broken because it shouldn't display
| "Never", and instead skip the date widget and show that the
| page results are for the moon, like it does for typos and
| other kind of corrected search terms.
|
| Or alternatively _always_ show which part of the query the
| results are based on. Failure to be transparent creates the
| problem.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Some people will really not know (think kids for
| instance, but not only)
|
| It seems very improbable that a kid would ask that question
| _without_ having any preconceived notion whatsoever of a
| person with that name famously stepping foot on an
| extraterrestrial body. It 's overwhelmingly likely that
| they have the famous 1969 event in mind, and that's why
| Google's response is appropriate.
|
| Of course I'm not disputing that it wouldn't be _even
| better_ for the Google response to explicitly correct the
| mistake in the query. I 'm only disputing the fact that
| it's "broken." If you were asking this question of a human
| as some sort of test (but the human didn't know they were
| being tested), it would clearly be a "gotcha," and you
| could likely "fool" highly educated people who know full
| well that it was the Moon and not Mars.
| cryptoz wrote:
| The answer Google gives to the question is wrong. End of
| story. Google aims to be a question-answering machine
| with the Info box, so giving the wrong answer is a broken
| state. Not sure you can really reason you way into how
| it's kinda-understandable-and-gotcha! to be 'not broken'.
|
| Aside: Going to get real confusing when another Neil
| Armstrong born in the 2010s does set foot on Mars in the
| 2030s. I wonder if we will still get the first response
| from Google, 1969, and if you will still consider it to
| be 'not broken' then too.
| lordnacho wrote:
| For instance I saw that many Russian generals had been killed
| during the war. I wondered how many Ukrainian generals had
| been killed over the same period.
|
| Still can't figure it out. Lots and lots of articles about
| dead Russian generals.
|
| There's got to be some way where the search engine doesn't
| second guess you. You can never find the answer to something
| adjacent to a popular question with the current state of
| things.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| From google's point of view, it's not second guessing you.
| It just associates words it decides are similar. You'd
| probably accept results for "dead generals", "killed
| generals", or "killed commanders". To google, dead =
| killed, generals = commanders, Russian = Ukranian, and moon
| = mars. It will expand the meanings of words until it has a
| page full of results and ads to show you.
| tremon wrote:
| But "Mars" is not simply a misspelling of the correct object,
| it confuses two distinct objects. A better comparison would
| be "When did Louis Armstrong set foot on the Moon?"
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| Amusingly, "what date did Louis Armstrong land on the Moon"
| displays the same behavior of showing the date "July 20,
| 1969" and no indication that it answered a different
| question than the one you asked.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Indeed, it's a confusion between two distinct objects, and
| the intended object is overwhelmingly clear, which is why
| it's appropriate to correct the confusion and give the
| intended response.
| dave5104 wrote:
| I'd consider it broken. In many other cases, if I make a typo
| in my search, Google will (rather prominently, IMO) at the
| top of the search display something like:
|
| > Showing results for "When did Neil _Armstrong_ set foot on
| the Moon? "
|
| > Show instead for "When did Neil Armwrong set foot on the
| Moon?"
|
| However, it seems to only work for actual spelling errors
| (e.g. if I typed Armstrong incorrectly) vs. context errors.
|
| So to answer your question, I'd expect Google calling out its
| interpretation, but not necessarily a "never".
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| It's correct for me. What are you getting?
|
| Edit, yes I'm wrong, did a mental s/mars/moon/ without
| noticing.
| drusepth wrote:
| I get July 20, 1969. Based on the results that follow, I
| assume that is correct.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| It is not. There was no human on Mars (yet) and that's the
| point of the question, proving that google's ML approach
| will recorrect and reinterpret the question and give a
| wrong answer.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Although it's interesting to note that two presumably
| human commenters in this thread got that wrong. Maybe the
| Google results are more human than we would have guessed.
| dekhn wrote:
| it's more showing that the search engine isn't much
| better than bag-of-words model, and doesn't seem to
| "know" enough logic/reasoning to parse a sentence and
| determine that it's false because it says mars instead of
| the moon.
|
| BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks at
| Google left the building and got replaced with growth
| marketers.
| htrp wrote:
| >BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks
| at Google left the building and got replaced with growth
| marketers.
|
| Is this the transition they made to AI powered rankings a
| couple of years ago?
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| This narrative doesn't really ring true to me. In any
| case, if you're saying that this result indicates that
| the system is no better than a bag of words model,
| doesn't that indicate that humans are equally no better,
| considering the errors made by the two commenters in this
| thread?
|
| To me it just seems like a query that is likely to trip
| any imperfect entity up, since a "when" question usually
| implies that the event in question is known to have
| happened.
| lhorie wrote:
| The date when he landed on the moon. For mars, the correct
| answer is "never".
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| Ah, I totally misread that. Hilarious. Brain auto-correct
| strikes again.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Google search doesn't know the correct answer, but it does
| know what people usually search for and returns an answer
| to that. It's silently adjusting Mars to Moon before
| returning an answer.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| I love that Google shills will defend that Instant Answers is a
| good idea. Its just a disinformation weapon to bad guys.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The question is whether any of those other sites could maintain
| quality while also _being Google_ , that is, while being target
| #1 for every SEO bad actor, spammer, and anti-trust regulator on
| the planet.
|
| The people at W3schools are a combination of all of the above:
| filthy SEO spammers who would readily make an antitrust stink if
| Google started just ripping off their content, but who in all
| likelihood don't care if Neeva does that, if they've ever even
| heard of Neeva.
| criddell wrote:
| Google spies on us so they can better serve us. Maybe it's time
| that they let us directly tell them what we want. Let me easily
| blacklist sites from the search results.
|
| They could even take the blacklists from all people with a high
| reputation and use that as a signal when they are building
| search results for others.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Sounds very easy to abuse. Don't like the competition's
| website? Pay a clickfarm to blacklist them on Google.
|
| I'd prefer a browser extension that removes results locally.
| Actually all I need is probably just a rule in uBO.
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| Quotes around words have basically stopped working on Google.
| Which makes all three of those searches even more difficult.
| drpixie wrote:
| And google hasn't handled complex queries for quite a while. A
| long time ago, you could get sensible answers to boolean
| queries - not so much now. A useful search engine would
| understand meaning, rather than just an index lookup.
| pcurve wrote:
| Google lags behind in Image search quality too, surprisingly.
| Bing consistently does better for me at least.
|
| Google also lags behind searching for torrent content, not
| surprisingly.
|
| In fact, I'm going to say, I use Google knowing that it sucks in
| many areas, just because it's hassle to use multiple search
| engines, and the quality was acceptable enough that it got the
| job done.
|
| But now, I do more searches in both Google and Duck.
|
| Their Youtube search engine is starting to suck too, because it's
| deliberately mixing completely unrelated items in the result.
| adrielyong wrote:
| anyone else find it so hard to find basic apparel and shoes? All
| my search results return me known brands with high ad spend.
| Recently started to go to reddit male fashion advice to look for
| crowdsourced recommendations but that's fairly time consuming.
|
| Anyone else has other ways?
| jdrc wrote:
| and images
| endisneigh wrote:
| it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have
| optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people
| talk about the 'good ol days' or times when Google was better, it
| was simply because there was less SEO, less spam and generally
| fewer pages on the internet.
|
| Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive
| to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist
| entire sites from the results - inevitably those sites that have
| the most ads would be the most likely to be blocked, resulting in
| lower revenue for Google.
| mywittyname wrote:
| The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the
| case.
|
| Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the
| same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the
| author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these
| cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until
| recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe
| in an old donut.
|
| Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google
| Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of
| YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue.
| People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to
| find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't
| found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but
| was missing that _je ne sais quoi_.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| The stories also serve the purpose of providing copyright. A
| recipe alone doesn't have copyright, but the story mixed
| throughout the recipe does have copyright.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Nah, the stories are there so you have to scroll 6000 pages
| to finally find the actual recipe. Why do they want you to
| scroll? Because every 5th word is an advertisement. More
| scrolling, more ads, more revenue.
|
| All of these recipe sites (that I've seen) will drop the
| ingredients + directions on the bottom of the page.
| WesternWind wrote:
| Google also isn't great at surfacing genuine product reviews that
| aren't just people reiterating amazon reviews with referral links
| and SEO. Like even stuff reviewed by reputable websites somehow
| loses out regularly.
|
| If I want someone's actual opinion and people I know don't have
| one, I have to check reddit or metafilter.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I used to add inurl:forum or inurl:thread to my searches to
| find actual opinions from people instead of ads disguised as
| articles. Now I just search reddit.
| georgehill wrote:
| Google recently updated its product review algorithm.
|
| https://blog.google/products/search/more-helpful-product-rev...
| ab_testing wrote:
| I would say that I have the exact opposite experience. My company
| is moving from IE to Edge as the default browser and I search for
| code issues on Edge (Bing). I usually do not like the results and
| then have to manually type in Google.com > search for code issues
| as that gives me better results.
| arccy wrote:
| you should be able set the default search engine...
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I like Edge, but the setting for the search engine is quite
| difficult to find despite being (I assume) one of the most
| common settings to change. You have to click on "Privacy,
| search, and services", then go the "Services" heading and
| click on the tiny "Address bar and search" box, and then you
| finally come to the page where it will let you change the
| default browser. Said "Address bar and search" box is also
| the very last item on the "Privacy, search, and services"
| page with no highlighting or emphasis whatsoever.
|
| Meanwhile for Firefox, I just have to go to "Search" and the
| setting for default search engine is immediately obvious.
| Chrome seems to have a similar layout as well despite being
| produced by a search engine company. Edge is my daily driver,
| but it still took me way longer to find the default search
| engine setting in Edge compared to Chrome and Firefox.
|
| Also, I have to compliment Firefox for making it really easy
| to search with a non-default search engine. I generally use
| Google, but I use Bing when searching for internal work stuff
| since it is integrated with O365 and SharePoint.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > setting for the search engine is quite difficult to find
|
| Didn't seem all that difficult to me.
|
| I went to settings, put "search" in the search box. That
| highlighted in yellow "address bar and search" click
| "manage search engines" click, 3 dots next to google,
| click, make default, click. 4 clicks with guiding highlight
| throughout. Didn't even need to google how to google with
| edge.
|
| I'm still using FF. However, switching search engines in
| Edge seems about the same difficulty as doing the same in
| FF or chrome.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I run into this on DuckDuckGo. I can try a bunch of different
| searches in DDG and not find what I need, then on Google it is
| the first result.
| mattferderer wrote:
| Question regarding the recipe example. Does Google deduct quality
| points the more ads that are put on the website? A long time ago,
| I recall hearing how Google was able to beat Yahoo by focusing on
| quality of ads & a higher click rate. Has Google defeated it's
| rivals & switched to their tactics?
|
| Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang
| operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use Bing.
| As the article points out, Bing is really awesome for searching
| for recipes.
|
| Looks like I need to start trying out Neeva & You.com. They had
| some nice features in this article.
|
| Neeva seems to be stealing all the important content from the
| recipe website which is a highly discussed issue. Bing tries to
| walk this line by making you still go to the website to read the
| instructions. Obviously people have trashed Google for doing this
| same thing on other kinds of websites. Though blogger recipe
| websites have somewhat encouraged this behavior due to their
| insane amount of ads & life stories they're well known for.
| jjeaff wrote:
| A very high percentage of ads on sites now use the Google ad
| network. So it may actually be in their interest to promote
| sites with more ads. They certainly promote a lot of garbage
| new sites on their Google news feed app and the product that
| they include on the pixel phones.
| aendruk wrote:
| > I already know what an Exception is, so I don't want to scroll
| halfway down the page to find what I'm looking for.
|
| I can't relate to this. That example, of the first result being
| the canonical documentation on the subject, is a search engine
| working exactly the way I want.
| cerved wrote:
| I thought the same thing but in the past I've also found the
| official python documentation to be somewhat verbose. Maybe
| these days I'd appreciate it more.
|
| I always found the MDN documentation striking a better balance
| of being in-depth but not an essay.
| simsla wrote:
| One Google feature that I miss terribly is hard filtering.
|
| Used to be if you included "term" or -"term" you'd only get
| results that did/n't include those terms. But it seems Google has
| gone all in on the "I don't think you really meant that" approach
| [ _], and the hard filters have become suggestions at best.
|
| --
|
| [_] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and
| more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard
| filters on top.
| asiachick wrote:
| I kinda hate searching for recipes. It's always the same 3-5
| sites who optimized for seo and , no idea what words to use here,
| for non European influenced cooking the recipes that surface at
| the top are often by people that really have no clue what
| authentic is.
|
| not a search example but it's like Jamie Oliver's fried rice
| renewiltord wrote:
| There was one which was no-bullshit and then a bunch of online
| people denounced it for removing all the story and context and
| stealing from PoC, etc.
| wanda wrote:
| I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of obvious that an
| entity extracting revenue from selling advertisement impressions
| is not going to produce a very useful search engine -- it's going
| to produce a search engine that maximises advertisement
| impressions. Either by encouraging the advertisers to game the
| search engine, or by simply preferring the paying advertisers'
| results, or both, on some level.
|
| So you end up with a Google that prioritises 2-3 promoted results
| above actual search results (some of which represent the opposite
| of what you're looking for _!_ ) and everything beneath is either
| a massive mainstream content factory, a Reddit/SO/Quora thread,
| or any one of a billion terrible blogs/news hosts that contain no
| content or simply regurgitate someone else's content with
| adverts, modals, etc galore.
|
| In fact, the only reason why Google's search engine is fairly
| safe in its product space -- the considerable head start on
| potential disruptors notwithstanding -- is that there apparently
| exists no comparably successful method to extract revenue from
| running a search engine.
|
| Not _that_ many people are realistically going to pay a monthly
| fee to have a Google without the noise, despite the amount of
| noise there is (I probably would). And let 's face it, if there
| was a market for that, Google Premium would probably exist
| already. Talk about vertical integration if they did though. Help
| pollute the ocean of the internet then sell people premium
| membership to sail across it rather than swim in it.
|
| One of the biggest things that Google did wrong was try to act as
| curator. The moment they start screening results by compliance
| with Google standards is the moment they make themselves no
| different to Facebook, Twitter and every other walled garden
| community. The internet is supposed to be about broadcasting
| information, about exploration and chasing the horizon -- not
| locking information behind forced memberships of social networks
| and paywalls, tardis-like megastructures where you're encouraged
| to become locked in yourself.
|
| Google could have been worse, of course. AMPHTML is pretty much
| over, right? They track your data, yes -- but show me the company
| that doesn't do that. Apple? Apple probably do, they just track
| less or whatever. Just because it's in the marketing doesn't
| necessarily mean that they don't do it, it just means that they
| know people will buy their shit if they _say_ they don 't, or
| make a point of doing it _less_.
|
| I don't blame Google for the way their search engine has turned
| out. As others have said, a big part of it is the sheer amount of
| noise out there now. But more importantly, the way capitalism
| works causes most companies to produce increasingly shitty
| products over time. This eventually creates the opportunity for
| someone new to release a great product, and eventually their good
| product will become a shitty dividend-paying product, and the
| cycle continues.
| kshacker wrote:
| I know google search is probably not the same as google flights,
| but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google
| flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia
| children.
|
| We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple
| independent tickets because we could not travel together. This
| was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through
| the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared
| to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to
| slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the
| airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to
| dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and
| analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually
| book through them since I did not want to get into the google
| payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not
| explore).
|
| On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a
| price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone
| up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem
| existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the
| airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.
| Sebguer wrote:
| Google bought the main provider of flight information in 2010
| (ITA). ITA had such a monopoly that Google was required to
| continue licensing their software out for years afterwards,
| though I think it expired in ~2016.
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