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Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

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Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#191

Post by NoSandbox »

phito wrote: post #147
dilliwal wrote: post #133

Also talking about SEO it is all so gamified. how can I just write something relevant and not do all the “tricks” and still reach to audience

Isn't it just the nature of competition? I've got a wordpress website where I don't really do any SEO, but it is of much better quality (IMHO) than my competitors who are not great with tech, and I am getting a lot of top ranked google/google images results.

that's the beauty of it. You can get massive traffic nowadays without building backlinks like back in the day. by making "better" content. Google really pays attention to user-signals like CTR and bounce rate. Source: I've tested and gamed it a lot.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#192

Post by burdo3417 »

oezi wrote: post #146
superasn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and on the other hand sites like codegrepper and other such scraper/scam sites are frequently showing in my search results - which are just SO results. I don't know if they're gaming Google's search or google is actually condoning this (like they've been condoning pinterest's shenanigans for almost 10 years now)

There is a ublock origin list which you can import to filter search results: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

amazing! ty

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#193

Post by robtherobber »

taftster wrote: post #56
kyrra wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googler, opinions are my own. For products that are core, large UI changes tend to just annoy a lot of users, unless there's something really amazing about the change. Even then, people are hesitant to like new UIs. Engineers and designers definitely want to try new things, but balancing those against messing with UIs that a billion+ people use is hard. My general take on drive and calendar, if they are trying to imp…

It's not "large" UI changes that are needed. (I mean, they are needed, the current google UI for most of their products sucks). But it's small improvements that make the big difference. A small user interface element added or removed to speed up an interaction. An updated user experience so that data can be found or organized in a slightly different way. I could pick on almost everyone of Google's products and have g…

One such example is the ability to copy my own email address. Gmail makes it so damn difficult it's mind-boggling. Whenever I try to copy my email address other elements are included in the selection, right-click is disabled and probably other annoying things happen: https://i.imgur.com/Ds0ROuT.png

Protonmail understood this and catered to this need without much fuss: https://i.imgur.com/1ZhWOsC.png

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#194

Post by Wavelets »

richardsocher wrote: post #49

This is one of the many problems we're trying to tackle at you.com (full disclosure, I work there). We felt like it's important that you can select your preferred sources and downvote sources you don't like. For this and other reasons we separate the experience into a private and personalized mode. So you get exactly what you want based on your explicit settings (like StackOverflow code snippets or arxiv papers) and…

I’ve had pretty good success with dev related searches on you.com. I like the idea of being able to downvote garbage sources. Who owns the company?

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#195

Post by NetOpWibby »

black_puppydog wrote: post #169
NetOpWibby wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try Neeva[0], made by ex-Google Search folks. [0]: https://neeva.com/p/signup?o=s&c=c3af6jnfmc2dehs8tq5g

"coming soon to your region" Ugh, that triggers me hard. I haven't lived in Germany nor Sweden for ~7 years now and Google never really figured out (despite me telling it so) that I don't need gmaps results in Stockholm and Berlin, and that yes, all my g products should be showing the English UI. If these folks are ex-google they might consider not doing shit like this in the first place.

Damn, that sucks! No idea they did things like that.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#196

Post by taftster »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #154
taftster wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a market for sites that have optimized search around a specific category of information. For example, imagine you had a hybrid directory+search model, where you could drill down into the directory: Top -> Programming -> Lisp -> Scheme And from there, search a repertoire of Scheme related articles, tips, blogs, etc. This model already exists, somewhat, in the form of scholarly articles, medical journal…

this is known as faceted search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_search on edit: I remember Carrot2 had the ability to derive categories from an index dynamically at one point, so when we put all the Danish laws into it and you searched for murder it generated categories such as Knife Murder etc. anyway here is the online Carrot2 with a search on Scheme https://search.carrot2.org/#/search/web/scheme/folders on e…

Hey - thanks for giving a name for this and the link to Wikipedia. I know it's not a "new" idea, but a faceted search organized and usable broadly across the www would be really useful.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#197

Post by taftster »

pengaru wrote: post #102
taftster wrote: post #23

I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…

Such optimism! Don't you think it's more likely in a post keyboard/computer-literate world Search web sites are displaced by vendor-provided App search boxes? You wanted news? Here's the CNN proprietary app in this beautiful walled garden! Enjoy the ads and total loss of privacy! [This app requires the following permissions: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US]

I think that's a fair point. The world of "apps" has certainly changed the meaning and usefulness of search. There's no exploring and random discovery when you're in the walled garden, unlike what it used to be like when you could really "surf" the web.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#199

Post by now-in-2d »

JimDabell wrote: post #90
SnowflakeOnIce wrote: post #74

I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.

I’ve noticed that as well. I’ve been finding a lot of queries are now leading me to those awful sites that just dump StackOverflow content onto a page and surround it with ads. The original Stack Overflow page is nowhere to be found on the first page, but if I grab a sentence from the spam page and search again, I can normally find the original.

Just last week I read about these search operators like site:example.com and learned that you can also use them to block certain sites (with -sites:example.com) and combine them. That gave me the idea to build a UI that manages allowed/blocked sites and always adds them as a chain of operators to the query.

Today I had some free time so I've build https://my-search.surge.sh/ as POC. It's a just static site. Everything is stored in localStorage. Works with Google and DuckDuckGo.

For now it's just a fun experiment, nothing more. Repo linked in the About page. Feedback welcome! :)

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#200

Post by wutbrodo »

mrVentures wrote: post #82

Can someone explain to me why the video results are so bad? Half the time I'm looking for YouTube and YouTube never shows up? Was this due to a lawsuit or something? Half the time it's some random website that has a 2minute video before two 30second ad rolls, never what I want.

My impression is that this was due to some legal constraint. I vaguely remember hearing about some legal pressure that prioritizing YouTube results was abusing monopoly power, and then shortly after that noticing as a user that YouTube became surprisingly uncommon as a result. It still annoys me.
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