31–40 of 515 posts
Way, way worse. There was a time you could force Google to only return pages with a specific term by wrapping it in double quotes (or further back, prefixing with a plus). This was useful when trying to learn about a specific error message/code. Now, it's a total crapshoot, and you may not get a single useful result at all.
Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
Right now Neeva seems very good at navigational queries, which I do 90% of the time. It's still not as good at deep research queries for obscure things. Probably related: Neeva is relying on Bing for a big chunk of their queries. But they are building their own index.
Way, way worse. There was a time you could force Google to only return pages with a specific term by wrapping it in double quotes (or further back, prefixing with a plus). This was useful when trying to learn about a specific error message/code. Now, it's a total crapshoot, and you may not get a single useful result at all.
It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…
Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
Oh, and the cherry on top is completely abandoning the idea of Natural Language Processing. Go right back to keywords only.
What do you mean by "worse" - it's hard to assess something defined in a qualitative manor quantitatively.
Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
I've pondered this, too. Why not a DMOZ 2.0 type concept, where you seed the index with high quality sites and grow from there. Freshness won't matter as much for most topics, so crawling X times per day probably won't be necessary. Maybe have user defined flags to indicate the types of results they want (large sites, small sites, high authority, technical sites-- maybe different sort by features) with backlinks/doma…
Imagine a service that provides you with a personal search engine in exchange for a list of your bookmarks. Those bookmarks provide the signal for what sites to index for the public search engine.
For me it was the pinterestizing of image search that finally made me realize how pointless google was. Why use a service that is just going to feed me ads in response to every query?
Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
Not only that, we just need one that works the way Google used to work. You know, something like the old algorithm that made Google famous and made competitors obsolete.
Unless you have some pretty evil supervillain scheme, no moral compass, and succeed.... that world is never coming back.