I can pay for a search engine service if it blocks paywalls, bloated sites, fake bullshit clickbait contents. It’s time consuming to find what you’re looking for with Google. Unfortuanetely, there is no alternative.
Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
31–40 of 221 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#32gated results are clearly cloaking right? displaying different content for googlebot vs the search user?
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#33If you can get a beta invite for https://kagi.com get it. Not only are their defaults really good you also have the option to customize your searches by blacklisting, creating groups with sites like stackoverflow, github, hackernews etc for a dev search and so much more. It feels like google in the 00s with better customization.
Tried getting one. Told me to fill up a survey. Closed.
You won't be a good beta tester without providing feedback so good for them.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#34The google scraping bot gets past the pay walls in many cases
I have a user-agent switcher and switching to googlebot definitely puts you beyond many paywalls.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. DDG is still not as good on certain searches, but most of the time it's perfectly adequate.
You are correct. I tried DDG before but it just isn’t good enough. I have been trying the new you.com search engine for a couple of months and it is really good, more so if you are in tech and your searches are work related.
Same, I've found you.com much more useful than DDG, especially for code related searches. Been using it for a month and haven't gone back.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. DDG is still not as good on certain searches, but most of the time it's perfectly adequate.
One day I hope either ddg becomes good, or a good alternative pops up.
DDG is pretty good, it just requires a bit more context on average. As using a search engine is a lot about knowing the right choice of keywords it takes some time to adjust to the differences. Waiting for another random search engine that works exactly like Google is gonna take a while.
I still find what I need, that's all I care about. And I can't remember seeing a pinterest link on the first page.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#37I think it's probably tied to the rise in gated content. Especially news. Unless they want to delist every for-profit news site, they can't carte blanche remove walled content. The algo is fundamentally based on popularity. If enough users are logging in to those sites and clicking on them, they'll keep being ranked.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#38Thanks to this cursed god forsaken parasite "Pinterest" I just completely stopped using google's image search option. I'm using bing/ddg now and it feels soooo good compared to how awful google search experience became
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#39It blows my mind that Google penalizes sites for being a fraction of a second slower than they imagine they should be, but a site I can’t actually view- right to the top baby.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#40I 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…
I've been coming to a similar conclusion. Increasingly I've had to use `site: ` syntax with DDG, but DDG has clearly become significantly worse in recent months. This was confirmed by others in another HN thread recently. Even if I use the site-syntax or use quotes to specify exact match (which DDG used to honor), I'll often get nonsense results whereas Yandex somehow manages to find results that aren't on DDG or Goo…
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 journals, etc. But there seems to be some innovation needed.
If there were such a "site" that focused on and aggregated Scheme related documentation, you'd think that being listed on that search-directory would be totally acceptable to the website owner. After all, a web article or blog generally wants to be read, especially by an interested reader.
Somehow we need to get back to the web being like a library, with a librarian and a well organized categorical index for references.
Getting humans back into the search loop I think is where we're going to circle to. Like asking your local librarian for information about a topic that is in their special collection.