81–90 of 158 posts
Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There m…
Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There m…
Bing is much more useful. yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations. I suspect it's the new focus on content policing versus search quality and corresponding resource allocation, that did Google search in
Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine... I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like. For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.
Oh, that reminds me. How long has Youtube's search been so utterly useless and downright terrible? Whatever I enter, it interrupts the search results with recommendations THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY QUERY every 5 results. What the fuck, Google. Are you doing this on purpose? Did somebody piss in your cereal and you decided to collectively punish all of us? If that's not the case, who's responsible so I can go ove…
It's not just you. First, I wish you & your wife all the best. For me it's the same. The search has been made more easy for everyone by Google. But that implied the reduction of some Poweruser functions. In the early times, one could use "+" and "-" to define the search in detail. Nowadays, no +/- anymore accepted in the search, but... There is a link somewhere for "advanced search ". If you get onto that page, you c…
This has been bothering me as it seems large sites are knee-capping advanced search. eBay used to let you search for an item using partial keywords with a wildcard but no more. Used to be simple to find a close matching part number by adding the first few digits and an asterisk.
Google search have been a mess for a long time, years. Their search results have lately been randomly cluttered by frames and boxes, their awful, idiotic snippits that attempt to provide an authoritative answer to question queries (e.g. what is the weight of water), ads that look like results, shopping categories if it thinks your looking for a product, etc.
Their results in the past were quality but now I mostly use duckduckgo because if I'm going to be flooded with SEO spam, I might as well do it anonymously. I fall back to google if DDG fails to provide me with anything useful.
Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine... I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like. For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.
Other search engines give me results that are useless most of the time, because they do not contain all my carefully chosen search terms.
It's not just you. First, I wish you & your wife all the best. For me it's the same. The search has been made more easy for everyone by Google. But that implied the reduction of some Poweruser functions. In the early times, one could use "+" and "-" to define the search in detail. Nowadays, no +/- anymore accepted in the search, but... There is a link somewhere for "advanced search ". If you get onto that page, you c…
- still works. I just used it yesterday. Enclosing terms in quotes also mostly works as an alternative to + although it’s not quite the same. The biggest difference is that I find myself having to use both far more often than before to get non-spam results and now often have to go beyond the first page as well.
That has an interesting effect on how Koreans access information. Sometimes it works out badly, because top search result is not subject to any wisdom of crowds but often just one person's anecdotal view. On the other hand, you often find high-effort content by informed individuals or direct experience reports instead of SEO spam much easier than on Google.
My wife is Korean and much more fluent in the lang than I am. Her Naver search often outperforms my Google search lately in speed and quality.