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On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

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Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#2
A friend had to chance his product name, because Google wouldnt stop suggesting porn. You googled his product and instead you found porn. It was not really related, and the term was as innocent as possible in it self, but well google thought and still thinks you want porn.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#4
post #2

A friend had to chance his product name, because Google wouldnt stop suggesting porn. You googled his product and instead you found porn. It was not really related, and the term was as innocent as possible in it self, but well google thought and still thinks you want porn.

Duckduckgo has a safe filter that blocks porn and a few other things from showing up in the search results that works pretty well, you can decide to take it off at any time too. They have the same kind of filter for looking for country specific results.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#6

One of the worst things is that they are removing Wikipedia from the "Knowledge Graph" results and generally replacing it with stuff inferior.

Any speculation on why they'd want to do this? It seems clearly better for the consumer if wikipedia shows up at the top anytime you google a word/phrase that appears in wikipedia. Do they make money on the results that are showing up higher?

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#7

One of the worst things is that they are removing Wikipedia from the "Knowledge Graph" results and generally replacing it with stuff inferior.

Any speculation on why they'd want to do this? It seems clearly better for the consumer if wikipedia shows up at the top anytime you google a word/phrase that appears in wikipedia. Do they make money on the results that are showing up higher?

Could it have anything to do with Wikipedia usually being the number one result people are actually searching for for a great number of queries? And they want to distribute that traffic more democratically?

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#8
Yeah this bites me nearly every day. I can only assume that they have some data that this helps 60%-80% of their users in some way, and they are optimizing for the common case rather than the uncommon case.

Not sure that it's the right decision, even if it helps the common case, but it may be. And I say this as somebody who's not particularly fond of Google as a company or its policies.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#9
post #2

A friend had to chance his product name, because Google wouldnt stop suggesting porn. You googled his product and instead you found porn. It was not really related, and the term was as innocent as possible in it self, but well google thought and still thinks you want porn.

Duckduckgo has a safe filter that blocks porn and a few other things from showing up in the search results that works pretty well, you can decide to take it off at any time too. They have the same kind of filter for looking for country specific results.

So you are saying that friend should go on a campaign to convince all of that product's potential users to not use Google and use DuckDuck ago instead?

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#10
This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assuming I want something else.
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