I trust them for dev stuff, error codes, obscure technical whatever, but not for news or political content, and I’m wary about certain scientific/medical topics.
How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
11–20 of 284 posts
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who do you use? I use Bing and like it, but I also used to work there.
Not sure about everyone else but google is a proxy for other sites now where I can get relevant answers. So I have 2 clicks to the eventual site instead of 1. Similar to using site:www.reddit.com or something similar. I realize that's still using Google as a search engine but it is different than how I previously used it. Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or ge…
>Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or getting a quick definition/spellcheck.
That is exactly right! I use it as a reference material, calculator, or map. There is no other use for google search due to optimization nonsense.
For anything in-depth, I use technical resources and databases available through my local public library.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#13> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is billions of people use Google?
Key paragraph of the article. You don't have to be good at ads when you have a firehose of most of the world's population coming directly to you, telling you exactly what they want to buy/find/learn/read/do in their native language combined with their geolocation and search history. It would be hard not to serve up relevant ads in that case.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#14I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as…
They are definitely trying to guess what you are searching for. One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local", they don't have an international search mode where the most relevant result in the world shows up.
Yes, Google is definately not a keyword search engine anymore, and not a great "question answering" engine yet. Uncanney walley?
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#15I miss the days when I could search with AND, OR, +word and -word. Now if I search google with more than one word it no longer searches the internet. Instead it searches for ads that are somewhat similar to my query and features those. Any useful links on the first page are accidental.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#16I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as…
Google ignoring what I had actually typed and instead showing results to a more popular query that was similar, but distinctly different, is what finally got me to switch over to DuckDuckGo. Now that I've gotten used to DDG I find Google unpleasant to use. The amount of ads and clutter on the page is distracting, and the organic results seemed ever more skewed towards ecommerce results.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#17I've already moved on. Same expected junk at the top nowadays.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#18You can remove some bias by using startpage.com but it won't eliminate SEO. Maybe Yandex?
I wish baidu had an english version. But yeah, bing, yandex, ddg.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#19I have to disagree fundamentally with the author on this point:
> but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently
Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. There is nothing ugly about getting people exactly what they need instantly.
As for the main thrust of the article, I’ve already found Google’s results mostly untrustworthy. For some time search results have been so dominated by adverts that frequently the results I was looking for are buried under the fold. Search is a simple task and for 99% of searches there are at least 2 competitors who serve 90% fewer adverts per page. For the other 1% of searches I’m 3 keystrokes away from getting Google’s search laden results as a second opinion.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#20I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as…
To get the old behaviour for literal search using quotes enable the "Verbatim mode" (Tools > All results > Verbatim)
It's a must if you're a developer searching for some obscure error message, yet still most people don't know about it.