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How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

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Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#111

Post by scarejunba »

titzer wrote: post #103
Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.

After all this time watchin me, everything I ever asked it, all the ads I never clicked on, all the videos it watched me watch, all my emails it read, heck even after I worked for the dang company for nearly ten years, Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it! I am sick of looking at it, I am sick of it looking at me. I am sick of hearing about how advertising is…

You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings.

The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that.

It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#112

Post by rstupek »

suifbwish wrote: post #59
eckza wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to DDG about a month ago, and the results are always dead-on for me. I don’t even notice that it’s not Google anymore.

In theory websites could kill off googles dominance by blacklisting their crawler and only caring about traffic from DDG and other lesser known engines

and probably kill themselves off the internet at the same time

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#113

Post by JohnFen »

mehrdadn wrote: post #91
JohnFen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, no. Their price tag and their billing shenanigans sure do, though.

I guess, but the price tag seems intertwined with the quality of service? Hard to separate them (at least for me).

The pricing is much higher than equally good service that can be had from other companies in other parts of my city, so I consider it overpriced.

But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until the next time.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#114

Post by gumby »

Reedx wrote: post #79
blackearl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual? Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...

This is just anecdote:I have two houses with Comcast: one in Palo Alto and one in the sierras. The one in the sierras is pretty fast though had lots of multi-hour outages that stopped a couple of years ago.

The one in Palo Alto goes out a couple of times a week and is quite slow.

Luckily they haven't implemented the mooted usage caps: last year I was traveling for a few months but somehow managed to transfer tens of GB over the network in the sierras, according to Comcast's site.

They have a lot of good network engineers but the work at the edge is inferior.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#115

Post by summerlight »

jborichevskiy wrote: post #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 bill…

> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway?

This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications.

I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#116

Post by scarejunba »

hunter-gatherer wrote: post #33
gregcrv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google trying to guess everything I was doing before me is what finally broke me from them. The day (not terrible long ago) I started typing an email in gmail and they were auto-typing entire sentences for me I lost it. I don't need an algorithm to help dictate my sentence structure. I can do that on me own.

That one showed up as a pop-up box for me and asked me if I wanted to turn on suggestions. I don't think they changed that.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#117

Post by Japhy_Ryder »

JohnFen wrote: post #50
grecy wrote: post #21

Does anyone here even really use Google's search engine anymore? I do search for stuff a lot, but to be honest I know perfectly when it will be a stackoverflow page I want, or a wikipedia page, or it will have that link to maps. I can't remember the last time I searched for something and I didn't already know what domain I actually wanted to end up on.

I don't use Google's search engine, but I do use search engines heavily. Unlike you, I rarely know what site will have what I'm looking for in advance -- it's rarely SO, Wikipedia, or maps.

Just out of morbid curiosity, _what_ kind of things are you usually looking for?

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#119

Post by scarejunba »

extropy wrote: post #14
gregcrv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"whats the movie where all the kids shoot ewch other on an island"

Pretty good for me. Gives me Battle Royale.

"whos the african warlord who has that laughing gif"

Top result is video of "Idi Amin laughing on a boat". Just the thing I was thinking of.

Pretty good.

"whats the name of the principle that two particles csnt have the same characteristics"

Pauli's Exclusion Principle as the top result. Great.

Google has always worked really well for me.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#120

Post by dodobirdlord »

II2II wrote: post #40
BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

I'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…

Perhaps they should create "Google Pro" that searches for what people ask for rather than trying to interpret what they mean. Don't get me wrong, the interpretations can be useful for generic queries. On the other hand, it is annoying when I know the exact terms that I need. > I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. Agreed. It also reminds me that th…

It exists, there are several configuration options you can enable.
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