Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 284 posts

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

#191

Post by crocodiletears »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #186

As far as I can tell, there are four major search providers: Google, Bing, Baidu, & Yandex. Qwant seems to do some amount of their own indexing, falling back to Bing for other things ( https://betterweb.qwant.com/web-indexation-where-does-qwants... ). Most of the 'alternative' search engines (DDG &c.) seem to rely on Bing and a few (like StartPage) on Google, and I continue to find regular Bing-based search results w…

Search engines like Google and Bing are like a new pair of shoes, imho. You've got to give them a week or rwo of use before they really fit your use case. I used to use Searx, and DDG, and kept having to fall back on Google regularly.

I went to Bing, and had a similar issue. But after its personalization kicked in, I haven't had to go back to Google more than once or twice a month, and in general, I'm happier with my results when I compare the two.

YMMV, though. I trust Google less than I trust Microsoft for search, because the company and its employees seem to lack a "save the world" pathology which I keep getting hints of whenever someone pulls back the curtain on the company's culture. I can intuitively understand a corporate Megalith like MS's interest a lot more easily, so I'm more comfortable deciding whether or not I'm getting a good response from Bing.

But as a daily driver, unless you're really concerned about Google, I don't think there's any material advantage to making the switch.

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

#192

Post by grawprog »

kerkeslager wrote: post #97
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.

I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.

>quality ads

I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.

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

#193

Post by rednerrus »

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…

I can tell you that Instgram serves up ads for things I didn't know that I wanted that I end up buying.

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

#195

Post by [deleted] »

calibas wrote: post #183
kerkeslager wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.

Peretti is talking about the quality of the ad service, not the quality of the ads themselves. Peretti is suggesting that maybe Google's service isn't anything special, and their success is due to their insanely large audience. The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.

[deleted]

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

#196

Post by friedegg »

celticmusic wrote: post #190
Semaphor wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG only just recently added the feature that they show you which terms they ignored… most of the time. This is actually my main problem with DDG (which is my default search engine), that they like to ignore even quotation mark-forced words. My impression is that Google sees "" as an important signal for what you want while DDG sees it as something you probably did by mistake and decides to show you a ton of unrelate…

I was under the impression that google ignores quotes, atleast that was my experience starting years ago before I switched to DDG. Maybe they changed that stance at some point?

They used quotes to take the place of + which used to be a prefix you could add for words that were required. We lost + to Google+.

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

#197

Post by mindfulhack »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #160
thrwaway69 wrote: post #63

Here is a list of alternatives: Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org Duckduckgo: https://duck.com Yandex: https://yandex.com Cliqz: https://beta.cliqz.com Qwant: https://www.qwant.com Startpage: https://www.startpage.com Searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx Bing: https://bing.com Resources to build your own: https://github.com/topics/search-engine https://openwebindex.eu https://commoncrawl.org

I regularly use yandex for reverse image search, it does much better than google and bing.

You're right. Wow. Just tried it. (yandex.com/images) This thread is really opening up the truth which is that Google is no longer the be all and end all of search.

This is a great feeling. Thanks for the Yandex tip.

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

#198

Post by AlchemistCamp »

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…

I've both read trials of 3rd parties and run campaigns where ads are a significant boost to the site already ranking #1 in organic results.

The price of AdWords has certainly gone up, but the value hasn't declined.

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

#199

Post by int_19h »

rurp wrote: post #16
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…

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.

Indeed! It's got to the point where I have to quote like 80% of the keywords in my query, just so that it doesn't throw them away. Because if I do not, I've had cases where it would throw away 2 out of 3 keywords for some results - and, as you say, it's usually the less generic ones that get thrown out.

Even worse, sometimes instead of striking them out, it substitutes them with "synonyms" that are anything but. For example, if you search for FreeBSD, you sometimes get results where "linux" is highlighted as a keyword. I'm pretty sure that this is some ML crap doing this, because the more obscure the term, the more likely it is to get it not just wrong, but hilariously wrong, even to the point of meaning the opposite.

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

#200

Post by oehpr »

feanaro wrote: post #189
oehpr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put the question to people "Would you have an easier time finding good products and services if there were no advertisements?" I think the majority of people would answer "no". It's sad state of affairs we're in if we can't even imagine finding out about something without that knowledge being forced down our throats.

I haven't seen an internet ad in years due to using uBlock Origin with very strict block lists. I feel like I find products and services I need effortlessly. Am I missing something?

Yes. We are discussing googles advertising, and the strategic decisions it forces on companies operating within googles context. And in my post more generally, how that same game plays out in wider society, and with the general public

We are not discussing your personal advertising experience. Nor even the general technocratic audience of HN's advertising experience.

Post reply on HN