51–60 of 296 posts
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So you replied to my response about the exact search term I used by telling me... this?
Yes, you said it was happening currently, so I tried it. The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively.
Also as a non native speaker you appear to be rude.
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This is correct. DuckDuckGo is finally better.
My experience is the opposite: while there certainly was a time when I felt DDG actually respected my queries [1] that time is now gone. The results I get often have very little to do with what I typed in the search box. I find myself resorting to !g more often than ever before. [1] I seem to have thought so in last December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665232
My experience was horrible. I don't tend to search 'popular' subjects, only technical ones, and hobbyist stuff. DDG was just plain useless for this, I had to switch back to google after about a week as I was using the !g prefix almost all the time.
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> Yes, on average it works Maybe we frequent vastly different websites, but this has absolutely not been true for me, even for companies who are supposed to be experts at using their data. I don't think I've ever seen an ad that has actually been relevant, and I'm not even trying to hide my habits or behaviors. For example, take Amazon. Their ads all over the web frequently recommends me stuff I've already bought jus…
> > Yes, on average it works > Maybe we frequent vastly different websites... I think we agree. What I mean is on average it works for Google , not that it works for us. They still makes boatloads of cash. For what I know the targeting is equally bad for you and me and everyone and they are just convincing advertisers that is worth paying for despite this.
I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…
I see mainly two problems: - Affiliate spam from douchebags that provide "reviews" of products just to link back to Amazon. Makes it nearly impossible to find actual reviews of products. - People who type whole sentences in natural language into Google. I tried since I used the internet to serach for keywords, omit as much words as possible that aren't necessary. Most people (after I guess ~2010?) don't. This worsens…
I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end of your search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google clearly lump all English based queries into the same geo-graphical bucket - they never used to do this.
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[1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am.
The "world's knowledge under you fingertips" motto is still valid and brilliant though. My personal solution is library of OCR-ed PDFs with most established books from various domains, git repository for each domain. Greppable in miliseconds, locally. Hijack this, SEO experts!
I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…
To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than struggling with bad SEO. - For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in doubl…
It is, however, technically a potential benefit that the more exactly advertisers can target you, the more relevant ads you could be seeing, which is a wonderful sales pitch for users who are agnostic anyway, but that's not how advertising works in practice.
I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…
Tweaking importance of some sites seems like a nice idea though, but it could also be a bad thing.
I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find. I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a…
There are definitely sites who's results I wish I could ban from my results. I won't visit them so they are just a waste of space. My short list, thillist, collider, vulture. Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a patte…