321–330 of 433 posts
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Ten years ago Google Calculator used to work perfectly. I don't understand how they've broken it and why no one is responsible for fixing it. Perhaps everyone who understood the codebase has left?
No one is going to get promoted for maintaining a calculator, so it rotted. Clearly they should have put a chat app in it.
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Isn't Google's monetization for Search results the primary reason for not allowing crowd funded quality metrics? If only good results get to the top how do they make money? Google's Search business model appears to be predicated on poor results getting disproportionately prominent listing.
The actual sponsored links end up at the top anyway. I don't see how bad regular results would contribute to their revenue; it would just drive people away.
Let's say you run a good song-lyrics site that has the correct lyrics for everyone's favorite songs. You happen to be on page 2 of google results for common queries; all of page 1 is taken up by spammers, fake pages, etc.
How can you possibly drive traffic to your site? Maybe you can invest in SEO but no promises there. You'd be competing against people whose whole focus is SEO and nothing else. The only option left is to buy ads.
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But you do vote on search results. Google knows if you stay on a page or leave it quickly for another result. That's an implicit vote that they definitely take into account. Having that explicit button might not really add any additional value.
How? I don't use Chrome.
The methodology in this article is terrible. It makes me doubt that the people at Surge HQ understand even the most basic scientific concepts. This is like doing a taste test between two sodas where one is clearly labeled "Coke" and the other labeled "Pepsi". It will end up measuring branding and public perception instead of anything empirical or even objective. This isn't a measurement of search quality, it's a publ…
Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google's problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways. I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering…
> I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering what you entered. This is probably part of it but not the whole explanation: Try to search on Google for: slack ngrok When I and others did earlier today there were a number of pa…
It is the top result on Bing as well. It probably shows up in this spot on both search engines because it's prominently linked on https://ngrok.com/.
I think that Google is optimizing for the "average user" to the detriment of power users such as the HN crowd. Most people treat Google as an internet oracle and send queries like "how do I do X" while power users will search for keywords. One example of this optimization is the automatic answer boxes that show up for certain questions, which are wrong disturbingly often or don't include important details.
I miss Altavista. I could generally either find exactly what I was looking for inside of three iterations of refining the search, or find that it wasn't to be found. I still just want a blazing fast full text search of the reachable WWW that understands regexes and a basic predicate calculus. Unfortunately the overhead and small potential user base means that under the current regime such a thing will never be made.…
This reply is based on my own biased experience, but I run a small website to share public trail data and I've found that Google (in my opinion) artificially suppresses my site's results on really basic searches. Within Google's search console you can easily check if a page has been indexed. For example, I've published new trails/hikes in the past where Google's index claims it includes the page.. but when I search "…
It's definitely deteriorating, and the worst part is that it completely ignores quotes if it thinks you meant something else, and shows the results for what it thinks you want. Completely useless in a lot of cases