541–550 of 1001 posts
An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…
What happened to clubhouse?
An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…
Free project idea for someone with more time on their hands than me: Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers are winning the arms-race. So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust. People used to curate lists of website…
Another "sticky" problem is how to make a living out of this I guess...
Have you ever utterly failed to extract information from google and just given up entirey? This happened to me most recently when I tried to look up what model snowboards are used by certain athletes in the winter olympics. You cannot bring up a relevant result. The minute you add the athletes name and snowboard to the query, no matter the surrounding terms, it just brings up the media dump of articles about the snow…
I don't know this, but would wager that a lot of people have scaled back what they search for on Google either consciously or subconsciously. The amount of topics you can expect quality results for has shrunk an awful lot, especially for subjects that are technical and/or non-current.
The DDG results aren't superb, but they also don't invoke the feelings of communicating with a distracted child or poorly-trained pet.
The other day I was searching for a specific kind of jewelry and realized I don't know of a search engine that can do what I needed, which is to just find good results for my search. Searches for jewelry-related keywords triggered Google to go 90+% ads, and their results (and other search engines' results) were so junked up with spam and the same couple sites over and over that they were useless. We're back to the We…
They have the buyer ready to buy and still missed the sale because they wanted to make a profit on ads. How ironic. And this kind of experience probably turns a lot of buyers off from using Google search. We don't need your unrelated ads, we already know what to buy, don't patronize us. We need help getting to the product page from keywords. We need real reviews. We need a shopping experience we can trust.
An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…
Free project idea for someone with more time on their hands than me: Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers are winning the arms-race. So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust. People used to curate lists of website…
Throw in some microformats2 and/or schema.org structured data and you're good to go.
Certain search engines specialize in this type of manually-curated content; I listed some in the "non-generalist search" section of my collection of indexing search engines: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
There have been many interesting threads recently about the decline of Google's search quality here on HN. There's zero doubt search results are getting worse, and that ads and spam are the cause. But Google's financial performance has been going from record to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the market. Each thread has had some common themes, but what's surprising is how different the problems disc…
I’m glad more and more people, from both here and on Reddit (similar discussions appear sporadically) are beginning to notice. I actually have most of these links already favorited haha. I hope your startup pans out well. Thanks for doing your part to make the internet less terrible!
I mean you can't blame Google too much. In the early days, a large fraction of Internet users made websites and had hand-picked, curated links. This gave Google a fantastic ranking signal with a high signal-to-noise ratio. This is mostly gone now and honestly I'm surprised their search is as good as it is.
The death of hand-curated general web directories like DMOZ has also deprived search engines of a hugely relevant "signal" for high-quality content. I'm not surprised that the SEO blackhats have basically won since then. (You can view the schema.org specification for machine-readable content description as an attempt by the big search engines to partially reverse this dynamic and give white-hat SEO the upper hand aga…
I will say as an academic, google scholar is still superior. I just search with the !scholar bang on in DDG.
I’m struggling to follow. Can anyone give an example of a query, and then the ideal result that Google is not delivering?