I've found a solution to this - you need to use the internet in any language other than English. You get much higher quality results that are not so full of ads and SEO and all of the other evil stuff which is going on. Its not perfect, but if you search for "pancake recipe" in French or German you have a much higher chance of being linked to some "old internet" style blog rather than some food.com bullshit.
Google Search Is Dying
941–950 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#942Google Rep: "You said in the post that quotes don't give exact matches. They really do. Honest. Me: Google for "quotes don't give": Top result, does not contain the given phrase Second result, does not contain that phrase This is literally the first thing I tried and I did a view source to be sure. They are lying to us and/or themselves. Looking at the result, I would say 1/2 the results don't include that phrase inc…
I'm the Google Rep, and there were two more parts to my reply which explain this: Here's why people often think quoting with Google doesn't work when it really does (I've looked a huge number of these reports). 1) We match ALT text 2) We match text not readily visible, such as in a menu or small text 3) Page has changed since we indexed it 4) Punctuation... Punctuation comes into play if you did a quoted search like…
I realise you're trying to help, but this is still not right. The top result for "quotes don't give":
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/never-give-up
Does not contain: "quotes don't give" "quotes dont give"
Nor does the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
Yes, as someone pointed out, there are tokenized versions down at the bottom, but that exact string does not exist.
So first of all it's just not true.
Second of all, if your consumers are all complaining the results do not match what they are searching, it might make more sense to listen. Adding quotations marks like that to find an exact string should be a huge red flag that the user is only interested in that string – why then would "it's in an offscreen meta tag of a cached version of the actual site" be anything other than a bad result?
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#943Just the way Chrome insists on auto-completing searches has seriously damaged the efficiency of my Googling. I'll search something like "Type-97 whatsit making funny noises", get no results, go to search just for "type-97 whatsit" and it adds the rest back on by itself and I get the same useless results from the first time. I don't make the mistake often enough to remember not to make it, and every time I wonder what…
And three million youtube videos for "funny noises compilation" featuring various farts
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#944Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers. Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has…
Just tried https://andisearch.com/ and I like it. Felt like a fresh look on results instead of the same old SEO ones. For example, searched for a few Java queries and found very informative website/results that weren't dominated by Bealdung. Searched for "soccer scores", "chelsea FC", "prince andrew", "WP export" and found things that would never have been on Google's first page, but were excellent returns. Nice work…
Very cool effort but just the first thing I tried which is a mega common search for everyone. "Denver weather."
Took a while to load, and only gave me short text of current conditions.
When I did "denver weather forecast" it gave a bit more and showed results on the right from Wolfram and others but they don't tell me anything. Wolfram is current conditions and wind tomorrow. Next one just meta description for weather underground.
It's going to snow tomorrow. That's what people are searching for.
Google gets this stuff and makes that info super visually accessible.
I really don't get the hate on their search quality. If it has gone down I haven't experienced this outside of mega spam things like recipes.
But I still experience the black magic of typing in some vague thing you are trying to remember and somehow they know what it is.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#945Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers. Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has…
I might be wrong, but they also have a moat I'm the sheer amount of compute required to trawl through the internet?
I mean maybe they was true and now they don't... But yeah good luck!
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#946With uBlock, the web is a different place.
Did not realize Google shows these many ads!
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#947It's interesting, and quite concerning, that Reddit has cemented its position as a key repository of useful information on just about everything just as its drive towards monetisation really kicks into gear. It's concerning because, as part of that monetisation strategy, Reddit is becoming increasingly walled off and anti-user. I am sure I am only one of many long-time Redditors who have vowed to stop using the site…
Has anyone here actually tried the " reddit" search lately? Click on a reddit link and it takes you to a page that forces you to open it in an app. This has made me stop using reddit completely.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#948It's interesting, and quite concerning, that Reddit has cemented its position as a key repository of useful information on just about everything just as its drive towards monetisation really kicks into gear. It's concerning because, as part of that monetisation strategy, Reddit is becoming increasingly walled off and anti-user. I am sure I am only one of many long-time Redditors who have vowed to stop using the site…
Has anyone here actually tried the " reddit" search lately? Click on a reddit link and it takes you to a page that forces you to open it in an app. This has made me stop using reddit completely.
Maybe you're a part of an a/b test? Reddit has always worked fine in the browser for me.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#949Contrarian opinion ahead: when everyone is skating in one direction, I try to look the other way to see what they might be missing.
With the rush to ML and AI in search and recommendation systems, I think there are huge opportunities in curation.
Curation is the opposite of where tech has been heading. Why? “Curation doesn’t scale!” People cry, but this ignores two important points: (1) it can scale via the crowd, and (2) it doesn’t necessarily need to scale to be valuable.
Regarding (1), others in this thread have suggested website up/down votes. Just one example of a scalable system. There are so many sites I’d tag as spam for my friends to avoid if I could. It’d be great if we could work together to eliminate the code spam sites, for example.
Regarding (2), I would happily take book recommendations from someone like PG even though he’s only read a tiny tiny tiny fraction of all books written. Critics don’t read everything, but they use their experience and social graph to find great culture. I’d value a domain expert’s opinion on great books over any number of Google queries.
I feel like there’s a massive opportunity here to “take a step backwards” towards curation and the high quality content it has traditionally provided. There are dozens of huge curation startup opportunities waiting for those willing to go against the wind.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#950Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers. Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has…
Is there a reason why you've chosen the chat style interface vs the standard search box at the top and results at the bottom layout?
This is not a comment on the search results itself - always appreciate the efforts to break out of the standard google results and surface other sources, but I found the interface confusing and the previews were also taking up a lot of space. A compact view would be better - or giving the option to turn the previews on / off.