If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? • Hacker News Board

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#11

Post by SllX » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:31 PM UTC

My standard line on this is that Google today is not as good as Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago, but it is still the best available option today because nothing is as good as or better than Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago.

That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once I’ve had a chance to actually investigate the new options.

EDIT: Maybe I should note that I’ve also been relying a lot more on Reddit too in the past year since Apollo has a decent search interface for Reddit and I’ve gotten used to processing new subs quickly and getting information out of them. If nothing else I usually at least have a stack of new terminology to feed my search queries elsewhere.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#12

Post by ct0 » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

If you're referring to google search specifically, a major tool to combat the spammed ads in search that has helped me is available here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt...

https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#13

Post by anothernewdude » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

Inertia

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#14

Post by johndfsgdgdfg » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's tyrannical regime on internet ends.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#15

Post by Gualdrapo » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

I still use it mainly for non "standard" search:

- Its location feature is better than DDG or anything else - It has gotten worse a bit, but if I tell it to show me results from Colombia, 95% of the results it will return are from actual websites from Colombia. DDG will throw anything from Latin America, for example. Not to mention the disaster with Bing.

- Its image search feature is still more precise than others. Reverse search won't return sometimes what I'm looking for and I have to resort to Yandex/TinEye/Bing, but still. Oh, and it can search for SVGs, which others can't.

- Double quotes aren't returning exact matches, but other operators are working fine as far as I can tell. Filetype operator is great and way bigger than DDG's, cache operator is great for looking for a cached version of a website that is not working at the moment, the minus operator still works (sans the advertisements).

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#16

Post by penjelly » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

i use brave and brave.search, havent had search issues since switching over.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#17

Post by dddnzzz334 » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

post_break wrote: post #9

I use DDG most of the time, then when I cant find technical stuff I g!. And let's be honest, bing is the king for porn.

> bing is the king for porn.

I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#18

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#19

Post by sithadmin » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:39 PM UTC

johndfsgdgdfg wrote: post #14

I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's tyrannical regime on internet ends.

Amazon did build one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#20

Post by falcolas » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

The moat is worse than we think. New search engines are not only hobbled by the bandwidth and processing power and storage required to spider the web, but by the websites who will preemptively disallow them because they're not Google.

I can't imagine trying to build a new search engine when the landscape is intentionally (if justifiably) hostile to new search engines.