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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

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

#141

Post by bushbaba »

supernovae wrote: post #125
bko wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.

none.. it’s all because of paid placement taking priority

Search, "what hotel to stay in san francisco soma". You'll see that every single result above the fold is an Ad.

In fact it doesn't even give me a single useful piece of information. #1 result is a link to expedia. #2 is to hotels.com, #3 to the trip advisor. Scroll down Google Hotels widget. Then on the 3rd browser viewpoint page I get actual query results.

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

#142

Post by madrox »

kauguste281 wrote: post #65

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see som…

I think companies have tried, but it simply hasn't worked. Yahoo tried to do a lot of this, and simply failed. Arguably they could have done it better, but I don't think many will have a better shot than them for a while more to come.

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

#143

Post by JSONderulo »

richardsocher wrote: post #55

They don't know yet about you.com? - No spam, no ads, you control the ranker with your source preferences, hardcore private mode that doesn't save anything nor uses your location (even DDG saves your queries and gives location-based results), many developer apps that include what you want - eg code snippets in a StackOverflow app, AI apps like you.com/write that would write essays for you, etc. Also, many folks (outs…

Great stuff, Richard. I've been using you.com since the beginning of the year and it continues to get better.

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

#144

Post by wolpoli »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #70
kauguste281 wrote: post #65

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see som…

Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away. You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

This could be solved with selectable ranking strategies. Of course Google isn't going to offer that.

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

#145

Post by space_rock »

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #22

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…

Sorry but duckduckgo or probably any other search is better than Google at this moment

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

#146

Post by grey_earthling »

I'm kind of surprised that HN hears “Google” and still thinks “web search” — I assumed the headline was about the company as a whole, and my mind first went to Gmail/Google Drive/their office stuff, Android/Chrome, and YouTube.

Are web search engines still “a thing” that people have opinions about? To me they're just kind of there and mediocre and unremarkable — the beige wallpaper of modern life, corporate blue and 12pt Arial; like a dreary shopping centre on a Tuesday; as exciting as a press release.

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

#147

Post by not2b »

The author missed the most important reason that Google search results often suck: tens of thousands of people are working very hard to make it suck. They call themselves "SEO specialists", and their job is to get their shitty site to the top of the rankings. It's an ongoing battle. Sure, Google wants to make money, but to do that they need to protect their search moneymaker and keep it dominant, so their incentive is to make the users happy. They aren't sucking on purpose.

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

#148

Post by jessriedel »

142 comments so far and no one is has mentioned the actual punchline of the OP: the Hypersearch chrome extension the author is pitching. Personally, I find the pitch compelling, but am very interested to hear from anyone who has used it.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag...

Note: This extension "can read and change all your data on all websites". Perhaps that's necessary for what they are offering, but it seems very dangerous, especially for a 1-week old extension with 24 users and 2 ratings.

Also, the "website" link (https://insight.space) on the Chrome extension page just says "The domain name insight.space is for sale!".

Do other folks have reason to trust this?

(General discussion of why Google Search is bad that does not actually engage with the specific details of the OP's arguments seems inappropriate in this thread; there have been innumerable HN threads about the general issue.)

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

#149

Post by mostlysimilar »

paulpauper wrote: post #137
humanwhosits wrote: post #108

I've started using DDG for most searches, and a private email provider instead of gmail

duck duck outsources to bing, so you are really using bing

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

>> To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

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

#150

Post by gotaquestion »

I've been using DDG for several years and every once and a while I prefix my search with "g!" to search google, and it isn't any better, so I stopped doing that.

Maybe people don't know there are alternatives? How does OP expect them to switch to Hypersearch if they aren't even using DDG which has been around for a very long time?

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