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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?

#151

Post by ipsi »

q-big wrote: post #127
elevaet wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that even work? Define the border between SEO and abuse.

> Define the border between SEO and abuse. Perhaps there is no border to be defined since nearly all SEO is abuse?! The only acceptable SEO should be "provide website content that is more relevant/interesting for the viewer".

Let's say someone writes a blog article. They publish it on Wordpress with a bunch of unoptimised defaults. Some time after, someone comes along and says "Hey, the search engine will rank your post more highly if you include the name of the post in the URL instead of just having it be blog.example.com/posts?id=1234", so they change the URL. Is that SEO? Should that result in the site being de-listed/banned? It doesn't meet your definition of "provide website content that is more relevant/interesting for the viewer".

And where is the line between "provide website content that is more relevant/interesting for the viewer" and SEO? If I realise that (to take an example from something found on Google) I could take the sentence "Identify the best customers and convert more" and rewrite it as "Marketing automation helps you identify the best customers and convert more", is that SEO because I'm intentionally adding a keyword, or is that making the content more relevant to the user by being more explicit in what I'm saying?

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

#152

Post by jasinjames »

omnicognate wrote: post #99
sltkr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi requires users to sign up (even though it's currently free?) which is 1000x more user-hostile than anything Google does and makes it a nonstarter as far as I'm concerned.

Kagi is intended to be a paid service when it launches. This is something I actively want. It should make them the opposite of user-hostile. Their users will be the source of their revenue so they will need to provide value or lose them. Login is a necessary part of that. I'm happy to take both that inconvenience and the cost.

And as of now, they are listening to users very attentively. Just a few hours ago I suggested they clarify the defualt "Programming" filter since it only searches q&a sites (i.e Stack Overflow) and they have already changed the name to "Programming Help" to make it more clear.

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

#153

Post by dlsa »

thrwawy283 wrote: post #80
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…

You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no complex filtering to do things like removing search results that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to specifically refine your search. Google still has the most useful search, but they've taken away methods to get bette…

Going backwards and standing still often look the same. I think its both in this case to varying degrees. Google is competing against itself, obvious competitors but also obvious refinements that appear so regardless of actually being implemented. The no-login filter is a refinement that would be useful to many.

There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.

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

#154

Post by Gtex555 »

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…

Could you please go into more detail , I agree with you btw.

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

#155

Post by moistly »

not2b wrote: post #147

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 i…

Search isn’t Google’s moneymaker, advertising is. And those shitty SEO’d sites are choc-a-bloc with advertising. Google has little incentive to downrank them.

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

#156

Post by lolinder »

Melatonic wrote: post #107
omnicognate wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi is intended to be a paid service when it launches. This is something I actively want. It should make them the opposite of user-hostile. Their users will be the source of their revenue so they will need to provide value or lose them. Login is a necessary part of that. I'm happy to take both that inconvenience and the cost.

I used it for awhile and did like it quite a bit - I found myself having a bit of anxiety though worrying if I was going to hit the search limit with my more trivial queries. Google really has us psychologically

Is there a search limit for Kagi during beta? I don't see it documented anywhere, and I've been using it as my primary search engine for a few months and haven't seen any sign of a limit.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some limit to prevent abuse, but it hardly gets in the way of my normal usage.

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

#157

Post by high_pathetic »

That's two blanket statements in one headline.

Google search is fast, accurate enough for the most users, very widely adopted.

GMail is fast, good with SPAM, free.

Google has some practices that might be considered as evil but this affects a relatively narrow list of people, it definitely doesn't "suck" for everyone. Lotus Notes, on the hand...

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

#158

Post by tomxor »

sph wrote: post #128
LeoPanthera wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back. It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.

Which is why we need more competitors in this space.

When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the only intrinsic business force is direct monetisation paths... completely different incentives.

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

#159

Post by lolinder »

Kuinox wrote: post #66
zargon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)

I disagree, Kagi is not yet "better in 90% of the queries" than google, it's good enough to not have to launch google in 90% of it's query.

It's substantially better than Google for what I do with it (mostly work-related queries). A few reasons why:

* It blocks all the GitHub and Stack Overflow copycat sites out of the box.

* I can add additional sites to the block list with two clicks.

* It up-ranks (semi-)official documentation like the Python docs or MDN over blog spam sites.

* I can manually up-rank sites (and even pin them to the top of the results) if I'd like to see them more often.

Kagi is awesome because where Google thinks it can guess what you want, Kagi gives you an easy way to tell it what you want.

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

#160

Post by emmelaich »

bushbaba wrote: post #141
supernovae wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The result I got was a list, with maps and prices with an option to refine stay dates.

Not sure how that could be improved to be honest.

Next entry was a non-ad from Tripadvisor.

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