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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

abhinavsharma.com

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

#161

Post by eevilspock »

If the Earth's ecosystem is being destroyed, why are we, in particular those that are not poor, still consuming so much plastic, energy and stuff in general?

If Facebook is bad for Democracy, why do so many people, especially those who decry the state of democracy, still use it?

If sugar and processed foods are so bad for us, why do so many people consume so much?

If the education system is tilted incredibly against children born into disadvantage and for those with advantage, why do the parents of the later, including liberal ones who fly the flag of equality and justice, hoard as much of quality educational resources for their own children as they can?

(I'm sad that no one else is pointing this out)

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

#162

Post by asiachick »

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.

I got a list of hotels. not sure how it could be more useful

https://ibb.co/JxfY6BX

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

#163

Post by lmg643 »

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…

Brave search is fantastic, haven't noticed a difference since moving

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

#164

Post by asiachick »

moistly wrote: post #155
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.

Google loses if people stop using it. Google has every incentive to downrank them.

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

#165

Post by ndiddy »

lolinder wrote: post #156
Melatonic wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to a discussion I had here previously with a Kagi user, when they go out of beta they plan to offer a $10/month plan with a quota of 20 searches per day (and $0.015 per each additional search), and an unlimited plan for $20-30/month. Additionally, every time you change something related to your search query (such as clicking "Images", changing the sort order, applying filters, or blocking a website) counts as an additional search, so you could go through your quota pretty fast.

Apparently all of this is to offset the costs from paying Google and Bing to run searches for them (the site basically takes results from Google and Bing and then combines them together with their own special sauce) but with a pricing model like this it seems like Kagi will remain a niche tool solely used by the wealthy.

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

#166

Post by q-big »

ipsi wrote: post #151
q-big wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

To my moral standard, all of this is manipulative if the intention is to manipulate the Google ranking instead of seeing an improved Google ranking as a result of delivering better service to the visitor.

This does of course not imply that these things can be proven, which implies that no action can be taken. Not everything that is immoral is punishable.

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

#167

Post by pinky1417 »

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.

Shouldn't there be a way to only search multiple forums through some userscript? Only found out about userscript after messing around with an iOS app called HyperWeb.

At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.

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

#168

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that.

Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.

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

#169

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

Am I the only person on earth who hasn't noticed any decline in Google results that everyone keeps talking about? To me it seems like people conflate the fact that there is now significantly more stuff on the internet (what's the data volume today compared to 2010, 100x? 1000x?) than there was years ago with the performance of search engines.

People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't in 2008. Which is obvious because in 2008 there was only reddit and like 3 other sites, now there's dozens of relevant ones.

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