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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?

#351

Post by MomoXenosaga »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #302
javchz wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance. Right now SEO it's an arms race between google and every SEO agencies, with a keyword being attached to some company that may have 0 relevance to the user. Doesn't help, that depending on the query, the first results are ads only sup…

> I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance. It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybo…

The internet grew up. I want to hate Google as much as the next guy but it is not their fault that money has corrupted it.

In that sense Google's monopoly is actually preferable for marketeers. It would be a lot harder to manipulate search engine results if the public was split among 20 of them.

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

#353

Post by JohnFen »

IncRnd wrote: post #272
Nextgrid wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users? Imagine that every Internet user pays just one dollar a month. That's still billions worth of revenue, and it can be segmented further such as basic features available for free and more advanced users (such as large-scale API access) can pay more.

There isn't a single scenario for any product or service anywhere that will get every Internet user to pay a monthly fee - not even for 1¢ a month.

It doesn't have to appeal to every internet user. Not even most internet users. It just has to appeal to enough to make money, which is a substantially smaller number than the total number of internet users.

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

#354

Post by petra »

Nextgrid wrote: post #226
moistly wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can trivially reduce the amount of spam by using the amount of ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc as a negative ranking signal. Instead of targeting SEO per-se (as it's difficult to determine a good website with SEO vs a spam website with SEO), target how they're making money. They're not doing so exactly because they have no incentive.

What incentives do they have to promote affiliate links to Amazon ?

It's a bit more complicated than that. Even useful sites in commercially related niches use affiliate links as a source of revenue.

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

#355

Post by JohnFen »

hedora wrote: post #225
_yoqn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search. The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.

Haven't tried Brave, but I'd say DDG results are much better than Google Search. I think it's down to personal preference or something.

Right now, DDG gives me the best search results of anything that I've tried. I know people who don't get the same quality results from it as I do, though.

I'm 100% convinced that the difference comes down to how searches are formulated. At least, the people who I know that experience poor quality searches seem to enter their queries as natural-language questions rather than search terms.

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

#356

Post by petra »

esperent wrote: post #315
nsgi wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow have plenty of sites scraping their content and hosting copies. People would just go to those sites from Google instead of the real ones. Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?

So in the last couple of days I've ended up doing a lot of research into equipment that I wasn't familiar with - commercial coffee equipment - and what I quickly found is that standard Google results are pretty much all blogspam. Not terrible info but it all feels like advertising while what I want is shared experiences from people who have actually used the equipment, not blogs that are actually ads from people who…

The problem with reddit is that the comments there could also be ads, and it's harder to tell.

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

#357

Post by notreallyserio »

tartoran wrote: post #84
black_puppydog wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to mention kagi. Very happy user here. The no-spam results make it so much more useful as a tool. Also, "block this site from myresults forever" gives so much more agency to the user than anything Google has release in years. Googles "we know better" just reads as a big middle finger to me.

Wow, they have that? That’s what I always wanted from Google and they never delivered. Im sure they had reasons. I really don’t think they want to empower their users, they are even hostile to search users and content creators, amp comes to mind and am glad it dissapeared already. Meanwhile I’be been using duckduck but i’ll give kagi a go.

Worse, Google used to allow you to block sites but removed the feature a long while back: https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-discontinue... .

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

#358

Post by Geonode »

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…

Honestly, Yandex has really good image search. I now do all three (Google, Bing, and Yandex) when I'm researching for a design.

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

#359

Post by mrkramer »

I have plenty ideas on how to improve quality of search of Google but I figured out competing with Google would be akin to slow painful death so I wouldn't start my own search engine atm. If somehow we could influence the Google's management to listen to our suggestions. Maybe the root problem is indeed business model which eventually shapes how features are introduced and how UI/UX turns out to be.

Google is smart but sleepy and somewhat distracted from their core business with 99 other projects they have.

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

#360

Post by scim-knox-twox »

dmurray wrote: post #311
derefr wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not a…

> That's not the algorithm's fault per se; Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.

Try Kagi.com, you can rank domains however you want
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