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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?

#401

Post by makeitdouble »

jessriedel wrote: post #176
RC_ITR wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The progression that people almost always forget: 1) New system comes out that indexes/controls/regulates a naively created dataset 2) Data consumers adopt that system and experience benefits 3) Data suppliers learn rules of system and take advantage of it to improve the positioning of their data, thus breaking the intent of a system built on the assumption of naive creation 4) Users complain about the broken system…

Honest question: what else besides web search has followed this progression?

Spam and bot detection could be close to that model ?

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

#402

Post by mrkramer »

Guest19023892 wrote: post #246

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google. 1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion. 2. You block Google from indexing the sites. 3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit. 4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarante…

I think this would spark all out search engine war. It would further degrade quality of search engines actually their usability since web content would be fragmented between different search engines.

But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.

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

#403

Post by fils »

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…

Untapped potential. exactly. To me the biggest problem isn't the results (even the ads) it's the lack of innovation. The lack of making search an experience and something that generates a value I can store and share.

I've been looking at several of the options talked about here. My favorite so far is Neeva (https://neeva.com) due to their "spaces" concept and how it provides a simple building block I can explore to address many of the use cases I have for search.

Search needs innovation and people trying new things.

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

#404

Post by mrkramer »

jbn_norse wrote: post #368

What people, entrepreneurial subculture, and professionals don’t understand is that Google is in the business of delivering a crappy product because of how it relates to advertising psychology. It’s that simple. An example can be observed in SEO which doubles as a product framework in the context of performing a job for Google by altering content in the hopes of producing behavioral modification. This is almost alway…

Google's algorithms are blackbox; nobody knows how they work so webmasters are trying to game the Google one way or another, vicious cycle that never ends. I agree with you nobody actually knows wtf they are doing because information asymmetry and information overload in the 21st century are brutal. Mass communication freed us but at the same time it is easy to get caught in never ending echo chambers.

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

#405

Post by mrkramer »

nr2x wrote: post #38
falcolas wrote: post #20

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.

robots.txt is a joke tho.

Elaborate? It is the best thing web has for crawling rules. Yea ofc crawling rules can be broken and violated but all serious internet search engines respect robots.txt.

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

#406

Post by mrkramer »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #101
mountainriver wrote: post #78

The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it. I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on

Only on HN. Virtually none of the "problems" described on HN at the intersection of tech and society are seen as problems out in the real world.

Thx I laughed. But nobody thought BlackBerry phone sucked except Jobs and his team that's why Apple is multi-trillion dollar company today. The same thing can be said for Gates, Page, Zuckerberg and other computer tech people who rejected conformism and status quo. This phenomena is called Innovator's Dilemma.

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

#407

Post by JohnFen »

everdrive wrote: post #347
thrwawy283 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It treats its power users like kids It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it. I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a smal…

> Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you.

Google trying to interpret what you want is, in my opinion, the largest reason that the search has become so bad. It guesses very poorly, and I end up having to try to guess what the magic incantation is to get it to give the what I'm searching for.

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

#408

Post by masa331 »

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 wonder what do you mean by "vastly superior". For search i use Kagi, for a browser i use Firefox. For mail you can use Protonmail or i guess there are other alternatives also. Only thing i miss is Gmail message threading. Other than that nothing else. So i think people are only used to Google, that's all. I don't think it's vastly superior in any area anymore

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

#409

Post by JohnFen »

saalweachter wrote: post #376
Schroedingersat wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stopped working reliably some time before last year.

Eh, it's not so much that it stopped working as it is that it never worked the way you thought it did. Quotes have ~always been an exact match on the tokenized query text, not a substring match on the corpus text. No synonyms, reordering, gaps, etc, but the matches -- and failures -- are sometimes not obvious at first blush. If you search for "don't stop me now", for instance, that "don't" tokenizes to "don t", so it…

Why is it that exact searches used to actually work reliably, then? What's changed?

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

#410

Post by erklik »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #367
everdrive wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It treats its power users like kids It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it. I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a smal…

> Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results. Even more ironically and many here would have experienced this themselves: the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing

> the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing

Weirdly the same is the case for reddit.

What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.

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