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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?

#451

Post by LordAtlas »

sltkr wrote: post #95
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.)

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.

And they also intend to charge $10 per month (and that's just for 20 searches per day, which is a WTF low number). There's no way I'm paying that kind of money.

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

#452

Post by noogle »

petra wrote: post #356
esperent wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ranking results by author's credibility (site karma) could help, at least for the time being.

It's not that the comments are plain ads (these will be easy for the reader to discern), it's dishonest product reviews. It's an unsolved problem in e-commerce websites and even in real life.

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

#453

Post by Gareth321 »

_yoqn wrote: post #200
elevaet wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been starting to use kagi for search. I'm still using google by default, but when I get a screen full of ads and clickbait articles I turn to kagi and it's almost always better.

Maybe you should try an opposite approach. When kagi gives you useless results switch to Google.

This is what I do. Kagi gets there 95% of the time. Plus I get to down/up rank results. Plus no ads. Plus I feel confident I’m getting the best result for me and not for advertisers. Truth be told I’ve been using “site:reddit.com” for years now already.

Google still has the lead with the answer box and older results. They’ve been collecting data for longer and I suspect their indexing heuristics are incredible.

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

#454

Post by Gareth321 »

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…

While true, this isn’t actually a complicated issue to solve: humans and a heavy hand. Get humans to review everything on page one of every search. Get caught massaging your site? Permanent ban.

Google refuses to hire humans to do stuff like this. Their service is terrible. Maps requires free labour of millions of users to get information updated.

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

#457

Post by aghilmort »

asimpletune wrote: post #132

I would gladly pay for a really good search engine if anyone is listening.

listening / founder of https://breezethat.com - best used on desktop atm; free is ad-based, premium is ad-free, both have curated topic filters with more on way

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

#458

Post by aghilmort »

paulpauper wrote: post #136

google needs better date filtering. old threads from reddit keep being marked as new.

where after: & before: filters aren't working? e.g., this comparable example of date-based query, https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1504901028520640514

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

#459

Post by scim-knox-twox »

loonster wrote: post #371
scim-knox-twox wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What I really want is biased search results of my choosing. $10 a month for a personal search is a bit much. $10 a month for work related search is cheap. Give me results specific to my industry without having a super long query.

That's what Kagi lenses are for. Just try...

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

#460

Post by jessriedel »

makeitdouble wrote: post #401
jessriedel wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Spam and bot detection could be close to that model ?

Email spam? I'd say that's basically solved.

For bot detection, when was the golden age? I'd say that, rather than follow the above description, it started as non-existent and there was basically a smooth descent downward to where we are now.

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