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Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

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Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#11

Post by WestCoastJustin »

An interesting observation is that over the years, I've sort of found that if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions, or I'm not thinking about the problem the right way. For example, you come up with some weird programming idea to solve a problem and no results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong path. This has been proved to me over and over again as sort of a canary in the search coal mine.

Google still solves all my questions, if I'm asking the right questions, I guess is what I'm getting at.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#12

Post by tshaddox »

belter wrote: post #2

Still broken after 7 months. "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730

"Broken" is a stretch. It gives the only result that could be reasonably expected by anyone making that query in good faith. If you're genuinely expecting a result like "never," then I wonder, would you also expect a result of "never" for the query "When did Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon?" (notice the misspelling of his name)

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#13

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

cookiengineer wrote: post #9
drusepth wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get July 20, 1969. Based on the results that follow, I assume that is correct.

It is not. There was no human on Mars (yet) and that's the point of the question, proving that google's ML approach will recorrect and reinterpret the question and give a wrong answer.

Although it's interesting to note that two presumably human commenters in this thread got that wrong. Maybe the Google results are more human than we would have guessed.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#14

Post by arccy »

ab_testing wrote: post #5

I would say that I have the exact opposite experience. My company is moving from IE to Edge as the default browser and I search for code issues on Edge (Bing). I usually do not like the results and then have to manually type in Google.com > search for code issues as that gives me better results.

you should be able set the default search engine...

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#15

Post by jeffbee »

The question is whether any of those other sites could maintain quality while also being Google, that is, while being target #1 for every SEO bad actor, spammer, and anti-trust regulator on the planet.

The people at W3schools are a combination of all of the above: filthy SEO spammers who would readily make an antitrust stink if Google started just ripping off their content, but who in all likelihood don't care if Neeva does that, if they've ever even heard of Neeva.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#16

Post by endisneigh »

it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people talk about the 'good ol days' or times when Google was better, it was simply because there was less SEO, less spam and generally fewer pages on the internet.

Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist entire sites from the results - inevitably those sites that have the most ads would be the most likely to be blocked, resulting in lower revenue for Google.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#17

Post by lordnacho »

tshaddox wrote: post #12
belter wrote: post #2

Still broken after 7 months. "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730

"Broken" is a stretch. It gives the only result that could be reasonably expected by anyone making that query in good faith. If you're genuinely expecting a result like "never," then I wonder, would you also expect a result of "never" for the query "When did Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon?" (notice the misspelling of his name)

For instance I saw that many Russian generals had been killed during the war. I wondered how many Ukrainian generals had been killed over the same period.

Still can't figure it out. Lots and lots of articles about dead Russian generals.

There's got to be some way where the search engine doesn't second guess you. You can never find the answer to something adjacent to a popular question with the current state of things.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#18

Post by WesternWind »

Google also isn't great at surfacing genuine product reviews that aren't just people reiterating amazon reviews with referral links and SEO. Like even stuff reviewed by reputable websites somehow loses out regularly.

If I want someone's actual opinion and people I know don't have one, I have to check reddit or metafilter.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#19

Post by tremon »

tshaddox wrote: post #12
belter wrote: post #2

Still broken after 7 months. "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730

"Broken" is a stretch. It gives the only result that could be reasonably expected by anyone making that query in good faith. If you're genuinely expecting a result like "never," then I wonder, would you also expect a result of "never" for the query "When did Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon?" (notice the misspelling of his name)

But "Mars" is not simply a misspelling of the correct object, it confuses two distinct objects. A better comparison would be "When did Louis Armstrong set foot on the Moon?"

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#20

Post by dekhn »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #13
cookiengineer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not. There was no human on Mars (yet) and that's the point of the question, proving that google's ML approach will recorrect and reinterpret the question and give a wrong answer.

Although it's interesting to note that two presumably human commenters in this thread got that wrong. Maybe the Google results are more human than we would have guessed.

it's more showing that the search engine isn't much better than bag-of-words model, and doesn't seem to "know" enough logic/reasoning to parse a sentence and determine that it's false because it says mars instead of the moon.

BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks at Google left the building and got replaced with growth marketers.

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