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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

#21

Post by mattferderer »

Question regarding the recipe example. Does Google deduct quality points the more ads that are put on the website? A long time ago, I recall hearing how Google was able to beat Yahoo by focusing on quality of ads & a higher click rate. Has Google defeated it's rivals & switched to their tactics?

Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use Bing. As the article points out, Bing is really awesome for searching for recipes.

Looks like I need to start trying out Neeva & You.com. They had some nice features in this article.

Neeva seems to be stealing all the important content from the recipe website which is a highly discussed issue. Bing tries to walk this line by making you still go to the website to read the instructions. Obviously people have trashed Google for doing this same thing on other kinds of websites. Though blogger recipe websites have somewhat encouraged this behavior due to their insane amount of ads & life stories they're well known for.

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

#22

Post by dave5104 »

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)

I'd consider it broken. In many other cases, if I make a typo in my search, Google will (rather prominently, IMO) at the top of the search display something like:

> Showing results for "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon?"

> Show instead for "When did Neil Armwrong set foot on the Moon?"

However, it seems to only work for actual spelling errors (e.g. if I typed Armstrong incorrectly) vs. context errors.

So to answer your question, I'd expect Google calling out its interpretation, but not necessarily a "never".

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

#23

Post by BitwiseFool »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #11

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 can…

>"if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions"

I used to think this way too, but I've come to realize that Google has turned from a search engine that returns results based on my input to an answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query - usually with the intent of selling me something or returning SEO spam. I've also found that the old google-fu techniques are now so unreliable that they must have been deprecated. I can't tell you how often I use quotes in my query and see results that don't contain that text at all.

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

#24

Post by tshaddox »

tremon wrote: post #19
tshaddox wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?"

Indeed, it's a confusion between two distinct objects, and the intended object is overwhelmingly clear, which is why it's appropriate to correct the confusion and give the intended response.

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

#25

Post by jjeaff »

mattferderer wrote: post #21

Question regarding the recipe example. Does Google deduct quality points the more ads that are put on the website? A long time ago, I recall hearing how Google was able to beat Yahoo by focusing on quality of ads & a higher click rate. Has Google defeated it's rivals & switched to their tactics? Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use…

A very high percentage of ads on sites now use the Google ad network. So it may actually be in their interest to promote sites with more ads. They certainly promote a lot of garbage new sites on their Google news feed app and the product that they include on the pixel phones.

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

#26

Post by quickthrowman »

lhorie wrote: post #6
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's correct for me. What are you getting? Edit, yes I'm wrong, did a mental s/mars/moon/ without noticing.

The date when he landed on the moon. For mars, the correct answer is "never".

Google search doesn’t know the correct answer, but it does know what people usually search for and returns an answer to that. It’s silently adjusting Mars to Moon before returning an answer.

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

#28

Post by luciusdomitius »

When it comes to programming it is not really due to superior work by the competition, but by so many people gaming the Google PR flooding the front pages with content-farm level crap. Generally for any search string producing 3-4 pages of spam, the competition would give a better results, without necessarily having any technological superiority. I cannot believe Google have not recognised this as a key risk.

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

#29

Post by victor106 »

Also noticed a recent change that Google did, if I search for e.g:- Volvo XC 60, it does not show me the Volvo XC 60 page on Volvo.com, it instead shows the ad that Volvo paid for and a bunch of other ads.

So they essentially don’t want you to click on the organic link that points to Volvo.com.

They want Volvo to know that all the traffic to them is being sent due to the Ad and not from any organic links.

This is what the not so evil company is doing, imagine if they are actually evil..

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

#30

Post by mywittyname »

endisneigh wrote: post #16

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 fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the case.

Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut.

Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue. People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but was missing that je ne sais quoi.

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