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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

#31

Post by criddell »

jeffbee wrote: post #15

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 Ne…

Google spies on us so they can better serve us. Maybe it’s time that they let us directly tell them what we want. Let me easily blacklist sites from the search results.

They could even take the blacklists from all people with a high reputation and use that as a signal when they are building search results for others.

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

#32

Post by KMag »

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…

Be careful. Maybe it's a useful rule of thumb, but be careful of the "searching for your keys under the light pole" problem.

I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, means that lots of long-tail queries don't do very well on Google.

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

#33

Post by makeitdouble »

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)

What is “good faith” in that case though ? Some people will really not know (think kids for instance, but not only)

The interesting part to me is that Google will show redirected queries from typos (“Did you mean “When did *Neil* Armstrong set foot on Mars” ?”) but not disclose the term it completely ignored.

I makes it look like it parsed and validated all the search terms before coming up with the prominently displayed date, which makes it worse.

On your point, it’s broken because it shouldn’t display “Never”, and instead skip the date widget and show that the page results are for the moon, like it does for typos and other kind of corrected search terms.

Or alternatively _always_ show which part of the query the results are based on. Failure to be transparent creates the problem.

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

#35

Post by adrielyong »

anyone else find it so hard to find basic apparel and shoes? All my search results return me known brands with high ad spend. Recently started to go to reddit male fashion advice to look for crowdsourced recommendations but that's fairly time consuming.

Anyone else has other ways?

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

#36

Post by renewiltord »

asiachick wrote: post #10

I kinda hate searching for recipes. It's always the same 3-5 sites who optimized for seo and , no idea what words to use here, for non European influenced cooking the recipes that surface at the top are often by people that really have no clue what authentic is. not a search example but it's like Jamie Oliver's fried rice

There was one which was no-bullshit and then a bunch of online people denounced it for removing all the story and context and stealing from PoC, etc.

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

#37

Post by htrp »

dekhn wrote: post #20
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Is this the transition they made to AI powered rankings a couple of years ago?

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

#38

Post by mort96 »

KMag wrote: post #32
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…

Be careful. Maybe it's a useful rule of thumb, but be careful of the "searching for your keys under the light pole" problem. I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, mea…

This is a great way to describe it. Google still gives me good results for the common stuff, but really fails me when I'm looking for something in the "long tail".

I just wish I could find obscure things again.

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

#39

Post by georgehill »

WesternWind wrote: post #18

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.

Google recently updated its product review algorithm.

https://blog.google/products/search/more-helpful-product-rev...

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

#40

Post by slaymaker1907 »

mywittyname wrote: post #30
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 t…

The stories also serve the purpose of providing copyright. A recipe alone doesn't have copyright, but the story mixed throughout the recipe does have copyright.
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