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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

#61

Post by wdevanny »

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)

At the very least I would expect a "Did you mean..." message at the top. In fact, it correctly does this for the "Neal" query. The lack of one indicates a failure on google's part to understand the answer it gives.

Yes, people probably don't make this exact query in good faith very often, but it raises significant concerns for other queries where google tries to supply an answer.

See for example: https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-...

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

#62

Post by version_five »

hattmall wrote: post #58
version_five wrote: post #55

That was a weird example to me. Google, although it ends up returning seo spam like w3schools, usually surfaces good SO answers, which are imo (and I think generally recognized as) the best answers that also contain discussion and caveats, if warranted. It's considered bad practice already to just cut/paste the SO answer unthinkingly. The only thing worse would be to do the same thing with whatever this search engine…

What's wrong with w3schools, never get the hate, it's an ok site, code on it seems fine.

It's a middle man is all imo. I have actually used it for css stuff, but for python (as a python programmer), I want SO or the actual documentation , so its annoying when what I consider ad-driven content gets in the way of my search.

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

#63

Post by bstar77 »

hattmall wrote: post #58
version_five wrote: post #55

That was a weird example to me. Google, although it ends up returning seo spam like w3schools, usually surfaces good SO answers, which are imo (and I think generally recognized as) the best answers that also contain discussion and caveats, if warranted. It's considered bad practice already to just cut/paste the SO answer unthinkingly. The only thing worse would be to do the same thing with whatever this search engine…

What's wrong with w3schools, never get the hate, it's an ok site, code on it seems fine.

I can tell you why I hate them... explanations are usually incomplete or wrong in some cases. Examples often use antiquated browser code when the answer should just be vanilla JS. They don't use best practices... like ever. They don't generally use modern code (don't use arrow functions or continute to use var). MDN is pretty much better in every way.

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

#64

Post by flenserboy »

mort96 wrote: post #38
KMag wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish there was a way to get rid of all sellers from results. Of late I have had to dig 2-3 pages in to get to anything which wasn't an online store.

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

#65

Post by flenserboy »

beachy wrote: post #54

The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming. As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less…

A HOSTS file for search would be most welcome.

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

#66

Post by cryptoz »

tshaddox wrote: post #48
makeitdouble wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 displ…

> Some people will really not know (think kids for instance, but not only) It seems very improbable that a kid would ask that question without having any preconceived notion whatsoever of a person with that name famously stepping foot on an extraterrestrial body. It's overwhelmingly likely that they have the famous 1969 event in mind, and that's why Google's response is appropriate. Of course I'm not disputing that i…

The answer Google gives to the question is wrong. End of story. Google aims to be a question-answering machine with the Info box, so giving the wrong answer is a broken state. Not sure you can really reason you way into how it's kinda-understandable-and-gotcha! to be 'not broken'.

Aside: Going to get real confusing when another Neil Armstrong born in the 2010s does set foot on Mars in the 2030s. I wonder if we will still get the first response from Google, 1969, and if you will still consider it to be 'not broken' then too.

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

#67

Post by pcurve »

Google lags behind in Image search quality too, surprisingly. Bing consistently does better for me at least.

Google also lags behind searching for torrent content, not surprisingly.

In fact, I'm going to say, I use Google knowing that it sucks in many areas, just because it's hassle to use multiple search engines, and the quality was acceptable enough that it got the job done.

But now, I do more searches in both Google and Duck.

Their Youtube search engine is starting to suck too, because it's deliberately mixing completely unrelated items in the result.

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

#68

Post by cogman10 »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #56
arccy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I like Edge, but the setting for the search engine is quite difficult to find despite being (I assume) one of the most common settings to change. You have to click on "Privacy, search, and services", then go the "Services" heading and click on the tiny "Address bar and search" box, and then you finally come to the page where it will let you change the default browser. Said "Address bar and search" box is also the ver…

> setting for the search engine is quite difficult to find

Didn't seem all that difficult to me.

I went to settings, put "search" in the search box. That highlighted in yellow "address bar and search" click "manage search engines" click, 3 dots next to google, click, make default, click. 4 clicks with guiding highlight throughout. Didn't even need to google how to google with edge.

I'm still using FF. However, switching search engines in Edge seems about the same difficulty as doing the same in FF or chrome.

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

#70

Post by jsnell »

cryptoz wrote: post #41
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…

I googled a phone number recently. It was the first result, got my answer. The rest of the results were websites for physical locations I had been recently, including a hospital, none of which had any relationship to the phone number. Google is _not_ a good guideline for asking the right questions. It is trying to make as much money as possible and it will scramble anything it can think of to do that. Don't use that…

1. Show visited locations in search results

2. ???

3. Make as much money as possible

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