Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

surgehq.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 362 posts

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

#141

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

Current Google search doesn't add features, it removes them (see end of + sign and other stuff). This is sadly the logical behavior of a "mature product". When you own the market, your rational question is "how much can I extract from the customers who already must come to me" and that means becoming more and more directive towards the customer. Letting the customers customize only stands against this.

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

#142

Post by thayne »

tptacek wrote: post #135

I'm immediately suspicious because of the inclusion of cooking. Google's cooking results aren't bad because Google is bad at cooking content; they're bad because Google is giving people what they actually want, which is lifestyle content. Most people searching for cassoulet aren't actually looking to make a cassoulet; they just enjoy reading about it. I say this as someone who is ultra-annoyed at the state of cooking…

> Google is giving people what they actually want, which is lifestyle content

you're right that google is giving people what they want, the people that are getting just aren't the ones searching, they are the people who are making money from you having to scroll through pages of ads before getting to the actual recipe.

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

#143

Post by swethmandava »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #127

This is somewhat tangential but for a lot of quick programming questions, I'm finding I don't even need a search engine. I just use Github Copilot. For example, if I wanted to remember how to throw an exception I'd just write that as a comment and let Copilot fill in the syntax. Between that and official docs, don't need a ton else.

You.com has the Code Complete app integrated into search, which is similar to Github Copilot

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

#144

Post by SMAAART »

Even PG had chimed in about the fact that there are underserved niches within the Google Search, and I wonder if this is going to create a Craigslist effect, where companies will be successful in search niches.

Time to disrupt the disruptor.

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

#145

Post by stephen_cagle »

PaulHoule wrote: post #87

For Python programming I would say 100% of the time you should look the answer up in the official manual for a well-defined problem (delete a file) because the manual is correct, well-written, etc. It's astonishing how often Google and Bing snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on queries like this. If you go looking in splogs, spam overflow and other spam sites at best you are going to get wrong answers, at worse y…

I get so annoyed that geeks for geeks is the default thing for so many things I search for in python. Really, it would be far more useful to just bring up the python docs most of the time.

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

#146

Post by swethmandava »

polote wrote: post #101

I don't feel like ranking results according to a query makes a lot of sense nowadays. Google works pretty well that it is almost always able to give you results that are relevant to your query. But where Google fails and other search engine is to show results that are relevant to the user. As some comments have said here for the query "python throw exception" some people want to get the official python doc when other…

You're exactly right. Google tends to regress to the mean - what do most people want to see as their first result? but You.com allows you to prefer sources that you'd personally like to see first

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

#147

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

> It seems very improbable

This is I think the critical point.

It’s one of the core assumption that is correct for us to have in our day to day interactions with other real people, and we also are able to adjust the probability levels looking at the person or the context, and follow up depending on the reaction to our answer.

None of that applies to Google Search [0], and we are fed with “most probable” results without qualifiers, little to no sensible adjustments, and very little control or opt out options.

Billions of people use Search every day, at these scales what is “improbable” actually happens millions of times, and I feel too many people are willing to throw the odd ones out under the bus, even if the current situation isn’t perfect either for the 90 part of the 10/90 split.

[0] search personalization based on logged in profile could be used, but in practice they only apply that to very crude adjustments like country, language and frequent searches.

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

#148

Post by tfsh »

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…

Shout out to https://onlyrecipe.app which allows you to extract just the recipe from SEO-corrupted ad-riddled websites.

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

#149

Post by codetrotter »

kshacker wrote: post #49

I know google search is probably not the same as google flights, but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia children. We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days w…

I personally like to use Momondo. Have had pretty good experience with Momondo over the years so far. I haven’t tried Expedia, so I can’t directly compare it. But I recommend giving Momondo a try anyways.

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

#150

Post by discordance »

Sebguer wrote: post #51
kshacker wrote: post #49

I know google search is probably not the same as google flights, but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia children. We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days w…

Google bought the main provider of flight information in 2010 (ITA). ITA had such a monopoly that Google was required to continue licensing their software out for years afterwards, though I think it expired in ~2016.

ITA Matrix is still available and is my preferred flight search tool. Still find the old interface much better than the new:

https://oldmatrix.itasoftware.com/

Post reply on HN