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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

#191

Post by tshaddox »

seoaeu wrote: post #162
tshaddox wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How is this different from answering the query "2+22=?" with "4"? There's a factual question that was asked and the answer provided is objectively wrong. Whether the user meant to ask a different question is irrelevant. Either say "2+2=4" or say "24", but under no circumstances say "4" without noting that you've answered a different question than what was asked

Google can interpret the intended meaning of arithmetic expressions like that with even higher confidence than this Neil Armstrong query. But the confidence with which Google can interpret the intended meaning of this Neil Armstrong query is well above any reasonable threshold one might propose.

I would argue that it's roughly just as clear that the query intends to refer to the Moon as it is that the query intends to refer to the Canadian Neil Armstrong who was killed in a plane crash in the Antarctic in 1994.

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

#192

Post by terrycody »

Nowadays, Google search results full of tons of AI/auto generated sites like KKnews.cc , which rakes in millions of IP per month with their bad quality/copied contents, also, don't forget those sites often got millions/billions pages, which jammed Google database centers.

I have no idea why Google won't do anything to these spam sites.

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

#193

Post by headsoup »

headsoup wrote: post #113

From all of the discussion here, I think the most interesting thing is the seeming lack of attempts to try other browsers when clearly Google is doing poorly and creating frustration. I mean in the general population I would not be surprised, but on this site the community is generally pretty tech aware to know of alternatives at least.

search engines, not browsers...

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

#194

Post by rolisz »

johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #171
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…

>As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less useful. Any ranking manoeuvrability that Google offers can and will be used against them. The SEO scammers out there would just automate millions of proxy IP addresses to blacklist all of their competitors sites.

But the blacklist would be personal, so applying only to me.

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

#195

Post by andirk »

chaxor wrote: post #97
slaymaker1907 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought it was so the site has longer to mine monero using your CPU while you scroll? Ever notice how incredibly slow any device gets when looking at recipes?

It's possible that the scrolling is giving the remote server time to use your CPU/GPU to mine some space cash, but it's also possible that attaching listeners to events that happen many times per second (such as scrolling, mouse movement) is common, especially if 3rd party ads are allowed to interact with the page, making it nearly impossible to know what those ads' scripts are doing.

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

#196

Post by mitchdoogle »

mostdataisnice wrote: post #89
vasco wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays you should google using what in 2005 would be considered "the wrong way to search". Back then it was all about keywords, quotes and so on. For example if you wanted to know if dogs could eat apples you'd search: > dog apple dangerous Today you should search: > can dogs eat apples And you get way better results with the second form. I've noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way to google…

Another thing for us on HN to note. This is how most people ask questions . It is not just that the other way is wrong - it is also less common.

Ya of course, but my natural inclination is not to ask a question to a web page

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

#197

Post by cush »

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 flights is delightfully easy to use

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

#198

Post by avrionov »

nerdponx wrote: post #185
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 will also plug Kayak as being the only other decent flight search site. The difference between Kayak/Google and the others is that Expedia and friends are online travel agencies . Kayak and Google are really just search engines. It makes a world of difference.

Can you explain what is the difference? I suppose the flight search engines don't book the flights.

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

#199

Post by russellbeattie »

aghilmort wrote: post #177
russellbeattie wrote: post #133

Wasn't there just an article about how horizontal services get eaten away by focused rivals once a market has been identified? [1] Like Indeed doing job search better than Craiglist. I wonder if Google isn't ripe for that sort of competitor. I can think of a bunch of verticals that could easily get their own dedicated search site, including cooking. Bing and others are trying to beat Google in generic search, and it'…

that's pretty much our thesis at Breeze: - for web search, we have a better date filter than most, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=tiger+woods+after%3A2022-04-12 - for anything else, we have topics, e.g., click recipe tab from any general search on home page, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado - we just launched a job finder, 14M listings with 20M by end of quarter, launched early due to the fast fiasco, h…

The different search topics are similar to what I was thinking but it's just a variation on Google's various tabs, like shopping.

What I'm thinking of is a dedicated search site focused on a single topic. Take Breeze's guitar tab search and make a Guitargle.com. Then it could be promoted, marketed, refined and advertised on all sorts of apps - probably even on Google itself if they weren't paying attention. All the guitar apps could have integrated Guitargle search. Then make another vertical for the bird watchers search. And another for scholarships. All with different graphic designs based on the target demographic, with a "Powered By Breeze" at the bottom of each site.

Just a thought.

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

#200

Post by Pxtl »

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 haven't coded python in a while, but does the python manual follow the man pages style of listing every possible parameter including the weird deprecated options that haven't been used since 1998 before actually providing information and examples of typical usage and instructions on how to handle the common use-cases?

Because that's the software equivalent to recipe spam.

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