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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

#201

Post by lph »

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 made an algorithm change a few years back that knocked ask.metafilter.com answers way down in search results. The resulting drop in ad revenue was disastrous for metafilter, which runs with a small staff on a tight budget. Kind of bitter to remember considering the dismal quality of search results today.

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

#202

Post by sdenton4 »

avrionov wrote: post #198
nerdponx wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The travel agent wants to sell you a flight and pick up a commission. The search engine just tells you what's out there.

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

#203

Post by onion2k »

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…

For code maybe that's true. It's hard to see how I might be wrong about the place I want to travel to or the recipe I want to cook though.

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

#204

Post by skilled »

I honestly don’t understand why W3Schools is a top site in Google. I blocked it after I realized all the site provides is a few lines of code snippets that supposedly explain how a certain CSS function works.

Even with activity tracking enabled, Google thinks I am searching for one-liners opposed to in-depth articles.

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

#205

Post by makeitdouble »

tshaddox wrote: post #190
makeitdouble wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 witho…

There is something to be said about how failure cases are handled even for systems that are almost always (say, 99.9%) successful. This is particularly true for systems where failure cases cause harm to people. A common example might be assumptions about people's names that are implemented in some form on a government website. Perhaps it is the case that 99.9% of people in this jurisdiction do have a first name and a…

You are bringing a very good point.

On the Google side, I think it’s an issue that has more consequences than just the moon landing.

For instance, for me “When is the francis election” (where I would have men “french or france instead of francis”) gives me a big and bold “Mar 13” with smaller below “Anniversary of the election of Pope Francis Observances” and an long anniversary Year/Week/Date table taking 80% of the widget display.

And as with the other examples, there is nothing showing the word approximations that has happened regarding to the original query.

There must thousands of other instances where a search result will come up with a big widget, an answer in big and bold font, except it will be completely wrong and have a direct impact on the user missing a deadline or taking the wrong action.

Of course users are supposed to know better and check the full result, but as you point out, if it’s almost always what they expected, they’ll learn to rely on it and be more complacent.

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

#206

Post by dazc »

mulmen wrote: post #84
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…

This used to be a feature of Google Search. It then moved from the Google Account to Chrome. I'm not sure if it still exists in the Chrome browser. It can be done with addons but of course that doesn't feed back to Google. It does surprise me that Google wouldn't want to capture this signal. Maybe it is too susceptible to abuse?

> Maybe it is too susceptible to abuse?

The incentive to block one's competitors from 10,000 different accounts is likely why they no longer offer this function?

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

#207

Post by dazc »

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…

> So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites ...

The problem is, since these sites dominate the SERPS, there is little incentive for anyone to offer the result you want. As a consequence, the web page that would satisfy your request probably doesn't exist.

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

#208

Post by atourgates »

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 flight's true genius is being able to search multiple city-pairs.

Let's say you want to get from the West Coast to Europe on a business class flight, but want to save some money.

Realistically, it's cheap and easy to get from West Coast airport to another, and similarly cheap and easy to get form one European airport to another.

Google flights will let you search for the best combination of flights that depart from any combination of up to 6 airports, and arrive at up to 6 airports. The technology they purchased (ITA) will let you do this as well, but limits you to a single country. Google flights? No problem with destination airports in multiple countries.

So, you could search for a flight that originates in some combination of, say Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver BC, and lands in some combination of London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Milan or Frankfurt. (Or any other 6 large European airports).

Google Flights will also show fares for a specific trip length (say, 14-days) over an entire month.

Want to filter by a maximum flight duration? No problem. Number of connections? Done. Specific airline or alliance? Easy.

In a traditional search engine, I'd have to run close to 400 individual searches to get the data that Google Flights gives me in a single screen.

It works well for domestic flights as well. I recently helped someone who had to attend a wedding across the country find a flight that was less than $180/person, when they thought they were going to have to pay over $800/person. Just by using Google Flight's tools for about 10 minutes.

There's plenty to complain about in the Google ecosystem, but Google Flights is amazing.

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

#209

Post by skilled »

pcurve wrote: post #67

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 Goog…

I concur. Google Images suck. It's all littered with garbage sites that have their logo plastered all over the image.

I use Yandex for image search, much more variety in results and the interface is also quite good to quickly go through a lot of images at once.

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

#210

Post by henrikschroder »

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 miss Hipmunk, and curse the day Concur bought them.
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