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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

#271

Post by DharmaPolice »

superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

w3schools is a pretty good resource for very basic stuff. If you're a professional developer you're probably not going to find it useful but if you're recommending a website for an absolute beginner there are worse sites.

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

#272

Post by lapser »

probabletrain wrote: post #265
superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

I use uBlacklist to remove these from my seach results: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://blog.probabletrain.com/hide-w3schools-from-search-re... With some lists to block the SO and Github clones: https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio... https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation

Gah, why do we need another blocking addon? Because previously blocking addons have worked out really well. Why can't this have just been a uBlock Origin list?

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

#273

Post by fleddr »

superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

I would add Stackoverflow for a very significant amount of queries. In particular in the domain of web development extremely outdated answers are heavily outranking far better answers. It shows how domain/link age is a strong factor in ranking, which is also why w3schools ranks highly.

That's bad, but I can somewhat sympathize with it as these sites are not really purposefully gaming SEO. It's rather Google's poor handling or relevancy and recenctness.

That's an entirely different situation from scammers like pinterest. They clone content without permission and then rank higher than the original. They broadcast content to be open to search engines yet when you visit, it's behind a login.

The behavior of duplicating content will normally tank your ranking. Faking content to not be behind a login where it really is behind a login, may get you fully delisted.

But not pinterest, they seem to get a free pass for anything.

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

#274

Post by orthoxerox »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #235
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…

You don't even have to blacklist... just look at user behaviour. Did the user come back to google and select the next result after two seconds on that site? Did many users do that? Something has to be wrong with that site, rank it down. I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who clicks on pinterest results in eg. image search, and immediately click back to find another image somewhere else.

> Did the user come back to google and select the next result after two seconds on that site?

It usually takes me at least a minute to recognize a search-optimized text if it's a topic I am unfamiliar with. Let's say I am googling something about windproofing underfloor insulation. The article starts with some basics about underfloor insulation in general, so I skim through the introduction, start hunting for the part of the article where it actually starts talking about windproofing and realize it's been cobbled together out of six random introductions or generated by GPT-3.

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

#275

Post by shp0ngle »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #253
naoqj wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

w3schools is good.

MDN is usually a much better resource.

It depends.

MDN has a better overall information and is more in depth. And more up-to-date.

On the other hand, w3schools has that one three-line CSS snippet that you need to copy-paste to center your DIV vertically or whatever, without 5 paragraphs of intro.

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

#276

Post by jokoon »

Is that because users are starting to use other engines like DDG, meaning google have trouble learning its AI models?

I have to say that most of the time, when I search for something related to python, it's difficult to land on the official doc, it's always something like tutorial point or something else, it's annoying. Same thing when I want to land on a wikipedia article.

Maybe it would be a cool thing if I could limit my search to a list of specific websites, like reddit, stackoverflow, wikipedia, official docs, cppreference.com, etc, to filter all blogspam.

Honestly I would actually use a search engine that lets you filter result from a list of websites, or maybe a search engine could decide to build a whitelist of trusty or quality websites (and being transparent about not letting those websites pay).

I would also love if tineye and google reverse image search had more options.

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

#277

Post by jokoon »

superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

pinterest is really the worst website ever, especially when you're looking for images.

don't they just steal content and then host it? pinterest is the worst when trying to prevent users to use their website when they're not logged in.

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

#278

Post by Markoff »

kchoudhu wrote: post #255
Markoff wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's pretty horrible, I just search my vacation destination and it doesn't have LCC Wizzair I'm flying with in Europe = useless search tool

That's on the LCC, not the aggregator. They don't want to pay commission, and that's fine. If you want to fly on them you have to actually go on their website.

I don't really care who pays who, but search engine which can't find me cheapest flights it's useless

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

#279

Post by Markoff »

seymore_12 wrote: post #269
Markoff wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's pretty horrible, I just search my vacation destination and it doesn't have LCC Wizzair I'm flying with in Europe = useless search tool

At least on my searches with Google Flights, Wizzair shows up as a carrier for EU flights. Good search engine for low cost EU carriers is https://www.azair.eu/

Azair doesn't really work either anymore, they will show you non-existent flights or wrong prices, for rough idea is OK, but data is wrong

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

#280

Post by iicc »

lapser wrote: post #272
probabletrain wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use uBlacklist to remove these from my seach results: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://blog.probabletrain.com/hide-w3schools-from-search-re... With some lists to block the SO and Github clones: https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio... https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation

Gah, why do we need another blocking addon? Because previously blocking addons have worked out really well. Why can't this have just been a uBlock Origin list?

https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
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