I think its just you
Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
141–150 of 158 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#142No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [1] 8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not a…
I really wish Kagi had family plans. I would love to have my whole family using Kagi but with 7 people in the household, it makes it rather expensive.
kagi.com/pricing shows that the teams plans allows unlimited users for $19 monthly plus $0.025/search
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising Some trivia: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote about this in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". [1] 8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not a…
I really wish Kagi had family plans. I would love to have my whole family using Kagi but with 7 people in the household, it makes it rather expensive.
Coming soon (december!) $4-5/mo per user. Announcement tomorrow.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#145Google used to have an option to exclude sites from search - but then advertising... bit painful especially with all the scraping and frequent domain changes now, but better than nothing. IIRC there's some browser extensions which can do this for you.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, that reminds me. How long has Youtube's search been so utterly useless and downright terrible? Whatever I enter, it interrupts the search results with recommendations THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY QUERY every 5 results. What the fuck, Google. Are you doing this on purpose? Did somebody piss in your cereal and you decided to collectively punish all of us? If that's not the case, who's responsible so I can go ove…
Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, I have no idea what the actual reason is. I think the problem is not malice nor stupidity. Most youtube users are non-technical/layman people who don't really know what they want. They type "fun cat videos" or "minecraft" or whatever and want suggestions of popular things to see. The technical people who know what they want are the minority so it's not profitable to create a separ…
True, it's not malice or stupidity, it's just "making money".
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#147Oh well. I stopped using Google entirely around 2006-2008-ish and I never looked back. I do not know the exact time I stopped, but it was way before the company was called "Alphabet" and before smartphones really took off. Back then Google was a Search Engine with an advertising company, but I was getting annoyed by what I thought was mixed interest (ads/information) as reflected by the increase in their analytics tag being put on lots of web sites and I thought I'd do the experiment of blocking them out and see how that panned out (some thoughts about privacy mattered as well). So, I stopped using Google, and not only that: I blocked Google.
Now I use all kinds of other Search Engines and I always find an answer to whatever problem I'm searching a solution for.
(edit: elaborated slightly)
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been putting it exactly this way ("recommendation engine") for years. Whatever algorithms Google is using, they're absolutely terrible at distinguishing the considerations of relevance to a specific query on one hand and broader tranches of popularity on the other hand. Unfortunately, nobody else seems to be doing much better. I've found that DuckDuckGo's results suddenly got drastically worse a few months ago:…
I'm also finding the same difficulties with DuckDuckGo. I don't think Google is "terrible" at anything; they know their stuff. But they have created peverse incentives around advertising which lead to this. They're paid by the advert clicks, so if you actually find a search result you're not clicking on an advert. The definition of an advert is "I want to push something at you that's only indirectly relevant to what…
Then they try to keep you using the system longer
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#149Sometimes I worry about how long the "site:reddit.com" gravy train will last... It is getting too hard to make the Internet useful these days.
I think that some companies have already caught on. I've seen suspicious recommendation patterns on Reddit before, where one product will be relentlessly mentioned, to the point where a naive searcher would think it's the "clear choice". But this could also be astroturfing. For example, yesterday I was looking for a good toaster oven. The _only_ brand that gets recommended consistently is Breville, on multiple differ…
I've been working on www.thegigabrain.com to address this problem. Filtering out the noise from reddit and other UGC sources to get the most useful answers
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#150I find myself having to add `site:reddit.com` to an increasingly large of queries to have any useful result. I wonder if I should make a little userscript that can add it for me with a hotkey/text combination..
I've been working on a tool that also filters out the cruft comments from reddit / ugc searches. We just came out with a chrome extension as well. Would love your feedback on it: www.thegigabrain.com