201–210 of 493 posts
This makes so much sense why people think search results are bad. Great results for "Download youtube videos" is "Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp" Just give me a website where I can plug in the DL link and download it to my hard drive. I don't care what package they are using (I don't worry about malware like I did in the 90s). 99.999% of people are not programming tin…
If you wanna know why Google (or any search engine) sucks, just look at how it measures its own search results. Most search companies do this “at scale” according to very specific guidelines, like what the author did here but on steroids. For example, take a look at Google’s 168-page instruction manual for search quality raters: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... It talks about figuring o…
While I obviously don't know it may be related to how Google believes a "normal" person search. I have come to view Google as a product search engine/price comparison site, that's what it's great at. Google can find you the most relevant products for any purchase you may consider, so maybe that's what Google has optimized for. The majority of my searches are related to IT, programming, software and computers in general, but what does "normal" people search for. They search for products, news, opening hours for a store, Google is pretty decent at that, but the money is in the "go buy something". The ads on a product search on Google is always way more accurate than the actual search result.
I think Google has optimized for selling products.
This makes so much sense why people think search results are bad. Great results for "Download youtube videos" is "Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp" Just give me a website where I can plug in the DL link and download it to my hard drive. I don't care what package they are using (I don't worry about malware like I did in the 90s). 99.999% of people are not programming tin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
hope kagi takes ddg place in terms of adoption. never really liked ddg even though i always care about privacy.
I really don't get that sentiment. Currently Kagi is just as dependent on Google as DuckDuckGo is on Bing. That might only be temporary of course and Kagi does seem to be working on a search engine of their own. Rather than wanting Kagi to take the place of DuckDuckGo, it would would be better if Kagi could take users from Google, and then when ready, drop Google as a search provider.
Which is a similar phenomenon to search. If you have sufficient tech skills there's a whole world of freely available software out there to complete your task.
If you're not then you are at the mercy of a range of commercial offerings (some built on the free software) that range from arguably scams to outright scams.
Can someone tell me why Bing, and thus DDG, has switched to prioritizing local results? I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses containing maybe one word in common. It's most frustrating with phone numbers. I picked up the habit of searching the random numbers that called me, to try and find out if they were possibly important. I used to get a bunch of spam sites…
> I'll search the most inane things, like lyrics to a song, and get results for local businesses Query: “I’m coming out of my cage…” Result (Ad): “You’ll be doing just fine with these amazing year-end closeout prices at Al’s Discount Car Barn. Gotta come down—you’ll want it all!”
I understand the author's point of turning off their ad blocker "to get the non-expert browsing experience" but then they could make a different test with uBlock on for every query and see how it goes.
It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading videos mentioning yt-dlp while trying to emulate "the non-expert browsing experience"... Yt-dlp is a command-line Python utility. Talk about non-expert! Most people don't know that videos are files that can be downloaded; of those who do, most don't know about the command line or Python.
Yet when searching for "how to download youtube videos" the first result I get on Google is a link to a service called "savefrom.net", which appears to work well and does not seem to be a scam. This would qualify as "very good" in my book.
When searching for "how to download youtube videos from the command line" the first few results are about youtube-dl, including links to github and superuser. Granted they don't mention yt-dlp, but youtube-dl is a good start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intentionally ranking sites with Google ads higher would be a huge antitrust liability, so no way they're doing that. On the other hand, they can achieve virtually the same outcome while keeping plausible deniability by just not doing anything that would downrank sites with ads (of which a significant chunk is likely to be Google's). Spam sites often include ads.
i dont think they public disclose that fact
Therefore the safest option is to never openly discuss it or intentionally do it and instead use other means to achieve the objective (don't intentionally rank spam higher, just defund/cancel any projects that would make it rank lower).