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How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

tedium.co

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Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#11

Post by lelanthran »

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler.

There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc.

Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each anti-user decision they took.

This sort of ranking cannot be gamed by SEO spammers, because ... why get their site to the top of the rankings if they can't put any advertisements on it?

Even if they do manage it, their time in the sun will be brief.

[1] Random spot-checks with different user agents with different fingerprints should work.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#12

Post by maven29 »

voiceblue wrote: post #7
triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

Try using Google like an average person. I Googled "best places to visit in Peru", and Google gave me a little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere. DDG did not. Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't. HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometim…

You're better off using Google Maps for this use-case. At some point, the heavy query rewriting becomes unbearable.

The end result of the algorithmically generated SEO spam which Google keeps indexing is that fewer people in enterprise environments will ultimately jump through the hoops to change their default search engine in edge.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#13

Post by succo »

voiceblue wrote: post #7
triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

Try using Google like an average person. I Googled "best places to visit in Peru", and Google gave me a little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere. DDG did not. Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't. HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometim…

you are just used to google, it doesn't mean it's better than others. I switched to DDG several years ago, now I'm used to it. Sometimes when I go back to google i think the results are just bad, because I'm used to how DDG works now. Google just shows you always what you'd like to see, this is not good at all, you just live inside a walled garden.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#14

Post by godelski »

triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

Not to mention that Google is also becoming hostile to VPNs. I always run my phone through one and Google w/ FF Mobile has just been putting me in the captcha loop.

And fucking reddit...

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#15

Post by gbuk2013 »

RajT88 wrote: post #8
triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

This. I may yet pay for Kagi because the ability to block certain domains is suuuuper useful. Looking at you Pinterest.

Not to discourage you from paying for Kagi, but I use https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist to remove Pintrest and some other domains from my search results and it works perfectly.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#16

Post by cj »

lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

> why get their site to the top of the rankings if they can't put any advertisements on it?

You would need to penalize any website that accepts money from users. There are a lot of SaaS companies out there writing blog spam to promote subscription products.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#17

Post by repox »

triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

> Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

To me, DDG's results seem relevant-ish, while Google clearly knows my profile and what I'm looking for. I get more relevant results with Google than I do with DDG. That of course comes with the price of my search history and other behaviour online, but I'm okay with that.

Google also comes with some features that is convenient, when searching. Doing a "take away [town]" I get a minimap with pins, so I can see the take away places near me, the menu's are easily available as well as information about opening hours. DDG just gives me an (apparently) unordered list of restaurants in the town I put in, and with my sample search, the two first results doesn't actually provide take away.

Google to me is a convenient choice. I like convenience.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#18

Post by wernsey »

I had to do some digging on SuperUser [0] to get this working in Firefox, because it has the "Add Search Engine" button disabled by default.

* Go to `about:config`

* Change `browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh` to true

* Now you can go to `about:preferences#search`

* ...and click the "Add" button below Search Shortcuts

* Add `https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14` as your URL.

* Set the name to "Google Web" or whatever you prefer and choose a keyword. You can also change your default search engine or other preferences.

[0] https://superuser.com/a/1756774/40115

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#19

Post by bryanrasmussen »

voiceblue wrote: post #7
triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

Try using Google like an average person. I Googled "best places to visit in Peru", and Google gave me a little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere. DDG did not. Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't. HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometim…

Yeah recently I was researching some articles on the Beatles, and I used Google search to find the lyrics - they were wrong, which I knew because I knew the right lyrics I just needed to copy past them.

I wrote a humorous little article about it and why they were wrong https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th... (sourcing lyrics through third party, returned Lennon's original draft lyrics)

But really I think the day that Google is the best search engine for the normal person are gone because Google will return stuff authoritatively that is wrong.

The normal person is by definition not a subject matter expert and cannot know if what they got from a search is wrong without further research.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#20

Post by ricardo81 »

succo wrote: post #13
voiceblue wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using Google like an average person. I Googled "best places to visit in Peru", and Google gave me a little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere. DDG did not. Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't. HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometim…

you are just used to google, it doesn't mean it's better than others. I switched to DDG several years ago, now I'm used to it. Sometimes when I go back to google i think the results are just bad, because I'm used to how DDG works now. Google just shows you always what you'd like to see, this is not good at all, you just live inside a walled garden.

>you are just used to google

Worth emphasising IMO. People are conditioned to using Google and its quirks, that can make alternatives engines a little less intuitive. Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth.

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