101–110 of 437 posts
I enter my search term hit enter, for a split second I can see the exact products I want to browse but those results are quickly swapped out for a bunch of unrelated products.
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i would often use `site:news.ycombinator.com` to search a topic to see if it has been talked about, and what comments that topic has. It's good, but not really _that_ often useful.
Yes I use that and site:reddit.com as well.
Google is so unbearable because they are no longer interested in you finding the answer to your query; they're interested in selling your query and its context to the highest bidder. That conflict of interest manifests in what Google has become.
Corollary: Web page creators are no longer interested in answering your query; they're interested in getting you to 1) view their page for ads 2) click on their affiliate links 3) buy the product they're selling. Google has an impossible task in trying to answer a query like "Portable air mattress reviews", because 99.99999% of the results are SEO-optimized crap
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> 1) view their page for ads 2) click on their affiliate links 3) buy the product they're selling. 1 and 2 are trivial to detect. 3 is harder but still not impossible given Google's machine learning capabilities and existing datasets. Downrank or ban ads & affiliate links and you remove any incentive for creating spam sites in the first place.
So you’d downrank sites like Tom’s Hardware or wired.com? Both of which show ads and have affiliate links
This would also put pressure on content creators to tone down the ads or explore alternative monetization models.
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It isn't nitpicking at all, I had the same question and glad you uncovered this answer. I think site:*.edu is just one tool in your search toolbox that you should know about, but I wouldn't expect it to work for every topic. Still, I had never thought of it so I'm glad I read this article.
i would often use `site:news.ycombinator.com` to search a topic to see if it has been talked about, and what comments that topic has. It's good, but not really _that_ often useful.
I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using '!g' most of the time. Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.
Or just use DuckDuckGo instead of google.
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While I might be a target audience for them and willing to pay a nominal fee monthly for good search I'm quite sure there isn't a market for it.
Just 1% of Google's market might be enough to sustain a non-bloated, VC-free company and make a good product. The Bloomberg Terminal is extremely expensive and yet companies pay for it because it makes their traders' jobs so much more efficient. I don't see why companies wouldn't do the same for a search engine that filters out all the bullshit so their employees don't have to waste their time wading through it.
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> 1) view their page for ads 2) click on their affiliate links 3) buy the product they're selling. 1 and 2 are trivial to detect. 3 is harder but still not impossible given Google's machine learning capabilities and existing datasets. Downrank or ban ads & affiliate links and you remove any incentive for creating spam sites in the first place.
The problem is half the time the ads are Google ads anyway.
Unfortunately there’s just too much inertia with the ads-based business model making it too hard for Google to not let itself get this way. Similar challenges with other ads supported businesses.