Yahoo tops Google in US traffic • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#101

Post by sigkill » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 11:50 AM UTC

uniclaude wrote: post #97

uniclaude wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt a bit like you until I added a "goodgle" search engine in my chrome, basically forcing Verbatim at each Google search (appending &tbs=li:1), and forcing English to be the base language, instead of whatever country I am finding myself in at the moment. Then, I tweaked the results by manually ignoring a couple domains, and now, Google is sort of usable again for my personal taste. Unlike you though, spam (at lea…

Oops, I can't edit my post anymore, but I wanted to add a little tip for Firefox users (as it is very good now), this addon[1] adds a search engine that does exactly what I do with my custom engine in Chrome. Funny thing, I did not make this myself, which shows me clearly that I am not the only one feeling this way. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/?src...

Good lord, this is perfect. I had no idea about the verbatim setting. All I'd do was use the hl=en and q=%s. This new parameter is practically god-sent.

Thanks.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#102

Post by sigkill » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 11:55 AM UTC

kbart wrote: post #94

thisisnotatest wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google engineer here. We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on improvements…

> "there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for" How do you know that? Just because I click on a result doesn't mean it was the correct one. I usually click on A LOT of results just to check if MAYBE there is something relevant (which is mostly not, especially with Google lately).

Maybe they should have another metric that if you click on a second result after the first result, then the first result should get penalized a little. Repeat steps for 'n' clicked results.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#103

Post by sigkill » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 11:59 AM UTC

abhiv wrote: post #80

mistermann wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you propose they should differentiate?

Interesting question. One possibility is a heuristic to determine whether the user is looking for a broad overview or trying to solve a specific problem. For example, "2d arrays in Objective C" should bring up a doc page or a tutorial page that provides an overview of the concept; but "How to initialize a 2D array in Objective C" could provide an SO page where someone has asked exactly that. In general, the narrower…

There are some of us who don't use 'how', 'why', 'where', 'when' as a carry over from the older days when such terms used to just be ignored. So your example would be searched as "initialize 2d array objective-c".

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#104

Post by freyr » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 12:41 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

I also pretty much use Google's search as a proxy for Wikipedia search or StackOverflow search at this point.

But I highly doubt much Yahoo's traffic is coming from search. They've got Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, omg! (which is huge), Flickr, Tumblr, etc. Yahoo is in the content business.

Plus, I know of some people (especially older people) who have Yahoo set as their homepage, and they'll freak out if it gets set to anything else. And besides, Yahoo is a much better homepage than iGoogle for most people, particularly if they use Yahoo mail.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#105

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 12:52 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

[deleted]

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#106

Post by stefap2 » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 12:54 PM UTC

Dn_Ab wrote: post #50

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

Very true, glad I'm not the only one to have noticed this. And I've got a suggestion for a search engine so intelligent - well relatively - it took google back to school and enrolled it in kindergarten. I find myself using it whenever Google gets stumped; it consistently gives better results in the sense that I feel it has a better understanding of my query. Take this example that prompted my above semi-hyperbole. Ba…

Never heard of samuru so I tried to google:

samuru search engine

The "samuru.com" did not come up on first five pages. Then it starts suggesting samurai.

Contrary, searching

duck duck go search engine

has the https://duckduckgo.com/ as the first result.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#107

Post by oinksoft » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 1:05 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #41

oinksoft wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contrast was/is starker: DDG would return pages of irrelevant crap, and Google/StartPage would have exactly what I wanted in the first 1-3 results, with usually 8 of the top ten being relevant. Google is simply leagues ahead of the competition right now in both index quality and query recognition.

I hear this a lot, but no one ever gives me a search example that bears it out. I !g sometimes after I'm just not seeing what I want on DDG, and as often as not, the Google results are even worse.

Sure. Just now, I wanted to make sure I was right about elements that fire the DOM "change" event for a guy in ##javascript by looking at Mozilla documentation. Unfortunately, I had DDG active in my search bar in Firefox. "mdn change" in DDG turns up nothing remotely useful, whereas the first result in StartPage (Google) is what I want, and the subsequent results are all of some interest. Google seems to understand the proximity of the name of a common DOM reference and the name of a DOM event (probably via some graph) and Bing/DDG is clueless.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#108

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 1:05 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

[deleted]

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#109

Post by jfoster » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 1:12 PM UTC

thisisnotatest wrote: post #56

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

Google engineer here. We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on improvements…

What it might come down to is whether making one query worse to make others better is actually a good thing. If they were all acceptable to begin with, it might not be.

Are you permitted to share the types of metrics that Google uses to determine whether an algorithm change is producing better results? Is bounce rate the primary metric that is used?

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#110

Post by jfoster » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 1:22 PM UTC

uniclaude wrote: post #45

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

I felt a bit like you until I added a "goodgle" search engine in my chrome, basically forcing Verbatim at each Google search (appending &tbs=li:1), and forcing English to be the base language, instead of whatever country I am finding myself in at the moment. Then, I tweaked the results by manually ignoring a couple domains, and now, Google is sort of usable again for my personal taste. Unlike you though, spam (at lea…

Last time I recall using a "least bad" search engine was when I was using Altavista. (before I started considering Google "least bad", I mean)

To some extent, I hope they're able to maintain their position. If Google were unseated, I would miss the big, audacious side-projects that they undertake.