121–130 of 299 posts
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I've been noticing it for a while, the search quality gets worse and worse every year. For me, the red line was the Panda update in 2011. That update completely destroyed the search quality by bringing dubious quality news articles and ecommerce websites on the top of search, it never really recovered since then.
At this point, I basically have to append "reddit" to every search if I want to get quality answers.
I've definitely noticed that I"ve had to add "wiki" to my search results to see Wikpedia articles to certain subjects I'm searching for whereas in previous years, Wikipedia was almost always the number one result. I feel like I'm back in the 90s when Yahoo went from a pretty good search engine to mediocre with ads and stuff, and I marveled at the clean simplicity of Google. Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of ar…
In my (limited) experience, I dislike using DDG because it gets confused by less important words in the search query. For example, for "who coined the term faux pas" Google simply gives a bunch of links to webpages that define and elucidate the term "faux pas". DDG, however, gives a wide variety of results, many being totally irrelevant. The first article is on parapraxis, the second is the wiki article for microaggression (?).
http://archive.is/jv0qd (notice how DDG bolds the phrase "coined the term" in the first link, thinking that this is the relevant part of the query).
It's stuff like this that will prevent DDG from catching on with the general population who have been spoiled by Google.
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Or worse: less active users who edit content. Up until now, an edit was one click away. Now, it's not only one more click away but wikipedia has no way to communicate that editing the result is possible at all.
Wikipedia's editing software also makes editing very difficult.
Have any HNers used google without ad blocking lately? It’s sort of insane. Even with it, I have just a huge variety of workaround I use to find anything remotely valuable. Usually adding reddit, wiki, HN, SO, examine, and all sort of other specificity filters. If you’re shopping, looking at health issues, comparing things, it’s worthless. If you’re looking for anything scientific it’s worse than worthless, it often…
> If you’re looking for anything scientific
> If you’re searching for news
Good thing I am using it to search for code snippets and error messages then :-)
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As the article points out, the problem isn't specifically that this harms Wikipedia, it's that this practice harms pretty much every for profit business that Google does this to. Pretty much every company in an established space that Google has entered, is losing traffic and thus revenue due to this practice: Yelp, any flight/hotel/tourism based company, video hosting sites, weather data sites, the list goes on and o…
well, it shouldn't be "legal" for one or cartel corporation to mediate between content/data and its users. its downright dystopian.
Have any HNers used google without ad blocking lately? It’s sort of insane. Even with it, I have just a huge variety of workaround I use to find anything remotely valuable. Usually adding reddit, wiki, HN, SO, examine, and all sort of other specificity filters. If you’re shopping, looking at health issues, comparing things, it’s worthless. If you’re looking for anything scientific it’s worse than worthless, it often…
But yeah, Google has become grocery store checkout-line tabloids.
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If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.
Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium” you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo. [1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-wit…
If you're not sure I can clarify that for you. I was responding to someone talknig about ddg, and I was showing a better way of doing it. I didn't know that it's possible with Chrome because I don't use it.
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The Wikimedia Foundation is not underfunded at all. What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.
There must be a bigger movement around contributing to Wikipedia, including financial rewards.
Is this a valid analogy?: Imagine you had a brilliant friend who read all the books in a library and answered any question you asked her. Would you say this friend is stealing profit from book publishers?
> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content , you literally can't steal from it -- being…