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Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

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Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#131

Post by Cthulhu_ »

blitzar wrote: post #89

> If you simply google: how to fix a flat tire My first result ... How to fix a flat tyre - in simple steps with video - RAC https://www.rac.co.uk › drive › advice › repair-a-flat-tyre An excellent first result thank you google.

Mine goes to https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-trucks/how-t..., with a summary on the Google search results itself.

It's probably location dependent, but I wonder if there's a bit of randomness in there as well to give websites with equivalent information similar exposure.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#133

Post by mrweasel »

Kiro wrote: post #107
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #8

Or just use DuckDuckGo instead of google.

It's just Bing under the hood so doesn't fix anything, unless you say Bing is actually better.

At this point I actually think it is. I believe that DDG does tweak the result they get from Bing, and mix in a few other sources. Still, even if it is just Bing, then yes, Bing is now better than Google.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#134

Post by zo1 »

mrweasel wrote: post #120
baggachipz wrote: post #13

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.

There are only two choices. Either Google are no longer interested in finding the best answers to your queries. Or as you point out: They don't care, that is no longer what they do. I cannot imagine it being easy, but I find it hard to believe that Google aren't able to weed out the worst offenders. For a large number of queries the results are all SEO spam. Try searching for anything related to health and get a usef…

Google has SO much money, they could probably afford to curate the web and white-list websites one at a time and still make money. Personally, I think Google should get out of the search-indexing market entirely and rely on website submissions only.

At this point, it's no different than an appstore in terms of volume. Ironically that's where we're heading with most websites being "3.0" and just SPAs and now PWAs even.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#135

Post by BEEdwards »

I think it's more about training your google algorithm, i searched the same things they searched and my results are answers to the question.

how to change a tire, nets videos of tire changing and the first 5 results are all different sites explaining how to do it.

how are pearls made, gives me an inline box answering the question.

half the things I search it offers me a "did you mean (my search) reddit" which I usually did...

google isn't great, but it's still the best by far (I like the algorithm that knows what i search and assists me with it), i'm not sure what this person has done to theirs...

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#137

Post by Cthulhu_ »

marvinblum wrote: post #51

I feel like Google could filter out a lot of SEO spam by simply ignoring or downranking heavy sites. Everything that loads more than "n MB" is probably bloated and made to trick you into buying something or generating traffic without providing value. Another method could be to analyze how many external requests a page makes and put that into the calculation. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think this might hel…

I was confident they already included page speed in their rankings, but who knows what the status of that is? After some (ironically) googling, I've found three blog posts from May 2020 [0], November 2020 [1] and April 2021 [2] announcing it, the last one saying it went live in August 2021. But I was sure they talked about it years ago, hence the PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse tools.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating...

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for...

[2] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/more-detai...

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#138

Post by makecheck »

Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL. Just thrown into the list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do have business: Google’s business).

Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran `ls` in a shell with a glob pattern, it just decided to sort of “add in” a few other files loosely based on your query (or heck, files that aren’t based on it at all)? Oh, now imagine if `rm` did that.

Sadly this happens with lots of search tools now. Why the heck is the default state on a new Mac to funnel what you type to everything, e.g. I searched for “Chrome” and hit Return and the FIRST thing it did was throw me into the App Store and call up some not-even-a-web-browser scam app with Chrome in its name, instead of selecting the Chrome already installed on my computer and opening it? More and more it seems that you have to turn off all kinds of poor defaults to put tools into a useful state, or there is simply no way to get them there at all.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#139

Post by wfleming »

dstroot wrote: post #114
baggachipz wrote: post #13

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.

I still use Google every day. I was really hoping this advice was for real. Like maybe how to filter your Web results by size since they started off with example of a 9 MB website maybe you could filter your queries down to websites that are 2 MB or less? Since I use pi.hole and the first results are ads my top links are always dead. It is time to switch - Is DDG the best alternative?

DDG has been my default search engine for probably ~7-8 years. In the early days it wasn't that unusual for me to still do some searches on Google for better results, but nowadays that's extremely rare (probably partially because DDG has gotten better and partially because Google has gotten worse). But I still hear people complain about DDG's search results quality, so I think it really depends & YMMV, but it's a pretty low-effort thing to try for a while, so maybe give it a shot?

My loosely held theory on the wide variance in people's judgement of DDG is that some people really like/have come to rely on how much Google personalizes results based on all the other data they have on you, even if they are in the "Google has gotten bad" camp. DDG doesn't do any of that: it's much more like going back 20 years where you have to put all the context you care about into a query, you're not searching "in a bubble". For me, that's a very positive feature, but others may find it frustrating and not even be able to articulate why they're not happy with the results. DDG does do a lot of the nice "enhancement" stuff Google pioneered long ago, like embedding the intro of the Wikipedia page in the sidebar for a query with a strong match, e.g. a person's name. So for me DDG is just the right level of "smart": it understands common queries well enough to immediately highlight useful details, but it doesn't try to be so smart that you as a user stop being able to understand what it's doing under the hood.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#140

Post by scarface74 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #104
nikanj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’d downrank sites like Tom’s Hardware or wired.com? Both of which show ads and have affiliate links

If other content that doesn’t have those annoyances matches my search query then I would absolutely want to see it first. This would also put pressure on content creators to tone down the ads or explore alternative monetization models.

Do you pay for Consumer Reports?
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