131–140 of 187 posts
Maybe they should get the Twitter treatment anytime they are mentioned: "Google formerly DoubleClick"
Two big reasons people add Reddit to search phrases is because Reddit's search isn't functional and to deprioritise Ad Junk from search. It's to fix broken search, which gets more broken - more unwanted Ad Junk. But Google's an advertising company with it's ad search device in everyone's pocket. At least it's reached sufficient post-don't-be-evil to be honestly shameless, even if it does employ people in PR with brok…
Reddit is the only social network I use. They're really dropping the ball by not having a fantastic search tool. I know search is a difficult problem, but with the kind of budget and engineering power they have it has to be solvable.
The article starts with intimating that SEO is the problem. Perhaps to an extent it is, though I'd say with G's massive market share that optimising for one sweet spot with one search engine is really the problem. It makes SEO easier, one search engine and criteria. 20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines you'd be ranking well in some but not others. A good argument for alternative algorithms (…
>20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) Altavista was the dominant engine, which rapidly gave way to Google essentially as soon as Google became available, and since 2000 Google has been the dominant engine. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was getting my info on what engines people were using mos…
As you say, once Google Beta appeared it was the first and last stop for any of its users.
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Answers, sure. Bit you'll never know if those are answers, bullshit, trolling, or straight up hallucinations. So no, it's not an option at all.
You write this as if that is substantially different from common epistemology of the first page of links. I’m not an llm advocate but responses like this bring to mind the “no wireless. Less storage than a nomad. Lame” reaction to the iPod.
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I just tried "how to use a massage ball" and I don't see any ads, and links seem to be all legit articles, with YouTube video tutorials at the top.
Google results are tailored on a number of factors such as location, your past searches and whatnot. The same deal with the ads. Advertiser wouldn't pay for advertising of their product in a region or to a demograph they don't care for. I'd be more surprised if you did get the same result as parent.
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Answers, sure. Bit you'll never know if those are answers, bullshit, trolling, or straight up hallucinations. So no, it's not an option at all.
> you'll never know if those are answers, bullshit, trolling, or straight up hallucinations That's how it has always been for purely human-generated content, too.
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Kagi relies on data from the search engine giants. Without that data, it's dead in the water. That's the dumbest part of it all; Kagi's not an entirely new search engine. It's Google's index but without the ad-tech juicing, and some clever use of a few other search indices to specialize results. (I.e. Google could unshit itself at any moment , it just doesn't want to.)
Hmm... really? They don't do their own crawling and indexing? How does one simply repurpose google's index... just technically or business speaking?
The problem being the aforementioned conflict of interest. The moment you're a competitor to Google Search (or any of Google's other products), they can kill your API access and ruin you.
> A spokesperson for Google tells the BBC that the company only launches changes to Search after rigorous testing confirms that the shift will be helpful for users, and that the company gives website owners help, resources and opportunities for feedback on their Search rankings. If you believe this I've got a bridge to sell you. The idea that Google does anything other than to improve its bottom line (in the _shortes…
Sell me another bridge then. This is why I believe it: > Google does anything to improve its bottom line (in the _shortest_ possible timeline) If the results suck, people would find alternatives. Look at how many techies installed Chrome for their parents and grandparents when MSIE was pre-installed and this was an easier-to-use, standards-compliant, and more performant option. It further snowballed from there. It ta…
The results often do suck and people are actively finding alternatives (mostly techies). No search engine I've tried has really reached the bar where I'd push my friends/family to switch but they are getting closer and closer. MSIE had a lot of momentum and it wasn't FF that techies installed, it was Chrome, all that to say just because we haven't seen a Google replacement yet doesn't mean we won't. Furthermore people's frustration with Google search is directly what has lead to the alternatives that have been gaining popularity (again, mostly in techie groups so far). With your logic I could have said back in 2009 that "If IE sucked people would find alternatives", momentum is hard to fight but it can be done.
> they're well aware that providing useful results is the only way to stay relevant
If this post [0] is to be believed then providing useful results is (now) a side effect of wanting to drive traffic to show ads and it's completely valid to degrade the search results if it means people spend more time searching (and thus see more ads). No doubt they have to provide value still but there is nothing saying that's what they are optimizing for, if it happens as a side-effect then so be it.
I really have no idea how to reply to the rest of your post which can be summed up to "Google knows best" which I reject completely.
I currently use Kagi but I'm not over the moon with it and it has its own issues [1].
Over the past several months I find Google search has become completely useless to find anything other than online retailers. I thought it may have been just something about my profile, but this article suggests it may have been an update on their end. Meanwhile, Duckduckgo still provides decent results in my experience.
DDG was such an absolutely subpar experience for me (used it for 6-8 months) that it wouldn't surprise me if nobody would _actually_ say it's better in a blind test. They just don't like Google. Kagi on the other hand really blew me away, I have no idea how they're doing it, but I'm only using Google for one thing these days (besides G Shopping & G Maps) which is when I want to use ad spend as proxy for quality/relia…