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Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

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Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#131
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting. "Samuru" brought it right up, but putting it in context "Samuru search engine" brought up tangential, secondary information, i.e., stories about samuru.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#132

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 remember when the web was still about the long tail -- it made Google extremely useful. Today I usually know where the information is before I Google it (StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.) which means their value add has diminished. It's less "search" and more "navigational aid."

The web still is about long tail, just that the signal:noise ratio has dropped precipitously.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#133
post #104

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…

Same here, Google has become `readline in a browser` somehow.

About * Mail, after everything Google did to be more social and whatnot, there's still no integration with Gmail, only Google Plus. A mail counter in Google's black bar would have been more useful.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#135
post #48

I believe it. I love the Yahoo homepage. And when I'm with a group and someone mentioned something obscure... just about everyone mutters - "oh yeah, I saw that on Yahoo." Keep in mind, these are not a geeky bunch, I'm the only redditor among them. We're talking about people who use their phones for everything and the computer to browse the web or answer an email.

I go to Yahoo maybe once a day. I can't read intellectual stuff that makes me think every single time. When I need to read casual stuff, I head to Yahoo and they always satisfy that need.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#136

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…

No. Your metrics are deceiving you, because your test suite under-weights or fails to include sophisticated searchers and programmers, and fails to include highly-specific queries with only a few results. For technical people, Google search has gotten so much worse it's hard to ignore.

Google fails for more than half of programming-related queries, because it splits up multi-word identifiers, and spelling-corrects valid technical terms to unrelated English words. It fails when searching for uncommon error messages in quotes.

This might be tolerable if turning on Verbatim mode was easy, but to do it (without a browser plugin) you have to first do a failed search, then click three times, the second of which is hard to aim because the target is animated by the first click.

Google Search fails whenever I'm doing a search where I suspect there are few or no results and want to confirm that. Then there are the queries with one or two matches on StackOverflow or a mailing list that fails to answer the question. You can't just move on, because there are pages and pages of scraper sites cluttering up the results with the exact same message. Improving the ranking doesn't help, because the problem isn't the rankings, it's that you don't know when you're done.

Then there's personalization, and in particular the inter-query persistence. You do this because some people make two queries, and include keywords that accurately indicate what they want in the first query, then omit them from the second query. In my own usage, however, if I do a second query it's often because the first query had something in it that I didn't want, which spoiled the results. Since I always include the keywords that were actually helpful, I get none of the upside. And if my second search then gives bad results, personalization means I can't trust that the reason is part of the query I made.

Basically, you've improved your metrics at the expense of everything on those metrics' blind spots. There are a lot of people whining, most of them unable to articulate what's wrong, but they are right. Now please, go enter these complaints into your bug tracker and fix it.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#138
post #104

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…

Actually, Tumblr isn't included in the comScore report - its listed separately at #28.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#140

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…

> ...another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me.

What's amazing here is the obviousness of the fact that Google is only going to do what either a) maintains or b) increases its profits...

Giving you good and relevant search results was the bootstrap. Now (that they've dominated the market and passed the bellcurve) it's nothing more than a hindrance to CTR (click through rates) on paid search ads.

That is, the better (more relevant) the results, the less someone is going to look at the ads.

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