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How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

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Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#141

Post by theturtletalks »

chongli wrote: post #140
theturtletalks wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s even more damning. So the established sites are playing by different SEO rules altogether?

I don’t have any proof. I’m just taking it as a given that this is what they’re doing because those sites are still engaging in cloaking despite Google making it clear they have a policy against cloaking.

Is their cloaking policy still active? Felt like they enforced it at the beginning, but when big sites started using the same dark patterns, they stopped? If it’s an official policy still, would love to hear why they selectively enforce it.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#142

Post by animuchan »

nkoren wrote: post #91
lelanthran wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's your ranking system, so it's correct by definition (for you), but I've got to point out you're not considering the quality of the text. Yes. This is by design! [1] > In your model, an empty page is perfect. Yes. What's the problem with that? An empty page won't match any search terms, will it? [1] It's impossible to quickly and cheaply determine the quality of the text, in an age where it's cheaper for a blog-…

Nah, you need some way to consider the quality of your text. No way around that. Let's say I publish a page -- nothing fancy to it, no dark patterns at all -- just the word "architecture". For anybody searching for the term "architecture", this is now the perfect page -- a 100% match to their search, with no dark patterns at all. Completely useless, but perfect. What would my motivation be for doing something like th…

Doing this only makes sense if the search engine gained some nontrivial traction, at which point it becomes feasible to hire a small number of students to manually delist obvious garbage.

I guess this will hold up as long as you're not the №1 default search engine.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#143

Post by [deleted] »

HWR_14 wrote: post #50
voiceblue wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using Google like an average person. I Googled "best places to visit in Peru", and Google gave me a little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere. DDG did not. Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't. HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometim…

The entire article is about how there is a new and easy way to get rid of Google's "little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere."

[deleted]

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#144

Post by amai »

gorbypark wrote: post #56

Unfortunately it seems that Safari hijacks all google.com/search?q= urls and strips all (or at least utm) query params, except q, when google is set to the default search engine! Even pasting in https://google.com/search?q=apple+sauce&utm=14 to the url bar doesn't work. The only way I was able to get this to work was set DuckDuckGo (or anything non-google) as the default search engine, then use the extension "Smart K…

You have a typo in your URL. You must use "udm" not "utm":

https://google.com/search?q=apple+sauce&udm=14

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#145

Post by ricardo81 »

hoveringhen wrote: post #45
ricardo81 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you are just used to google Worth emphasising IMO. People are conditioned to using Google and its quirks, that can make alternatives engines a little less intuitive. Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth.

> Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth. Sorry didn't get this, what do you mean exactly?

Beyond 10 blue links, certain niches organic results have been pushed down the page and placed under G specific results (when I say certain, nowadays it's most).

Celebritynetworth is an example of this where a site had some unique content, G apparently realised that lots of people search for such stuff, asked the owner for an API and then eventually scraped it. A rough version of events, more details below.

There are lots of examples of well performing sites/niches where similar has happened.

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#146

Post by Booleans »

RajT88 wrote: post #8
triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

This. I may yet pay for Kagi because the ability to block certain domains is suuuuper useful. Looking at you Pinterest.

Never seeing Quora in my search results sounds wonderful.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#148

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

"This sort of ranking cannot be gamed by SEO spammers, because ... why get their site to the top of the rankings if they can't put any advertisements on it?"

Because it links to pages with advertisements on them?

There are easier and more objective methods for ordering search results.

Alphabetical, chronological, relevance, etc.

People who grew up in a world before Google used these extensively. They were everywhere. I used these in libraries for decades.

"Developers" want to pretend these methods were inferior.

When I think about people trying to game alphabetical business listings by naming their business "A-1" it seems delightfully quaint compared to the sociopathatic "dark patterns" of software developers.

"Rankings", a subjective measure, powered by a secret, ever-changing, hand-tweaked algorithm, are superior because they can be used strategically for commercial gain by intermediaries like Google.

When the intermediary becomes wealthy and influential enough, acting as gatekeeper to vast amounts of information, then the other, objective methods might seem inferior.

Google accelerates the death of objectivity. It's an advertising company, not an academic search think tank.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#149

Post by gorbypark »

Majromax wrote: post #101
gorbypark wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It infuriates me that exact match searches don't work anymore. I understand that for the average person/average query, the modern google results are better (with info boxes, AI type stuff going on), but please let me type in "I want this exact phrase, including punctuation!". I don't even care if it tells me there's nothing found and then makes some suggestions below that.

Google has restored 'verbatim' search, as a drop-down beneath "all results." If you'd prefer to add it to a bookmarklet, the URL parameter is tbs=li:1.

Oh wow, thanks! This combined with the new "web" view is basically what I've been dreaming of.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#150

Post by marginalia_nu »

lelanthran wrote: post #37
Fethbita wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe you might be interested in Marginalia Search https://search.marginalia.nu/

> Then maybe you might be interested in Marginalia Search https://search.marginalia.nu/ I have tried it before, but it appears to me that it dismisses all commercial content altogether, which is not what I want. That is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. For example, I searched for "The Vietnam of computer science" (Without the quotes) and it returned zero results.

Hmm, seems like a bug in the query construction logic. Works if you drop the "the".

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=Vietnam+of+compute...

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