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Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

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Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#151

Post by geoduck14 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #123
twofornone wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because the manual is correct, well-written, etc. It's also verbose and requires effort and working memory to parse, when I could get a trivial one line answer or code snippet from a stackoverflow post specific to my question. Yes, in an ideal world we would all read the manual, but unfortunately manuals are inconvenient. And in my experience the vast majority of stackoverflow answers are correct.

I think it takes a lot of effort and working memory to ignore the ads and correct the mistakes on sites like spam overflow, spam3school, etc. If it was was Clojure or some other language that has an awful online manual it is one thing but the Python manual is good.

Spam overflow? Is that stack overflow?

And... I'm guessing w3school?

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#152

Post by Pxtl »

beachy wrote: post #54

The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming. As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less…

The problem, as always, is credibility. If they're not careful about the credibility of the aggregate blocking signal, this would become another tool in the SEO scammer toolbox as they use sockpuppet accounts to downmoderate their competitors.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#153

Post by PeterisP »

lordnacho wrote: post #17
tshaddox wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Broken" is a stretch. It gives the only result that could be reasonably expected by anyone making that query in good faith. If you're genuinely expecting a result like "never," then I wonder, would you also expect a result of "never" for the query "When did Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon?" (notice the misspelling of his name)

For instance I saw that many Russian generals had been killed during the war. I wondered how many Ukrainian generals had been killed over the same period. Still can't figure it out. Lots and lots of articles about dead Russian generals. There's got to be some way where the search engine doesn't second guess you. You can never find the answer to something adjacent to a popular question with the current state of things…

Ukraine has repeatedly asserted that the HQs of all their major units are intact and as far as I know there have been no announcements of any Ukrainian generals killed and as far as I see even Russian media have not contested that. With some searching on the Russian internet, I find some assertions in Russian social media from early March that Lt Gen Юрій Содоль commanding the Ukraine Marines was killed, but not anything conclusive. So the number seems to be 0, or perhaps 1. And IMHO that isn't surprising, it's quite normal to fight major wars without many generals KIA, it is very surprising that Russia lost so many of them.

Even on colonel level the losses seem to be small - I think that this https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-cris... this was the first Ukrainian ground force colonel KIA that I recall, there was at least one air force colonel before that.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#155

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mattferderer wrote: post #21

Question regarding the recipe example. Does Google deduct quality points the more ads that are put on the website? A long time ago, I recall hearing how Google was able to beat Yahoo by focusing on quality of ads & a higher click rate. Has Google defeated it's rivals & switched to their tactics? Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use…

Go look at the horrible chumbox infested AMP sites that Google promotes on Google Assistant. You can tell where their priorities lie.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#156

Post by holografix »

beachy wrote: post #54

The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming. As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less…

I’m sure someone is going to point this out but guess what happens when scammers find out their site can be black listed?

They get crowds of people and/or scripts to blacklist all other sites.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#157

Post by pfg_ »

simsla wrote: post #80

One Google feature that I miss terribly is hard filtering. Used to be if you included "term" or -"term" you'd only get results that did/n't include those terms. But it seems Google has gone all in on the "I don't think you really meant that" approach [ ], and the hard filters have become suggestions at best. -- [ ] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and more to semantic search and ML, but they co…

Do you have any examples of searches that don't respect hard filters? The only time I've seen it ignoring quotes is when there are 0 results and it puts up a little notice at the top "No results found for "…". Results for … (without quotes):"

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#158

Post by tikhonj »

gwbas1c wrote: post #100
beachy wrote: post #54

The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming. As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less…

> The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). I wish I could do that at Hacker News too. I really just don't want anything from medium.com.

Seems like you could do that in a reasonably thorough way on HN with an ad block filter.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#159

Post by bkobren »

tptacek wrote: post #135

I'm immediately suspicious because of the inclusion of cooking. Google's cooking results aren't bad because Google is bad at cooking content; they're bad because Google is giving people what they actually want, which is lifestyle content. Most people searching for cassoulet aren't actually looking to make a cassoulet; they just enjoy reading about it. I say this as someone who is ultra-annoyed at the state of cooking…

re: programing/code comment...(disclaimer, I work for Neeva) we are actually an ad-free, private search engine. Comprehensive search which includes user friendly code query results and no ads and no affiliate links. We also block third party trackers, give you agency over preferred sources, and lots of unique features that no other traditional search engine that relies on ad revenue can offer. If your curious, check us out at neeva.co

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#160

Post by nomilk »

beachy wrote: post #54

The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming. As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less…

This is a great idea. On YouTube I use the 'Don't recommend channel' button a lot and consequently the algorithm has learned to filter out a lot of the nonsense.
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