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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

#171

Post by johnnyApplePRNG »

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…

>As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less useful.

Any ranking manoeuvrability that Google offers can and will be used against them.

The SEO scammers out there would just automate millions of proxy IP addresses to blacklist all of their competitors sites.

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

#172

Post by redmen »

endisneigh wrote: post #16

it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people talk about the 'good ol days' or times when Google was better, it was simply because there was less SEO, less spam and generally fewer pages on the internet. Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist entire sites from…

those sites would just clone themselves with a different domain

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

#173

Post by redmen »

mywittyname wrote: post #30
endisneigh wrote: post #16

it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people talk about the 'good ol days' or times when Google was better, it was simply because there was less SEO, less spam and generally fewer pages on the internet. Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist entire sites from…

The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the case. Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut. Google has all of the tools t…

"Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut."

I LOL'ed. Thank you for that.

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

#174

Post by abbeyj »

tikhonj wrote: post #158
gwbas1c wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Quick and dirty version for uBlock Origin:

  news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"])
  news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"]) + tr
  news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"]) + tr + tr.spacer
If somebody can improve this, please share.

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

#175

Post by Spooky23 »

PeterisP wrote: post #153
lordnacho wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyt…

Ukraine has better signals security so we don’t know.

The other thing is that Russia is operating WW2 style. It’s a top down system where the lower level people have no autonomy. American colonels and generals die in helicopter shoot downs and accidents. Russian generals get assassinated on the front screaming at soldiers to move trucks, etc.

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

#176

Post by aghilmort »

asiachick wrote: post #10

I kinda hate searching for recipes. It's always the same 3-5 sites who optimized for seo and , no idea what words to use here, for non European influenced cooking the recipes that surface at the top are often by people that really have no clue what authentic is. not a search example but it's like Jamie Oliver's fried rice

we added recipe search to Breeze last month -- search for recipe name, ingredients, etc., click recipe tab in results -- would be curious if same / better / worse, etc.

example -- mango avocado -> click recipe at https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado

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

#177

Post by aghilmort »

russellbeattie wrote: post #133

Wasn't there just an article about how horizontal services get eaten away by focused rivals once a market has been identified? [1] Like Indeed doing job search better than Craiglist. I wonder if Google isn't ripe for that sort of competitor. I can think of a bunch of verticals that could easily get their own dedicated search site, including cooking. Bing and others are trying to beat Google in generic search, and it'…

that's pretty much our thesis at Breeze:

- for web search, we have a better date filter than most, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=tiger+woods+after%3A2022-04-12

- for anything else, we have topics, e.g., click recipe tab from any general search on home page, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado

- we just launched a job finder, 14M listings with 20M by end of quarter, launched early due to the fast fiasco, https://breezethat.com/x/job-search-beta

- tons of other topics, some listed on page atm under "drops" at top, more advanced such as jobs in the pipeline

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

#178

Post by aghilmort »

adrielyong wrote: post #35

anyone else find it so hard to find basic apparel and shoes? All my search results return me known brands with high ad spend. Recently started to go to reddit male fashion advice to look for crowdsourced recommendations but that's fairly time consuming. Anyone else has other ways?

do you have some specific examples? if don't want to post here, can dm dotdotjames on twitter -- we're adding product search to breezethat.com sooooooooon

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

#179

Post by londons_explore »

Spooky23 wrote: post #170
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 always assumed that they were getting paid. I can’t think of any reason why a spam Pinterest link has any value, yet it’s ranked high.

Pinterest has a surprisingly large userbase of people who actually like the content there.

There are a lot of real world people I meet who speak highly of all the great creative ideas they get from there.

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