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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#171

Post by xp84 »

leakycap wrote: post #100
evertedsphere wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also true on Apple's app stores, to be fair. I didn't know this until I got a MacBook Pro recently and my assumption that Apple's controls would be tighter than Google's was proven quite wrong when I opened the Mac App Store for the first rime.

The Mac App Store is such a wasteland. I don't know why Apple doesn't provide it a budget and some real human curation. The average person searching for Microsoft Word, which is on the App Store, gets screens of templates and junky overpriced apps.

I don't know if curation is really the problem. Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.

I think they just (A) have no idea what they're doing when it comes to search and (B) the scamware that fills all their App Stores makes Apple a ton of extra money compared to people finding the real apps which usually are monetized outside the app store due to Apple's absurd revshare.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#173

Post by xp84 »

homebrewer wrote: post #46
irrational wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.

Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox. I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).

That's interesting. I wish it were more practical to use a dedicated VPN for some less-developed country just for my podcast client.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#174

Post by MarsIronPI »

pitched wrote: post #167
gerdesj wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember when the web didn't exist ... and when I dumped Altavista and Ask Jeeves and co for the cool kids: Google. I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard. Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.

Instead of stressing, you could move on to supporting the next cool kids.

With what kind of assurance that history won't repeat itself? If anything, the rate at which companies enshittify has increased. Instead of taking 10 years now it takes more like 3 (or less).

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#175

Post by pitched »

homebrewer wrote: post #46
irrational wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.

Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox. I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).

Podcasts are normally plain mp3 (or similar) files that get downloaded as-is off an rss feed, as far as I understand. I don’t think anyone gets extra ads outside the sponsored/host-read ones.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#176

Post by romanows »

jrootabega wrote: post #79
omnicognate wrote: post #41

There's no AI preview in that screenshot, so it's not everything that's wrong with Google Search.

search: "coffee is mostly water" "No, coffee is not mostly water. That appears to be a misconception based on a popular television show. Coffee is actually about 98% water."

"Yes, coffee is mostly water, with standard black coffee consisting of about 98% to 99% water..."

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#178

Post by FabHK »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #78
CSMastermind wrote: post #19

I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.

My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality. If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results. Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near…

Of course it was the quality of the search results thanks to the algorithm (Page Rank) that at the time was unmatched and amazingly resilient, compared to the competition, against the primitive SEO tactics of the day (key word spamming etc.).

However, the lean interface without blinkentags and ads was definitely a selling point. Also, IIRC, the guarantee that you'd only get sites that actually contained all the words in your search query (that feature is long gone, too, of course).

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#179

Post by xp84 »

aydyn wrote: post #87
LorenDB wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.

> You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid The only people who would say that are people who would be better off just asking ChatGPT. Any nuanced search that isnt some encyclopedic fact is terrible on DDG.

I agree somewhat, but those searches are getting less and less good on Google though.

In my recent experience, I'm far better off asking ChatGPT or just using it through Bing/Copilot than what I used to do a decade ago, which was deep dives through 5 pages of long-tail search results.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#180

Post by romanows »

gdulli wrote: post #52
jensenbox wrote: post #3

Too bad I cannot zoom into the image in my phone. Even tapping on it does not enable me to really see it much larger.

Android Firefox and its various forks (I use Waterfox) have a setting that allows zoom on all sites.

I "open image in a new tab" and can then pinch to zoom in the new tab, too.
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