181–190 of 362 posts
It is reasonably common that I search for a string from a bit of code and find "0 results", even though that code is up on GitHub (and probably mirrored to a bunch of other sites). GitHub search finds it fine.
Same for searching for stuff on my own personal blog. Only about half of pages are indexed, even though many have been there years.
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…
https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
Also noticed a recent change that Google did, if I search for e.g:- Volvo XC 60, it does not show me the Volvo XC 60 page on Volvo.com, it instead shows the ad that Volvo paid for and a bunch of other ads. So they essentially don’t want you to click on the organic link that points to Volvo.com. They want Volvo to know that all the traffic to them is being sent due to the Ad and not from any organic links. This is wha…
Wouldn't this just be caused by Volvo committing ad spend on their own keyword? I liken it to a defense strategy. Imagine if they didn't, and a search for Volvo XC 60 showed an ad for a Subaru!
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…
It's extremely frustrating how much "content" is displayed on the page versus how much is hidden in the page source.
I know google search is probably not the same as google flights, but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia children. We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days w…
The difference between Kayak/Google and the others is that Expedia and friends are online travel agencies. Kayak and Google are really just search engines. It makes a world of difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google bought the main provider of flight information in 2010 (ITA). ITA had such a monopoly that Google was required to continue licensing their software out for years afterwards, though I think it expired in ~2016.
ITA Matrix is still available and is my preferred flight search tool. Still find the old interface much better than the new: https://oldmatrix.itasoftware.com/
Also, it looks like the Matrix might go extinct soon:
> This interface runs on a deprecated web platform. At some point in the near future, we will be forced to shut it down. We unfortunately do not have a timeline on when this will happen. We welcome feedback about features missing from the new interface, we read all feedback and open bugs accordingly.
Google lags behind in Image search quality too, surprisingly. Bing consistently does better for me at least. Google also lags behind searching for torrent content, not surprisingly. In fact, I'm going to say, I use Google knowing that it sucks in many areas, just because it's hassle to use multiple search engines, and the quality was acceptable enough that it got the job done. But now, I do more searches in both Goog…
Google sucks at image search but I just wanted to add, Bing either intentionally or unintentionally broke one of my porn searches. I'd search for "my-fetish-keyword-of-choice" and then pick to only show results for the last month. Since like January of February the results have been zero which I know, based on all the other places I look for content, is false. Content from sites that otherwise show up in Bing results…
That was a weird example to me. Google, although it ends up returning seo spam like w3schools, usually surfaces good SO answers, which are imo (and I think generally recognized as) the best answers that also contain discussion and caveats, if warranted. It's considered bad practice already to just cut/paste the SO answer unthinkingly. The only thing worse would be to do the same thing with whatever this search engine…
They’ve since changed their stance, but I think the website has not substantially improved since w3fools’ inception.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people will really not know (think kids for instance, but not only) It seems very improbable that a kid would ask that question without having any preconceived notion whatsoever of a person with that name famously stepping foot on an extraterrestrial body. It's overwhelmingly likely that they have the famous 1969 event in mind, and that's why Google's response is appropriate. Of course I'm not disputing that i…
How is this different from answering the query "2+22=?" with "4"? There's a factual question that was asked and the answer provided is objectively wrong. Whether the user meant to ask a different question is irrelevant. Either say "2+2=4" or say "24", but under no circumstances say "4" without noting that you've answered a different question than what was asked
It also seems rather unlikely that someone would search for "2+22", but not obviously any more or less unlikely than "2+2", and building a calculator into your search engine is trivially easy compared to handling natural language queries, so it's not a useful comparison.
> Whether the user meant to ask a different question is irrelevant.
Of course it's relevant. If Google can correctly determine what question the user meant to ask, then obviously Google should provide an answer that provides value to the user instead of trolling the user with nitpicking about spelling or what have you. If you ask Google for the "capitol of India" you'll get New Delhi, even though that is the "capital" of India, and arguably the "capitol" of India is actually the Chandigarh Capitol Complex, so the result is "objectively wrong".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people will really not know (think kids for instance, but not only) It seems very improbable that a kid would ask that question without having any preconceived notion whatsoever of a person with that name famously stepping foot on an extraterrestrial body. It's overwhelmingly likely that they have the famous 1969 event in mind, and that's why Google's response is appropriate. Of course I'm not disputing that i…
> It seems very improbable This is I think the critical point. It’s one of the core assumption that is correct for us to have in our day to day interactions with other real people, and we also are able to adjust the probability levels looking at the person or the context, and follow up depending on the reaction to our answer. None of that applies to Google Search [0], and we are fed with “most probable” results witho…
However, in this particular case, I think the very low probability of someone genuinely asking when Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars, combined with the very low probability of any measurable harm being done to those people by Google's response, makes me conclude that this is reasonable expected behavior and not something I would call "broken."