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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

abhinavsharma.com

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Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#201

Post by IgorPartola »

pessimizer wrote: post #168
thrwawy283 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no complex filtering to do things like removing search results that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to specifically refine your search. Google still has the most useful search, but they've taken away methods to get bette…

> Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.

I still don’t get why. It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search?

I do suspect the main thing people complain about currently with Google is the abundance of ads and the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#202

Post by garbagetime »

passerby1 wrote: post #184
tomxor wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why we need more competitors in this space. When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the…

Where should the profit come from for a search-oriented product/business?

Governments

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#203

Post by notriddle »

zargon wrote: post #40
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #22

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…

No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)

Kagi is probably a lot more usable, right now. Nobody’s trying to game it.

As long as it remains niche, it might actually stay that way indefinitely. I’m just worried about Google taking inspiration from them. I bet whatever “tricks” they use now would get a lot less effective if they did.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#204

Post by IgorPartola »

passerby1 wrote: post #184
tomxor wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why we need more competitors in this space. When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the…

Where should the profit come from for a search-oriented product/business?

Because indexing the web and organizing all that information is expensive. It’s also a lot of power so we can’t exactly trust that job to a single government or even a group of allied governments. Universities could potentially handle it by pooling a lot of resources, but I can’t really think of who else I would trust to be The Search Engine. Google isn’t ideal but at least it’s priorities are mostly aligned with the average user’s.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#205

Post by google234123 »

johndfsgdgdfg wrote: post #60
sithadmin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon did build one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com

Oh thank you. We should definitely promote this more.

It died in 2008 - it's now just the search engine on Amazon.com Feel free to promote Amazon :) Prime is pretty good

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#206

Post by skinnymuch »

pinky1417 wrote: post #167
LeoPanthera wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away. You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

Shouldn't there be a way to only search multiple forums through some userscript? Only found out about userscript after messing around with an iOS app called HyperWeb. At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.

Google has a limit to how long searches can be. So if it’s a complex one, it can’t be too long.

I think you can only specify searching one site at a time. With site: search filter.

—

Google’s custom search engine’s where you can give a whitelisted amount of sites isn’t very good. At least not any more. It didn’t include lots of pages it’s main index does. Or the rankings were all out of sorts rendering not useful.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#207

Post by skinnymuch »

not2b wrote: post #191
glenstein wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has incentives to degrade the quality of search results for the benefit of its profitability, up to the extent that is able to without turning away too many users. I think it's more like that rather than an either/or.

They have competition: if we get to the point where Bing/DuckDuckGo results are clearly better, people will start moving, and that will hurt their revenue badly.

Yes and those results don’t have to be just better. They have to be clearly better as you stated. The likliehood of that happening any time soon is close to zero.

I personally use Bing for 95% of my searches and have done so since it launched. Or re-launched.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#208

Post by skinnymuch »

Kye wrote: post #77
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #22

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…

People said this about pre-Google search engines. Someone will figure out the next PageRank and give us another 10-20 years of useful search.

There were many multiples less people online. The internet economy was almost nothing back then.

There’s no comparing how things were in the 90s and early 00s to now.

Every social media company before Facebook faltered or began losing a good chunk of their user base fairly quickly. Until that stopped happening with Facebook and IG for over a decade now.

Reddit’s position has also been here for a decade now.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#209

Post by skinnymuch »

massysett wrote: post #177
mountainriver wrote: post #78

The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it. I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on

I don’t know what people are expecting of Google. I use it like the Yellow Pages was thirty years ago. I use it to find answers to interesting but ultimately inconsequential questions, like “when is Joe Biden’s birthday?” I crank computer error messages into it. Google was never good for much else. Generating good content is expensive, so most of it is not on the free Web. Never has been. People are expecting it to p…

The last part of what you wrote isn’t what a lot of people are saying. At all. I don’t want any of that. I didn’t see many comments wanting that. Most want proper filtering and other older previously functioning features like more scopes and respecting plus sign, quotes, and so on.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#210

Post by BurningFrog »

not2b wrote: post #147

The author missed the most important reason that Google search results often suck: tens of thousands of people are working very hard to make it suck. They call themselves "SEO specialists", and their job is to get their shitty site to the top of the rankings. It's an ongoing battle. Sure, Google wants to make money, but to do that they need to protect their search moneymaker and keep it dominant, so their incentive i…

The web has - as it inevitably would - adapted to being searched by Google.

This makes it much harder to be a good search engine.

I have no idea how to quantify how much the decline is because of that.

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