Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

abhinavsharma.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 471 posts

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

#211

Post by skinnymuch »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #149
paulpauper wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

duck duck outsources to bing, so you are really using bing

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... >> To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple pa…

You’re giving the PR fluff that DDG has written. Even that is saying essentially what parent said. Most of those 400 sources are for the insane answers which are in the hundreds. Bing is by far their biggest index of results.

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

#212

Post by huynhhacnguyen »

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.)

Do I have to wait for their invitation to join the beta list before I can try Kagi? The comments here are promising and I tried to take a look for myself but apparently only beta users are allowed in at the moment.

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

#213

Post by unlikelymordant »

asiachick wrote: post #162
bushbaba wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search, "what hotel to stay in san francisco soma". You'll see that every single result above the fold is an Ad. In fact it doesn't even give me a single useful piece of information. #1 result is a link to expedia. #2 is to hotels.com, #3 to the trip advisor. Scroll down Google Hotels widget. Then on the 3rd browser viewpoint page I get actual query results.

I got a list of hotels. not sure how it could be more useful https://ibb.co/JxfY6BX

You are using an adblocker though

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

#214

Post by moistly »

Program_Install wrote: post #183
moistly wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search isn’t Google’s moneymaker, advertising is. And those shitty SEO’d sites are choc-a-bloc with advertising. Google has little incentive to downrank them.

Search is their main gateway to the advertising dollars. "Google it" is synonymous with any search regardless of the engine being used.

They serve ads regardless how you get to the site you’re viewing.

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

#215

Post by Nextgrid »

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?

Users?

Imagine that every Internet user pays just one dollar a month. That's still billions worth of revenue, and it can be segmented further such as basic features available for free and more advanced users (such as large-scale API access) can pay more.

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

#216

Post by [deleted] »

compiler-guy wrote: post #76

The web itself sucks more and more, and Google results reflect that. Much good discussion migrated to siloed locations like facebook groups. There are thousands of pages of technical content that are barely redone versions of each other. Each SEO'd to within an inch of its life. These are quite similar to the dozens of identical off-brand products one finds on amazon. I would love to see Google results get better. Bu…

[deleted]

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

#217

Post by huynhhacnguyen »

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…

I believe blocking an honest discussion is never going to do more good than harm. The original post doesn't even suggest that we should overthrow our Google overlord to replace it with whatever we find interesting. It's just pointing various limitations and issues that Google users are facing right now. And apparently from the replies here, there are even more aspects that people are have troubles with.

It's true building a good search engine is an gigantic undertaking but if Google (or someone else entirely) is aware of the current issues, they may have ideas to tackle those problems and then we can all share a better internet.

Same for the argument with democracy and any other similar arguments, pointing out problems within our current institutions doesn't remotely mean that we want to abolish everything and start from scratch.

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

#218

Post by wyclif »

thereare5lights wrote: post #81
kauguste281 wrote: post #65

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see som…

> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. Came here to write exactly that Why are we still using it? There's nothing better out there.

You should try Brave search.

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

#219

Post by dmw_ng »

lmg643 wrote: post #163
kauguste281 wrote: post #65

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see som…

Brave search is fantastic, haven't noticed a difference since moving

I made an earnest effort to switch to Brave, but I'm back with Google for almost all searches because 1100ms+ result page loads are simply unworkable here.

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

#220

Post by phendrenad2 »

asimpletune wrote: post #132

I would gladly pay for a really good search engine if anyone is listening.

Me too. There's https://neeva.com/, but their selling point is slightly different (I don't really care about ads per se, or privacy, I just want to get good search results (without paid promoted results or weird interstitial results modals, looking at you "people also clicked on" Google box!) and maybe be able to do advanced queries (search by file type, date, booleans, etc. I would also like to be able to ban sites from my results, for example, all of the spammy websites that scrape stackoverflow and mirror the pages, which Google somehow hasn't blocked themselves yet...
Post reply on HN