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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

#211

Post by lovelearning »

A low-hanging improvement Google can do easily: a one-line warning that its smart results may be wrong, and caution people to check all result pages and domains.

Given the shortened attention spans, prevalence of fake news, and evidence that featured snippets are being misused by scammers, I think it's imperative Google condition its users not to blindly trust these top results. Instead, they're doing the opposite.

An anecdote: I recently saw a phrase new to me - "on the lamb". Googled "on the lamb meaning". Google's top answer was a confident claim that it's related to Quakers and their persecution in the 17th century.

But that answer was in fact a downvoted one on an English StackExchange page. The top consensus answer there was different.

A person with a short attention span or a tendency to be satisfied with factoids that match their beliefs is likely to simply accept Google's answers as correct and not dig deeper.

Such conditioning results in bigger social problems. In my country, a popular method of scamming people involves SEO-ing fake banking service numbers to the top of search results. When a person searches for "X bank customer service number", Google shows these fake numbers. People trust Google's answers, call those numbers, provide details like banking OTPs, and get scammed.

Google provides a 'Feedback' dialog for such results, but it's a corrective measure that relies on diligence of users and not a preventive measure.

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

#212

Post by mostdataisnice »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #196
mostdataisnice wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing for us on HN to note. This is how most people ask questions . It is not just that the other way is wrong - it is also less common.

Ya of course, but my natural inclination is not to ask a question to a web page

Right - I think this is part of the "scaling" of the internet. Those of us (relatively small set of earlier heavy internet users) are forced to change as the product is built for the wider audience.

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

#213

Post by nextlevelwizard »

Couldn't disagree more with the code examples. Whenever I'm looking for answer that can be answered by the standard library I really do want to get the actual documentation of that language and not a random stackoverflow solution.

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

#214

Post by rg111 »

I am sure it’s plenty more than these three.

Yesterday, I searched "best after-sale service of AC". What I was shown was SEO'd pure junk. Absolute junk as the first result.

Next few were the same, but more focused on affiliate programs rather than providing genuine info.

Down the line was Quora, where _sales rep of AC companies_ wrote answers that _theirs_ had the best service.

I wad very disappointed.

You.com showed me better result right away.

My Kagi and You use is now on par with my Google use. They mights surpass Google soon.

I still find Google to be the best for programming answers btw.

I would also say that Google's ad business is in direct conflict of interest with its search business.

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

#216

Post by ehsankia »

rg111 wrote: post #214

I am sure it’s plenty more than these three. Yesterday, I searched "best after-sale service of AC". What I was shown was SEO'd pure junk. Absolute junk as the first result. Next few were the same, but more focused on affiliate programs rather than providing genuine info. Down the line was Quora, where _sales rep of AC companies_ wrote answers that _theirs_ had the best service. I wad very disappointed. You.com showed…

Am I the only ones who has a really hard time with Quora. I can never tell which answer is real or fake. And even the "real" ones rarely ever answer the question. Quora is basically the Pinterest of answer results.

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

#217

Post by ehsankia »

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…

Isn't that similar to what they tried for things like shopping for example, and they got sued for? The problem is that if they become an aggregator for a specific type of content, like let's say travel or lyrics, then other aggregator websites start suing.

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

#218

Post by ImaCake »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #213

Couldn't disagree more with the code examples. Whenever I'm looking for answer that can be answered by the standard library I really do want to get the actual documentation of that language and not a random stackoverflow solution.

It depends for me. Sometimes I am simply after the documentation but often I want to make some weird plot and would like to see if anyone else has tried to make said weird plot using the same library before. I don't think there is any way to optimise for which to prioritise without including the word "documentation" in your query.

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

dekhn wrote: post #20
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it's interesting to note that two presumably human commenters in this thread got that wrong. Maybe the Google results are more human than we would have guessed.

it's more showing that the search engine isn't much better than bag-of-words model, and doesn't seem to "know" enough logic/reasoning to parse a sentence and determine that it's false because it says mars instead of the moon. BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks at Google left the building and got replaced with growth marketers.

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