I think normal people have just changed how they use it without much fanfare. If people want to quickly find a specific site they are looking for they know it's the place. But if they want to explore the world of cat memes they know it's not the place for something like that any more (it'll only show you 143 results, many with weak relevancy).
If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
221–230 of 471 posts
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
The result I got was a list, with maps and prices with an option to refine stay dates. Not sure how that could be improved to be honest. Next entry was a non-ad from Tripadvisor.
Here's my results: https://ibb.co/cv06gHg https://ibb.co/BwZX9FQ https://ibb.co/NCnBC6b
Yeah the second looks like what I got. (BwZX9FQ)
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#223I've been using DDG for several years and every once and a while I prefix my search with "g!" to search google, and it isn't any better, so I stopped doing that. Maybe people don't know there are alternatives? How does OP expect them to switch to Hypersearch if they aren't even using DDG which has been around for a very long time?
I find DDG is well optimised for software folks and geeks, because it's the main demographic that uses it. It's hard for me to recommend it to my friends though since often basic queries fail compared to Google, especially with relation to country specific queries like that I'd make here in Australia.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.
none.. it’s all because of paid placement taking priority
It's less about paid placement taking priority (as in intentionally degrading results) but more that there's no incentive to spend money improving organic search results where at best it'll do nothing and at worst decrease the profitability of paid results (people are less likely to click on them if the organic results are good), not to mention that crap organic results also benefit Google as these websites often have Google Ads or Analytics.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brave search is fantastic, haven't noticed a difference since moving
I'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search. The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.
Haven't tried Brave, but I'd say DDG results are much better than Google Search.
I think it's down to personal preference or something.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#226The 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…
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.
Google can trivially reduce the amount of spam by using the amount of ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc as a negative ranking signal.
Instead of targeting SEO per-se (as it's difficult to determine a good website with SEO vs a spam website with SEO), target how they're making money.
They're not doing so exactly because they have no incentive.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#227I would gladly pay for a really good search engine if anyone is listening.
Kagi is listening. Sign up and give it a shot. I've tried them all (Neeva, Brave, Bing, Yandex, etc.) and I like Kagi the best. They are planning to make it a paid service when it gets out of beta.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sadly, that's not realistic. You can get a subset of users to pay, but it's vanishingly small compared to everyone who thinks they are perfectly happy with the "free" status quo. Even a dollar a month, it is infinitely more than zero. I just had this conversation with members of my extended family and almost all of them were of the "I don't care if I'm tracked, I've got nothing interesting to hide" mindset, along with "not a chance in hell I'm going to pay for this, or email, when I get them from Google for free."
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#229Google 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…
I think there's also some inertia. I know how to tweak google.
I have also used some competitors. They are fine for most things (finding the hours of a local store, a restaurant's menu).
However, when the going gets tough (troubleshooting a technical issue, looking for a recommendation) I fall back to google.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
3) ban abusive data providers?
You're ignoring the only insightful part of the article: if a search engine succeeds at all, it cannot ban anyone, because some antitrust bureaucrat somewhere will cluck about it.
If this were true, wouldn't Google display all million pages that are vaguely relevant to my query on the first screen?
Their only job is to stack order the internet. Down ranking a site to the 1,000,000th result is the same as banning them. They necessarily do this all the time (like for every search with more than 10 potential hits).