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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

#231

Post by techdragon »

freshpots wrote: post #167
KMag wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful. Maybe it's a useful rule of thumb, but be careful of the "searching for your keys under the light pole" problem. I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, mea…

I wish I could find forums with my answer instead of a multitude of websites and blogs that do not answer my query. I guess I could add 'forum' or something but when I am already searching a specific query and particular piece of hardware I don't need the first page to show me retailers of said hardware.

Tried it, blog spam mentions finding or not finding stuff in forums way too much and it basically didn’t help unless I started getting into weird Google fu like including strings from the copyright footer of various forums in an advanced search using the OR operator and multiple quoted sections … at which point I was like “why am I working this hard on making Google better when they don’t fucking pay me”

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

#233

Post by ajsnigrutin »

beachy wrote: post #54

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…

Aw man... that would destroy pinterest.

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

#234

Post by xg15 »

londons_explore wrote: post #179
Spooky23 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always assumed that they were getting paid. I can’t think of any reason why a spam Pinterest link has any value, yet it’s ranked high.

Pinterest has a surprisingly large userbase of people who actually like the content there. There are a lot of real world people I meet who speak highly of all the great creative ideas they get from there.

It's still completely useless for people who are not on Pinterest.

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

#235

Post by ajsnigrutin »

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…

You don't even have to blacklist... just look at user behaviour. Did the user come back to google and select the next result after two seconds on that site? Did many users do that? Something has to be wrong with that site, rank it down.

I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who clicks on pinterest results in eg. image search, and immediately click back to find another image somewhere else.

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

#236

Post by eloisius »

dmje wrote: post #223
gwbas1c wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). I wish I could do that at Hacker News too. I really just don't want anything from medium.com.

That's a weird thought. Medium might be irritating as an interface or as a business but there are still some really interesting things written on it, no?

There may be good content on medium, but more often than not I'm frustrated by long-winded, less accurate retellings of official documentation. I think it might be because of the monetization. People have an incentive to write shallow blog posts/tutorials on things like "throwing an exception with Python." If I'm out of options I will skim through a Medium post, but usually I avoid them at first because they tend to be less helpful than non-Medium blogs, official docs, etc.

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

#237

Post by Marazan »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #40
mywittyname wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The stories also serve the purpose of providing copyright. A recipe alone doesn't have copyright, but the story mixed throughout the recipe does have copyright.

No, it's so the pages follow thr Google blessed "ideal" page format. X number of words, 2-3 pictures, iser stays on page for longer than Y time.

Last one is the killer, a site that quickly gives you the info you are looking (or quickly shows you it doesn't have the info) for is punished by google search ranking.

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

#238

Post by urthor »

PaulHoule wrote: post #87

For Python programming I would say 100% of the time you should look the answer up in the official manual for a well-defined problem (delete a file) because the manual is correct, well-written, etc. It's astonishing how often Google and Bing snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on queries like this. If you go looking in splogs, spam overflow and other spam sites at best you are going to get wrong answers, at worse y…

Realpython is a third party site that I'll admit is acceptable for these results.

Mostly yes, you just search efficient documentation.

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

#239

Post by blenderdt »

beachy wrote: post #54

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…

This is not only a problem with Google search. DDG is now also flooded with auto (AI?) generated content. For example there are now loads of websites about programming topics. They look real but always lack the main point of the article which makes you navigate to other articles on the same website.

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

#240

Post by wodenokoto »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #235
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…

You don't even have to blacklist... just look at user behaviour. Did the user come back to google and select the next result after two seconds on that site? Did many users do that? Something has to be wrong with that site, rank it down. I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who clicks on pinterest results in eg. image search, and immediately click back to find another image somewhere else.

No, that SEO shit works. The whole adbased internet is optimized to waste your time.

Did I spend a minute or two trying to read a 1000 word article, because I was looking for how many pixels there is in a 4k monitor? Or did I spend 2 seconds visiting a chart?

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