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

Google’s top search result is Google

themarkup.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 317 posts

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#241

Post by acituan »

eggsnbacon1 wrote: post #233
drusepth wrote: post #230

Makes sense to me. Google Flights is amazing, Google Stocks is better than my broker (and way easier/faster), Translate doesn't even have a decent competitor, and Restaurants isn't perfect but just makes it easier to get to Google Maps. As a consumer, this is great. As a small business owner, I'm not very concerned about Google usurping pieces of my site into a widget. If the entirety of a business/site can be replac…

Competitors have a hard time getting off the ground because the dominant player is promoting its own products. Classic monopoly. Competition won't be good if nobody uses them. Google maps might be a good example, MapQuest and Terraserver used to be better for navigation and satellite photos. Did they fail because of business reasons or self promotion? Hard to know, but Google pulled the same shit as MS got antitrust…

> ...promoting its own products. Classic monopoly

How is promoting equivalent to classic monopoly? They are not removing competitors from search results. They are ranking based on relevance and apparently users are happy with their own widgets coming up on top.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#242

Post by atombender »

reaperducer wrote: post #186
elpool2 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a while ago, but I remember Google maps being far better than any other map service when it first launched.

The reason Google Maps was successful in its early days wasn't because of its quality, it was because it was free. The other options were just as good, but often you had to pay for them. With Google, you could repeatedly refine the bad results until you found something useful, because there was zero additional cost involved.

Google Maps was revolutionary when it came out.

Maps had smooth, animated panning and zooming that updated the map in real time without reloading the page. MapQuest and the other major competitors at the time only allowed panning and zooming by clicking buttons on the side of the map, which scrolled a predefined number of steps and reloaded, at least initially, the entire page when you did so.

Google Maps was also less cluttered and used the browser's real estate much effectively. MapQuest was a small, cramped map by comparison.

Screenshots:

https://i2.wp.com/www.matthewhurst.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/websites/google-maps-we...

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#244

Post by carstenhag »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #167
josefresco wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder that the numbers look like now. I could see someone searching "MSN" for "Google" because MSN was set to their home page, or the default search. I wonder if those practices are still widespread enough to create this same effect. Given that Chrome is the new IE, I wonder how long (or ever) until they see competitors' brands in their popular search terms.

Don't underestimate the technical illiteracy here. A significant number of people don't really understand how the address bar or an URL works in a web browser. Use web searching as a substitute of typing an URL is common, and some can't distinguish the "search" function of an address bar and the "enter an URL" function of an address bar. Searching "Google" in the address bar to access Google in Google Chrome is not u…

Back when I was in high school (~5 years, not even that much), Firefox still had separate URL and search input fields. Of course the teachers used Chrome at home and were confused on why they couldn't search on the URL field.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#245

Post by res0nat0r »

addicted wrote: post #226
Mirioron wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'm trying to say. When I search for "maps" I'm trying to go to Google maps. The same happens when I search for "translate".

Why would you want to go to goofle translate or google maps when you search for translate or google? Wouldn’t you want to go to the best service you could get?

His point is those are the best.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#246

Post by dmoy »

xapata wrote: post #208
onion2k wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once it is an arguably better product, then yes, Google should definitely link to it first. Google Search should list the websites that best match the user's search terms ordered by a fair Pagerank score that doesn't emphasise Google's own properties. That's it. Google shouldn't be making subjective decisions about "site quality" (objective factors like speed, mobile optimization, malware etc are OK..). If I search f…

I care about speed, mobile optimization, and malware. Generalizing from my observation of myself, I expect others do as well.

And spam. Don't forget that with just base pagerank, all you'd get today is spam.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#247

Post by jb775 »

Probably because a lot of boomers open browsers and initially type "google" into the top bar (which does a google search for "google") just to get to the actual google website...then search for w/e they actually want to search for.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#248

Post by dbuder »

acituan wrote: post #241
eggsnbacon1 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competitors have a hard time getting off the ground because the dominant player is promoting its own products. Classic monopoly. Competition won't be good if nobody uses them. Google maps might be a good example, MapQuest and Terraserver used to be better for navigation and satellite photos. Did they fail because of business reasons or self promotion? Hard to know, but Google pulled the same shit as MS got antitrust…

> ...promoting its own products. Classic monopoly How is promoting equivalent to classic monopoly ? They are not removing competitors from search results. They are ranking based on relevance and apparently users are happy with their own widgets coming up on top.

>>They are ranking based on relevance

But they aren't! That's what we are talking about! They're putting themselves at the top.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#249

Post by freediver »

rydre wrote: post #169
mrkramer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah ok I got it. I like your idea it is similar to my. Currently what you can do as a website owner is to use Google Adsense ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AdSense ) and then you are kind of sharing revenue with Google but only when someone visits and clicks Google Ad on your website.

> Currently what you can do as a website owner is to use Google Adsense Nooo! This is not what I meant. I mean that embedding a search engine to your website without the user moving back to Google. So every website has a search engine for the entire internet. Not just Google. I want search to be kind of affiliate revenue to Amazon. So the developer embeds a search engine on the search page of a news website they get…

Imagine websites did this. Who would use it?

A search engine widget on website would probably look bad, would always be in different position and present a host of UX challenges which would add friction to adoption.

Every website is already able to search the internet via the URL bar of your browser nowadays. Its always there when you need it.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#250

Post by el-salvador »

chimen wrote: post #23

Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well. One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal bu…

It depends on the country.

Naver has super detailed maps of Korea.

Yandex Street View image quality is great in Russia.

Post reply on HN