241–250 of 412 posts
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The new UI is great! It keeps the programmers occupied so they stop messing with the old UI that I actually want to use.
Till one day they pull the old UI and theres nothing you can do about it
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Yep, this is Content Marketing. People use SEO tools to gauge how good a blog post is going to rank, and the current sweet spot seems to be around 1000 words, so they end up filling it with fluff. Some of those are even machine generated. The answer to the "can cats eat X", of course, can't be at the beginning or at the end. The reason is that the user must stay a long time and read the text, otherwise Google punishe…
I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam from the results. It must be profitable somehow for the majority of search results to be utterly useless.
Old-school useful content is rarely monetized, just someone sharing their passion for something. Occasional affiliate link, with the obligatory apologetic "hey web servers cost money, so I included some affiliate links here!"
The uselessness is just a side effect of Google directing you toward paying customers.
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For my cat, I'd probably just call the pet poison line in my state/country. Dogs are relatively better at eating human food (except very obvious well known examples like alcohol, grapes, cooked bones etc) but most plants can be poisonous to cats, so I wouldn't risk it.
Simple rule: Chocolate is poisonous to cats. And what's poisonous to humans is usually poisonous to cats as well.
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Monopolies are a barrier to entry. I don't think any of google's products prevent that. As we see in most technology over the last 20 years, the companies at the top can change fast. A company that creates a better search engine, will easily take over search. Next gen of search will be better at providing more relevant / less spam Youtube does have some network effect and high costs but not enough to stop anyone from…
Can you provide examples of better companies replacing the incumbent in a mature market? Most examples I can think of occurred in markets that were a tiny fraction of their mature size. Most of Google's users weren't using search engines when Google was created. Most of facebook's users weren't using social media when Facebook was created. In these cases it's less about converting existing users as it is about captur…
>Most of Google's users weren't using search engines when Google was created.
I really don't know about your assessment about Facebook but I'd fundamentally disagree, as in the beginning they were capturing the college aged to young professionals. I'd say they fundamentally grew off the back of MySpace users. Myspace was huge and everyone had a page at the time.
Google was a little different as they did help to define and create this space of web indexing, as a lot of early search pages were more directories and portals.
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I know this sounds implausible, but I find Bing image search so much better than Google.
Yandex is surprisingly good at image search and allows you to crop the source image in-browser.
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When I search Google now I mostly get spam. “Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads. “Product Review” -> same as above, spam. “Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes. Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful. Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occa…
I have a cat that is always ravenous for anything edible, even if it's not exactly typical cat fare, e.g., my leftover salad, berries, etc. Trying to search for "can cats eat X" after he manages to get a few sneaky morsels is almost pointless. There are so many spammy sites for every value of X, and I have no idea if it's a sophisticated problem to systematically exclude this type of useless content, but Google's top…
Huh, I just tried this with a bunch of stuff and the snippets for each of the top several results for each all had fairly direct yes/no answers with reasons. Don't know if I got lucky hitting the right food items, or if it's a personalization issue.
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When I search Google now I mostly get spam. “Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads. “Product Review” -> same as above, spam. “Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes. Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful. Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occa…
My experience is puzzlingly contrary to the unanimously-shared frustration above. I tried this with a bunch of products ripe for spamming: instapot review, nvidia 3070 review, and Apple Watch review, and the first page results were almost entirely reputable. I also tried “huggies vs pampers pull ups” and the result is quite a good variety of forum threads, blogs, and reputable articles. “Quasar formation” leads to Wi…
It's less common stuff that tends to give you mostly crap.
Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…
I think it's a popular opinion on HN that Google search sucks, but I just don't agree. I used DDG on all my devices for the better part of last year, and bailed when I noticed by g! usage ratcheting up.
Many moons ago, I put a ton of work into a (now defunct) content site that provided specific information in a small vertical. Each post took hours, but I enjoyed writing the articles, and the revenue from the ads was enough to enjoy a little extra cash every month (we're talking just about enough to cover a car payment, for context). Google decided they liked a lot of the content and started providing it in their kno…
It’s hard to see how this isn’t anticompetitive. Using their market power in search to show their own ads but prevent anyone navigating to view any others seems like something that should end up in court.
I don’t see it as anticompetitive so much as copyright violations. The fact that Google makes advert revenue using this strategy just contributes to damages.
Anticompetitive would likely require Alphabet (and potentially other companies) from preventing users from accessing the original web page (which might be possible but more difficult to prove).
Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…
And the natural language questions sometimes get stuck. For example, [what's the difference between cauliflower cheese and cauliflower mornay] seems like it should return a page that tells you what the difference is, but it doesn't. It returns a bunch of recipes.