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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

abhinavsharma.com

251–260 of 471 posts

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#251

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google. 1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion. 2. You block Google from indexing the sites. 3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit. 4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarante…

Great way to kill both Reddit and SO lol

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#252

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…

Sorry but duckduckgo or probably any other search is better than Google at this moment

Not everyone lives in the US and/or an English-speaking country.

I can't find shit with DDG and the experience is like using Google from 20 years ago when it didn't have any of its bells and whistles.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search, "what hotel to stay in san francisco soma". You'll see that every single result above the fold is an Ad. In fact it doesn't even give me a single useful piece of information. #1 result is a link to expedia. #2 is to hotels.com, #3 to the trip advisor. Scroll down Google Hotels widget. Then on the 3rd browser viewpoint page I get actual query results.

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.

When weird search results get posted on HN, they're sometimes fixed within minutes. I wouldn't doubt that the search term was "fixed" by someone reading HN.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#255
post #247

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google. 1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion. 2. You block Google from indexing the sites. 3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit. 4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarante…

Doesn't google have something called the Google CSE where you specify which sites you will exclusively include in search results?

[deleted]

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#256

Google is still the fastest way to find things. The rest, including ddg just is not as good.

My phone randomly searches on bing from time to time and it blows my mind how shitty the search is. Fault Google, but it either knows what my brain wants, or my brain expects what Google provides.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#257
post #247

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google. 1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion. 2. You block Google from indexing the sites. 3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit. 4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarante…

Doesn't google have something called the Google CSE where you specify which sites you will exclusively include in search results?

yes, but it's limited in terms of number of searches you can do and also they'll run ads on free version.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#258

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google. 1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion. 2. You block Google from indexing the sites. 3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit. 4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarante…

If a site allows crawling by at least one public-Internet spider, is there any legal protection it has against other crawlers who choose to ignore robots.txt and crawl anyway? Because I feel like that's exactly what Google would do here, as long as it wasn't literally illegal for them to do so.

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#259
post #147

The 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.

This makes no sense. Google makes more money when users click on some crappy landing page filled with display ads?

Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.

I still don’t get why. It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search? I do suspect the main thing people complain about currently with Google is the abundance of ads and the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked…

> It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it?

Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not at 10B queries/day.

> the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.

That's not the algorithm's fault per se; that's instead the fact that recipes can't be copyrighted, and so these sites can freely steal + repost one-another's recipes, and so you'll find the same recipe word-for-word on many sites, thus making an exact match in the recipe part not contribute highly to ranking any particular site. The 2000-word blog post, on the other hand, is actual Intellectual Property unique to the site posting it. So it only appears in the one place; and so when your query matches it, it ranks quite highly indeed.

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