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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

abhinavsharma.com

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

#281

Post by remus »

Guest19023892 wrote: post #246

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…

Don't forget step 4.5:

As your search engine tips in to popularity all sites on it are overrun with spammy SEO content as marketers search for the next way to get more eyeballs on their ads.

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

#283

Post by popcube »

derefr wrote: post #261
rootusrootus wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

How about a company that provides a search engine, but as a part of a greater subscription service whose selling point isn't search? Imagine, for example, that paying for Apple One got you access to an Apple-operated search engine.

how about just sell your customers to Google? Apple had do this on Safari

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

#284

Post by thisNeeds2BeSad »

IgorPartola wrote: post #201
pessimizer wrote: post #168

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…

Because somebody could have crafted a superior search using their refined search as an API, destroying the Add Revenue

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

#285

Post by richardfey »

rvnx wrote: post #231
IgorPartola wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Approximate match allows you to sell approximate/related-match ads

Brilliant observation, never thought of it. Now the quality degradation kinda starts to make sense.

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

#286

Post by octoberfranklin »

Because their crawler gets special privileges from cloudflare and the other CDNs.

Here, read about the problem from one of the very few remaining non-GoogleBingYandex crawlers remaining:

https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#willneverhappen

https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#stopevilcensorship

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

#287

Post by charcircuit »

cromwellian wrote: post #235
1_player wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? But it's definitely possible nowadays when RAM is cheap and modern Google makes the Internet feel incredibly smaller than it was 20 years ago. At the time you would get tons of results from a myriad of small blogs, forums, niche websites. Nowadays it's Pinterest, blogspam and more SEO optimised algorithmic crap. If you're lucky you get a forum result that might actually be relevant. Given the joke that if you…

Here, let Jeff Dean explain how it works (and why this is a complex problem that a lot of the naive 'build a better search engine than Google' miss) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fc32/72302461b74217662085a8... The original article's description of how Google search signals work doesn't even scratch the surface of all the signals it's using.

A link to the talk for those curious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQuSuyUVkoE

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

#288

Post by bencollier49 »

not2b wrote: post #191
glenstein wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has incentives to degrade the quality of search results for the benefit of its profitability, up to the extent that is able to without turning away too many users. I think it's more like that rather than an either/or.

They have competition: if we get to the point where Bing/DuckDuckGo results are clearly better, people will start moving, and that will hurt their revenue badly.

I switched precisely because I found that the DuckDuckGo results were indeed better. This was a third attempt though - the first two times it wasn't quite good enough. It improved, and Google got worse.

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

#289

Post by y42 »

kauguste281 wrote: post #65

Google 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…

Yeah well, that's what you want, and probably a decent couple of power users. And I totally agree.

But here is the thing:

My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are living and the "future is real". They do not understand the drawbacks or they just don't care.

And I dare to assume that this pictures the vast majority of Internet users.

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

#290

Post by jackblemming »

y42 wrote: post #289
kauguste281 wrote: post #65

Google 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…

Yeah well, that's what you want, and probably a decent couple of power users. And I totally agree. But here is the thing: My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are livi…

Good thing there's more of a market than your mom, dad, and even your brother, or alternative search competitors like duckduckgo and others would be completely screwed.
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