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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#291

Post by BitwiseFool »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #172
omega3 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it's mainly not even their fault. It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.

Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either. What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap. Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site be…

I also feel like some product manager decided that having a blank results page is horrible. So even if I put terms in quotes, and there are no results with those quoted terms, Google decides to show me results that have virtually nothing to do with what I want to see.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#292

Post by tyingq »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #290
tyingq wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical urls help with noting your own purposeful duplicated content. But that meta tag goes on the duplicated content. So it doesn't help with scrapers, who strip that out.

But I thought that it was useful for google - who could find two caches with same content, one of which was 2018 one of which 2020 and both say "this is canonical". At that point the 2018 version is real and the other rejected. Then again, you could just do it with publication dates ...

I don't know why, but Google seems unable to figure out (or just doesn't care) "who published it first". I've seen it be confused many times.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#293

Post by BitwiseFool »

GuB-42 wrote: post #271
spaniard89277 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either. What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap. Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site be…

I think there is a market here. "Dumb" search engines, that search exactly the words you type, maybe with advanced features like regex, metadata search, etc... It won't replace Google's guesswork, but sometimes, I just want to grep the internet. All non-Google engines are all about privacy, which is nice, and almost a requirement if you want to compete with Google, but I'd like to see features that actually improve s…

I'd like to go a step further and hope for "dumb" search engines that are tailored towards indexing specific subsets of the internet as a whole. As an example, imagine a search engine that is specifically tailored towards programming questions. Or one that specifically omits some of the more annoying SEO optimized results, like Livestrong and USA Today.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#294

Post by BitwiseFool »

account42 wrote: post #205
kkoncevicius wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to also place less emphasis on search phrases. When searching for exact article names I easily find them on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google. Two recent search-term examples: 1. the scientific worldview needs an update 2. from reproducibility to over reproducibility

In general, google no longer primarily searches what you asked them but for what they think you want. This might be better for the average user but can be extremely frustrating when you are trying to find something more niche.

I think it is also the result of the whole "Ok, google" voice assistant push. It seems like Google switched to natural language processing and the old-school system of keyword searching is no longer effective.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#295

Post by throwuxiytayq »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #291
spaniard89277 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either. What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap. Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site be…

I also feel like some product manager decided that having a blank results page is horrible. So even if I put terms in quotes, and there are no results with those quoted terms, Google decides to show me results that have virtually nothing to do with what I want to see.

Except a blank page is exactly what I want to see if there are no results or if I mistyped my query. These shoehorned-in results throw me off every time because it takes extra mental effort to reinterpret them as "oh, google has no results for what I typed in past this point, so they're showing me random crap". I miss the old days when search was as precise as a scalpel.

Maybe I'm naive about the complexity of the problem (every article I read about the difficulty of what Google's doing certainly suggests so), but I honestly believe that we've reached the point where a talented and well-founded startup could outplay Google at their own game.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#296

Post by tikiman163 »

I'm kind of curious why he's so concerned about this? They've never managed better than ninth most relevant and in most cases they didn't even make the first page of result. Any advertising person will tell you, if you aren't in the top 3 results (basically the top result now that paid ads automatically get the top 2 spots on nearly all searches) your odds of being seen and clicked on drop to almost nothing.

Are they potentially doin harm? Sure. Have the successfully managed to trick anybody with this? I'd be extremely surprised if they're getting more than a dozen people clicking through from being the ninth result in a day,and when people see they've been redirected to an advertisement the majority of people immediately click away.

This isn't like clicking on a fake prorn site that redirects to cam girls with viruses hidden in all the downloads. It's random unrelated searches redirecting you to blatant ads for cryto currency. The kind of people who are young enough to know what crypto currency is and how to buy it, also know how to spot a redirect to a fake website.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#297

Post by tonypace »

Adrig wrote: post #169
keyme wrote: post #140

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated sof…

One of the last use case for Google is being a proper search engine for Reddit. But I think they are aware of their downfall, that's why the top of the page is increasingly taken by their widgets to provide directly the information. On the other hand, Youtube is the second most popular search engine and I don't see it slowing down. What an insight they had when they bought it. Edit : I entirely agree to the fact that…

YouTube search is regressing quickly. They're losing there too.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#298

Post by BitwiseFool »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #295
BitwiseFool wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also feel like some product manager decided that having a blank results page is horrible. So even if I put terms in quotes, and there are no results with those quoted terms, Google decides to show me results that have virtually nothing to do with what I want to see.

Except a blank page is exactly what I want to see if there are no results or if I mistyped my query. These shoehorned-in results throw me off every time because it takes extra mental effort to reinterpret them as "oh, google has no results for what I typed in past this point , so they're showing me random crap". I miss the old days when search was as precise as a scalpel. Maybe I'm naive about the complexity of the p…

>"blank page is exactly what I want to see"

I literally couldn't agree more. I can't stand how bad searching has become.

While we're at it, you know what else I really hate? How google switches the order of the buttons for Images, News, Shopping, Video, etc. on EACH QUERY. Who in the world ever thought this was a good idea?

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#300

Post by aasasd »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #291
spaniard89277 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either. What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap. Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site be…

I also feel like some product manager decided that having a blank results page is horrible. So even if I put terms in quotes, and there are no results with those quoted terms, Google decides to show me results that have virtually nothing to do with what I want to see.

Exactly, it's very easy to see how Google doesn't leave the user unspammed. YouTube's search works the same way, and even if there are useful results on top, they quickly trail off into clickbait garbage. Plus the unrelated lists of ‘people also watch’, injected every few items. The search filters are barely enough to dial in when you want to skip obvious trash, but give up on anything slightly complicated. On Play Store, it's worse: you just get troves of what Google thinks you should be getting, with no control on your side—because if people could skip apps with payment inside, they would, and who in Google wants that.
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