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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

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

#291

Post by y42 »

javchz wrote: post #270
not2b wrote: 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…

I miss the days when SEO was only focusing on a decent HTML semantics, meta tags in order, organic backlinking, a good title that aligned with the content, and a good enough performance. Right now SEO it's an arms race between google and every SEO agencies, with a keyword being attached to some company that may have 0 relevance to the user. Doesn't help, that depending on the query, the first results are ads only sup…

That would not help. Those kind of effects are inherent in the system. As long as Visitsv lead to any kind of revenue, no matter if by Ad Impressions or Affiliate Programms or whatever, there exists a motivation and people will try to drag visitors to their sites. You will have to remove eCommerce from the Internet to fix that.

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

#292

Post by jpalomaki »

zargon wrote: post #40
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #22

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…

No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)

What’s the story behind Kagi - are they somehow related to Google?

To my knowledge besides the old experiments with client side search, Google has never allowed (even paid) api access to their search. I thought they did not do this, because it would have allowed somebody to jump start a search engine that might eventually become a competitor.

Kagi seems to be open about their Google relationship, so I assume they have agreement in place.

This even feels like some experiment from Google to create a premium, paid, search product (like what they did with YouTube).

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

#293

Post by andi999 »

irrational wrote: post #236
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…

> I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever). Yes, I would love this. I was recently looking for reviews of a certain woodworking tool. The…

So you want the search engine to perform a turing test? Nice.

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

#294

Post by etherael »

bko wrote: post #110
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…

> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.

> manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")?

This makes it basically unusable for anything that isn't a technical question, for which it is still reasonably good if you restrict to sites where it will likely get a reasonable answer.

If special interest groups aligned with google have a position on what you're searching though, it will simply be spammed outright and any evidence to the contrary either concealed or "fact checks" which consist of minor modifications on the core underlying fact in question spiked with something that is obviously false so that the fact check can say "false" whilst actually the underlying fact in question is not at all false. Even when those special interest groups are right, google is still useless because it will give you such a slanted view of the territory you will be utterly clueless as to what other sides of the debate even exist as anything more than silly strawmen. Most questions in this class people would be better served by just petitioning Blackrock and similar directly and asking them what they should think.

For commercial stuff it's almost as bad, I find myself having to figure out the underlying financial realities of the industry that produces x, then getting a summary of the market space by volume and associated data, then speculating on stuff that might exist within that market space that might be nice in light of whatever flaws afflict the market space in question, and maybe if I get lucky I'll find something through the reams and reams of valueless SEO optimised pop-up spewing complete and utter bullshit desperately attempting to capitalise on my assumed stupidity with their cookie cutter a-b tested "sales pitches". Most of the time I end up just going to alibaba or similar, finding vendors shipping actual large units with decent reviews, and then working backwards from there to what I'm looking for.

Watching google fall from something amazing to probably-worse-than-microsoft-all-things-considered tier was quite the eye opener.

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

#295

Post by kuhewa »

elevaet wrote: post #114
thereare5lights wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. Came here to write exactly that Why are we still using it? There's nothing better out there.

I've been starting to use kagi for search. I'm still using google by default, but when I get a screen full of ads and clickbait articles I turn to kagi and it's almost always better.

I wanted to love kagi, but they still have the same fuzzy search that makes it about impossible to find something odd that shares keywords with commonplace things.

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

#296

Post by jokethrowaway »

Duckduckgo is vastly superior to Google in my experience.

Normal searches give me the same information, news results feel less biased (they present articles from both left.and right viewpoint), better code search (especially with the code snippet extractor), less DMCA removed content

The only things I reach out for google are: - Business hours of stores - Google maps

Also, I don't often search for images but duckduckgo safety filter still let a few nsfw pics to go through.

People are on Google because of habit

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

#297

Post by Broken_Hippo »

Tenoke wrote: post #186
zargon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)

I use Google without AdBlock on my phone daily and it's not quite that different.

I use Google without AdBlock whenever I am in a private browser in addition to going without adblock on both my phone and tablet. I agree, it isn't that much different. At least with search, that is.

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

#298

Post by 1_player »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #101
mountainriver wrote: post #78

The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it. I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on

Only on HN. Virtually none of the "problems" described on HN at the intersection of tech and society are seen as problems out in the real world.

I disagree. There is bound to be more than a non-tech person that notices that Google has gone downhill, and is confused because it _feels_ like they were getting better results 10 years ago, but has no way and knowledge to confirm that. Regular people were using Google during its golden age in the 2000s already.

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

#299

Post by nsgi »

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…

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow have plenty of sites scraping their content and hosting copies. People would just go to those sites from Google instead of the real ones.

Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?

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

#300

Post by mrjin »

buildbot wrote: post #79
zargon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)

+1 kagi was the first alternative engine that has passed all of my random tests, mostly weird cameras and python coding searches…

But why would a search engine require an account to use in the first place? Or maybe I took it wrong?
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