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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
301–310 of 471 posts
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#302The 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…
> 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.
It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybody was doing the same.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#303I'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?
So why is it that I can never find my old reddit comments if I want to refer back to them?
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#304I'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?
A lot of people add "reddit" to their search results for certain types of searches, including product reviews. It provides a ton of information from real people and cuts a lot of the garbage out.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe the market of people that are significantly different from his/her mom is just too small to justify the significant investments needed to build a search engine.
Or said another way: If 99% are happy with Google, can the remaining 1% pay enough to finance "Google pro" ?
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#306Because they invested 20 years of majority of online capital into becoming the infrastructure of the web, much like Microsoft spent all of theirs to become the infrastructure of PC. These corporate strategies should be illegal.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#307I have switched to Kagi for everything other than trying to find stuff that's on Google Maps. Search results are consistently better. I think their backend is mostly just Bing?
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#308Earlier 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
Exactly. Even within the ad platform they keep pushing advertisers to target ‘broad’ keywords instead of ‘exact match’ ones.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#309It was ideas that mattered in the early 2000s. but nowadays marketing is much more important than ideas. In other words, an alternative that can work better than Google can of course be made, but its good work alone is never enough to compete with it. Or maybe I don't know.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#310I'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…
Google has prepared counter-moves for every step of your path. E.g. can you guarantee (2) against all moves Google could make?
Even if you succeed in securing an island of quality content: How big is your audience? I don't remember the exact quote but somebody said that television is the way it is because that's what people want.
Yahoo should have chosen to become a media company. Now they would have all the knowledge to mix search results in a way that is rewarded by the market. It's the academics of the early internet who want the best results. Everybody else wants to be entertained.