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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?

#311

Post by dmurray »

derefr wrote: post #260
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…

> 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 a…

> That's not the algorithm's fault per se;

Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.

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

#312

Post by visarga »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #70
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 had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away. You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

You can make custom search engines by selecting an explicit list of sites on top of Google here

https://cse.google.com/all

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

#313

Post by jspash »

dmw_ng wrote: post #219
lmg643 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave search is fantastic, haven't noticed a difference since moving

I made an earnest effort to switch to Brave, but I'm back with Google for almost all searches because 1100ms+ result page loads are simply unworkable here.

I'm sticking it out, but I find that I have to fall back to Google on 1 out of 10 searches. Mostly technical ones.

But what really annoys me (and maybe I'm doing something wrong) is that one page of (slow) results is not enough. I understand that Google's 1,000,000+ results is also not necessary. But I often need more than 20. Come to think of it, I rarely need pages 2 and beyond when using Google. So maybe that's saying something about the quality of the Brave results? They're just not as good.

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

#314

Post by tomp »

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…

0. Incorporate a company called "WeSearch"

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

#315

Post by esperent »

nsgi wrote: post #299
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?

So in the last couple of days I've ended up doing a lot of research into equipment that I wasn't familiar with - commercial coffee equipment - and what I quickly found is that standard Google results are pretty much all blogspam. Not terrible info but it all feels like advertising while what I want is shared experiences from people who have actually used the equipment, not blogs that are actually ads from people who are trying to sell it to me.

So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit. YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.

Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.

Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?

Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.

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

#316

Post by black_puppydog »

lordnacho wrote: post #89
black_puppydog wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to mention kagi. Very happy user here. The no-spam results make it so much more useful as a tool. Also, "block this site from myresults forever" gives so much more agency to the user than anything Google has release in years. Googles "we know better" just reads as a big middle finger to me.

What happens when you ask it how many Ukrainian generals have died? Does it insist on giving you pages and pages about Russian generals, like Google? I was looking for this and it really annoys me how it thinks it knows what I want.

Just tried that. I did have to put "ukrainian generals" into quotes (which makes sense, that's how it's supposed to work) but then it just showed me 5 results total, all of which contained exactly that phrase.

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

#317

Post by Axien »

Google is already losing substantial market share. Let’s do an experiment. If you want to buy a blender, what is the first site you try? What about directions? Today’s weather?

My answers are Amazon, Siri, and Alexa. Not Google. Google will continue to lose as these assistants become more powerful.

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

#318

Post by dantyti »

visarga wrote: post #312
LeoPanthera wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away. You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.

You can make custom search engines by selecting an explicit list of sites on top of Google here https://cse.google.com/all

it requires a google account. I like teddit.net's approach of allowing the user to set up preferences and import them as a json.

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

#319

Post by kalleboo »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #302
javchz wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everybo…

Even before Google, people would stuff the bottom of their page with black on black keyword stuffing to game Altavista

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

#320

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

mathteddybear wrote: post #129
dddnzzz334 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bing is the king for porn. I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.

Curious thought, isn't in this area that the most important thing to avoid showing to the user certain undesirable result by accident? Not implying that bing ever failed to do that.

That's why all search engines have a 'safe search' toggle. And on Bing it's much easier to find than on Google.
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