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Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

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Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#311

Post by mywittyname »

ehsankia wrote: post #217
mywittyname wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the case. Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut. Google has all of the tools t…

Isn't that similar to what they tried for things like shopping for example, and they got sued for? The problem is that if they become an aggregator for a specific type of content, like let's say travel or lyrics, then other aggregator websites start suing.

Oh, I was not suggesting they be an aggregator. They should get people to produce original content and pay them per view like YouTube.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#312

Post by wintermutestwin »

superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

You included MS Answers, but left out discussions.apple.com, which I find to be an even greater disappointment. This pair of $2T+ enterprises have failed so badly at something that should be table stakes.

How hard would it be to pay a small team to go through this tangled mess and clean it up and keep it that way? How little do they care about the attitudes of their users??

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#313

Post by gwbas1c »

dmje wrote: post #223
gwbas1c wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). I wish I could do that at Hacker News too. I really just don't want anything from medium.com.

That's a weird thought. Medium might be irritating as an interface or as a business but there are still some really interesting things written on it, no?

I've found the Medium posts that make it to Hacker News to be drivel: Uninteresting and inaccurate. The titles themselves are interesting, but the content itself isn't worth reading.

It's happened so much that I just won't click on anything that's on medium.com.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#314

Post by remexre »

gwbas1c wrote: post #313
dmje wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a weird thought. Medium might be irritating as an interface or as a business but there are still some really interesting things written on it, no?

I've found the Medium posts that make it to Hacker News to be drivel: Uninteresting and inaccurate. The titles themselves are interesting, but the content itself isn't worth reading. It's happened so much that I just won't click on anything that's on medium.com.

I've noticed the same thing, but (like n=2, so take it with a grain of salt) even for authors whose other writings I enjoy; I wonder if there's something weird with how they structure the incentives for writing there such that this is what you get

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#315

Post by AlwaysRock »

superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

w3schools isnt perfect but they are god for html and css syntax.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#316

Post by dayvid »

superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

w3schools was useful when it first came out years ago. It's probably riding on its initial utility. I remember when the w3fools site was released later (https://www.w3fools.com/)

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#317

Post by AlwaysRock »

beachy wrote: post #54

The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming. As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less…

I believe -site:facebook will remove that site from your queries. Annoying but it is functional.

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#318

Post by culi »

superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

> 5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2, alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects can sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole.

Wow I've never had this pop up for me tbh. I wish alternativeto would come up more often, it's a really great resource and it's all crowd-sourced so it's very valuable information. Definitely wouldn't classify it as seo spam

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#319

Post by culi »

xvello wrote: post #262
superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

Shameless plug for the Let's Block It project: we have a filter template to selectively remove domains from search results: https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results For the Stackoverflow / Github clones, we partner with https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter and their lists are available as presets at the bottom of the filter configuration.

That's awesome and exactly what we need. Never any shame in plugging an open source and free project. Would love to see this as a standalone browser plugin some day. Maybe even making it easier to create and share custom lists

Re: Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

#320

Post by culi »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #295
superasn wrote: post #249

There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / revi…

W3schools is wonderful, it's got great primers on a whole lot of languages and libraries with concise, clear explanations and examples.

It has terribly outdated info today. MDN does everything it does but better and always up to date yet MDN almost always shows up after w3schools in my results
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