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Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

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Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#311

Post by elorant »

benstrumental wrote: post #212
deelly wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you show some examples of search results?

I have been trying Kagi for a few months and have found it better than Google in most cases, though not a silver bullet. Here are the queries from the original article in Kagi: how to fix a flat tire Top result: https://www.wikihow.com/Fix-a-Flat-Tire Also, it predicts a video is best to answer this question and gives 3 YouTube thumbnails listed at the top of the results. They all seem generally helpful based on the…

I got the wikihow as the second result. The top one was this:

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-trucks/how-t...

Which is equally good.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#312

Post by nabakin »

twofornone wrote: post #301
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL There used to be a 'verbatim' mode that would do exactly that. The quotes symbol were also a way to enforce verbatim mode. Sadly this behaviour of "let me assume what you want" is not exclusive of google as I also now experience this on ddg.

What I don't understand is that the verbatim option still exists, it just doesn't seem to do anything. And quotes don't seem to work anymore either. It's all very insulting.

In my case quotes still work but they aren't as good as they once were

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#313

Post by freediver »

EricE wrote: post #270
freediver wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that is what we intend to try ($10/mo flat fee for unlimited). Most users told us they are more comfortable with this model vs pay-per-use which is why we removed the "Consumption" page as is not relevant in this model. We do not yet know if the flat fee will be viable for the company and we hope to learn that very soon.

Another user here who see's huge value in just renaming the consumption page to a history page. Would be VERY handy! Especially if I could restrict a search to my own search history.

Hmm, we never had the ability to search your search history as we do not keep track of searches. Consumption page merely showed search count per day.

If you want to save your search history perhaps you can open a suggestion on https://kagifeedback.org

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#314

Post by sph »

malfist wrote: post #277
colordrops wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your expectations are too low. We all remember google in it's heyday when it returned honest results, so we know what's possible.

Ah yes, the good ol' days of content farms copying from stack overflow, or did you mean the good ol' days of buying back links? Or the good ol' days of web rings? Let's face it, the heyday of honest results are just as mythical as the political "good ol' days".

> the good ol' days of web rings

I honestly don't get your snark. Those were the good old days of the Internet, when SEO spam and PageRank wasn't a thing. Then Google came and made the Internet even better, then it turned to shit, and here we are. And web rings were great, you take that back.

So yes, there was a period of time when the Internet was in some ways better than nowadays. Now I'm not saying that everything that happened since is bad, but Internet search and signal-to-noise ratio has definitely fallen off a cliff.

Let's enjoy the good days of siloes and SEO optimization. I doubt it'll get better.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#315

Post by davoneus »

tome wrote: post #256
rg111 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not a Google problem Oh it is definitelt a Google problem. I was in mood yesterday and I tried Google versus Kagi and You Code. Results of N out of N queries in other search engines were miles better in other search engines than Google. I have now switched completely to code.you.com and Kagi from Google. They are ready.

Kagi is jaw-droppingly amazing. With Google search quality declining, Bing being on average 95% as good as Google, and DuckDuckGo being 90% as good, I was doubting there was any way that search engines would ever improve. Kagi has removed that doubt completely. I ask for stuff and it finds it. I couldn't believe there could be such a useful product.

Bing may be that good for some, but every time I use it it stinks and I end up back on Google. Same for DDG. Then again, my queries tend to be pretty specific and are probably not a typical use case.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#316

Post by guerrilla »

How come nobody is doing social search yet? Why can't I up and down vote results and maybe even comment on them or something? I don't want to ever see some of these recipe sites that show up again... I can't imagine I would if people were helping curate. Seems like an "easy" solution to SEO crapola?

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#317

Post by corrral »

strbean wrote: post #288
malfist wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the good ol' days of content farms copying from stack overflow, or did you mean the good ol' days of buying back links? Or the good ol' days of web rings? Let's face it, the heyday of honest results are just as mythical as the political "good ol' days".

Eh, there were a few periods of "glory days". Usually in the months after Google's latest crackdown on one of the SEO techniques you mentioned.

Notably, around `08 or `09, these cycles stopped. From the outside, it looks like Google stopped trying to fight spam and just gave a bunch of huge sites a permanent boost in rankings instead, so at least some of your results might not be spammy garbage.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#318

Post by trhoad »

Err, what?

.edu is a TLD for US based educational bodies. So the reason you don't see a cookie banner is because the majority (AFAIK) of US states don't mandate a cookie banner, unlike EU and UK based sites (like the Natural History Museum, based in the UK). Does this mean the Natural History Museum is a less authoritative resource than anywhere else? I'd say the opposite, actually.

And for the "change a tire" example using a .edu TLD. That's a fantastic example of how to find search results that are almost completely useless for anyone outside the US. What's a "tire", anyway? Oh, you mean "tyre". What's a "flashlight". OK, you mean a "torch".

In summary: there's a world outside the US. It's lovely out here.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#319

Post by nabakin »

baxuz wrote: post #77

It's not a Google problem, it's a web problem. Everything is based around SEO spam. If someone has a website, and they're producing content, their point is to monetize the browsing of the website itself, or promote their main product via the website. This incentivizes a certain kind of content, which is marketing content. These days I'm back to searching social networks like Reddit or Hacker News for (at least somewh…

I understand that to some degree this is an arms race between business SEO optimization and Google's SEO ranking algorithms but I don't understand why Google upranks websites with obvious annoyances like the 3 popups in the case of OP's website, excessive amount of adtracking, and unreasonably large website sizes. In those cases, I can only suspect Google upranks them because they provide ad revenue to Google.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#320

Post by dizhn »

sitkack wrote: post #304
Croftengea wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google.stanford.edu :)

https://altavista.com it runs on the latest top end Alpha processors.

http://altavista.digital.com

I honestly switched to google from alltheweb and altavista initially because of the easier name and muscle memory taking hold. To this day I believe Altavista was better when google first took off.

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