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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

#321

Post by DharmaPolice »

makecheck wrote: post #138

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 . Just thrown into the list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do have business: Google’s business). Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran…

Unfortunately the fuzzy search thing is in a kind of feedback loop in terms of user expectation. Because of Google users are used to typing the wrong thing and getting the right answer. If I search for "how old is Roger Redford" Google tells me that Robert Redford was born in 1936 (it doesn't even display the "Did you mean...?" correction). And to be fair, in 99% of cases the person probably did mean Robert Redford.

But anyway, this is the behaviour I think people are being trained to expect from searches. I sometimes have to show new users our business systems (which manage residential property data) and it's seen as a drag that you have to have some level of precision when searching for anything.

It's like a spellchecker. As they've got better over time you can be less and less accurate with words you're not quite sure on and they still find the word you meant.

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

#322

Post by corrral »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #273
jszymborski wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like what I've read about Kagi, and I'll likely end-up paying for it too, but I _hate_ the metered fee. I've never run a search engine, but I don't imagine that offering "Unlimited" searches where "unlimited" means "do not abuse" would meaningfully hurt their margins. As a benefit, you avoid losing customers that then need to ask "Do I make more than 5*80 searches a month? How many is that a day? What do I i…

They're not going to do a metered plan. From an email sent today: > Kagi will come as a free version with limited use; and an unlimited use, paid option at $10 a month, both versions having great search results with less spam and completely ad-free, tracking free, and with none of your search data being retained

$10/m for a household, if this is as good as people are saying, would be a no-brainer subscription for me.

Not paying $10/m per person in my household, though. That'd be way too high.

[EDIT] Though I guess with no retained search history, we could just share one account anyway, so it doesn't matter. I was thinking about keeping those separate. Unless there are per-user settings that we might not all want to share.

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

#323

Post by sph »

greybox wrote: post #70

I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using '!g' most of the time. Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.

I've been using Brave Search for months now, much better than DDG. I had a Kagi invite sitting in my inbox, just signed up and set as default search.

Will give it a spin, but so far I like what I see.

EDIT: I immediately boosted all `github.com` and `reddit.com` results. That's a killer feature!

EDIT 2: better than Brave Search on mobile: there's a search button to enter a new search, and the textbox doesn't move around like Brave or Google do causing you to click on the first suggestion. I bloody hate that. Well done Kagi.

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

#324

Post by naravara »

corrral wrote: post #317
strbean wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also honest content moved into video and podcasting formats (that are harder to index) or inside walled gardens like Twitter or Facebook. It's like if the internet was a sea and Google was the ship used to navigate it, the water has dried up and now it's just craggy shoals we have to navigate around to get anywhere.

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

#325

Post by omoikane »

colordrops wrote: post #257
l33t2328 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value This is exactly the ridiculous kind of hyperbole I come to HN for. If you honestly can’t find any value in using Google despite its unreliability, you were probably expecting too much of it to begin with.

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

I remember the days when internet as a whole were simpler in terms of contents and users, and search engines reflected that simpicity. I am not sure if it's possible to go back to those days.

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

#326

Post by pmontra »

> If you simply google: how to fix a flat tire the first website in the search results is this piece of bloatware, MillerAutoPlaza:

I attempted to reproduce the experiment and I got a full page of useful results, all of them videos or numbered lists of the steps as in

> Step One: Find the Puncture. Once you're in a safe place, hop out of the car, and find the flat tire. ...

etc.

Maybe Google read HN and fixed that query but how to replace flat tires yields similar results.

Maybe it's because I'm not logged in into Google and they are less aggressive on showing me ads?

Maybe it's because I'm not from an English language country and they know from my IP address. Let's try with come cambiare una gomma bucata. Other useful numbered lists and videos.

I'm not always happy with Google's results but there seems to be something wrong in the experiment here.

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

#327

Post by stevelosh »

superasn wrote: post #197
svnpenn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop pushing some site thats still in beta, AND requires a login.

Yes i too would like to see a side by side comparison why it's better than just dude trust me..

I've been using it during the beta and plan on paying for it once they start charging. Previously I had tried switching to DuckDuckGo, but found myself using !g half the time because I knew the DDG results would be garbage compared to the Google results.

I haven't found Kagi's results to be significantly better than Google's results, but unlike DDG they're not hugely worse than Google. It's all the extra stuff that makes me want to use Kagi instead of Google:

* Ability to banish sites from results forever. E.g. I never want to see the Concordia Lutheran High School's website when I search for things in the Common Lisp HyperSpec with clhs.

* Ability to weight sites higher. E.g. there are two mirrors of the Common Lisp HyperSpec that appear in results, one at http://clhs.lisp.se and one at http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/. The lisp.se mirror is hilariously slow for me (5-10 seconds to load) while the lispworks one is instant. Google always ranks lisp.se first which tricks me into clicking it and wasting my time. Kagi lets me weight that site lower so the lispworks site comes first. Banishing lisp.se would also work, but just upweighting it means I can still find it if the other mirror ever goes down or something.

* I reported a minor bug to Kagi and they fixed it within a few days. I doubt that would happen with Google.

* Supports DDG-style bang queries, which I use occasionally.

* No goddamn ads/tracking (I use uBlock Origin, but it's the principle of the thing). I've almost entirely de-Googled my life at this point (Youtube is the only holdout for me).

So it's not that it gives better results than Google, it's that the results aren't any worse and the extra quality-of-life features are really nice.

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

#328

Post by [deleted] »

svnpenn wrote: post #99
greybox wrote: post #70

I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using '!g' most of the time. Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.

Please stop pushing some site thats still in beta, AND requires a login.

[deleted]

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

#329

Post by sph »

soco wrote: post #290
svnpenn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop pushing some site thats still in beta, AND requires a login.

Not only requires a login, but also Joe Regular cannot use it - beta means here closed invite-only, so it's just an internal tool for some group of people. So any news about it should be taken with a grain of salt.

AFAIK it's an open invite system. I put my email, the next day I received an invite.

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

#330

Post by monkpit »

nabakin wrote: post #312
twofornone wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Quotes haven’t worked for about 10 years now. For my job in 2012 I very often had to google obscure part numbers to find documentation.

Even if you added quotes to the part number (such as “foo123-x”, google would return results for “foo234-x” or “foo123-y” and bold them as if they had matched. The real part numbers could be 10-20 characters long, so it was more difficult to spot discrepancies.

I learned very quickly not to trust the results even when adding quotes. If I had assumed the quotes had worked, I would have grabbed bad documentation without even realizing it.

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