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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?

#331

Post by glenstein »

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…

> (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).

These are all truly excellent and refreshingly imaginative ideas, in a conversation too often starved of critical thinking (elsewhere in this thread commenters, unable to imagine any alternative at all, are incredulously asking "what would you even replace it with?").

I would just say that search in it's traditional form is valuable too, and highly efficient. Or at least it can be when done well. I think millionshort search results are a good example of what traditional search can be.

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

#332

Post by Nextgrid »

IncRnd wrote: post #272
Nextgrid wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users? Imagine that every Internet user pays just one dollar a month. That's still billions worth of revenue, and it can be segmented further such as basic features available for free and more advanced users (such as large-scale API access) can pay more.

There isn't a single scenario for any product or service anywhere that will get every Internet user to pay a monthly fee - not even for 1¢ a month.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a direct payment. Companies can white-label the service or include it as a value-add as part of their offering; for example an ISP or mobile carrier offering this to their customers.

At the moment I'm not aware of any company whose primary service is search. I believe the demand would be there - OS manufacturers currently have to either put up with Google (even if their goals diverge - for example it doesn't work well with Apple's privacy-focused marketing) or Bing.

A third player whose primary business is search (as opposed to using it as a loss-leader to lure people into their ecosystems, like Google and Bing are) could get some use, not to mention that programmatic access to large web index would no doubt be a service many companies would pay for. Think Algolia or hosted ElasticSearch but pre-seeded with a broad index of the web.

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

#334

Post by sfe22 »

derefr wrote: post #258
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…

If a site allows crawling by at least one public-Internet spider, is there any legal protection it has against other crawlers who choose to ignore robots.txt and crawl anyway? Because I feel like that's exactly what Google would do here, as long as it wasn't literally illegal for them to do so.

You can still block googles ip’s manually

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

#336

Post by Schroedingersat »

IgorPartola wrote: post #201
pessimizer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.

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…

> What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search?

Control. They've moved from helping you find what you asked for, to trying to influence you to changingnwhat you ask for to the thing that paid them the most.

Similarly they're they're forcing creators to alter content to match their metrics or fall into obscurity.

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

#337

Post by Schroedingersat »

vbezhenar wrote: post #329
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…

They didn’t remove literal search. Put your literal in quotes.

This stopped working reliably some time before last year.

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

#338

Post by Schroedingersat »

google234123 wrote: post #172
Barrin92 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only person on earth who hasn't noticed any decline in Google results that everyone keeps talking about? To me it seems like people conflate the fact that there is now significantly more stuff on the internet (what's the data volume today compared to 2010, 100x? 1000x?) than there was years ago with the performance of search engines. People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't…

I’ve noticed more spam and shit sites but I’m not sure if that’s entirely googles fault. There might just be 1000x more spam sites now then a few years ago.

It is their fault when they've actively pressured real content into being indistinguishable from spam sites.

If you don't write like a drunk two year old and fill everything with key phrases now you simply don't appear in results, so any site that can become known has to be rewritten by gpt into barely intelligible garbage that dances around the point for four paragraphs when it could be communicated in four words..

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

#339

Post by jsnell »

jpalomaki wrote: post #292
zargon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries. It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)

What’s the story behind Kagi - are they somehow related to Google? To my knowledge besides the old experiments with client side search, Google has never allowed (even paid) api access to their search. I thought they did not do this, because it would have allowed somebody to jump start a search engine that might eventually become a competitor. Kagi seems to be open about their Google relationship, so I assume they hav…

At least Startpage has been serving Google results (via paid API access) for years. There is nothing new about Kagi paying for access to it.

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

#340

Post by glenstein »

randomsilence wrote: post #310
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…

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 knowledg…

Huh? What counter moves? You buy Reddit, Google buys X? Why would that be inevitable, and why, if there is a counter move, would it function as a stopper or defeater rather than just as some separate thing that also exists? What even is the other reddit? Why wouldn't google's prospective counter acquisition just say no to their offer? And is it an acquisition, right, or does Google build something to compete? And why would that work, given googles history of abandoning it's own projects to the Google graveyard? And where even is the precedent for this kind of reactionary behavior as a strategic actor? Wouldn't Google just ignore it, focus on it's core products like it always does? This just sounds like a kid playing with action figures.

And that's just the first sentence!

It's also just kind of frustrating because it's the kind of response that comes from a place of refusing to engage with a hypothetical exercise. Failing to meet these exercises with the spirit of open-ended curiosity, as they loosen suspension of disbelief just enough to make it possible to canvas the space of strategic possibilities, is a misunderstanding of the exercise, and it's just the kind of sleepwalking response that turns potentially fruitful conversations into dreary dead ends.

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