Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

abhinavsharma.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 471 posts

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

#341

Post by hwers »

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…

It would be funny if some site with youtube-style recommendations got popular because that's basically what I believe google is using under the hood already and it would be so easy for them to pivot to that style and then take over all the momentum the recommendation-style site got.

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

#342

Post by freeflight »

esperent wrote: post #315
nsgi wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tho marketers are slowly catching on to this with product placements on Reddit.

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

#344

Post by freeflight »

ndiddy wrote: post #165
lolinder wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a search limit for Kagi during beta? I don't see it documented anywhere, and I've been using it as my primary search engine for a few months and haven't seen any sign of a limit. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some limit to prevent abuse, but it hardly gets in the way of my normal usage.

According to a discussion I had here previously with a Kagi user, when they go out of beta they plan to offer a $10/month plan with a quota of 20 searches per day (and $0.015 per each additional search), and an unlimited plan for $20-30/month. Additionally, every time you change something related to your search query (such as clicking "Images", changing the sort order, applying filters, or blocking a website) counts…

Monthly subscription and quotas? While I respect and understand the goal I can’t help but feel like we are paywalling what the web has been for the longest time and should be “out of the box”.

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

#346

Post by toshk »

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 works great for most daily tasks software questions, looking for a service/company etc

But when I want to do serious research on things like eczema, diet, backpain, exercise. Google absolutely fails (also Google scholar) I have to buy books, go through Reddit,listen to YouTube lectures etc that point to the correct literature and then you get to know the experts, different opinions etc.

All you find is these generic sites with basic advice which is common knowledge lik WebMD. Not bad, but they dominate the entire search.

I would think a heavy version of Google focused on in depth/experts would be great.

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

#347

Post by everdrive »

thrwawy283 wrote: post #80
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…

You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no complex filtering to do things like removing search results that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to specifically refine your search. Google still has the most useful search, but they've taken away methods to get bette…

>It treats its power users like kids

It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it.

I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.

It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.

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

#348

Post by soniman »

richardsocher wrote: post #55

They don't know yet about you.com? - No spam, no ads, you control the ranker with your source preferences, hardcore private mode that doesn't save anything nor uses your location (even DDG saves your queries and gives location-based results), many developer apps that include what you want - eg code snippets in a StackOverflow app, AI apps like you.com/write that would write essays for you, etc. Also, many folks (outs…

I like you.com but would like the option to search using google if my search on you.com fails. You.com will default to google if there are literally no results, but it disrupts my flow to paste the search terms into google if I don't like the you.com results.
Post reply on HN