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If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

abhinavsharma.com

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

#41

Post by FastMonkey »

joering2 wrote: post #34
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #22

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…

Democracy would be best replaced with cashless society. Society based on everyone value of doing what they love doing most (aka hobbyist), and virtually everything else replaced by robots and technology we already have. This is what's coming eventually, but its not something that can be installed on the top of your "operating system"; you will have to format the whole hard-drive (civil war)

I suppose in the absence of cash we would just force some people to do the necessary tasks that aren't anyone's favourite hobbies?

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

#43

Post by karaterobot »

By the end of the article, this is full-on marketing the OPs product, so be aware of that when thinking about how the problem and solution are framed.

It's an interesting question though. I think the answer is that most people don't really care? The bubble we live in is filled with other people who, like us , are very knowledgeable about this domain, pay attention to what's going on behind the scenes, and have very strong opinions on it. 99% of the rest of the world doesn't give the quality and nature of Google search a second thought.

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

#45

Post by bsder »

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #22

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…

> Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine.

No, they are underestimating the difficulty of funding a good search engine.

I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down.

Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you searched for "python", it would show your results but would also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff really quickly.

Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ...

(/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.)

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

#46

Post by fdgsdfogijq »

zargon wrote: post #40
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #22

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…

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.)

I think that with current technology, beating google at the scale they run at is impossible. I think with advances it NLP, its possible. But right now, its pie in the sky.

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

#47

Post by post_break »

dddnzzz334 wrote: post #17
post_break wrote: post #9

I use DDG most of the time, then when I cant find technical stuff I g!. And let's be honest, bing is the king for porn.

> bing is the king for porn. I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.

All I know is that I've fed bing some of the most obscure keywords to find what I'm looking for and it's been like "oh I know exactly the video you're looking for I've got you".

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

#48

Post by dariusj18 »

SllX wrote: post #11

My standard line on this is that Google today is not as good as Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago, but it is still the best available option today because nothing is as good as or better than Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago. That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once I’ve had a chance to actually inv…

Also, the internet is a far better and worse place than it was 10 years ago. So much more content, but astronomically more bad actors.

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

#49

Post by dariusj18 »

philovivero wrote: post #36
ubvhgidft wrote: post #27

> If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? If prison food sucks why do prisoners eat it?

If Vladimir Putin sucks, why is everyone letting him be in charge over there? If Donald Trump sucks why did we ele-- If Barack Obama sucks-- The FBI sucks. Facebook sucks. C sucks. The WWW sucks. Fiat currency sucks. Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?"

Rule 44 of the internet

http://web.archive.org/web/20070110035128/http://www.encyclo...

Edit: NSFW

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

#50

Post by alligatorplum »

This feels like one of those things where people only notice the bad experiences, bad search results, and ignore all the times it was right, good/neutral search results.

One of google search's biggest advantages is the ability to save a click for the user. If I search for "NCAA scores" google will show me the live scores directly instead of showing me a link to the ncaa website which also shows me the score but at the expense of me having to click on the link.

IMO, the right way to dethrone google search would be to have better (or more) QOL features.

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