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

411–420 of 471 posts

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

#411

Post by Spooky23 »

zapdrive wrote: post #387
Spooky23 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Google sucks because the internet that we remembered died long ago, hoovered up into social media. The person passionate about beetles who would have a great website in 2002 now posts 38 post Twitter threads (at best) or Instagram/Facebook posts that are lost forever. It’s sad as we had this amazing “long tail” effect where a company like Google could set out to organize the worlds information. Unfortunately…

Reddit isn't manipulative? Have you been there recently?

They are manipulative, but not effective.

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

#412

Post by JohnFen »

mescaline wrote: post #393
sltkr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi requires users to sign up (even though it's currently free?) which is 1000x more user-hostile than anything Google does and makes it a nonstarter as far as I'm concerned.

Google uses ads to pay for the service, which is available without logging in. Those ad systems can track you. On the other hand, a paid service (even if it is currently in "free" mode) will likely get rid of ads, but requires some authentication to know you are you. I'm logged into Google all the time. I do this to get sharing working across Chrome. Others doe the same with Firefox. Some don't, because privacy. I he…

It used to be that if you used a paid service, then that service wouldn't throw you to the wolves of internet marketing/tracking companies. That alone made logins 1000 times less hostile.

But that is changing. Internet marketing companies are now teaming up with websites so the websites to their dirty work for them and you end up getting tracked anyway -- but with much higher certainty as to who you are. That means that now, yes, logins are more hostile.

The web continues to get smaller and smaller.

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

#413

Post by JohnFen »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #369
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…

> Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then Has anyone considered the possibility that all this Machine learning and AI models is what made Google and YouTube searches worse?

I strongly suspect that's a very large part of what is making everything worse. Or, at least, there does seem to be a correlation in time between the implementation of ML and the degradation of the quality of results.

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

#414

Post by elliekelly »

not2b wrote: post #147

The author missed the most important reason that Google search results often suck: tens of thousands of people are working very hard to make it suck. They call themselves "SEO specialists", and their job is to get their shitty site to the top of the rankings. It's an ongoing battle. Sure, Google wants to make money, but to do that they need to protect their search moneymaker and keep it dominant, so their incentive i…

The author included with this “blog post” about their browser extension.

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

#416

Post by buywarbonds »

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…

I see the problem with Google search of today vs Google search of 10 years ago being that the first page of search has already become a "Youtube-style recommendations for websites". It's more like a curated list of "approved content" now.

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

#417

Post by IncRnd »

JohnFen wrote: post #409
saalweachter wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it's not so much that it stopped working as it is that it never worked the way you thought it did. Quotes have ~always been an exact match on the tokenized query text, not a substring match on the corpus text. No synonyms, reordering, gaps, etc, but the matches -- and failures -- are sometimes not obvious at first blush. If you search for "don't stop me now", for instance, that "don't" tokenizes to "don t", so it…

Why is it that exact searches used to actually work reliably, then? What's changed?

This has changed:

  term -term
In the past that Google search returned no results for any search. Today the set of results are altered before they are presented to the user. Sometimes the set of reslts is empty and at other times it contains results.

For example:

  steve -steve    returns 0 results
  test -test      returns 4,780,000,000 in my search
                  starting with google/youtube videos

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

#418

Post by martha_neeva »

derefr wrote: post #260
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…

> It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not a…

(Neeva team member here) re: recipes. You might like the Neeva recipe search experience. You can see an entire recipe and reviews (without the ads or intro text) without navigating away from the search results page. Quick example here: https://neeva.com/search?q=baked+potato&src=nvobar

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

#419

Post by saalweachter »

IncRnd wrote: post #417
JohnFen wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that exact searches used to actually work reliably, then? What's changed?

This has changed: term -term In the past that Google search returned no results for any search. Today the set of results are altered before they are presented to the user. Sometimes the set of reslts is empty and at other times it contains results. For example: steve -steve returns 0 results test -test returns 4,780,000,000 in my search starting with google/youtube videos

That's easy; there are synonyms added for test but not for steve.

If you search for ["test" -test] you'll get no results; quoting "test" removes the synonyms.

It's probably not new behavior per se, but synonyms have gotten a lot broader over the years, so it was a lot easier to punch [term -term] ten years ago and hit a term which had no synonyms.

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

#420

Post by fargle »

saalweachter wrote: post #419
IncRnd wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has changed: term -term In the past that Google search returned no results for any search. Today the set of results are altered before they are presented to the user. Sometimes the set of reslts is empty and at other times it contains results. For example: steve -steve returns 0 results test -test returns 4,780,000,000 in my search starting with google/youtube videos

That's easy; there are synonyms added for test but not for steve. If you search for ["test" -test] you'll get no results; quoting "test" removes the synonyms. It's probably not new behavior per se, but synonyms have gotten a lot broader over the years, so it was a lot easier to punch [term -term] ten years ago and hit a term which had no synonyms.

[test -test -tests -tested -testing] returns no results for me - teased out the synonyms!
Post reply on HN