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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?

#431

Post by xerox13ster »

FastMonkey wrote: post #429
xerox13ster wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, ideally people could choose to do whatever they liked to provide for society. Everyone would have a role to play. So those that like to farm (raised on a farm, to be proud of their work) would farm, those that want to commit their life to science could attempt to advance their field. Someone might find an invigorating pride in making sure wastewater treatment is running well, but they don't know how to get into…

I don't know how to break it to you, but the system you're looking for that does all the things you're saying is capitalism. Have the talent and desire to be a heart surgeon? Go for it, and you'll be rewarded. Want to make life sized statues of the Beatles out of used printer cartridges? Eh, fine but maybe also get a day job.

Ah yea. Let me just pay to put myself through med school independently while I struggle to pay for food and housing.

Sorry but Capitalism is a broken system that is not meeting mine or million's of others needs, much less enabling us to pursue what we're actually passionate about. I at least know that I am passionate about building and supporting technology but I still struggle to pursue it professionally because I had the poor luck to be born without the resources to get a piece of paper that says I know how.

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

#432

Post by malwarebytess »

tytso wrote: post #234
malwarebytess wrote: post #193

I wonder what googlers think about discussions like this? It doesn't seem like a rare opinion among techies that Google search has been declining in usefulness. Honestly, Google obfuscates the internet instead of making it accessible.

Googler here, so here's a sample size of one. 1) I personally use Google, because it works for me. I will admit freely that part of this may be that I've gotten used to framing queries such that it works with the search engine that I'm used to using, and that's probably true for many people commenting on HN. 2) Every so often, these posts will inspire me to do my own non-scientific experiments such as using the same…

thanks for your 2c.

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

#433

Post by mrjin »

ornornor wrote: post #277
beebeepka wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No fun allowed. Or the implication is taking drugs for anything but recreation won't kill you. I need more guidance!

Taking drugs for fun won’t necessarily make you an addict or kill you.

Hmmm, only if you know when to stop and can actually stop, sure, no it won't kill you. But what if you cannot stop? Most importantly, I did not even mention which drug as those was never the point.

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

#434

Post by IncRnd »

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.

Correct, though it is new in the sense of this conversation, which compares to how a search used to be.

The point wasn't as to what the synonyms were for a specific search term but that they have been added as implicit terms, which makes google search no longer exact.

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

#436

Post by kodah »

vivekraghunatha wrote: post #421
sokoloff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind giving my email or making an account after I have any inkling that the product might be worth deleting a few spam emails. Neeva was giving me a modal popup in my first minute; that's never going to get my email.

(Founder of Neeva here) Appreciate the input and hear your frustration. This is a carryover from changes we made to introduce the free tier earlier in the quarter. We are making imminent improvements on modal frequency and getting them out of your way. Stay posted.

Yo! Neeva is a dope product, imo, but could I offer some suggestions on how I use Neeva?

1. I have more than one GitHub account (one is for work, one is for personal stuff). I would like to somehow keep them separate, but at least being able to add multiple GitHub accounts for indexing would be cool.

2. Could Neeva offer something for segmenting the parts of my online presence? For instance, there's personal me and then there's work me. I'd like to turn a different profile on when I'm doing different things.

3. I don't know if it's possible to partner with ProtonMail, but I'd love to index that and my Proton Calendar as well.

Also didn't know the free tier is permanent, but I think that's probably a good move. Thanks for what you do!

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

#437

Post by derefr »

dmurray wrote: post #311
derefr wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> That's not the algorithm's fault per se; Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.

What I'm saying is that the "recipe" part of a recipe website is a commodity – there is no "authoritative" source for a given recipe, unless that recipe is too niche in appeal to end up widely disseminated. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNLzyqqINw) has a pretty good coverage of the topic.

Compare and contrast: phone-number directory listings. Who should Google cite as the authoritative source for lists of name-to-phone number associations? Nobody. All the lists are copying from each-other, curating and correcting the data taken from one-another, gathering their own original data for additions, and everything in between. Every portal overlaps every other portal, but mostly has the same stuff.

Compare and contrast, in the physical world: printings of public-domain literature. If Google indexed bookstores, which printing by which publisher would you want them to rank first on a search for e.g. Pride and Prejudice?

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

#438

Post by saalweachter »

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?

I mean, I'm confident that the core of how it works -- "an exact match between the tokenized document and the tokenized query" -- hasn't changed in a very long time, but I can't really promise there wasn't another aspect I'm ignorant of that is responsible for the behavior you remember that changed somehow.

"Exact tokenized matching" can look like "exact string matching" a lot of the time. Until you hit some of the edge cases it's like kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/

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

#439

Post by mushyhammer »

knighthack wrote: post #383
mushyhammer wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t give Google enough credit: They totally can add a “report spam site” action in the search results, but they don’t, because they don’t care. It would help immensely to have websites disappear from search after 100 trusted Google users complain about them (after manual review). This stuff already exists and works on Google Maps. Even the data collected from a personal blocklist would be useful for them, witho…

I think this is also because of potential abuse: there's nothing to prevent malicious SEO gamers from reporting legitimate sites as 'spam' to remove competition, as a means of extortion, etc.

Yes but I mentioned how to limit that:

> trusted Google users

> (after manual review)

> already exists and works on Google Maps

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

#440

Post by _yoqn »

dantyti wrote: post #326
_yoqn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search. The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.

> orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others used brave as my daily search engine for a couple of months and I must say this was not the case for me. Results for global EN topics were indeed better than ddg/bing in some cases (nowhere near an order of magnitude better, though), but results for any non-EN or local queries (think searching for major websites running for 15 yrs) were extremely poor in most cases…

Well that's a good point. I only speak English so I speak for my language. On the point of Brave vs DDG I think my main point is that Brave has its own index and DDG is based on ... Bing? ... I'm not sure. At any rate I don't think there's a comparison there.
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