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

461–470 of 471 posts

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

#461

Post by zeruch »

everdrive wrote: post #347
thrwawy283 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 smal…

"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."

This. So much this.

And it is so...bloody...annoying.

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

#462

Post by cupofpython »

mrjin wrote: post #248
irrational wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (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). Yes, I would love this. I was recently looking for reviews of a certain woodworking tool. The…

I really missed those days that I could write URLs I visited frequently on notebook. Unfortunately, we might never be no way back to the good old days. There is literally way too much info on the internet, and thus impossible to index contents manually.

I dont think it is as hopeless as you think. There are only so many websites people actually use for human-created content. Those should be prioritized. There is still the issue of differentiating between bot blogs and human blogs but I'm sure I could figure something out at a 200k salary, and google has plenty of people like that

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

#464

Post by etherealG »

erklik wrote: post #410
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Even more ironically and many here would have experienced this themselves: the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing

> the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing Weirdly the same is the case for reddit. What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.

What about discovery of sites you don’t know about. The whole purpose of he internet is that we’re all connected, but you seem to want only an extended private network.

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

#465

Post by JohnHaugeland »

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.

It's sort of weird how badly people have become unable to understand what the word capitalism actually means, these days

It seems like everyone just thinks it's how you describe the contemporary world

No, what they're describing isn't capitalism. Not even close

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

#466

Post by manx »

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…

Yes, please bring web directories back!

Today we have more possibilities to manage that than in the early days. Many things can be automatically generated/crawled/MLed or crowdsourced. Browser extensions can help to categorize almost all important websites.

Data sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow or Wikipedia already have many websites categorized. We just need to combine the data.

I did a few experiments myself trying to drive hierarchies from tag data. It works surprisingly well. There is even some academic work in this direction.

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

#467

Post by richardsocher »

JSONderulo wrote: post #143
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…

Great stuff, Richard. I've been using you.com since the beginning of the year and it continues to get better.

So happy to hear. We'll keep making it better :)

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

#468

Post by mohanmcgeek »

etherealG wrote: post #464
erklik wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing Weirdly the same is the case for reddit. What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.

What about discovery of sites you don’t know about. The whole purpose of he internet is that we’re all connected, but you seem to want only an extended private network.

Google fails miserably over there too.

First page is full of results from a handful of sites.

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

#469

Post by Schroedingersat »

saalweachter wrote: post #376
Schroedingersat wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stopped working reliably some time before last year.

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…

This is just patently false in addition to being condescending.

If you use quotes around a phrase, it will reorder terms and make substitutions with synonyms in addition to straight up ignoring the quoted phrase no katter how many times you add +. If you then fiddle with settings (randomly not available depending on star alignment and device) to change it to 'verbatim' it will still reorder and split up tokens in the phrase.

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

#470

Post by erklik »

etherealG wrote: post #464
erklik wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing Weirdly the same is the case for reddit. What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.

What about discovery of sites you don’t know about. The whole purpose of he internet is that we’re all connected, but you seem to want only an extended private network.

A surprsingly large amounts of time I use Google, is to mainly to search on either reddit, stackoverflow, hackernews etc. Even searching for other sites is helpful using those sites i.e. searching for developer blogs gets far better results if I add reddit to it.

I think Google has it's place. However, I also think that an additional search engine like the one I described would be a very nice and useful tool. At least for me.

Post reply on HN