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

Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

news.cnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 163 posts

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#51

Post by abhiv »

uniclaude wrote: post #46
abhiv wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually find Google's higher weighting of StackOverflow results annoying. I've recently been experimenting with a new iOS project, and whenever I search for something Objective-C or iOS SDK related, the first few results are SO questions. In some cases this is useful, but for many queries you really just want the canonical explanation from Apple's docs, not a bunch of people discussing an issue that happens to inc…

Well that's a very simple problem to fix, the "-" operator still works, so you can exclude stackoverflow easily, or use the "site:" operator to force the result to come from apple. You can even setup those parameters as custom search engines in Chrome so you don't have to repeat yourself every time.

True, although I think this is something that I shouldn't have to manually specify.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#52

Post by smegel »

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

> I "Google" less and less for search results

Google is absolutely unusable for some search terms that are not part of the primary association of the term. Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan). If I don't mention the word "buy" or "holiday" I would not expect to see either.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#53

Post by mahmud »

asperous wrote: post #39
kulpreet wrote: post #20

I just finished a 10 week internship at Yahoo and while I can't say much about where the company is headed strategically, I can say that it's a super exciting time to be working there :)

You mean you aren't allowed to say, or you aren't really sure?

He/she was an intern. Typically, interns are neither privy to strategy, nor are they sure of where things are headed.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#54

Post by dmpk2k »

codex wrote: post #35
espeed wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. +1 to that. At the least Google should have added a ++ operator to replace the co-opted +.

"Quote" the search term. That's the replacement for +.

I'm not sure if my memory is playing tricks on my, but I've found quotes unreliable. Google will spit out "close" suggestions that have nothing to do with what I requested, despite using quotes.

Google also happily returns results which do not fulfill even the "close" suggestions: e.g. I ask for three words, Google searches for those three words, and returns a bunch of pages that contain only two or one of those words. Google, that's not what I asked for.

Google's attempts to tweak my queries and also return results that don't fulfill all requirements makes it much less useful to me, because they usually backfire. I don't want my queries tweaked -- I want exactly what I asked for, and only what I asked for. If I made a mistake, I can figure it out and fix it myself.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#55

Post by makomk »

Dn_Ab wrote: post #50
pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

Very true, glad I'm not the only one to have noticed this. And I've got a suggestion for a search engine so intelligent - well relatively - it took google back to school and enrolled it in kindergarten. I find myself using it whenever Google gets stumped; it consistently gives better results in the sense that I feel it has a better understanding of my query. Take this example that prompted my above semi-hyperbole. Ba…

You're definitely not the only one to have noticed this. Microsoft has been trying to get the EU to force Google to continue to rank the spam highly, under the pretext that fake "shopping" and "review" sites and shitty "vertical search engines" that can't actually find anything and get all their traffic through SEO are competitors to Google and deranking them is anti-competitive.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#56

Post by thisisnotatest »

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

Google engineer here.

We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on improvements.

We also added "Verbatim Mode" to save you the trouble of putting "each" "query" "term" in "quotes" when you want to exactly match all your query words.

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#57

Post by kevinh »

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

I switched to DuckDuckGo for search for one of the reasons you listed - Google felt the need to guess what I was thinking and it felt like, most of the time, it was getting it wrong (especially with synonym search). One of DuckDuckGo's stated policies is not to modify what you search[0]. The fact that DDG doesn't collect information about me is just a plus.

[0] http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215637-autoco...

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#58

Post by reid »

mahmud wrote: post #53
asperous wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean you aren't allowed to say, or you aren't really sure?

He/she was an intern. Typically, interns are neither privy to strategy, nor are they sure of where things are headed.

I work at Yahoo!. Our interns attend weekly meetings where strategy is discussed. :)

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#59

Post by nostromo »

pasbesoin wrote: post #15

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, G…

I remember when the web was still about the long tail -- it made Google extremely useful.

Today I usually know where the information is before I Google it (StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.) which means their value add has diminished. It's less "search" and more "navigational aid."

Re: Yahoo tops Google in US traffic

#60

Post by randomhunt »

makomk wrote: post #55
Dn_Ab wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, glad I'm not the only one to have noticed this. And I've got a suggestion for a search engine so intelligent - well relatively - it took google back to school and enrolled it in kindergarten. I find myself using it whenever Google gets stumped; it consistently gives better results in the sense that I feel it has a better understanding of my query. Take this example that prompted my above semi-hyperbole. Ba…

You're definitely not the only one to have noticed this. Microsoft has been trying to get the EU to force Google to continue to rank the spam highly, under the pretext that fake "shopping" and "review" sites and shitty "vertical search engines" that can't actually find anything and get all their traffic through SEO are competitors to Google and deranking them is anti-competitive.

Dude, your ignorance is showing. Europe is trying to stop Google pushing its own above everything else, which is VERY different.
Post reply on HN