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Giving up on Google

robsheldon.com

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Re: Giving up on Google

#61

Post by jacquesm »

danilocampos wrote: post #48
petercooper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any good examples now, but in some IDEs in the 80s and 90s they had an "expert mode" you could toggle on and off to extend the number of menu options and the like. A similar setting on Google would be great. I know a little of Google's syntax like the + and " workarounds, but having a literal search as default would be worthwhile for many users. I recall that I switched to Altavista back in the mid 9…

From your mouth to Marissa Meyer's ears. My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode." No instant search. No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search. No word clustering/auto-substitution. It would be awesome.

Yes, please.

The image search has been a pet peeve of mine, especially because of the way the results are provided to the end users. It seems they do everything they can to stop people from visiting actual websites through the image search.

Instant search was fun for about 30 seconds. Then it's back to work and then it is rather annoying. At least you can disable it (just to the right of the search bar there is a little settings menu).

The word clustering and auto-substitution are a real pain in the ass, especially when it keeps coming up with stuff that just isn't right but is more popular. I really can't stand that. I find myself using quoted queries far more frequently than in the past.

2008 sounds just about right, they can market it as 'google classic' for all I care.

Re: Giving up on Google

#62

Post by thaumaturgy »

dasil003 wrote: post #49

I don't understand the Gmail complaint at all . Sure it has its weaknesses such as the policy to not spend the resources stemming emails causing search to suck, but Gmail pretty much defined the usable webmail interface for power users. The interface on my webmail software feels like a mail client should -- easy navigation, threaded conversations, multiple window panes, and it's fast. Google on the other hand took ye…

I use Dovecot + Postfix + Roundcube + Managesieve + SpamAssassin and am pretty happy with that stack (although I've currently got a very annoying Roundcube problem, so ...).

Re: Giving up on Google

#64

Post by thaumaturgy »

alecco wrote: post #45
doubleyooexwhy wrote: post #16

Wow, that blog design is beautiful. Anyways, I'd love to switch to DDG, but too often it tells me "No more results. Try Google.", and almost every time a subsequent search on Google provides me with many more (relevant) links for the same query. If DDG could be configured to basically be a proxy and fetch all of its results from Google, that'd be cool.

The text gets chopped for Chrome/OSX.

Argh. I will fix this. Sorry.

edit: fixed.

Re: Giving up on Google

#65

Post by thaumaturgy »

diziet wrote: post #37

Really curious why the website cuts the right border of the text without allowing js for some external site...

The external site is my business server, which hosts the JS package that the personal site uses. I wasn't aware of the border issue until just a bit ago. Sorry 'bout that.

Re: Giving up on Google

#66

Post by patrickaljord »

squidsoup wrote: post #57
VBprogrammer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is that for many people google is the internet. Even for me (pretty technically minded) if a few google searches doesn't find what I'm looking for it isn't on the internet, or might as well not be. I don't think I've even tried turning to another search engine in several years.

Which begs the question, are there regions of the web that just simply aren't indexed?

Those that blacklist googlebot on their robots.txt

Re: Giving up on Google

#67

Post by patrickaljord »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #60
blacksmythe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. I think that this is a case where we were comparing Google to what existing before (Yahoo, etc), and thought "this is great". Now we compare Google only to what we think it 'should' be.

For me, I remember how great Google was when I started using it around 1999, compared to AltaVista or Metacrawler; it was great because it was able to find results that the other two just couldn't, and it did it quickly. Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.

> Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.

You're spoiled then.

Re: Giving up on Google

#68

Post by GrandMasterBirt »

Amen brother. I found instant to be uncomfortable. Sometimes DDG results were not as good as google's, but pretty good. Gabriel is also incredibly responsive and tries to solve problems quickly, every problem I've asked about has been solved or had a serious effort to try to solve. Its so "personal" that I just feel like its a search engine that cares about me, vs me being just another face in a crowd.

In any case, I still love gmail, everything else has been crap.

Also try replacing google EVERYWHERE on an android device, quite well embedded and hard to change in 100 places and still browsers use google as the search engine.

Re: Giving up on Google

#69

Post by Alex3917 »

As far as I can tell Google is basically giving up on the search business. About a month ago I reported a couple spam sites that were in the top ten results for a fairly popular search phrase. Over a month later they're still there. These are sites that are literally just a list of keywords with no actual content of value on the site, and Google does nothing even though they come up at the top of the results for a phrase that gets several hundred searches per day. That has to be in the top .1% of all searches, and while I realize they probably get tens of thousands of complaints per day this one would have literally taken less than 20 seconds to recognize it was a scam site and delete it from the index. And since clearly any algorithm should have moved this to the front of the queue based on both the popularity of the term and also the good standing of my account, the only real conclusion is that Google has basically just given up on trying completely.

Re: Giving up on Google

#70

Post by patrickaljord »

alecco wrote: post #52
ggrot wrote: post #33

Maybe a minor quibble, but isn't DDG powered by Yahoo BOSS with features added on top? Yet, Rob then goes on to say "Yahoo can't be taken seriously" and points out queries where Yahoo does a poor job of handing synonyms - DDG has the same problem for the exact same query if you try it. Furthermore, the other queries which he suggests give irrelevant results on Google seem to give me irrelevant results on DDG.

Among the differences, DDG blocks MFA content mills and junk sites. If you report one they add it quite fast.

> If you report one they add it quite fast.

Probably because few people report sites.

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