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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#601

Post by jrootabega »

Tepix wrote: post #562
jrootabega wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

search: "coffee is mostly water" "No, coffee is not mostly water. That appears to be a misconception based on a popular television show. Coffee is actually about 98% water."

Interesting. I did this google search and i get this: "Yes, coffee is predominantly water , with a standard cup of brewed coffee being about 98% water and the remaining 1-2% being solids like caffeine and antioxidants. Because water forms the vast majority of coffee, its quality is crucial for a good cup and it contributes to your daily fluid intake"

Yeah, it was just a creative example of the type of awful AI responses search engines, including Google, give. It tends to contradict what you say, push everything towards useless and inoffensive "there are many complicated factors" analysis, and even contradict itself.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#602

Post by [deleted] »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #444
leakycap wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac App Store is such a wasteland. I don't know why Apple doesn't provide it a budget and some real human curation. The average person searching for Microsoft Word, which is on the App Store, gets screens of templates and junky overpriced apps.

This is not my experience. In fact, I just tried searching for "Microsoft Word" in the Mac App Store, and it was the first hit (with other Office apps coming next). I did a search for "Instapaper" and again, first hit. On my iPhone I did the same thing, there was a single sponsored app as the first item (and oddly completely unrelated), and the first app after that was the one I typed.

[deleted]

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#603

Post by yunohn »

makeitdouble wrote: post #576
yunohn wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I understand that you/others think this is an already solved problem - my point was that as time passes and the world grows, it no longer is - they can’t exactly solve it satisfactorily for all.

I don't think it was ever a "solved and done" problem, but at least Google kept putting tremendous efforts to lead the arms race and bring a decent solution for most people. It wasn't perfect for everyone of course. I think they could still keep up if it was a priority to them. It's complicated, but they have a lot of the best minds of our generation after all.

I’m acutely aware that any topic related to Google Ads invites the blind fury of HN. I don’t want to excuse their shitty behavior, but I also dislike the illogical and irrational posts and threads that pop up about this topic on a monthly basis and make it to #1!

However, if you are to make this argument - please note that for OP and all the commenters in this post who tested this, all of them got the official Midjourney page as search result #1. Unsure why we’re discussing this at all then?

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#604

Post by wavemode »

alex77456 wrote: post #600
thecopy wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try DuckDuck Go, it performs significantly better than Google for me

It only works well for mainstream search subjects. If something is slightly off the spotlight, it will often fail to find it even with exact name of the page/article in quotes in my experience.

do you have an example of such a query?

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#605

Post by rpdillon »

imiric wrote: post #478
zeroq wrote: post #373

One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speak…

> I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web. Google Search is garbage, but highly unlikely to be "finished". Millions of people still find it useful, and Google is adopting "AI" on the results page just like any other "AI" web search service. The reason the UX is not good is, first of all, subjective, and second of all, because Google is in the advertising business, and they've found it more…

This sounds correct to me. Cory Doctorow wrote explicitly about how Kagi uses Google's own index, but just presents the results in a more useful way, which validates everything that you're saying.

> In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

> The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/...

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#606

Post by vogu66 »

arcbyte wrote: post #592
xg15 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app. The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's sea…

I actually do open the app store specifically to find a cool new app to install. I do this maybe a couple times a year. It never works. The apps it suggests are all ad farming garbage. I have found maybe one fun game doing this over the years, but mostly its been repeated frustration. I keep doing it occasionally in hopes that I find another diamond in the rough but I think Google has just trashed this whole thing up…

You can do that with F-droid, it's a lot of fun seeing what open source app people developed

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#607

Post by testbjjl »

jsheard wrote: post #12

They do the same thing on the Play Store, for example I just searched for Firefox and the first result is a sponsored spot for Opera. Does Apple do that on the App Store? A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their o…

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

Yes, this has been my experience, at least on mobile. Is this different for others?

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#609

Post by rchaud »

squigz wrote: post #544
rchaud wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.

As my parents get older, I worry more about this. Are there any good, easy-to-understand resources for spotting and avoiding phishing scams and such things for non-tech audiences?

My parents were highly computer literate and taught me how to use them growing up. These days they can barely even send emails and spend 30-60 minutes looking for files that are either on their desktop, download folder or in Recent Documents menu in Word/Excel. At some point in the aging process computer skills are one of those things that seem to go.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#610

Post by CodingJeebus »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #597
coldpie wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Perplexity, as a business, sustainable? I'm skeptical of these "AI search is better than web search" claims. Not because it's not true, but because of how wildly subsidized these AI things are. Web search doesn't suck because it's an impossible problem, web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few year…

For this kind of thing I'm an LLM skeptic, but People said the same thing you're saying about Google in the late 90s, early 2000s before their IPO (and immediately afterwards). There was a sense in which people didn't really think search -- which seemed more like a public utility -- could ever be profitable. Yahoo and AltaVista and Excite blanketed theirs in ads and junk. The search itself was seen merely as a draw i…

The big difference with Google monetizing in the 90’s is that they owned their platform, which gave them control to build out a search and ad network that scaled.

Perplexity uses frontier models under the hood, it doesn’t own all core aspects of its platform. They’re extremely dependent on frontier models and therefore reliant on underlying model pricing remaining sustainable.

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