Not really though. My top search result on most topics is usually Wikipedia. Maybe if you're searching for Google you find Google.
FTA > How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org 2000 screenshot: https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google... 2020 screenshot: https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...
Google’s top search result is Google
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Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#72If anything I am searching can even remotely be considered a product or paid service, I get an entire page, minus one link of links that have the [ad] box on them. And they're all shady 3rd party retailers. And when I want to find a product, to get the manufacturers website and product details, it's nowhere to be found. Just page upon page of [ad] links.
Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#73Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well. One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal bu…
The thing is, increasingly I'm catching it returning wrong answers. A few days I was looking up the approximate weight of a cup of flour to do a recipe conversion, and the "helpful answer" was pulled from some random site and was about 15% off-base compared to the median from a handful of other sites, including from flour companies.
I've observed similar bad results when looking up information about medications… I feel bad for those acting on that information.
Just like ads, I've learned to tune out that top part of the search result page. Honestly, the increasing noise feels a lot like Yahoo! in 2001.
Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#74Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well. One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal bu…
Actually, on text translations, DeepL nowadays outclasses Google Translate IMHO. The only downside is that they don't appear to offer some kind of transparent website translate feature ("put a URL in and it translates the entire site, with layout kept intact"), at least not for free. But if I happen to have a paragraph or so in some foreign language and want that translated to some language I can understand, DeepL ha…
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Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am constantly trying new things. I just ditched duckduck go for the third time. I'm using firefox since 2 months. I am aware of alternatives. I WANT to ditch Google too but I get value from it atm that I cannot find elsewhere.
How would you bootstrap such a company? The solution as I see it is to forcefully break-up Google, such that these services can have their run as independent companies (Maps, flight search, product price comparison, etc.). This has been done before with big companies (e.g. break of Bell Systems into 7 companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System )
And what good came out of the remains of Bell Systems afterwards?
Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#76When I worked at Bing almost 20 years ago, the #1 search term was "Google". So maybe this is reasonable :) (#2 was "Gogle")
Bing was launched in 2009. Where were you working in the year 2000?
Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board." How will you find out about the better alternatives? Are you certain there aren't good alternatives to translate, maps, flights, shopping etc? For any language? I know for a fact that google translate is bad for some ideographic languages and as a result there are competing services that co…
Someone will mention better alternatives here, after all I've been hearing about how ddg blows Google out of the water a couple times every week here for years.
I may be an outlier but I haven't had a good experience with DDG for a while.
I don't really feel like I would recommend it.
Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#78I know there's the sentiment of fear/hate/etc about Google taking over but... 1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing) and playing an important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google 2) Wouldn't you do the same? Keep in mind they're a public company and we know how incent…
3) Isn't a system in which monopolistic business practices make sense a fundamentally broken one?
4) Shouldn't we, as members of a democratic system of government, be concerned that this has become the case? And express that concern to others in order to spread understanding and continue the democratic process?
5) Isn't it strange how Hacker News comments so often take the position of large companies, as if those individuals aren't going to suffer from a small number of multi-trillion dollar companies ingesting entire industries in the long term?
Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#79Re: Google’s top search result is Google
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am constantly trying new things. I just ditched duckduck go for the third time. I'm using firefox since 2 months. I am aware of alternatives. I WANT to ditch Google too but I get value from it atm that I cannot find elsewhere.
How would you bootstrap such a company? The solution as I see it is to forcefully break-up Google, such that these services can have their run as independent companies (Maps, flight search, product price comparison, etc.). This has been done before with big companies (e.g. break of Bell Systems into 7 companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System )
The way Google: ship it and make it work really, really well.
The product was so good that people noticed. They were able to take this and leverage this into being search for a really large property, like
Back in the 90s there were lots of search engines. People didn't pick Google because it was hard to switch, they converged on Google because the product was that good - there was Infoseek, HotBot, AskJeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite ... the list goes on.
It's a theoretical problem to have a significantly better search engine and not find users for it.