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

Google’s top search result is Google

themarkup.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 317 posts

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#81

Post by uniqueid »

martinskou wrote: post #6

Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized. It should be free, uncluttered, distributed and transparent. The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

   > Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized.
Exactly! What a mess to have Google Marketing farting around with the world's information spigot. It's a good thing opportunities aren't physical objects, because it would be mightily depressing if we could see Google toss potential cures for cancer, and strategies for world peace down a well.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#82

Post by ricardo81 »

My own personal observations

- The "rich results" do indeed save people a click

- Some of them are excerpts from sites crawled by Google (that will tend to now be the 2nd result) that the user will no longer click on

- Google's query disambiguation is the best in the business

- They'd had a history of piggy backing on external resources and then turning them into their own, e.g. DMOZ, now wikipedia. I'm sure their knowledge ontology will soon render Wiki obsolete and push them down a result also.

- They've taken some verticals and halved the number of clicks competitors or "price comparison" sites previously got, albeit it's their search engine, they lay it out as they see fit.

It's changed a lot since the "10 blue links". Most of us probably used to think of search engines as an agnostic finder of information on the web, with ads on top. Now with "query intent" and monetisation - the temptation is too much and it's not so much about finding information "out there", on the web.

Because of the position that Google is now in wrt their dominance in search markets and to the extent they can monetise a query, no one else can match their revenue per user or find alterative avenues of traffic that are comparable to their portal (i.e. Google in the UK commands 95% of searches, 80% of ad spend is between them and Facebook). If Google decides they want to enter a vertical, it's hugely detrimental to others in that market. Someone who ranked #1 10 years ago would get 50% of clicks, IIRC it's closer to 20% now, because of all the other media on the page.

But in the end, there are other choices. The problem is that due to the monetisation Google is capable of (based on a lot of data acquisition about their users), it's hard for anyone to carve out an alternative. Particularly so when Google pay phone vendors and browsers for them to be the default engine, it's a perpetuating cycle.

My personal ideal would be 5 or 6 independent search engines, with a number of meta engines built on top of those independent data sources;algos. Purely for the sake of getting alternative points of view and perhaps past any filters or bias.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#83

Post by wolco »

kevingadd wrote: post #36
maxwellito wrote: post #24

It even leads to funny situations sometimes : https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169

To be fair, I think pagerank would naturally end up putting those results on top, since gmaps is the mapping service lots of people are linking to - especially if you're linking to a saved route or location, it's going to be a url to the google maps service as a whole that probably boosts its pagerank. It's definitely not a clear-cut "they decided to do this" scenario like the infoboxes and such that the article is c…

PageRank wasn't natural. Google properities started with a score of 10. Google friends 5-9. Your site 0.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#84

Post by xwdv »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #69
xwdv wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would say maybe the little startups should have a chance.

Then they have to start by building a better product. Any suggestions for alternative services that outperform Google’s?

Alternatives? No. Fuck little startups, most of them hawk bullshit and don't get interesting until they grow into big companies. A startup won't compete well with Google for very long and using one instead of Google feels too much like pandering to a novelty.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#85

Post by TomMarius »

kevingadd wrote: post #49
fractionalhare wrote: post #27

> A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned: - Google’s dictionary definition. - A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page. - A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links. - And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Googl…

The definition of "search" or what it means to type something into the google search input field has changed over time, and that's probably the root of this. It used to mean "show me web pages related to this input string", and some of those search results were sponsored (ads). Now it's interpreted more as "inform me about this input string" or "please help me with this", like a Siri or Google Assistant (though not n…

What is "search" and "search engine"? Are these words with well defined legal meaning (as you seem to use them like that)?

To you, a software person, search might be to look up and compare a string with a pile of other strings. To non-sw people, it is to look for the correct (abstract or concrete) thing/answer. Why should your definition win?

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#87

Post by pb7 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #32
ZinniaZirconium wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duck is a front-end for Bing. Why not use Bing?

That's both tired and inaccurate. DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and n…

No, this answer is tired and inaccurate. They successfully fool you into thinking they are much more complex than they really are. They use Bing and Bing alone for the SERP links (without this, you don’t have a search engine) and their crawlers fill in the handful of “onebox” results for certain queries. They keep changing this statement but it used to say “multiple sources like Bing, Yahoo, Oath”... all of which are just Bing. It’s Bing with a couple of add-ons. If Bing were to go away tomorrow, your beloved DDG would be done.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#88

Post by torgoguys »

chimen wrote: post #23

Many 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…

>“We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2004.

The article presents you as some sort of "gotcha" quote demonstrating how Google overturned a core value or something. Yes, Google search results have changed, but what it is now is very much in the spirit of that original value. I searched for something. Google gave me the answer directly. Boom, I'm done. Get in, get the answer fast, get out. I can go back to my life.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#89

Post by leeoniya »

athenot wrote: post #73
chimen wrote: post #23

Many 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 fe…

i run into this so often it might as well be called misinformation. it will surface parts of 2 different sentances which completely changes the meaning or context, or removes important nuance.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#90

Post by hrktb »

chimen wrote: post #23

Many 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…

> Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient.

I think the point is that some are convenient, others aren’t, but they all have prominent positioning. Google is not the best flight search service, yet it’s on top.

As you say, it wouldn’t matter if Google was the best at everything all the time. The issue is that of course it isn’t, and will never be.

Post reply on HN