Google’s top search result is Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#91

Post by mrkramer » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

rydre wrote: post #21

The problem is that website are commodities. The future for original high quality websites is that they should not allow search engines to crawl their content and slowly become a brand which people trust. Stop relying on search for traffic. Be an app, websites for marketing only. Alternative new search engines are needed that allow for embedding/iframe/integration of global web search results in any 3rd party website…

I never understood why websites are not personal property and why US gov. decided that anybody can crawl and scrape them at will and free of charge. That would be similar to someone crawling your house and making it fully visible and searchable to the global public . I guess Google Maps already did that.

My understanding is that .com (commerce) prevailed and people who have websites want to be fully public, visible and searchable.

On the other hand deep web and dark web exist but most of the people who use it and operate there do it because of shady business.

I don't entirely understand your search engine idea but if internet would start all over again I think the right model for search engine would be to have website owners submit their websites to the search engines along with metadata so searching experience becomes rich.

Metadata would be similar to something like Resource Description Framework https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#92

Post by umaar » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

Generally, I like the 'rich snippets' feature, but I think they've gotten worse.

For example here's a reddit post I made from 6 years ago showcasing a search for 'mac shortcut screenshot' https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for...

It's extremely clear, and results in minimal cognitive effort in parsing the result.

Here's the result now: https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png

There's so much more cruft:

- 4x low resolution screenshots which I initially thought were related to ads

- An extra URL

- Multi-step instructions

- Lots of extra words

- Bold formatting has been applied inconsistently

Seeing the text: "Command + Shift + 3" in big bold letters was great, but it's now changed into something else.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#93

Post by harshitaneja » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #56

jfoster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you mention the worst or most deceptive thing they've done?

Larry and Sergey said from the very beginning we needed a search engine in the academic realm because ads present an inherent conflict of interest. It's right here! http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html This was who they were and what they believed! Check out Appendix A, it's entirely about the mixed motivation of funding a search engine with ads. Yet not only did they make an ad company that has a search…

I read Appendix A and it doesn't seem to be against what they are doing currently. Unless you assume their search engine has exceptions or intentional bias. We have no conclusive evidence to believe the same(including the currently discussed article). I am conflicted by their shopping app integration. But I wonder why I am having trouble accepting shopping integration vs maps integration. Having google maps part of the result makes for a better and quicker experience to information. But if shopping were a more successful product the reasons would hold their as well. I understand the intention behind anti-trust regulations in such cases but have trouble accepting them in data driven products like google which have huge user experience benefits from tighter integration of their own products. I would love if anyone could help me with my conflicting thoughts on this.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#94

Post by pradn » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

The problem here is that something that's useful for users (saving time with knowledge panels, question/answer lists, and suggested searches) also takes away clicks from other websites. Something can be both good for the user in the short-term (quicker answers) and bad for the user in the long term (fewer websites survive if clicks are diverted). We have the same issue with "ecosystems". It's great for the user that the Google Assistant can ring the Pixel phone if you don't know where it is. But it's one more feature that locks our smaller/independent competitors.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#95

Post by harshitaneja » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #83

kevingadd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Source?

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#96

Post by kevingadd » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #54

kevingadd wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

I think you're overselling your point here. if I search "maps" in google, the google product is the first hit, but several major alternatives are right under it on the first page of results. FWIW, DeepL is also on the first page for "translate". I don't actually want to discover new products by finding their homepages in my search results. when I am looking for something new, I want to read a review in a publication…

If you search for "route to " on Google, you get a Google Maps embed with directions above search results from services like mapquest. That's what I'm referring to. (Do many people find mapping services by searching that way now? I don't know.)

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#97

Post by Kiro » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

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…

> 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 none from Google).

So most of the actual search results come from Bing. The other 400 sources and DuckDuckBot are only used for widgets and stuff.

I don't understand why people keep linking to a page that clearly says it's mostly Bing as an argument for the opposite.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#98

Post by Madzen__ » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #76

jforman wrote: post #35

When 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?

Creating bing.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#99

Post by kevingadd » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

kartayyar wrote: post #80

dybber wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Vi…

I'd argue that Google was able to win specifically because they had so much competition. They weren't fighting against one or two massive entrenched competitors in an established space. Search was still pretty new at that point and Google's approach to it was innovative.

Google also had lots of space to improve on its competition when it came to metrics like latency, which paid off. Nobody really has the option to beat them on latency now. That's not really Unfair in any fashion but it is an example of how it would be much harder to dethrone the ruling search engine in 2020.

Re: Google’s top search result is Google

#100

Post by vinay427 » Tue, Jul 28, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

Slartie wrote: post #64

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…

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…

I would be prepared to switch over completely for the languages they support if DeepL didn't insert their advertisement at the bottom of some results (I've had this accidentally included in an email before), and if they had a mobile app with a text selection action on Android to highlight text and see a popup with the translation. As it is, I use it most of the time but still rely on Google Translate being more accessible. Obviously DeepL is newer, so these limitations are understandable.