[HN Gopher] In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without...
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In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click
Author : randfish
Score : 254 points
Date : 2021-03-22 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sparktoro.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sparktoro.com)
| Beached wrote:
| looking over the comments here, people seem to be assuming this
| is because of googles scraping and presenting of data on the
| search results page. but knowing my experiences with google
| search over the past few years, I immediately assumed this was
| because google search is getting worse and worse every day.
|
| after reading the article, the author doesn't correlate the
| findings with a cause, so who knows what the real reason for this
| is. but I know for me at least, it now takes me 3, 4 or 5
| searches to find an abstract with something that looks even
| close. maybe I such at google searches, but after doing hundreds
| a day for over 12 years, I feel google search just got reaaaal
| shitty some time in the past few years.
|
| ddg use to not even be close to google in result quality, now,
| imo, they are on par with each other. and that is largely due to
| googles decline, ddg only got slightly better.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I now use google as a last resort. I start on DDG or Bing and go
| from there. If those are dead ends, I will reluctantly use Google
| as a means of last resort.
|
| There are so many ads and now every time I search for something
| on Google, the first five results aren't even related to what I'm
| looking for. You search for "hifi headphones" and you get eight
| of the top ten searches are something like, "The top 10 hifi
| headphones." in an article from three or four years ago. Or "What
| you need to know about buying hifi headphones." informational
| articles. Not to mention the obligatory Amazon product link
| stuffing at the top of any product search results.
|
| Google's results are just so convoluted, its a real PIA to try
| and wade through everything they're advertising in order to get
| to an actual product or manufacturing website these days - I just
| gave up a few years ago. Too much advertising and not enough
| organic results to be useful anymore.
| wnevets wrote:
| As a consumer I absolutely that google provides the answers I
| need without having to click on any sites.
| Jonnax wrote:
| I would say that's about right for me.
|
| I Google things for information which I can glean from the search
| results more than looking for a website.
|
| Like what's the definition of a word or a quick calculation is
| easier than opening the calculator.
|
| There's even a metronome if you search metronome.
| shtack wrote:
| +1 to this. Weather, translations, timezones, quick math,
| sports scores (searching "nba" gives a much cleaner interface
| than going to nba.com), not to mention Wikipedia snippets. That
| easily covers >50% of my searches.
| CodeIsTheEnd wrote:
| If you're looking for a clean, _fast_ interface for sports
| scores, I built https://plaintextsports.com to do exactly
| that.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| I love the metronome but everytime I reset the tempo my volume
| resets to 100% :(
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Weather is another big one. The Google weather widget is well
| done and every time the Safari omnibar takes me to weather.com
| I am displeased.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| > takes me to weather.com I am displeased.
|
| Likewise, but with Google's own search, not safari.
| spicybright wrote:
| I wonder if they do some light A/B testing to see if not
| clicking is because of this or not.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Google's goal, for a long time, has been precisely this
| experience.
|
| The company mission statement is "Organize the world's
| information and make it universally accessible and useful."
| Nothing about that statement says "redirect web traffic to
| third-party sites." They consider it an inconvenience to the
| user (a negative signal) if the user has to click through.
| ProAm wrote:
| You provide the content, they'll accept the revenue
| gruez wrote:
| Right, because if you don't provide the content (you can opt
| out), someone else will, and they'll get 33% of the traffic.
| prepend wrote:
| If I put content out on the web with no login, then thats what
| I do.
|
| If I want to control the revenue then I use a different
| protocol.
|
| I can also just simply set up a robots.txt file telling others
| what to do with it and lots of indexers, Google included,
| respect and abide by my wishes.
|
| When people misuse a tool it seems easily fixed by them
| properly using the tool.
|
| Trying to change the web because I'm too stupid to understand
| it seems like a bad thing.
| davide_v wrote:
| It's actually something good (expecially for Google) since the
| information found is now usually in the results itself instead of
| inside a website. If you notice, in the last years, Google shows
| you lists extracted from articles, makes calculations directly,
| answer simple questions like age, shows a lot of Wikipedia info
| for any person/movie on the right, etc, etc. It's not because
| there is more ads or because the results are irrelevant, actually
| I'm never disappointed by the results.
| sinemetu11 wrote:
| Do AMP clicks count as no click since the user didn't leave
| google?
|
| And how many are no click because google has presented semi-
| correct but not really correct information at the top of the
| results so the user finds what they think they're looking for
| without actually clicking?
|
| Seems like google is doing just fine so I'd imagine both of the
| above scenarios account for a significant portion.
| ketzo wrote:
| This seems like... a really big deal? I know that we're all sort
| of living in a world where "put ads on your high-traffic site" is
| a deeply outdated revenue model, but it's still quite a popular
| one, depending on what corner of the internet you're in.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I think that model is as relevant as ever. Google is just
| narrowing the list of "high-traffic" sites worth putting your
| ads on, to exclusively Google properties.
| cma wrote:
| I'm fairly sure they block wikipedia on medical searches not
| due to accuracy, but due to drug ads on webmd etc. that use
| Google for ads.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| I tried 5 different diseases, 4 had wikipedia on the first
| page, 1 had it on the top of the second page.
|
| Do you mean blocking just that automated text result that
| appears on the top of the page for some questions? That
| would make sense, since they probably don't want to boldly
| state medical facts without context, especially since that
| feature can be wrong sometimes.
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Google, not on anything related
| cma wrote:
| No I meant the result itself, but I see it too now, I
| thought they were blocked altogether. I don't know if it
| is changed or it was always just never/rarely near the
| top (and maybe that legitimately organically happens).
|
| Searching 'ADHD' and Wikipedia's extensive page is midway
| down the second page of results. Drug ads for
| amphetamines from Google on 3 or 4 of the first page's
| results, but not the top few results (which are CDC, NHS,
| etc.).
| moate wrote:
| If I put an ad on there, but nobody clicks it, how is that
| still relevant?
|
| Anecdata, but the rate at which I google something that I
| basically want to search on Wikipedia but then don't click
| through to Wikipedia has got to be about 50%. WP doesn't
| monetize their site, so maybe not the best example?
|
| I guess this could also be indicative of how people use
| Google (the search engine proper) now. You need some sort of
| data(phone number, address, trivia fact), and Alphabet has
| already scraped the relevant site to pipe in that data.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 2/3rds of Google Searches Now End Without a Click
|
| Isn't that the whole point of Google providing it's own
| interpretation (sometimes several of them) of an answer to the
| search query ahead of the classic search results: give users what
| they are likely to be looking for _without_ requiring another
| click?
|
| > zero-click search problem
|
| As a user, I see zero-click searches as a benefit, not a problem.
| It's a problem for people trying to use Google as a "clickstream"
| to waste my time and try to get a crack at my money, but then,
| that's exactly _why_ it is a benefit to me.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| Could someone here shed some light on the possible copyright
| implications of how Google now rips excerpts from web pages and
| displays them directly on the search results page? A cursory
| search shows that there have been a few lawsuits in the
| past[1][2] but they seem mostly related to the act of
| indexing/caching web pages and the display of thumbnails.
|
| However, Google's new method of extracting and displaying
| possible answers to queries from external sources instead of
| simply linking to those sources feels like it falls outside of
| the bounds of fair use.
|
| [1]: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html
|
| [2]: https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/copyright-
| law/a-b....
| jccooper wrote:
| Most material they're scraping is copyrighted, and reproducing
| it without permissions would be prohibited save for the various
| "fair use" provisions.
|
| Google would probably make a "de minimis" defense of the
| practice. A previous case (Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation
| 2002) allowed thumbnails in search engines as fair use, but
| that's not quite the same. And current interpretation seems to
| be pretty restrictive on what's insignificant enough (witness
| various music sampling cases). And while any individual result
| may be small, doing so on an industrial scale is probably not
| "a trifle" and harm can probably be demonstrated. Ultimately,
| it would have to be tried to tell.
|
| They might also argue implied license. In cases like meta tags,
| that's probably reasonable. For straight-up scraping, it's more
| questionable.
| danmg wrote:
| Most queries don't require further action.
|
| You can glean the information you were looking for from the
| results themselves. This is particularly true when you use google
| as a spell checker.
| ev1 wrote:
| As a developer: This seems questionable.
|
| As a user: thank fuck i dont need to click through to those piece
| of shit sites that are nothing but spam and ad farms that front
| load fake description and title content
| AimForTheBushes wrote:
| I usually append 'reddit' to my google searches. It doesn't
| necessary provide better results but I love the plain text
| format.
| rawtxapp wrote:
| So are we trusting similarweb's data on Google itself? How
| trustworthy is it? How do they get their data? I've seen
| similarweb be off by magnitudes vs alexa for estimating traffic
| on some sites I own.
| xnx wrote:
| This seems like very good progress. I'm continually impressed by
| how fast I can find the answers I'm looking for from Google.
| Google is working hard from being somewhere to get pointers to
| places that might contain the information you want to giving you
| the answers directly. Truly amazing.
| mattacular wrote:
| Google has become a really bad search engine for anything besides
| the most superficial information about a broad range of topics,
| especially ones that are commercial in nature (which it is
| extremely good at... go figure). I spent a while trying to find
| the name of a contemporary artist whose name I forgot by querying
| those key words along with various things about the thematic etc
| qualities of their work and all Google could tell me was about
| Claude Monet. Gave up and searched some of the same keywords on
| Twitter of all places and instantly found the artist I was
| looking for.
| bartread wrote:
| I've had similar issues quite a bit recently and have resorted
| to trying other search engines. Sadly DuckDuckGo, Bing, Wiby.me
| (!) and others aren't really better.
|
| Good search was historically one of the harder unsolved
| problems on the web, even back in the 90s. The problem is that
| nowadays we treat it rather like a solved problem when in
| reality it's still probably one of the harder unsolved problems
| on the web.
| kome wrote:
| In other words, the future of the internet (or what remains of
| it) it's the desktop.
|
| Mobiles phones are a walled garden for megacorps.
| allochthon wrote:
| Often I'm looking for a Wikipedia page, and it seems that in the
| past year or so Wikipedia pages have been moved way down on the
| first page of search results, especially if the topic is a
| medical one.
| prepend wrote:
| I noticed this too and now suffix any query that I think
| Wikipedia is best at with "wiki."
|
| This is faster for me that opening Wikipedia and searching.
| georgiecasey wrote:
| so do i, and you look at related searches and adding wiki is
| the top one. surely this is a signal to Google?
| cgriswald wrote:
| I add "wiki" too, but I made it a keyword search command to
| use Wikipedia's search and cut out the middleman altogether.
| cruano wrote:
| You can prefix your search with "!w" on DuckDuckGo,
| bangs[1] are a neat feature and what actually made me
| switch
|
| [1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang
| gxqoz wrote:
| This is effectively the same as the "wiki [query]" search
| shortcut you can add to a browser. This is useful, but
| there are also situations where I want to get to the
| search engine's results page but weighted towards the
| wiki content. Wikipedia search will always send you to
| the page for an exact match. There are times where I want
| to see the search results instead.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I just put "Wiki" into the Google search because Wikipedia
| usually has what I'm looking for.
| SilverRed wrote:
| Similarly I tend to apply "reddit" to searches about products
| to get to something that it at least somewhat real rather
| than paid blogspam.
| cambalache wrote:
| 90% of my Google queries is "Search terms + Reddit".Usually I end
| up with better quality info. Reddit is missing a great
| opportunity there, especially because its search engine sucks
| (They should use algolia or something). If they were more
| visionary they could use their internal search as a starting
| point for a generic web searcher.
| rantwasp wrote:
| of course there is no click. a lot of search traffic is machines
| (machines don't click) + a lot of the results come in on the
| SERP.
| truxten wrote:
| I wonder if you'll see more domain specific content
| aggregators/search engines pop up as people (like myself) because
| increasingly dissatisfied with the almost populist nature of a
| lot of Google's search results.
| tyingq wrote:
| I wonder if an AMP click counts as a click or not.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Don't ogle Google, https://duckduckgo.com instead.
| Demonsult wrote:
| I recently realized DuckDuckGo's !sp operator can give you
| Google results anonymously via Startpage.com
|
| "Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so
| your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your
| query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you
| privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the
| request; they only see Startpage."
| karlshea wrote:
| I use DDG as my default engine on my phone, and about 50% of
| the time I have to re-search on Google with g! because I'm not
| finding what I'm looking for.
|
| That's not to say the results on Google aren't getting worse,
| because they are, but DDG still has a long way to go.
| ancarda wrote:
| Doesn't DDG do the same thing? DDG will show a snippet from
| Wikipedia, has a built in calculator, built in timer, and so
| on...
|
| Sure, Google also has a flight tracker widget, but it's not
| that much worse than DDG. If you really want no widgets or
| inline responses, https://www.startpage.com/ has that.
|
| EDIT: Startpage does have a time widget (search for "time in
| <some place>"), but doesn't have a calculator, timer, or
| literally anything else. How odd...
| croes wrote:
| At some point Google will overdo it and they will be split up.
| moate wrote:
| I think that time was "a while ago" and they're still running
| because the US doesn't actually care that much about virtual
| monopolies.
| croes wrote:
| They are just very slow.
| angryasian wrote:
| Monopolies are a barrier to entry. I don't think any of
| google's products prevent that. As we see in most technology
| over the last 20 years, the companies at the top can change
| fast.
|
| A company that creates a better search engine, will easily
| take over search. Next gen of search will be better at
| providing more relevant / less spam
|
| Youtube does have some network effect and high costs but not
| enough to stop anyone from competing and vc money evens out
| the costs. Next gen in video may offer more features, or for
| a completely different platform like VR
|
| The only platform I do see them having a strong ability to
| block out potential competition would be mobile and Android.
| SomewhatLikely wrote:
| Can you provide examples of better companies replacing the
| incumbent in a mature market? Most examples I can think of
| occurred in markets that were a tiny fraction of their
| mature size. Most of Google's users weren't using search
| engines when Google was created. Most of facebook's users
| weren't using social media when Facebook was created. In
| these cases it's less about converting existing users as it
| is about capturing new users.
| angryasian wrote:
| Yahoo, MySpace, Geocities were all top 5 global
| properties at one point. Spotify crushed several music
| related services like Pandora, napster, maybe even Apple
| Music. Dating sites theres a few as in Match, okCupid
| have largely been displaced.
|
| >Most of Google's users weren't using search engines when
| Google was created.
|
| I really don't know about your assessment about Facebook
| but I'd fundamentally disagree, as in the beginning they
| were capturing the college aged to young professionals.
| I'd say they fundamentally grew off the back of MySpace
| users. Myspace was huge and everyone had a page at the
| time.
|
| Google was a little different as they did help to define
| and create this space of web indexing, as a lot of early
| search pages were more directories and portals.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Since Regan, the US doesn't care about concentration of
| market power, only whether prices for consumers are affected.
| Since Google services are "free", no anti-trust violations
| are incurred under this standard.
|
| However, it's looking like things might be changing slightly.
| Biden appointed someone that cares about anti-trust. We'll
| have to see if that's just for show or not like most of his
| administration.
| vernie wrote:
| It's quite common for teenagers on TikTok to use a screenshot of
| the often-wrong snippet at the top of the Google results page as
| evidence in whatever crusade they're currently on.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This "panel" must be highly biased, right? Only Google itself
| knows the real answer to this question. The data in the article
| comes from 100 million people dumb enough to infect their devices
| with malware.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > Only Google itself knows the real answer to this question
|
| This alone should be setting off alarm bells for everyone, the
| government should be _raiding_ Google offices to find the
| necessary facts to answer these questions. Google operates as
| the de facto front page of the Internet, the default starting
| point for the vast majority of the public, and they 're
| incredibly dodgy about the real facts about how they use that
| power.
|
| It's incredible how often Google both states a "fact" that is
| extremely biased in their favor, and simultaneously suggest
| it's indisputable because only Google has data on it, and of
| course, Google will not share the data because it's
| confidential business information.
|
| This stonewall is behind incredible lies like the idea that
| targeted advertising increases revenue by 50%, despite
| independent data finding the difference closer to 4%.
|
| I think the issue at hand here, is that Google should be
| legally compelled to disclose the real answers to this
| question, and a lot of other questions about how their
| algorithms work.
|
| > The data in the article comes from 100 million people dumb
| enough to infect their devices with malware
|
| This is ironic, considering the Google Toolbar, headed by
| Sundar Pichai himself, is much of how Google got it's mass
| adaption as well as browsing data to improve their search
| rankings. Perhaps the difference between "malware" and "useful
| tool" is how successful the business behind it is. ;)
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| > the government should be raiding Google offices
|
| I can't get behind this. Suggesting that corporations be
| raided by the government is not a good idea.
|
| To my knowledge, Google has not denied any information
| requests they've received (or been subpoenaed for), and
| actively work with law enforcement in circumstances required
| of them. If we get to a point where they stand in contempt of
| court ordered information requests, perhaps this becomes
| appropriate, but let's not jump straight there because
| they're a big (huge) company. Many, if not most companies
| have private information that only they would know about
| their company and don't have the expectation of turning it
| over, I don't think scale changes that.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > To my knowledge, Google has not denied any information
| requests they've received
|
| Your knowledge stops very short in this area then. Google
| is utilizing the entire playbook to delay and obscure
| information from antitrust regulators. For example, Google
| almost always responds to requests for response from
| regulators on the last legally permissible day to do so,
| often after requesting multiple extensions. Here's an
| article about the _third_ extension they got to respond to
| one of the EU charges:
| https://phys.org/news/2015-08-google-extension-eu-case.html
| (Google responded to this one four days before the deadline
| of the third extension,
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-responds-to-european-
| uni...)
|
| In another example, Google was to respond by April of 2016.
| After getting extensions out to the end of September and
| then October... Google finally responded on November 3rd:
| https://www.digitaltrends.com/business/google-antitrust-
| eu-r...
|
| Each of these months-delayed responses of course, can be
| summarized down to "Google doesn't believe Google is
| anticompetitive" in a blog post I could've written in an
| afternoon.
|
| They managed to drag out the EU cases _years_ longer than
| they should 've taken through these sorts of games, and the
| US cases are now just getting started.
|
| This was three days ago:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-doj-accuses-google-
| dragging...
|
| Google has taken states to court to try and block them from
| sharing information necessary to investigate the case:
| https://www.axios.com/google-texas-paxton-antitrust-
| microsof...
|
| And have straight up refused to turn over emails and texts
| from corporate executives relevant to the case:
| https://nypost.com/2020/02/21/google-stonewalling-ags-
| over-e...
|
| Also, bear in mind, Google and Facebook agreed to cooperate
| in fighting antitrust investigations against them, to avoid
| one providing information on the other's side of the deal:
| https://news.yahoo.com/google-facebook-agreed-team-
| against-0...
|
| Essentially what's happening here is Google knows it's in
| the wrong, and it knows it's making more money than it will
| ever be forced to give up in fines and penalties, so they
| want to drag all of these processes out as long as
| possible.
|
| The public would be best served by raiding the offices,
| seizing the information, and stopping all illegal
| operations from continuing while the investigation is
| completed, so that Google executives have adequate
| incentive to respond quickly to restore business.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| I started to write up a whole thing, but your hn history
| and linked twitter shows you're very openly rabidly anti-
| google. That's fine, and in general I'd even mostly agree
| with you. I draw the line at suggesting government raids
| of private companies, though. That won't ever be a good
| idea.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Not going to change, since Google has become a huge advertising
| container with less and less value wrt genuine information about
| products. If I search for a product to buy, I usually add the
| "price" word to it so that the search engines includes shops
| selling that product. All fine, but if I want to read reviews
| (real ones, not the usual paid fakes) or blogs in which a product
| features, compatibility etc. are discussed, which is very common
| in IT hardware, I don't want Google to throw at me a pageful of
| its top sponsors. No thanks, I don't care, I'm perfectly able to
| find a place where to shop; what I want from a search engine
| depicting itself as intelligent is to know when I want technical
| information and stop defaulting nearly every damn result to a
| shop to buy from.
| MAXPOOL wrote:
| Search is the most important application of AI inside Google.
| It's the raison d'etre for data collection. So why the search
| quality decreases?
|
| My current hypothesis is:
|
| _Users who click ads and generate ad revenue like this garbage.
| Google learns to serve this outlier group of users. Killing the
| experience for everyone else is just a side effect._
| superasn wrote:
| This is going to be happening more and more as technologies like
| GPT-3 get better and better.
|
| I remember seeing a demo which accurately answered a lot of
| search questions like who killed Mahatma gandhi, etc just using
| the GPT-3 model(1). I'm sure Google must have even better models
| than this and it only makes sense for them to answer the
| questions directly when there is sufficient confidence level.
|
| (1)
| https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060?l...
| fractionalhare wrote:
| The author speculates that this is a direct side effect of Google
| searches being monetized by ads, and therefore targeting multiple
| searches.
|
| I don't think that's the case. I think this has more to do with
| the fact that Google now deliberately surfaces as much
| information - including summaries, answers, tools and widgets -
| in the search results page itself, which incentivizes searching
| without a subsequent click. Google very much wants you to end
| your search journey on google.com, but I think that's because
| they believe it will keep people coming back. I do not think
| Google directly tries to keep people searching for the same
| thing.
|
| This may still raise interesting antitrust concerns though.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last
| decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my
| query and returns the most generic results for my geographic
| area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques
| are just ignored or are no longer functional.
|
| There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain
| that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic Search
| drove this decline.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| So there needs to be a significant _cost in production_ of the
| content - youtube for example - want to see how to (a recent
| example) lay laminate floor, well you need to have a camera and
| a person and, hell, a room with laminate flooring needed - that
| 's a big cost.
|
| Lowes has made a video, so have dozens of contractors. It's
| amazing how tool rental firms have not advertised on there ...
| actually that is a bit weird...
|
| SideNote - for some reason I replied to an email outreach from
| Rand, and he actually replied back within a few hours, clearly
| having read my words and come up with a real answer.
|
| I was frankly shocked. Either he works an inhuman amount or he
| has secretly invented AGI to respond to his emails for him.
|
| Kudos and good luck
| cmckn wrote:
| I don't think the "problem" here is bad search results -- I
| think the lack of clicks is thanks to search results becoming
| much richer. The "card" style answers that show up more and
| more often mean I don't have to actually visit the site where
| the information originated (which publishers despise, for good
| reason). Take a common search I made last year as an example,
| "covid king county" -- I almost never ended up visiting the
| county's coronavirus dashboard because Google had the graphs I
| wanted in the search results.
|
| I think it's a popular opinion on HN that Google search sucks,
| but I just don't agree. I used DDG on all my devices for the
| better part of last year, and bailed when I noticed by g! usage
| ratcheting up.
| dougb5 wrote:
| It can be simultaneously true that Google's gotten better at
| displaying results pages that fully satisfy the user without
| the need for a click, _and_ worse at other kinds of queries.
| The latter case -- searches which I have to rephrase, or that
| cause me to give up on the search entirely -- adds to the
| total number of searches that do not lead to clicks.
| jader201 wrote:
| Yeah, the parent and most its children are focusing on
| something not even related to the article -- this is about
| providing what the user is looking for without the need for
| more clicks.
|
| While it's an unpopular opinion on HN, there's no denying
| that from a user perspective, that's only a good thing.
| bridanp wrote:
| I definitely read this like the two of you. If the
| information being shown by Google results is what I need,
| there isn't a need to click further. On top of that, many
| of us have been "trained" that products like ZScaler are
| going to block most sites and register a hit with InfoSec.
| I'm not going to click on bobsfunmainframefacts.com if
| Google scraped the needed info for me.
| rurp wrote:
| Card results might be a good thing overall, but they
| certainly aren't _only_ good. In many cases, adding the
| cards takes revenue away from the exact people who
| collected or created the content to make them possible in
| the first place. We 'll never know how many websites shut
| down or never got created to begin with given Google's
| history of crushing the revenue from various sites on a
| whim.
| visarga wrote:
| It sucks at searching for exact things, it would often subtly
| by essentially change the meaning of the search. Like
| confusing searches for the desired "weight of scooter" with
| the max "weight of rider" on the scooter. What a shame, it
| was even a shopping related search, where the money are. They
| could have lead me to a sale.
|
| When people are trying variations on a search it's a clear
| sign of failure. They should do something about it, like use
| a verbose natural language interface. Apparently the NLP
| community can do natural language Q&A in papers, but Google
| can't do it in search. Maybe it doesn't make business sense
| to be such a useful service after all, better to keep it
| status quo.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Everyone please post examples of search terms that have gotten
| worse.
|
| Specifically, it's handy to have the query, and the URL that
| you think would be the best result.
|
| Google engineers can then peer in and see why that URL didn't
| rank highly.
|
| The most common reason is it's behind an invisible captcha or
| blocked by robots.txt, so do check that.
| [deleted]
| amaccuish wrote:
| And half the time I click the wrong thing because the related
| pages thing slides into view just as I click. That javascript
| can burn in hell
| kenny11 wrote:
| Same here. I can remember how refreshing it was when Google was
| new and you could trust it to give you results for what you
| actually searched for instead of what it _thought_ you searched
| for, like AltaVista and the rest of its competitors were doing
| at the time.
|
| I guess it's time for something new to do the same thing to
| Google that it did to those companies years ago.
| rchaud wrote:
| Other sites still offered old-school website directories, I
| remember using those for years, well after Google became #1.
|
| I'd much prefer going back to something like that now than
| bother with Google's approach; depending on the search term,
| I already know what the top sites are going to be, and I know
| they won't have what I'm looking for.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Probably a side-effect of SEO[0]. Its in the best interest of
| the vender, not of the user. I should be banned, forbidden of
| fought against by google themselves.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Not to mention that it's infiltrated by quora, Printerest, and
| Wikipedia.
| akkartik wrote:
| Yeah. I wonder what fraction of searches actually end with no
| clicks, just the requestor bouncing from the search results
| page. Anecdotally, I suspect that metric is also trending in
| the wrong direction.
| minikites wrote:
| >I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing
| drove this decline
|
| It's the switch from lexical/syntactic search to semantic
| search. There are benefits and drawbacks to each and it would
| be nice for Google to give you the option to try each.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Thank you for the clarification, I edited my original post to
| add "/ Semantic Search" because it's an important addition.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| I'm really starting to prefer DuckDuckGo at this point. There
| was one time when I thought they would always live in Google's
| shadow, but in this brave new world of content censorship and
| commercialization-induced bias, I find that I get noticeably
| "better" results on the more neutral alternative.
| narrator wrote:
| Anything in google that hits the political "twiddler" does
| not produce useful results. This was in the Zachary Vorheis
| leak of Google internal documents.
|
| https://saraacarter.com/google-whistleblower-state-
| attorney-...
| dreamer7 wrote:
| I have noticed an eerily accurate prediction of my search term
| though. Several times, when I hit a bug and attempt to learn
| more about it, Google makes precise auto-complete suggestions
| gxx wrote:
| For me Google "verbatim" is the best way to get focussed
| results although it's too bad it doesn't allow date ranges.
| Bing search with appropriate use of guotes, + and - operators
| and date ranges usually beats non-verbatim Google search, and
| it can sometimes be better than Google verbatim.
| diegocg wrote:
| The verbatim mode is exactly what most people here are
| missing. But, for some reason, it's something that can't be
| configured - you need to set it in every new search. Three
| freaking clicks.
|
| I don't understand what goes on corporations. I guess power
| users aren't a target demographic anymore.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I'm suspecting that they generate results from statistics
| ahead of time and just serve you the closest cached result,
| unless it is strictly necessary to do an actual search.
| dgellow wrote:
| I had no idea "Verbatim" was a thing!
|
| For those who don't know, after a search, click on "Tools",
| then "All results", and select "Verbatim".
| tablespoon wrote:
| > For me Google "verbatim" is the best way to get focussed
| results although it's too bad it doesn't allow date ranges.
|
| One word of caution: I use verbatim mode and I regularly (but
| not always) get Wikipedia clones as my top result. It must be
| skipping some of their anti-spam filtering.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You are 100% correct about the switch to Semantic Search and
| dense vectors being one of the main reasons. BERT shouldn't be
| anywhere near my search results.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| I was trying to remember the name of a song. _Not_ an obscure
| song: "Toe Rag" by The Rifles, a modestly well known indie
| band. I even remembered a chunk of the lyrics! But I got
| nothing. Here's let's cheat, and copy and paste _exactly_ two
| lines from the song.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friend...
|
| I don't know what other people see, but I just get SEO garbage
| listicles. Nothing even remotely relevant. Add "lyrics"? You
| get lyrics..... for other songs!
| https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friend...
|
| You have to quote the entire string! Which won't work if you
| misremembered a word or two.
| resonantjacket5 wrote:
| if you use double quotes you only need "See them more than
| my" lyrics. Though if you do "see them more" you get "Further
| Than the Stars" song instead.
| fossuser wrote:
| When I search Google now I mostly get spam.
|
| "Product vs. Product" -> list of spam websites that just show
| them side by side with ads.
|
| "Product Review" -> same as above, spam.
|
| "Product referral code" -> sites with spam and no codes.
|
| Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google
| exists as a tool to search Reddit since the "new" Reddit site
| is awful.
|
| Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but
| occasionally you get a useful blog.
|
| General knowledge is Wikipedia, news is axios.
|
| Amazon for most purchases (except for products that have their
| own brand and sites that are at risk of being faked). Etsy for
| boutique stuff.
|
| Most of the rest of the web is junk.
|
| I think we could probably go back to curated 90s era web
| portals and have a better experience.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| IMO Google Image search has gone down hill significantly too.
| Getting full pages of pinterest results was bad enough but
| now on my phone you have to scroll past multiple screens
| worth of Google Shopping ads or images tagged with the
| "Product" icon before you see any actual, organic photos of
| the thing you're looking for.
| creamynebula wrote:
| Indeed, recently I tried Yandex for the first time and the
| results were way better for everything I had to search in
| the past 2 months since discovering it.
| tompagenet2 wrote:
| I know this sounds implausible, but I find Bing image
| search so much better than Google.
| DanBC wrote:
| Bing had a problem with images of child sexual abuse, and
| with bestiality images. I don't know if they've fixed
| that.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| Not just for images. Bing seems to be a lot more closer
| to what Google search used to be a few years ago.
| Anything related to torrents or streams is pretty much
| impossible to find on Google. Any news not spouted from
| mainstream sources, gone from Google. My default search
| deck nowadays is a mix of Bing and DuckDuckGo.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| it's nice to see my vague worries, bothering me in the
| back of my head put into words. Also good to know that
| i'm not crazy for thinking googles results are
| surpisingly poor and generic. I sometimes get the same
| feeling using google that i get reading a poorly
| transalated manual from a Chinese company. Generic,
| admire the fact some effort has been made, little laugh
| inside. Except this is google (and ironically, the
| chinese copywriters are probably using Transalate)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Yandex is surprisingly good at image search and allows
| you to crop the source image in-browser.
| superdisk wrote:
| Yandex is CRAZY good. There's a Firefox plugin that lets
| you reverse image search from the right click menu, and
| it opens a tab for Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu and
| TinEye. Yandex is the king every time.
| ep103 wrote:
| Google Images now only returns maybe 1-200 images by
| default, and if you click show me more, it shows a few
| hundred. The top results are consistently pinterest
| garbage, or similar types of spam. Images are consistently
| diverse from what I've typed in, and results seem curated
| to show a diverse types of results, which, given the small
| number of returned relevant images, means I rarely find
| something that looks like what I'm looking for.
|
| What I've discovered, though, is that what google images
| now does, is it is only returning a few results. If you
| click a result, then there's a "new-to-me" "related images"
| section that shows images similar to THAT image, only in
| that window. It is in these images that I actually see the
| results I was expecting to show on the main page.
|
| Its still far worse than google images 10 years ago, but
| not as bad as the UI makes you believe by looking at the
| initial results page.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| For my money, yandex.com now has the best search results.
|
| Beware though, yandex allows NSFW by default. You have to
| enable safe/family search. This is the opposite of Google
| and Bing, so it could get you in trouble at work. Those
| crazy Russians.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| So, they just show you what you are looking for :-) I
| remember the days when Google would not try to protect me
| from "dangerous" sites and images.
| georgiecasey wrote:
| I wouldn't object to all product review searches to be Google
| ads now because it's all spammed anyway
| rchaud wrote:
| And people say SEO is snake oil!
|
| You are absolutely correct. So many of the top results are
| basically machine-generated pages, perfectly optimized for
| search robots, not so much for humans.
| naringas wrote:
| > I think we could probably go back to curated 90s era web
| portals and have a better experience.
|
| sometimes I search hacker news directly when investigating a
| new tech.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Most of the rest of the web is junk."
|
| Google today limits how much of "the web" (their index) they
| will let you see.
|
| You are only seeing what they choose to allow you to see.
|
| Google, not the user, determines "relevance" and Google
| automatically excludes results. in theory this sounds useful.
| In practice, Google is now limiting max number of results to
| 200-300 or 500 if you add &filter=0. Retrieving 501 search
| results for a single search is not allowed. Sorry.
|
| Try a search for some common phrase like "the web". Surely
| this phrase occurs on more than 500 web pages. Yet Google
| will limit you to only 231 results. Does that represent the
| entire www. Then you try "repeat the search with the omitted
| results included". Google then limits you to 466 results.
| WTF. What if you searched page titles for some string. Is
| every string you search going to be found in less than 500
| pages.
|
| Google search results today are not representative of the
| entire www. Not even close.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Quora can be good too, my go to is usually "question reddit",
| and if that is not sufficient then "question quora". Quora is
| spammy too though, so it is hit or miss, but when it hits, it
| hits good.
| Mrnothing_ wrote:
| I hate quora don't have a report for spam sell
| ecf wrote:
| > Interesting web content is in Reddit
|
| I've found this to no longer be the case after Reddit has
| starting doing nefarious tricks with the date of a post.
|
| For example, I'll click on a link in Google showing it's from
| last week when in reality the post is 2 years old.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Oh yeah, try finding honest product comparisons and test. It
| is spam or "aggregated tests" on shopping sites. latest
| examples: cameras and tires. Cameras worked reasonably well
| on youtube (required some diging to get the "influencer"
| stuff out of the way). Tires required going through various
| forums. because every single video or review for tires I was
| looking for was product placement, spam or both. in the end
| price and availability decided the tire question. sometimes I
| miss the times when you had magazines catering for a certain
| domain doing honest tests and reviews. Well, even back then
| magazines started to prefer Canon over Nikon or the other way
| round.
| nwienert wrote:
| There's a common thread in _every_ one of the good sources of
| search information: user curated content.
|
| Usually: voted on/curated by members who are specialized in
| some way (reddit, so, hn, wikipedia to a degree).
|
| The fallbacks are editorial sites.
|
| If you make a search engine that focused on indexing user-
| curated sites + results outside of that that are themselves
| curated/voted-on by your search engine users (ie, you and
| others could upvote axios and Amazon as a good source), I
| think you'd have an interesting model. Basically, take the
| HN/reddit model to search itself.
| dundarious wrote:
| I have a cat that is always ravenous for anything edible,
| even if it's not exactly typical cat fare, e.g., my leftover
| salad, berries, etc. Trying to search for "can cats eat X"
| after he manages to get a few sneaky morsels is almost
| pointless. There are so many spammy sites for every value of
| X, and I have no idea if it's a sophisticated problem to
| systematically exclude this type of useless content, but
| Google's top results are chock-full of sites that all seem to
| follow the format below, where the question is not answered
| at all:
|
| Is it safe for cats to eat X?
|
| Cats are mischievous and we love them.
|
| X is not typical cat food. Let's go over some background on X
| before we answer the question.
|
| Cats are obligate carnivores.
|
| Thanks for reading, make sure to subscribe or buy these
| products!
| gnulinux wrote:
| For my cat, I'd probably just call the pet poison line in
| my state/country. Dogs are relatively better at eating
| human food (except very obvious well known examples like
| alcohol, grapes, cooked bones etc) but most plants can be
| poisonous to cats, so I wouldn't risk it.
| _nalply wrote:
| Simple rule: Chocolate is poisonous to cats. And what's
| poisonous to humans is usually poisonous to cats as well.
| gnulinux wrote:
| This is a terrible simple rule if you have a cat. Most
| house plants are poisonous to cats.
|
| https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-
| control/toxic-a...
|
| In addition to plants, common human drugs like alcohol,
| THC and caffeine are also poisonous to cats.
|
| Also common human spices such as salt, garlic and onion
| can be toxic too. Cats tolerate very small quantities of
| these (e.g. small slice of salami), but feeding your cat
| a chicken with garlic sauce is probably a bad idea.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| While we are at it: The popular hair loss medication
| minoxidil is HIGHLY TOXIC to cats.
| _nalply wrote:
| I retract my simple rule. It's bad. Sorry.
| blueboo wrote:
| Is it really that bad? I tried three queries.
|
| Can cats eat chocolate? Yields ovrs.com (Oakland vet),
| purina, webmd, thesprucepets.com (cat blog run by vets),
| pdsa (pet veterinary charity)...
|
| Can cats eat grapes? Yields top-N dangerous foods for cats
| listicles from various sites such as pet insurance and cat
| food brands. A response from a veterinary trust is in the
| top ten.
|
| Can cats eat paint? Yields all reputable medical sources
| for the first several hits.
|
| I'm not sure I can square this with your description of
| ubiquitous spam swamping out useful information.
| ratww wrote:
| Yep, this is Content Marketing. People use SEO tools to
| gauge how good a blog post is going to rank, and the
| current sweet spot seems to be around 1000 words, so they
| end up filling it with fluff. Some of those are even
| machine generated.
|
| The answer to the "can cats eat X", of course, can't be at
| the beginning or at the end. The reason is that the user
| must stay a long time and read the text, otherwise Google
| punishes the website for having a more than acceptable
| "bounce rate".
|
| Putting the answer in the title (what has been dubbed
| "Anti-clickbait") also makes the site "less clickable" and
| will make it drop from the results. Trust me, I tried.
|
| This is why we can't have nice things.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I use DuckDuckGo and haven't used Google in years, but
| searching "can cats eat asparagus" shows three answers
| above the fold just in the snippets without even needing
| to go to the page. Yes, they can, apparently, and it's
| perfectly safe. No ads in the results, either.
| dmart wrote:
| I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are
| unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam
| from the results. It must be profitable somehow for the
| majority of search results to be utterly useless.
| samatman wrote:
| The point of content marketing blogspam is to pester the
| reader with AdWords and the occasional affiliate link.
|
| Old-school useful content is rarely monetized, just
| someone sharing their passion for something. Occasional
| affiliate link, with the obligatory apologetic "hey web
| servers cost money, so I included some affiliate links
| here!"
|
| The uselessness is just a side effect of Google directing
| you toward paying customers.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| > I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms
| are unable to identify and remove content marketing
| blogspam.
|
| Easy for me to believe. They have to use some formula,
| and as soon as they change it, well, there's a massive
| industry dedicated to getting around it. If their
| algorithm is just "filter out what's useless", that's
| AGI.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Google's top results are chock-full of sites that all
| seem to follow the format below, where the question is not
| answered at all:
|
| Huh, I just tried this with a bunch of stuff and the
| snippets for each of the top several results for each all
| had fairly direct yes/no answers with reasons. Don't know
| if I got lucky hitting the right food items, or if it's a
| personalization issue.
| amelius wrote:
| According to Google search, 90% of the web is content farms.
| blueboo wrote:
| My experience is puzzlingly contrary to the unanimously-
| shared frustration above.
|
| I tried this with a bunch of products ripe for spamming:
| instapot review, nvidia 3070 review, and Apple Watch review,
| and the first page results were almost entirely reputable.
|
| I also tried "huggies vs pampers pull ups" and the result is
| quite a good variety of forum threads, blogs, and reputable
| articles. "Quasar formation" leads to Wikipedia, but also
| academic articles and astronomy.com. "How beer is made" is
| even better quality.
|
| Is most of the web junk? Have I gotten astronomically lucky
| in not finding it? Are these somehow the exceptions that
| prove the rule?
|
| (Ironically I think my search terms caused this comment to be
| flagged as spam..!)
| fossuser wrote:
| The results are better when the products are more
| common/famous (Nvidia card, instapot) since there will
| likely be reviews from The Verge or something that rank
| highly.
|
| It's less common stuff that tends to give you mostly crap.
| numpad0 wrote:
| What really astonish me is they sometimes give me straight up
| malvertising fake domains, like "general-<word>-info. xyz"
| second or third from topmost these days! wtf.
| queuebert wrote:
| You can search Reddit from DuckDuckGo by adding '!r' to your
| search terms. This is how I search most of the time these
| days for the exact reasons you mention above. DuckDuckGo has
| many other bang shortcuts like that too, like '!w' for
| Wikipedia. Actual search engine results are too manipulated,
| but they make great link aggregators.
| CiceroCiceronis wrote:
| Also, you can set up custom search prefixes for more
| obscure sites you visit regularly using Firefox
| (potentially Chrome too).
| bentcorner wrote:
| Note that "!r <foo>" is different than "site:reddit.com
| <foo>". The former redirects you to reddit's own search,
| the latter keeps you on DDG but restricts the results to
| reddit.com.
|
| I prefer "site:reddit.com" but honestly it's only because
| I'm used to it. I search in-app on mobile frequently (which
| I assume is the same as the on-site search) and it's
| generally pretty good. It usually finds something for me
| but sometimes using an external search engine works better.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Occasionally I open a private window and try browsing the web
| on my phone or laptop without an ad blocker. It doesn't take
| long before the autoplaying videos and Taboola crap makes me
| close the browser.
| purerandomness wrote:
| You can set extensions to work in private windows in the
| settings.
|
| Agree, the web is unusable without an ad blocker.
| samvher wrote:
| I haven't heard of Axios before - how would you characterize
| it? Looking at the website I can't quite tell if it's an
| aggregator or how they generate content, and if there is any
| particular leaning to what they host.
| ckolkey wrote:
| They write their own content. It's a site who's focus is
| short, concise stories.
| axaxs wrote:
| Agreed with everything above.
|
| If I ever X vs Y in google, I append site:reddit.com
|
| I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but it's about the largest
| forum. I really miss Forum search in Google.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > I really miss Forum search in Google.
|
| You may find this useful: https://boardreader.com/
| axaxs wrote:
| This is awesome, how did I not know it existed. Thank
| you!
| Shared404 wrote:
| Always happy to help!
|
| I try to "collect" search engines, so I'm always
| interested in finding more/sharing the ones I've found.
| edoceo wrote:
| Now I'm waiting for your Show HN curated list of
| alternative search engines
| Shared404 wrote:
| I've thought about doing it before. I don't have quite
| enough to justify a Show HN though.
|
| You can see the list here[0], and if you see more feel
| free to send them my way!
|
| [0] http://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/
| rurp wrote:
| One I just recently discovered is symbolhound.com. It's
| nice because it lets you search for characters that
| google absolutely refuses to treat as search terms. I
| needed to debug some makefiles and bash scripts the other
| day (not my strong suit!) and it helped me understand
| some of the weird syntax I was seeing.
|
| As others have mentioned, Google no longer respecting
| literal search terms has made it _much_ worse for many
| types of searches. DDG had been great at this, but sadly
| has been following in Google 's footsteps the past few
| years.
| Shared404 wrote:
| Ooh thanks! I'll throw that on the list!
| nafizh wrote:
| Yesterday I discovered, if you go to the 2nd page of the
| search results the "site:example.com" no longer works. The
| user hostility is shocking.
| [deleted]
| lrem wrote:
| Can't reproduce:
| http://pub.lrem.net/2021/03/Teifo4sh/serp.jpg
| FpUser wrote:
| >"I really miss Forum search in Google"
|
| I absolutely hated when they did remove it. I was able to
| sort of mitigate it by adding "forums" and "discussions" to
| search terms but it is not the same of course.
| bcrl wrote:
| Amazon search is similarly broken. Try to find an ECC DIMM on
| Amazon. Everything I try results in dozens of listings for
| non-ECC DIMMs. Even searching for " ECC" doesn't work all
| that well. It's sad that in these days of advanced neural
| networks, we can't get a simple binary attribute matched
| correctly in search results.
| necovek wrote:
| I guess it's location based too (like Google is). Searching
| for "ECC DIMM" returned a bunch of actual ECC memory chips
| available to ship overseas on the first page of results on
| Amazon.com, though I'd still suggest being more specific
| when searching for ECC RAM myself (eg. RDIMM or UDIMM
| or...).
| bcrl wrote:
| I did, and that helped a little, but it's just sad that
| what should be a solved problem by now isn't. Nearest
| neighbour search is so not helpful to me in many cases.
| typon wrote:
| For pretty much any product or review related search I just
| do "<product name> reddit" and then scour the somewhat up
| voted posts for information. Have to deal with tons of dead
| links though for any post older than a couple of years. The
| Web really seems like it's an awful place. The original dream
| of hyper links is really dead. It's all about jumping from
| walled garden to walled garden through tricks and luck.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Google is having trouble determining the date of reddit
| posts and is also making their filter rules useless. You
| try to filter last month, a result says 3 days ago and you
| click, but reddit says it was 2y ago!
| typon wrote:
| Agreed, this is infuriating
| zip1234 wrote:
| and reddit has gotten much less useful with all their push
| for login and using their app...
| Spivak wrote:
| This in no way absolves their god awful mobile experience
| but if you're logged into Reddit with the new UI turned
| off or use the Old Reddit Redirect add-on it's basically
| as if nothing on Reddit changed since 2011.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The new UI is great! It keeps the programmers occupied so
| they stop messing with the old UI that I actually want to
| use.
| hntrader wrote:
| This was one of the few UI changes that I never got
| accustomed to over time. It's _still_ just as bad,
| irritating and ugly as the first day I used it.
| typon wrote:
| Till one day they pull the old UI and theres nothing you
| can do about it
| mjrpes wrote:
| That might begin the next major exodus. Digg -> Reddit ->
| ???
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean there's not _nothing_ you can do. You can still
| grab the source to old Reddit and it 's just a matter of
| gluing the old UI to the new API like all the 3rd party
| clients do.
|
| Not trivial by any means but there's a lot of prior art
| floating around you could pull from.
|
| Sure they could pull API access and be more hostile to
| scrapers but that's the current escape hatch for people
| who would have left because of the redesign.
| breakingcups wrote:
| I'm even more worried they'll shut off the API at some
| point and start going hostile to third-party clients.
| ookware wrote:
| The day they turn off old reddit and stop third party API
| access is the day I can finally detox myself from reddit.
| unionpivo wrote:
| :) The old wife and a mistress approach
| astrange wrote:
| Their mobile website works fine for me, or at least the
| annoyances are a blessing because I spend less time on
| it. The one thing I do notice is if you follow a link out
| of reddit then go back, it shows an error instead of the
| thread and you have to reload, which loses your place.
| dschuessler wrote:
| Use the Teddit frontend (https://teddit.net/) and the
| Redirector extension
| (https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/) to redirect all
| Reddit links to Teddit and view the content there. You
| won't be bothered by pushes for login again.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| That, and don't get me started on their search. Love
| getting 0 results on initial submit, then reloading the
| page with the results magically appearing...
|
| Also love being redirected in order to continue reading
| certain threads
| ekianjo wrote:
| For coding questions it still works relatively well. For
| "reviews", or anything remotely tied to commercial interests,
| it's indeed pure garbage: pages and pages of low quality links.
| colordrops wrote:
| The main problem with google search is that results are driven
| mostly by interests other than the user doing the search.
| benibela wrote:
| It seems to just return the most popular sites
|
| Mostly ignoring what is on the sites
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I agree, but it still seems far ahead of any competitor. Eg
| DuckDuckGo, Bing etc... anecdotally for the things I search
| for.
| bmitc wrote:
| It drives me crazy how Google never fails to remove the most
| unique and yet most important words of my search term. It
| basically does this 99% of the time now.
| georgiecasey wrote:
| I wonder are they doing this because of a resources issue; do
| including all the unique words put too much of a hit on their
| servers and it's way cheaper to give generic results?
| vkou wrote:
| If you force the term to stay, you'll get two search results,
| neither of which answer your question.
|
| The web of 2021 sucks.
| another-dave wrote:
| I'd prefer to recognise immediately that there are no
| results & reframe my query that to start to scan down
| through the results, maybe click into one & start to read
| only _then_ to realise it doesn't relate, back to Google --
| "oh, they didn't actually search for what I told them to
| search for" & then reach the same point they could've given
| me at the start.
|
| At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess
| when limited results" / "give me my exact search query"
| (maybe there is somewhere & I've missed this)
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Google's search index of the web of 2021 sucks. Getting two
| search results which match the exact terms I got is no
| longer particularly strong evidence that those were the
| only pages with those terms, and quite a few times I've had
| it fail to find pages which do exist and should have
| matched the search I did.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It drives me crazy how Google never fails to remove the
| most unique and yet most important words of my search term.
| It basically does this 99% of the time now.
|
| Which is ironic, because one of Google's original innovations
| was to make a space an AND connector instead of OR (which its
| competitors used to maximize result counts). Back then, they
| understood that fewer, more specific results were better.
| polote wrote:
| It really depends on what you are looking for. If you are
| searching on a term that is used by business you will get
| mostly shitty content. But if you search for things that make
| no money, for example. "diff with prosemirror" or "travelling
| with monitors" you will get very relevant results.
|
| I don't think it has a lot of to do with new search algo. I
| think it is the opposite, the algo is mostly the same as a
| decade a ago, but now it is abused by SEO expert. And Google
| doesn't seem to care yet
| tomxor wrote:
| > Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms
|
| This feels very true... the majority of my searches go like
| this:
|
| 1. Search with all relevant terms with some parts that should
| be exact combinations in quotes => nothing or BS results
|
| 2. Remove words that Google is fixating on without context =>
| no or seemingly unrelated results without search terms at all
|
| 3. Reduce specificity to 2 or 3 words, topic and subtopic
| (trying to locate context only and search the rest myself) =>
| sometimes ends me on sites where I can then just browse for the
| result i'm after
|
| 4. Worst case reduce to single search term to find huge context
| sites and manually search myself. Sometimes at this point I
| just give in and manually navigate to other sites where I know
| I can manually browse and narrow down context myself and then
| try to find what I'm looking for... it really feels like a curl
| web scrape and grep would work better than Google at this point
| (yes I know google "site:", it's doesn't work properly
| anymore).
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| I started writing down the search queries for such bad results
| from different search engines to publish one day a 'Search
| Engine Wall of Shame'.
|
| But this needs to be public effort to create any meaningful
| action from search engines.
|
| How many of you would be willing to contribute to such platform
| by submitting your bad search results?
| neogodless wrote:
| I find it really obnoxious that if I search on 5-6 terms,
| Google will return popular results that include 1-2 of the
| least specific but most popular terms. If I put anything in
| quotes, it will ask if I really mean something less specific
| than what I put in quotes! Well yes if we get to a generic
| enough level, you will return the best relevant results to
| those generic terms. Who cares if they relate to the specific
| search I started with?
| arbirk wrote:
| Totally agree. And there are spampages on nearly all results
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last
| decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in
| my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic
| area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu
| techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional.
|
| I thought the main issue here was Google directing searchers to
| its own services and scraping data from non-Google websites to
| present on its own pages? It's declining search result quality
| is certainly an issue, but I don't think this link is about
| that at all.
| dougb5 wrote:
| It's infuriating when Google prefers the documents that ignore
| some of my keywords even when there are plainly pages that
| include them all. I get the sense that there's an over-
| weighting of broad semantic match, to the detriment of lexical
| match, in their current ML model, whatever form it is now. It's
| harming quality for a segment of technical users like ourselves
| but might be "better" in the aggregate over all users,
| according to at least some of their internal quality metrics.
|
| Back in the 90s, search engines were driven largely by sparse
| vector representations of the documents such as TF IDF vectors
| before latent semantic indexing, topic modeling, and other
| dense vector representations like sentence embeddings entered
| the fray (not to mention non-content features that use the web
| graph, click stream, etc.). A lot of NLP applications use a mix
| of dense and sparse features but it's hard to get the balance
| right in a way that works for all inputs. Google's pendulum has
| swung too far in the "dense" direction, as it certainly seems
| "dense" a lot more often lately!
| visarga wrote:
| They are missing the mark on excellence. Apparently having
| thousands of PhD's and product managers does not make for a
| better search experience.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Agreed, I have issues daily with Google:
|
| * shows results despite having zero actual matching results
|
| * ignores parts of the query even if they are surrounded in
| quotes
|
| * gets completely thrown off by keywords (and, or, etc) and
| symbols (=, ;, etc)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last
| decade._
|
| A lot of people say this is because Google is worse at
| returning the desired search results for various reasons
| (algos, ads, spam, etc). I've come to suspect it is more
| deliberate on the part of Google.
|
| I've said it before, so I'll belt out the chant again: "Google
| doesn't make money from providing the right search results.
| Google makes money from keeping you searching for the right
| search results."
|
| This is especially true for the vast majority of people on the
| internet who do not know there are any (better or worse)
| alternatives to Google.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I've seen it: I happened to enter exactly the same query from
| two separate IPs used by communities without deep cultural
| connections in between, and only one of them returned the
| desired results.
|
| That felt like a thick wall of glass separating worlds have
| suddenly come into my view.
| hobs wrote:
| ooh yeah, especially when I am doing some specific database
| programming stuff and my results come up with amazing
| perfect resources and a noob's results come up with
| absolute shit... its bad.
| Const-me wrote:
| And another reason, Google makes money when you click on low-
| quality machine generated search results, because these pages
| are almost always monetized with google ads. This causes a
| conflict of interests: when they improve search, they earn
| less money.
| jayqd3 wrote:
| Your remark is very good. How do they balance rich answers
| which lead to zero-clicks with the revenues which are based
| on a-clicks? Thanks.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| >> _Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this
| last decade_
|
| I have ZERO doubt in my mind that a Google search update that
| decreases their ad revenue would be rolled back and metrics
| tweaked to make it so. So...
| echelon wrote:
| My guess is that you're part of an unprofitable long tail. Why
| optimize for your use case when they can capture customers that
| bring more money with far less effort?
|
| I wager that most people don't perceive a decline in search
| results quality. At least not to an extent where they'd notice
| and switch to using Bing.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| I'd guess because people who are looking for something
| specific, are more likely to buy the damn thing if they find
| it, if it's something buyable.
| remram wrote:
| I'd be surprised if there was a long tail of customers. There
| is probably a long tail of searches for most customers.
|
| Google giving up on difficult searches and focusing on
| showing promoted links, AMP sites, and "rich" result boxes is
| probably a sound business strategy too, and is unlikely to
| make users switch search engines this late in the game
| (Bing/DDG don't seem to do better anyway).
| yakubin wrote:
| Google Search users aren't Google's customers. Making Google
| Search useful to its users is not what makes it profitable.
| It only needs to be mildly better than the competition, so
| that people use it and can be used for collecting data and
| serving ads.
|
| So GP may not be "an unprofitable long tail". GP may in fact
| be "a profitable typical long tail for whom Google Search is
| frustratingly unhelpful".
| ImpressiveWebs wrote:
| Google doesn't want people to find alternative sources for
| news, healthcare, and politics. They now force all the
| mainstream sources to the top, regardless of whether the search
| terms entered have any relation to the actual results. And this
| seems to have carried over to other subjects as well, because I
| can never find obscure pages any more.
|
| This should destroy Google, but for some reason it doesn't, and
| it baffles me that they are still surviving in this.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| This is has been my experience as well. When I search using
| very specific terms for a any topic tangentially related to
| something popular, all I get is the News articles.
|
| I suspect it is because the best sources of information do
| not serve adds, but news, spam, and social media do.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > alternative healthcare
|
| I don't blame Google for this. 99% of alternative medicine is
| quackery and it's almost impossible to separate wheat from
| chaff in an automated way.
| godshatter wrote:
| Why should Google care about this? Maybe I'm trying to find
| examples of egregious claims made about a particular
| alternative medicine.
|
| I only want Google Search to filter based on search terms,
| not it's creators opinions about what I'm searching for.
| throwaway53453 wrote:
| Thank the media for slandering the company, accusing it of
| perpetrating genocides, political strife, Russian election
| hacking conspiracy, etc... The reason they do this is being
| scared of liability, not a top-down desire to control.
| rchaud wrote:
| Same could be said for any site that is smaller in scale than
| the #1 result.
|
| If I'm looking for a review of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I
| will see links to Amazon, Pitchfork, Rateyourmusic and other
| sites well before I find something written by a regular
| person on their personal blog.
|
| Same goes for products. I will see a page of Amazon links
| before anything on say, a boutique Ecommerce website with a
| Shopify backend.
| DanBC wrote:
| And the natural language questions sometimes get stuck. For
| example, [what's the difference between cauliflower cheese and
| cauliflower mornay] seems like it should return a page that
| tells you what the difference is, but it doesn't. It returns a
| bunch of recipes.
| notahacker wrote:
| The highlighted responses to _suggested_ natural language
| questions are comically bad. Answers to different questions,
| complete failure to apply simple contextualisers like
| 'today', and treating some random on Quora or some splog as
| an authoritative source for identifying a fact that _has_
| authoritative sources. I know it 's difficult to do this
| stuff without human curation, but it's like a campaign to
| discourage people from taking NLP seriously.
| Arnt wrote:
| Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good
| they were a decade ago. Because every search I've done today
| produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results,
| above the fold.
|
| I can't say I've really counted how many days that's true. I
| can't even say that I really remember what searches I did
| yesterday or the day before. But if I'm not totally weird and
| google searches were dramatically better in the past, then they
| must have produced the desired results every time on almost
| every day.
| eitland wrote:
| > Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how
| good they were a decade ago.
|
| Oh, I forget some people doesn't know why Google enjoy their
| current position:
|
| Back before 2007 they completely blew competition out of the
| water:
|
| If something was accessible on the Internet and wasn't behind
| a noindex spell, Google would find it.
|
| Compared to other search engines that both then and now work
| more like Google does today it was totally amazing.
|
| Then things started to go sideways:
|
| - first there was: did you mean <something else with similar
| spelling>? (this was actually user friendly)
|
| - then there was: we didn't find many results for <search
| term> so we included <related but different search term>, use
| double quotes to search for "<search term>"
|
| - then there was fuzzing: expnding all my search terms into
| the unrecognizable unless I double quoted them
|
| - and the latest few years they have also ignored my double
| quotes
|
| somewhere in between there they messed up the + operator that
| used to mean "make sure this term is included" as well as ~
| that used to mean I wanted Google to fuzz that term.
|
| Sometimes I can get better results by trying to think how my
| wife would phrase the question, i.e. instead of searching for
|
| - <search terms including a weird _mispeling_ from a dialog
| box >
|
| I search for
|
| - <why does my computer show search terms including a weird
| _mispeling_ from a dialog box >
|
| But other times nothing works.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _somewhere in between there they messed up the + operator
| that used to mean "make sure this term is included"_
|
| IIRC this one was driven by Google Plus marketing wanting
| "+" to mean "Go to this page on Google Plus" so they could
| do some co-marketing thing with +Pepsi.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Unbelievable. Google plus is the "gift" that keeps on
| giving, even after it's gone.
| eitland wrote:
| Most amazingly the worst thing about it is they killed it
| after it had become nice :-)
| eitland wrote:
| My understanding as well.
|
| It never made sense to me for Google+ but it broke that
| feature.
|
| Lately it seems + might be working on DDG and maybe
| Google as well, only I have to use it in combination with
| double quotes like this:
|
| + <some search terms including a +"weiiird" one>
|
| Edit: Can't say for sure if it is a feature or if I just
| knock out the dumbifier somehow :-P
| rplnt wrote:
| Default search might have gotten better, but it also became
| virtually impossible to do any complex queries. Google is
| being too smart and it's extremely hard to find old results,
| foreign results, other meanings of a popular keyword. It's
| always trying to force you to the same results, whatever you
| try. Oh, and if it's anything you can buy you get loads of
| ads followed by spam.
| purerandomness wrote:
| > every search I've done today produced the result I wanted
| on the first page of the results, above the fold.
|
| Same for me, but that's because I just stopped searching for
| things that I know will not give me good quality results as
| they used to be circa pre-2010 back when search tools like +,
| -, and "" still worked and the results weren't filled with
| generated SEO texts.
| [deleted]
| dawnerd wrote:
| I was kinda thinking the same too until I went back and gave
| bing and DDG a shot and well, Google is still way better for my
| searches. I think its more of the seo spam that popping up
| thats making the results look less useful.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| That would be an interesting problem, how do you
| algorithmically filter out SEO and focus on useful
| information? A signal vs. noise problem, but on human text,
| with the added challenge that the noise is trying to outsmart
| you. Maybe an adversarial ML network with an SEO-generating
| bot working against you?
| Const-me wrote:
| Technically, trivially simple: detect and penalize ads. You
| can even reuse an ad.blocker's database for the detection.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| Quoting part of a comment I posted on HN in 2018:
|
| "love monetizing niche search engines and other data products,
| but it looks like Google will eventually get into any industry
| where the main source of traffic is organic search, I wonder what
| is next."
| boromi wrote:
| Google anything... more than half the page is irrelevant adds.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I'm confused by the top comment using this headline to complain
| about the quality of results. The quality of results is obviously
| irrelevant to the fact that most searches do not result in
| clicks. Google specifically tries to answer your question on the
| result page:
|
| "nifarious" - oh, it's spelled "nefarious"
|
| "1000 USD in CHF" - aha, about 1000 swiss francs
|
| 4 tablespoons in cups - 1/4 cup
|
| "how old is taylor swift" - 31 years; this shows up in the
| _suggested search dropdown_ , so you don't even need to hit the
| result page
| sebringj wrote:
| I think this is mostly due to the immediate messaging they give
| on the topic that is sufficient and no further click is needed.
| Meaning the little drop down suggestions more often than not for
| me has the full content I want. For example, "What is the meaning
| of temporal?" or 'Who wrote "Wild Thing?"'. Google has inline
| calculators and an amazing array of usefulness without needing a
| website to go to in so many cases growing more and more. What is
| kind of sad/funny about this is its making the search results
| themselves less useful in which it was built on, giving less
| incentive to give this AI food.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| What's disappointing about this is how inaccurate some of the
| information is. For example, we even go the extra step of adding
| the OccupationSchema meta tag on Levels.fyi for salary data to be
| shown on queries. However, Google only uses the base salary
| component and not the total key, which highly misleads people
| into taking what's shown as 'per year' as the total compensation,
| especially since there isn't even a clarification for it on the
| salary cards.
|
| Still think it does make for a better user experience overall,
| just wish they'd add some more details to some of these Search
| schemas they themselves adopted to get more detailed and accurate
| info.
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| On one hand I'm sad that Google as the Oracle is killing
| businesses and lives.
|
| On the other hand I'm excited about other portals that will open
| up. This just cannot be how things end.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| About a decade ago or so, I remember complaining about Google's
| search result quality having already declined then. Specifically,
| I think my complaint was that the search results were a lot
| higher quality in the mid-2000s, and then from then on, the
| search results ended up becoming progressively more sanitized and
| crafted.
|
| So, I mean, we're way, way past Google's heyday. It's not even
| close. But it's interesting to me that I can recall having those
| discussions that many years ago, and that people still complain
| about the same issue today.
|
| In fact, just about every other search engine is better in my
| opinion.
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think the issue here is really simple. Google has learned that
| it is more profitable to infer the intent of a query & tell
| people what to think up front based upon a carefully crafted set
| of advertiser criteria. It is difficult to appease your paying
| customers when you give the non-paying customers direct access to
| the most likely match for their query and allow them to draw
| their own conclusions from the information.
|
| Put differently, there is a conflict of interest inherent in the
| very nature of Google's business. It can only become a steeper
| death spiral from here if the motive continues to be profit above
| all else.
| thepete2 wrote:
| That's definitely a tendency that you'd expect when sites are
| engineered for engagement and everybody starts out at google. I
| guess it also means google completely controls the experience of
| most people on the internet.
| bttrfl wrote:
| If I were to build my own search engine:
|
| - I'd make sure that multipurpose sites get lower ranks,
| ecommerce with a blog would get worse rank than a stand alone
| blog or an ecommerce. this would eliminate all the content
| marketing and owners would have to focus on their core business
|
| - I would put a cap on amount of content that increases rank. A
| website with a million recipes harvested from other sites won't
| be better than a blog with 10 quality recipes.
|
| - I would downgrade rank for use of third-party cookies, invasive
| ads etc.
|
| - I would give users an option to "mute" a website
|
| - Randomise top results to make sure no one can "occupy" top
| spots.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| Anyone have any opinions on the state of image search? What do
| you use?
|
| I find Google Image search, which I used to love, filled with
| absolute garbage now. 90% of links are to Pinterest which greets
| you with usual overlays, signup modals etc. I use DDG's image
| search because I find Google's search unusable.
|
| Also, Yandex image search is probably the best reverse image
| search on the market. It's crazy how much better it is than
| Google.
| diegocg wrote:
| Bing image search is much better too
| godshatter wrote:
| !bi on DDG for me.
| npteljes wrote:
| DDG is ridiculous with resolutions. Categorizes 500x900
| resolution as "Large". Otherwise it works for me as an image
| search engine. I usually return to google if I absolutely can't
| find what I'm looking for - google is better when it has to
| guess, with instructions like "yellow blob old game".
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Yup I agree. It's surprisingly better.
| colordrops wrote:
| It's not that google isn't capable of providing much better
| search. It's that they are driven by interests other than the
| users actually doing the search. Google has some of the most
| advanced tech and engineers in the world. But they also have an
| endless list of issues they must address - no facial
| recognition, no racial bias, no sexual content, filtering
| specific politics, supporting partners, etc.
| SilverRed wrote:
| They also face huge amounts of legal pressure to make GI less
| useful and stripping out features so that more people follow
| through to the site and see the adverts.
| thrower123 wrote:
| This is what Google has been trying to do, right? As they keep
| scraping more and more information out of the sites that they
| index and then provide thumbnail answers in the results page,
| there's no reason to click on anything.
|
| If I google for the weather in Chicago, I'm not going to click on
| a link to weather.com for it, because the seven day forecast is
| right there.
|
| If I google for information about a person, Google scrapes
| Wikipedia and puts that right in the results page sidebar.
|
| Flight information, bus schedules, anything that looks like a
| calculation, a whole bevy of other things, Google just preempts
| any results and shows inline at the top of the search page. Why
| would you click through to anything?
| oblib wrote:
| That doesn't surprise me. I look up answers to questions and
| definitions of words using google and seldom click through
| because I get what I need in the results. Not sure that's 2/3 of
| my usage of Google but that may not be far off.
| newsbinator wrote:
| 2/3rds of my Google searches are:
|
| * current time [city]
|
| * [city] weather
|
| * [city] covid
| gxqoz wrote:
| Are you like frequently traveling to different cities based on
| the covid level? Is your behavior somehow changing
| significantly due to slight differences in covid deaths in your
| city?
| paulpauper wrote:
| google search results are nothing but content farms and other
| mostly useless shit unless you search for things that are STEM-
| related or academic-related.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Google provides instant answers for most medical queries,
| calculations, celebrities, sports, news, weather, how-tos,
| definitions, reviews, map, shopping, images, etc. Most people
| don't search outside of queries that google can answer from their
| own sources frequently so this seems plausible.
| rchaud wrote:
| This type of "no-click search" is infuriating because of how
| often people take the snippet Google spits out at face value,
| without the context that a full article might have provided.
| jfk13 wrote:
| It provides instant answers, but in my experience they're
| frequently not the answer to what you actually asked, or
| they're just plain wrong.
|
| (YMMV: it depends on your specific searches, I'm sure.)
| lmeyerov wrote:
| I googled for 'soc 2 multitenancy requirements' this morning then
| gave up and went to bing....
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| If Google ever started including copy-pasteable code from Stack
| Overflow, I might never follow a link from Google again.
|
| Which I think says a lot about how Google is used now. I don't
| use Google to find _web pages_ , I use it to find an answer to a
| pressing question. When I'm looking for something to read, I go
| to a content aggregator like HN or Reddit.
|
| Of course this isn't sustainable. If Google is just presenting
| other sites' data "for" them, and thus depriving them of traffic
| and revenue, eventually there won't be any incentive to create
| the content Google is scraping. Long term, this seems self-
| defeating for Google, just as its ruinous to the sites they
| scrape.
| californical wrote:
| I don't know about Google, but I've gotten relevant Stack
| Overflow code snippets pretty regularly from DDG
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| But so few people use DDG. It probably isn't much of an issue
| for stack overflow. If Google started doing that, my guess is
| that stack overflow would feel it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content
| Google is scraping
|
| It's an interesting hypothesis, but it assumes the only reason
| people bother to seek and aggregate facts is to get paid (and
| the only way to get paid is click-through to ads). No doubt
| that early surfacing of data could disrupt payment-for-visit-
| dependent models, but that doesn't guarantee the data
| evaporates from Google's view or that new payment models don't
| arise to replace the old.
| freebuju wrote:
| I don't see any reason why Google can't pay for using your
| website's content on their search engine. Looks to me exactly
| like the same deal they've been cutting with media owners from
| Australia & France. The law should cut this side too. For
| individual content owners as well.
| SilverRed wrote:
| You don't have to put your content on google, you can add
| yourself to robots txt and google will respect that.
|
| You want to be able to force google to take your content, AND
| force them to pay for being forced to take it.
|
| A better idea would be coming up with plans on how to break
| up googles market share to split it among multiple smaller
| search engines which may allow you to bargain for paid
| content with.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Generally the price of information is race to the bottom,
| people shouldn't be expected to get payed anymore. I'm happy
| to pay for content: I pay for Youtube and Netflix, and they
| pay content creators. I'm also buying books on Kindle. But
| when I signed up for the Economist, what I read was
| significantly worse content than Hacker News comments.
| tasogare wrote:
| I don't particularly like the press, but as a profession they
| recognized quickly the danger of Google displaying directly
| their content on the results page. Too bad they fought only for
| themselves and not for the web in general, since they're
| holding enough power to tip the scale.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Half of my Googles are literally just using Google as a
| calculator.
| allenu wrote:
| I used to do that until I realized on Mac, I can just cmd-
| spacebar to do Spotlight search and type my equation in there.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I don't have a Mac. Does Spotlight handle units as well as
| Google does? Also, doing the calculation in Google is handy
| because it's easy to share in a modifiable way.
| adav wrote:
| Spotlight handles the majority of unit conversions and
| quick calculations that Google can do. I think it is, or
| was, powered by Wolfram Alpha.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Wolfram Alpha is pretty good and is more powerful than
| Google Calculator, but I've found Google Calculator to be
| more responsive and consistent and thus a bit easier for
| regular usage.
| allenu wrote:
| I don't know how well it handles units vs. Google but it
| does convert as you type, say "5inches" immediately shows
| it in cm but you can keep typing "5inches in m" and it'll
| do the math too.
| [deleted]
| Graffur wrote:
| Thanks for posting that. I never knew that. It does currency
| conversion too but unfortunately not crypto
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I'm reminded of the bit in the Hitchhiker's Guide where a
| character pointedly counts at a computer, to remind it that he
| still can.
| scudd wrote:
| I admit I sometimes use google search as a spell check that's a
| simple Ctrl + T away. I'm not proud, but it's so simple to access
| when you're already in the browser.
| criddell wrote:
| > the zero-click search problem is likely to rise even more
|
| I have a hard time seeing this as a problem.
| phpnode wrote:
| As a user? sure.
|
| People who create and curate content quite often want to be
| paid for their work, they create businesses to support
| themselves, often in the form of a website. If Google scrapes
| and repackages that content, so the searcher never even visits
| the creator's site, what incentive does the creator have to
| continue making content freely available?
| criddell wrote:
| The zero-click queries that I've done have been for fairly
| simple facts that I think most of us would agree should be
| zero-click.
|
| What are some examples that I could try that show results
| that you think should require me to click through?
| bartread wrote:
| I suspect a bunch of people might jump on the bandwagon that this
| is Google repackaging others' content into search snippets and
| robbing their sites of traffic.
|
| No doubt there's some truth to that, but I'd like to indulge in a
| slightly different flavour of Google bashing on this occasion.
|
| The reason I often don't click through on search results is that
| the search results are garbage - either irrelevant or poor
| quality. I'm in the midst of refurbing and redecorating my house.
| Often I'll need to do some research on topics related to that,
| and when I do that I often find I need to refine my search query
| to find anything of relevance, even sometimes digging through
| several pages of results manually to find a really useful page.
|
| And then there's work: I still haven't found any answers on this,
| but one of the things that's on my mind about becoming a more
| senior business leader is that I feel like I'm changing as a
| person. I feel like the way I think about problems and people is
| changing. That's to some extent to be expected, but the issue is
| I'm feeling ambivalent about some of the changes I perceive.
|
| So it's about the effect that leadership has on the leader
| (selfish, I realise).
|
| But when I start searching around this topic, what does Google
| want to show me? Pages and pages of results about change
| management or, when it's being marginally less of a village
| idiot, pages and pages of results about leadership styles and
| changing leadership style. Neither of these is what I'm talking
| about.
|
| A human will understand that, but Google doesn't, and I'm finding
| that increasingly to be a problem when I'm looking for
| information: either, (i) my results are overwhelmed with low-
| grade spammy SEO'd to hell and back content, or (ii) Google's AI
| is too bloody stupid and pig-ignorant to understand what I'm
| talking about.
|
| Hence I don't click through on the search results the majority of
| the time.
| jsight wrote:
| I'm seeing very similar issues. Google seems to heavily favor
| sending people to the sites with the highest content volume
| instead of the highest quality content.
|
| The worst thing is that content creators are manipulating this
| to build content farms full of low quality content and
| overwhelming ad volumes.
|
| I miss the old web where Google was really great at finding
| that one guy's blog post that was actually useful.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > about becoming a more senior business leader is that I feel
| like I'm changing as a person. I feel like the way I think
| about problems and people is changing.
|
| Dunno, but this might be the sort of perspective you're
| seeking: there's a book
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes about the culture of
| managers at large corporations. And a series of posts on it --
| I'd start with the one near the top that's just quotes from the
| book, to see if it's you're after:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS
| [deleted]
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's not all bad. I consider it a feature that Google usually
| pulls the right information from Wikipedia. It doesn't harm
| Wikipedia, which is free anyway, but reduces their bandwidth
| load.
| panopticon wrote:
| That's not strictly true. Wikipedia is crowed-sourced, and
| losing visitors means losing potential contributors.
|
| You could probably make the case that someone who would rather
| read the snippet on Google isn't likely to contribute, but it
| likely has an effect on the margin.
|
| And that's ignoring the donate banner they throw up there from
| time to time.
| izacus wrote:
| Google will start paying for that content though
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22334276/wikimedia-
| enterp...
| marcodiego wrote:
| Alternatives I've been using: searx[0] and millionshort[1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx
|
| [1] https://millionshort.com/
| bordercases wrote:
| Thanks!
| loopz wrote:
| Bogus metric when search results might contain enough answer to
| majority of sincere queries.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Google provides tons of data itself. I search stock prices on it.
| No clicks there. I search weather on it. No click there.
|
| There are all sorts a little utilities that are now just part of
| Google.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yup. Weather, stocks, various bits of statistical info like GDP
| and population, and image searches. Image searches are super
| awesome for learning some things in ways you didn't expect.
| lolive wrote:
| In 2014, the Google Knowledge Graph was a good way for Google to
| redirect Wikipedia page views to its own ecosystem. Good job
| Google! https://wikipediocracy.com/2014/01/06/googles-knowledge-
| grap...
| prepend wrote:
| As long as they use the content appropriately that's a good
| thing as it reduces web traffic to Wikipedia and saves them
| money.
|
| The purpose of Wikipedia is to improve human knowledge and all
| their content is CC so unless Google is altering content or
| biasing searches, sucking it into Knowledge graph seems like
| one of the main reasons Wikipedia started.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| How much is this due to mobile search quite often I do a search
| with auto complete on my phone - then add a modifier to get the
| search you want.
| sharkweek wrote:
| Many moons ago, I put a ton of work into a (now defunct) content
| site that provided specific information in a small vertical. Each
| post took hours, but I enjoyed writing the articles, and the
| revenue from the ads was enough to enjoy a little extra cash
| every month (we're talking just about enough to cover a car
| payment, for context).
|
| Google decided they liked a lot of the content and started
| providing it in their knowledge graph. It was initially great to
| be validated and the link to my content at the top of the search
| result was pretty cool to see. But it did tank traffic, as Google
| scraping my content and giving it away at the top of their search
| result page meant people didn't need to navigate to my site.
|
| Felt pretty terrible, if I'm being honest, but I also have always
| subscribed to understanding the risks for relying on other
| networks for my own benefit.
|
| BUT!!!
|
| As a regular user of search engines, I love getting the answer
| super fast without necessarily having to guess what sort of ad-
| trap I'll have to navigate to get the answer I'm looking for on
| some random content site.
|
| As a user, when I'm asking some non-critical question, it's nice
| to just get a snappy answer. I appreciate it.
|
| The problem of course arises when content creators stop making
| the content for Google to scrape and index, what then?
| jart wrote:
| Knowing the way they are, you might want to consider applying
| for a job and telling that story during the interviews.
| irrational wrote:
| Did they scrape your content and put it into their own
| database? That is, if you had deleted all of your content,
| would it still have appeared in the Google results?
| caoilte wrote:
| "The problem of course arises when content creators stop making
| the content for Google to scrape and index disappear, what
| then?"
|
| communist revolution?
| adav wrote:
| Sounds like the plot of Atlas Shrugged.
| rchaud wrote:
| > The problem of course arises when content creators stop
| making the content for Google to scrape and index, what then?
|
| This has already happened. People put content on their sites
| only long enough to figure out what works, then turn that
| content into a book that can be sold. Every Cal Newport book
| came out of his blog posts.
|
| Others are turning content into paid newsletters, courses and
| Patreon-only walled content.
|
| Wrote something 15 years ago? Just set the "Date Modified" to
| last week and Google will think it's been updated.
|
| The 'content' you and I are seeing are just second and third-
| hand summarizations of popular topics written by content
| marketers.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Will content creators stop, or will a new payment model that
| isn't "pay for eyeballs" arise?
|
| The financial sources for information-collection-and-creation
| undertakings throughout human history have been manifold
| (wealthy patron and collective financing, to name two). It is
| entirely possible, if Google finds its data sources drying up,
| that Google itself will pay for data collection (they already
| do this with several categories of data they host).
| germanjoey wrote:
| In my experience, "Google Instant Answers" are more often than
| not factually incorrect. It makes me queasy every time I see
| that... it speaks volumes that's so much more important to them
| that they keep you on the page that they'd rather give you
| wrong information than let you go.
| 1f60c wrote:
| A classic example is the instant answer to "who invented
| running?"
| monkeybutton wrote:
| What I find entertaining is that while answers may be
| wrong, you can see from the question statement and the
| returned sample text that it is working perfectly in a
| mechanical sense. The parsing of the question is correct,
| the searching works, and so does the ranking. But at the
| end of the day, it is just applied NLP at a large scale,
| not AGI, so it doesn't know that it is returning a wrong
| answer. It doesn't know anything at all!
| screaminghawk wrote:
| For those that are curious it displays a Quora answer that
| states:
|
| >Thomas Running
|
| >Running was invented in 1612 by Thomas Running when he
| tried to walk twice at the same time.
|
| It's actually quite and interesting post if you follow the
| link. Obviously it's not correct in the purest form but
| there is justification for this answer.
| notahacker wrote:
| On the other hand "who discovered running?" quotes a
| _tweet_ telling a variant of the same joke.
|
| I wonder if GPT-3 has learned about Mr Running yet?
| SilverRed wrote:
| That wrong info came from the pages which are listed in the
| search results. So much objectively, factually incorrect info
| is written in to blog posts which show up in google search
| results which then get copied to instant answers.
| Particularly historical info is filled with mistakes, people
| misunderstanding the context of some old news article and
| then taking it out of context to drop on wikipedia where it
| is taken as fact.
| twhb wrote:
| The error usually arises from Google misinterpreting and
| decontextualizing the page's content, for example reading a
| table incorrectly then giving one stat as another stat. The
| page is correct, it's Google that's wrong.
| mnd999 wrote:
| It's hard to see how this isn't anticompetitive. Using their
| market power in search to show their own ads but prevent anyone
| navigating to view any others seems like something that should
| end up in court.
| thephyber wrote:
| Google has always respected robots.txt and has well
| documented how to restrict crawling.
|
| I don't see it as anticompetitive so much as copyright
| violations. The fact that Google makes advert revenue using
| this strategy just contributes to damages.
|
| Anticompetitive would likely require Alphabet (and
| potentially other companies) from preventing users from
| accessing the original web page (which might be possible but
| more difficult to prove).
| neolog wrote:
| IIRC you can't copyright facts
| JasonFruit wrote:
| All of my Google searches have now ended. I use DuckDuckGo
| exclusively, and while there was a time when I used to add !g to
| about every tenth search, I have not felt that need more than
| about once a week for several months now. DuckDuckGo is simply
| enough improved, and Google enough worsened, that it's not worth
| it anymore. From my point of view, Google has blown the vast
| advantage they had, and is now second-best.
| SomewhatLikely wrote:
| Article says clicks to other Google properties don't count as
| clicks. I would be curious how many searches end up in a click to
| YouTube. I know my fraction has gone up over time as it's more
| likely someone has put up a video about some finer point of one
| of my hobbies than it is they post a blog. At least in these
| cases the content creator can often still monetize these
| searches.
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