[HN Gopher] Three areas where Google Search lags behind competit...
___________________________________________________________________
Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code,
cooking, travel
Author : swethmandava
Score : 497 points
Date : 2022-04-13 21:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.surgehq.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.surgehq.ai)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For Python programming I would say 100% of the time you should
| look the answer up in the official manual for a well-defined
| problem (delete a file) because the manual is correct, well-
| written, etc. It's astonishing how often Google and Bing snatch
| defeat from the jaws of victory on queries like this.
|
| If you go looking in splogs, spam overflow and other spam sites
| at best you are going to get wrong answers, at worse you will get
| answers that "aren't even wrong".
| urthor wrote:
| Realpython is a third party site that I'll admit is acceptable
| for these results.
|
| Mostly yes, you just search efficient documentation.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I haven't coded python in a while, but does the python manual
| follow the man pages style of listing every possible parameter
| including the weird deprecated options that haven't been used
| since 1998 before actually providing information and examples
| of typical usage and instructions on how to handle the common
| use-cases?
|
| Because that's the software equivalent to recipe spam.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I wish the python manual was the default search for function
| references too...
| twelvechairs wrote:
| I agree yet in the article google is criticised for having the
| official docs as search result 1.
|
| I guess I just want different results to the same query than
| the author
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Of the three code related searches in the original blog post,
| only one Google example listed the official Python
| documentation as the first link. In the other two examples,
| the sites shown where:
|
| - W3 Schools
|
| - StackOverflow
|
| I will definitely agree with you that the author seems to
| want very different things from their search results than we
| might though. I will always always prefer the official docs
| (which I can pick through) when I make as vague a search as
| "<language> throw exception". If I wanted to know "how do I
| <verb> <noun> in <language>", then that's what I'd Google.
| stephen_cagle wrote:
| I get so annoyed that geeks for geeks is the default thing for
| so many things I search for in python. Really, it would be far
| more useful to just bring up the python docs most of the time.
| twofornone wrote:
| >because the manual is correct, well-written, etc.
|
| It's also verbose and requires effort and working memory to
| parse, when I could get a trivial one line answer or code
| snippet from a stackoverflow post specific to my question. Yes,
| in an ideal world we would all read the manual, but
| unfortunately manuals are inconvenient. And in my experience
| the vast majority of stackoverflow answers are correct.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think it takes a lot of effort and working memory to ignore
| the ads and correct the mistakes on sites like spam overflow,
| spam3school, etc.
|
| If it was was Clojure or some other language that has an
| awful online manual it is one thing but the Python manual is
| good.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Spam overflow? Is that stack overflow?
|
| And... I'm guessing w3school?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Searching for "Delete a file" in the python manual, will take
| you to a page about the configuration parser.
|
| https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=delete+a+file&check_...
|
| Top result:
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/configparser.html?highligh...
|
| Top 4 result is "Miscellaneous operating system interfaces",
| which does hold the answer, but it is not obvious, and browsing
| through that page is quite a chore before you finally get to
| `os.remove`, which says that it deletes "a path", which even I,
| a seasoned developer need to look twice to make sure that path
| removing a path and a file is the same thing.
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html?highlight=delete%2...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| To be fair I have read the Python manual over and over again,
| I can usually find things by clicking on the appropriate
| section.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > ... maybe I'm not asking the right questions,
|
| You're holding it wrong :-)
| funstuff007 wrote:
| The home page for this site looks like it was designed by Stripe
| in their "gradient all the things fashion". Gradient Memphis?
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| An interesting observation is that over the years, I've sort of
| found that if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not
| asking the right questions, or I'm not thinking about the problem
| the right way. For example, you come up with some weird
| programming idea to solve a problem and no results are found --
| I'm almost always headed down the wrong path. This has been
| proved to me over and over again as sort of a canary in the
| search coal mine.
|
| Google still solves all my questions, if I'm asking the right
| questions, I guess is what I'm getting at.
| DancesWTurtles wrote:
| > For example, you come up with some (...) idea (...) and no
| results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong
| path.
|
| And by that you mean, Google is telling you how to think, and
| that you should think in some way and not in some other way.
| I'm quite sure I am not comfortable with that.
| [deleted]
| devteambravo wrote:
| And what do you do about this discomfort? Asking for a friend
| who is also uncomfortable with that "guidance".
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| This resonated a lot with me. Often if I'm learning a language
| and I see no one is doing what I'm querying for, I take a step
| back and try to ask a more basic question
| KMag wrote:
| Be careful. Maybe it's a useful rule of thumb, but be careful
| of the "searching for your keys under the light pole" problem.
|
| I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more
| than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really
| cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs
| getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn
| to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, means that lots
| of long-tail queries don't do very well on Google.
| freshpots wrote:
| I wish I could find forums with my answer instead of a
| multitude of websites and blogs that do not answer my query.
| I guess I could add 'forum' or something but when I am
| already searching a specific query and particular piece of
| hardware I don't need the first page to show me retailers of
| said hardware.
| techdragon wrote:
| Tried it, blog spam mentions finding or not finding stuff
| in forums way too much and it basically didn't help unless
| I started getting into weird Google fu like including
| strings from the copyright footer of various forums in an
| advanced search using the OR operator and multiple quoted
| sections ... at which point I was like "why am I working
| this hard on making Google better when they don't fucking
| pay me"
| mort96 wrote:
| This is a great way to describe it. Google still gives me
| good results for the common stuff, but really fails me when
| I'm looking for something in the "long tail".
|
| I just wish I could find obscure things again.
| chaxor wrote:
| What is a common query? facebook.com? Some very impressive
| search capabilities needed for that query there.
| KMag wrote:
| More than a decade ago, Google had some special-case
| logic for these "navigational queries". Lee Kai-Fu (head
| of Google China at the time) said that navigational
| queries were particularly prevalent in Chinese search
| traffic.
|
| Though, there's also a use case for people trying to find
| third-party information about various websites,
| particularly in trying to figure out if the website
| itself is a scam. You really want to have the
| navigational result up at the top unless you have a very
| high degree of confidence that the site is a scam, but in
| all cases you want high quality reviews of the site to
| follow up the navigational link.
| ByteJockey wrote:
| Probably something like: "food delivery near me"
| flenserboy wrote:
| I wish there was a way to get rid of all sellers from
| results. Of late I have had to dig 2-3 pages in to get to
| _anything_ which wasn 't an online store.
| headsoup wrote:
| There is, use a different search engine. I've even found
| something as new as Andisearch good for finding research
| papers and Qwant good for general searching. There are
| many more and they keep up with Google pretty well now
| without the trash.
| onion2k wrote:
| For code maybe that's true. It's hard to see how I might be
| wrong about the place I want to travel to or the recipe I want
| to cook though.
| cryptoz wrote:
| I googled a phone number recently. It was the first result, got
| my answer. _The rest of the results were websites for physical
| locations I had been recently, including a hospital, none of
| which had any relationship to the phone number._
|
| Google is _not_ a good guideline for asking the right
| questions. It is trying to make as much money as possible and
| it will scramble anything it can think of to do that. Don't use
| that as a guideline for how you are thinking about questions.
| jsnell wrote:
| 1. Show visited locations in search results
|
| 2. ???
|
| 3. Make as much money as possible
| cryptoz wrote:
| > 2. ???
|
| oh Haha, funny old meme. Step 2 though is very clearly to
| show more ads and more content, to show more 'full results
| pages', etc, rather than just show me the 1 thing I needed
| and be on my way.
|
| I should include that Google said next to each result
| ('"555-555-555" is not on this page') and then show the
| page. Totally knows that the results are unrelated to my
| query, but shows them anyway. Why?
| jsnell wrote:
| So was there even a single ad on that search result page?
| From your original description it certainly didn't sound
| so. If not, how did it contribute to you being shown more
| ads?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the
| right questions"
|
| I used to think this way too, but I've come to realize that
| Google has turned from a search engine that returns results
| based on my input to an answer engine that actively tries to
| reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query -
| usually with the intent of selling me something or returning
| SEO spam. I've also found that the old google-fu techniques are
| now so unreliable that they must have been deprecated. I can't
| tell you how often I use quotes in my query and see results
| that don't contain that text at all.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I
| enter into some other more generic query
|
| Google has come full circle and turned into Ask Jeeves.
| vasco wrote:
| Nowadays you should google using what in 2005 would be
| considered "the wrong way to search". Back then it was all
| about keywords, quotes and so on. For example if you wanted
| to know if dogs could eat apples you'd search:
|
| > dog apple dangerous
|
| Today you should search:
|
| > can dogs eat apples
|
| And you get way better results with the second form. I've
| noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way
| to google is still the former overlap a lot with the crowd
| that keeps complaining google is worse now than it was
| before.
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| Another thing for us on HN to note. _This is how most
| people ask questions_. It is not just that the other way is
| wrong - it is also less common.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Ya of course, but my natural inclination is not to ask a
| question to a web page
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| Right - I think this is part of the "scaling" of the
| internet. Those of us (relatively small set of earlier
| heavy internet users) are forced to change as the product
| is built for the wider audience.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| "you're thinking about it wrong" isn't really that great a
| defense of Google, you know? I'm not being flippant. The
| two examples you gave are different searches, with
| different goals.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I think this also indicates why Google seems to have gotten
| worse at programming questions.
| jakejarvis wrote:
| I've noticed the same, and it's an incredibly hard habit to
| break!
| savanaly wrote:
| I'm in the awkward middle area I think where I'm almost a
| digital native, and what you said maps perfectly to my
| experience. In middle school and high school I got pretty
| good at the first type of search you mentioned. I was young
| enough that I was almost learning how to "speak" google and
| it came easily, I was fluent. Throughout the end of high
| school and into college I had more and more issues finding
| what I wanted and one day after I had failed to search
| several times I thought to myself "Fuck it. I'm just going
| to type in exactly what I want in plain English, as if I
| was a moron, and see what happens." And it worked, and that
| day a lightbulb went off in my head.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I'd argue that it's not a "better way", but rather a
| regression: I assume Google genuinely wants to understand
| my query, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't still
| be obvious to Google what kind of results it should return.
|
| Otherwise, it there truly is a "right way of asking Google
| questions", why doesn't Google release and promote a guide
| about it so people can be more successful in their search?
| grogenaut wrote:
| Okay, so answer me this... I'm trying to find out about
| the extra controls in the old space suits. I believe they
| used a chin switch or chin toggle (resistive). If I
| google "did astronauts control things with their chin" I
| see: 'It's All Different for Women in Space | Marie
| Claire' and 'Pillsbury Space Food Sticks were sweet Slim
| Jims in space' as the first 2 answers... nothing about
| switches. If I google 'space suit chin switch' I get
| links to resistivity toggle switches.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| If "you're doing it wrong" didn't fly with Apple. It
| doesn't fly with Google.
| neoromantique wrote:
| I hate it as much as any other geek, but it did pretty
| much fly with apple. Even when it was as bad as "You're
| holding your phone wrong" bad.
| KMag wrote:
| I could very well be biased, but the first example still
| seems more useful than the second.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dog%20apple%20dangero
| u...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=can%20dogs%20eat%20ap
| p...
|
| Also worth comparing (seems to focus more on diabetes than
| cyanoglycosides. Diabetes is the bigger chronic problem,
| and cyanoglycosides are the bigger acute problem, so which
| is a bigger danger largely depends on how disciplined the
| owner is.):
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+dangerous+about+fee
| d...
| KMag wrote:
| Back when I started at Google, they at least said they
| actively targeted "long-tail" queries to gain market share.
| The thinking was that people would use a search engine until
| they hit some query that their usual search engine failed on.
| Then they'd give another search engine (perhaps Google) a
| try, so if you really targeted those tough queries and were
| at least decent at the common queries, you'd gain market
| share.
|
| Though, even when I was doing indexing changes at Google, the
| common practice was to do A/B testing with both the most
| common queries and a uniformly random sample (see reservoir
| sampling) of queries in order to justify a go-live of
| indexing changes. The former explicitly over-weights common
| queries, and the latter still optimizes for the common case.
| (In case you're wondering, the worst query I had to manually
| check in A/B testing was [flesh hook suspension].)
|
| Google used to turn off some of the query re-writing logic
| (that tries to fix your query) if you used a query operator.
| (It has been a while, but I think maybe even their "Kansas"
| user info database kept track of the last time you used an
| operator, and would turn off some of the cleverness if you
| had recently used a search operator, as it was a good signal
| that you were a power user capable of optimizing your own
| queries.) My understanding is that they don't disable any of
| the too-clever bits for power users any more, and that
| everything uses all of the cleverness of learn-to-rank all
| the time.
|
| I suspect it has gotten even worse with learn-to-rank, as it
| must be incredibly difficult to intentionally under-weight
| the uncommon/difficult queries.
|
| They did keep track of when users re-issued similar queries
| in a short period, as a signal that the ranking algorithm
| wasn't doing well. I think an optimal system would use learn-
| to-rank for the first query in a related sequence of queries,
| and then switch to turning some of the smarts off, and
| finally switching to a learn-to-rank algorithm trained only
| on later queries in these related query sequences. That way,
| they can avoid the secondary learn-to-rank instance from
| over-fitting the median/easy queries.
| rg111 wrote:
| I am sure it's plenty more than these three.
|
| Yesterday, I searched "best after-sale service of AC". What I was
| shown was SEO'd pure junk. _Absolute_ junk as the first result.
|
| Next few were the same, but more focused on affiliate programs
| rather than providing genuine info.
|
| Down the line was Quora, where _sales rep of AC companies_ wrote
| answers that _theirs_ had the best service.
|
| I wad very disappointed.
|
| You.com showed me better result right away.
|
| My Kagi and You use is now on par with my Google use. They mights
| surpass Google soon.
|
| I still find Google to be the best for programming answers btw.
|
| I would also say that Google's ad business is in direct conflict
| of interest with its search business.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Am I the only ones who has a really hard time with Quora. I can
| never tell which answer is real or fake. And even the "real"
| ones rarely ever answer the question. Quora is basically the
| Pinterest of answer results.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| you.com, the search engine you control, huh?
|
| http://shitmyself.com/thumb/thumb_800_5e84542c26a8815f33d767...
| donbrae wrote:
| I much prefer Kagi to Google (and DuckDuckGo et al). Often the
| first page of Google consists solely of SEO rubbish. Being able
| to block and rank domains is also useful.
| rg111 wrote:
| For straightforward answers and navigating to websites, I
| often use what is the default in browser that I happen to use
| at that time.
|
| I use DDG, FF, and Bromite on my smartphone. Sometimes Brave,
| too. I have Brave as my secondary browser (FF as the main,
| LibreWolf for personal stuff) on my daily driver as well.
|
| I used Brave Search and DDG a lot. Nothing can go wrong with
| them if all I am asking is the capital of Belgium or trying
| to navigate to a subreddit.
|
| With special, not so straightforward searches, I rely on You
| and Kagi.
|
| I really appreciate You's different _kind_ s of search
| results and grouping them. They are clear that they use some
| kind of AI model to tailor search results, and I have an
| account there.
|
| I really like Kagi for showing me sites that I wasn't even
| aware of. I can boost or shove down sites. I turned off Quora
| and Pinterest right away. No extensions, no scripts. Love
| that.
|
| As I said, Google's adbiz is in direct conflict with its
| Search division. Search should show the best result for the
| Searcher. Ad div would want the pages to be shown that are
| crawling, infesting with Google Adsense ad. When more of
| these pages are visited, they have better metrics to lure
| more people to Adsense thus making $$$.
|
| This is clear conflict of interest.
| python_bread wrote:
| code2life wrote:
| I never find google to be good for programming queries. I use
| you.com for all programming queries, and recently learned to
| use their Coding Complete app, it's actually great. This
| article doesn't do it a proper justice
| abraae wrote:
| The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to
| blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months).
|
| So damn annoying when the top search results _all_ lead to shitty
| SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on,
| leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just
| excellent SEO scamming.
|
| As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets
| less and less useful.
|
| When I see a site like that, I can be quite sure there is no
| value to me from that site. I want to blacklist it - not forever
| (though I'd settle for that) but so I don't see it in search
| results again.
|
| The crazy thing is that this could even be a benefit for Google
| themselves. They could aggregate these signals and use them to
| identify SEO scammers, since their algorithms clearly can't. I'm
| sure that Google aren't happy with the lacklustre performance of
| their search in modern times.
| nomilk wrote:
| This is a great idea. On YouTube I use the 'Don't recommend
| channel' button a lot and consequently the algorithm has
| learned to filter out a lot of the nonsense.
| woudsma wrote:
| This button doesn't really work for me. Often I need to click
| it multiple times before a video dissapears from my
| recommendations. Same with the 'Not interested' button.
|
| I'm guessing YT works with a system that is 'eventually
| consistent', but having to click the button 2-3 times before
| a video disappears doesn't seem particularly consistent to
| me.
| blenderdt wrote:
| This is not only a problem with Google search. DDG is now also
| flooded with auto (AI?) generated content. For example there
| are now loads of websites about programming topics. They look
| real but always lack the main point of the article which makes
| you navigate to other articles on the same website.
| bigcat123 wrote:
| wetpaws wrote:
| I started adding "reddit" to all my searches in google, cause
| 99.9% of time all google links point to seo rubbish.
|
| It is absolutely impossible to find anything anymore, I gave up
| on google for all intents and purposes and use it exclusively
| as reddit indexer.
| swethmandava wrote:
| You.com lets you prefer reddit and see it in your search
| Giorgi wrote:
| This will create Perverse incentive, SEO "ninjas" will just
| mass-block competitors.
| mattwad wrote:
| ublacklist is a browser extension that does what you want. it
| works well and i don't find myself having to blacklist new
| sites very often
| dazc wrote:
| > So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to
| shitty SEO-optimised sites ...
|
| The problem is, since these sites dominate the SERPS, there is
| little incentive for anyone to offer the result you want. As a
| consequence, the web page that would satisfy your request
| probably doesn't exist.
| physicsgraph wrote:
| I've a good experience with uBlacklist, an extension that
| blocks results by domain in the search page results.
| flenserboy wrote:
| A HOSTS file for search would be most welcome.
| erichurkman wrote:
| Google used to allow you to block individual domains right
| from the search UI. It was discontinued in 2011.
|
| There are numerous extensions to block domains, like
| uBlacklist: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublackl
| ist/pncfbmi... (not affiliated)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability
| to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months).
|
| I wish I could do that at Hacker News too.
|
| I really just don't want anything from medium.com.
| tikhonj wrote:
| Seems like you could do that in a reasonably thorough way on
| HN with an ad block filter.
| abbeyj wrote:
| Quick and dirty version for uBlock Origin:
| news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"])
| news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"])
| + tr
| news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"])
| + tr + tr.spacer
|
| If somebody can improve this, please share.
| [deleted]
| dmje wrote:
| That's a weird thought. Medium might be irritating as an
| interface or as a business but there are still some really
| interesting things written on it, no?
| EnKopVand wrote:
| This is completely anecdotal but most medium (and similar
| platforms) that I end up on from HN are basically an A4
| page of what is essentially nothingness.
|
| This is not to say it's not interesting, because it is, but
| what typically happens is that I end up in the "want to
| know more" state, but then don't actually get to know more.
| This is not really on the medium authors, it's more just my
| social media consumption taking me back to HN and then
| never looking into it again, but that also means that my
| time on the medium article was sort of wasted doesn't it?
|
| I can't for the life of me remember a single medium article
| that had any sort of impact on me or anything I do tech
| wise.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I've found the Medium posts that make it to Hacker News to
| be drivel: Uninteresting and inaccurate. The titles
| themselves are interesting, but the content itself isn't
| worth reading.
|
| It's happened so much that I just won't click on anything
| that's on medium.com.
| remexre wrote:
| I've noticed the same thing, but (like n=2, so take it
| with a grain of salt) even for authors whose other
| writings I enjoy; I wonder if there's something weird
| with how they structure the incentives for writing there
| such that this is what you get
| eloisius wrote:
| There may be good content on medium, but more often than
| not I'm frustrated by long-winded, less accurate retellings
| of official documentation. I think it might be because of
| the monetization. People have an incentive to write shallow
| blog posts/tutorials on things like "throwing an exception
| with Python." If I'm out of options I will skim through a
| Medium post, but usually I avoid them at first because they
| tend to be less helpful than non-Medium blogs, official
| docs, etc.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I always assumed that they were getting paid.
|
| I can't think of any reason why a spam Pinterest link has any
| value, yet it's ranked high.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Pinterest has a surprisingly large userbase of people who
| actually like the content there.
|
| There are a lot of real world people I meet who speak highly
| of all the great creative ideas they get from there.
| techdragon wrote:
| I don't care, they are a blight on the internet that
| deserves to end. I have NEVER wanted to see a Pinterest
| board in my Google search results image or otherwise and
| their SEO optimisation serves only to parasitically drive
| traffic in order to feed their conversion funnel.
|
| If your Pinterest board is public and you let others see it
| that's nice, but the Pinterest developers should never have
| let that show up in my search results, your board is not
| and will never be more interesting than the original
| content you have pinned from other places on the internet,
| shitty aggregate pin pages hurt original content producers
| by ranking better and stealing page views and preventing
| users from navigating to the original content without
| jumping through hoops in the Pinterest user interface.
| xg15 wrote:
| It's still completely useless for people who are _not_ on
| Pinterest.
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| >As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google
| gets less and less useful.
|
| Any ranking manoeuvrability that Google offers can and will be
| used against them.
|
| The SEO scammers out there would just automate millions of
| proxy IP addresses to blacklist all of their competitors sites.
| rolisz wrote:
| But the blacklist would be personal, so applying only to me.
| Pxtl wrote:
| The problem, as always, is credibility. If they're not careful
| about the credibility of the aggregate blocking signal, this
| would become another tool in the SEO scammer toolbox as they
| use sockpuppet accounts to downmoderate their competitors.
| chewz wrote:
| > Blocks sites you specify from appearing in Google search
| results This extension prevents the sites you specify from
| appearing in Google search results.
|
| https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
| brynjolf wrote:
| Ironically I tried to find a blacklist extension or similar
| through Google search past week, and couldn't find it due to
| blogspam talking about how it used to be. So added reddit and
| clicked in past year, but reddit now doesn't show accurate
| dates on posts so that didn't work.
|
| Thanks, will add this!
| arbirk wrote:
| I use uBlacklist in Safari - highly recommended. In Chrome I
| have a custom search string that adds "-pinterest -quora"
| because result on those spammy sites are behind a login wall
| ajmurmann wrote:
| kagi.com allows you to adjust from the results page how often
| you want to see a page in the results or just block it
| entirely. I don't think there is a way to temporarily ban
| though.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Aw man... that would destroy pinterest.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I believe -site:facebook will remove that site from your
| queries. Annoying but it is functional.
| headsoup wrote:
| I'd say it depends on the money they make. I'm not sure how,
| but it must be profitable enough for them to let it persist.
| holografix wrote:
| I'm sure someone is going to point this out but guess what
| happens when scammers find out their site can be black listed?
|
| They get crowds of people and/or scripts to blacklist all other
| sites.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| Kagi.com allows such blacklisting.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Current Google search doesn't add features, it removes them
| (see end of + sign and other stuff). This is sadly the logical
| behavior of a "mature product". When you own the market, your
| rational question is "how much can I extract from the customers
| who already must come to me" and that means becoming more and
| more directive towards the customer. Letting the customers
| customize only stands against this.
| version_five wrote:
| There is a programmable search feature [0] that lets you limit
| search to a defined list of sites. Someone did a ShowHN a few
| months ago where they had built a programmable search with
| 200ish common sites that a stereotype HN reader might like
| (software documentation, wikipedia, reddit, some news and other
| media, etc), and it was actually pretty good.
|
| I've said before, google is now basically what I'd call a
| "smart" portal site. For most stuff, you already know the
| handful of sites you might want to look at, and google just
| sort of brings you there from a relatively clean interface, as
| opposed to a traditional portal that would have lots of
| categorized nested links to traverse. In most cases you're not
| searching for a random site that you wouldn't know existed if
| it wasn't indexed, like in 1998. So the whitelist approach
| actually works pretty well.
|
| [0] https://developers.google.com/custom-search/
| telotortium wrote:
| You're looking for https://notrashsearch.github.io/
|
| HN comments: [Show HN: No Trash
| Search](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774456)
| python_bread wrote:
| mulmen wrote:
| This used to be a feature of Google Search. It then moved from
| the Google Account to Chrome. I'm not sure if it still exists
| in the Chrome browser. It can be done with addons but of course
| that doesn't feed back to Google.
|
| It does surprise me that Google wouldn't want to capture this
| signal. Maybe it is too susceptible to abuse?
| [deleted]
| dazc wrote:
| > Maybe it is too susceptible to abuse?
|
| The incentive to block one's competitors from 10,000
| different accounts is likely why they no longer offer this
| function?
| ansible wrote:
| At the end of the day, being able to detect bots (and the
| abuse from them) is key to maintaining, well, anything.
| abraae wrote:
| It surprises me too. Perhaps they are snow blind from having
| had something like it in the past and then removing it.
|
| But in the modern era, I feel that being able to use human
| signals like that - on top of the fancy algorithms - could
| well be a killer network effect for them.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The SEO dreck drives more ad impressions than real content.
| Why would they improve the results when they have a captive
| audience who won't switch to other search providers.
| version_five wrote:
| That was a weird example to me. Google, although it ends up
| returning seo spam like w3schools, usually surfaces good SO
| answers, which are imo (and I think generally recognized as) the
| best answers that also contain discussion and caveats, if
| warranted. It's considered bad practice already to just cut/paste
| the SO answer unthinkingly. The only thing worse would be to do
| the same thing with whatever this search engine dragged out of
| w3schools.
|
| There are lots of criticisms of google search, but in this case,
| I think the Google result is better - anyone looking regularly
| for answers is conditioned to tune out the Geeksforgeeks and
| w3schools and other spam, so as long as good SO answers are from
| and center, I think google wins
| hattmall wrote:
| What's wrong with w3schools, never get the hate, it's an ok
| site, code on it seems fine.
| version_five wrote:
| It's a middle man is all imo. I have actually used it for css
| stuff, but for python (as a python programmer), I want SO or
| the actual documentation , so its annoying when what I
| consider ad-driven content gets in the way of my search.
| bstar77 wrote:
| I can tell you why I hate them... explanations are usually
| incomplete or wrong in some cases. Examples often use
| antiquated browser code when the answer should just be
| vanilla JS. They don't use best practices... like ever. They
| don't generally use modern code (don't use arrow functions or
| continute to use var). MDN is pretty much better in every
| way.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| For CSS and Javascript I've found MDN to be more
| comprehensive.
|
| I do use w3schools for SQL syntax though - I haven't found
| any better resource for this, and generally Google gives me
| MSDN articles about TSQL which are usually of no use to me.
| wonderbore wrote:
| If you want to know "why", Google w3fools.
|
| They've since changed their stance, but I think the website has
| not substantially improved since w3fools' inception.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| This is somewhat tangential but for a lot of quick programming
| questions, I'm finding I don't even need a search engine.
|
| I just use Github Copilot.
|
| For example, if I wanted to remember how to throw an exception
| I'd just write that as a comment and let Copilot fill in the
| syntax. Between that and official docs, don't need a ton else.
| swethmandava wrote:
| You.com has the Code Complete app integrated into search, which
| is similar to Github Copilot
| headsoup wrote:
| From all of the discussion here, I think the most interesting
| thing is the seeming lack of attempts to try other browsers when
| clearly Google is doing poorly and creating frustration.
|
| I mean in the general population I would not be surprised, but on
| this site the community is generally pretty tech aware to know of
| alternatives at least.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| People love pain. And, being lazy.
| headsoup wrote:
| _search engines_ , not browsers...
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Three areas where Google lags behind yesterday's Google:
|
| Displaying actual search results
|
| Searching for what I actually typed into the search field
|
| Page load times
| calderwoodra wrote:
| I use the grepper chrome extension which solves the coding
| vertical - it embeds search results in the Google search results
| bspear wrote:
| There's more: medical, crypto
| luciusdomitius wrote:
| When it comes to programming it is not really due to superior
| work by the competition, but by so many people gaming the Google
| PR flooding the front pages with content-farm level crap.
| Generally for any search string producing 3-4 pages of spam, the
| competition would give a better results, without necessarily
| having any technological superiority. I cannot believe Google
| have not recognised this as a key risk.
| SMAAART wrote:
| Even PG had chimed in about the fact that there are underserved
| niches within the Google Search, and I wonder if this is going to
| create a Craigslist effect, where companies will be successful in
| search niches.
|
| Time to disrupt the disruptor.
| victor106 wrote:
| Also noticed a recent change that Google did, if I search for
| e.g:- Volvo XC 60, it does not show me the Volvo XC 60 page on
| Volvo.com, it instead shows the ad that Volvo paid for and a
| bunch of other ads.
|
| So they essentially don't want you to click on the organic link
| that points to Volvo.com.
|
| They want Volvo to know that all the traffic to them is being
| sent due to the Ad and not from any organic links.
|
| This is what the not so evil company is doing, imagine if they
| are actually evil..
| paxys wrote:
| This is not a recent change but exactly how Google has worked
| since 1999.
| julianlam wrote:
| Wouldn't this just be caused by Volvo committing ad spend on
| their own keyword?
|
| I liken it to a defense strategy.
|
| Imagine if they didn't, and a search for Volvo XC 60 showed an
| ad for a Subaru!
| after_care wrote:
| If I search for "Volvo XC 60" then there is absolutely no
| doubt I want to see information about that vehicle. Any
| information about Subaru is just irrelevant noise.
| nicbou wrote:
| Use an ad blocker and that will solve the problem
| benrapscallion wrote:
| If they didn't pay, Google would be showing the competitor's
| ad instead. Base camp has called it a shakedown.
|
| https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016
| spullara wrote:
| It is the first organic result after the ads. This has
| basically always been the case.
| debesyla wrote:
| So you would rather like to see both ad + organic result at the
| same time?
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| lol self promo blog post bashing Google while saying they're
| better
| nicbou wrote:
| Incidentally, this is a really common SEO technique now.
| "Alternative to X" content is always written by one of the
| alternatives.
| [deleted]
| Lamad123 wrote:
| I love You and have it in my bookmarks. It gets many things right
| and better the current monopolist.
| hlbjhblbljib wrote:
| And image search.
| id02009 wrote:
| I wonder if the constant cat and mouse play between Google
| algorithm updates and dark SEO optimizers could be fixed by a
| plethora of search engines without one specific dominant one?
| bbarn wrote:
| Free content is free content, but when it comes to cooking sites,
| some of them are just flat out scammy SEO farms. Even big names
| like food network, a link to the recipe I want almost always
| simply goes to an index page without my recipe on it on the food
| network site.
|
| The long tell me your life story format of just wrapping a recipe
| that's not original is also incredibly annoying, and sometimes I
| find I get tricked into just wading through ads for nothing of
| value. As I posted elsewhere here, I've become very loyal to a
| few high quality sites that I can count on. seriouseats.com is
| probably the only one I really like in web format, but honestly
| youtube is full of excellent 12-15 minute videos for just about
| any meal I can think of, and I tend to go there.
| Mumps wrote:
| BBC Good Food is worth proselytizing to. No spam, great
| recipes, and often easy/simple (depends on what you're going
| for, of course).
| jokoon wrote:
| Is that because users are starting to use other engines like DDG,
| meaning google have trouble learning its AI models?
|
| I have to say that most of the time, when I search for something
| related to python, it's difficult to land on the official doc,
| it's always something like tutorial point or something else, it's
| annoying. Same thing when I want to land on a wikipedia article.
|
| Maybe it would be a cool thing if I could limit my search to a
| list of specific websites, like reddit, stackoverflow, wikipedia,
| official docs, cppreference.com, etc, to filter all blogspam.
|
| Honestly I would actually use a search engine that lets you
| filter result from a list of websites, or maybe a search engine
| could decide to build a whitelist of trusty or quality websites
| (and being transparent about not letting those websites pay).
|
| I would also love if tineye and google reverse image search had
| more options.
| goldphotograph1 wrote:
| bkobren wrote:
| (Disclaimer, work for Neeva), but sounds like we might offer a
| lot of what you are looking for. We are an ad-free, private
| search engine. Which means no ads, no affiliate links and you
| data is not sold or shared. We give users control letting you
| customize your search result preferences for sources including
| news, shopping and more. Want more of X? That's your choice.
| want to see less of Y? That's your choice. We also block third
| party trackers, let you search across personal apps like
| dropbox and email all from the same search bar. See for
| yourself neeva.com
| joseferben wrote:
| I realized that the decline quality of Google Search is changing
| my habits as a programmer. I even wrote a small blog post about
| that: https://www.joseferben.com/posts/how-google-search-is-
| making...
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Bing is better in terms of video and photo search UI/UX.
|
| Nobody I've seen touches Google in terms of Geospatial though, I
| wish there were a decent competitor.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Sometimes I actually like to long and comprehensive recipe
| articles. Like compare an article from Serious Eats about pasta
| carbonara to just getting a 10 line recipe. Both serve their own
| purpose.
|
| Same applies to programming. Sometimes I want the one liner from
| w3schools, sometimes I'm willing to consume the reference
| documentation.
| belter wrote:
| Still broken after 7 months.
|
| "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730
| tshaddox wrote:
| "Broken" is a stretch. It gives the only result that could be
| reasonably expected by anyone making that query in good faith.
| If you're genuinely expecting a result like "never," then I
| wonder, would you also expect a result of "never" for the query
| "When did Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon?" (notice the
| misspelling of his name)
| wdevanny wrote:
| At the very least I would expect a "Did you mean..." message
| at the top. In fact, it correctly does this for the "Neal"
| query. The lack of one indicates a failure on google's part
| to understand the answer it gives.
|
| Yes, people probably don't make this exact query in good
| faith very often, but it raises significant concerns for
| other queries where google tries to supply an answer.
|
| See for example: https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-
| lying-to-you-about-...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| What is "good faith" in that case though ? Some people will
| really not know (think kids for instance, but not only)
|
| The interesting part to me is that Google will show
| redirected queries from typos ("Did you mean "When did *Neil*
| Armstrong set foot on Mars" ?") but not disclose the term it
| completely ignored.
|
| I makes it look like it parsed and validated all the search
| terms before coming up with the prominently displayed date,
| which makes it worse.
|
| On your point, it's broken because it shouldn't display
| "Never", and instead skip the date widget and show that the
| page results are for the moon, like it does for typos and
| other kind of corrected search terms.
|
| Or alternatively _always_ show which part of the query the
| results are based on. Failure to be transparent creates the
| problem.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Some people will really not know (think kids for
| instance, but not only)
|
| It seems very improbable that a kid would ask that question
| _without_ having any preconceived notion whatsoever of a
| person with that name famously stepping foot on an
| extraterrestrial body. It 's overwhelmingly likely that
| they have the famous 1969 event in mind, and that's why
| Google's response is appropriate.
|
| Of course I'm not disputing that it wouldn't be _even
| better_ for the Google response to explicitly correct the
| mistake in the query. I 'm only disputing the fact that
| it's "broken." If you were asking this question of a human
| as some sort of test (but the human didn't know they were
| being tested), it would clearly be a "gotcha," and you
| could likely "fool" highly educated people who know full
| well that it was the Moon and not Mars.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > It seems very improbable
|
| This is I think the critical point.
|
| It's one of the core assumption that is correct for us to
| have in our day to day interactions with other real
| people, and we also are able to adjust the probability
| levels looking at the person or the context, and follow
| up depending on the reaction to our answer.
|
| None of that applies to Google Search [0], and we are fed
| with "most probable" results without qualifiers, little
| to no sensible adjustments, and very little control or
| opt out options.
|
| Billions of people use Search every day, at these scales
| what is "improbable" actually happens millions of times,
| and I feel too many people are willing to throw the odd
| ones out under the bus, even if the current situation
| isn't perfect either for the 90 part of the 10/90 split.
|
| [0] search personalization based on logged in profile
| could be used, but in practice they only apply that to
| very crude adjustments like country, language and
| frequent searches.
| tshaddox wrote:
| There is something to be said about how failure cases are
| handled even for systems that are almost always (say,
| 99.9%) successful. This is particularly true for systems
| where failure cases cause harm to people. A common
| example might be assumptions about people's names that
| are implemented in some form on a government website.
| Perhaps it is the case that 99.9% of people in this
| jurisdiction do have a first name and a last name each of
| which are representable in Unicode with a character count
| less than 50. But that's still 0.1% of people who now
| can't get a driver's license, and that's unacceptable.
|
| However, in this particular case, I think the very low
| probability of someone genuinely asking when Neil
| Armstrong set foot on Mars, _combined_ with the very low
| probability of any measurable harm being done to those
| people by Google 's response, makes me conclude that this
| is reasonable expected behavior and not something I would
| call "broken."
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You are bringing a very good point.
|
| On the Google side, I think it's an issue that has more
| consequences than just the moon landing.
|
| For instance, for me "When is the francis election"
| (where I would have men "french or france instead of
| francis") gives me a big and bold "Mar 13" with smaller
| below "Anniversary of the election of Pope Francis
| Observances" and an long anniversary Year/Week/Date table
| taking 80% of the widget display.
|
| And as with the other examples, there is nothing showing
| the word approximations that has happened regarding to
| the original query.
|
| There must thousands of other instances where a search
| result will come up with a big widget, an answer in big
| and bold font, except it will be completely wrong and
| have a direct impact on the user missing a deadline or
| taking the wrong action.
|
| Of course users are supposed to know better and check the
| full result, but as you point out, if it's almost always
| what they expected, they'll learn to rely on it and be
| more complacent.
| seoaeu wrote:
| How is this different from answering the query "2+22=?"
| with "4"? There's a factual question that was asked and
| the answer provided is objectively wrong. Whether the
| user meant to ask a different question is irrelevant.
| Either say "2+2=4" or say "24", but under no
| circumstances say "4" without noting that you've answered
| a different question than what was asked
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| It's different because nobody is actually going to ask
| this silly question in good faith. It does not matter in
| the slightest bit to anyone whether Google can produce a
| correct answer to nonsense questions that nobody is ever
| going to actually ask with the intention of getting a
| correct answer. Google also can't produce correct answers
| to queries written in ancient undeciphered languages. Oh
| well.
|
| It also seems rather unlikely that someone would search
| for "2+22", but not obviously any more or less unlikely
| than "2+2", and building a calculator into your search
| engine is trivially easy compared to handling natural
| language queries, so it's not a useful comparison.
|
| > Whether the user meant to ask a different question is
| irrelevant.
|
| Of course it's relevant. If Google can correctly
| determine what question the user _meant_ to ask, then
| _obviously_ Google should provide an answer that provides
| value to the user instead of trolling the user with
| nitpicking about spelling or what have you. If you ask
| Google for the "capitol of India" you'll get New Delhi,
| even though that is the "capital" of India, and arguably
| the "capitol" of India is actually the Chandigarh Capitol
| Complex, so the result is "objectively wrong".
| tshaddox wrote:
| Google can interpret the intended meaning of arithmetic
| expressions like that with even higher confidence than
| this Neil Armstrong query. But the confidence with which
| Google can interpret the intended meaning of this Neil
| Armstrong query is well above any reasonable threshold
| one might propose.
|
| I would argue that it's roughly just as clear that the
| query intends to refer to the Moon as it is that the
| query intends to refer to the Canadian Neil Armstrong who
| was killed in a plane crash in the Antarctic in 1994.
| cryptoz wrote:
| The answer Google gives to the question is wrong. End of
| story. Google aims to be a question-answering machine
| with the Info box, so giving the wrong answer is a broken
| state. Not sure you can really reason you way into how
| it's kinda-understandable-and-gotcha! to be 'not broken'.
|
| Aside: Going to get real confusing when another Neil
| Armstrong born in the 2010s does set foot on Mars in the
| 2030s. I wonder if we will still get the first response
| from Google, 1969, and if you will still consider it to
| be 'not broken' then too.
| lordnacho wrote:
| For instance I saw that many Russian generals had been killed
| during the war. I wondered how many Ukrainian generals had
| been killed over the same period.
|
| Still can't figure it out. Lots and lots of articles about
| dead Russian generals.
|
| There's got to be some way where the search engine doesn't
| second guess you. You can never find the answer to something
| adjacent to a popular question with the current state of
| things.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Ukraine has repeatedly asserted that the HQs of all their
| major units are intact and as far as I know there have been
| no announcements of any Ukrainian generals killed and as
| far as I see even Russian media have not contested that.
| With some searching on the Russian internet, I find some
| assertions in Russian social media from early March that Lt
| Gen Iurii Sodol' commanding the Ukraine Marines was killed,
| but not anything conclusive. So the number seems to be 0,
| or perhaps 1. And IMHO _that_ isn 't surprising, it's quite
| normal to fight major wars without many generals KIA, it is
| very surprising that Russia lost so many of them.
|
| Even on colonel level the losses seem to be small - I think
| that this https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-
| ukraine-cris... this was the first Ukrainian ground force
| colonel KIA that I recall, there was at least one air force
| colonel before that.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Ukraine has better signals security so we don't know.
|
| The other thing is that Russia is operating WW2 style.
| It's a top down system where the lower level people have
| no autonomy. American colonels and generals die in
| helicopter shoot downs and accidents. Russian generals
| get assassinated on the front screaming at soldiers to
| move trucks, etc.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| From google's point of view, it's not second guessing you.
| It just associates words it decides are similar. You'd
| probably accept results for "dead generals", "killed
| generals", or "killed commanders". To google, dead =
| killed, generals = commanders, Russian = Ukranian, and moon
| = mars. It will expand the meanings of words until it has a
| page full of results and ads to show you.
| tremon wrote:
| But "Mars" is not simply a misspelling of the correct object,
| it confuses two distinct objects. A better comparison would
| be "When did Louis Armstrong set foot on the Moon?"
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| Amusingly, "what date did Louis Armstrong land on the Moon"
| displays the same behavior of showing the date "July 20,
| 1969" and no indication that it answered a different
| question than the one you asked.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Indeed, it's a confusion between two distinct objects, and
| the intended object is overwhelmingly clear, which is why
| it's appropriate to correct the confusion and give the
| intended response.
| dave5104 wrote:
| I'd consider it broken. In many other cases, if I make a typo
| in my search, Google will (rather prominently, IMO) at the
| top of the search display something like:
|
| > Showing results for "When did Neil _Armstrong_ set foot on
| the Moon? "
|
| > Show instead for "When did Neil Armwrong set foot on the
| Moon?"
|
| However, it seems to only work for actual spelling errors
| (e.g. if I typed Armstrong incorrectly) vs. context errors.
|
| So to answer your question, I'd expect Google calling out its
| interpretation, but not necessarily a "never".
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| It's correct for me. What are you getting?
|
| Edit, yes I'm wrong, did a mental s/mars/moon/ without
| noticing.
| drusepth wrote:
| I get July 20, 1969. Based on the results that follow, I
| assume that is correct.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| It is not. There was no human on Mars (yet) and that's the
| point of the question, proving that google's ML approach
| will recorrect and reinterpret the question and give a
| wrong answer.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Although it's interesting to note that two presumably
| human commenters in this thread got that wrong. Maybe the
| Google results are more human than we would have guessed.
| dekhn wrote:
| it's more showing that the search engine isn't much
| better than bag-of-words model, and doesn't seem to
| "know" enough logic/reasoning to parse a sentence and
| determine that it's false because it says mars instead of
| the moon.
|
| BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks at
| Google left the building and got replaced with growth
| marketers.
| [deleted]
| htrp wrote:
| >BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks
| at Google left the building and got replaced with growth
| marketers.
|
| Is this the transition they made to AI powered rankings a
| couple of years ago?
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| This narrative doesn't really ring true to me. In any
| case, if you're saying that this result indicates that
| the system is no better than a bag of words model,
| doesn't that indicate that humans are equally no better,
| considering the errors made by the two commenters in this
| thread?
|
| To me it just seems like a query that is likely to trip
| any imperfect entity up, since a "when" question usually
| implies that the event in question is known to have
| happened.
| lhorie wrote:
| The date when he landed on the moon. For mars, the correct
| answer is "never".
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| Ah, I totally misread that. Hilarious. Brain auto-correct
| strikes again.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I suspect this happened to a lot of people. I read it
| like "is the name misspelled?"
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Google search doesn't know the correct answer, but it does
| know what people usually search for and returns an answer
| to that. It's silently adjusting Mars to Moon before
| returning an answer.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| I love that Google shills will defend that Instant Answers is a
| good idea. Its just a disinformation weapon to bad guys.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The question is whether any of those other sites could maintain
| quality while also _being Google_ , that is, while being target
| #1 for every SEO bad actor, spammer, and anti-trust regulator on
| the planet.
|
| The people at W3schools are a combination of all of the above:
| filthy SEO spammers who would readily make an antitrust stink if
| Google started just ripping off their content, but who in all
| likelihood don't care if Neeva does that, if they've ever even
| heard of Neeva.
| criddell wrote:
| Google spies on us so they can better serve us. Maybe it's time
| that they let us directly tell them what we want. Let me easily
| blacklist sites from the search results.
|
| They could even take the blacklists from all people with a high
| reputation and use that as a signal when they are building
| search results for others.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Sounds very easy to abuse. Don't like the competition's
| website? Pay a clickfarm to blacklist them on Google.
|
| I'd prefer a browser extension that removes results locally.
| Actually all I need is probably just a rule in uBO.
| dismantlethesun wrote:
| If Google can't tell the difference between a click farm
| and real people then how can they hope to have advertisers
| trust that their ad performance is accurate?
| supramouse wrote:
| I don't know why google needs to lead in any of these spaces
| azangru wrote:
| > Is this page any better than what you'd have gotten in 2010?
| What if it looked like this instead?
|
| I can't take seriously an example that still puts w3schools as
| the first search result. If I were searching for a simple answer
| about a language feature, I would want the search engine to give
| me a page from the definitive authoritative source on that
| language. w3schools isn't that.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Web dev is my bread and butter for many years, and for
| realistic simple and functional samples (which work beyond the
| latest builds, since I try to accomodate all 100% of my
| visitors) no one even comes close to w3schools.
|
| I wish them many years of success and prosperity.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Wasn't there just an article about how horizontal services get
| eaten away by focused rivals once a market has been identified?
| [1] Like Indeed doing job search better than Craiglist.
|
| I wonder if Google isn't ripe for that sort of competitor. I can
| think of a bunch of verticals that could easily get their own
| dedicated search site, including cooking. Bing and others are
| trying to beat Google in generic search, and it'll never happen
| because Google defines what that means, and it's a moving target.
|
| I'm wondering why Google hasn't done this themselves? Whitelist a
| bunch of decent websites and give the search page a fun URL like
| "Cookle".
|
| 1. https://www.georgesequeira.com/writing/zapier-
| the-5b-unbundl...
| aghilmort wrote:
| that's pretty much our thesis at Breeze:
|
| - for web search, we have a better date filter than most, e.g.,
| https://breezethat.com/?q=tiger+woods+after%3A2022-04-12
|
| - for anything else, we have topics, e.g., click recipe tab
| from any general search on home page, e.g.,
| https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado
|
| - we just launched a job finder, 14M listings with 20M by end
| of quarter, launched early due to the fast fiasco,
| https://breezethat.com/x/job-search-beta
|
| - tons of other topics, some listed on page atm under "drops"
| at top, more advanced such as jobs in the pipeline
| russellbeattie wrote:
| The different search topics are similar to what I was
| thinking but it's just a variation on Google's various tabs,
| like shopping.
|
| What I'm thinking of is a dedicated search site focused on a
| single topic. Take Breeze's guitar tab search and make a
| Guitargle.com. Then it could be promoted, marketed, refined
| and advertised on all sorts of apps - probably even on Google
| itself if they weren't paying attention. All the guitar apps
| could have integrated Guitargle search. Then make another
| vertical for the bird watchers search. And another for
| scholarships. All with different graphic designs based on the
| target demographic, with a "Powered By Breeze" at the bottom
| of each site.
|
| Just a thought.
| aghilmort wrote:
| interesting; we have one site like that to search VC blogs,
| https://askanything.vc/
|
| so in that context, Breeze becomes a portfolio of vertical
| searches, not unlike say Meredith or Hearst as publishers,
| etc.?
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Cool! That's the idea. When you guys make it big,
| remember to save a few shares for your ol' buddy Russ on
| HN. ;-)
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| Quotes around words have basically stopped working on Google.
| Which makes all three of those searches even more difficult.
| drpixie wrote:
| And google hasn't handled complex queries for quite a while. A
| long time ago, you could get sensible answers to boolean
| queries - not so much now. A useful search engine would
| understand meaning, rather than just an index lookup.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > What happened to page quality factors in ranking?
|
| I've been wondering this myself. Whatever happened to penalizing
| webpages with intrusive popups? Or those that show different
| content to users than to search engines (paywalls)? (I'm sure the
| latter is because of lawsuits). And many years ago, there was SEO
| advice about not duplicating content from other sites, but these
| days, half the search results for e.g. Go related questions are
| blogspam copy/pastes from Stack Overflow.
|
| Google Search used to be stricter.
| big_blind wrote:
| It is especially frustrating to use when Google while coding.
| I've noticed an increase in SEO sites on Google that seem to just
| scrape Q&As from the internet and regurgitate them[0]. I've
| recently started trying other search engines like DuckDuckGo and
| You.com and thankfully haven't had any issues with these sorts of
| sites popping up as results. It makes debugging 10x faster not
| having to sift through so many fake answer sites.
|
| [0] https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-use-google-calendar-in-
| dj...
| pcurve wrote:
| Google lags behind in Image search quality too, surprisingly.
| Bing consistently does better for me at least.
|
| Google also lags behind searching for torrent content, not
| surprisingly.
|
| In fact, I'm going to say, I use Google knowing that it sucks in
| many areas, just because it's hassle to use multiple search
| engines, and the quality was acceptable enough that it got the
| job done.
|
| But now, I do more searches in both Google and Duck.
|
| Their Youtube search engine is starting to suck too, because it's
| deliberately mixing completely unrelated items in the result.
| python_bread wrote:
| skilled wrote:
| I concur. Google Images _suck_. It 's all littered with garbage
| sites that have their logo plastered all over the image.
|
| I use Yandex for image search, much more variety in results and
| the interface is also quite good to quickly go through a lot of
| images at once.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| Google sucks at image search but I just wanted to add, Bing
| either intentionally or unintentionally broke one of my porn
| searches. I'd search for "my-fetish-keyword-of-choice" and then
| pick to only show results for the last month. Since like
| January of February the results have been zero which I know,
| based on all the other places I look for content, is false.
| Content from sites that otherwise show up in Bing results. And
| no, I'm not looking for anything remotely illegal.
| pcurve wrote:
| Just to clarify, when I say Image search, I meant, searching
| for like-images by uploading your own.
| wonderbore wrote:
| Intentionally. Both search engines now stop showing related
| keywords for anything adult-related.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Google is not great for code search, but I dislike this "rich
| snippet" thing.
|
| These engines are stealing the sites traffic. The whole point was
| to be a _search_ engine, not an encyclopedia. If you want to be
| the latter, produce your own content.
|
| It's my opinion. I don't use those engines because of that. They
| jeopardize their sources. It's unsustainable.
| culi wrote:
| Yeah I think coders should give up on search engines to meet
| their needs and instead rely on coder-specific search engines
| like
|
| - https://searchcode.com/
|
| - http://symbolhound.com/
|
| - https://publicwww.com/
|
| etc
| rmbyrro wrote:
| IMHO, the options you listed still miss the point.
|
| When I do a code-related search, most often I'm looking for a
| documentation entry.
|
| So, for example, if I search for "python string replace",
| Google returns me a bunch of crappy pages.
|
| I can fix it with "site:python.org string replace".
|
| SearchCode does a terrible job [1]. So does Public WWW [2].
|
| Now, Google nails with the first result, pointing to Python's
| built-in types page. But it would be perfect if it could just
| add a _#str.replace_ fragment to the URL [3] and save me some
| scrolling. Instead, it sends me to the top of the page...
|
| [1] https://searchcode.com/?q=python+string+replace
|
| [2] https://publicwww.com/websites/python+string+replace/
|
| [3]
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.replace
| grogenaut wrote:
| symbol hound looks dead
|
| searchcode seems to not let you say things like "in the main
| api", or in libraries, it's all usages, it's also actually
| the code itself. so "boto3 list_buckets" a common query I do
| (that google actually does well).
|
| publicwww seems to be searching google?
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm immediately suspicious because of the inclusion of cooking.
| Google's cooking results aren't bad because Google is bad at
| cooking content; they're bad because Google is giving people what
| they actually want, which is lifestyle content. Most people
| searching for cassoulet aren't actually looking to make a
| cassoulet; they just enjoy reading about it.
|
| I say this as someone who is ultra-annoyed at the state of
| cooking results on Google (I want to make the cassoulet!). But
| there probably aren't enough of me to sustain a product --- and
| I'm not sure I'd even like that product, because even if Google
| gave me the most useful practitioner content it could, it still
| wouldn't be meaningfully curated. I can get recipes for anything
| from sites like Epicurious, but I'd sooner search for code tips
| on Expert Sex Change than try an Epicurious recipe. That's what
| Food52 and Serious Eats are for.
|
| Similarly, programming is a weird callout here. I've never heard
| of the code search engine they mention ("Neeva"?) and, if that
| name comes up a week from now, I still won't have heard of it.
| Stack Overflow solved this problem pretty decisively, and they
| did it with a Google-first strategy, which is the reason the
| first example code search in this article has strong Stack
| Overflow results at the top of the SERP.
| bkobren wrote:
| re: programing/code comment...(disclaimer, I work for Neeva) we
| are actually an ad-free, private search engine. Comprehensive
| search which includes user friendly code query results and no
| ads and no affiliate links. We also block third party trackers,
| give you agency over preferred sources, and lots of unique
| features that no other traditional search engine that relies on
| ad revenue can offer. If your curious, check us out at neeva.co
| thayne wrote:
| > Google is giving people what they actually want, which is
| lifestyle content
|
| you're right that google is giving people what they want, the
| people that are getting just aren't the ones searching, they
| are the people who are making money from you having to scroll
| through pages of ads before getting to the actual recipe.
| [deleted]
| kristopolous wrote:
| Who is looking for paragraphs and paragraphs of poorly written
| memories about their childhood in the countryside when they
| type in "gingerbread recipe"?
|
| The fall leaves change colors along the windy path to Grandma's
| cottage with the crisp smell of freshly burnt firewood in the
| distance while my trusty spotted Labrador plays with me and my
| sister at the creek by the meadow. As Fido splashes playfully
| after a school of tadpoles, a scent of gingerbread cusps over
| the sunburnt field and tickles my senses like the first soft
| ray of sunshine on a dewdripped morning
|
| I smell 1tsp of ground ginger as I remove a piece of driftwood
| and toss it on to the old cornhusks amidst overgrown willows as
| my companion chases after it. We race together back to the
| warmth of grandmother's kitchen overcome by the rapturous
| aplomb of allspice, cinnamon and cloves all at 1/4 tsp.
|
| That was 40 years ago and I've longed to touch the perfection
| of those fretless childhood days of a memorized youth modified
| by dreams. This gingerbread loaf lets me relive the magic of a
| forgotten freedom with a preparation time of merely 90 minutes.
|
| I close my eyes during the baking as I lie on my afghan rug in
| my Boston apartment knowing there's another generation of youth
| passing by idyllic days on those timeless Connecticut farms
| where the 1/4 cup of unsalted butter comes from.
|
| I mean it's just insanity. I'm not doing them justice. The real
| stuff looks AI generated
|
| I honestly don't think these people exist. It's just SEO food
| terrycody wrote:
| Nowadays, Google search results full of tons of AI/auto generated
| sites like KKnews.cc , which rakes in millions of IP per month
| with their bad quality/copied contents, also, don't forget those
| sites often got millions/billions pages, which jammed Google
| database centers.
|
| I have no idea why Google won't do anything to these spam sites.
| adrielyong wrote:
| anyone else find it so hard to find basic apparel and shoes? All
| my search results return me known brands with high ad spend.
| Recently started to go to reddit male fashion advice to look for
| crowdsourced recommendations but that's fairly time consuming.
|
| Anyone else has other ways?
| aghilmort wrote:
| do you have some specific examples? if don't want to post here,
| can dm dotdotjames on twitter -- we're adding product search to
| breezethat.com sooooooooon
| jbhouse wrote:
| very interesting. I'm going to start using Neeva tomorrow at work
| raldi wrote:
| And video game walkthroughs
| bruhhh wrote:
| not that it doesnt have valid points, but, this entire article
| seems like an ad for You.com
| code2life wrote:
| Great alternatives to Google are long overdue, you.com is
| solving it, glad people are noticing
| polote wrote:
| I don't feel like ranking results according to a query makes a
| lot of sense nowadays. Google works pretty well that it is almost
| always able to give you results that are relevant to your query.
|
| But where Google fails and other search engine is to show results
| that are relevant to the user.
|
| As some comments have said here for the query "python throw
| exception" some people want to get the official python doc when
| others want a snippet and when other want a tutorial, and some
| want other things. The fact that there is only one first result
| and it is the same for everyone IS the issue.
|
| In my personal experience Google works very well for code queries
| much better than any queries on SEO topics
| swethmandava wrote:
| You're exactly right. Google tends to regress to the mean -
| what do most people want to see as their first result? but
| You.com allows you to prefer sources that you'd personally like
| to see first
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| > But we're Google fails...is to show results that are relevant
| to the user
|
| This is going to sound tongue-in-cheek but I mean it with all
| sincerity: isn't it wild given the data they hoover up?
| polote wrote:
| Maybe, but compared to other they don't do worse
| jdrc wrote:
| and images
| dennyabraham wrote:
| I'm teaching my partner to drive and I've noticed that Google
| Maps will suggest very different routes to the same destination.
| It's also less accurate in estimating times, adding 5-10 minutes
| for its indirect routes versus taking straight paths.
|
| Another thing I've noticed is that some directions will use
| businesses ("take a left after McDonald's") as landmarks in
| navigation. I'm beginning to believe the routing noise was
| introduced to allow navigational ads.
|
| If the effectiveness of a core product is being compromised for
| monetization, is this what's also happening to their Search?
| lovelearning wrote:
| A low-hanging improvement Google can do easily: a one-line
| warning that its smart results may be wrong, and caution people
| to check all result pages and domains.
|
| Given the shortened attention spans, prevalence of fake news, and
| evidence that featured snippets are being misused by scammers, I
| think it's imperative Google condition its users not to blindly
| trust these top results. Instead, they're doing the opposite.
|
| An anecdote: I recently saw a phrase new to me - "on the lamb".
| Googled "on the lamb meaning". Google's top answer was a
| confident claim that it's related to Quakers and their
| persecution in the 17th century.
|
| But that answer was in fact a downvoted one on an English
| StackExchange page. The top consensus answer there was different.
|
| A person with a short attention span or a tendency to be
| satisfied with factoids that match their beliefs is likely to
| simply accept Google's answers as correct and not dig deeper.
|
| Such conditioning results in bigger social problems. In my
| country, a popular method of scamming people involves SEO-ing
| fake banking service numbers to the top of search results. When a
| person searches for "X bank customer service number", Google
| shows these fake numbers. People trust Google's answers, call
| those numbers, provide details like banking OTPs, and get
| scammed.
|
| Google provides a 'Feedback' dialog for such results, but it's a
| corrective measure that relies on diligence of users and not a
| preventive measure.
| endisneigh wrote:
| it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have
| optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people
| talk about the 'good ol days' or times when Google was better, it
| was simply because there was less SEO, less spam and generally
| fewer pages on the internet.
|
| Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive
| to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist
| entire sites from the results - inevitably those sites that have
| the most ads would be the most likely to be blocked, resulting in
| lower revenue for Google.
| mywittyname wrote:
| The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the
| case.
|
| Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the
| same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the
| author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these
| cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until
| recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe
| in an old donut.
|
| Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google
| Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of
| YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue.
| People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to
| find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't
| found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but
| was missing that _je ne sais quoi_.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Isn't that similar to what they tried for things like
| shopping for example, and they got sued for? The problem is
| that if they become an aggregator for a specific type of
| content, like let's say travel or lyrics, then other
| aggregator websites start suing.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Oh, I was not suggesting they be an aggregator. They should
| get people to produce original content and pay them per
| view like YouTube.
| tfsh wrote:
| Shout out to https://onlyrecipe.app which allows you to
| extract just the recipe from SEO-corrupted ad-riddled
| websites.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| The stories also serve the purpose of providing copyright. A
| recipe alone doesn't have copyright, but the story mixed
| throughout the recipe does have copyright.
| Marazan wrote:
| No, it's so the pages follow thr Google blessed "ideal"
| page format. X number of words, 2-3 pictures, iser stays on
| page for longer than Y time.
|
| Last one is the killer, a site that quickly gives you the
| info you are looking (or quickly shows you it doesn't have
| the info) for is punished by google search ranking.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Nah, the stories are there so you have to scroll 6000 pages
| to finally find the actual recipe. Why do they want you to
| scroll? Because every 5th word is an advertisement. More
| scrolling, more ads, more revenue.
|
| All of these recipe sites (that I've seen) will drop the
| ingredients + directions on the bottom of the page.
| chaxor wrote:
| I thought it was so the site has longer to mine monero
| using your CPU while you scroll? Ever notice how
| _incredibly slow_ any device gets when looking at recipes?
| andirk wrote:
| It's possible that the scrolling is giving the remote
| server time to use your CPU/GPU to mine some space cash,
| but it's also possible that attaching listeners to events
| that happen many times per second (such as scrolling,
| mouse movement) is common, especially if 3rd party ads
| are allowed to interact with the page, making it nearly
| impossible to know what those ads' scripts are doing.
| redmen wrote:
| "Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow
| the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about
| the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of
| these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until
| recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the
| recipe in an old donut."
|
| I LOL'ed. Thank you for that.
| redmen wrote:
| those sites would just clone themselves with a different domain
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| You don't even have to blacklist... just look at user
| behaviour. Did the user come back to google and select the next
| result after two seconds on that site? Did many users do that?
| Something has to be wrong with that site, rank it down.
|
| I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who clicks on pinterest
| results in eg. image search, and immediately click back to find
| another image somewhere else.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > Did the user come back to google and select the next result
| after two seconds on that site?
|
| It usually takes me at least a minute to recognize a search-
| optimized text if it's a topic I am unfamiliar with. Let's
| say I am googling something about windproofing underfloor
| insulation. The article starts with some basics about
| underfloor insulation in general, so I skim through the
| introduction, start hunting for the part of the article where
| it actually starts talking about windproofing and realize
| it's been cobbled together out of six random introductions or
| generated by GPT-3.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| No, that SEO shit works. The whole adbased internet is
| optimized to waste your time.
|
| Did I spend a minute or two trying to read a 1000 word
| article, because I was looking for how many pixels there is
| in a 4k monitor? Or did I spend 2 seconds visiting a chart?
| rkangel wrote:
| It has been a constant battle of SEO improving and Google
| improving the page ranking algorithm. For a long time Google
| was winning that battle, but more recently they haven't seen as
| interested. The economic argument you're making may be the
| reason, but it's short termist if people slowly get driven away
| from Google by poor quality search results.
|
| Five to ten years ago no other engine was close - the fact that
| duckduckgo was even try was comical. Google had an effectively
| monopoly. That might not be true at all five to ten years from
| now if the trend continues.
| WesternWind wrote:
| Google also isn't great at surfacing genuine product reviews that
| aren't just people reiterating amazon reviews with referral links
| and SEO. Like even stuff reviewed by reputable websites somehow
| loses out regularly.
|
| If I want someone's actual opinion and people I know don't have
| one, I have to check reddit or metafilter.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I used to add inurl:forum or inurl:thread to my searches to
| find actual opinions from people instead of ads disguised as
| articles. Now I just search reddit.
| lph wrote:
| Google made an algorithm change a few years back that knocked
| ask.metafilter.com answers way down in search results. The
| resulting drop in ad revenue was disastrous for metafilter,
| which runs with a small staff on a tight budget. Kind of bitter
| to remember considering the dismal quality of search results
| today.
| georgehill wrote:
| Google recently updated its product review algorithm.
|
| https://blog.google/products/search/more-helpful-product-rev...
| ab_testing wrote:
| I would say that I have the exact opposite experience. My company
| is moving from IE to Edge as the default browser and I search for
| code issues on Edge (Bing). I usually do not like the results and
| then have to manually type in Google.com > search for code issues
| as that gives me better results.
| arccy wrote:
| you should be able set the default search engine...
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I like Edge, but the setting for the search engine is quite
| difficult to find despite being (I assume) one of the most
| common settings to change. You have to click on "Privacy,
| search, and services", then go the "Services" heading and
| click on the tiny "Address bar and search" box, and then you
| finally come to the page where it will let you change the
| default browser. Said "Address bar and search" box is also
| the very last item on the "Privacy, search, and services"
| page with no highlighting or emphasis whatsoever.
|
| Meanwhile for Firefox, I just have to go to "Search" and the
| setting for default search engine is immediately obvious.
| Chrome seems to have a similar layout as well despite being
| produced by a search engine company. Edge is my daily driver,
| but it still took me way longer to find the default search
| engine setting in Edge compared to Chrome and Firefox.
|
| Also, I have to compliment Firefox for making it really easy
| to search with a non-default search engine. I generally use
| Google, but I use Bing when searching for internal work stuff
| since it is integrated with O365 and SharePoint.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > setting for the search engine is quite difficult to find
|
| Didn't seem all that difficult to me.
|
| I went to settings, put "search" in the search box. That
| highlighted in yellow "address bar and search" click
| "manage search engines" click, 3 dots next to google,
| click, make default, click. 4 clicks with guiding highlight
| throughout. Didn't even need to google how to google with
| edge.
|
| I'm still using FF. However, switching search engines in
| Edge seems about the same difficulty as doing the same in
| FF or chrome.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I run into this on DuckDuckGo. I can try a bunch of different
| searches in DDG and not find what I need, then on Google it is
| the first result.
| domatic1 wrote:
| Tiktok is amazing for cooking ideas/recipes
| londons_explore wrote:
| I just wish Google would expand its index.
|
| It is reasonably common that I search for a string from a bit of
| code and find "0 results", even though that code is up on GitHub
| (and probably mirrored to a bunch of other sites). GitHub search
| finds it fine.
|
| Same for searching for stuff on my own personal blog. Only about
| half of pages are indexed, even though many have been there
| years.
| swethmandava wrote:
| You.com does well on github + stackoverflow searches fwiw
| secretsatan wrote:
| I absolutely detest the google optimised recipes, they're mostly
| just filler and you have to scroll all the way to the end to find
| the recipe. I just go to bbc food which has an excellent db of
| recipes, and they use correct temperatures for the oven too.
| bbarn wrote:
| seriouseats.com is also a fantastic site. Recipes there are
| lengthy but it's because they use the length to explain things
| in very excellent detail, and the science behind why. Minimal
| adverts and high quality content, but you might need to convert
| some temps :)
| raincom wrote:
| Maybe, these three areas don't generate much ad revenue!!
| noduerme wrote:
| I'm just mad I read four paragraphs before realizing this was a
| sales pitch. Damn my pathetic human brain meat.
| mola wrote:
| What annoys me most about google search is that they show at most
| ~500 results for any search. No way to get to results that are
| not surfaced . If you're searching for something which contains
| terms related to heavily SEOd verticals, there's absolutely no
| way to find "real" results. Just let me decide if the long tail
| is interesting, please.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Not convinced. The example of a blueberry pancake recipe has a
| big button titled "jump to recipe" a few lines in and the ads
| covering the page is what 99% of the internet looks like without
| an adblocker. That doesn't sound like the fault of the search
| engine (but it is probably the fault of Google itself).
|
| As to this:
|
| >> Google rating: "This search result page is just okay. I don't
| like the first search result (I already know what exceptions are
| in programming, so the official Python documentation is way more
| than I need). I have to scroll halfway down before finding the
| information that I want.
|
| The Python documentation is the primary source for what is being
| searched for. I don't think it's too much to ask to "scroll
| halfway down". That comes across as a bit petulant, to be honest.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| the pointless animations on google search make the site truly
| unbearable to use, unless you have ublock to disable the
| animations. i can't believe it still has those animations, do
| people at google even use their own site?
|
| [0] http://jollo.org/LNT/public/google-animations.html
| zerop wrote:
| I recently moved to edge from chrome because of high CPU issues
| with chrome. With edge I started using Bing. I found search
| results were better in many scenarios.
| mattferderer wrote:
| Question regarding the recipe example. Does Google deduct quality
| points the more ads that are put on the website? A long time ago,
| I recall hearing how Google was able to beat Yahoo by focusing on
| quality of ads & a higher click rate. Has Google defeated it's
| rivals & switched to their tactics?
|
| Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang
| operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use Bing.
| As the article points out, Bing is really awesome for searching
| for recipes.
|
| Looks like I need to start trying out Neeva & You.com. They had
| some nice features in this article.
|
| Neeva seems to be stealing all the important content from the
| recipe website which is a highly discussed issue. Bing tries to
| walk this line by making you still go to the website to read the
| instructions. Obviously people have trashed Google for doing this
| same thing on other kinds of websites. Though blogger recipe
| websites have somewhat encouraged this behavior due to their
| insane amount of ads & life stories they're well known for.
| richardsocher wrote:
| you.com has all the bangs that DDG has too now.
| bruhhh wrote:
| they also store all your info
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qqpggk/new_youcom_pr...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Go look at the horrible chumbox infested AMP sites that Google
| promotes on Google Assistant. You can tell where their
| priorities lie.
| jjeaff wrote:
| A very high percentage of ads on sites now use the Google ad
| network. So it may actually be in their interest to promote
| sites with more ads. They certainly promote a lot of garbage
| new sites on their Google news feed app and the product that
| they include on the pixel phones.
| JSONderulo wrote:
| you.com is good for coding, especially the SO results.
| skilled wrote:
| I honestly don't understand why W3Schools is a top site in
| Google. I blocked it after I realized all the site provides is a
| few lines of code snippets that supposedly explain how a certain
| CSS function works.
|
| Even with activity tracking enabled, Google thinks I am searching
| for one-liners opposed to in-depth articles.
| aendruk wrote:
| > I already know what an Exception is, so I don't want to scroll
| halfway down the page to find what I'm looking for.
|
| I can't relate to this. That example, of the first result being
| the canonical documentation on the subject, is a search engine
| working exactly the way I want.
| cerved wrote:
| I thought the same thing but in the past I've also found the
| official python documentation to be somewhat verbose. Maybe
| these days I'd appreciate it more.
|
| I always found the MDN documentation striking a better balance
| of being in-depth but not an essay.
| superasn wrote:
| There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever
| helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results
|
| 1. w3schools
|
| 2. pinterest
|
| 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it
| always looks like the person asking the question is asking
| exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom
| any useful answers)
|
| 4. all the code clones for SO
|
| 5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2,
| alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but
| they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link
| it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link
| and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects can
| sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole.
|
| 6. The best of lists. Google for the love of god, please ban
| them.. they are always always SEO spam and product placements.
| Often the blog post itself says "to put your product on this list
| pay us a $1000 and we will include them in our list."
|
| 7. Quora and similar answer sites.. okay it's a mixed bag but you
| have to be very careful on these sites as most often the answers
| are just spam. I never read any answer with a link in it. But I
| think it's more Quora's problem than google. But if google is
| strict with them they may do a better job at moderating I guess.
| Also now quora hides answers and asks for a payment. Did they
| learn nothing from experts-exchange!
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| w3schools is a pretty good resource for very basic stuff. If
| you're a professional developer you're probably not going to
| find it useful but if you're recommending a website for an
| absolute beginner there are worse sites.
| szundi wrote:
| Until you realize as a beginner that for some reason that is
| not enough and you are even more stuck
| yywwbbn wrote:
| Why no just MDN then? From my experience it's much better in
| 95%+ of cases.
| fleddr wrote:
| I would add Stackoverflow for a very significant amount of
| queries. In particular in the domain of web development
| extremely outdated answers are heavily outranking far better
| answers. It shows how domain/link age is a strong factor in
| ranking, which is also why w3schools ranks highly.
|
| That's bad, but I can somewhat sympathize with it as these
| sites are not really purposefully gaming SEO. It's rather
| Google's poor handling or relevancy and recenctness.
|
| That's an entirely different situation from scammers like
| pinterest. They clone content without permission and then rank
| higher than the original. They broadcast content to be open to
| search engines yet when you visit, it's behind a login.
|
| The behavior of duplicating content will normally tank your
| ranking. Faking content to not be behind a login where it
| really is behind a login, may get you fully delisted.
|
| But not pinterest, they seem to get a free pass for anything.
| naoqj wrote:
| w3schools is good.
| jordanwallwork wrote:
| I think the problem is that w3schools _was_ terrible. It
| certainly seems to have improved, but it's reputation -
| amongst the older coders that I know, at least - is in the
| toilet
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| MDN is usually a much better resource.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| It depends.
|
| MDN has a better overall information and is more in depth.
| And more up-to-date.
|
| On the other hand, w3schools has that one three-line CSS
| snippet that you need to copy-paste to center your DIV
| vertically or whatever, without 5 paragraphs of intro.
| toshk wrote:
| MDN is much more complicated. I almost always get my answer
| faster and easier to understand with w3schools. Plus quick
| little things like browser support and try it (which mdn
| also has now)
| naoqj wrote:
| MDN is generally too technical.
| Rilfeu wrote:
| As it should be. It's a resource for professional
| developers, not people who are learning how to code for
| the first time.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Professional developers enjoy simple and concise
| explanations just as much as people who are coding for
| the first time.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| You included MS Answers, but left out discussions.apple.com,
| which I find to be an even greater disappointment. This pair of
| $2T+ enterprises have failed so badly at something that should
| be table stakes.
|
| How hard would it be to pay a small team to go through this
| tangled mess and clean it up and keep it that way? How little
| do they care about the attitudes of their users??
| swethmandava wrote:
| Google regresses to the mean - what do most people want to see
| on the top? just from comments on this thread, people both love
| and hate w3schools.
|
| So I think there's a need for personalized search engines where
| one can pick their sources - we designed You.com keeping that
| in mind.
|
| fwiw i hate w3schools too, if anyone's counting
| kmlx wrote:
| g2 is actually used quite a lot by businesses looking for
| alternative service providers.
| bilkow wrote:
| > alternativeto
|
| I actually find alternativeto so useful that I usually just go
| directly to it instead of my search engine when looking for
| FOSS alternatives. Having to go to the alternative page before
| clicking the official site link is a small hassle compared to
| finding what's the official from name search, but it used to be
| better when the description page and the alternative page were
| the same. If I were to guesa, they probably changed because it
| would be confusing for people searching for alternatives and
| finding the software description.
| tapland wrote:
| It's my go to place for alternatives, so if it shows up odds
| are I wanted that result.
| jokoon wrote:
| pinterest is really the worst website ever, especially when
| you're looking for images.
|
| don't they just steal content and then host it? pinterest is
| the worst when trying to prevent users to use their website
| when they're not logged in.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| w3schools isnt perfect but they are god for html and css
| syntax.
| dayvid wrote:
| w3schools was useful when it first came out years ago. It's
| probably riding on its initial utility. I remember when the
| w3fools site was released later (https://www.w3fools.com/)
| id02009 wrote:
| I remember W3schools being an excellent resource closer to the
| beginning of my career (a decade ago?), but now I barely ever
| enter. But I always thought it's me who outgrew it not that it
| became worse...
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| MSDN was really helpful once. I don't even know how they could
| destroy it relatively quickly. The current forums are indeed
| useless for the most part. I don't even know where to get deep
| technical information about MS tech stacks anymore.
|
| > "please mark this issue as resolved so I can please my
| incompetent overlords with a point in a metric they are
| interested in because of the mentioned incompetence".
|
| I agree that users tend to ask the right questions, but the
| lack of any coherent answer seems to be systematic.
|
| Pinterest is spam if you don't have an account, which I would
| recommend to nobody because of such policies in the first
| place. Twitter did the same recently but at least it isn't as
| prominently featured in search results.
|
| I don't know about w3schools. It did help me a few times. I
| guess because the content might be out of date? I am no web
| developer so I sometimes use it as a reference.
|
| I think the worst aspect is that Google seems to favor news
| sites. Perhaps it is their SEO, but if a term you are looking
| up accidentally is part of a news article that was copied by
| tens of news outlets, you have to visit the dark net, page 2+
| of Google results.
| culi wrote:
| > 5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2,
| alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but
| they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link
| it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link
| and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects
| can sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole.
|
| Wow I've never had this pop up for me tbh. I wish alternativeto
| would come up more often, it's a really great resource and it's
| all crowd-sourced so it's very valuable information. Definitely
| wouldn't classify it as seo spam
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| W3schools is wonderful, it's got great primers on a whole lot
| of languages and libraries with concise, clear explanations and
| examples.
| culi wrote:
| It has terribly outdated info today. MDN does everything it
| does but better and always up to date yet MDN almost always
| shows up after w3schools in my results
| bobro wrote:
| speedgoose wrote:
| It used to teach people bad coding practices and it had
| outdated information. It has improved but I am not ready to
| recommend it to anyone I like.
| tremon wrote:
| Quora is the first site that I ended up blacklisting by DNS,
| even before rpz and pi-hole were a thing. I felt dirty every
| time I inadvertently ended up on that site.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Thanks for the idea.
| poisonarena wrote:
| pinterest completely destroyed google images and is now
| starting to infect duckduckgo
| polote wrote:
| Maybe they have never been helpful to you, but w3schools,
| Microsoft answers, alternative websites, best of lists and
| Quora have all been helpful to me at some time.
| xvello wrote:
| Shameless plug for the Let's Block It project: we have a filter
| template to selectively remove domains from search results:
| https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results
|
| For the Stackoverflow / Github clones, we partner with
| https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter and their
| lists are available as presets at the bottom of the filter
| configuration.
| culi wrote:
| That's awesome and exactly what we need. Never any shame in
| plugging an open source and free project. Would love to see
| this as a standalone browser plugin some day. Maybe even
| making it easier to create and share custom lists
| xvello wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! The site currently allows you to
| create one personal list that you can sync across all
| browsers, but I have plans to allow creating several lists
| and sharing some of them publicly
|
| The main complexity will actually be in the frontend: how
| to make it easy to edit several instances, and check in
| what list you'll add a new filter?
| akhosravian wrote:
| Would add cplusplus.com to this list. Cppreference is just a
| better resource in every way.
| probabletrain wrote:
| I use uBlacklist to remove these from my seach results:
|
| https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
|
| https://blog.probabletrain.com/hide-w3schools-from-search-re...
|
| With some lists to block the SO and Github clones:
|
| https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio...
|
| https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation
| lapser wrote:
| Gah, why do we need another blocking addon? Because
| previously blocking addons have worked out really well. Why
| can't this have just been a uBlock Origin list?
| iicc wrote:
| https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
| lapser wrote:
| Thanks! I saw this in a leaf comment of my original
| comment. Much better.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I'd say it is that it is Microsoft's faults that their answers
| sucks.
|
| Most commonly asked questions you will be getting one of the
| three responses: 1. assume the user is at fault 2. it's a
| "feature", get over it 3. the official helper doesn't know
| anyway so he/she just pasted a link to some random tutorial
| they found online which doesn't work anyway
|
| There really isn't much that Google unless they kinda remove
| Microsoft at all.
| lament76 wrote:
| Alternativeto is quite good in my experience.
| simsla wrote:
| One Google feature that I miss terribly is hard filtering.
|
| Used to be if you included "term" or -"term" you'd only get
| results that did/n't include those terms. But it seems Google has
| gone all in on the "I don't think you really meant that" approach
| [ _], and the hard filters have become suggestions at best.
|
| --
|
| [_] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and
| more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard
| filters on top.
| jmkni wrote:
| Similar to the date filtering, you used to be able to see
| results between two dates, this doesn't seem to work at all
| anymore.
|
| As an example, if I search for 'gilbert gottfried' and set the
| date filter 1 apr -> 3 apr, I still see stories about his
| death.
| twofornone wrote:
| >[] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and
| more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard
| filters on top
|
| The issue is that "power users" that are even aware of quotes
| and and hard filtering are now the long tail that google is no
| longer optimizing for. They'd much rather focus on the 99% of
| searches by, for lack of a better term, normies, and as a
| consequence, rather than expecting users to learn to think,
| their search features and performance are regressing toward a
| totally dumbed down mean. And I think society is worse for it.
| WestCoastJustin wrote:
| 100% agree. This used to be my secret weapon for finding
| things. -"term" along with "other terms you were looking for".
| epistasis wrote:
| Next time that happens, open up the page source and search
| again, and you will likely find the term amongst a huge huge
| list of SEO terms.
|
| It's extremely frustrating how much "content" is displayed on
| the page versus how much is hidden in the page source.
| pfg_ wrote:
| Do you have any examples of searches that don't respect hard
| filters? The only time I've seen it ignoring quotes is when
| there are 0 results and it puts up a little notice at the top
| "No results found for "...". Results for ... (without quotes):"
| asiachick wrote:
| I kinda hate searching for recipes. It's always the same 3-5
| sites who optimized for seo and , no idea what words to use here,
| for non European influenced cooking the recipes that surface at
| the top are often by people that really have no clue what
| authentic is.
|
| not a search example but it's like Jamie Oliver's fried rice
| aghilmort wrote:
| we added recipe search to Breeze last month -- search for
| recipe name, ingredients, etc., click recipe tab in results --
| would be curious if same / better / worse, etc.
|
| example -- mango avocado -> click recipe at
| https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado
| renewiltord wrote:
| There was one which was no-bullshit and then a bunch of online
| people denounced it for removing all the story and context and
| stealing from PoC, etc.
| python_bread wrote:
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Couldn't disagree more with the code examples. Whenever I'm
| looking for answer that can be answered by the standard library I
| really do want to get the actual documentation of that language
| and not a random stackoverflow solution.
| ImaCake wrote:
| It depends for me. Sometimes I am simply after the
| documentation but often I want to make some weird plot and
| would like to see if anyone else has tried to make said weird
| plot using the same library before. I don't think there is any
| way to optimise for which to prioritise without including the
| word "documentation" in your query.
| wanda wrote:
| I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of obvious that an
| entity extracting revenue from selling advertisement impressions
| is not going to produce a very useful search engine -- it's going
| to produce a search engine that maximises advertisement
| impressions. Either by encouraging the advertisers to game the
| search engine, or by simply preferring the paying advertisers'
| results, or both, on some level.
|
| So you end up with a Google that prioritises 2-3 promoted results
| above actual search results (some of which represent the opposite
| of what you're looking for _!_ ) and everything beneath is either
| a massive mainstream content factory, a Reddit/SO/Quora thread,
| or any one of a billion terrible blogs/news hosts that contain no
| content or simply regurgitate someone else's content with
| adverts, modals, etc galore.
|
| In fact, the only reason why Google's search engine is fairly
| safe in its product space -- the considerable head start on
| potential disruptors notwithstanding -- is that there apparently
| exists no comparably successful method to extract revenue from
| running a search engine.
|
| Not _that_ many people are realistically going to pay a monthly
| fee to have a Google without the noise, despite the amount of
| noise there is (I probably would). And let 's face it, if there
| was a market for that, Google Premium would probably exist
| already. Talk about vertical integration if they did though. Help
| pollute the ocean of the internet then sell people premium
| membership to sail across it rather than swim in it.
|
| One of the biggest things that Google did wrong was try to act as
| curator. The moment they start screening results by compliance
| with Google standards, introducing stuff like AMPHTML etc,
| anything like that is the moment they make themselves no
| different to Facebook, Twitter and every other walled garden
| community.
|
| The internet is supposed to be about broadcasting information,
| about exploration and chasing the horizon -- not locking
| information behind forced memberships of social networks and
| paywalls, tardis-like megastructures where you're encouraged to
| become locked in yourself.
|
| All that should matter is that a webpage's content matches a
| query. Not whether their website matches some random person's
| idea of good UX etc. Does the content match the query. That's it.
| Refined obviously to assess whether a page's content is too
| insanely well matched (old SEO bullshit) and maybe include that
| domain rank stuff (if it was based on conversions so it's self-
| moderating rather than Google saying "[majorpublication].com is
| better than [randomblog].com because big business website >
| random person's website")
|
| Google could have been worse, of course. AMPHTML is pretty much
| over, right? They track your data, yes -- but show me the company
| that doesn't do that. Apple? Apple probably do, they just track
| less or whatever. Just because it's in the marketing doesn't
| necessarily mean that they don't do it, it just means that they
| know people will buy their shit if they _say_ they don 't, or
| make a point of doing it _less_.
|
| I don't blame Google for the way their search engine has turned
| out. As others have said, a big part of it is the sheer amount of
| noise out there now. But more importantly, the way capitalism
| works causes most companies to produce increasingly shitty
| products over time. This eventually creates the opportunity for
| someone new to release a great product, and eventually their
| great product becomes a good product, and eventually that will
| become a shitty dividend-paying product, and the cycle will
| continue.
|
| (to clarify, the opportunity isn't just there for competitors,
| the opportunity also exists for Google to sort their shit out
| too).
| kshacker wrote:
| I know google search is probably not the same as google flights,
| but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google
| flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia
| children.
|
| We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple
| independent tickets because we could not travel together. This
| was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through
| the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared
| to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to
| slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the
| airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to
| dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and
| analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually
| book through them since I did not want to get into the google
| payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not
| explore).
|
| On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a
| price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone
| up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem
| existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the
| airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.
| Sebguer wrote:
| Google bought the main provider of flight information in 2010
| (ITA). ITA had such a monopoly that Google was required to
| continue licensing their software out for years afterwards,
| though I think it expired in ~2016.
| dataflow wrote:
| Minor note: they announced it in 2010, but the acquisition
| closed on April 12, 2011. [1]
|
| [1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/ita-software-
| acquisi...
| discordance wrote:
| ITA Matrix is still available and is my preferred flight
| search tool. Still find the old interface much better than
| the new:
|
| https://oldmatrix.itasoftware.com/
| nerdponx wrote:
| I wonder how much of the old Lisp codebase is left.
|
| Also, it looks like the Matrix might go extinct soon:
|
| > This interface runs on a deprecated web platform. At some
| point in the near future, we will be forced to shut it
| down. We unfortunately do not have a timeline on when this
| will happen. We welcome feedback about features missing
| from the new interface, we read all feedback and open bugs
| accordingly.
| Markoff wrote:
| it's pretty horrible, I just search my vacation destination
| and it doesn't have LCC Wizzair I'm flying with in Europe =
| useless search tool
| seymore_12 wrote:
| At least on my searches with Google Flights, Wizzair
| shows up as a carrier for EU flights. Good search engine
| for low cost EU carriers is https://www.azair.eu/
| Markoff wrote:
| Azair doesn't really work either anymore, they will show
| you non-existent flights or wrong prices, for rough idea
| is OK, but data is wrong
| kchoudhu wrote:
| That's on the LCC, not the aggregator. They don't want to
| pay commission, and that's fine. If you want to fly on
| them you have to actually go on their website.
| Markoff wrote:
| I don't really care who pays who, but search engine which
| can't find me cheapest flights it's useless
| samhw wrote:
| Well, you're getting it free: if you don't get any use
| from it, don't use it. Try doing an iterated search of
| every possible route on every possible airline website
| and let us know how you get on!
| namdnay wrote:
| ITA wasn't in any way to e main provider of flight
| information in 2010. It's a relatively minor player, but with
| great features
| pweezy wrote:
| ITA powered the backend flight search functionality for
| virtually every OTA, even if the ITA Matrix website wasn't
| popular among end users.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I personally like to use Momondo. Have had pretty good
| experience with Momondo over the years so far. I haven't tried
| Expedia, so I can't directly compare it. But I recommend giving
| Momondo a try anyways.
| atourgates wrote:
| Google flight's true genius is being able to search multiple
| city-pairs.
|
| Let's say you want to get from the West Coast to Europe on a
| business class flight, but want to save some money.
|
| Realistically, it's cheap and easy to get from West Coast
| airport to another, and similarly cheap and easy to get form
| one European airport to another.
|
| Google flights will let you search for the best combination of
| flights that depart from any combination of up to 6 airports,
| and arrive at up to 6 airports. The technology they purchased
| (ITA) will let you do this as well, but limits you to a single
| country. Google flights? No problem with destination airports
| in multiple countries.
|
| So, you could search for a flight that originates in some
| combination of, say Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los
| Angeles and Vancouver BC, and lands in some combination of
| London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Milan or Frankfurt. (Or any
| other 6 large European airports).
|
| Google Flights will also show fares for a specific trip length
| (say, 14-days) over an entire month.
|
| Want to filter by a maximum flight duration? No problem. Number
| of connections? Done. Specific airline or alliance? Easy.
|
| In a traditional search engine, I'd have to run close to 400
| individual searches to get the data that Google Flights gives
| me in a single screen.
|
| It works well for domestic flights as well. I recently helped
| someone who had to attend a wedding across the country find a
| flight that was less than $180/person, when they thought they
| were going to have to pay over $800/person. Just by using
| Google Flight's tools for about 10 minutes.
|
| There's plenty to complain about in the Google ecosystem, but
| Google Flights is amazing.
| aembleton wrote:
| I find https://www.kiwi.com/en/ works well for doing all of
| this too.
| kubami wrote:
| You can do the same thing in momondo. Being in Europe, what I
| like about momondo is that they include the cheap carriers -
| like ryanair
| namdnay wrote:
| The product was called ITA Matrix, Google bought them a while
| back
| henrikschroder wrote:
| I miss Hipmunk, and curse the day Concur bought them.
| pweezy wrote:
| Same! Their "agony" sorting (basically sorted flights by a
| combination of # of stops, total hours, and price) was a
| breakthrough at the time. It seems to be factored into most
| flight searches today, even though it's not labeled as such.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I will also plug Kayak as being the only other decent flight
| search site.
|
| The difference between Kayak/Google and the others is that
| Expedia and friends are _online travel agencies_. Kayak and
| Google are really just search engines. It makes a world of
| difference.
| avrionov wrote:
| Can you explain what is the difference? I suppose the flight
| search engines don't book the flights.
| namdnay wrote:
| On top of querying the travel agency APIs, Kayak will also
| query each airline directly. So you also get fares and
| airlines that aren't published to agencies
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The travel agent wants to sell you a flight and pick up a
| commission. The search engine just tells you what's out
| there.
| cush wrote:
| Google flights is delightfully easy to use
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