[HN Gopher] Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it
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Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it
Author : ixnus
Score : 431 points
Date : 2022-05-18 12:17 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ixns.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ixns.github.io)
| frmdstryr wrote:
| I recently found https://commoncrawl.org/ and started working on
| my own personal search engine. I'm surprised how easy it is to
| actually get decent results with just metadata that show up
| nowhere in Google/DDG.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| Heads up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410042
|
| marginalia_nu, the author of another search engine, is looking
| for ways to cooperate.
| guerrilla wrote:
| What's the license for this? It isn't obvious from the website
| and I got bored of looking.
| buo wrote:
| Not a license, but there are some terms of use:
| https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use/
| thallukrish wrote:
| There is no perfect answer for a query. There can only be
| contextually meaningful answers. They can be from highly relevant
| to far off. It is very hard to prove a search engine as bad in
| general. It may not work for you. But it may still work for a lot
| more. Google has indexed the entire Web. This is as large a span
| as one can take.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| Google is no longer fixable.
| ricardoplouis wrote:
| Any search engine with a profit motive is inevitably doomed as
| one value overtakes the other. To have a search engine that works
| means having one where scaling endlessly in pursuit of profit is
| discouraged.
| schnable wrote:
| The cookie popup really kills me when trying to do a quick site
| preview on my iPhone and all I see is the popup.
| nathias wrote:
| imagine what it will be in a thousand years, all search will be
| impossible as all content will be encased in layers upon layers
| of SEO optimizations and adds ...
| planede wrote:
| You don't need to use the asterix after site:, site:.edu or even
| site:edu works the same.
| Mo3 wrote:
| > Oh, and also, Miller is hiring if you're interested in joining
| the team.
|
| I don't think so.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| chicob wrote:
| I use smart bookmarks most of the time, if not Duckduckgo (which
| has !bangs). I almost always go to Wikipedia first.
|
| If I don't find what I want right away, I usually assume I am not
| trying hard enough.
| hidden-spyder wrote:
| What do you mean by smart bookmarks?
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I've given up on google for search and I'm not going back. I've
| been beta-testing kagi search [1] for the last couple of months
| and it does 95% of what I need - accurate and low-distraction and
| it doesn't try to sell me stuff or sell me to anyone. They're
| about to go into public beta and announce their pricing, and I'm
| pretty sure I'm in.
|
| [1] kagi.com
| bsedlm wrote:
| > stop trying to make money off me for one second while I solve
| this tire crisis.
|
| but if they did, they'd be pretty much wasting money! their stock
| holders could reasonably sue the board for choosing to not make
| money for a second.
|
| /half-joking
| blitzar wrote:
| > If you simply google: how to fix a flat tire
|
| My first result ...
|
| How to fix a flat tyre - in simple steps with video - RAC
| https://www.rac.co.uk > drive > advice > repair-a-flat-tyre
|
| An excellent first result thank you google.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Mine goes to https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-
| trucks/how-t..., with a summary on the Google search results
| itself.
|
| It's probably location dependent, but I wonder if there's a bit
| of randomness in there as well to give websites with equivalent
| information similar exposure.
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| quadcore wrote:
| So I will reiterate my little theory, this is not entirely
| Google's fault, regulations, especially KYC are responsible for
| this. KYC is incompatible with having a free zone. This is
| actually the aim of KYC, to remove free zones.
|
| If you dont get it, let's take an example. The flat tire mustard-
| yellow webpage. This page is not KYC'd. Are they laundering money
| through their website? Are they rallying people for a bloody
| crusade? A search engine cant know that (basically) but it knows
| a website that display ads is KYC'd so google can display them
| more easily.
|
| For sure Google is pressed to help make a regulated web and stop
| the free zone. Knowing it's in their interest anyway (ads), they
| embrace it. I dont get why the internet dont get that already:
| it's all KYC :)
| deelly wrote:
| Sorry, I still don't get it. How exactly KYC is responsible to
| crappy web search results? Should it be other way around?
| quadcore wrote:
| Regulators dont want mustard-yellow webpage anymore. They
| dont want anything they don't Know.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| It's the aggregate result of the sort of hiring they do in there.
| Take for example they rejected the guy who created homebrew
| because he couldn't invert a binary tree to the satisfaction of
| some jobsworth in there (1). It's jumped the shark and gone full
| on corporate bs, not because of any changes to what they do, but
| as a result of who's making the decisions in there these days.
|
| (1) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985775
| amai wrote:
| Better:
|
| "site:wikipedia.org how are pearls made"
|
| "site:wikipedia.org how to change a tire"
| BEEdwards wrote:
| I think it's more about training your google algorithm, i
| searched the same things they searched and my results are answers
| to the question.
|
| how to change a tire, nets videos of tire changing and the first
| 5 results are all different sites explaining how to do it.
|
| how are pearls made, gives me an inline box answering the
| question.
|
| half the things I search it offers me a "did you mean (my search)
| reddit" which I usually did...
|
| google isn't great, but it's still the best by far (I like the
| algorithm that knows what i search and assists me with it), i'm
| not sure what this person has done to theirs...
| verisimi wrote:
| Let's not forget, if there is more that one answer, its a bug!
| baggachipz wrote:
| Google is so unbearable because they are no longer interested in
| you finding the answer to your query; they're interested in
| selling your query and its context to the highest bidder. That
| conflict of interest manifests in what Google has become.
| bstar77 wrote:
| I'm using Google less and less in favor of Youtube. It's not
| always convenient to get answers in video form, but I'm finding
| it's better for more involved answers. Also, google is just
| littered with Answers/Quora/StackOverflow/etc dodgy clones that
| make searching questions a nightmare.
| coverslide wrote:
| This message was brought to you by Raid Shadow Legends!
| schleck8 wrote:
| Casino Legends, the #1 gambling simulator for kids
| thrusong wrote:
| While I overall agree, I ironically find the search engine on
| YouTube to be somewhat limiting when I'm looking for specific
| and/or fresh things...
|
| For example, I wanted to watch a bunch of videos of Mark
| Zuckerberg speaking from before 2010 and the YouTube search
| engine only showed me a limited amount of things I had
| already watched-- it even had unrelated suggestions below
| those results based on my viewing habits.
|
| So I went to Google and searched for videos and interviews of
| Zuck and found a bunch which were not easily surfaced on
| YouTube itself.
|
| Same thing with Ina Garten/Barefoot Contessa cooking videos.
|
| Now that I've found some fresh videos, the homepage
| recommendation algorithm has gotten better at surfacing new
| content related to these topics.
| nikanj wrote:
| Corollary: Web page creators are no longer interested in
| answering your query; they're interested in getting you to 1)
| view their page for ads 2) click on their affiliate links 3)
| buy the product they're selling.
|
| Google has an impossible task in trying to answer a query like
| "Portable air mattress reviews", because 99.99999% of the
| results are SEO-optimized crap
| wutbrodo wrote:
| The top two organic results for that precise query are pretty
| informative articles from Wirecutter and Good Housekeeping.
| Unless I'm misunderstanding and you are expecting something
| better than this: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home-
| products/a25473658/bes...
| jeremyjh wrote:
| We don't know if the task is impossible because Google has no
| incentive to do it at all, so we can't assume they are really
| doing their best. They created this situation and they profit
| from it just the way it is.
| nikanj wrote:
| Build a better mouse trap etc, if the task was possible,
| DDG / Bing / Whoever could absolutely dominate the search
| market by providing a "no crap results" option
| jeremyjh wrote:
| They would only bother to try if they could monetize it,
| and the only model for that which won't create the same
| incentives is paid user subscriptions. The market for
| that may just be way to small for the big guys to
| consider.
| metabagel wrote:
| Kagi is trying to build a better mouse trap. I quite like
| it. Open beta is coming along with subscription model. I
| will be a subscriber.
| darinf wrote:
| Check out Neeva. This is what we are all about.
| amf12 wrote:
| > We don't know if the task is impossible because Google
| has no incentive to do it at all,
|
| On the other hand, they have an incentive - increased
| competition, they can still monetize better pages, search
| is what makes them money.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 1) view their page for ads 2) click on their affiliate
| links 3) buy the product they're selling.
|
| 1 and 2 are trivial to detect. 3 is harder but still not
| impossible given Google's machine learning capabilities and
| existing datasets.
|
| Downrank or ban ads & affiliate links and you remove any
| incentive for creating spam sites in the first place.
| nikanj wrote:
| So you'd downrank sites like Tom's Hardware or wired.com?
| Both of which show ads and have affiliate links
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If other content that doesn't have those annoyances
| matches my search query then I would absolutely want to
| see it first.
|
| This would also put pressure on content creators to tone
| down the ads or explore alternative monetization models.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Do you pay for Consumer Reports?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I paid for Which? which is the UK equivalent. Would've
| subscribed again when I needed it (and there's been a few
| times since) but their dark pattern upon unsubscription
| put me off from going anywhere near them again.
|
| I also spend 50PS/month on Patreon to support the
| creators I watch regularly.
| brightball wrote:
| The problem is half the time the ads are Google ads anyway.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That's the ultimate problem - Google has a conflict of
| interest with their users which is why the quality has
| gone to shit.
| bbarnett wrote:
| They also have no focus, as you and a reply essentially say.
|
| For example, all the stupid aliasing of search terms, and
| dropping of search terms.
|
| This is helpful if you want to optimize for "sorta close, sell
| things!" such as "maytag A4453 fix timer", but you want
| advertisers to latch on to maytag=washing machine, and ignore
| the rest.
|
| And it also helps when websites with google ads on them them
| get higher SEO, because suggesting that site might get a click,
| and profit!
|
| EG, suggest a blog/spam site, because google ads are on it.
|
| And it also helps with google voice search! Did the speaker
| mean here/hear? Did they mean Danny/Daniel/Danson when they
| said Dan?
|
| Google has too much genericization in its search, and it is for
| profit naturally, but I think it is lazy profit, and it is
| becoming worse yearly.
|
| And it is all their fault, no one else's.
| [deleted]
| titzer wrote:
| It is sad because I spent nearly 10 years at Google and nearly
| all the people I met were well-meaning, seemingly harmless,
| engineering-oriented, and data-driven. But the configuration of
| people that makes up the superorganism that is Google nowadays
| is driven by both local incentives and a broad top incentive to
| grow. Scale to more computation, more storage, more bandwidth,
| and with lower overhead--morally, those are neutral to
| positive, IMHO, but they are put in service of the real goal at
| the end of the day: swallow more money. More revenue, more
| markets, more ads, more engagement, more watch time...muscle
| out the competition, dominate. 20% YoY growth for nearly 25
| years running, and suddenly you get huge, scary numbers. And
| you have to do insane things to keep that exponential curve
| from regressing to an S-curve like the laws of physics dictate
| it must.
| aporetics wrote:
| > well-meaning, seemingly harmless, engineering-oriented, and
| data-driven
|
| At some point I really hope that we can all recognize that
| "seemingly harmless", "engineering-oriented", and "data-
| driven" are not virtues.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| If you believe they are neither vices as well, then I can
| see your point -- they just are.
|
| Perhaps this is the point you are making: if one is data-
| driven and engineering-oriented without regard to the
| consequences, _that_ could be seen as a vice.
|
| Despite the amazing engineering/science, it is hard to come
| to peace with von Braun or Teller (just to pick two
| examples).
| aporetics wrote:
| Yes exactly. But until this is clear and accepted, these
| terms are apt to be misdirections--for example here, in a
| discussion trying to understand how things went so wrong
| at a leading tech company.
|
| Hopefully we can get to the point of putting purpose (I
| think "mission" is a bit too hackneyed and neat to work
| here) first in discussions of culture, whether corporate
| or engineering culture.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think most of us want to view "engineering culture" as
| just problem solving, amoral. If these companies we
| worked for didn't have such an outsized effect on the
| greater world we live in that would probably be a
| reasonable way to view engineering culture.
| blagie wrote:
| The overall problem -- and this is not specific to Google --
| is that managers at all levels are incentivized to grow head
| counts.
|
| Google has at least 10x as many employees as it needs. That's
| based on decades of revenue being decoupled from costs, and
| from monopoly profits. It's the double-whammy of being in
| tech (where costs and revenues don't couple since incremental
| costs are close to zero), and having a super-profitable
| monopoly.
|
| You can't fire 90% of the workforce; even morale and culture
| problems aside, at this point, the organization is structured
| to need too many people. On the other hand, organizing over
| 100k employees turns into this superorganism problem.
|
| At >100k employees, the influence of anyone -- up to and
| including the CEO -- is very, very limited. Dynamics take
| over.
|
| I've been bearish on Google for a long time, but I haven't
| shorted the stock. Market irrationality can last a lot longer
| than my wallet. Fundamentally, though, one could muscle
| through building a new, better Google for much less than the
| valuation of Google.
|
| Google could also be worth a lot more with a breakup. There
| is negative synergy between, for example, advertising, Google
| Workspace, Android, hosting, etc. If those were independent
| businesses, with partnerships around things like data
| sharing, the total value could be much higher. Alphabet was a
| move in the right direction, but the move should have been
| much deeper. Right now, Alphabet is Google + a bunch of tiny
| startups.
| evgen wrote:
| > The overall problem -- and this is not specific to Google
| -- is that managers at all levels are incentivized to grow
| head counts.
|
| No one is incentivised to grow head count. They are
| incentivised to do more, produce more revenue, and expand
| the reach of the company; most of these goals require the
| application of more smart people to a problem. They are not
| getting a promotion or salary bump because their group
| increased from 200 to 300 people over the previous quarter,
| they are receiving rewards for being able to effectively
| direct those people in order to achieve some specific goal.
| Increasing head count by 50% while delivering 250% growth
| in revenue/engagement/view/etc is what is being rewarded.
| inoffensivename wrote:
| Respectfully, I think this is a little bit naive. While
| the job ladder doesn't explicitly specify org growth as a
| requirement to get ahead, leading more people is a
| classic way to get ahead as a relatively junior manager.
| If a manager's peers are all more senior but are leading
| similar sized or smaller orgs, it will seem natural that
| the junior manager should get promoted to the same level.
| Building orgs is a classic way for managers to get ahead.
|
| Actually delivering value is a huge advantage too, but as
| far as I've seen is not prerequisite for getting ahead.
| blagie wrote:
| > Actually delivering value is a huge advantage too, but
| as far as I've seen is not prerequisite for getting
| ahead.
|
| Appearing to deliver value is strongly advantageous.
| Delivering value helps you do that. Other methods:
|
| - Good salesmanship (e.g. making easy things look
| difficult)
|
| - Stealing credit (can be personal, or e.g. for market
| conditions)
|
| - Lying (e.g. cooking books)
|
| Delivering value is probably the easiest way to appear to
| deliver value at the IC level. The higher one moves in
| the corporate ladder, the more important the others
| become.
| blagie wrote:
| This is false:
|
| - If I have a job at Google as an IC, I can look for IC
| jobs.
|
| - If I have a job managing 10 people, I can get a
| manager-level job.
|
| - If I have a job managing 100 people, I can get a
| director-level job.
|
| - If I have a job managing 1000 people, I can look for a
| VP-level job.
|
| - If I have a job managing 10,000 people, I can look for
| a C-suite job.
|
| Average tenure in a position in the tech industry is
| around 3 years. No one will know or care what objectives
| a Google manager achieved, or whether those were hard or
| easy to achieve. If you want to grow rapidly in your
| career, the things which matter are:
|
| - Connections, network, and references
|
| - What shows up on an interview (e.g. self-improvement)
|
| - What shows up on your CV (e.g. how many people you
| managed, or the brands you worked on)
|
| The place techies get stuck in career growth is by trying
| to do the "right thing." By the time you're trying to
| rise to the top of a corporate ladder, the competition is
| extreme, and the people who succeed play the game as
| optimally as they can.
|
| I might be able to look one level up. An IC might be able
| to manage a small team. However, your odds of having an
| IC move directly into the C-suite require nothing short
| of a miracle (a Nobel prize, being the author of Linux,
| or something similar).
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > including the CEO
|
| In any public company the CEO is just another employee.
| Maybe he even has less freedom than others.
|
| Yes, responsibility and compensation are vastly greater,
| but in the end you don't really realize personal goals.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| OT, but Amazon is in the same boat. Their problems with
| counterfeit merchandise and fly-by-night Chinese junk
| manufacturers have been going on so long that it's become clear
| they don't want to fix the problem because it's now a major
| revenue source for them. Apparently someone at Amazon decided
| the Aliexpress marketplace was more lucrative than selling good
| products.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Totally agree. Also, Prime used to be a premium service where
| any item taking longer than two days got you a service
| credit. Those days are long gone.
| EricE wrote:
| They don't care about fixing it because people still flock to
| them.
|
| And who can blame us? Other sites still suck worse. I can't
| believe how bad walmart.com still is - the user experience is
| night and day. Walmart - the retailer embracing computerized
| tracking of spending by credit card number and other advanced
| data analytics a full decade before Amazon was even a glimmer
| in Bezo's eye took forever to realize the power of using
| their stores as local fulfillment centers? Provides a 3rd
| party marketplace that's less reliable than craigslist? Who
| the hell is in charge of online operations at these big
| companies and how do they still have jobs?
|
| Then again just look at Sears - the company that literally
| invented mail order *in the 1800's* and how they completely
| missed the Internet - the ultimate mail order environment.
|
| Ugh.
| stickfigure wrote:
| This makes no sense. You make it sound like Google has no
| financial incentive to fix this problem, which is patently
| false. Google isn't selling the _organic_ search results, which
| is what this article talks about.
|
| The problem is that Google is engaged in a war with SEO
| optimizers, and losing (or at least, barely breaking even). No
| business model will fix that. It's a hard problem that any
| successful search engine will struggle with.
| blagie wrote:
| "Google" is 100+k people. "Google" doesn't respond to
| incentives; individuals do.
|
| A typical employee at any large company is incentivized to:
|
| - Maximize their salary
|
| - Maximize their future earnings potential (e.g. CV)
|
| - Have fun
|
| - Have work-life balance
|
| ... and so on. That goes all the way up to the CEO.
| Pretending a corporation thinks and responds to incentives is
| folly. Running a corporation like Google is like herding
| cats. If everyone marched in the same direction, Google would
| cut through SEO optimizers like a chainsaw through butter.
| There is no wayh to do that with 100+k people.
|
| Google fundamentally has no financial incentive to fix any
| problem, since organizations aren't intelligent, sentient
| beings which act on incentives. They have dynamics from the
| interactions of 100k+ individual agents.
|
| There is no magical fairy which makes large organizations act
| in their own best interests or even try to survive. The only
| reason they do survive is that's as true of their competitors
| as themselves.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Did you write that, or did your 85 billion (approx.)
| neurons?
|
| Corporations _are_ intelligent, sentient entities which act
| on incentives. They don 't have a conscious sense of self,
| but then neither do many natural organisms. That doesn't
| keep them from responding to their environment as if
| they're aware of it, and acting in incentive-driven ways.
|
| Corporations seeking to maximise profits are _exactly_ like
| humans attempting to maximise income. The problem is that
| corporations - like humans - have the wrong incentives,
| further diminished by limited predictive ability and poor
| heuristics.
|
| So maladaptive behaviours emerge and stick. Both humans and
| corporations find a nice local minimum and don't move from
| it.
|
| More intelligent behaviour would be able to predict and
| avoid existential threats without having to experience them
| first. But it's a question of predictive ability, not a
| binary absence of all intelligence.
|
| So it's not that Google can't do better because it has too
| many employees. It can't do better because its cultural
| heuristics - which include it internal culture and the
| external culture it operates in - don't allow it to.
| blagie wrote:
| A megacorporation doesn't act like my 85 billion neurons.
| A corporation acts like a forest of trees, or at best, an
| anthill. Corporations (and simple organisms) respond to
| their environment, but not necessarily in incentive-
| driven ways. Often, corporations move opposite incentives
| not because of some local minimum or whatever, but
| because it, for example, personally benefits the CEO, a
| few board members, or a group of employees.
|
| I can set up "incentives" for an anthill, in the form of
| a mixture of sugar and borax. Emergent behavior takes
| over.
|
| The behavior of corporations, at the scale of Google,
| Facebook, or similar, is almost entirely emergent
| dynamics. Same thing for countries, for that matter.
| stetrain wrote:
| But does Google care about the organic search result quality?
|
| For many search terms, the entire above-the-fold and
| sometimes multiple scroll heights are filled with:
|
| - Ads
|
| - Info cards
|
| - People Also Ask
|
| - Map/Business info
|
| - Videos
|
| - Related Products
|
| - More Ads
|
| The organic search results start after that and on mobile
| they may as well not exist.
|
| If everyone is clicking the directly or indirectly
| sponsored/algorithmic content then what incentive does Google
| have to give you good, straightforward links to relevant
| webpages?
| lozenge wrote:
| And when the organic result is filled with ads - like
| recipe sites, lyrics sites, ehow, quora - those also give
| Google ad revenue.
|
| So why would Google serve the more direct and helpful
| result from the edu domain!
| stickfigure wrote:
| I am not a Googler, but I know some Googlers (including
| at least one that worked on search) and... Google doesn't
| seem to work like that? The search team doesn't make take
| direction from the adsense team.
|
| I think they are genuinely struggling in an adversarial
| environment. Imagine every hacker in the world
| specifically focused on _your_ system and the payoff is
| millions or even billions of dollars.
| stetrain wrote:
| I think that's totally reasonable as far as the organic
| results go.
|
| But clearly there are also a lot of motivations to de-
| emphasize the organic results on the search page in favor
| of ads, "algorithmic answers" that give you an answer
| without clicking away from Google, and redirects to Maps,
| Youtube, and Shopping which are revenue-generators for
| Google.
|
| Maybe that also comes with a budget de-emphasis for
| fighting the war in the organic results vs surfacing
| relevant content from these other sources.
| fzf wrote:
| This is why I switched to Neeva, I want my search engine to
| make products for me that help me find the best results for
| what I am looking for. When an advertiser is the customer
| instead of the end user the entire product road map is just
| trying to take you back to that search results page as many
| times as possible.
|
| Neeva also lets me index my personal documents and includes
| those in search results as well. They are an early startup but
| I am excited about what they can build when they are not
| beholden to advertisers.
| fils wrote:
| Another Neeva user here... yeah, the personal document
| indexing was far cooler than I expected. I held off doing it
| for it a while but glad I gave it go. Just the GitHub
| indexing alone is cool. Can do some fun hacks with that too.
| I think they need to surface these personal results even
| better in the web results than they do (and I hear that is in
| the works?? hope it is).
| blackhaz wrote:
| Got me thinking - Google has became what it is - this colorful
| commercial ooze - by parasiting on the pre-Google web. Is there
| a search engine that searches sites without any Google code in
| them?
| neuronic wrote:
| That's the free market for you. Delivering ever less value in
| exchange for ever increased cost.
| timbit42 wrote:
| It's not a free market when it is monopolized by one
| corporation.
| mateo1 wrote:
| If this picks up, google will just start ignoring the
| modifiers. It's like tv again, but with a lot more channels.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| Not TV. It's almost exactly like Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo,
| Excite and other "search portals" of yore. The thing they
| swore they would never become, yet here we are now.
| dstroot wrote:
| I still use Google every day. I was really hoping this advice
| was for real. Like maybe how to filter your Web results by size
| since they started off with example of a 9 MB website maybe you
| could filter your queries down to websites that are 2 MB or
| less? Since I use pi.hole and the first results are ads my top
| links are always dead. It is time to switch - Is DDG the best
| alternative?
| wfleming wrote:
| DDG has been my default search engine for probably ~7-8
| years. In the early days it wasn't that unusual for me to
| still do some searches on Google for better results, but
| nowadays that's extremely rare (probably partially because
| DDG has gotten better and partially because Google has gotten
| worse). But I still hear people complain about DDG's search
| results quality, so I think it really depends & YMMV, but
| it's a pretty low-effort thing to try for a while, so maybe
| give it a shot?
|
| My loosely held theory on the wide variance in people's
| judgement of DDG is that some people really like/have come to
| rely on how much Google personalizes results based on all the
| other data they have on you, even if they are in the "Google
| has gotten bad" camp. DDG doesn't do any of that: it's much
| more like going back 20 years where you have to put all the
| context you care about into a query, you're not searching "in
| a bubble". For me, that's a very positive feature, but others
| may find it frustrating and not even be able to articulate
| why they're not happy with the results. DDG _does_ do a lot
| of the nice "enhancement" stuff Google pioneered long ago,
| like embedding the intro of the Wikipedia page in the sidebar
| for a query with a strong match, e.g. a person's name. So for
| me DDG is just the right level of "smart": it understands
| common queries well enough to immediately highlight useful
| details, but it doesn't try to be _so_ smart that you as a
| user stop being able to understand what it 's doing under the
| hood.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I think a subscription model could succeed for a niche group of
| people if the price was right, and the quality was good enough.
|
| Also, I think Google could make a ton of money if they sold one
| ad per language at a time. As in, for the next 5 minutes the ad
| for all English speaking users will be for coca-cola, and then
| it will be for boscovs. Just like TV ads.
|
| That is to say, a search engine could sell advertising without
| betraying it's users or compromising its own quality. It is
| possible, but would need constant vigilance against the
| temptations of greed.
| darinf wrote:
| $5 / mo for a premium Neeva subscription or just use the free
| tier to experience ad-free search focused on the user. I left
| Google to join Neeva so I could be part of building a better
| search experience for people. Check us out. Would love
| feedback.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There are only two choices. Either Google are no longer
| interested in finding the best answers to your queries. Or as
| you point out: They don't care, that is no longer what they do.
|
| I cannot imagine it being easy, but I find it hard to believe
| that Google aren't able to weed out the worst offenders. For a
| large number of queries the results are all SEO spam. Try
| searching for anything related to health and get a useful
| result. It's no longer possible.
| zo1 wrote:
| Google has SO much money, they could probably afford to
| curate the web and white-list websites one at a time and
| still make money. Personally, I think Google should get out
| of the search-indexing market entirely and rely on website
| submissions only.
|
| At this point, it's no different than an appstore in terms of
| volume. Ironically that's where we're heading with most
| websites being "3.0" and just SPAs and now PWAs even.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I should have just read your comment before replying. You
| and I are thinking alike.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| My thought is that the Web has adapted to Search.
|
| When Google started, the web was honest and innocent. People
| linked to the pages they liked, and Google could crowd source
| those links and raise up the most popular pages.
|
| Now most of the web is lies meant to confuse search engines.
| Figuring out what pages are good is no longer a feasible task
| for software.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > Figuring out what pages are good is no longer a feasible
| task for software.
|
| Of course it is. It shouldn't be at all difficult to train
| a large natural language AI model on SEO spam pages. But
| nobody will do it unless they can figure out a business
| model that makes it pay.
|
| Or a non-profit organization is formed to do search
| spidering for the benefit of the whole world, much like
| Wikipedia or PBS.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't doubt the narrative as you relay it, but I question
| how hard this can be for one of the largest corporations
| with one of the largest engineering pools in the world.
| eimrine wrote:
| > Try searching for anything related to health and get a
| useful result. It's no longer possible.
|
| Medicine researching on the internets always was among the
| hardest topics. And anyone who really understands Medicine
| has to write on any advice not to consider it as a _real_
| medical advice... I agree that google has degraded down to
| unusable in comparison to non-global searchable websites
| (like SO) but Medicine is very bad example to your point.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| At the same time, it would be the easiest to solve with
| something like a "white list" (I know, not a good term to
| use these days). With one stroke you shut out all the bad
| actors.
|
| In fact, I wonder how far a search engine could go with a
| curated list of "good actors" you exclusively serve up
| results from. Add a "search everywhere" link for people
| that prefer SEO hell.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| While obviously not universally true, this bothers me about a
| large swath of current UX culture and it's pushing me towards
| other types of design. Anyone who's heard a UX conference
| keynote in the past ten years would think UX folks go into work
| every day making unbiased data, using it to identify users'
| genuine needs, and championing those needs at every stage of
| product development. Sure, the suits call the shots, but does
| our software landscape indicate _anybody_ really does that?
|
| Many product folks just don't seem honest, even with
| themselves, about what benefits users. Do you _really_ think
| your users benefit from _"more relevant"_ advertisements?
| Because your users don't. Are new services and content so
| beneficial to users that they'd forfeit their privacy to fund
| it? If so, why obfuscate your having made that choice for them?
| Why not make it opt-in? Does that dialog box popping up _just_
| at the right time really give that overstimulated and
| frustrated user a _choice?_ Either answer those kinds of
| questions honestly or admit that you're just finding the
| smoothest path to maximize revenue. The hypocrisy is
| infuriating.
|
| Give me a break.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Some years ago there were some serious Warnings issued from
| Google: Make your website fast and small! Popups will be
| PUNISHED! as will mobile-unfriendliness!
|
| But in hindsight, this was a ploy from them to try and upsell
| AMP, which was in a lot of cases heavier than non-AMP websites,
| and it was a means to keep people inside of their ecosystem -
| and inside of their advertising network, because not all
| websites Google linked to had Google adverts on it.
|
| They've given up on AMP. They've given up on improving search
| results quality. Dare I say they've given up on improving the
| web? I mean they're still putting some money into Chrome and
| HTTP/3 and the like.
| orangeoxidation wrote:
| > I mean they're still putting some money into Chrome and
| HTTP/3 and the like
|
| Looking at the misnamed "Privacy Sandbox", Chrome is not just
| there to improve the Web (and therefore google usage), but
| also to control it (and steer advertisers to Google even if
| it undermines the Web as a whole).
| marricks wrote:
| They own the web through Chrome, it's one of their best
| investments.
|
| They're killing Firefox with it (RIP) and successfully killed
| IE with it (rest in piss).
|
| We're getting to a desktop browser hegemony again but I doubt
| a scrappy upstart will be able to save us.
| satao wrote:
| For sure, and it's only Safari that gets a bad reputation
| marricks wrote:
| Yep, and folks will keep complaining until it's just a
| fork of Chrome.
| davedx wrote:
| I use Safari for everything except front-end web
| development on MacOS now. I started because it's more
| energy efficient but I got quite used to the UX and now I'm
| glad I switched.
|
| I'm hopeful there are a lot of Mac users like me out there.
| scarface74 wrote:
| That's what it always was.
| Beltiras wrote:
| I agree. What the search space needs is a different business
| model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a
| subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken
| off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad
| business?
| lolpython wrote:
| AndiSearch[0] is going for a freemium model:
|
| > How we make money
|
| > We plan to fund Andi through a freemium business model,
| with free anonymous search for everyone for ever, and paid
| plans for professionals and businesses, including APIs and
| using Andi for corporate information, with supplemental
| revenue from anonymous referral link attribution. We're
| focused on building the product right now, and will figure
| out the details once we're further along.
|
| > We are committed to staying 100% advertising free.
| Commercial considerations or partnerships will have zero
| impact on our search results or recommendations. Our
| recommendations are always made based on the best results we
| can find for our customers, and are never subject to
| commercial influence.
|
| > By sharing search revenue with content producers and media
| companies that join our network, our mission is to provide
| funding to great content and reduce media's reliance on
| invasive ad-tech. Contact us at info@andisearch.com to get
| involved!
|
| There are only 2 employees[1] of the company so there is a
| low amount of revenue they need to be self-sufficient
|
| [0]: https://andisearch.com/about/
|
| [1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi
| moffkalast wrote:
| Unfortunately there's little that stops them from just
| taking your money and then forwarding your query to Google
| and their response back to you.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Why not make micropayments take off?
|
| Do I have to build the startup myself?
| baggachipz wrote:
| I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch
| a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out.
|
| [1] https://kagi.com/faq
| Beltiras wrote:
| While I might be a target audience for them and willing to
| pay a nominal fee monthly for good search I'm quite sure
| there isn't a market for it.
| bkobren wrote:
| Give Neeva a try (disclosure I work with them). We offer
| a freemium model (free basic and premium version for
| $5/month that includes paid versions of VPN and password
| manager), it's ad-free and private, it's available to
| anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent
| stack to make the search experience unique and better.
| fils wrote:
| Just a user of Neeva here but a happy one. Also very
| excited to hear about the work toward an independent
| stack! Enjoy the spaces and immersive search UIs for
| various types of searches. Neeva make search fun again.
| ;)
| verve_rat wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there is a viable business
| in selling a quality search engine.
|
| Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but
| not every thing has to be that.
| prox wrote:
| Every month I see my user experience decline with Google,
| in so much a paid search solution would be a blessing.
|
| Imagine a search engine that truly is private,
| containerized search and does not need to sell you
| anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and
| accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites
| that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites.
| That search engine would be bliss.
| darinf wrote:
| Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no
| ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user
| experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who
| are keen to support us.
| prox wrote:
| Unfortunately the app is not available in my region it
| says. Will there be an in browser solution?
| bkobren wrote:
| We have been working on exactly that at Neeva and the
| response has been very positive in terms of growth and
| adoption. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and
| premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN
| and a password manager), you can connect third party apps
| like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in
| one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-
| free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we
| are building our own independent stack to make the search
| experience unique and better.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Just 1% of Google's market might be enough to sustain a
| non-bloated, VC-free company and make a good product.
|
| The Bloomberg Terminal is extremely expensive and yet
| companies pay for it because it makes their traders' jobs
| so much more efficient. I don't see why companies
| wouldn't do the same for a search engine that filters out
| all the bullshit so their employees don't have to waste
| their time wading through it.
| FredPret wrote:
| 1% of people who use Google is a hell of a lot. Also,
| Bloomberg doesn't just search, it also provides data
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Categorized search results are also data. Bloomberg is no
| different to Google in this regard, it doesn't generate
| the data, it just fetches and aggregates market data from
| various sources which anyone could technically do with
| enough effort and yet people pay for it.
| FredPret wrote:
| They add their own interpretations and calculations of
| footnotes to financial statements. It's a step beyond
| categorizing and aggregating.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _Just 1% of Google 's market_
|
| Google has 4.3B users, so 1% of that is 43M. With a $5
| subscription, Kagi would have $215M in monthly revenue,
| enough to pay for 14,000 developer salaries.
|
| A more reasonable target might be 500k users at, let's
| say, $10/mo.
| freediver wrote:
| You are right. And the actual number is lot smaller. We
| just need 0.001% of Google users to be sustainable with
| the current team size. (or about 50,000 users out of 4.3B
| Google users). And if you find 50k users, you will find
| 100k. First 5k is tricky!
|
| (Kagi founder here)
| warent wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for a month or two now. Love it and
| very excited about your work. Unlike alternatives such as
| DuckDuckGo, it has _easily_ and _painlessly_ replaced
| Google Search for me. Can 't wait to see more from yall
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Hi!
|
| I'm a Kagi private beta tester and love it. Will become a
| paying customer.
|
| One question: I do remember a page that told me how much
| I searched and what that would mean once Kagi becomes a
| paid service. I can't find that info anymore. In light of
| the mail us Kagi users got today, does that mean that
| it's going to be a flat rate for starters?
| freediver wrote:
| Yes that is what we intend to try ($10/mo flat fee for
| unlimited). Most users told us they are more comfortable
| with this model vs pay-per-use which is why we removed
| the "Consumption" page as is not relevant in this model.
|
| We do not yet know if the flat fee will be viable for the
| company and we hope to learn that very soon.
| djbusby wrote:
| Can you make Consumption page into History page? I think
| it handy to see all my old searches.
| EricE wrote:
| Another user here who see's huge value in just renaming
| the consumption page to a history page. Would be VERY
| handy! Especially if I could restrict a search to my own
| search history.
| freediver wrote:
| Hmm, we never had the ability to search your search
| history as we do not keep track of searches. Consumption
| page merely showed search count per day.
|
| If you want to save your search history perhaps you can
| open a suggestion on https://kagifeedback.org
| deltree7 wrote:
| If I had a nickel 1% of the time some naive dude said,
| "we only need to capture 1% of the market to become
| rich", I'd be very rich.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am using their beta search service. It does seem nice
| enough. I am not sure yet how it compares with DDG, but I
| am probably going to sign up as a paying customer.
| darinf wrote:
| DDG is just repackaged Bing with their own ads inserted.
| greybox wrote:
| You really think you're unique?
| Beltiras wrote:
| No, but one among few.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| At this point I'd pay for it. Every search I do these
| days is a fight with Google to find pearls buried in the
| overwhelming muck. I'd sincerely like to see how search
| curation would change if the intent was to keep me as a
| paying customer, not to show me more ads.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| I just searched "how to fix a flat tire" on both Google and
| Kagi and got pretty similar results. Different in display
| but no .edu links in sight.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Why would a .edu help you learn to fix a tire? That seems
| like a YouTube question, not something a school would
| teach, and if they did, not something that would go
| online.
| jefftk wrote:
| The article we're discussing is about limiting your
| search results to ".edu" domains to remove bloat, and
| gives an example of an
| https://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/303win97/Group3/2245.html
| which does have this information on changing a tire.
| throwmamatrain wrote:
| I think the idea is that the SNR of .edu TLD is likely
| higher than all other TLDs. Probably true for now.
| chongli wrote:
| Too bad .edu seems to be restricted to US-based schools.
| There's plenty of great stuff hosted by universities in
| other countries but none of them are on the .edu TLD.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There are other national domain schemes with educational
| subdomains. 'ac.uk' and 'edu.au' being two of which I'm
| aware.
|
| A listing of top global educational institutions would
| only have a few thousand entries.
|
| It's not without some irony that I note that the early,
| and much belated, Internet was largely edu domains, along
| with a handful of tech firms, government agencies, and
| military entities.
| memorable wrote:
| Neeva user here. The first few results on both Neeva and
| Google are the same. The same with video results.
| zeteo wrote:
| I've tried the same and don't find the results super
| similar. Both search engines seem to think that you're
| trying to _repair_ the old tire. However the second
| Google result is goodyear.com which, while trying to sell
| you tires, does explain how to use the spare:
|
| https://www.goodyear.com/en-US/learn/tire-care-
| maintenance/h...
|
| On Kagi you have to go until the 10th result to get
| something from Bridgestone, which explains the same thing
| while being less aggressive about selling tires:
|
| https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-
| cha...
|
| So the trade-off seems to happen between seeing fewer ads
| and having better tolerance for imprecise queries.
| scroot wrote:
| Why does web search need to have a business model at all? Why
| can't we just provide the Library of Congress funding to run
| something like it? Google got its start as a library project,
| after all, and it's the natural place for such a service.
| amelius wrote:
| Just ban their old businessmodel, and they will come up with
| a new one.
|
| Or let Musk buy them.
| Beltiras wrote:
| How do you propose to bring about such a ban?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| There are many ways laws could be written to would
| effectively ban the current online advertising business
| model. One could be to require written permission each
| and every time a company wants to transfer user data of
| any kind to anyone else. Google could try keeping all
| Google site collected data internally but all analytics
| data collected from non-Google sites would be forbidden
| without written permission for each and every instance.
|
| Every site would have to run their own data analysis and
| sell their own ads. Advertisers would be unlikely to take
| Google or anyone else's word, so audits would be
| necessary but difficult to conduct. It wouldn't
| completely end online advertising but would turn it back
| into something closer to the old traditional model where
| those selling ad space had a handful of semi-generic
| personality models for their readers/users and
| advertisers would select one that best matches the
| profile of their target customer. It destroys the
| economics of centralized data collection.
|
| There are many other laws that could accomplish a similar
| end but through different means. The biggest barrier
| would be getting politicians to not care about the
| demands of huge tech companies that dump endless amounts
| of money into lobbying and campaign funding.
| pbz wrote:
| It doesn't matter what new model you come up with. As long as
| capitalism is around and pushing for ever increasing profits
| this kind of behavior will always be on the menu.
| baremetal wrote:
| do you have a solution or are you just upset about
| capitalism?
| mcosta wrote:
| The solution is a system that doesn't have internet to
| begin with.
| pbz wrote:
| I'm not upset nor do I have a solution; I'm just pointing
| out the model/problem.
| chii wrote:
| > How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad
| business?
|
| The only way you have not listed is gov't funding. And i dont
| think i would trust a gov't run search engine either. May be
| a well meaning librarian institution could make it work.
|
| > I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail.
|
| this hasn't really been tried yet - it could work, who knows?
| bkobren wrote:
| Hi there, you should give Neeva a try. Disclosure, I work
| for them, but we were the first to introduce a
| subscription, interest/growth has been really strong so
| far. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium
| for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a
| password manager), you can connect third party apps like
| dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one
| search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and
| private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are
| building our own independent stack to make the search
| experience unique and better.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Missing commas?
|
| "...offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for
| $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN....."
|
| Or as it reads?
| bkobren wrote:
| There are two versions 1) Free basic which is free --
| full search, ad free, private, and personal connectors.
| 2) Premium for $5/Month includes all the free basic +
| additional connectors and paid versions of VPN and
| password manager.
|
| https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-
| neev...
| Beltiras wrote:
| An alternative is academic institutions. I'd trust a
| university-backed government-funded search engine.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| University of Moscow?
| chongli wrote:
| Why stop there? Social media suffers from the same conflict
| of interest as search. Heck, even mainstream media online has
| this problem: the public's confidence in journalism has
| plummeted due to the rise of clickbait, fake news, and
| sensationalism.
|
| What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open
| source web. As part of this I would like to see search and
| communications moved to the client, rather than the cloud.
| This seems like it would take a huge effort to build,
| however, and even more monumental effort to bring people into
| the network. So it feels like a pipe dream at this point. I
| do think there are a lot of other people out there craving
| for something similar, based on nostalgia for the old days
| (90's and earlier).
| technothrasher wrote:
| > based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).
|
| Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the
| web were a very different place back then. I remember about
| 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh
| crap, it's over."
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I've been sort of thinking there really ought to be a sort
| of open source manhattan project to disrupt the search
| ecosystem and offer real competition to big tech.
|
| There's a lot more to search than just search in the
| traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating
| services offering small complimentary functionality slices
| could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save
| for like image search, maps and translation) with a
| significantly smaller hardware footprint.
|
| My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its
| problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed,
| at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice,
| searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one
| for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow
| and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in
| social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing
| lists, and so on.
|
| As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put
| together an actually useful information gateway this way.
| Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work
| probably exceeds its difficulty.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Do we really need it to be a business? Does it need to make
| money? Torrent communities and DHT don't make any money and
| yet they're pretty good. Would it be possible to build a
| decentralized solution around finding things on the internet?
| Something with trustworthiness ratings and user controlled
| blacklists perhaps?
| StreamBright wrote:
| Search is the only service that I would pay for no matter what.
| Google never considered this business model.
| makecheck wrote:
| Well whether you add "site:.edu" or not, Google still does the
| thing where they just spit out a pile of extra "matches" that
| _don't_ contain your search phrase _AT ALL_. Just thrown into the
| list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do
| have business: Google's business).
|
| Frankly, if it's not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and
| I can't believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you
| ran `ls` in a shell with a glob pattern, it just decided to sort
| of "add in" a few other files loosely based on your query (or
| heck, files that aren't based on it at all)? Oh, now imagine if
| `rm` did that.
|
| Sadly this happens with lots of search tools now. Why the heck is
| the default state on a new Mac to funnel what you type to
| _everything_ , e.g. I searched for "Chrome" and hit Return and
| the _FIRST_ thing it did was throw me into the _App Store_ and
| call up some not-even-a-web-browser scam app with Chrome in its
| name, _instead of_ selecting the Chrome already installed on my
| computer and opening it? More and more it seems that you have to
| turn off all kinds of poor defaults to put tools into a useful
| state, or there is simply no way to get them there at all.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > Well whether you add "site:.edu" or not, Google still does
| the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra "matches"
| that don't contain your search phrase AT ALL
|
| There used to be a 'verbatim' mode that would do exactly that.
| The quotes symbol were also a way to enforce verbatim mode.
|
| Sadly this behaviour of "let me assume what you want" is not
| exclusive of google as I also now experience this on ddg.
| freediver wrote:
| As an anecdote, we have implemented a really strict exact
| match at Kagi (meaning quotes do exactly what they are
| supposed to do). We did receive some feedback that we should
| relax it a bit mostly because non-alphanum character matching
| (some users wanted them ignored) and occasional empty results
| page (some users were not used to getting an empty result
| page as Google almost always returns something, even if it is
| not what they searched for).
| brimwats wrote:
| how capable is your Boolean searching? could I do
| `(catalog* OR classif*) AND (archiv* OR librar* OR
| museum*)`? does it support AND/OR booleans?
| freediver wrote:
| Yes you can. Star will work too.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| I would also be curious if you're able to filter results
| by site or country domain? (similar to now depricated
| google keywords with "site:foo.com" or "domain:.bar")
| freediver wrote:
| We could build this feature, you can suggest at
| https://kagifeedback.org
| twofornone wrote:
| What I don't understand is that the verbatim option still
| exists, it just doesn't seem to do anything. And quotes don't
| seem to work anymore either. It's all very insulting.
| nabakin wrote:
| In my case quotes still work but they aren't as good as
| they once were
| monkpit wrote:
| Quotes haven't worked for about 10 years now. For my job
| in 2012 I very often had to google obscure part numbers
| to find documentation.
|
| Even if you added quotes to the part number (such as
| "foo123-x", google would return results for "foo234-x" or
| "foo123-y" and bold them as if they had matched. The real
| part numbers could be 10-20 characters long, so it was
| more difficult to spot discrepancies.
|
| I learned very quickly not to trust the results even when
| adding quotes. If I had assumed the quotes had worked, I
| would have grabbed bad documentation without even
| realizing it.
| Melatonic wrote:
| You have to both quote the term(s) and then check the box
| for "verbatim". Then it should generally work. Have you
| all tried doing both at once?
|
| edit: It is a pain in the ass though
| nabakin wrote:
| What I mean is that quotes still improve looking up
| specific strings, but yeah, not as good as they once were
| and getting progressively worse.
| swat535 wrote:
| Regarding the quotes, I actually notice they do work.
| However the difference is that it doesn't highlight where
| the string was matched in the search result index page.
|
| So for example if you google "Food", all the results _will_
| contain the string "Food" somewhere in the page (if you
| don't believe me, try it). It can also match somewhere in
| the comments or metadata which is useless..
|
| So the feature is still there but it's nowhere as useful as
| it once was.
|
| I recall a Google engineer who confirmed this once but
| maybe one of them lurking in the thread can clarify it?
| the_snooze wrote:
| It's not just search. It's so much user-facing interactivity
| online. Stop black-box-inserting irrelevant search results.
| Stop black-box-modifying what I type in the document. Stop
| black-box-suggesting-as-I-type. Stop black-box-second-guessing
| what I meant.
|
| I'm a perfectly capable human who can communicate my intent,
| and make corrections on my own if needed. What kind of deranged
| hubris must these engineers have to build systems that try to
| proactively act on what _they think_ I actually meant?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Also, I wish Google could simply deliver the information I
| want without tracking me or gathering information about me,
| my interests, communication, travel, searches, or contacts.
|
| Google should respect their users' privacy.
| nine_k wrote:
| Please remember, you, who does a Google search, is a user,
| but not a customer.
|
| Customers' interests come first, and the customers pay well
| for tracking and targeting.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Given that chat texts are used in court as evidence, I wonder
| what happens to this when the text is not what you typed, but
| what the AI system "corrected" for you.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| > Frankly, if it's not reliable as a tool, it has no real value
|
| This is exactly the ridiculous kind of hyperbole I come to HN
| for.
|
| If you honestly can't find any value in using Google despite
| its unreliability, you were probably expecting too much of it
| to begin with.
| colordrops wrote:
| Your expectations are too low. We all remember google in it's
| heyday when it returned honest results, so we know what's
| possible.
| vkou wrote:
| > we know what's possible.
|
| We know its possible to do in the Internet of 2004.
|
| The Internet of 2004 no longer exists, the Internet of 2022
| is a very different problem for search to solve.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I wonder if google could even return to its heyday if it
| wanted. Even if they stopped playing dumb games with search
| there a alot more malicious actors whose entire career is
| to fuck up search results now.
| omoikane wrote:
| I remember the days when internet as a whole were simpler
| in terms of contents and users, and search engines
| reflected that simpicity. I am not sure if it's possible to
| go back to those days.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| A more complex web landscape doesn't explain why the
| entire first page of results is very often just ads and
| e-commerce sites.
| car_analogy wrote:
| If only there was a large, old search engine, that still
| had a web index from the days before SEO spam, that it
| could prioritize over newer results.
| colordrops wrote:
| Or a search engine with zetabytes of data and the world's
| largest collection of AI PhDs. It could be possible that
| they have the advantage over some scam artist smoking
| cigs in front of a screen at 3am, considering it's their
| system.
| Croftengea wrote:
| google.stanford.edu :)
| sitkack wrote:
| https://altavista.com it runs on the latest top end Alpha
| processors.
| dizhn wrote:
| http://altavista.digital.com
|
| I honestly switched to google from alltheweb and
| altavista initially because of the easier name and muscle
| memory taking hold. To this day I believe Altavista was
| better when google first took off.
| malfist wrote:
| Ah yes, the good ol' days of content farms copying from
| stack overflow, or did you mean the good ol' days of buying
| back links? Or the good ol' days of web rings?
|
| Let's face it, the heyday of honest results are just as
| mythical as the political "good ol' days".
| sph wrote:
| > the good ol' days of web rings
|
| I honestly don't get your snark. Those were the good old
| days of the Internet, when SEO spam and PageRank wasn't a
| thing. Then Google came and made the Internet even
| better, then it turned to shit, and here we are. And web
| rings were great, you take that back.
|
| So yes, there was a period of time when the Internet was
| in some ways better than nowadays. Now I'm not saying
| that everything that happened since is bad, but Internet
| search and signal-to-noise ratio has definitely fallen
| off a cliff.
|
| Let's enjoy the good days of siloes and SEO optimization.
| I doubt it'll get better.
| strbean wrote:
| Eh, there were a few periods of "glory days". Usually in
| the months after Google's latest crackdown on one of the
| SEO techniques you mentioned.
| corrral wrote:
| Notably, around `08 or `09, these cycles stopped. From
| the outside, it looks like Google stopped trying to fight
| spam and just gave a bunch of huge sites a permanent
| boost in rankings instead, so at least _some_ of your
| results might not be spammy garbage.
| naravara wrote:
| Also honest content moved into video and podcasting
| formats (that are harder to index) or inside walled
| gardens like Twitter or Facebook. It's like if the
| internet was a sea and Google was the ship used to
| navigate it, the water has dried up and now it's just
| craggy shoals we have to navigate around to get anywhere.
| dirtybird04 wrote:
| That was when silicon valley was still run by computer
| nerds. Those days aren't coming back buddy, time to move on
| kache_ wrote:
| Open source alternatives are the cure (in the case of Mac
| hacking their search results to drive some arbitrary metric so
| some random PM gets promoted somewhere)
|
| A lot harder to track me using linux instead and constantly
| pushing my company to allow people to use linux machines for
| dev
| stickfigure wrote:
| I would be willing to bet substantial sums of money that Google
| tracks metrics for these alternative results and has concluded
| that they _add_ value to the user. Maybe not to you, but to
| most people.
|
| Personally, I'm ok with a bit of "oh, this is what I think you
| meant" rather than a literal interpretation of my query. It's
| not perfect but neither are my queries.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm ok with fuzzy searches, but there should be a switch for
| verbatim.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I certainly have moments where I don't quite know how to ask
| what I'm looking for and badly describe it in a query: e.g.
| "flat thing you use for cooking" - google seems to understand
| what I'm looking for, whereas bing/ddg guide me more towards
| cooking tools with the word "flat" in them.
|
| I usually use ddg but I do find google useful for the more
| weird queries I have.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _has concluded that they add value to the user._
|
| Not the user. To Google.
|
| Marginal search results adds value for Google because it
| keeps people searching, which is how Google makes its money.
| If you find what you want, you stop feeding money into
| Google.
|
| Google can do this because it has a virtual monopoly on
| search. If a strong competitor were to emerge, Google
| couldn't play these revenue optimization games, and would
| have to go back to being a search engine.
| bobsomers wrote:
| > I would be willing to bet substantial sums of money that
| Google tracks metrics for these alternative results and has
| concluded that they add value to the user.
|
| And I would be willing to be substantial sums of money that
| any metrics Google has with respect to "adding value to the
| user" are actually more directly track "adding value to the
| business".
| kempbellt wrote:
| I would imagine that "adding value to the user" translates
| to "adding value to the business" in a lot of ways for
| Google.
|
| If, on _average_ , users perceive more value from Google,
| they use Google more, and Google earns more ad rev. Even if
| this lowers value substantially for the "relative few".
|
| It's basic utilitarianism, and it sucks to be in the
| "relative few"...
|
| I too, wish that quotes were respected, and Google would
| stop giving results for what it _thinks_ I meant to search
| for like it knows what I meant better than I do - even if
| that is the case...sometimes.
| Retric wrote:
| That assumes people consider alternatives to Google
| viable.
|
| Right now maximizing the number of searches people
| preform even if it degrades overall search quality is
| probably the goal.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| Unfortunately the fuzzy search thing is in a kind of feedback
| loop in terms of user expectation. Because of Google users are
| used to typing the wrong thing and getting the right answer. If
| I search for "how old is Roger Redford" Google tells me that
| _Robert_ Redford was born in 1936 (it doesn 't even display the
| "Did you mean...?" correction). And to be fair, in 99% of cases
| the person probably did mean Robert Redford.
|
| But anyway, this is the behaviour I think people are being
| trained to expect from searches. I sometimes have to show new
| users our business systems (which manage residential property
| data) and it's seen as a drag that you have to have some level
| of precision when searching for anything.
|
| It's like a spellchecker. As they've got better over time you
| can be less and less accurate with words you're not quite sure
| on and they still find the word you meant.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Seems like the search market is ready for Google Search Pro,
| where you can use advanced operators and syntax to get
| exactly what you asked. Just $9.99 monthly, or buy Google One
| and get it free!
| thunderbong wrote:
| Google is 24 years old. They track everything from email to
| searches to website behaviour across innumerable sites.
|
| If they still need a feedback loop on their search results
| page, maybe they should hire some other guys to tweak their
| search engine!
| nine_k wrote:
| They do, partly because SEO spam never sleeps and ever
| evolves.
| car_analogy wrote:
| And just like a spellchecker, a _suggestion_ of what it
| thinks you meant is welcome, but an automatic change is
| extremely not.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > the word you want
|
| I was watching a new movie yesterday (The Lost City) with
| closed captioning on. The character said "synonym". The cc
| text said "cinnamon".
|
| I see a lot of homonyms in the cc, but that one was the
| funniest.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| In a presentation yesterday, I noticed "Jews" appear in the
| live closed caption stream of my talk.
|
| It threw me off for a few seconds and I went back to the
| recording to figure out it took the word "choose"
| completely out of grammatical context to form a new clause
| of just "Jews", as if I'd been speaking in complete
| sentences, then suddenly just decided to interject a random
| word between two half-sentences.
| WalterBright wrote:
| "There's a bathroom on the right"
|
| "Wrapped up like a douche"
|
| "When the rain washes you'll clean your nose"
|
| The entertainment never ends!
| marvinblum wrote:
| I feel like Google could filter out a lot of SEO spam by simply
| ignoring or downranking heavy sites. Everything that loads more
| than "n MB" is probably bloated and made to trick you into buying
| something or generating traffic without providing value.
|
| Another method could be to analyze how many external requests a
| page makes and put that into the calculation.
|
| Of course, there are exceptions, but I think this might help.
| karaterobot wrote:
| People literally curate lists of websites that are _only_ spam,
| and provide no value in search results[1]. Even if Google only
| cared a little bit about blocking the worst 1% of websites they
| don 't already block, they would simply copy these lists, or
| use them as a starting point. Let alone devoting actual
| resources of their own. But they don't even do that.
|
| [1] e.g. https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I was confident they already included page speed in their
| rankings, but who knows what the status of that is? After some
| (ironically) googling, I've found three blog posts from May
| 2020 [0], November 2020 [1] and April 2021 [2] announcing it,
| the last one saying it went live in August 2021. But I was sure
| they talked about it years ago, hence the PageSpeed Insights
| and Lighthouse tools.
|
| [0]
| https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating...
|
| [1] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-
| for...
|
| [2] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/more-
| detai...
| einr wrote:
| Downranking these sites will overwhelmingly mean downranking
| those who spend money on Google ads. It will not happen because
| it is exactly contrary to Google making more money.
|
| Of course Google has PageSpeed, which supposedly influences
| rankings by downranking sites that are very heavy to load, so I
| mean, that's an aspect to take into account, but I still
| believe the above to be largely true.
| onion2k wrote:
| _generating traffic without providing value_
|
| Those sites generate plenty of value ... for Google. Even if
| they're not showing Google adverts, those sites normalize the
| idea that "websites have adverts", so users don't question it
| on other sites.
|
| If Google started returning sites with low numbers of adverts
| first then users would start demanding more sites with fewer
| ads. Google _really_ don 't want to show fewer adverts.
| mojuba wrote:
| Thought the same, but it would be unfair to web sites that are
| actual web apps and are JS-heavy.
|
| Google is hopeless anyway, so here's something for the next
| search engine that wants to bring back the Web: downrank by the
| number of 3rd party domain requests, attempts of tracking, and
| possibly also popups.
| chii wrote:
| How would one detect what is a popup and what is an
| interactive dialog that the user actually desires?
| [deleted]
| mojuba wrote:
| If you show an example of something that pops up right
| after the initial load, and that a user actually desires,
| we'll think of ways. I can't think of any right now. Things
| should pop up in response to a click, generally.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The presence of ads, analytics and affiliate links are a good
| proxy for "spam site" and is very hard to game, so downranking
| them is a trivial solution.
|
| Google will never do it because those ads & analytics can be
| Google's and benefit their bottom line.
| s-video wrote:
| This is nitpicky but the tire changing page doesn't actually fit
| your rational for choosing .edu pages
|
| >Professors are paid generous salaries to share knowledge with
| the paying customers of the University (students). So, let's find
| some paid unpaid University knowledge on how to change a tire by
| using our new trick!
|
| But the bottom of the page says
|
| >Prepared by: [students] For Dr. Bruce Magee's English 303
| (Technical Writing) Class, Winter 1997-1998.
|
| The professor is actually an English professor and the page was
| written by students as an assignment. I looked into this because
| I was wondering, "what would a professor be teaching that he's
| writing notes on tire changing?". There's probably some professor
| out there that does that in an academic context, but there's
| probably a lot of things that no professor actually gets paid to
| write about. Maybe they would write about something miscellaneous
| like that anyway and put it online, but they would be doing so
| out of the culture of web savvy professors having personal pages
| where they upload stuff they think is helpful.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| Does it really matter if it was a writing assignment, or a
| class in tire changing, provided that the information is
| correct?
| bentcorner wrote:
| Yes, it matters - a writing assignment would be graded on
| writing quality and style. I would assume the writing
| professor is not a tire changing expert. You're there because
| you don't know how to change a tire, so there's no way to
| know if the information is correct.
|
| It's certainly better than nothing but there could be
| specific gotchas for your situation. Most common would be
| needing certain tools or techniques for your model of car.
| It'd probably be best to either look up the manual for your
| car online or find a youtube video for changing the tires for
| your model of car.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| I know this isn't the point of the discussion, but any
| car's owners manual likely has a section on how to change a
| tire in case anyone needs it.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| It isn't nitpicking at all, I had the same question and glad
| you uncovered this answer. I think site:*.edu is just one tool
| in your search toolbox that you should know about, but I
| wouldn't expect it to work for every topic. Still, I had never
| thought of it so I'm glad I read this article.
| chii wrote:
| i would often use `site:news.ycombinator.com` to search a
| topic to see if it has been talked about, and what comments
| that topic has.
|
| It's good, but not really _that_ often useful.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Yes I use that and site:reddit.com as well.
| april_22 wrote:
| Consider using alternative SE's like you.com or neeva,
| they give you the ability to rank sources and e.g. set
| Reddit as a preferred site so you don't have to type
| site:reddit.com every single time. Works great and saves
| time.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Yep, those are my two modifiers i often use -- that and
| since:2021
| avh02 wrote:
| This has recently been my desperation move when e.g
| similar bugs to what I'm facing were solved a decade ago
| (but were irrelevant) were coming out as top results
| rather than bugs for a recent version
| richardsocher wrote:
| We also have recent github issues as an app within
| you.com to solve for that.
|
| (you.com founder here)
| unabridged wrote:
| Hacker News has a really good dedicated search engine:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/
| sph wrote:
| That's how a search engine should work: it returns only
| what you asks of it, knows how many results there are,
| can be forced to use your query verbatim.
| sitkack wrote:
| except the date picker is horribly, horribly broken.
| FpUser wrote:
| Ok. I bit the bullet and typed exactly those words: "how to fix a
| flat tire".
|
| This is what I got in return:
|
| Row 1: 2 buttons marked "on a bike" and "scooter"
|
| Row 2: single scrollable row of images of tire fixing kits with
| the prices.
|
| Row 3: step by step recipe on how to fix flat on a car (7 steps
| long) followed by the link to the corresponding article and small
| image on the right side.
|
| To me it looks straight to the point and one can't bitch about
| single row of ads of a relevant products.
| hollowdene wrote:
| In this specific case, it's a great example of how Google's
| attempts to keep people on Google has made search worse.
|
| It's showing this result as a featured snippet because it's easy
| to distil into steps, and Google is hoping you'll just read the
| result and not leave Google.
|
| The real 'no.1 result' is this much better article from a trusted
| UK-based motoring organization:
| https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/car-maintenance/how-to-ch...
|
| Of course, Google's attempts to stop you leaving, and hoover up
| as much of the ad market as possible, also drives publishers to
| ever more desperate things to make money.
| Railsify wrote:
| I was trying to find pre-made hand railing mounting plates, I
| thought to try and use google shopping because I didn't have an
| existing part number.
|
| I enter my search term hit enter, for a split second I can see
| the exact products I want to browse but those results are quickly
| swapped out for a bunch of unrelated products.
| pmontra wrote:
| > If you simply google: how to fix a flat tire the first website
| in the search results is this piece of bloatware,
| MillerAutoPlaza:
|
| I attempted to reproduce the experiment and I got a full page of
| useful results, all of them videos or numbered lists of the steps
| as in
|
| > Step One: Find the Puncture. Once you're in a safe place, hop
| out of the car, and find the flat tire. ...
|
| etc.
|
| Maybe Google read HN and fixed that query but how to replace flat
| tires yields similar results.
|
| Maybe it's because I'm not logged in into Google and they are
| less aggressive on showing me ads?
|
| Maybe it's because I'm not from an English language country and
| they know from my IP address. Let's try with come cambiare una
| gomma bucata. Other useful numbered lists and videos.
|
| I'm not always happy with Google's results but there seems to be
| something wrong in the experiment here.
| westcort wrote:
| This is a great idea. I tried doing this with all of the .edu
| domains on the former DMOZ and created this for simple searches:
| https://locserendipity.com/edu.html?q=astronomy
|
| Also, I created a pure JavaScript (no dependency, tracking, or
| downloads!) bookmarklet that kills all the links in a page and
| turns it to plain text with a visual optimization algorithm
| applied to make it easier to read:
| https://locserendipity.com/Hyper.html
|
| The internet is much better without all the cruft.
| bayareabadboy wrote:
| Has anyone else noticed a significant uptick in negative posts
| about google search lately? Is this because it's gotten
| noticeably worse recently or it's trendy to complain about?
| Thinking over the last six months or so.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| An Algolia search for "google search" would suggest that
| there's more recent traffic amongst the most popular hits,
| though you can find complaints dating back over a decade.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| We are all frogs who have noticed the water is getting pretty
| warm.
| rand0mx1 wrote:
| also mention of some closed beta search engine in those post is
| mandatory.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| lol @ musk thinking cookie settings should be in the browser.
| Does he not know that they used to be until a certain advertising
| company took it out of their browser, and Mozilla then followed?
| sharno wrote:
| I got surprised recently by more predictable Yandex search is. I
| started comparing it to TikTok, the algorithm is more predictable
| and feels that you can direct it into the pathway you want.
| dandare wrote:
| > Oh, and also, Miller is hiring if you're interested in joining
| the team. I want to change my tire! Get off my back, and stop
| trying to make money off me for one second while I solve this
| tire crisis.
|
| So, you want someone to help you and you are pissed when they
| don't want to do it for free?
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| I came to find out how to change a tire, not to get a job in
| dealership. If the page said "we have 5 different guides on how
| to change a tire with different level of details, so you can
| choose the one you preffer. Just pay us 5$ to get download
| link" without forcing an account, it would be much better.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Ironically, it's the ones who were doing it for free who tended
| to excel at providing information, and the ones who're busy
| monetising their presence who've revealed the Sadim Touch,
| turning all that's gold to shit.
|
| (Sadim is the revers of Midas.)
| welshwelsh wrote:
| The problem is that there _are_ people who have published free,
| no-bullshit guides on how to change a tire for the sake of
| spreading knowledge, and these results should be prioritized
| over businesses who have a profit motive.
| rglullis wrote:
| No. We are not looking for hire someone to do a job. We just
| want to be able to search for content online without middlemen
| interjecting themselves in the hopes of monetizing the
| interaction.
| lupire wrote:
| And who do you expect will provide that content for you, for
| free?
| swayvil wrote:
| The ten-million free content providers. We do it because
| it's worth doing.
|
| If the "business people" were to disappear we'd do just
| fine. The whine of incessant marketing does tend to disturb
| the peace.
| rglullis wrote:
| The millions of people that write and produce content
| without being tied to this Protestant mentality that
| something is only worth doing if it is profitable.
|
| In fact, I'd wager that if we had a way to filter for
| content that is written _without_ the goal of being
| monetized, we 'd have a better web _and_ us consumers would
| be more inclined to reward and give back to the creators
| generously.
| grumple wrote:
| I thought this was an interesting topic, so I read a bit
| on Protestantism and Protestant work ethic and what makes
| things worth doing. [1, 2] The interpretation that
| something is only worth doing if profitable seems
| somewhat uncharitable but does seem to be possibly rooted
| in truth.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism#Protestant
| _cultu...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
| metabagel wrote:
| The Kagi search engine which is close to entering public
| beta has lenses which tailor the search experience. There
| is a non-commercial lens. The lenses are basically on or
| off all the time and affect the overall search results.
| metabagel wrote:
| I just realized that Kagi has a !hn option which will
| search hacker news.
| benstrumental wrote:
| Where did you find this feature? As a beta user, I have a
| hard time finding documentation for the features in Kagi.
| Ironically, searching about Kagi in Kagi is not helpful.
| freediver wrote:
| Our documentation still sucks, but Kagi supports all
| bangs that DDG supports and you can find them here :
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/bang
| soneil wrote:
| The irony is that the garage is doing a fantastic job up
| until that point.
|
| If someone is so clueless about changing a tyre that the
| best place they can start is google, then organically
| taking them to the garage's page is a win. Maybe they'll
| find the information useful, maybe they'll decide they're
| out of their depth and call the number on the screen.
|
| For them to show up as the first organic result is a huge
| win. All they have to do with that win is not screw it up.
| And 9 meg of trackers, a page full of popups, and pointless
| CTAs (do you want to hire someone who can't change a tyre?)
| is screwing up that easy win.
|
| You don't have to be scummy to turn search results into
| profit. That garage came so, so close of being a great
| example, before they threw it away and made a bad example.
| qgin wrote:
| Just add "Reddit" to the search string
|
| Reddit is what the internet used to be back when it was useful.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Usenet will always reassert itself in one form or another.
| drstewart wrote:
| Reddit has very strong biases and its own bubbles as well.
| Don't expect to be exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints
| there, but what appeals to a very narrow demographic (18-30
| year old low-income white progressive American males)
| qgin wrote:
| True, but at least it's content written humans in good faith
| and not just SEO bait.
| Jtype wrote:
| Except for all the bots.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Sort of, the huge subreddits are just as much a hellhole as the
| majority of google.
| diarrhea wrote:
| Sure, but you wouldn't search
| site:reddit.com/r/worldnews change a tyre
|
| but rather (just an example)
| site:reddit.com/r/diy change a tyre
|
| There are countless small(er) subreddits where a Google
| 'site:' search works wonderfully. Often, I don't specify a
| subreddit at all if the query itself is narrow enough.
| grumple wrote:
| Unfortunately, I find Reddit results to generally be of very
| low quality. For tech related searches, stackoverflow and
| direct links to documentation are far superior. Where reddit is
| occasionally useful is when searching for things like "what's
| the best service for X?", but even then I find myself wading
| through many posts and many comments on those posts before I
| come across a sliver of useful information.
| afterburner wrote:
| I use this especially for any consumer product comparison or
| "best" search; otherwise you just get monetized BS articles
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Nonfunctional on contemporary cell phones?
| toqy wrote:
| Works decent if you both have a powerful phone and sign in
| and disable the nag to download the app
| webmobdev wrote:
| ... or use Firefox (Tor Browser after disabling tor) + uBlock
| Origin, and avoid all the unwanted crap most websites throw at
| you today. And train yourself not to automatically search for
| everything on Google. Instead use IMDB, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow
| / Stackexchange, Reddit etc. etc. by adding their search to your
| browser ( https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-
| custom-sea... ).
| bobajeff wrote:
| That still leaves you going to sites who's only purpose is to
| funnel you through some sales channel and waste your time.
|
| Edit: yeah that's good advice too. Though the *.edu trick also
| seems to be pretty useful so far.
| dktp wrote:
| The mentioned queries provide quite good search results for me
|
| The first link clearly explains how to fix a tire and right
| underneath the first link, there's a link to Youtube video with
| described sections which you can click on immediately
|
| The sites are full of tracking and ads, but that's hardly
| Google's fault imo
| guerrilla wrote:
| How come nobody is doing social search yet? Why can't I up and
| down vote results and maybe even comment on them or something? I
| don't want to ever see some of these recipe sites that show up
| again... I can't imagine I would if people were helping curate.
| Seems like an "easy" solution to SEO crapola?
| ryan-duve wrote:
| I vaguely remember Wiki's search engine doing this; maybe it
| was called WikiCloud? Anyway, it was just clunky in practice to
|
| 1. search something
|
| 2. click links until you get your info
|
| 3. go back to the search page and upvote/downvote the results
| based on which ones were useful
| guerrilla wrote:
| Hmm, I see what you mean and how that could be bad. Maybe
| something like the old stumbleupon interface could work.
| dostojevski1 wrote:
| I don't think there is the need of curating content in a social
| search way, if the SE itself is just good and alternative SE's
| that are coming up seem very promising.
|
| e.g., you.com lets you pick preferred sources, so that you can
| tailor your search experience to your needs.
|
| They've also done a great job on recipes.
| https://you.com/search?q=oven%20roasted%20broccoli
|
| Neeva and Kagi also seem promising, though their both
| waitlist/invite only still
| fils wrote:
| Actually I think Neeva is fully open now for all to try at
| https://neeva.com/
|
| I don't work for them, but I have gone the paid route with
| them and I am very pleased with them as my default search
| now.
| [deleted]
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Excuse the shameless self-promotion, but contrast the results for
| the same searches:
|
| https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+to+fix+a+flat+tire
|
| https://bikerepairvideos.com/fix-flat-tire/
|
| https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+are+pearls+made%3F
|
| https://www.gemrockauctions.com/learn/did-you-know/how-are-p...
| nova22033 wrote:
| I got completely different results. The first hit was a pretty
| good youtube video. It even started at the relevant part when I
| clicked on it.
| darinf wrote:
| This is why I left Google to join Neeva. Check us out. Unlike the
| alternatives, we are truly investing in our search stack.
|
| Unfortunately there's just too much inertia with the ads-based
| business model making it too hard for Google to not let itself
| get this way. Similar challenges with other ads supported
| businesses.
| fils wrote:
| I think this is part of the issue with Google. They are almost
| too afraid to innovate in search (for the user) for fear it
| would impact advertising.
| paco3346 wrote:
| Hey, I just came from the company that hosts that dealer website!
|
| The amount of money that dealerships pour into SEO and
| advertising is unreal. They also chase every single thing that
| Google says with complete abandon. (Remember AMP? ya, that was
| something we chased because dealers asked us to and then forgot
| about 12 months later.)
|
| I realize this is about Google but I think there will always be a
| struggle until everyone can boycott playing the game and I just
| don't see that happening.
| more_corn wrote:
| This is by far the most useless advice I have ever seen.
| sabujp wrote:
| another trick site:*.reddit.com
| redgrange wrote:
| I lol at the paying professors generous salaries part
| nonameiguess wrote:
| At least some of the problem here needs to be laid at the feet of
| users relying too heavily on the web to learn everything. Your
| vehicle's owner manual has instructions for how to change a tire,
| with the bonus that it will even know where the tools that come
| with your car are located and whether you have some extra
| features like locking lug nuts.
| trhoad wrote:
| Err, what?
|
| .edu is a TLD for US based educational bodies. So the reason you
| don't see a cookie banner is because the majority (AFAIK) of US
| states don't mandate a cookie banner, unlike EU and UK based
| sites (like the Natural History Museum, based in the UK). Does
| this mean the Natural History Museum is a less authoritative
| resource than anywhere else? I'd say the opposite, actually.
|
| And for the "change a tire" example using a .edu TLD. That's a
| fantastic example of how to find search results that are almost
| completely useless for anyone outside the US. What's a "tire",
| anyway? Oh, you mean "tyre". What's a "flashlight". OK, you mean
| a "torch".
|
| In summary: there's a world outside the US. It's lovely out here.
| nabakin wrote:
| You're annoyed with him because his target audience is only the
| United States?
|
| Why stop at British people? I can't believe this guy didn't
| consider Japanese-speaking people! Why didn't OP make an
| article for Chinese people?! Wow, can you believe OP didn't
| make an article for every single possible person on the planet?
|
| Honestly, you make a good point at the start but I don't
| understand your rage at the end there.
| queuebert wrote:
| I fixed it by leaving for DuckDuckGo.
| BLanen wrote:
| The reason that cookies are not a browser setting is NOT because
| of a technical limitation. Besides, if it was a browser setting,
| I would hope most people would have default "no, you can't store
| cookies except for the functional ones" and not "yes, store a
| thousand tracking cookies".
|
| It is because of a power issue.
|
| It would have to be a protocol change. Google owns the largest
| browser. Google doesn't want it to be a browser setting. End of
| story. Unless you gather political power to force google and
| others to have this, it will not change.
| darinf wrote:
| Check out cookie cutter by Neeva:
| https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-cookie-cutter-by-neeva-a-...
| kazinator wrote:
| Make up your mind: are you complaining that MillerAutoPlaza is in
| the Google search results, or that MillerAutoPlaza is asking for
| your location?
| tejohnso wrote:
| Counter example:
|
| "what is an iris" when wondering about anatomy brings up
| Wikipedia as the first link. Perfect.
|
| With the .edu trick the first link is about the flower, and
| there's nothing about the human eye anywhere on the first page of
| results.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| what is an iris site:*.edu
|
| At least for me...
|
| First listing (eye):
| https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215826/http:/...
|
| Second listing (flower):
| http://www.ladybug.uconn.edu/FactSheets/iris.php
| einr wrote:
| Okay, but iris does have two meanings and sometimes you need to
| be specific in your queries. Your original query would _not_
| have been perfect if you were in fact wondering about the
| flower. "what is an iris anatomy site:*.edu" is enough to
| bring up this as the first result:
|
| https://www.umkelloggeye.org/conditions-treatments/anatomy-e...
| fotta wrote:
| but that's not a .edu site though
|
| e: ah it looks like it is a .edu that redirects to a .org
|
| https://www.kellogg.umich.edu/patientcare/conditions/anatomy.
| ..
| einr wrote:
| Good catch -- the Google result is actually on an .edu
| domain but it redirects to the link I pasted above.
| fotta wrote:
| yep, Google makes it hard to copy the original link too
| which is annoying
| einr wrote:
| Sidetrack, but I can recommend the Firefox/Chrome
| extension "Don't Track Me Google" which cleans up Google
| result links to be the actual URL, without Google's
| tracking redirect.
| fotta wrote:
| ha! nice, thanks for that
| davorak wrote:
| Still works ok for me 'what is an iris site: _.edu '
|
| First result
| https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215133/http:/...
|
| Short but description of the iris and the function in the eye.
|
| For textual links 2 out of 9 responses for eye irises. and 7
| out of 9 for the flower.
|
| embedded in the same page is 'Images for what is an iris
| site:_.edu' and 10 out of 10 of those links are for eye irises.
|
| Switching over to image search the first 20 are all about eye
| irises.
| mlom wrote:
| "Nothing wrong with that, making money is noble"
|
| this right here is why you never make any progress and never fix
| anything and you never understand why everything sucks, you keep
| rewarding perverse incentives and greed and then try to work
| around it as if greed were not the central problem.
|
| making money is not noble, making money does not represent
| increasing value, it only represents cornering tokens of others'
| labor time, which you have just observed takes the form of
| profiteers intentionally seeking ways to waste your time.
|
| improving the world is noble, and whether you make money or not,
| you get to live in a better world.
|
| linus was awarded a salary because people were EMBARRASSED that
| they were profiting so much off his free work.
|
| you all should be a lot more ashamed.
| tonguez wrote:
| thank you
| royal10march wrote:
| I'm sorry but in no way should you limit your results to only
| those published on .edu websites. There's got to be a better
| solution to this. Ideas only end up on .edu websites after a long
| period from the point it was conceived.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Seems like a long way to go to you know, not just switch search
| engines. Google's had a nice run so did yahoo, hotbot, excite,
| alta vista... the question isn't how to fix Google. The question
| is...
|
| what's next?
| royal10march wrote:
| I'm sorry; but it makes no sense to limit yourself to results
| form .edu websites. Ideas take way too long from the point they
| have been conceived to land on .edu websites. We have to find a
| better solution to Google.
| greybox wrote:
| I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked
| back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using
| '!g' most of the time.
|
| Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better
| than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce
| the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this
| point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.
| sph wrote:
| I've been using Brave Search for months now, _much_ better than
| DDG. I had a Kagi invite sitting in my inbox, just signed up
| and set as default search.
|
| Will give it a spin, but so far I like what I see.
|
| EDIT: I immediately boosted all `github.com` and `reddit.com`
| results. That's a killer feature!
|
| EDIT 2: better than Brave Search on mobile: there's a search
| button to enter a new search, and the textbox doesn't move
| around like Brave or Google do causing you to click on the
| first suggestion. I bloody hate that. Well done Kagi.
| svnpenn wrote:
| Please stop pushing some site thats still in beta, AND requires
| a login.
| soco wrote:
| Not only requires a login, but also Joe Regular cannot use it
| - beta means here closed invite-only, so it's just an
| internal tool for some group of people. So any news about it
| should be taken with a grain of salt.
| sph wrote:
| AFAIK it's an open invite system. I put my email, the next
| day I received an invite.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| They're about to move into public beta. But you'll still have
| to log in because they want you to pay. I think its worth it,
| and its more honest.
| zild3d wrote:
| they didn't provide a link that got you login-walled, they
| mentioned a product that's working for them. Don't see why
| that's an issue
| jjulius wrote:
| Why?
| endisneigh wrote:
| There's no way to test without giving your info away and
| taking a long survey from what I remember. It's kind of
| like posting Facebook links I suppose.
| freediver wrote:
| Our goal at this stage (invite only beta) was not to get
| users who just want to try it out, but who actualy wanted
| to contribute by reporting bugs and suggestions as beta-
| testers. This is why we have a survey form, as completing
| it signals wilingness to invest time in the product. Soon
| (in two weeks) we will move to public beta.
|
| Even then we won't have search without an account, among
| other things because bots would probably kill us.
|
| (kagi founder here)
| [deleted]
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I know you are getting downvoted here ... but there are
| multiple mentions of Kagi in the comments, so it struck me
| too.
| superasn wrote:
| Yes i too would like to see a side by side comparison why
| it's better than just dude trust me..
| benstrumental wrote:
| I've been relatively happy with Kagi so far. Happy to post
| some search results if you want to propose some queries to
| compare against Google.
| stevelosh wrote:
| I've been using it during the beta and plan on paying for
| it once they start charging. Previously I had tried
| switching to DuckDuckGo, but found myself using !g half the
| time because I knew the DDG results would be garbage
| compared to the Google results.
|
| I haven't found Kagi's results to be significantly _better_
| than Google 's results, but unlike DDG they're _not hugely
| worse_ than Google. It 's all the extra stuff that makes me
| want to use Kagi instead of Google:
|
| * Ability to banish sites from results forever. E.g. I
| never want to see the Concordia Lutheran High School's
| website when I search for things in the Common Lisp
| HyperSpec with clhs.
|
| * Ability to weight sites higher. E.g. there are two
| mirrors of the Common Lisp HyperSpec that appear in
| results, one at http://clhs.lisp.se and one at
| http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/. The
| lisp.se mirror is hilariously slow for me (5-10 seconds to
| load) while the lispworks one is instant. Google always
| ranks lisp.se first which tricks me into clicking it and
| wasting my time. Kagi lets me weight that site lower so the
| lispworks site comes first. Banishing lisp.se would also
| work, but just upweighting it means I can still find it if
| the other mirror ever goes down or something.
|
| * I reported a minor bug to Kagi and they fixed it within a
| few days. I doubt that would happen with Google.
|
| * Supports DDG-style bang queries, which I use
| occasionally.
|
| * No goddamn ads/tracking (I use uBlock Origin, but it's
| the principle of the thing). I've almost entirely de-
| Googled my life at this point (Youtube is the only holdout
| for me).
|
| So it's not that it gives _better_ results than Google, it
| 's that the results _aren 't any worse_ and the extra
| quality-of-life features are really nice.
| ydant wrote:
| Basically everything you wrote above is what I'd say -
| except I haven't submitted a bug report or feedback to
| Kagi...
|
| Basically, when I used DDG, I found myself frequently
| using !g to search Google instead. For Kagi, I haven't
| really found myself doing that anywhere near as often.
|
| So yeah, you have to fill out a survey (took a couple of
| minutes and I got an invite the same/next day), so it's
| not the easiest to recommend right now. Two weeks and
| they go free+premium according to an email today.
|
| I think it's just that I, like a lot of HN, have been
| getting super disillusioned with Google lately - and most
| importantly the preponderance of obviously machine-
| generated zero-value spam pages for everything I search
| for - so I was desperately trying to find something
| better. DDG constantly disappointed for my searching.
| Kagi doesn't do that. So I'm happy. $10/month happy? I'm
| not sure.
|
| Generally, there's a growing group of people who are
| feeling about Google the way a lot of us felt about
| Facebook 10+ years ago - it's time to stop relying on it
| and maybe cut it out entirely (and yes, I know there are
| plenty of people who felt this way about Google for years
| already). So I pay for Fastmail now. I guess I'll likely
| be paying for Kagi now. Quality is getting expensive, but
| at least I'm paying with my money rather than my data.
| deelly wrote:
| Could you show some examples of search results?
| benstrumental wrote:
| I have been trying Kagi for a few months and have found it
| better than Google in most cases, though not a silver bullet.
|
| Here are the queries from the original article in Kagi:
| how to fix a flat tire
|
| Top result:
|
| https://www.wikihow.com/Fix-a-Flat-Tire
|
| Also, it predicts a video is best to answer this question and
| gives 3 YouTube thumbnails listed at the top of the results.
| They all seem generally helpful based on the title.
| how are pearls made?
|
| Top result:
|
| https://www.thepearlsource.com/blog/facts-about-
| pearls/how-a...
| elorant wrote:
| I got the wikihow as the second result. The top one was
| this:
|
| https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-
| trucks/how-t...
|
| Which is equally good.
| jszymborski wrote:
| These top results are identical to the results I'm getting
| from metager.org which is just a meta search engine. Both
| those results came from Bing in the case of metager
| gernb wrote:
| I get useful results from google for the same query
|
| First result is
|
| https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-
| trucks/how-t...
|
| 2nd, 3rd, and 4th resultsa are videos
|
| 5th is wikihow (which by the way IMO is often a really bad
| site. There is lots of junk content on wikihow)
| rg111 wrote:
| I remember these from yesterday: 1. Quotes
| on abstraction 2. How does jpeg represent images
|
| Google gave me bunch of spam, but Kagi gave me sites I could
| actually learn from.
|
| In case of code.you.com vs. Google: 1. Write a recursive max
| function for lists in Scala
|
| Not much different from Google, but surely a search dedicated
| for code only feels better.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I really like what I've read about Kagi, and I'll likely end-up
| paying for it too, but I _hate_ the metered fee.
|
| I've never run a search engine, but I don't imagine that
| offering "Unlimited" searches where "unlimited" means "do not
| abuse" would meaningfully hurt their margins. As a benefit, you
| avoid losing customers that then need to ask "Do I make more
| than 5*80 searches a month? How many is that a day? What do I
| if I go over?". It also just feels like I'm being nickle-and-
| dimed.
|
| I love that they're charging for the service, it makes me feel
| like they're building something sustainable. I just don't love
| the fee structure.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| They're not going to do a metered plan. From an email sent
| today:
|
| > Kagi will come as a free version with limited use; and an
| unlimited use, paid option at $10 a month, both versions
| having great search results with less spam and completely ad-
| free, tracking free, and with none of your search data being
| retained
| corrral wrote:
| $10/m for a household, if this is as good as people are
| saying, would be a no-brainer subscription for me.
|
| Not paying $10/m per person in my household, though. That'd
| be way too high.
|
| [EDIT] Though I guess with no retained search history, we
| could just share one account anyway, so it doesn't matter.
| I was thinking about keeping those separate. Unless there
| are per-user settings that we might not all want to share.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Awesome! I was just going off of their FAQ
|
| https://kagi.com/faq#cost
| sph wrote:
| I sent the founder an email asking for clarification, he
| replied with "$10/mo is what we decided to use. FAQ needs
| an update."
| freediver wrote:
| Sorry for the confusion, we have not updated the FAQ yet.
| We are going to try with a flat fee ($10/mo) model.
|
| (kagi founder here)
| metabagel wrote:
| I like Kagi too, and I will be a subscriber. It actually kind
| of reminds me of early google. Just the feels of it.
| alx__ wrote:
| Yeah I've running Kagi recently and in most areas it outshines
| Google.
|
| Love how I can easily banish garbage seo-only sites from
| results
|
| I appreciate how it groups results into a more compact section
| if they're from forums or review sites. The UX give you the
| ability to scan for relevant links quicker
|
| e.g. Searching for a generic "best wireless headphones" looks
| like this https://i.ibb.co/GPyb6Zp/kagi-exmple.png
| [deleted]
| shortformblog wrote:
| This title bothers me because he's clearly going after the wrong
| target. It's not that Google is unbearable. It's that people with
| money are more likely to invest on ranking high in Google than
| those who don't have money.
|
| This would be the case with any commercial service with financial
| goals, given enough time and the right motivations.
|
| If commercial content is your problem, say it. Leave Google out
| of it.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| `site:` is great.
|
| As an aside, anyone knows if you can still find "who links to?".
| I used to do this to hear how people feel about my site/app. I
| would do something like `link:foo.bar.com` I don't remember if it
| was link: or linkto: but it seems it no longer is supported? :(
| rpsw wrote:
| It was link:, and unfortunately Google removed support.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I dunno about "who links to" functionality in the search engine
| itself, but this information can be found if you set up Google
| Analytics, which is probably what they want you to do anyway
| because that data is worth a lot to them.
| big_blind wrote:
| It's a little sad we have to '.edu' filter searches just to not
| be directed to SEO sites at this point. Kagi's and You.com's
| searches are really smooth and painless from this perspective.
| You.com also has built in site filtering which helps a ton.
| Vladimof wrote:
| There's a Firefox add-on that allows you to block specific sites
| from Google's search results... not every practical for the whole
| Internet but it is for the worst offenders.
| (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublacklist/)
| owlninja wrote:
| I get none of the same results as my top hit?
| shmde wrote:
| Depends on the region google is set too. You will find varying
| results based on your location.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I get none of the same results as my top hit?_
|
| Google spends billions of dollars a year to give everyone their
| own personalized set of bad search results.
|
| That's the justification for its invasive tracking.
|
| Google: "We to build a dossier about you, your life, your
| friends, and your family members in order to give you better
| results!"
|
| Us: "So... they could be worse?"
| martimarkov wrote:
| That's google's personalisation. I like freaking ppl out when I
| just ask them to google a famous politician's name and compare
| the results. Some times they get similar results on WiFi and
| very different on mobile data afterwards.
|
| Bringing awareness
| nomilk wrote:
| The number of results can also vary wildly.
| benstrumental wrote:
| Any idea why this happens? I don't understand why WiFi vs.
| mobile data would impact how they want to personalize the
| results.
| baisq wrote:
| > I want to change my tire! Get off my back, and stop trying to
| make money off me for one second while I solve this tire crisis.
|
| So you expect them to write an article on how to fix your tyres
| for free? And what about the hosting costs?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| so my takeaway is that the best sites were written in the 90s and
| still out there with the right search incantation :)
| baxuz wrote:
| It's not a Google problem, it's a web problem.
|
| Everything is based around SEO spam. If someone has a website,
| and they're producing content, their point is to monetize the
| browsing of the website itself, or promote their main product via
| the website.
|
| This incentivizes a certain kind of content, which is marketing
| content.
|
| These days I'm back to searching social networks like Reddit or
| Hacker News for (at least somewhat) unbiased information.
|
| Google is a fuzzy-search address bar at this point for me.
| s__s wrote:
| The SEO spam exists in part because Google does a really bad
| job at surfacing any site that isn't content heavy. This leads
| to sites needing to churn out keyword rich fluff content in
| order to get any organic traffic.
|
| I have first hand experience with this. My niche, hyper local
| online service (of which everyone loves) was completely
| undiscoverable through Google despite the niche having nearly
| zero relevant results of any kind, and zero competition of any
| kind. It seems Google didn't like the concise, no BS one-pager
| for my service.
|
| My options were to continue to spend on Facebook ads
| perpetually or to create SEO spam content. Within literally a
| month or so of generating fluff articles I was gaining a ton of
| organic traffic and could stop ad spending altogether.
|
| A good example of larger company doing this is Digital Ocean.
| Fortunately they've been extremely ethical about it and the
| content is genuinely very good and helpful.
| kionce wrote:
| What is a hyper local online service, like services for
| someone you closely relate to geographically or socially?
|
| Could you give an example?
| s__s wrote:
| By hyper local I mean something relevant to a small
| geographic region like a city or state.
|
| To be clear, that aspect was mostly tangential to my point.
|
| I think the point is Google is really bad at understanding
| web apps, online services, or really any site that isn't
| information rich.
|
| The majority of web apps for example only really need a
| landing page and a sign up form. But if that's all you have
| Google's algorithm is going to show zero interest. And it
| seems that's the case even if you put in the work and
| optimize the content and provide plenty of meta data.
|
| Imagine you own a pizza joint, but the only way Google
| shows your site to any of your potential customers is if
| you dedicate to publishing an article about pizza every
| month. That's basically the boat a lot of us are in with
| web apps, and other online services.
| sitkack wrote:
| DO is the best example of online content marketing.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The other side of the coin is that users are so used to the
| "free" model (read: ad model) that they refuse to pay for
| anything directly.
|
| Look at youtube. They show ads and there is a non-stop stream
| of complaints about how long/bad/annoying they are. They offer
| a paid subscription to remove all ads and people laugh at the
| audacity youtube has to ask for money.
|
| Users DO NOT want to see/watch ads. Users DO NOT want to pay a
| subscription for "free" content.
|
| Just look at the story of Vid.me, a youtube competitor start-up
| that promised ad-free and sub-free videos. It was a huge hit
| until it hit bankruptcy.
| bkobren wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure, agree that there is an enormous
| challenge to convince people to pay for something they think
| they are getting for free, even when it's really not free ie
| paying for it with time, attention, privacy.
|
| But create enough value, provide truly differentiated and
| unique experiences that ad-supported models can't, include
| privacy etc and there is a case to be made that over time a
| sizable enough segment will pay for that value that you can
| have a sustainable business.
|
| That is certainly our bet at Neeva, and so far we have seen a
| lot of growth, interest and folks opting for the premium
| (paid version) over the basic. Even without a full push to
| encouraging the premium.
| Gunax wrote:
| YT Premium is expensive. Much more expensive than users
| expect.
|
| Most people underestimate the value of their attention.
| Youtube earned 7 billion USD in ad revenue last quarter.
|
| The value of our attention is a shock to most people. I
| suspect that YouTube may actually be losing money (as
| compared to ad revenue), even at the $12 / month--a price
| many users find outrageous.
|
| I am calling this the 'ad gap', which is difference between
| what an advertiser is willing to pay, and what the user is
| willing to pay to avoid the ad.
|
| One way to look at it is that users are irrational. But it
| can also be seen as a testament to the effectiveness of
| advertising.
| freediver wrote:
| Actually, things are quite the opposite. 50 million people
| pay for YouTube Premium. 50 million people do want to pay for
| ad-free content.
|
| That is only 1% of all Google users maybe, but it is the seed
| we need.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-millio.
| ..
| more_corn wrote:
| We're used to free because google decided free was the answer
| and they had so much clout, no other answer could compete.
| Now that their time is ending there will be room for other
| answers.
| davoneus wrote:
| No, free has been an accepted paradym for for a long, long
| time. Simply think of a hundred years of radio advertising,
| and just short of that for tv.
| rg111 wrote:
| > It's not a Google problem
|
| Oh it is definitelt a Google problem.
|
| I was in mood yesterday and I tried Google versus Kagi and You
| Code. Results of _N out of N queries_ in other search engines
| were miles better in other search engines than Google.
|
| I have now switched completely to code.you.com and Kagi from
| Google.
|
| They are ready.
| tome wrote:
| Kagi is jaw-droppingly amazing. With Google search quality
| declining, Bing being on average 95% as good as Google, and
| DuckDuckGo being 90% as good, I was doubting there was any
| way that search engines would ever improve. Kagi has removed
| that doubt completely. I ask for stuff and it finds it. I
| couldn't believe there could be such a useful product.
| [deleted]
| davoneus wrote:
| Bing may be that good for some, but every time I use it it
| stinks and I end up back on Google. Same for DDG. Then
| again, my queries tend to be pretty specific and are
| probably not a typical use case.
| more_corn wrote:
| Doesn't DuckDuckGo use bing for the search backend?
| tome wrote:
| Apparently it uses Bing plus some secret sauce although
| in my experience the results are a bit worse than pure
| Bing. Having said that I have not performed a rigorous
| study, this is just my guess from using all these search
| engines over a prolonged period.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It was mostly Bing and Yandex. The latter was responsible
| for the odd Russian language results you'd get at times
| but presumably produced English results as well.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Incredibly dumb and naive to assume that if Kagi becomes even
| remotely successful, the SEO bandwagon will not target them.
| corrral wrote:
| Kinda OT, but goddamn is it ballsy of Kagi to make their logo
| a G.
| freediver wrote:
| Come on'! Google owns pretty much everything on the web, we
| can't let them own the letter g too ;)
| deelly wrote:
| You right, but Google at least can try to fix it. For example:
| allow users to hide sites from search results, allow users to
| downrank sites in search results, etc. etc.
| khaledh wrote:
| Then it's going to be gamed, again. This time by businesses
| who would love to drown their competitors search results, or
| malicious players who want to attack an entity's web
| presence.
| kroltan wrote:
| It's much harder to game if the rules are different for
| each consumer (and yeah, most people won't bother, but then
| they can't really complain either)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They just need a hidden karma system that ignores the
| contributions from bad actors.
| mikevin wrote:
| I don't know if I can agree, yes SEO spam is probably worse but
| it's grown side-by-side with Google, both sides have more money
| and resources.
|
| SEO spammers decided to improve their tools/techniques. Google
| realized they could earn just as much by replacing their grep-
| for-the-web search-engine with some NLP, ML and fuzzy matching
| on what I strongly suspect to be a tiny subset of the index
| they had before.
|
| I understand the reasoning and I admit it does a really good
| job at correcting mistakes but I often wonder if anyone working
| on the search-engine actually uses it to find development
| related information.
|
| Maybe I'm in some kind of A-B testing hell but my results often
| show 1 relevant random url and a tiny a stackoverflow box with
| other relevant information and then always the same 10-20
| stackoverflow/github copycats. Scrolling down just loops those
| same sites over and over again. Similarly I've never had Google
| link to the official python docs, it's always some spammy
| website that copy pasted a docstring and decorated it with
| ads/share buttons.
|
| I don't understand how that's not bothering people that
| actually work on the search-engine.
| more_corn wrote:
| It is a google problem as well as a web problem.
| nabakin wrote:
| I understand that to some degree this is an arms race between
| business SEO optimization and Google's SEO ranking algorithms
| but I don't understand why Google upranks websites with obvious
| annoyances like the 3 popups in the case of OP's website,
| excessive amount of adtracking, and unreasonably large website
| sizes. In those cases, I can only suspect Google upranks them
| because they provide ad revenue to Google.
| colordrops wrote:
| I keep seeing this excuse but it doesn't explain why google
| doesn't downrank obvious bad actors that have been showing up
| at the top for years, or returning results that don't have the
| most important word in your search terms, or why they don't
| offer settings to permanently filter some sites. It's a problem
| with incentives, not SEO spam.
| freediver wrote:
| Most likely because the only reliable on-page indicator for
| detecting low quality content is the amount of ads/trackers
| on page which is probably the only thing that they can not
| directly punish a site for.
| arroz wrote:
| lately when I google I put my query + Reddit xD
| richardsocher wrote:
| This is why we have preferred sources on you.com - and a special
| mode just for coding specific results: code.you.com, eg.
|
| https://code.you.com/search?q=onnxruntime+segfault
|
| those you would not necessarily find on .edu domains but it's a
| similar spirit.
|
| (you.com founder here)
| chiken wrote:
| refreshing layout! Those apps are time saver as I don't have to
| search across different sources by opening up multiple tabs for
| every query.
| Beltiras wrote:
| I just realized that the authors suggestion is basically to
| implement a custom bang (using !g on ddg will send you to the
| google search, !a to amazon, etc.) for .edu.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Google is good but it is not good enough because with their
| resources they can make it so much better.
| swayvil wrote:
| >...making money is noble....
|
| Color my knee slapped. This author has moxie.
| camillomiller wrote:
| To be fair my result in Germany is a very good article that even
| has a video and a good schema. Before the result I even have
| google's automatically generated summary of the page that's quite
| good to understand if the page's actually useful. I hate Google
| Search for many reasons, but this example is really ill-
| conceived.
| mhmmbt wrote:
| Technical solutions are not going to fix a political problem.
|
| Sundar has been quoted as saying "they are a business first" and
| a businesses political obligation is make profit for the owners.
|
| These companies and technologies are meant to serve human beings,
| not a mathematical ideal in programmers heads.
|
| While: $makeMoney == $howSocietyWorks; return $getUsedToIt
|
| Ooh but politics is boring!
|
| Only 13% of adults in the US have an advanced degree. Coddled
| engineers live in an emotional bubble ignoring the very real
| world that does not feel an obligation to a minority of coddled
| engineers.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| They sure use and depend on what that 13%
| develop/create/literally engineer and maintain, though.
| gsatic wrote:
| Good suggestion.
|
| I had to look up some govt pdfs and tables recently and the
| government sites hosting the files hardly ever show up on the
| first page on Google anymore. It's a sad story.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Or just use DuckDuckGo instead of google.
| daneel_w wrote:
| And Tutanota, Protonmail or Posteo instead of Gmail.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's not really any better in terms of the results it serves
| up.
|
| If it had a filter to only show pages that didn't have cookie
| popups then maybe I'd look at it again.
| more_corn wrote:
| It's not more useful. It's less annoying.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Install the 'I Don't Care About Cookies' browser plug-in.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Searching for "how to fix a flat tire" gave me good results,
| at least better than the crap the OP got :)
| dazc wrote:
| The sooner a critical mass of people start use alternatives
| then the sooner Google will start changing their behaviour.
| Gigablah wrote:
| Don't forget, so will the alternatives :)
| dazc wrote:
| Why clean anything because it just gets dirty again?
| Kiro wrote:
| It's just Bing under the hood so doesn't fix anything, unless
| you say Bing is actually better.
| mrweasel wrote:
| At this point I actually think it is. I believe that DDG does
| tweak the result they get from Bing, and mix in a few other
| sources. Still, even if it is just Bing, then yes, Bing is
| now better than Google.
| BasilPH wrote:
| I've been using Kagi for search and it's much better than
| DuckDuckGo. As much as I like DuckDuckGo, I think I'll stick
| with Kagi.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Instead of fighting Google, better "just" stop using it. Leave it
| for good, even if it feels better than competition right now.
| Let's face it, Google is not going to improve. We are not their
| customers, and they are not going to make their product better
| _for us_. That boat has sailed long time ago.
|
| We need to reset the web. Try out as much of alternative search
| engines as you can. Use the one, or multiple, that suit you
| better. Maybe they will get some traction in a couple of years,
| maybe in a decade, or so. We'll be there where we were before
| Google, using Yahoos, Altavista, Excite et al. and waiting for
| the history to repeat in a form of a new incumbent that will
| again make search usable.
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