4 ms·

I have been shocked recently at how Google.com is no longer the best search engine at many (legal) things I want to find. Yesterday I was looking for downloada

I have been shocked recently at how Google.com is no longer the best search engine at many (legal) things I want to find. Yesterday I was looking for downloadable Word / Excel templates for a certain kind, and wondering why Google wasn't showing me what I KNOW exists on the web. In exasperation I went to Bing.com. In first few results, it showed me exactly what I was looking for. Google say they give us what we want, but my story demonstrates that Google now show what they want us to find. Couldn't help but notice they were significantly de-ranking search results about a competitor's file formats vs. their own. They know I'm looking for DOCX / XLSX files. Ultimately this is good. By using multiple search engines now, I feel like I'm using The Internet again. Google is a censored and corporatised filtering of the web - not the web. This is insane...but it's 2020, and I'm going to check out Lycos.

ec109685 7y ago
There are a lot of assumptions in this post. A more likely explanation is the search term has been SEO’d to hell.
- mindfulhack 7y ago
  I'm not in the search engine or SEO industries, but: Isn't it Google's job to deal with that type of thing in order to give us an accurate print-out of what's most relevant to a search query? Would they do the same thing (i.e. do nothing) if SEO was burying their own Google products' search results? My cynicism is necessary for a healthy and thriving ecosystem. It should not be discouraged.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- outside1234 7y ago
  Why did it work on Bing then?
  - paxy 7y ago
    Because companies aren't spending millions of dollars, hiring specialists and tweaking their content in every which way to get to the front page of Bing.com results.
jeen02 7y ago
Did you know that CAPITALIZING your words makes you sound pretty silly?
- mindfulhack 7y ago
  You're right, bad habit. Fixed.
- jalbertoni 7y ago
  Read it as one would read italics. It helps, most of the time. Unless the person is really cuckoo, then it just makes it sillier.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
conception 7y ago
I’ve noticed this as well. Searching for Iowa caucus for instance gave me a ton of news sites, twitter hits, ads and then far down the page the Iowa Democrats site, still not even the caucus results page. Good for as revenue, bad for searching for data.

ec109685 7y ago

There are a lot of assumptions in this post. A more likely explanation is the search term has been SEO’d to hell.

mindfulhack 7y ago
I'm not in the search engine or SEO industries, but: Isn't it Google's job to deal with that type of thing in order to give us an accurate print-out of what's most relevant to a search query? Would they do the same thing (i.e. do nothing) if SEO was burying their own Google products' search results? My cynicism is necessary for a healthy and thriving ecosystem. It should not be discouraged.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
outside1234 7y ago
Why did it work on Bing then?
- paxy 7y ago
  Because companies aren't spending millions of dollars, hiring specialists and tweaking their content in every which way to get to the front page of Bing.com results.

jeen02 7y ago

Did you know that CAPITALIZING your words makes you sound pretty silly?

mindfulhack 7y ago
You're right, bad habit. Fixed.
jalbertoni 7y ago
Read it as one would read italics. It helps, most of the time. Unless the person is really cuckoo, then it just makes it sillier.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

conception 7y ago

I’ve noticed this as well. Searching for Iowa caucus for instance gave me a ton of news sites, twitter hits, ads and then far down the page the Iowa Democrats site, still not even the caucus results page. Good for as revenue, bad for searching for data.