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Their revenue goes up as their search degrades in quality. Looks like a ripe opportunity for someone to take on the long tail search market. Duckduckgo seems po

Their revenue goes up as their search degrades in quality. Looks like a ripe opportunity for someone to take on the long tail search market. Duckduckgo seems poised to do this. Or perhaps some kids in a garage?

whitepaint 6y ago
> their search degrades in quality Are you 100% confident that this is the case? I personally have a completely different experience (their search results have gotten much better than they used to).
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  Google search results have been gradually getting worse for me as well.
  - munchbunny 6y ago
    Personally I've felt that useful results have been pretty consistently on the first page for a while, and some of the specialized widgets have even improved that, but over the last ~3 years more and more of that has become an exercise of dodging the ads to find the actual result. Feels like the frog getting boiled.
  - version_five 6y ago
    For me it depends on what I'm searching. For more obscure stuff, I find google better. Sometimes I accidentally use bing (it's a default on one of my machines) and I usually eventually have a "oh right, this isn't Google" moment when I can't find what I'm looking for. OTOH, if it's anything that has been SEO'd, I find google has gotten really bad. Last week I tried to google for what frying pan to buy, and everything I saw was a un-trustworthy ad. Incidentally, it's the same for python: you google some very common thing like how to sort a list, the first few links are spam (but the docs are still high in the list usually). You google something obscure and usually get the relevant stack overflow first.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nonameiguess 6y ago
Looks like YouTube and Google Cloud Platform drove the gains, not search.
nr2x 6y ago
Assistant has gotten mind-blowingly good, I recently started using it after having given up on Siri and the amount of lead Google has on complex spoken queries is insane. Otherwise, DDG is basically privacy chrome on top of Bing's results.
tryptophan 6y ago
Im kind of amazed at the lack of search engine innovation. Why can't we explicitly rate results and have them be personalized to us(goodbye quora and wikihow)? Why can't we add tags to results, such as "ad bloated" and have that be taken into account for rankings? It seems like such an obvious next step, but google is too rich for its own good at this point and doesnt need to do anything.
- wolpoli 6y ago
  For the last three decades, search engines have been presenting results in descending order. While a lot of innovations have happened with the sorting algorithm, it hasn't fundamentally move forward from that. From a user point of view, it's frustrating to look through the result, finding a list of ads, a commercial site, a few videos, a definition, a wikipedia link, a commercial site, and so on. Instead, users have a pretty good idea of what kind of result they want. It would make it so much easier if the results are grouped together. For example, a search engine could group results under individual tabs, separating results from user generated content sites, forums, commerce and commercial blogs, Wikipedia, content farms, and so on. Within each tab, there could be subtabs grouping results under each domain. This would make searching the web a much less frustrating experience.

whitepaint 6y ago

> their search degrades in quality Are you 100% confident that this is the case? I personally have a completely different experience (their search results have gotten much better than they used to).

Judgmentality 6y ago
Google search results have been gradually getting worse for me as well.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  Personally I've felt that useful results have been pretty consistently on the first page for a while, and some of the specialized widgets have even improved that, but over the last ~3 years more and more of that has become an exercise of dodging the ads to find the actual result. Feels like the frog getting boiled.
- version_five 6y ago
  For me it depends on what I'm searching. For more obscure stuff, I find google better. Sometimes I accidentally use bing (it's a default on one of my machines) and I usually eventually have a "oh right, this isn't Google" moment when I can't find what I'm looking for. OTOH, if it's anything that has been SEO'd, I find google has gotten really bad. Last week I tried to google for what frying pan to buy, and everything I saw was a un-trustworthy ad. Incidentally, it's the same for python: you google some very common thing like how to sort a list, the first few links are spam (but the docs are still high in the list usually). You google something obscure and usually get the relevant stack overflow first.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nonameiguess 6y ago

Looks like YouTube and Google Cloud Platform drove the gains, not search.

nr2x 6y ago

Assistant has gotten mind-blowingly good, I recently started using it after having given up on Siri and the amount of lead Google has on complex spoken queries is insane. Otherwise, DDG is basically privacy chrome on top of Bing's results.

tryptophan 6y ago

Im kind of amazed at the lack of search engine innovation. Why can't we explicitly rate results and have them be personalized to us(goodbye quora and wikihow)? Why can't we add tags to results, such as "ad bloated" and have that be taken into account for rankings? It seems like such an obvious next step, but google is too rich for its own good at this point and doesnt need to do anything.

wolpoli 6y ago
For the last three decades, search engines have been presenting results in descending order. While a lot of innovations have happened with the sorting algorithm, it hasn't fundamentally move forward from that. From a user point of view, it's frustrating to look through the result, finding a list of ads, a commercial site, a few videos, a definition, a wikipedia link, a commercial site, and so on. Instead, users have a pretty good idea of what kind of result they want. It would make it so much easier if the results are grouped together. For example, a search engine could group results under individual tabs, separating results from user generated content sites, forums, commerce and commercial blogs, Wikipedia, content farms, and so on. Within each tab, there could be subtabs grouping results under each domain. This would make searching the web a much less frustrating experience.