6 ms·

Despite the consensus of Google from people who know about alternatives or ways to avoid it, Google is still the most mainstream and de-facto search engine in a

Despite the consensus of Google from people who know about alternatives or ways to avoid it, Google is still the most mainstream and de-facto search engine in atleast the English speaking world, and is the top most visited website in the world. I wish people would stop saying something is "dying" when they personally dont like it anymore or don't use it as much, you don't speak for the world.

dcminter 5y ago
Betteridge's law tells us the answer is no. But there is a real phenomenon - Google is becoming less useful. It used to be that a challenger would get no traction because why would one bother when Google always popped out good answers to searches. Now... I'd at least try something new to skip all the makeuseof, wikihow, and similar dross without having to explicitly constrain it to reddit. So no, it's not dying. But this is how it could die.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  Betteridge's law is for news headlines. Ask HN posts are supposed to end with a question mark
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  >Google is becoming less useful. Exactly. I wonder how a person could construct a highly curated google search. Not just blocking of sites but also a bit of parsing on the site for disposal purposes. Could it all be done on a local machine? On a related note, as eBay became more of an all-purpose webstore I'll tend to use it rather than Amazon search to find products. The actual purchase, if it happens, is wherever.
  - dcminter 5y ago
    I honestly wonder if there might be room in the market for a paid-membership search engine that included only a curated set of sites. You'd lose all the long-tail quality stuff (e.g. my own write-only blog :P ), but also all the garbage. It might be worth it. I don't think you could kill Google with that, but it might make a viable lifestyle business. Edit: and I meant to add - I was looking for info on a specific Synology device the other day. Google turned up Synology's own website (good) and a zillion crappy affiliate-link-spam sites. eBay and Reddit were the best sources of info when I sighed and started constraining the search with site: prefixes.
    - kingsuper20 5y ago
      >I honestly wonder if there might be room in the market for a paid-membership search engine that included only a curated set of sites. I know basically nothing of the mechanics of search, although I expect that a boutique search engine would have trouble accessing the guts of third party sites as they don't want to get hammered by the world. I did just think of an interesting specialty engine. If you had fast access to the full library on libgen or sci-hub, a person could produce a pretty interesting set of abilities.
      - dcminter 5y ago
        I know enough to know I don't know much :) But there's plenty of documentation out there. My impression is that if you're not dealing with people trying to game the algorithm then it's all a lot simpler. As to data sources - with a constrained set of sites the creation of custom adapters should be do-able I'd have thought. Not that I have any plans. Maybe I should though :) Edit: come to think of it, it's practically an internet law that stuff you think of already exists. So maybe I should just post an Ask HN for the link to the search engine in question...
        kingsuper20 5y ago
        An interesting meta-problem comes with success of a curated search engine. The sites it actually supports would themselves have to be curated as otherwise the camel's nose gets back into the tent.
        dcminter 5y ago
        Yeah, exactly. Either not successful enough to game or... Nice problem to have? Maybe? (I have similar thoughts about diacussion fora fwiw)
- lumost 5y ago
  This is going into technical documentation as well. Even for tensorflow/keras related questions on specific methods the tensorflow documentation is at position ~5-10. Sites that literally just copy a random version of the docs are ranked higher...
  - dcminter 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm learning Rust at the moment. Searching on that is ... pretty good. Searching on Java stuff turns up soooo much crap. Presumably because the search volume is vast enough to make infospamming worthwhile :'(
    - RhysU 5y ago
      It would be interesting to study how the uniqueness of new programming language names and the superior technical search results they bring about causes programmers to adopt new languages as time wears on.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    > Sites that literally just copy a random version of the docs are ranked higher... Recently I put something together in Common Lisp, a language I’m a novice at, so I often had to search. The first result returned in all my Google searches was a copycat website. Someone had clearly taken some previous high-quality Lisp reference and extensively rewritten it to avoid copyright violation, then loaded it with SEO. However, their English was rather poor and so this rewrite was a pain to read. I would love a search engine that would allow me to zap certain domains and hide them permanently from results, but at the same time without retaining information about me for advertising purposes.
    - freediver 5y ago
      I am building one. We are in private beta. Details in my profile.
- tmaly 5y ago
  Google search might be becoming less useful, but YouTube search is becoming more useful in my opinion.
xhkkffbf 5y ago
Well, to be fair, the headline is not trying to speak for the world. It's polling HN which isn't exactly the world, but it's certain a group of very smart people with deep technical experience. I think Google is dying because they're including more and more adds on the pages. The ads used to be separate and distinctive. No longer. They're often ads for competitors or other distractions. It's just annoying and it gets in the way.
traveler01 5y ago
I tried to use another search engines for a while. Tried Ectosia, tried Duckduckgo, even gave Bing a chance. Google just gives me better results...
- caturopath 5y ago
  I find that Bing's results are on par with Google's, but all of the others are basically useless for me.
  - ToFab123 5y ago
    The trick to get Bing to give you the best results are to change your region (on bing.com) to United States. There are tons of features that are only enabled if you are in the US.
  - traveler01 5y ago
    Probably because both use the information they're getting from you to actually improve their services. And that's (probably) fine, since you're giving away your information to get a better service. I want privacy but I also want good services, Duckduckgo for example gives me a good privacy service but its searches have nothing to do with what I wanted to find.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Google is still the best for very Australia specific searches, and still better than others that scrape from Google. But for most scenarios DDG suits me.
- eitland 5y ago
  Googles search results seems to depend a lot on who you are. At the moment I sometimes get better, almost good results which is maybe even more infuriating as it proves they can if they want to, they just don't care. DuckDuckGo.com is reliably mediocre but annoy me less and it is easier to jump to Google that from google to DDG.
  - 5y ago
tolbish 5y ago
People can use the word "dying" in many legitimate ways. A popular product can be dying if it is degrading in quality.
runawaybottle 5y ago
Tech vanguards don’t really get what global scale is. There’s nothing fringe or niche about any of these major products. Your mom and dad use this stuff. Dead to us means absolutely nothing at this point.
stevenicr 5y ago
Fair points. I get your point about google being popular for the millions of phone using consumers that are too busy caring about other things than to change the defaults that are being sold to them, using "dying" and "google" in a sentence when speaking for webmasters / people who have web sites - is certainly a thing though. I said some time ago that google is to become the new yellow pages, and apparently last year more than half the web searches got zero clicks via google. More and more people are becoming aware of privacy concerns and how to do things without big F and G. I know this is not at a tipping point for google, but look at the whatsapp privacy debacle and how a good percentage of users can be lost in just a month. I see more and more people skipping google and going straight to youtube/reddit/amazon / etc.. I expect more and more people to continue to 'search' starting with other portals. Now I do see google keeping dominance with local search / maps - mainly because people/businesses tend to update their google local listing as being the most important (as opposed to people updating their fbook listing, which for most, I believe is easier.) this is partially do to the default with android. Should an Msoft like antitrust thing force removal of gmaps / gmail / similar - like the courts demanded of IE with msoft long ago.. fbook could take the place for most current 'yellow pages like' information. Sure there could be places for others to jump in, especially if open maps gamified with foursqaure - combined with visa/mc rewards.. so yeah, big things are possible. Also, I wonder how much of that is inflated by defaults on iOs / Android, including apps like maps / mail.. Also after seeing dozens of people "search" for google, by typing google into the search bar, before googling it.. I think it's fair to say the results are a bit skewed. Anyhow, google is still looking more and more like the yellow pages - this is good in some ways, however as for web site owners who are not in the top 3 of g search results, and especially those not in the top 10 - google is less important than ever, and actually it's existence and it's ads are a detriment. I expect more web sites will be catering to Bing and even instagram / fbook / reddit, etc... as this happens more and more, and google continues to censor and keep clicks more and more - I believe a few anti-google / hiding info from google protest kind of things couple have a similar paradigm shift that occurred with myspace. I also think we will see a more divided net as whole not too long from now - different rules for different countries and states will continue and all that. Anyhow I do believe google is the new yellow pages, and right now they are the most used 'not-the-Real yellow pages' - so they get the most money for ads and people find their local space important. Yet google as many of us once knew it, has been dying a slow not-so-painful death for a long time, and I don't see it going back to the cool it once was. Sterile, yes.. cool.. not so much. I know, small data points don't speak for the world. But what number of of 'former 100% google users' need to change to alternative sources before it's okay for people to say 'for many, google has been dying' ? I for one used to teach people how to use google.. these days I teach people to use alternatives and why. https://search.slashdot.org/story/21/03/23/2015235/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click https://search.slashdot.org/story/21/03/23/2015235/in-2020-t...

dcminter 5y ago

Betteridge's law tells us the answer is no. But there is a real phenomenon - Google is becoming less useful. It used to be that a challenger would get no traction because why would one bother when Google always popped out good answers to searches. Now... I'd at least try something new to skip all the makeuseof, wikihow, and similar dross without having to explicitly constrain it to reddit. So no, it's not dying. But this is how it could die.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago
Betteridge's law is for news headlines. Ask HN posts are supposed to end with a question mark
kingsuper20 5y ago
>Google is becoming less useful. Exactly. I wonder how a person could construct a highly curated google search. Not just blocking of sites but also a bit of parsing on the site for disposal purposes. Could it all be done on a local machine? On a related note, as eBay became more of an all-purpose webstore I'll tend to use it rather than Amazon search to find products. The actual purchase, if it happens, is wherever.
- dcminter 5y ago
  I honestly wonder if there might be room in the market for a paid-membership search engine that included only a curated set of sites. You'd lose all the long-tail quality stuff (e.g. my own write-only blog :P ), but also all the garbage. It might be worth it. I don't think you could kill Google with that, but it might make a viable lifestyle business. Edit: and I meant to add - I was looking for info on a specific Synology device the other day. Google turned up Synology's own website (good) and a zillion crappy affiliate-link-spam sites. eBay and Reddit were the best sources of info when I sighed and started constraining the search with site: prefixes.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    >I honestly wonder if there might be room in the market for a paid-membership search engine that included only a curated set of sites. I know basically nothing of the mechanics of search, although I expect that a boutique search engine would have trouble accessing the guts of third party sites as they don't want to get hammered by the world. I did just think of an interesting specialty engine. If you had fast access to the full library on libgen or sci-hub, a person could produce a pretty interesting set of abilities.
    - dcminter 5y ago
      I know enough to know I don't know much :) But there's plenty of documentation out there. My impression is that if you're not dealing with people trying to game the algorithm then it's all a lot simpler. As to data sources - with a constrained set of sites the creation of custom adapters should be do-able I'd have thought. Not that I have any plans. Maybe I should though :) Edit: come to think of it, it's practically an internet law that stuff you think of already exists. So maybe I should just post an Ask HN for the link to the search engine in question...
      - kingsuper20 5y ago
        An interesting meta-problem comes with success of a curated search engine. The sites it actually supports would themselves have to be curated as otherwise the camel's nose gets back into the tent.
        dcminter 5y ago
        Yeah, exactly. Either not successful enough to game or... Nice problem to have? Maybe? (I have similar thoughts about diacussion fora fwiw)
lumost 5y ago
This is going into technical documentation as well. Even for tensorflow/keras related questions on specific methods the tensorflow documentation is at position ~5-10. Sites that literally just copy a random version of the docs are ranked higher...
- dcminter 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm learning Rust at the moment. Searching on that is ... pretty good. Searching on Java stuff turns up soooo much crap. Presumably because the search volume is vast enough to make infospamming worthwhile :'(
  - RhysU 5y ago
    It would be interesting to study how the uniqueness of new programming language names and the superior technical search results they bring about causes programmers to adopt new languages as time wears on.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  > Sites that literally just copy a random version of the docs are ranked higher... Recently I put something together in Common Lisp, a language I’m a novice at, so I often had to search. The first result returned in all my Google searches was a copycat website. Someone had clearly taken some previous high-quality Lisp reference and extensively rewritten it to avoid copyright violation, then loaded it with SEO. However, their English was rather poor and so this rewrite was a pain to read. I would love a search engine that would allow me to zap certain domains and hide them permanently from results, but at the same time without retaining information about me for advertising purposes.
  - freediver 5y ago
    I am building one. We are in private beta. Details in my profile.
tmaly 5y ago
Google search might be becoming less useful, but YouTube search is becoming more useful in my opinion.

xhkkffbf 5y ago

Well, to be fair, the headline is not trying to speak for the world. It's polling HN which isn't exactly the world, but it's certain a group of very smart people with deep technical experience. I think Google is dying because they're including more and more adds on the pages. The ads used to be separate and distinctive. No longer. They're often ads for competitors or other distractions. It's just annoying and it gets in the way.

traveler01 5y ago

I tried to use another search engines for a while. Tried Ectosia, tried Duckduckgo, even gave Bing a chance. Google just gives me better results...

caturopath 5y ago
I find that Bing's results are on par with Google's, but all of the others are basically useless for me.
- ToFab123 5y ago
  The trick to get Bing to give you the best results are to change your region (on bing.com) to United States. There are tons of features that are only enabled if you are in the US.
- traveler01 5y ago
  Probably because both use the information they're getting from you to actually improve their services. And that's (probably) fine, since you're giving away your information to get a better service. I want privacy but I also want good services, Duckduckgo for example gives me a good privacy service but its searches have nothing to do with what I wanted to find.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Google is still the best for very Australia specific searches, and still better than others that scrape from Google. But for most scenarios DDG suits me.
eitland 5y ago
Googles search results seems to depend a lot on who you are. At the moment I sometimes get better, almost good results which is maybe even more infuriating as it proves they can if they want to, they just don't care. DuckDuckGo.com is reliably mediocre but annoy me less and it is easier to jump to Google that from google to DDG.
- 5y ago

tolbish 5y ago

People can use the word "dying" in many legitimate ways. A popular product can be dying if it is degrading in quality.

runawaybottle 5y ago

Tech vanguards don’t really get what global scale is. There’s nothing fringe or niche about any of these major products. Your mom and dad use this stuff. Dead to us means absolutely nothing at this point.

stevenicr 5y ago

Fair points. I get your point about google being popular for the millions of phone using consumers that are too busy caring about other things than to change the defaults that are being sold to them, using "dying" and "google" in a sentence when speaking for webmasters / people who have web sites - is certainly a thing though. I said some time ago that google is to become the new yellow pages, and apparently last year more than half the web searches got zero clicks via google. More and more people are becoming aware of privacy concerns and how to do things without big F and G. I know this is not at a tipping point for google, but look at the whatsapp privacy debacle and how a good percentage of users can be lost in just a month. I see more and more people skipping google and going straight to youtube/reddit/amazon / etc.. I expect more and more people to continue to 'search' starting with other portals. Now I do see google keeping dominance with local search / maps - mainly because people/businesses tend to update their google local listing as being the most important (as opposed to people updating their fbook listing, which for most, I believe is easier.) this is partially do to the default with android. Should an Msoft like antitrust thing force removal of gmaps / gmail / similar - like the courts demanded of IE with msoft long ago.. fbook could take the place for most current 'yellow pages like' information. Sure there could be places for others to jump in, especially if open maps gamified with foursqaure - combined with visa/mc rewards.. so yeah, big things are possible. Also, I wonder how much of that is inflated by defaults on iOs / Android, including apps like maps / mail.. Also after seeing dozens of people "search" for google, by typing google into the search bar, before googling it.. I think it's fair to say the results are a bit skewed. Anyhow, google is still looking more and more like the yellow pages - this is good in some ways, however as for web site owners who are not in the top 3 of g search results, and especially those not in the top 10 - google is less important than ever, and actually it's existence and it's ads are a detriment. I expect more web sites will be catering to Bing and even instagram / fbook / reddit, etc... as this happens more and more, and google continues to censor and keep clicks more and more - I believe a few anti-google / hiding info from google protest kind of things couple have a similar paradigm shift that occurred with myspace. I also think we will see a more divided net as whole not too long from now - different rules for different countries and states will continue and all that. Anyhow I do believe google is the new yellow pages, and right now they are the most used 'not-the-Real yellow pages' - so they get the most money for ads and people find their local space important. Yet google as many of us once knew it, has been dying a slow not-so-painful death for a long time, and I don't see it going back to the cool it once was. Sterile, yes.. cool.. not so much. I know, small data points don't speak for the world. But what number of of 'former 100% google users' need to change to alternative sources before it's okay for people to say 'for many, google has been dying' ? I for one used to teach people how to use google.. these days I teach people to use alternatives and why. https://search.slashdot.org/story/21/03/23/2015235/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click https://search.slashdot.org/story/21/03/23/2015235/in-2020-t...