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What Google search isn’t showing you
- narrator 5y agoNo love for http://Yandex.com http://Yandex.com ? It's the only search engine I know of that actually answers the question when searching for "what countries are using ivermectin" instead of giving out a bunch of anti-ivermectin editorials.
- emptysongglass 5y agoHow much longer is Yandex going to exist? Aren't they at risk of default?
- lynguist 5y agoI want to add to the discussion that whenever I search for any kind of discussion topic on the internet I search on Google and add "-reddit" to it! I hate the reddit-style low-effort void anti-discussions. It's unreadable. I find every forum in the whole Internet better than reddit. The voting system turns everything into a one line joke and there are no founded opinions.
- batperson 5y agoInteresting, I do the opposite and add "reddit" to most of my searches.
- blakesterz 5y ago"The search engine’s stated mission is to “show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of.” Its results, based on its own custom algorithm and data gathering, prioritize text-based Web sites that lack ads, mobile support, encryption, and other features that qualify as good S.E.O. “Google punishes sites that aren’t up to speed with modern Web technologies,”" Does Marginalia really prioritize sites that lack encryption?? The other things seem like good ideas, but don't we all want to encourage encryption?
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoi've never understood "encrypt everything". Your ISP still knows the domain you're going to, encrypted or not. It might not be able to see the specific pages/URLs if it's SSL. But some sights just aren't... sensitive. They don't have logins, they don't have user-data stored. I don't get the point. Does it matter if zombo.com really has an SSL cert?
- mancerayder 5y agoThe attitude below: "Well, duh, what did you expect, I'm sick of these HN posts" is a depressing, cynical take. Google is the search engine, and if a business, or a thought, or a piece of information, doesn't show up there, then it's invisible to 95% of the (Western) human population that doesn't use duckduckgo or Bing or whatever failed alternatives there are.* I do find it very amusing that I'm not the only one that uses reddit as a keyword in search results, because the results are almost spot on. * - Yes, I use duckduckgo as my default, but use g! a lot because the results aren't superb for tech items, and it too falls prey to SEO type manipulation with dubious stuff at the top, in my experience.
- mediumsmart 5y ago'Ukraine on fire' Google gets you nowhere near a link to that film at this moment because Google is not a search engine. DDG has it as the 3rd result so you can decide for yourself.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Seirdy 5y agoI'm glad they brought up Marginalia; it's one of my favorite engines. Teclis[0] and Wiby[1] are similar contenders in the non-commercial search space. [0]: http://teclis.com/ http://teclis.com/ [1]: https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ What the article mentioned about the influence of PageRank definitely rings true. An interesting variation is used by the Secret Search Engine Lab's CashRank algorithm[2]. [2]: http://www.secretsearchenginelabs.com/tech/cashrank.php http://www.secretsearchenginelabs.com/tech/cashrank.php I listed a bunch of engines with their own indexes, FWIW: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoit'd be nice if these could be worked into SearX
- zzo38computer 5y agoIt look like good, but perhaps should have some more options (that can be specified as a part of the search query text), and documenting these features. Some possibilities would include filters (by file format, domain name, scheme, etc), sort order, excluding, etc. There are two menus for options ("Popular Sites", "Blogocentric Eigenvector", "Both Algorithms", "Experimental", "Allow JS", "Deny JS", "Require JS"), but does not explain them very well. (For example, I might want the search engine to not execute any scripts in web pages to determine their text, but if the text works when scripts are disabled that it can still be included in the search results (even if the web page has scripts, as long as those web pages work correctly even when scripts are disabled).) Also, they have some documentation using Gemini format. I have a Gemini viewer in my computer, but it won't use it because of the "Content-disposition" response header.
- cryptolake 5y agoI don't know, why i wasn't aware of these search engine, i'm having a blast discovering personal website, this is amazing.
- aghilmort 5y agolist is great -- & knew you'd done your homework when saw Marginalia - also a fave run search startup, Breeze, so have a similar list and I was like damn :)
- undersuit 5y ago>When I recently Googled “best toaster” on my phone When I search for an opinion...
- caaqil 5y agoThis "Google Search sucks" discussion is officially getting boring. We get it, it sucks; we already know. It's been discussed ad nauseum. This article is particularly bad because it's a rehash of (and commentary on) content that already appeared here, with no significant new information (much like the original article it's commenting on, which was also a rehash of HN threads and comments made by people popular with the HN crowd).
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoby the time it's boring for us technical folks, it's just beginning to penetrate in mainstream discussion
- midhhhthrow 5y agoI’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve done so many fairly basic searches and gotten back absolutely awful results. I imagine most of the web isn’t even accessible through. This is an important topic that deserves even more discussion, especially since there isn’t even another solution yet
- teknopaul 5y agoThis. The Internet needs search. I took a screenshot the first time Google showed only ads and no organic search. It's critical to the functioning of the free market that consumers have accurate information. The fact that Google is crap is less important. The fact that Google squashes competition and there is no unbiased search engine, is of national interest. Current situation is because of a combination of Google's monopoly abuse and the fact that US govt does not recognise that search engines are(is) the entry point to a significant market. If you believe in the free market, then the state of Google search indicates huge inefficiency. A lot of people treat the term free market to mean "I, personally, am free to get rich, however I can, at the expense of everyone else." Which is pretty much the opposite of what it really means. It really means "you are free to join the market and compete on equal terms." Under those conditions best product/price should win.
- 5y ago
- Nursie 5y ago>> those who want to know what a “genuine real-life human being” thinks of a certain product Are SoL, as they say on the internet, because more or less any avenue where a genuine person can leave a review can also be used by a marketer to help steer you to the 'right' choice, their product. I'm still with Bill Hicks on this one.
- soared 5y agoTyping “Reddit” after your query will get the job done quite easily :)
- ramraj07 5y agoUntil (which is already happening) marketers start using Reddit to game their recommendations. Next it’ll be hacker news. So basically it’s the red queen thing in the internet.
- whatshisface 5y agoThere's nothing wrong with the red queen thing, animals keep breeding even in the throes of it. Spam is impossible to block but also largely blocked, same story.
- Gigachad 5y agoThey have been for ages but marketers are less able to control the narrative and SEO optimise for reddit.
- jimmaswell 5y agoIf anyone wants a real answer for "best toaster": http://automaticbeyondbelief.org/ http://automaticbeyondbelief.org/
- pid-1 5y agoThe best toaster is having no toaster. Just eat "raw" bread, it's faster and likely healthier.
- alexb_ 5y agoProbably the most HN response to this question possible. "Well you wouldn't need x if you just did Y instead, which is just better"
- Akronymus 5y agoAnd the technology connections video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
- edgyquant 5y agoI bet it still can’t make a toaster strudel that isn’t either burned or cold in the middle.
- jahewson 5y agoJust make your own toaster. https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toas...
- onion2k 5y agoI bet it can't too, because "toaster strudel" cannot ever work in a toaster. A toaster is specifically designed not to cook bread all the way through. The idea is to caramelise (toast) the outside of a slice of bread to the point where it's golden and crisp while still leaving the inside fluffy and bread-like. Good toast is fundamentally opposed to what a "toaster strudel" is. To make good strudel you should heat it through consistently in a conventional over and then grill it.
- anonred 5y ago> Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should. Cherry-picked quotes aside, this part of the article really did make me roll my eyes. Users self-censoring searches to a _single website_ because the rest of Google’s results are so unusable is somehow a feature, not a bug. The same way that Google improperly handling quoted searches and returning pages _without that exact string_ is somehow a feature, not a bug.
- Barrin92 5y ago> because the rest of Google’s results are so unusable I would suggest the correct framing here is "the rest of the internet is unusable". How else is Google supposed to guess you want a personal opinion from Reddit other than... typing it in the search query? Google is a search engine, not God. If you want an answer from a particular source you're going to have to specify that, Google can't know if you want Wikipedia, or Quora, or a news article or a TikTok video or one of the other thousand pages that plenty of users might be interested in. The internet has exploded in size, so has the diversity of legitimate sources, the search engines are hardly at fault.
- masswerk 5y agoI would suggest an even more correct framing as in "the rest of the internet as discoverable by Google is unusable". On a more serious side, I think, we may need to have another dimension to web search, regarding the type of origin, namely "conversational" versus "commercial" (to be applied to both text and image search). Something like this would provide a more generalized solution to the problem, instead of pushing one of the more commonly known origins to become yet another monopoly.
- aemreunal 5y ago> The same way that Google improperly handling quoted searches and returning pages _without that exact string_ is somehow a feature, not a bug. Couldn't find it now but that was refuted by Danny Sullivan (I think) in an HN thread about the Google search results quality. They gave a pretty convincing explanation of why that may happen (spoiler: it has something to do with the tokenization of words on the website) and I, for one, believed them. *Edit:* Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382
- usui 5y agoI tried their "Best toaster" query and one thing I want to say is just how hilarious it is that "best x"-of-anything webpage HAS to have $CURRENT_YEAR in the title. Yelp does something similar to its Google search results. As if nothing good or the best in its breed ever came out from $PREVIOUS_YEAR or any previous years before that! Tell me you're a garbage SEO website without telling me, just slap on "in $CURRENT_YEAR" or use some capital letters, I love how easy it is to tell the wheat from the chaff! edit: someone with a more negative outlook/rant than my glee https://reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/qowtws/cmv_seo_and_clickbaitish_headlinestitles_have/ https://reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/qowtws/cmv_seo_an...
- mkr-hn 5y agoBest toaster: https://shop.panasonic.com/kitchen-and-home/kitchen-appliances/toaster-ovens/nb-g110p https://shop.panasonic.com/kitchen-and-home/kitchen-applianc... It is, in fact, a 20+ year old design that's had some minor updates but is still essentially the same as the one it replaced.
- Akronymus 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y Toasters were IMO a basically solved problem.
- edgyquant 5y agoI just have one of the bread toasters with two slots. It was like 12$ and I can’t imagine a better toaster. What you’ve linked to is a toaster oven, which isn’t what Americans tend to think of when we hear “toaster.”
- mkr-hn 5y agoI'm American and don't think I know anyone who uses that kind of toaster. Lots of variety of experience in this country.
- noahtallen 5y ago
- fouc 5y agoI notice this especially in Google Maps. Sometimes I want to search for things like "cafe" or "hotel" and get a list of all the actual matches nearby. Even for buildings that show up on the map itself when you zoom in. But no, google maps search has to get all clever, hide results, and only show "relevant" results. It's super annoying when I search "hotels" and all I get is the equivalent of an agoda.com or booking.com search, when I wanted to actually see all hotel buildings, including offline ones.
- metanonsense 5y agoIf relevant only was relevant. It happens so often to me that I search for something like "restaurant" and get top results 150 kilometers away.
- Gareth321 5y agoThat's because the "relevant" results pay Google to be "relevant." It's definitely getting worse over time.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI don't think that's on Google. The hotel industry is super heavily targeted with SEO spam. They're almost on par with online casinos in how much effort they put into manipulating search engines.
- hackernewds 5y agoBut it is Google that sets the rules for how and what is sorted. SEO is downstream
- marginalia_nu 5y agoNo I mean like virtually every document pertaining to hotels is search engine spam. It's very hard to actually find documents that aren't in this category. The hotel booking industry is extremely shady and evidently has pretty deep pockets to be able to afford literally registering hundreds if not thousands of domain names to attempt to manipulate search engines.
- roflc0ptic 5y agoOn a tangential note, I recently started wondering about how legal brothels work, where prostitution is legal, what do legal brothels charge, etc, and google was supremely unhelpful. I don't know if these things are just so shady they don't have websites, or I'm looking in e.g. Germany and it's not in English, but I imagine American sex tourism is probably decently sized market. Dunno. Strong suspicion the morality police were preventing me from sating my abstract curiosity about sex work.
- psyc 5y agoThis sounds like a great example of where Reddit would be 100x more useful than Google's version of the web. There's no doubt in my mind that Google tries really hard to Disneyfy the web, unless you push it really hard not to.
- judge2020 5y agoSeems pretty useful to me[0,1], but this is google.com set to english. 0: https://i.judge.sh/WmhyQ/F_pp1uDoEG.png https://i.judge.sh/WmhyQ/F_pp1uDoEG.png 1: https://i.judge.sh/H1t5n/G_6H65oODP.png https://i.judge.sh/H1t5n/G_6H65oODP.png
- roflc0ptic 5y agoEh, wasn't clear - was looking for specific brothels.
- mhh__ 5y agoYou might just not be good at googling for that topic.
- cube00 5y agoIt's difficult when you're searching for something where there's money to be made because all those sites are fighting for the top and using all the tricks in the book do it. See also: blockchain.
- upsidesinclude 5y agoAh, the New Yorker. Just about a decade late
- windows2020 5y agoEveryone--note this moment. We're witnessing the fall of Google and Windows. Like IBM, it will take time to realize what happened. To some, it's obvious. But to others, it's all that's known.
- judge2020 5y agoI'm not sure IBM is doing too bad. Sure, they aren't the growth machine that is AAPL or MSFT, but relatively low PE for a tech company that's been valued at or above $100B for over 10 years is a pretty good success story. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IBM:NYSE?window=MAX https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IBM:NYSE?window=MAX
- executesorder66 5y agoBy "fall" I don't think they meant financially. Just in relevance.
- mhh__ 5y agoMeanwhile alphabet EPS is up 35% from last year.
- drpixie 5y agoYes - IBM used to be computers, as in average people genuinely considered them to be the same thing, like "Hoover" was more or less synonymous with vacuum cleaner. Google was functionally synonymous with "the web". No longer.
- scim-knox-twox 5y agoI recommend Kagi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756
- usui 5y agoIf I put in "best toasters", there's a section called listicles that it lumps all such articles into. What a great feature.
- Seirdy 5y agoKagi's interesting. On the surface, it seems like a metasearch engine. But upon closer inspection, two of its sources--its news and "non-commercial" Teclis indexes--are actually developed by the Kagi team, and can be used independently on their own dedicated sites. I do like the ability to boost and downrank certain domains myself. Its TinyGem platform also looks like an interesting "social bookmarking" approach that's more minimal and focused than other mainstream solutions. I'm currently working on a way to POSSE[0] my public bookmarks to TinyGem. [0]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- dmje 5y agoI've been using Kagi for a few weeks now. Unlike when I trialled ddg, and found about 90% of my searches ended up being !g, I'm finding Kagi results to be genuinely excellent. The "lens" functionality which lets you gone searches to a subset of site is really excellent and genuinely useful. Plus you can remove sites from results, too. I'm really optimistic about where it's going. And yes, they have a "pay for it" model which reassures me they're thinking about the future.
- ikt 5y ago> Unlike when I trialled ddg, and found about 90% of my searches ended up being !g How long ago did you try DDG and do you have some examples of searches that didn't work on DDG but did on Google?
- thematrixturtle 5y agoI filled out a survey for them, and the suggested pricing scheme seems out of whack though: $120/year is going to be a complete non-starter for mass adoption.
- Razengan 5y ago> Google messed up the internet because they don't allow installing other websites' searches easily. We had an opensearchdescription.xml for literally most of the websites, and somehow Browsers (including Firefox and Safari) managed to mess that up. I’ve long thought that search should be provided by individual websites and cached/indexed by ISPs, like DNS etc. You search for “foo”, your nearest Search Protocol Service (or called whatever) hosted on the ISP looks at all the content served by the ISP in the past which contained “foo”, then it asks those web servers for a detailed index for all occurrences of “foo” on their site. If none found, query the next nearest search servers. Search could and should definitely be decentralized.
- caymanjim 5y agoThis would be even easier to game than Google SEO.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago> Search could and should definitely be decentralized. While looking things up in an index partitions fairly well, search queries are typically extremely underspecified, so what you end up with is potentially millions of results. This is why you need a search ranking, like this is not negotiable. If you don't have this, your results will be hot garbage. The crux being that this partitions in an orthogonal axis to document retreival. If you don't solve this problem, you basically end up with YaCy. It's peer-to-peer, but it's slow as molasses and the results just aren't very good.
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.ph/J4v6T https://archive.ph/J4v6T http://web.archive.org/web/20220311040818/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/what-google-search-isnt-showing-you http://web.archive.org/web/20220311040818/https://www.newyor...
- ankit219 5y agoThis is a meta post. A discussion rose up on HN, so much that people at New Yorker took notice, cited HN, and that article is posted here too. A couple of observations since I last wrote my thoughts on this (last time i said this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348492) : - People who work in tech do not constitute the avg internet user now a days who uses Google to search. Naturally, google evolved to serve the lowest denominator by default, and that would probably not be satisfying for advanced users. (which opens up space for a new competitor I think?) Half the searches are when people are asking basic questions - hence they do not even result in a click. I have searched multiple times for a random calculation because google is faster than opening a calculator on mac. - Adding site:reddit.com is a feature, and it's a utility of the engine that Google is allowing us to concentrate search to a subset. Same goes with many other operators, it's just another phrase. Ideally, there could be a wrapper which does these things for us, but I doubt it would work well. That does not mean Google search is dying, but more like we are now realizing the dependency we had on Google and the laziness when it comes to finding things on the internet.
- andromeduck 5y agowhat do you suggest? Bring back advanced search? Or just disable the training wheels.
- UweSchmidt 5y agoLooking for an exact phrase (with "quotes") and limiting search to a specific site (maybe assisted by UI) is not difficult for the "avg internet users". It was possible to find just the most obscure and surprising information with a good search, and Google had the SEO spammers and content clowns beat for many years. Now people use "site:reddit.com" to limit the results to a space that is moderated by humans and not completely commercialized. The loss of Old Google might be worse for humanity than the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago"Hacker News does not represent the totality of everyone who searches," he said. "Not all of them are going to be happy if all of our results are a hundred-per-cent Reddit." How would he know whether they are/would be happy or not. The HN contigent is the only one that actually gives meaningful feedback. It seems like Google does not want that feedback. Something about Danny Sullivan becoming a spokesperson for Google reminds me of when Microsoft bought out Mark Russinovich.
- lizardactivist 5y agoI haven't used Google directly in years, but here on HN I frequently get the idea it's going downhills. What would be good to have is an independent search engine that both works well, and which is not backed by anonymized Bing or Google results.
- richardfey 5y agoIt feels like the New Yorker should pay royalties to Dmitri Brereton? It's a slightly better written rehash of the same points, including the mention of founders' concern about tension between useful search results and profitable ones.
- zerof1l 5y agoI thought I was the only one who started adding "Reddit" to some of my searches when I'm trying to do some research and learn about products.
- nofunsir 5y agoThis site is maliciously messing with Reader Mode.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bambax 5y ago> When I recently Googled “best toaster”... Well if you google "best toaster" then yes, Google will (and should) show you ads and sponsored posts and articles that have been seo-ed to death, because it's a meaningless search. Google isn't in the business of assessing toasters' quality. Google is in the business of finding information relevant to your search. But relevancy goes both ways: you need to search for something specific to find it. "When will I die" will not point to anything interesting. "Pancreatic cancer symptoms" might.
- dazc 5y agoNot defending Google, but there are hundreds of online retailers that sell toasters [and other such utility items] and it really is an opportunity they are missing by not having a page that addresses such queries whilst allowing 'others' to do it instead.
- dorianmariefr 5y agoCuisinart CPT-180 Classic Toaster
- alexb_ 5y agoOf course. Most people have figured out by now that "best toaster" will only get you horrible SEOd sites written by robots. This is why "best toaster site:reddit.com/r/toasters" gives you the actual best answer.
- esperent 5y agoIt's not in any way a meaningless search and one of the main goals of decent search engine should be to figure out common shorthand searches like this and show meaningful results for them. When I search "best toaster" it's shorthand for "show me roundup reviews of toasters + forums where people discuss toasters + very highly reviewed toasters on shopping sites". It's not shorthand for "show me loads of ads and SEO bullshit".
- bambax 5y agoOk, you may be right. But my point is that "best toaster" doesn't mean anything per se; do you want a fast toaster? Durable? Low energy consumption? Elegant? Large capacity? There are many characteristics to any device and the "best" one depends on personal preferences. What's the "best car" for example? Does that even mean anything? I don't think a generalist search engine should be used for shopping. You don't need Google to read reviews on Amazon and form your own opinion, again, depending on your own preferences. People use Google as an oracle and then complain when that fails. But Google is a search engine. It's not the Pope.