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Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

• skilled 4y ago
  I honestly don’t understand why W3Schools is a top site in Google. I blocked it after I realized all the site provides is a few lines of code snippets that supposedly explain how a certain CSS function works. Even with activity tracking enabled, Google thinks I am searching for one-liners opposed to in-depth articles.
• millytexas12 4y ago
  [dead]
• millytexas12 4y ago
  [dead]
• belter 4y ago
  Still broken after 7 months. "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730
  • WestCoastJustin 4y ago
    It's correct for me. What are you getting? Edit, yes I'm wrong, did a mental s/mars/moon/ without noticing.
    • drusepth 4y ago
      I get July 20, 1969. Based on the results that follow, I assume that is correct.
      • cookiengineer 4y ago
        It is not. There was no human on Mars (yet) and that's the point of the question, proving that google's ML approach will recorrect and reinterpret the question and give a wrong answer.
        • asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
          Although it's interesting to note that two presumably human commenters in this thread got that wrong. Maybe the Google results are more human than we would have guessed.
          • dekhn 4y ago
            it's more showing that the search engine isn't much better than bag-of-words model, and doesn't seem to "know" enough logic/reasoning to parse a sentence and determine that it's false because it says mars instead of the moon. BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks at Google left the building and got replaced with growth marketers.
            • htrp 4y ago
              >BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks at Google left the building and got replaced with growth marketers. Is this the transition they made to AI powered rankings a couple of years ago?
            • asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
              This narrative doesn't really ring true to me. In any case, if you're saying that this result indicates that the system is no better than a bag of words model, doesn't that indicate that humans are equally no better, considering the errors made by the two commenters in this thread? To me it just seems like a query that is likely to trip any imperfect entity up, since a "when" question usually implies that the event in question is known to have happened.
            • deleted 4y ago
              [deleted]
    • lhorie 4y ago
      The date when he landed on the moon. For mars, the correct answer is "never".
      • WestCoastJustin 4y ago
        Ah, I totally misread that. Hilarious. Brain auto-correct strikes again.
        • spookthesunset 4y ago
          I suspect this happened to a lot of people. I read it like “is the name misspelled?”
      • quickthrowman 4y ago
        Google search doesn’t know the correct answer, but it does know what people usually search for and returns an answer to that. It’s silently adjusting Mars to Moon before returning an answer.
  • jeffybefffy519 4y ago
    I love that Google shills will defend that Instant Answers is a good idea. Its just a disinformation weapon to bad guys.
  • tshaddox 4y ago
    "Broken" is a stretch. It gives the only result that could be reasonably expected by anyone making that query in good faith. If you're genuinely expecting a result like "never," then I wonder, would you also expect a result of "never" for the query "When did Neal Armstrong set foot on the Moon?" (notice the misspelling of his name)
    • lordnacho 4y ago
      For instance I saw that many Russian generals had been killed during the war. I wondered how many Ukrainian generals had been killed over the same period. Still can't figure it out. Lots and lots of articles about dead Russian generals. There's got to be some way where the search engine doesn't second guess you. You can never find the answer to something adjacent to a popular question with the current state of things.
      • ______-_-______ 4y ago
        From google's point of view, it's not second guessing you. It just associates words it decides are similar. You'd probably accept results for "dead generals", "killed generals", or "killed commanders". To google, dead = killed, generals = commanders, Russian = Ukranian, and moon = mars. It will expand the meanings of words until it has a page full of results and ads to show you.
      • PeterisP 4y ago
        Ukraine has repeatedly asserted that the HQs of all their major units are intact and as far as I know there have been no announcements of any Ukrainian generals killed and as far as I see even Russian media have not contested that. With some searching on the Russian internet, I find some assertions in Russian social media from early March that Lt Gen Юрій Содоль commanding the Ukraine Marines was killed, but not anything conclusive. So the number seems to be 0, or perhaps 1. And IMHO that isn't surprising, it's quite normal to fight major wars without many generals KIA, it is very surprising that Russia lost so many of them. Even on colonel level the losses seem to be small - I think that this https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-crisis/ukrainian-colonel-leading-anti-terrorist-operation-killed-in-mykolayiv-by-russian-forces-articleshow.html https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-cris... this was the first Ukrainian ground force colonel KIA that I recall, there was at least one air force colonel before that.
• ab_testing 4y ago
  I would say that I have the exact opposite experience. My company is moving from IE to Edge as the default browser and I search for code issues on Edge (Bing). I usually do not like the results and then have to manually type in Google.com > search for code issues as that gives me better results.
  • arccy 4y ago
    you should be able set the default search engine...
    • slaymaker1907 4y ago
      I like Edge, but the setting for the search engine is quite difficult to find despite being (I assume) one of the most common settings to change. You have to click on "Privacy, search, and services", then go the "Services" heading and click on the tiny "Address bar and search" box, and then you finally come to the page where it will let you change the default browser. Said "Address bar and search" box is also the very last item on the "Privacy, search, and services" page with no highlighting or emphasis whatsoever. Meanwhile for Firefox, I just have to go to "Search" and the setting for default search engine is immediately obvious. Chrome seems to have a similar layout as well despite being produced by a search engine company. Edge is my daily driver, but it still took me way longer to find the default search engine setting in Edge compared to Chrome and Firefox. Also, I have to compliment Firefox for making it really easy to search with a non-default search engine. I generally use Google, but I use Bing when searching for internal work stuff since it is integrated with O365 and SharePoint.
      • cogman10 4y ago
        > setting for the search engine is quite difficult to find Didn't seem all that difficult to me. I went to settings, put "search" in the search box. That highlighted in yellow "address bar and search" click "manage search engines" click, 3 dots next to google, click, make default, click. 4 clicks with guiding highlight throughout. Didn't even need to google how to google with edge. I'm still using FF. However, switching search engines in Edge seems about the same difficulty as doing the same in FF or chrome.
• asiachick 4y ago
  I kinda hate searching for recipes. It's always the same 3-5 sites who optimized for seo and , no idea what words to use here, for non European influenced cooking the recipes that surface at the top are often by people that really have no clue what authentic is. not a search example but it's like Jamie Oliver's fried rice
  • renewiltord 4y ago
    There was one which was no-bullshit and then a bunch of online people denounced it for removing all the story and context and stealing from PoC, etc.
  • aghilmort 4y ago
    we added recipe search to Breeze last month -- search for recipe name, ingredients, etc., click recipe tab in results -- would be curious if same / better / worse, etc. example -- mango avocado -> click recipe at https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado
  • python_bread 4y ago
• WestCoastJustin 4y ago
  An interesting observation is that over the years, I've sort of found that if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions, or I'm not thinking about the problem the right way. For example, you come up with some weird programming idea to solve a problem and no results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong path. This has been proved to me over and over again as sort of a canary in the search coal mine. Google still solves all my questions, if I'm asking the right questions, I guess is what I'm getting at.
  • BitwiseFool 4y ago
    >"if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions" I used to think this way too, but I've come to realize that Google has turned from a search engine that returns results based on my input to an answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query - usually with the intent of selling me something or returning SEO spam. I've also found that the old google-fu techniques are now so unreliable that they must have been deprecated. I can't tell you how often I use quotes in my query and see results that don't contain that text at all.
    • vasco 4y ago
      Nowadays you should google using what in 2005 would be considered "the wrong way to search". Back then it was all about keywords, quotes and so on. For example if you wanted to know if dogs could eat apples you'd search: > dog apple dangerous Today you should search: > can dogs eat apples And you get way better results with the second form. I've noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way to google is still the former overlap a lot with the crowd that keeps complaining google is worse now than it was before.
      • Baeocystin 4y ago
        "you're thinking about it wrong" isn't really that great a defense of Google, you know? I'm not being flippant. The two examples you gave are different searches, with different goals.
• jeffbee 4y ago
  The question is whether any of those other sites could maintain quality while also being Google, that is, while being target #1 for every SEO bad actor, spammer, and anti-trust regulator on the planet. The people at W3schools are a combination of all of the above: filthy SEO spammers who would readily make an antitrust stink if Google started just ripping off their content, but who in all likelihood don't care if Neeva does that, if they've ever even heard of Neeva.
  • criddell 4y ago
    Google spies on us so they can better serve us. Maybe it’s time that they let us directly tell them what we want. Let me easily blacklist sites from the search results. They could even take the blacklists from all people with a high reputation and use that as a signal when they are building search results for others.
    • hiccuphippo 4y ago
      Sounds very easy to abuse. Don't like the competition's website? Pay a clickfarm to blacklist them on Google. I'd prefer a browser extension that removes results locally. Actually all I need is probably just a rule in uBO.
      • dismantlethesun 4y ago
        If Google can't tell the difference between a click farm and real people then how can they hope to have advertisers trust that their ad performance is accurate?
• endisneigh 4y ago
  it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people talk about the 'good ol days' or times when Google was better, it was simply because there was less SEO, less spam and generally fewer pages on the internet. Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist entire sites from the results - inevitably those sites that have the most ads would be the most likely to be blocked, resulting in lower revenue for Google.
  • mywittyname 4y ago
    The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the case. Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut. Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue. People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but was missing that je ne sais quoi.
    • slaymaker1907 4y ago
      The stories also serve the purpose of providing copyright. A recipe alone doesn't have copyright, but the story mixed throughout the recipe does have copyright.
      • cogman10 4y ago
        Nah, the stories are there so you have to scroll 6000 pages to finally find the actual recipe. Why do they want you to scroll? Because every 5th word is an advertisement. More scrolling, more ads, more revenue. All of these recipe sites (that I've seen) will drop the ingredients + directions on the bottom of the page.
• WesternWind 4y ago
  Google also isn't great at surfacing genuine product reviews that aren't just people reiterating amazon reviews with referral links and SEO. Like even stuff reviewed by reputable websites somehow loses out regularly. If I want someone's actual opinion and people I know don't have one, I have to check reddit or metafilter.
  • georgehill 4y ago
    Google recently updated its product review algorithm. https://blog.google/products/search/more-helpful-product-reviews/ https://blog.google/products/search/more-helpful-product-rev...
  • hiccuphippo 4y ago
    I used to add inurl:forum or inurl:thread to my searches to find actual opinions from people instead of ads disguised as articles. Now I just search reddit.
  • lph 4y ago
    Google made an algorithm change a few years back that knocked ask.metafilter.com answers way down in search results. The resulting drop in ad revenue was disastrous for metafilter, which runs with a small staff on a tight budget. Kind of bitter to remember considering the dismal quality of search results today.
• mattferderer 4y ago
  Question regarding the recipe example. Does Google deduct quality points the more ads that are put on the website? A long time ago, I recall hearing how Google was able to beat Yahoo by focusing on quality of ads & a higher click rate. Has Google defeated it's rivals & switched to their tactics? Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use Bing. As the article points out, Bing is really awesome for searching for recipes. Looks like I need to start trying out Neeva & You.com. They had some nice features in this article. Neeva seems to be stealing all the important content from the recipe website which is a highly discussed issue. Bing tries to walk this line by making you still go to the website to read the instructions. Obviously people have trashed Google for doing this same thing on other kinds of websites. Though blogger recipe websites have somewhat encouraged this behavior due to their insane amount of ads & life stories they're well known for.
  • jjeaff 4y ago
    A very high percentage of ads on sites now use the Google ad network. So it may actually be in their interest to promote sites with more ads. They certainly promote a lot of garbage new sites on their Google news feed app and the product that they include on the pixel phones.
  • richardsocher 4y ago
    you.com has all the bangs that DDG has too now.
  • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Go look at the horrible chumbox infested AMP sites that Google promotes on Google Assistant. You can tell where their priorities lie.
  • bruhhh 4y ago
    they also store all your info https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qqpggk/new_youcom_privacyoriented_search_engine_stores/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qqpggk/new_youcom_pr...
• noizejoy 4y ago
  > … maybe I'm not asking the right questions, You’re holding it wrong :-)
• luciusdomitius 4y ago
  When it comes to programming it is not really due to superior work by the competition, but by so many people gaming the Google PR flooding the front pages with content-farm level crap. Generally for any search string producing 3-4 pages of spam, the competition would give a better results, without necessarily having any technological superiority. I cannot believe Google have not recognised this as a key risk.
• victor106 4y ago
  Also noticed a recent change that Google did, if I search for e.g:- Volvo XC 60, it does not show me the Volvo XC 60 page on Volvo.com, it instead shows the ad that Volvo paid for and a bunch of other ads. So they essentially don’t want you to click on the organic link that points to Volvo.com. They want Volvo to know that all the traffic to them is being sent due to the Ad and not from any organic links. This is what the not so evil company is doing, imagine if they are actually evil..
  • paxys 4y ago
    This is not a recent change but exactly how Google has worked since 1999.
  • spullara 4y ago
    It is the first organic result after the ads. This has basically always been the case.
  • julianlam 4y ago
    Wouldn't this just be caused by Volvo committing ad spend on their own keyword? I liken it to a defense strategy. Imagine if they didn't, and a search for Volvo XC 60 showed an ad for a Subaru!
    • benrapscallion 4y ago
      If they didn’t pay, Google would be showing the competitor’s ad instead. Base camp has called it a shakedown. https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016
    • after_care 4y ago
      If I search for "Volvo XC 60" then there is absolutely no doubt I want to see information about that vehicle. Any information about Subaru is just irrelevant noise.
      • nicbou 4y ago
• blahyawnblah 4y ago
  Quotes around words have basically stopped working on Google. Which makes all three of those searches even more difficult.
  • drpixie 4y ago
    And google hasn't handled complex queries for quite a while. A long time ago, you could get sensible answers to boolean queries - not so much now. A useful search engine would understand meaning, rather than just an index lookup.
• adrielyong 4y ago
  anyone else find it so hard to find basic apparel and shoes? All my search results return me known brands with high ad spend. Recently started to go to reddit male fashion advice to look for crowdsourced recommendations but that's fairly time consuming. Anyone else has other ways?
  • aghilmort 4y ago
    do you have some specific examples? if don't want to post here, can dm dotdotjames on twitter -- we're adding product search to breezethat.com sooooooooon
• aendruk 4y ago
  > I already know what an Exception is, so I don't want to scroll halfway down the page to find what I'm looking for. I can’t relate to this. That example, of the first result being the canonical documentation on the subject, is a search engine working exactly the way I want.
  • cerved 4y ago
    I thought the same thing but in the past I've also found the official python documentation to be somewhat verbose. Maybe these days I'd appreciate it more. I always found the MDN documentation striking a better balance of being in-depth but not an essay.
• kshacker 4y ago
  I know google search is probably not the same as google flights, but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia children. We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually book through them since I did not want to get into the google payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not explore). On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.
  • Sebguer 4y ago
    Google bought the main provider of flight information in 2010 (ITA). ITA had such a monopoly that Google was required to continue licensing their software out for years afterwards, though I think it expired in ~2016.
    • dataflow 4y ago
      Minor note: they announced it in 2010, but the acquisition closed on April 12, 2011. [1] [1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/ita-software-acquisition-cleared-for.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/ita-software-acquisi...
    • discordance 4y ago
      ITA Matrix is still available and is my preferred flight search tool. Still find the old interface much better than the new: https://oldmatrix.itasoftware.com/ https://oldmatrix.itasoftware.com/
• beachy 4y ago
  The one thing I wish that Google offered would be the ability to blacklist sites for a period (coud be fixed - say 6 months). So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming. As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less useful. When I see a site like that, I can be quite sure there is no value to me from that site. I want to blacklist it - not forever (though I'd settle for that) but so I don't see it in search results again. The crazy thing is that this could even be a benefit for Google themselves. They could aggregate these signals and use them to identify SEO scammers, since their algorithms clearly can't. I'm sure that Google aren't happy with the lacklustre performance of their search in modern times.
  • johnnyApplePRNG 4y ago
    >As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less useful. Any ranking manoeuvrability that Google offers can and will be used against them. The SEO scammers out there would just automate millions of proxy IP addresses to blacklist all of their competitors sites.
    • rolisz 4y ago
      But the blacklist would be personal, so applying only to me.
  • blenderdt 4y ago
    This is not only a problem with Google search. DDG is now also flooded with auto (AI?) generated content. For example there are now loads of websites about programming topics. They look real but always lack the main point of the article which makes you navigate to other articles on the same website.
  • flenserboy 4y ago
    A HOSTS file for search would be most welcome.
• version_five 4y ago
  That was a weird example to me. Google, although it ends up returning seo spam like w3schools, usually surfaces good SO answers, which are imo (and I think generally recognized as) the best answers that also contain discussion and caveats, if warranted. It's considered bad practice already to just cut/paste the SO answer unthinkingly. The only thing worse would be to do the same thing with whatever this search engine dragged out of w3schools. There are lots of criticisms of google search, but in this case, I think the Google result is better - anyone looking regularly for answers is conditioned to tune out the Geeksforgeeks and w3schools and other spam, so as long as good SO answers are from and center, I think google wins
  • hattmall 4y ago
    What's wrong with w3schools, never get the hate, it's an ok site, code on it seems fine.
    • version_five 4y ago
      It's a middle man is all imo. I have actually used it for css stuff, but for python (as a python programmer), I want SO or the actual documentation , so its annoying when what I consider ad-driven content gets in the way of my search.
    • bstar77 4y ago
      I can tell you why I hate them... explanations are usually incomplete or wrong in some cases. Examples often use antiquated browser code when the answer should just be vanilla JS. They don't use best practices... like ever. They don't generally use modern code (don't use arrow functions or continute to use var). MDN is pretty much better in every way.
    • jamesfinlayson 4y ago
      For CSS and Javascript I've found MDN to be more comprehensive. I do use w3schools for SQL syntax though - I haven't found any better resource for this, and generally Google gives me MSDN articles about TSQL which are usually of no use to me.
  • 4y ago
• pcurve 4y ago
  Google lags behind in Image search quality too, surprisingly. Bing consistently does better for me at least. Google also lags behind searching for torrent content, not surprisingly. In fact, I'm going to say, I use Google knowing that it sucks in many areas, just because it's hassle to use multiple search engines, and the quality was acceptable enough that it got the job done. But now, I do more searches in both Google and Duck. Their Youtube search engine is starting to suck too, because it's deliberately mixing completely unrelated items in the result.
  • pronlover723 4y ago
    Google sucks at image search but I just wanted to add, Bing either intentionally or unintentionally broke one of my porn searches. I'd search for "my-fetish-keyword-of-choice" and then pick to only show results for the last month. Since like January of February the results have been zero which I know, based on all the other places I look for content, is false. Content from sites that otherwise show up in Bing results. And no, I'm not looking for anything remotely illegal.
    • wonderbore 4y ago
      Intentionally. Both search engines now stop showing related keywords for anything adult-related.
    • pcurve 4y ago
      Just to clarify, when I say Image search, I meant, searching for like-images by uploading your own.
  • skilled 4y ago
    I concur. Google Images suck. It's all littered with garbage sites that have their logo plastered all over the image. I use Yandex for image search, much more variety in results and the interface is also quite good to quickly go through a lot of images at once.
  • python_bread 4y ago
• jdrc 4y ago
  and images
• simsla 4y ago
  One Google feature that I miss terribly is hard filtering. Used to be if you included "term" or -"term" you'd only get results that did/n't include those terms. But it seems Google has gone all in on the "I don't think you really meant that" approach [], and the hard filters have become suggestions at best. -- [] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard filters on top.
  • WestCoastJustin 4y ago
    100% agree. This used to be my secret weapon for finding things. -"term" along with "other terms you were looking for".
  • jmkni 4y ago
    Similar to the date filtering, you used to be able to see results between two dates, this doesn't seem to work at all anymore. As an example, if I search for 'gilbert gottfried' and set the date filter 1 apr -> 3 apr, I still see stories about his death.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • twofornone 4y ago
    >[] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard filters on top The issue is that "power users" that are even aware of quotes and and hard filtering are now the long tail that google is no longer optimizing for. They'd much rather focus on the 99% of searches by, for lack of a better term, normies, and as a consequence, rather than expecting users to learn to think, their search features and performance are regressing toward a totally dumbed down mean. And I think society is worse for it.
  • pfg_ 4y ago
    Do you have any examples of searches that don't respect hard filters? The only time I've seen it ignoring quotes is when there are 0 results and it puts up a little notice at the top "No results found for "…". Results for … (without quotes):"
• wanda 4y ago
  I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of obvious that an entity extracting revenue from selling advertisement impressions is not going to produce a very useful search engine — it's going to produce a search engine that maximises advertisement impressions. Either by encouraging the advertisers to game the search engine, or by simply preferring the paying advertisers' results, or both, on some level. So you end up with a Google that prioritises 2-3 promoted results above actual search results (some of which represent the opposite of what you're looking for!) and everything beneath is either a massive mainstream content factory, a Reddit/SO/Quora thread, or any one of a billion terrible blogs/news hosts that contain no content or simply regurgitate someone else's content with adverts, modals, etc galore. In fact, the only reason why Google's search engine is fairly safe in its product space — the considerable head start on potential disruptors notwithstanding — is that there apparently exists no comparably successful method to extract revenue from running a search engine. Not that many people are realistically going to pay a monthly fee to have a Google without the noise, despite the amount of noise there is (I probably would). And let's face it, if there was a market for that, Google Premium would probably exist already. Talk about vertical integration if they did though. Help pollute the ocean of the internet then sell people premium membership to sail across it rather than swim in it. One of the biggest things that Google did wrong was try to act as curator. The moment they start screening results by compliance with Google standards, introducing stuff like AMPHTML etc, anything like that is the moment they make themselves no different to Facebook, Twitter and every other walled garden community. The internet is supposed to be about broadcasting information, about exploration and chasing the horizon — not locking information behind forced memberships of social networks and paywalls, tardis-like megastructures where you're encouraged to become locked in yourself. All that should matter is that a webpage's content matches a query. Not whether their website matches some random person's idea of good UX etc. Does the content match the query. That's it. Refined obviously to assess whether a page's content is too insanely well matched (old SEO bullshit) and maybe include that domain rank stuff (if it was based on conversions so it's self-moderating rather than Google saying "[majorpublication].com is better than [randomblog].com because big business website > random person's website") Google could have been worse, of course. AMPHTML is pretty much over, right? They track your data, yes — but show me the company that doesn't do that. Apple? Apple probably do, they just track less or whatever. Just because it's in the marketing doesn't necessarily mean that they don't do it, it just means that they know people will buy their shit if they say they don't, or make a point of doing it less. I don't blame Google for the way their search engine has turned out. As others have said, a big part of it is the sheer amount of noise out there now. But more importantly, the way capitalism works causes most companies to produce increasingly shitty products over time. This eventually creates the opportunity for someone new to release a great product, and eventually their great product becomes a good product, and eventually that will become a shitty dividend-paying product, and the cycle will continue. (to clarify, the opportunity isn't just there for competitors, the opportunity also exists for Google to sort their shit out too).
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  For Python programming I would say 100% of the time you should look the answer up in the official manual for a well-defined problem (delete a file) because the manual is correct, well-written, etc. It's astonishing how often Google and Bing snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on queries like this. If you go looking in splogs, spam overflow and other spam sites at best you are going to get wrong answers, at worse you will get answers that "aren't even wrong".
  • twelvechairs 4y ago
    I agree yet in the article google is criticised for having the official docs as search result 1. I guess I just want different results to the same query than the author
    • lelandbatey 4y ago
      Of the three code related searches in the original blog post, only one Google example listed the official Python documentation as the first link. In the other two examples, the sites shown where: - W3 Schools - StackOverflow I will definitely agree with you that the author seems to want very different things from their search results than we might though. I will always always prefer the official docs (which I can pick through) when I make as vague a search as "<language> throw exception". If I wanted to know "how do I <verb> <noun> in <language>", then that's what I'd Google.
  • Topgamer7 4y ago
    I wish the python manual was the default search for function references too...
  • twofornone 4y ago
    >because the manual is correct, well-written, etc. It's also verbose and requires effort and working memory to parse, when I could get a trivial one line answer or code snippet from a stackoverflow post specific to my question. Yes, in an ideal world we would all read the manual, but unfortunately manuals are inconvenient. And in my experience the vast majority of stackoverflow answers are correct.
• Lamad123 4y ago
  I love You and have it in my bookmarks. It gets many things right and better the current monopolist.
• polote 4y ago
  I don't feel like ranking results according to a query makes a lot of sense nowadays. Google works pretty well that it is almost always able to give you results that are relevant to your query. But where Google fails and other search engine is to show results that are relevant to the user. As some comments have said here for the query "python throw exception" some people want to get the official python doc when others want a snippet and when other want a tutorial, and some want other things. The fact that there is only one first result and it is the same for everyone IS the issue. In my personal experience Google works very well for code queries much better than any queries on SEO topics
  • Forgeties79 4y ago
    > But we’re Google fails…is to show results that are relevant to the user This is going to sound tongue-in-cheek but I mean it with all sincerity: isn’t it wild given the data they hoover up?
    • polote 4y ago
      Maybe, but compared to other they don't do worse
  • swethmandava 4y ago
    You're exactly right. Google tends to regress to the mean - what do most people want to see as their first result? but You.com allows you to prefer sources that you'd personally like to see first
• raincom 4y ago
  Maybe, these three areas don’t generate much ad revenue!!
• headsoup 4y ago
  From all of the discussion here, I think the most interesting thing is the seeming lack of attempts to try other browsers when clearly Google is doing poorly and creating frustration. I mean in the general population I would not be surprised, but on this site the community is generally pretty tech aware to know of alternatives at least.
  • NetOpWibby 4y ago
    People love pain. And, being lazy.
  • headsoup 4y ago
    search engines, not browsers...
• TheRealNGenius 4y ago
  lol self promo blog post bashing Google while saying they're better
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • nicbou 4y ago
    Incidentally, this is a really common SEO technique now. "Alternative to X" content is always written by one of the alternatives.
• CSMastermind 4y ago
  Bing is better in terms of video and photo search UI/UX. Nobody I've seen touches Google in terms of Geospatial though, I wish there were a decent competitor.
• funstuff007 4y ago
  The home page for this site looks like it was designed by Stripe in their "gradient all the things fashion". Gradient Memphis?
• Ozzie_osman 4y ago
  This is somewhat tangential but for a lot of quick programming questions, I'm finding I don't even need a search engine. I just use Github Copilot. For example, if I wanted to remember how to throw an exception I'd just write that as a comment and let Copilot fill in the syntax. Between that and official docs, don't need a ton else.
  • swethmandava 4y ago
    You.com has the Code Complete app integrated into search, which is similar to Github Copilot
• russellbeattie 4y ago
  Wasn't there just an article about how horizontal services get eaten away by focused rivals once a market has been identified? [1] Like Indeed doing job search better than Craiglist. I wonder if Google isn't ripe for that sort of competitor. I can think of a bunch of verticals that could easily get their own dedicated search site, including cooking. Bing and others are trying to beat Google in generic search, and it'll never happen because Google defines what that means, and it's a moving target. I'm wondering why Google hasn't done this themselves? Whitelist a bunch of decent websites and give the search page a fun URL like "Cookle". 1. https://www.georgesequeira.com/writing/zapier-the-5b-unbundling-opportunity/ https://www.georgesequeira.com/writing/zapier-the-5b-unbundl...
  • aghilmort 4y ago
    that's pretty much our thesis at Breeze: - for web search, we have a better date filter than most, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=tiger+woods+after%3A2022-04-12 https://breezethat.com/?q=tiger+woods+after%3A2022-04-12 - for anything else, we have topics, e.g., click recipe tab from any general search on home page, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado - we just launched a job finder, 14M listings with 20M by end of quarter, launched early due to the fast fiasco, https://breezethat.com/x/job-search-beta https://breezethat.com/x/job-search-beta - tons of other topics, some listed on page atm under "drops" at top, more advanced such as jobs in the pipeline
    • russellbeattie 4y ago
      The different search topics are similar to what I was thinking but it's just a variation on Google's various tabs, like shopping. What I'm thinking of is a dedicated search site focused on a single topic. Take Breeze's guitar tab search and make a Guitargle.com. Then it could be promoted, marketed, refined and advertised on all sorts of apps - probably even on Google itself if they weren't paying attention. All the guitar apps could have integrated Guitargle search. Then make another vertical for the bird watchers search. And another for scholarships. All with different graphic designs based on the target demographic, with a "Powered By Breeze" at the bottom of each site. Just a thought.
• tptacek 4y ago
  I'm immediately suspicious because of the inclusion of cooking. Google's cooking results aren't bad because Google is bad at cooking content; they're bad because Google is giving people what they actually want, which is lifestyle content. Most people searching for cassoulet aren't actually looking to make a cassoulet; they just enjoy reading about it. I say this as someone who is ultra-annoyed at the state of cooking results on Google (I want to make the cassoulet!). But there probably aren't enough of me to sustain a product --- and I'm not sure I'd even like that product, because even if Google gave me the most useful practitioner content it could, it still wouldn't be meaningfully curated. I can get recipes for anything from sites like Epicurious, but I'd sooner search for code tips on Expert Sex Change than try an Epicurious recipe. That's what Food52 and Serious Eats are for. Similarly, programming is a weird callout here. I've never heard of the code search engine they mention ("Neeva"?) and, if that name comes up a week from now, I still won't have heard of it. Stack Overflow solved this problem pretty decisively, and they did it with a Google-first strategy, which is the reason the first example code search in this article has strong Stack Overflow results at the top of the SERP.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • kristopolous 4y ago
    Who is looking for paragraphs and paragraphs of poorly written memories about their childhood in the countryside when they type in "gingerbread recipe"? The fall leaves change colors along the windy path to Grandma's cottage with the crisp smell of freshly burnt firewood in the distance while my trusty spotted Labrador plays with me and my sister at the creek by the meadow. As Fido splashes playfully after a school of tadpoles, a scent of gingerbread cusps over the sunburnt field and tickles my senses like the first soft ray of sunshine on a dewdripped morning I smell 1tsp of ground ginger as I remove a piece of driftwood and toss it on to the old cornhusks amidst overgrown willows as my companion chases after it. We race together back to the warmth of grandmother's kitchen overcome by the rapturous aplomb of allspice, cinnamon and cloves all at 1/4 tsp. That was 40 years ago and I've longed to touch the perfection of those fretless childhood days of a memorized youth modified by dreams. This gingerbread loaf lets me relive the magic of a forgotten freedom with a preparation time of merely 90 minutes. I close my eyes during the baking as I lie on my afghan rug in my Boston apartment knowing there's another generation of youth passing by idyllic days on those timeless Connecticut farms where the 1/4 cup of unsalted butter comes from. I mean it's just insanity. I'm not doing them justice. The real stuff looks AI generated I honestly don't think these people exist. It's just SEO food
• alphabet9000 4y ago
  the pointless animations on google search make the site truly unbearable to use, unless you have ublock to disable the animations. i can't believe it still has those animations, do people at google even use their own site? [0] http://jollo.org/LNT/public/google-animations.html http://jollo.org/LNT/public/google-animations.html
• SMAAART 4y ago
  Even PG had chimed in about the fact that there are underserved niches within the Google Search, and I wonder if this is going to create a Craigslist effect, where companies will be successful in search niches. Time to disrupt the disruptor.
• zerop 4y ago
  I recently moved to edge from chrome because of high CPU issues with chrome. With edge I started using Bing. I found search results were better in many scenarios.
• hlbjhblbljib 4y ago
  And image search.
• supramouse 4y ago
  I don't know why google needs to lead in any of these spaces
• raldi 4y ago
  And video game walkthroughs
• JSONderulo 4y ago
  you.com is good for coding, especially the SO results.
• bspear 4y ago
  There's more: medical, crypto
• jbhouse 4y ago
  very interesting. I'm going to start using Neeva tomorrow at work
• londons_explore 4y ago
  I just wish Google would expand its index. It is reasonably common that I search for a string from a bit of code and find "0 results", even though that code is up on GitHub (and probably mirrored to a bunch of other sites). GitHub search finds it fine. Same for searching for stuff on my own personal blog. Only about half of pages are indexed, even though many have been there years.
  • swethmandava 4y ago
    You.com does well on github + stackoverflow searches fwiw
• terrycody 4y ago
  Nowadays, Google search results full of tons of AI/auto generated sites like KKnews.cc , which rakes in millions of IP per month with their bad quality/copied contents, also, don't forget those sites often got millions/billions pages, which jammed Google database centers. I have no idea why Google won't do anything to these spam sites.
• lovelearning 4y ago
  A low-hanging improvement Google can do easily: a one-line warning that its smart results may be wrong, and caution people to check all result pages and domains. Given the shortened attention spans, prevalence of fake news, and evidence that featured snippets are being misused by scammers, I think it's imperative Google condition its users not to blindly trust these top results. Instead, they're doing the opposite. An anecdote: I recently saw a phrase new to me - "on the lamb". Googled "on the lamb meaning". Google's top answer was a confident claim that it's related to Quakers and their persecution in the 17th century. But that answer was in fact a downvoted one on an English StackExchange page. The top consensus answer there was different. A person with a short attention span or a tendency to be satisfied with factoids that match their beliefs is likely to simply accept Google's answers as correct and not dig deeper. Such conditioning results in bigger social problems. In my country, a popular method of scamming people involves SEO-ing fake banking service numbers to the top of search results. When a person searches for "X bank customer service number", Google shows these fake numbers. People trust Google's answers, call those numbers, provide details like banking OTPs, and get scammed. Google provides a 'Feedback' dialog for such results, but it's a corrective measure that relies on diligence of users and not a preventive measure.
• nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  Couldn't disagree more with the code examples. Whenever I'm looking for answer that can be answered by the standard library I really do want to get the actual documentation of that language and not a random stackoverflow solution.
  • ImaCake 4y ago
    It depends for me. Sometimes I am simply after the documentation but often I want to make some weird plot and would like to see if anyone else has tried to make said weird plot using the same library before. I don't think there is any way to optimise for which to prioritise without including the word "documentation" in your query.
• rg111 4y ago
  I am sure it’s plenty more than these three. Yesterday, I searched "best after-sale service of AC". What I was shown was SEO'd pure junk. Absolute junk as the first result. Next few were the same, but more focused on affiliate programs rather than providing genuine info. Down the line was Quora, where _sales rep of AC companies_ wrote answers that _theirs_ had the best service. I wad very disappointed. You.com showed me better result right away. My Kagi and You use is now on par with my Google use. They mights surpass Google soon. I still find Google to be the best for programming answers btw. I would also say that Google's ad business is in direct conflict of interest with its search business.
  • ehsankia 4y ago
    Am I the only ones who has a really hard time with Quora. I can never tell which answer is real or fake. And even the "real" ones rarely ever answer the question. Quora is basically the Pinterest of answer results.
  • donbrae 4y ago
    I much prefer Kagi to Google (and DuckDuckGo et al). Often the first page of Google consists solely of SEO rubbish. Being able to block and rank domains is also useful.
    • rg111 4y ago
      For straightforward answers and navigating to websites, I often use what is the default in browser that I happen to use at that time. I use DDG, FF, and Bromite on my smartphone. Sometimes Brave, too. I have Brave as my secondary browser (FF as the main, LibreWolf for personal stuff) on my daily driver as well. I used Brave Search and DDG a lot. Nothing can go wrong with them if all I am asking is the capital of Belgium or trying to navigate to a subreddit. With special, not so straightforward searches, I rely on You and Kagi. I really appreciate You's different kinds of search results and grouping them. They are clear that they use some kind of AI model to tailor search results, and I have an account there. I really like Kagi for showing me sites that I wasn’t even aware of. I can boost or shove down sites. I turned off Quora and Pinterest right away. No extensions, no scripts. Love that. As I said, Google’s adbiz is in direct conflict with its Search division. Search should show the best result for the Searcher. Ad div would want the pages to be shown that are crawling, infesting with Google Adsense ad. When more of these pages are visited, they have better metrics to lure more people to Adsense thus making $$$. This is clear conflict of interest.
• calderwoodra 4y ago
  I use the grepper chrome extension which solves the coding vertical - it embeds search results in the Google search results
• joseferben 4y ago
  I realized that the decline quality of Google Search is changing my habits as a programmer. I even wrote a small blog post about that: https://www.joseferben.com/posts/how-google-search-is-making-me-a-better-programmer/ https://www.joseferben.com/posts/how-google-search-is-making...
• bruhhh 4y ago
  not that it doesnt have valid points, but, this entire article seems like an ad for You.com
  • code2life 4y ago
    Great alternatives to Google are long overdue, you.com is solving it, glad people are noticing
    • bruhhh 4y ago
      are they? https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qqpggk/new_youcom_privacyoriented_search_engine_stores/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qqpggk/new_youcom_pr...
• noduerme 4y ago
  I'm just mad I read four paragraphs before realizing this was a sales pitch. Damn my pathetic human brain meat.
• azangru 4y ago
  > Is this page any better than what you’d have gotten in 2010? What if it looked like this instead? I can't take seriously an example that still puts w3schools as the first search result. If I were searching for a simple answer about a language feature, I would want the search engine to give me a page from the definitive authoritative source on that language. w3schools isn't that.
  • forgotmypw17 4y ago
    Web dev is my bread and butter for many years, and for realistic simple and functional samples (which work beyond the latest builds, since I try to accomodate all 100% of my visitors) no one even comes close to w3schools. I wish them many years of success and prosperity.
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  From the article: > What happened to page quality factors in ranking? I've been wondering this myself. Whatever happened to penalizing webpages with intrusive popups? Or those that show different content to users than to search engines (paywalls)? (I'm sure the latter is because of lawsuits). And many years ago, there was SEO advice about not duplicating content from other sites, but these days, half the search results for e.g. Go related questions are blogspam copy/pastes from Stack Overflow. Google Search used to be stricter.
• secretsatan 4y ago
  I absolutely detest the google optimised recipes, they're mostly just filler and you have to scroll all the way to the end to find the recipe. I just go to bbc food which has an excellent db of recipes, and they use correct temperatures for the oven too.
  • bbarn 4y ago
    seriouseats.com is also a fantastic site. Recipes there are lengthy but it's because they use the length to explain things in very excellent detail, and the science behind why. Minimal adverts and high quality content, but you might need to convert some temps :)
• mola 4y ago
  What annoys me most about google search is that they show at most ~500 results for any search. No way to get to results that are not surfaced . If you're searching for something which contains terms related to heavily SEOd verticals, there's absolutely no way to find "real" results. Just let me decide if the long tail is interesting, please.
• superasn 4y ago
  There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest 3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers) 4. all the code clones for SO 5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2, alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects can sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole. 6. The best of lists. Google for the love of god, please ban them.. they are always always SEO spam and product placements. Often the blog post itself says "to put your product on this list pay us a $1000 and we will include them in our list." 7. Quora and similar answer sites.. okay it's a mixed bag but you have to be very careful on these sites as most often the answers are just spam. I never read any answer with a link in it. But I think it's more Quora's problem than google. But if google is strict with them they may do a better job at moderating I guess. Also now quora hides answers and asks for a payment. Did they learn nothing from experts-exchange!
  • lowken 4y ago
    I don’t understand the hate for w3schools. I found this site super useful when I was first learning web development.
  • naoqj 4y ago
    w3schools is good.
    • throwawayffffas 4y ago
      MDN is usually a much better resource.
      • toshk 4y ago
        MDN is much more complicated. I almost always get my answer faster and easier to understand with w3schools. Plus quick little things like browser support and try it (which mdn also has now)
• rmbyrro 4y ago
  Google is not great for code search, but I dislike this "rich snippet" thing. These engines are stealing the sites traffic. The whole point was to be a search engine, not an encyclopedia. If you want to be the latter, produce your own content. It's my opinion. I don't use those engines because of that. They jeopardize their sources. It's unsustainable.
  • culi 4y ago
    Yeah I think coders should give up on search engines to meet their needs and instead rely on coder-specific search engines like - https://searchcode.com/ https://searchcode.com/ - http://symbolhound.com/ http://symbolhound.com/ - https://publicwww.com/ https://publicwww.com/ etc
    • grogenaut 4y ago
      symbol hound looks dead searchcode seems to not let you say things like "in the main api", or in libraries, it's all usages, it's also actually the code itself. so "boto3 list_buckets" a common query I do (that google actually does well). publicwww seems to be searching google?
    • rmbyrro 4y ago
      IMHO, the options you listed still miss the point. When I do a code-related search, most often I'm looking for a documentation entry. So, for example, if I search for "python string replace", Google returns me a bunch of crappy pages. I can fix it with "site:python.org string replace". SearchCode does a terrible job [1]. So does Public WWW [2]. Now, Google nails with the first result, pointing to Python's built-in types page. But it would be perfect if it could just add a #str.replace fragment to the URL [3] and save me some scrolling. Instead, it sends me to the top of the page... [1] https://searchcode.com/?q=python+string+replace https://searchcode.com/?q=python+string+replace [2] https://publicwww.com/websites/python+string+replace/ https://publicwww.com/websites/python+string+replace/ [3] https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.replace https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.replace
• domatic1 4y ago
  Tiktok is amazing for cooking ideas/recipes
• jokoon 4y ago
  Is that because users are starting to use other engines like DDG, meaning google have trouble learning its AI models? I have to say that most of the time, when I search for something related to python, it's difficult to land on the official doc, it's always something like tutorial point or something else, it's annoying. Same thing when I want to land on a wikipedia article. Maybe it would be a cool thing if I could limit my search to a list of specific websites, like reddit, stackoverflow, wikipedia, official docs, cppreference.com, etc, to filter all blogspam. Honestly I would actually use a search engine that lets you filter result from a list of websites, or maybe a search engine could decide to build a whitelist of trusty or quality websites (and being transparent about not letting those websites pay). I would also love if tineye and google reverse image search had more options.
  • bkobren 4y ago
    (Disclaimer, work for Neeva), but sounds like we might offer a lot of what you are looking for. We are an ad-free, private search engine. Which means no ads, no affiliate links and you data is not sold or shared. We give users control letting you customize your search result preferences for sources including news, shopping and more. Want more of X? That's your choice. want to see less of Y? That's your choice. We also block third party trackers, let you search across personal apps like dropbox and email all from the same search bar. See for yourself neeva.com
  • goldphotograph1 4y ago
• bbarn 4y ago
  Free content is free content, but when it comes to cooking sites, some of them are just flat out scammy SEO farms. Even big names like food network, a link to the recipe I want almost always simply goes to an index page without my recipe on it on the food network site. The long tell me your life story format of just wrapping a recipe that's not original is also incredibly annoying, and sometimes I find I get tricked into just wading through ads for nothing of value. As I posted elsewhere here, I've become very loyal to a few high quality sites that I can count on. seriouseats.com is probably the only one I really like in web format, but honestly youtube is full of excellent 12-15 minute videos for just about any meal I can think of, and I tend to go there.
  • Mumps 4y ago
    BBC Good Food is worth proselytizing to. No spam, great recipes, and often easy/simple (depends on what you're going for, of course).
• forgotmypw17 4y ago
  Three areas where Google lags behind yesterday's Google: Displaying actual search results Searching for what I actually typed into the search field Page load times
• dennyabraham 4y ago
  I'm teaching my partner to drive and I've noticed that Google Maps will suggest very different routes to the same destination. It's also less accurate in estimating times, adding 5-10 minutes for its indirect routes versus taking straight paths. Another thing I've noticed is that some directions will use businesses ("take a left after McDonald's") as landmarks in navigation. I'm beginning to believe the routing noise was introduced to allow navigational ads. If the effectiveness of a core product is being compromised for monetization, is this what's also happening to their Search?
• jpalomaki 4y ago
  Sometimes I actually like to long and comprehensive recipe articles. Like compare an article from Serious Eats about pasta carbonara to just getting a 10 line recipe. Both serve their own purpose. Same applies to programming. Sometimes I want the one liner from w3schools, sometimes I’m willing to consume the reference documentation.
• id02009 4y ago
  I wonder if the constant cat and mouse play between Google algorithm updates and dark SEO optimizers could be fixed by a plethora of search engines without one specific dominant one?
• YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Not convinced. The example of a blueberry pancake recipe has a big button titled "jump to recipe" a few lines in and the ads covering the page is what 99% of the internet looks like without an adblocker. That doesn't sound like the fault of the search engine (but it is probably the fault of Google itself). As to this: >> Google rating: “This search result page is just okay. I don't like the first search result (I already know what exceptions are in programming, so the official Python documentation is way more than I need). I have to scroll halfway down before finding the information that I want. The Python documentation is the primary source for what is being searched for. I don't think it's too much to ask to "scroll halfway down". That comes across as a bit petulant, to be honest.
• big_blind 4y ago
  It is especially frustrating to use when Google while coding. I've noticed an increase in SEO sites on Google that seem to just scrape Q&As from the internet and regurgitate them[0]. I've recently started trying other search engines like DuckDuckGo and You.com and thankfully haven't had any issues with these sorts of sites popping up as results. It makes debugging 10x faster not having to sift through so many fake answer sites. [0] https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-use-google-calendar-in-django/ https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-use-google-calendar-in-dj...
  • PokestarFan 4y ago
    Some of these are so bad it's hilarious. My favorite so far is https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-turn-my-android-into-a-beacon/#What_it_means_to_be_salt_and_light https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-turn-my-android-into-a-be...
• frays 4y ago
  you.com is great. Will also check out Neeva. Fantastic article, thanks for sharing.