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Just compared "chinese food baltimore" search results between Google and Wolfram Alpha. Google gave me a list of ten places in my area to get chinese food incl

Just compared "chinese food baltimore" search results between Google and Wolfram Alpha. Google gave me a list of ten places in my area to get chinese food including phone numbers, locations (mapped out and in text) and links to all their websites; Wolframalpha gave me general nutrition information about random foods. One could go on and on and on, of course, with similar examples. All that this shows is that some tools are better than others at certain tasks. Google search is still better than all competitors at many, many things. However, (of course! it ought to be this way!) some of their competitors are better than Google at very specific things. How is Google's failure to do as well as another search tool at a single task indicative of why Google is (no longer, I think it's implied) any good?

kposehn 15y ago
Agreed. What made me (and presumably the author) post this article is not the relevance of the result, but how much of the page is now taken up by advertising. I'm a marketer, so I do certainly like advertising, but what irks me is the sheer vertical volume of the page taken up by monetized ads. Google does not consider a site quality of the top 1/3 of the page is ads, yet here they take the space on the page which has the most attention. It is their search engine, yes, but at the same time I think no one can argue that they are making the monetized links take up more and more space in order to boost CTR and their bottom line. They are a company after all, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
deleted 15y ago
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