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I never use general-purpose search engines if I already know which website the thing I'm looking for is on (assuming that website has it's own search functional

I never use general-purpose search engines if I already know which website the thing I'm looking for is on (assuming that website has it's own search functionality.) If I am looking for a wikipedia article, I go to wikipedia and search for it there. If I am looking for a tweet, I go to twitter and search for it there. If I'm searching for something on HN, then it's algolia. Search keywords in firefox make this easy. I can type "wiki train" into my address bar and it will take me directly to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=train https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=train From a usability standpoint it's just as streamlined as typing the same into the address bar and expecting Google to find it for you, except you don't need Google. Googling everything by default is a bad habit, but one Google obviously likes to encourage. They want everybody to rely on them for everything.

bthrn 4y ago
It’s heavily dependent on the quality of the search offered. For example — Reddit’s search functionality is terrible. I’ve found that Google is much better for searching Reddit.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Or Amazon. Amazon's search sucks. Results are often completely irrelevant, or dismissive of the search terms. You search for a refrigerator filter from a known refrigerator manufacturer and the first results you get are the toxic offbrand refrigerator filters from companies with randomly generated company names that poison your entire family.
  - waboremo 4y ago
    That combined with Amazon's aggressive category filtering is annoying. Search a generic term like rings, it forces you into the clothing category without the ability to switch. You have to then slap on more keywords in hopes it navigates to the right category, because manually changing the category while including generic searches does not work. It does not matter if you first went to the category you believe your search to be in. Somehow Amazon has managed to make the bloated Aliexpress experience seem more straight forward and easy to navigate.
    - 29athrowaway 4y ago
      Amazon, despite having a high bar for hiring, has fallen victim to one of the most trivial forms of SEO. Companies create multiple subsidiaries with randomly generated names, so they can spam search results and faceted results with their products and exclude other vendors. Search for "flying bird cat toy" and you'll see what I mean. Much of that could be solved using a filter by country of origin. Because the usual suspects are always from the same territory. Why is this necessary? because shell companies sell products loaded with lead, cadmium, phthalates, formaldehyde, VOCs, and other highly toxic stuff.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  Google's propensity to return reddit results is a negative to me. Reddit almost never has the information I'm looking for, particularly ever since their website redesign. Even if the search result takes me to a reddit comment section that might have the result, reddit will only show me the top N% of comments in that discussion and then when I scroll down, I see irrelevant top-level posts on reddit about people's cat pictures or something. Yes I know I can install an extension to redirect me to old.reddit.com, but fuck that noise. Reddit answers are virtually never worth that effort anyway. Consumer advice on reddit is worthless, the subreddits about products are all run by shill-mods paid by the companies making the products. Technical information on reddit is often confidently wrong. And for general inquiries, reddit is worse than yahoo answers ever was. Most of the "I'm a [profession] and I have [experiences and opinions]" posts on reddit seem to be "creative writing" exercises, aka liars motivated by the karma system to make shit up.
  - hakanderyal 4y ago
    Interesting. My experience is the exact opposite and I lot of my review searches are start by adding “Reddit” to the end. For opinions on non-tech topics and products Reddit is my #1 source, and I haven’t got burned even once. But I’ll admit it’s not my only source, and I always cross reference my findings.
    - gremlinsinc 4y ago
      I have setup a custom search under search engines in chrome/settings which basically maps !r to google+reddit e.g. : SE: GReddit Shortcut: !r https://google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%s https://google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%s I have a similar one for github too: gh : order by last updated, with > 5 stars, and has been pushed to since 1/1/2022.
  - waboremo 4y ago
    Don't think they were talking about google returning reddit results for generic searches, which doesn't happen that much and certainly isn't a highlight feature like it is for Bing and DuckDuckGo. When it comes to generic searches, google's biggest problem is SEO-farming blogs that are substantially lower quality than even the most inane reddit comment from someone pretending to be an expert. Rather, when they are specifically looking for something on reddit, using google is much easier than actually using reddit. Counter to the above person's advice in using the site's specific search over general search engines. Which makes sense, there are a lot of great posts on reddit when you know what you're looking for. Not so great for general advice.
- ahuify 4y ago
  You may get better results searching the Pushshift archive, e.g. via https://camas.unddit.com https://camas.unddit.com. It will search deleted and removed items too.
unshavedyak 4y ago
Oh, man. My issue is that so many in-app searches are just.. bad. Reddit is the easy example. I learned ages ago to never use reddit search, always use a proper search engine bound to the reddit domain (or even a subreddit). With that said i don't use Google. I generally agree that it's an adversarial relationship but at the same time Search Engines often have focused tech that is just way, way better than some random search of some content site.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JustLurking2022 4y ago
Not if they have a better search engine than most sites internal one...
unglaublich 4y ago
Many websites just redirect to `https://google.com/search?q=site%3Awebsite.com+ https://google.com/search?q=site%3Awebsite.com+`.
spacetime_cmplx 4y ago
Reddit search is somehow worse than a simple `WHERE markdown LIKE '%query%' ORDER BY upvotes DESC` so you can understand where that sentiment comes from.
imbiased 4y ago
It's not what you're saying but it feels a bit unrelated in that it doesn't mean that it is not useful for Google to index tweets. More likely than one wanting to find a specific tweet, is one wanting an answer or pages related to a query where one does not care about where the result is hosted, and I would rather not search across several sites separately.

bthrn 4y ago

It’s heavily dependent on the quality of the search offered. For example — Reddit’s search functionality is terrible. I’ve found that Google is much better for searching Reddit.

29athrowaway 4y ago
Or Amazon. Amazon's search sucks. Results are often completely irrelevant, or dismissive of the search terms. You search for a refrigerator filter from a known refrigerator manufacturer and the first results you get are the toxic offbrand refrigerator filters from companies with randomly generated company names that poison your entire family.
- waboremo 4y ago
  That combined with Amazon's aggressive category filtering is annoying. Search a generic term like rings, it forces you into the clothing category without the ability to switch. You have to then slap on more keywords in hopes it navigates to the right category, because manually changing the category while including generic searches does not work. It does not matter if you first went to the category you believe your search to be in. Somehow Amazon has managed to make the bloated Aliexpress experience seem more straight forward and easy to navigate.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Amazon, despite having a high bar for hiring, has fallen victim to one of the most trivial forms of SEO. Companies create multiple subsidiaries with randomly generated names, so they can spam search results and faceted results with their products and exclude other vendors. Search for "flying bird cat toy" and you'll see what I mean. Much of that could be solved using a filter by country of origin. Because the usual suspects are always from the same territory. Why is this necessary? because shell companies sell products loaded with lead, cadmium, phthalates, formaldehyde, VOCs, and other highly toxic stuff.
LarryMullins 4y ago
Google's propensity to return reddit results is a negative to me. Reddit almost never has the information I'm looking for, particularly ever since their website redesign. Even if the search result takes me to a reddit comment section that might have the result, reddit will only show me the top N% of comments in that discussion and then when I scroll down, I see irrelevant top-level posts on reddit about people's cat pictures or something. Yes I know I can install an extension to redirect me to old.reddit.com, but fuck that noise. Reddit answers are virtually never worth that effort anyway. Consumer advice on reddit is worthless, the subreddits about products are all run by shill-mods paid by the companies making the products. Technical information on reddit is often confidently wrong. And for general inquiries, reddit is worse than yahoo answers ever was. Most of the "I'm a [profession] and I have [experiences and opinions]" posts on reddit seem to be "creative writing" exercises, aka liars motivated by the karma system to make shit up.
- hakanderyal 4y ago
  Interesting. My experience is the exact opposite and I lot of my review searches are start by adding “Reddit” to the end. For opinions on non-tech topics and products Reddit is my #1 source, and I haven’t got burned even once. But I’ll admit it’s not my only source, and I always cross reference my findings.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    I have setup a custom search under search engines in chrome/settings which basically maps !r to google+reddit e.g. : SE: GReddit Shortcut: !r https://google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%s https://google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%s I have a similar one for github too: gh : order by last updated, with > 5 stars, and has been pushed to since 1/1/2022.
- waboremo 4y ago
  Don't think they were talking about google returning reddit results for generic searches, which doesn't happen that much and certainly isn't a highlight feature like it is for Bing and DuckDuckGo. When it comes to generic searches, google's biggest problem is SEO-farming blogs that are substantially lower quality than even the most inane reddit comment from someone pretending to be an expert. Rather, when they are specifically looking for something on reddit, using google is much easier than actually using reddit. Counter to the above person's advice in using the site's specific search over general search engines. Which makes sense, there are a lot of great posts on reddit when you know what you're looking for. Not so great for general advice.
ahuify 4y ago
You may get better results searching the Pushshift archive, e.g. via https://camas.unddit.com https://camas.unddit.com. It will search deleted and removed items too.

unshavedyak 4y ago

Oh, man. My issue is that so many in-app searches are just.. bad. Reddit is the easy example. I learned ages ago to never use reddit search, always use a proper search engine bound to the reddit domain (or even a subreddit). With that said i don't use Google. I generally agree that it's an adversarial relationship but at the same time Search Engines often have focused tech that is just way, way better than some random search of some content site.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

JustLurking2022 4y ago

Not if they have a better search engine than most sites internal one...

unglaublich 4y ago

Many websites just redirect to `https://google.com/search?q=site%3Awebsite.com+ https://google.com/search?q=site%3Awebsite.com+`.

spacetime_cmplx 4y ago

Reddit search is somehow worse than a simple `WHERE markdown LIKE '%query%' ORDER BY upvotes DESC` so you can understand where that sentiment comes from.

imbiased 4y ago

It's not what you're saying but it feels a bit unrelated in that it doesn't mean that it is not useful for Google to index tweets. More likely than one wanting to find a specific tweet, is one wanting an answer or pages related to a query where one does not care about where the result is hosted, and I would rather not search across several sites separately.