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>This is a categorically false premise This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search. But people

>This is a categorically false premise This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search. But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate property. Alphabet won't change unless it's made to do so.

distortedsignal 3y ago
I'm not sure that I agree. My brother tried to set me up with a girl last week. She has a pretty uncommon name. Googled her. Found... a lot of stuff. I have a VERY common name. Think multiple (relatively) famous people (photographers, US Medal of Honor winner, enough lawyers to choke a court system for DECADES), but if you google my name and the city I live in (1,000,000+ people), my LinkedIn is like the second result. For everyone saying that Google has gotten worse over the time they've been using it, these two use cases (which are pretty challenging) do really still work.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  And did you Google yourself on a clean computer?
  - distortedsignal 3y ago
    Tried this test three ways - from my wifi, on my phone's LTE connection, and via a VPN that my family uses, all in private windows to prevent Google using my local cache. All found my LinkedIn in the top 2 slots. It seems pretty stable to me? How could I make this cleaner?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      That sounds pretty thorough for the purpose. I think the parent's point was just that if you naively Google yourself without doing anything special, your own results will tend to percolate to the top more so than if a random person were to Google you.
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Based on the rants I've gotten from barbers, taxi drivers and the like when I've told them what I'm working om, there does indeed seem like there is a widespread dissatisfaction with capital G.
        distortedsignal 3y ago
        Yeah - but that's a different problem. How many barbers are there in your city? How many taxi drivers? Now - how should Google satisfy all of those people? I'll confess that I don't have the answer here. But if you're trying to look up "barber ${my_city}" or "taxi ${my_city}", and there are more than one page of results, everyone but the top 10 (top 20? how many results per page are there on google these days?) is going to be unhappy. Unless there are 20 (or 40?) or fewer barbers in your city, more than half the barbers are going to be unhappy with google. It sucks, but when x people are clamoring for y resources, x - y people will be unhappy. And if y is significantly smaller than x, a significant amount of people are going to be unhappy.
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        No I mean it's the barbers and taxi drivers struggling to find things.
        distortedsignal 3y ago
        Sorry, I misunderstood.
- deltarholamda 3y ago
  Okay, but now try "what's the best gaming laptop?" or something similar. This is the sort of query that, at one time, would unearth some nerd's web site alongside PCWorld or whatever. Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of which are on bizarre domains like "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are festooned with ads, also provided by Google.
  - distortedsignal 3y ago
    Ok, I'll try that. Top results (excluding sponsors b/c UBlock Origin): PC Gamer The Verge Games Radar Youtube (channel: Jarrod's Tech) A giant ad showing some laptops to buy Youtube (channel: PC Builder) RTINGS.com PC Magazine Youtube (channel: Top Tech Now) CNET Tom's Hardware Another giant ad showing some laptops to buy Engadget PC Magazine Laptop Mag TechRadar These are mainstream tech press sites. And maybe the reason that it's a bunch of similar listicles is because the thing you're looking for (a laptop) is a product with relatively few entries in the market. What are you expecting here that Google isn't giving you? I'm trying to be as charitable as possible, but, for me, the expected results are about as good as I could hope for.
    - distortedsignal 3y ago
      I want to point out - if you get to the seventh page of Google, it's been known for some time that those results are... specious at best. Check out this xkcd from almost a decade ago: https://xkcd.com/1334/ https://xkcd.com/1334/ https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1334:_Second https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1334:_Second If you're really going to page 7 of Google... man, that's a desperation I've never known.
      - deltarholamda 3y ago
        I've searched for various weird error messages and ended up far into the Lands of Deep Pagination before, trying to find some glimmer of hope that I can unbrick whatever beep-boop thing I broke. It is a violent and windswept place, barren of joy or peace.
Aurornis 3y ago
> But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. I typed "Joey Hess" into Google. The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking about him that links me to his Patreon. The search results are, I would say, very relevant and very good. I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from people who aren't even trying to use it.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from people who aren't even trying to use it. Maybe. But I stopped using Google because while it didn't become useless, it did become one of the worse search engines.
- deltarholamda 3y ago
  "Useless" isn't accurate, but "not nearly as good as it used to be" sure is. At least in my experience. PageRank was brilliant, and worked as expected. It's now been superceded by... whatever is going on over in Googleland. Some of which isn't Google's fault, per se; the Internet is a lot bigger now than it was two decades ago. Some of it is. Their entire profit model depends on people using Google in a way orthogonal to "search and find and move on," as it was back in the 00s. People pay Google to game Google results. No corporation is going to overlook that.
  - twelve40 3y ago
    > People pay Google to game Google results are you referring to ads? cuz Im not aware of a way to pay Google to game search and it doesn't make any sense. Is there some dark alley in Mountain View where I can drop off a bag of cash? to game the search? Really curious now.
  - __loam 3y ago
    The problem with Google is people professionalizing gaming the algorithm because of the huge incentives to do so. I don't think it's Google's fault and I think the problem is hard or they would have fixed it.
motbus3 3y ago
I believe it was an ideologic position by the author, but maybe it is not too far. I can't tell for others, but depending on what I look for Google is not the best option. I find that now there are too much ads which kind get in the way of the answer. There are too many crafted results to appear more relevant than they are and they tend to sticky to the top for a long time.
8jef 3y ago
Corporations are rarely made to do anything, unless some court judgement forces them. More likely, corporations die because they couldn't adapt and survive. Any legacy web entity is at risk of disappearing sooner than later, because most actual web trafic (that isn't bot made) is driven by people born after the web was created, who couldn't care less about why and how the web came to be. They are running with it and breaking it (as well as other things) as they see fit. Google et al. is already that irrelevant, old, rotting and decrepit thing from ancient history. Unless Alphabet can pull some new trick without killing it first. Thanks for the ride. That's the message here.

distortedsignal 3y ago

I'm not sure that I agree. My brother tried to set me up with a girl last week. She has a pretty uncommon name. Googled her. Found... a lot of stuff. I have a VERY common name. Think multiple (relatively) famous people (photographers, US Medal of Honor winner, enough lawyers to choke a court system for DECADES), but if you google my name and the city I live in (1,000,000+ people), my LinkedIn is like the second result. For everyone saying that Google has gotten worse over the time they've been using it, these two use cases (which are pretty challenging) do really still work.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago
And did you Google yourself on a clean computer?
- distortedsignal 3y ago
  Tried this test three ways - from my wifi, on my phone's LTE connection, and via a VPN that my family uses, all in private windows to prevent Google using my local cache. All found my LinkedIn in the top 2 slots. It seems pretty stable to me? How could I make this cleaner?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    That sounds pretty thorough for the purpose. I think the parent's point was just that if you naively Google yourself without doing anything special, your own results will tend to percolate to the top more so than if a random person were to Google you.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Based on the rants I've gotten from barbers, taxi drivers and the like when I've told them what I'm working om, there does indeed seem like there is a widespread dissatisfaction with capital G.
      - distortedsignal 3y ago
        Yeah - but that's a different problem. How many barbers are there in your city? How many taxi drivers? Now - how should Google satisfy all of those people? I'll confess that I don't have the answer here. But if you're trying to look up "barber ${my_city}" or "taxi ${my_city}", and there are more than one page of results, everyone but the top 10 (top 20? how many results per page are there on google these days?) is going to be unhappy. Unless there are 20 (or 40?) or fewer barbers in your city, more than half the barbers are going to be unhappy with google. It sucks, but when x people are clamoring for y resources, x - y people will be unhappy. And if y is significantly smaller than x, a significant amount of people are going to be unhappy.
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        No I mean it's the barbers and taxi drivers struggling to find things.
        distortedsignal 3y ago
        Sorry, I misunderstood.
deltarholamda 3y ago
Okay, but now try "what's the best gaming laptop?" or something similar. This is the sort of query that, at one time, would unearth some nerd's web site alongside PCWorld or whatever. Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of which are on bizarre domains like "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are festooned with ads, also provided by Google.
- distortedsignal 3y ago
  Ok, I'll try that. Top results (excluding sponsors b/c UBlock Origin): PC Gamer The Verge Games Radar Youtube (channel: Jarrod's Tech) A giant ad showing some laptops to buy Youtube (channel: PC Builder) RTINGS.com PC Magazine Youtube (channel: Top Tech Now) CNET Tom's Hardware Another giant ad showing some laptops to buy Engadget PC Magazine Laptop Mag TechRadar These are mainstream tech press sites. And maybe the reason that it's a bunch of similar listicles is because the thing you're looking for (a laptop) is a product with relatively few entries in the market. What are you expecting here that Google isn't giving you? I'm trying to be as charitable as possible, but, for me, the expected results are about as good as I could hope for.
  - distortedsignal 3y ago
    I want to point out - if you get to the seventh page of Google, it's been known for some time that those results are... specious at best. Check out this xkcd from almost a decade ago: https://xkcd.com/1334/ https://xkcd.com/1334/ https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1334:_Second https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1334:_Second If you're really going to page 7 of Google... man, that's a desperation I've never known.
    - deltarholamda 3y ago
      I've searched for various weird error messages and ended up far into the Lands of Deep Pagination before, trying to find some glimmer of hope that I can unbrick whatever beep-boop thing I broke. It is a violent and windswept place, barren of joy or peace.

Aurornis 3y ago

> But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. I typed "Joey Hess" into Google. The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking about him that links me to his Patreon. The search results are, I would say, very relevant and very good. I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from people who aren't even trying to use it.

JohnFen 3y ago
> I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from people who aren't even trying to use it. Maybe. But I stopped using Google because while it didn't become useless, it did become one of the worse search engines.
deltarholamda 3y ago
"Useless" isn't accurate, but "not nearly as good as it used to be" sure is. At least in my experience. PageRank was brilliant, and worked as expected. It's now been superceded by... whatever is going on over in Googleland. Some of which isn't Google's fault, per se; the Internet is a lot bigger now than it was two decades ago. Some of it is. Their entire profit model depends on people using Google in a way orthogonal to "search and find and move on," as it was back in the 00s. People pay Google to game Google results. No corporation is going to overlook that.
- twelve40 3y ago
  > People pay Google to game Google results are you referring to ads? cuz Im not aware of a way to pay Google to game search and it doesn't make any sense. Is there some dark alley in Mountain View where I can drop off a bag of cash? to game the search? Really curious now.
- __loam 3y ago
  The problem with Google is people professionalizing gaming the algorithm because of the huge incentives to do so. I don't think it's Google's fault and I think the problem is hard or they would have fixed it.

motbus3 3y ago

I believe it was an ideologic position by the author, but maybe it is not too far. I can't tell for others, but depending on what I look for Google is not the best option. I find that now there are too much ads which kind get in the way of the answer. There are too many crafted results to appear more relevant than they are and they tend to sticky to the top for a long time.

8jef 3y ago

Corporations are rarely made to do anything, unless some court judgement forces them. More likely, corporations die because they couldn't adapt and survive. Any legacy web entity is at risk of disappearing sooner than later, because most actual web trafic (that isn't bot made) is driven by people born after the web was created, who couldn't care less about why and how the web came to be. They are running with it and breaking it (as well as other things) as they see fit. Google et al. is already that irrelevant, old, rotting and decrepit thing from ancient history. Unless Alphabet can pull some new trick without killing it first. Thanks for the ride. That's the message here.