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I personally feel like search has been broken for a long time. I rarely use Google outside of "site:" searches b/c the results are so bad. For example, last n

I personally feel like search has been broken for a long time. I rarely use Google outside of "site:" searches b/c the results are so bad. For example, last night I flooded my lawn mower engine. I did a search on Google and Bing for "how to fix a flooded lawn mower engine". The first page on both sites were stuffed with results from ehow, ask, answers, etc. I could not find a single good result. I finally gave up a few pages in. I am sure there are good answers out there, but I am convinced that Google and Bing can no longer find them. Both companies should be embarrassed that they have let these cheap content companies game them to the point where search is no longer relevant. Maybe Bing will fix this and my faith will be renewed, but I am not too optimistic.

jonnycoder 14y ago
I completely agree with you. Outside of doing software/programming relating searches, Google's results are all overridden with, and you phrased it perfectly, cheap content sites. Most of the time, if I'm doing a search like "best turkey call", I tend to do a search such as "jesse hunting forums best turkey call". I would not call eHow, Yahoo Answers and other cheap content sites SPAM, but they are far from reliable than places where you can get extremely relevant information such as hunting forums regarding hunting, or health and workout information from forum.bodybuilding.com.
- madoublet 14y ago
  Yeah, that is about how I operate. But, when I am out of my comfort zone (like lawn mower repair), I am completely lost. It seems like search engines should know where people get the best results and serve those up first. And, in my opinion, it is rare that the best results come from these content sites. Heck, when I search that same query today, out of the first five results, only 1 has a picture of a lawnmower that is not in an ad. And, it is a stock photo.
  - rakkhi 14y ago
    Have you tried using the Google option to block results from these sites? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd... Assume you have adblock running as well? Maybe I'm the anomaly but Google still seems very good to me for these types of queries. Top results for me on "how to fix a lawn mower": Youtube Wiki Number of other forums that seem relavant
- deleted 14y ago
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hsshah 14y ago
Indeed. I got fed up with this couple of months back. Depending on the topic, I would do a site search on my own list of sites. I did this so many times, I decided to create customized search engines on top of Google. It will save you a lot of time. Check it out: http://www.google.com/cse/ http://www.google.com/cse/
brudgers 14y ago
The place to search for this sort of stuff is YouTube, e.g. search for "flooded engine." It's an illustration with the problems of ranking pages algorithmically rather than using a keyword search.
sliverstorm 14y ago
Be more specific. For example, let's assume your lawn mower has a Briggs-Stratton engine. "fix flooded briggs-stratton" seems to return fairly high-quality results.
- deleted 14y ago
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jonnycoder 14y ago

I completely agree with you. Outside of doing software/programming relating searches, Google's results are all overridden with, and you phrased it perfectly, cheap content sites. Most of the time, if I'm doing a search like "best turkey call", I tend to do a search such as "jesse hunting forums best turkey call". I would not call eHow, Yahoo Answers and other cheap content sites SPAM, but they are far from reliable than places where you can get extremely relevant information such as hunting forums regarding hunting, or health and workout information from forum.bodybuilding.com.

madoublet 14y ago
Yeah, that is about how I operate. But, when I am out of my comfort zone (like lawn mower repair), I am completely lost. It seems like search engines should know where people get the best results and serve those up first. And, in my opinion, it is rare that the best results come from these content sites. Heck, when I search that same query today, out of the first five results, only 1 has a picture of a lawnmower that is not in an ad. And, it is a stock photo.
- rakkhi 14y ago
  Have you tried using the Google option to block results from these sites? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd... Assume you have adblock running as well? Maybe I'm the anomaly but Google still seems very good to me for these types of queries. Top results for me on "how to fix a lawn mower": Youtube Wiki Number of other forums that seem relavant
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

hsshah 14y ago

Indeed. I got fed up with this couple of months back. Depending on the topic, I would do a site search on my own list of sites. I did this so many times, I decided to create customized search engines on top of Google. It will save you a lot of time. Check it out: http://www.google.com/cse/ http://www.google.com/cse/

brudgers 14y ago

The place to search for this sort of stuff is YouTube, e.g. search for "flooded engine." It's an illustration with the problems of ranking pages algorithmically rather than using a keyword search.

sliverstorm 14y ago

Be more specific. For example, let's assume your lawn mower has a Briggs-Stratton engine. "fix flooded briggs-stratton" seems to return fairly high-quality results.

deleted 14y ago
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