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HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still

by geor9e 2y ago

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetector.com/status/bing/ https://downdetector.com/status/bing/

whiplash451 2y ago
Maybe because search is an extremely hard problem and requires hundreds of millions (if not billions) of investment to remain competitive?
- eviks 2y ago
  What's incredibly hard allowing client side filtering like kagi is doing? How many millions do you need to spend to decrease your own spending on AI for every query?
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  Also: There is a MASSIVE incentive for foul play from everyone being searched. Every single business wants their results at the top. Everyone is grasping for every single advertiser's cents. The monetary encouragement to game the system is so incredibly strong. Google has to fight that uphill battle 24/7. I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
  - mc32 2y ago
    If they only divided it into information search ("library" knowledge) and business search (Yelp/YP) where you can tweak your preferences. When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs. What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your query. It's a sea of flotsam.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Unfortunately, if you did that, the businesses would still do their best to muscle in on the "information search" results. Marketers gotta Market, and placement on a SERP is a zero sum game. If one competitor managed to get themselves highly ranked in the "information search" then there would be incentive for all competitors to try.
      - mc32 2y ago
        I guess the idea is you disallow them from optimizing at all in the info search so much that you derank them on the biz for some not inconsequential amount of time if they misbehave.
  - ta_1138 2y ago
    No doubt, but there's a whole lot of problems shaped like that in tech today. Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners. The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.
  - jldugger 2y ago
    >It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it. But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords. And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  It's only getting harder and harder for newcomers to compete. Especially with the rise of abusive AI scrapers, webmasters are increasingly hostile to new web crawlers. Google and Bing get a pass because they're well-known, but any new service is fighting an uphill battle; a lot of sites will block them right off the bat. Nor does it help that some large sites (like Reddit) have inside deals with Google to feed them updates directly.
voisin 2y ago
> I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.
- ergonaught 2y ago
  Google search results are garbage and are still superior to DDG. I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.
  - voisin 2y ago
    I am just shocked at how different our experiences are. I wonder what leads to the vast gulf? Could your results be better due to what you are searching or is the algorithm producing different results for each of us, based on other Google cues?
    - gretch 2y ago
      Because generalized Internet search encompasses any and all human interests. The vast gulf could easily be explained by bias in what 2 ppl are interested in and search for. For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results. And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results. Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.
    - nosianu 2y ago
      I have two examples where Google is really bad. A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event. A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations: Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark. I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.
blackoil 2y ago
That even if True is irrelevant to discussion. Antitrust isn't mostly against monopoly, but its abuse to gain benefit in another area or uncompetitive practices to stifle potential competition.
enraged_camel 2y ago
The alternatives are bad because the ones that were even remotely good were bought and killed by Google over the years. This includes ones we all have heard of as well as countless others. This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.
- aednichols 2y ago
  Google has acquired a lot of ad competitors, but I can't remember any general-purpose search engines. It seemed more like they died out naturally over a long period. I welcome new information if that's not right.
  - buildsjets 2y ago
    They definitely bought and killed DejaNews. Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.
xdennis 2y ago
> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you want. For political stuff it's very biased. If you search for something more obscure, Google really likes to "correct" your search and eliminate terms. Although Google is better in my maternal language and for images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).
- thurnderbong 2y ago
  [dead]
AlbertCory 2y ago
I use DDG most of the time. Sometimes I try Google, and then I'm disgusted by all the non-result garbage they put at the top nowadays. Once in a while they do have something valuable that DDG misses. So yeah, I find DDG perfectly adequate.
tannhaeuser 2y ago
HN isn't that special a place considering nerds think about Google as a "search engine" lol. Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web in more than one way.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  google.com is a search engine, regardless of what drives Google's revenue. Weird to say it's not.
  - patmorgan23 2y ago
    It's an advertising billboard that if you scroll past might have some relevant links at the bottom of the page.
    - mvdtnz 2y ago
      Well no, it's a search engine.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    But Google the company is an advertising company, regardless of what they use to spread those adverts. Weird to say it's not.
    - mvdtnz 2y ago
      It's very clear GP was talking about Google the search engine (as in, google.com) in their post. > I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.
mm263 2y ago
> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Kagi
- arghwhat 2y ago
  After having been a paid subscriber for a number of months, I have to say that it still wasn't cutting it. I still ended up falling back to google all the time. Plus, https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
  - kachapopopow 2y ago
    Interesting read.
    - wetpaws 2y ago
      [dead]
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    What bugs me most about Kagi at the moment is that their iOS plugin behaves weirdly. Frequently it will completely swallow my search and I'll have to retype it. Eventually I just disabled it :( Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      On iOS I just set my default browser to Orion with Kagi as a default search engine. There’s some minor UI bugs but they’re not showstoppers.
  - chiaroscuro1312 2y ago
    thanks for this link
  - hiatus 2y ago
    Wow, those comments from the founder on GDPR are not unlike "we just chatgpted the license lol". I'm reconsidering my sub.
ta1243 2y ago
The goal of almost all search engines is to direct people to adverts, not to give them the results. Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you adverts, not to give you the content you want.
miohtama 2y ago
Alternatives are bad because they do not have 24 years of data how users use the search. They will also never get this data if Google keeps dominating.
JasserInicide 2y ago
Unironically Yandex, especially if you're searching for politically sensitive stuff. It is wild how much Google censors.
- goryramsy 2y ago
  Care to elaborate?
wavemode 2y ago
> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Can you give me an example of a search query which yields acceptable results on Google but does not on Bing?
stephenr 2y ago
With (practically) every website in existence spending fuck knows how many hours/days/weeks optimising for Google search bot, it's baffling? Really?

by geor9e 2y ago

whiplash451 2y ago

Maybe because search is an extremely hard problem and requires hundreds of millions (if not billions) of investment to remain competitive?

eviks 2y ago
What's incredibly hard allowing client side filtering like kagi is doing? How many millions do you need to spend to decrease your own spending on AI for every query?
Night_Thastus 2y ago
Also: There is a MASSIVE incentive for foul play from everyone being searched. Every single business wants their results at the top. Everyone is grasping for every single advertiser's cents. The monetary encouragement to game the system is so incredibly strong. Google has to fight that uphill battle 24/7. I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
- mc32 2y ago
  If they only divided it into information search ("library" knowledge) and business search (Yelp/YP) where you can tweak your preferences. When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs. What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your query. It's a sea of flotsam.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Unfortunately, if you did that, the businesses would still do their best to muscle in on the "information search" results. Marketers gotta Market, and placement on a SERP is a zero sum game. If one competitor managed to get themselves highly ranked in the "information search" then there would be incentive for all competitors to try.
    - mc32 2y ago
      I guess the idea is you disallow them from optimizing at all in the info search so much that you derank them on the biz for some not inconsequential amount of time if they misbehave.
- ta_1138 2y ago
  No doubt, but there's a whole lot of problems shaped like that in tech today. Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners. The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.
- jldugger 2y ago
  >It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it. But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords. And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.
duskwuff 2y ago
It's only getting harder and harder for newcomers to compete. Especially with the rise of abusive AI scrapers, webmasters are increasingly hostile to new web crawlers. Google and Bing get a pass because they're well-known, but any new service is fighting an uphill battle; a lot of sites will block them right off the bat. Nor does it help that some large sites (like Reddit) have inside deals with Google to feed them updates directly.

voisin 2y ago

> I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.

ergonaught 2y ago
Google search results are garbage and are still superior to DDG. I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.
- voisin 2y ago
  I am just shocked at how different our experiences are. I wonder what leads to the vast gulf? Could your results be better due to what you are searching or is the algorithm producing different results for each of us, based on other Google cues?
  - gretch 2y ago
    Because generalized Internet search encompasses any and all human interests. The vast gulf could easily be explained by bias in what 2 ppl are interested in and search for. For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results. And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results. Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.
  - nosianu 2y ago
    I have two examples where Google is really bad. A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event. A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations: Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark. I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.

blackoil 2y ago

That even if True is irrelevant to discussion. Antitrust isn't mostly against monopoly, but its abuse to gain benefit in another area or uncompetitive practices to stifle potential competition.

enraged_camel 2y ago

The alternatives are bad because the ones that were even remotely good were bought and killed by Google over the years. This includes ones we all have heard of as well as countless others. This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.

aednichols 2y ago
Google has acquired a lot of ad competitors, but I can't remember any general-purpose search engines. It seemed more like they died out naturally over a long period. I welcome new information if that's not right.
- buildsjets 2y ago
  They definitely bought and killed DejaNews. Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.

xdennis 2y ago

> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you want. For political stuff it's very biased. If you search for something more obscure, Google really likes to "correct" your search and eliminate terms. Although Google is better in my maternal language and for images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).

thurnderbong 2y ago
[dead]

AlbertCory 2y ago

I use DDG most of the time. Sometimes I try Google, and then I'm disgusted by all the non-result garbage they put at the top nowadays. Once in a while they do have something valuable that DDG misses. So yeah, I find DDG perfectly adequate.

tannhaeuser 2y ago

HN isn't that special a place considering nerds think about Google as a "search engine" lol. Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web in more than one way.

mvdtnz 2y ago
google.com is a search engine, regardless of what drives Google's revenue. Weird to say it's not.
- patmorgan23 2y ago
  It's an advertising billboard that if you scroll past might have some relevant links at the bottom of the page.
  - mvdtnz 2y ago
    Well no, it's a search engine.
- ta1243 2y ago
  But Google the company is an advertising company, regardless of what they use to spread those adverts. Weird to say it's not.
  - mvdtnz 2y ago
    It's very clear GP was talking about Google the search engine (as in, google.com) in their post. > I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.

mm263 2y ago

> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Kagi

arghwhat 2y ago
After having been a paid subscriber for a number of months, I have to say that it still wasn't cutting it. I still ended up falling back to google all the time. Plus, https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
- kachapopopow 2y ago
  Interesting read.
  - wetpaws 2y ago
    [dead]
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  What bugs me most about Kagi at the moment is that their iOS plugin behaves weirdly. Frequently it will completely swallow my search and I'll have to retype it. Eventually I just disabled it :( Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    On iOS I just set my default browser to Orion with Kagi as a default search engine. There’s some minor UI bugs but they’re not showstoppers.
- chiaroscuro1312 2y ago
  thanks for this link
- hiatus 2y ago
  Wow, those comments from the founder on GDPR are not unlike "we just chatgpted the license lol". I'm reconsidering my sub.

ta1243 2y ago

The goal of almost all search engines is to direct people to adverts, not to give them the results. Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you adverts, not to give you the content you want.

miohtama 2y ago

Alternatives are bad because they do not have 24 years of data how users use the search. They will also never get this data if Google keeps dominating.

JasserInicide 2y ago

Unironically Yandex, especially if you're searching for politically sensitive stuff. It is wild how much Google censors.

goryramsy 2y ago
Care to elaborate?

wavemode 2y ago

> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Can you give me an example of a search query which yields acceptable results on Google but does not on Bing?

stephenr 2y ago

With (practically) every website in existence spending fuck knows how many hours/days/weeks optimising for Google search bot, it's baffling? Really?