5 ms·
> If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones? I believe because stickyness is a strong force. Google gets worse, but
by luckylion 2y ago
> If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?
I believe because stickyness is a strong force. Google gets worse, but you know it and you know how it fails and what to do to make it better (i.e. how to word your query differently, what parameters to add etc when you get terrible results).
You don't know this for any other search engine, so you need to make a) an active decision to try another search engine, and b) learn how to use it so it delivers what you want.
And I assume that, for most people, Google isn't bad enough to make that kind of investment.
Earlier today I tried to find out what's currently happening in Sudan, is there any shift in the civil war etc. Google was pretty useless. News articles from 6 weeks ago, the best results were probably Wikipedia, but they ranked the Timeline higher than the actual article. I tried with "sudan civil war", "sudan civil war maps" etc.
I tried just now and Yandex actuall provided much better results for what I wanted. They had sudan.liveuamap.com, they showed polgeonow.com, which looks very interesting (can't say if accurate or trustworthy, but definitely topically relevant), sudanwarmonitor.org etc. Compared to Google, they show much less "top 1000 media sites" and more of what look to be topic-experts.
Bing found sudanshahid.org (again, don't know how accurate), multiple arcgis.com-hosted articles, and also included sudanwarmonitor.org. I'd say more Big News Corps than Yandex, but less than Google.
On this search, I'd say Yandex was best, Bing second, Google last. Yet still I use Google as my daily driver, I think mostly because I don't know how far I can trust Yandex, and I have a general bias against MS products. It's certainly not because they don't deliver better results -- but I know Google and it's "the devil you know", until Google becomes too hard to extract results from, at which point I'll be forced to switch.