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Yet another sign that Scott Locklin was dead-on about Google having become Fat Elvis: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-elvis/ https:

by varelse 11y ago

Yet another sign that Scott Locklin was dead-on about Google having become Fat Elvis: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-elvis/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-... And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of search quality. I find this frustrating because I hate Google for its A/B testing and blind-allocated mediocrity, and yet, everything else continues to be worse. It's like being married to someone you truly despise (at least for me, your mileage may vary). I really don't get why no one can disrupt them. But clearly they can't...

bad_user 11y ago
I just read that article and I've lost at least 10 minutes out of my life that I'll never get back. It's amongst the worst links I ever followed on HN.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Agree. I agreed with the first few paragraphs of the article, but when they called autocomplete and Gmail retarded I could barely keep reading. They went on to defend content farms, claimed that they're useful, and noted that any sensible search engine algorithm should be able to avoid them. The article sounds as if it's written by someone who operates a link farm, uses AOL for email, and has no clue how web search works. The imagery of Google as Fat Elvis is enough for a good chuckle, though.
  - varelse 11y ago
    Gmail is an atrocity of a once great service, possibly the easiest component of Google to disrupt (all IMO of course) I am on a 6 Mbps connection and I regularly have to kill my Gmail window or else it hogs the bandwidth, memory leaks until it crashes my browser (Firefox), or slows the entire browser to a crawl for any other window. I see no such issues with facebook, twitter, or any other web site I visit regularly. Then there's all the weird javascript idiosyncracies when one wants to reply to a message and the compose window won't appear unless I open a new tab. Sigh... And don't even get me started on the abomination that Chrome has become, possibly IMO, because so much of its original team has long since left Google (ex-googler myself who knew many of them).
    - lucaspiller 11y ago
      Would you say Chromium is in bad shape too?
    - x0x0 11y ago
      I agree -- gmail has become crappy, and their recent changes on mobile suck. eg shrinking inbox view from 8 messages to 5.5 on my nexus 5 (fuck the jerk who decided to do that.) That said, how can one compete with them? I just switched to fastmail which is very ok at best -- I have a list of bugs, and their web client is very half assed. But I don't know that I believe there are enough people who want a good gmail and who are willing to pay eg $40/year for it to make a business if you don't have search ads making money rain out of the sky to subsidize everything else...
      - bad_user 11y ago
        If you pay for Google Apps, then they don't show you any ads, as Google Apps is not subsidized from ads.
        x0x0 11y ago
        It is subsidized -- the development costs were largely born (I think, but at minimum partially born) by the public ad supported version. It's perfectly possible that it would not be profitable to run it solely as an ad-free business, but once you've already built it the profit is largely incremental. Don't ignore their strategic reasons for building it either, ie cutting the legs out from under microsoft's most profitable product office: it's quite possible google apps is not particularly profitable and the value is largely strategic.
learnstats2 11y ago
Every other search engine is worse because they are simply following Google. Every existing search engine that I'm aware of is essentially based on the PageRank algorithm, an innovation which Google created. At the time it was created, it was not obvious that it was the best option - only that it was better than AltaVista's algorithm and Yahoo's curated portal model that were the options in 1999. Why are search engines not innovating? Or, if they are, where are they?
- millstone 11y ago
  I would say that it's because search engine ranking is good enough. At the very least we are in the domain of diminishing returns. In terms of innovations, there was a weird and misguided attempt to integrate "social search" into your results, which thankfully seems to have disappeared. There is also Google's Knowledge Graph, which is a promising idea but doesn't work well yet. Search for "calories in a cup of corn" and Google's answer is wildly off. Or try "activation fee" and find out that it's $40 (huh?). It remains to be seen whether this feature can be rendered trustworthy and relevant.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    My Google results are noticeably worse for me logged-out (or through DDG) than logged-in. This suggests that search is in fact such a hard problem that my search engine literally needs to know more about me than I know about myself to do a good job for me. Which explains why Bing has such a hard time unseating Google - I'm always logged into GMail, so Google has known it's me doing my searches for the past eleven years.
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  > the PageRank algorithm, an innovation which Google created. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0306457376900480# http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03064573769... http://www.w3.org/People/Massimo/papers/WWW6/ http://www.w3.org/People/Massimo/papers/WWW6/
lazyjones 11y ago
> And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of search quality. YMMV, but I have been using Duckduckgo exclusively on my desktop and smartphone for half a year or so and the rare times I used Google (with "!g" prefix) during that time, I could not find better search results there either. So for all common purposes, DDG fully replaces Google for me (and I'm not a novice user who cannot tell, I've been using the web obsessively for ~20 years [and yes, AltaVista before Google]). Perhaps you should dare switch to DDG for a while and see if the illusion, that Google works better in some unspecified way, disappears.
- varelse 11y ago
  I so wish DuckDuckGo were a viable replacement for Google's search results because I love the concept, and you're right that it is for simple queries, but my main use case for google these days is naively pasting long error message sequences from compilations gone bad and reading the relevant stackoverflow questions that lead to the fix. DuckDuckGo chokes on this stuff.
  - lazyjones 11y ago
    If you just want to search SO, use the "!so" prefix in the Duckduckgo search prompt...
    - lukaslalinsky 11y ago
      Well, you don't need Duckduckgo for that. You can set your browser to search SO directly if you type "!so <query>". The point of an internet search engine is to search the entire internet and give you the best results.
- bad_user 11y ago
  I've got 2 problems with DDG: 1) The results I get in DDG are the same results I get in Bing - which means that DDG is for me just a shell around Bing. And even though DDG is not sending to Bing any cookies with my ID, well, being a power user I can and do use the Incognito/Private mode of my browser. Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help. And the bang shortcuts of DDG are also provided by my browser. I mean, if I'm concerned with privacy, why in the world would I want to send my Google searches to DDG's servers? 2) People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US. Outside of the US, like in Europe, non-Google search results get to be like really, really bad ;-)
davidgerard 11y ago
Same reason everyone stays on Facebook even though the experience is terrible. It's like there's only one bar in town and it's a hideous dump, but it's the only place you can be sure to catch people.

by varelse 11y ago

bad_user 11y ago

I just read that article and I've lost at least 10 minutes out of my life that I'll never get back. It's amongst the worst links I ever followed on HN.

seanp2k2 11y ago
Agree. I agreed with the first few paragraphs of the article, but when they called autocomplete and Gmail retarded I could barely keep reading. They went on to defend content farms, claimed that they're useful, and noted that any sensible search engine algorithm should be able to avoid them. The article sounds as if it's written by someone who operates a link farm, uses AOL for email, and has no clue how web search works. The imagery of Google as Fat Elvis is enough for a good chuckle, though.
- varelse 11y ago
  Gmail is an atrocity of a once great service, possibly the easiest component of Google to disrupt (all IMO of course) I am on a 6 Mbps connection and I regularly have to kill my Gmail window or else it hogs the bandwidth, memory leaks until it crashes my browser (Firefox), or slows the entire browser to a crawl for any other window. I see no such issues with facebook, twitter, or any other web site I visit regularly. Then there's all the weird javascript idiosyncracies when one wants to reply to a message and the compose window won't appear unless I open a new tab. Sigh... And don't even get me started on the abomination that Chrome has become, possibly IMO, because so much of its original team has long since left Google (ex-googler myself who knew many of them).
  - lucaspiller 11y ago
    Would you say Chromium is in bad shape too?
  - x0x0 11y ago
    I agree -- gmail has become crappy, and their recent changes on mobile suck. eg shrinking inbox view from 8 messages to 5.5 on my nexus 5 (fuck the jerk who decided to do that.) That said, how can one compete with them? I just switched to fastmail which is very ok at best -- I have a list of bugs, and their web client is very half assed. But I don't know that I believe there are enough people who want a good gmail and who are willing to pay eg $40/year for it to make a business if you don't have search ads making money rain out of the sky to subsidize everything else...
    - bad_user 11y ago
      If you pay for Google Apps, then they don't show you any ads, as Google Apps is not subsidized from ads.
      - x0x0 11y ago
        It is subsidized -- the development costs were largely born (I think, but at minimum partially born) by the public ad supported version. It's perfectly possible that it would not be profitable to run it solely as an ad-free business, but once you've already built it the profit is largely incremental. Don't ignore their strategic reasons for building it either, ie cutting the legs out from under microsoft's most profitable product office: it's quite possible google apps is not particularly profitable and the value is largely strategic.

learnstats2 11y ago

Every other search engine is worse because they are simply following Google. Every existing search engine that I'm aware of is essentially based on the PageRank algorithm, an innovation which Google created. At the time it was created, it was not obvious that it was the best option - only that it was better than AltaVista's algorithm and Yahoo's curated portal model that were the options in 1999. Why are search engines not innovating? Or, if they are, where are they?

millstone 11y ago
I would say that it's because search engine ranking is good enough. At the very least we are in the domain of diminishing returns. In terms of innovations, there was a weird and misguided attempt to integrate "social search" into your results, which thankfully seems to have disappeared. There is also Google's Knowledge Graph, which is a promising idea but doesn't work well yet. Search for "calories in a cup of corn" and Google's answer is wildly off. Or try "activation fee" and find out that it's $40 (huh?). It remains to be seen whether this feature can be rendered trustworthy and relevant.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  My Google results are noticeably worse for me logged-out (or through DDG) than logged-in. This suggests that search is in fact such a hard problem that my search engine literally needs to know more about me than I know about myself to do a good job for me. Which explains why Bing has such a hard time unseating Google - I'm always logged into GMail, so Google has known it's me doing my searches for the past eleven years.
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> the PageRank algorithm, an innovation which Google created. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0306457376900480# http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03064573769... http://www.w3.org/People/Massimo/papers/WWW6/ http://www.w3.org/People/Massimo/papers/WWW6/

lazyjones 11y ago

> And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of search quality. YMMV, but I have been using Duckduckgo exclusively on my desktop and smartphone for half a year or so and the rare times I used Google (with "!g" prefix) during that time, I could not find better search results there either. So for all common purposes, DDG fully replaces Google for me (and I'm not a novice user who cannot tell, I've been using the web obsessively for ~20 years [and yes, AltaVista before Google]). Perhaps you should dare switch to DDG for a while and see if the illusion, that Google works better in some unspecified way, disappears.

varelse 11y ago
I so wish DuckDuckGo were a viable replacement for Google's search results because I love the concept, and you're right that it is for simple queries, but my main use case for google these days is naively pasting long error message sequences from compilations gone bad and reading the relevant stackoverflow questions that lead to the fix. DuckDuckGo chokes on this stuff.
- lazyjones 11y ago
  If you just want to search SO, use the "!so" prefix in the Duckduckgo search prompt...
  - lukaslalinsky 11y ago
    Well, you don't need Duckduckgo for that. You can set your browser to search SO directly if you type "!so <query>". The point of an internet search engine is to search the entire internet and give you the best results.
bad_user 11y ago
I've got 2 problems with DDG: 1) The results I get in DDG are the same results I get in Bing - which means that DDG is for me just a shell around Bing. And even though DDG is not sending to Bing any cookies with my ID, well, being a power user I can and do use the Incognito/Private mode of my browser. Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help. And the bang shortcuts of DDG are also provided by my browser. I mean, if I'm concerned with privacy, why in the world would I want to send my Google searches to DDG's servers? 2) People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US. Outside of the US, like in Europe, non-Google search results get to be like really, really bad ;-)

davidgerard 11y ago

Same reason everyone stays on Facebook even though the experience is terrible. It's like there's only one bar in town and it's a hideous dump, but it's the only place you can be sure to catch people.