Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

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Here's the thing: I don't care. I don't care if Google's algorithm makes life difficult for SEOs. I don't care if it prioritizes Google's own properties unfairly. I don't care if it hurts somebody's conversion rate.

All I care about is the quality of my browsing experience, which takes a nosedive every time one of these fullscreen mobile ads shows up. As long as Google's algorithm ranks results roughly in the order of how useful and pleasant they are to me - even if that's just a side-effect of their own self-interested intentions - I'm OK. In general I'm not a big fan of egoist philosophy, but in this case, all I care about is me, me, me. Google should keep doing what they're doing.

It might be dictatorial, but the web has so few incentives to not load your website down with a ratchet of ever-increasing invasive crap, that any incentive pushing in the opposite direction is good, and Google is one of the only agents with the might to make that happen.

" I don't care if it hurts somebody's conversion rate. All I care about is the quality of my browsing experience"

In the short run, it won't matter, but in the long run, it may likely affect your browsing experience on the whole.

Google doesn't do anything well but search. So you are trading a slightly better search experience - which may cost you the death of several brands that provide much more than search outcomes.

Trip Advisor, Yelp etc. ostensibly provide a useful service, beyond whatever Google will do. So when those companies go, we lose those greater services.

The impact of Google's monopoly is something we cannot ignore.

It's like 80% of Russians still support Putin, because he 'seems strong' - but Russians also don't realize how much he has de-facto degraded their standard of living. Russians would be a lot wealthier if they integrated into global markets, stop invading neighbouring territories. There'd be massive growth and opportunity for Russians - at least in globalist terms.

> Google doesn't do anything well but search.

I beg to differ. Google also provides great products for - Maps, Email, Browser, Mobile OS, Video, Photo management. If you think neither of those are great and you can think of a better alternative, you have a lot of market share to capture.

Having said that, I concur with the rest of your sentiment and would like to see services like TripAdvisor, Kayak etc flourish.

Disclaimer: hold a lot of GOOG

Google Cloud is also pretty great, but suffered from AWS's First Mover advantage.

But it's very easy to switch to another search engine. I used DuckDuckGo for some days. It's literally 10 seconds to change it.

As an engineer, I have found no other search engine better for programming related issues than Google. I've tried Bing, and DDG (which is my default on my work browser), and neither have performed as well as Google.

> Google doesn't do anything well but search. I beg to differ too. It's increasingly difficult to use google search effectively - it has no concept of content vs sidebar/nav, so searches (particularly technical) often turn up a plethora of unrelated* top ten list blog posts.

They're still the best in the game - but that doesn't mean they're still doing it well. Just better than the competition.

* "term A" is in the body, and "term B" is in the navlinks but has no bearing on "term A". Google search sees that the body includes both terms and include it in the results.

I really wish Google offered some way to indicate that you wanted a strong spatial correlation between two or more words that wasn't just the "I need this phrase verbatim" of quotes and allowed them to still do the smart stuff with synonyms/different forms of the words.

> Here's the thing: I don't care.

You will care when nobody's in the business of providing hotel/restaurant/etc reviews...except Google.

If google does a good eough job, then may be i will continue not to care?

Google has tried repeatedly to challenge Yelp. Every attempt fails, but they insist on hurting Yelp and businesses like it that have provided value over many years. This goes back to Larry asking his teams to answer the users' query on the Google landing page. He wants the entire users' session to be in Google products. These companies are as much at fault for relying on Google so heavily. Google is as much as fault for taking on companies with established products and histories. Google should look to new markets instead of cannibalizing its search business for short term gain.

I think Google has just recently reached a "good enough" state for Yelp like use-cases, while Yelp has simultaneously declined, that I'm nowadays more likely to just use Google.

Yelp used to be good until, among other things, hyperemotional crybabies destroyed it.

I don't use yelp anymore, all the places around me google reviews seems to become more and more popular. Instantly I get nice photos, hours, directions, and just as quality of reviews. The best thing, sometimes a direct link to the menu. Show times are much better than going to fandango etc. I want to spend less time on my phone navigating sites and more time giving options to my wife or friend who's traveling with me

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