Hacker News Reader

Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

The presumption here, as I understand is, is that a zero-click search happened because Google used one of their inline apps to answer a question. (For example, if I search "population of new york city", I get a big and bold answer along with a graph that shows NYC's population over time, as well as LA and Chicago.)

But I'm not convinced that's necessarily true. I frequently search for things to get a general idea of what is out there, and I only skim the results. This is also something I do when I'm refining my search terms. It may take me several iterations to refine my terms until I find something I want to click through to. In this process, I may have three or four no-click searches before I land on a good query, and then I start clicking.

View on HN

I've also had several fights with google over my refinements.

If I search for 2 words, odds are stupidly high that most of the results will NOT include one of my two words. Thanks Google, for deciding I didn't really mean to type that.

I follow up with added quotes, etc to enforce what I actually typed, so there will be a lot of Google-induced churn.

Google has focused so highly on the peak that more and more searches - certainly the majority of mine - have been relegated to the long tail.

Yeah I have that problem.

-something react something something-

Google gives me some results without react and asks if I want to include the word I typed in the box for reasons.

Like Google I KNOW the words are popular without "react", that's why I included react to narrow the results. Thanks for ruining my search for me....

DuckDuckGo is lately behaving the same way... Time to find another alternative I guess.

DDG is worse, sadly. Unlike Google, they don't tell you they ignored part of your query. And for Google forcing a term is a strong signal and it will show to in the snippet most of the time. For DDG forcing a term is a weak signal and it will often not show up in the snippet and sometimes not at all.

I love DDG because of their bangs, but their "let me tell you what you actually wanted to search for"-attitude is pissing me off.

It is. At least google still provides "verbatim" mode, which is annoying to enable and still doesn't work some of the time, but DDG has no alternative. So if I search for "mispselling" for example, with double-quotes around it, 0% of the results contain my word and DDG doesn't even mention that it altered my search term. I know this is a bad example, but I've encountered it in the past with legitimate searches where I need results for some acronym or product whose name is close to another common word.

google really needs to fix this problem. it's driving a lot of us mad.

Preach ergothus - it's making me crazy.

Another factor is snippets. They grab a sentence or two from the web pages that are your search result, and display that inline. Sometimes that gives me all I need to know. It's debatable whether previews of a web site are really a walled garden. (If I like what I see, it drives me toward the external web site.)

However, while I agree that there are other factors (and we shouldn't make assumptions), I do think the walled garden effect is real. I find it particularly annoying on Android when I ask Assistant for something and instead of showing me search engine results and a Google inline app, it shows me just Google's answer and has a button to do a search. Adding an extra step to see non-Google information feels like they're trying very hard to steer me toward their stuff.

The article is wholly ambiguous about whether your example counts as 1 search or 4 searches.

Google’s currently helping to perpetuate the myth that New York is a growing city and its population is at an all-time high of 8.623 million. In reality, it’s a dying city, and the current best estimate is 8,398,748; every bureau except Staten Island is losing population. People are fleeing New York (both the city and upstate) due to high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, bad weather, and a generally poor standard of living.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/planning-level/nyc-popula...

Am I reading this incorrectly?

"Each of the city’s five boroughs registered gains in population. The Bronx saw the largest increase, up 3.4 percent, followed by Brooklyn (3.1 percent), Manhattan (2.7 percent), and Queens (2.2 percent); Staten Island showed the smallest gain (1.6 percent) over the 99-month period."

Next paragraph states there’s been declines mostly since 2016. And tables lower than that show declines from 2017.

The slight decline has been happening for two years. You can’t state a bunch of reasons over something that just started. As if you know those are the reasons.

Sure, but "nuance" and "context" is not what Google is trying to optimize for. They are going for the "instant fact check" audience, like the sidekick gophers on podcasts who look stuff up while the main host and their guest warbles on.

The parent included their biases no proof agenda in their comment. And that seems to be the primary reason for the comment in the first place. I’d say that’s worse than Google.

I cited a government website showing that the population is off by over 200,000 people. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in New York, but it’s full of world-class bullshitters, so much of what you hear about New York is bullshit. Bill de Blasio claimed there were 2 million people standing in Times Square for New Year’s. How in the world could that possibly be true?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com