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Comment by sagivo | Hacker News Reader

It's a good time to pivot. Google is one ad-block away from loosing 70% of their revenue [1]. They should adopt the model that DuckDuckGo uses [2] and offer ads based on search query vs user data tracking.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-g...

[2] https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/

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They should also offer a paid search engine with more advanced features and better results. I would pay for that if the cost were reasonable.

You mean one where SEO-driven garbage content didn't flood the ten first pages of results? Isn't that a lost battle, ie, wouldn't the same guerilla army of SEO marketers who've driven things to where they are right now find ways to pollute that too?

I used to keep a txt file containing something like:

-site:highrankingspamsite1.com -site:highrankingspamsite2.com etc

And then I would paste that in at the end of each query.

Today they've removed that kind of spam so I don't need that.

Today my problem is that they fuzz my queries to include useless results. Not a spam problem rather than a problem of Google not realizing that I only want relevant results.

But of course, removing results that doesn't contain what I search for is easy and not an interesting machine learning problem so why should anyone care to fix that?

(That said: lately things have improved, so maybe I should just shut up and hope nobody at Google notices and puts back the insane fuzzing.)

> Today they've removed that kind of spam so I don't need that.

Try looking for images and see how many results in the first "pages" are not from Pinterest.

If you want to avoid the term expansion, just put double quotes around the words you want to hard require.

As for including "useless" results - that's never a goal, the goal is always to rank the results in the best possible way. What's the best possible way varies depending on the user, and relatively large term expansion is useful for certain users in certain cases.

> If you want to avoid the term expansion, just put double quotes around the words you want to hard require.

Lucky you if that consequently works for you. It is getting better lately, but from 2009 to 2019 they've more or less consequently ignored both dpuble quotes and their own verbatim option.

BTW: the way you write make it sound like you work in search. Is that correct?

I don't, but I collaborate with people that work in search, and regularly hear detailed presentations about aspects of it.

Which is fine, except even that seems to be ignored sometimes.

A paid search engine could have advanced features like "exclude this site from future results" or "don't show me content like this" that used semantic AI profiling. It could leverage more CPU-intensive and data-intensive AI features because you are paying for it so the economics work.

Free search incentivizes the cheapest (in CPU and other resource terms) search possible and monetizing in ways that add the least actual value.

I'd pay for the old Google Image Search and the ability to blacklist Pinterest.

You can pretty easily implement this! There are a few Chrome/Firefox extensions that modify Google Image search to look like it used to, and as far as blacklisting Pinterest, I'd recommend creating a custom search engine in Chrome (I assume this is possible in ff too?) with that parameter as a part.

Settings > Search Engines > Manage Search Engines > Add

Then input:

- Search Engine: Google Images

- Keyword: i

- URL: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=%s%20-site:pinteres...

Then typing i<space> in the url bar will use that search engine. I've got about 30 of these for various sites and they're a great time saver! (Chicago Craigslist, Google Maps Directions to <place>, DuckDuckGo I'm Feeling Lucky, Wikipedia search, etc.)

I pay for Google One and would love it if they included no ads in with that. I bet a lot more people would take it up too.

A drag and drop filter builder alone and I'd fork over a subscription.

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