And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.
Yup: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
Or use to. Now the quality and quantity of results forces site owners to implement their own search or use third parties.
DDG has the bang searches though, so typing in !wiki handball is faster still.
Chrome has an even more complicated way to hide this, although I don't regularly use it so I don't remember what the process was.
It's often inaccurate too. I've had a lot of issues with menus, hours, and phone numbers being completely incorrect when searching for businesses.
The one that really bothered me was when I needed to change flights and the reported number for an airline was just some fake support line scam.
These sites seem to have emerged in earnest over the last 5 years or so, designed to present the appearance of relevant content to the search engine but existing only to serve ads.
I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lame because it just uses Bing" or something in between. It just seems to me these comments are missing the forest through the tree.
From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).
If it’s fine for you for most things, great, but based off very recent and nearly daily data on my end, that is not my experience at all.
I do agree about Google getting worse though. There isn’t a search engine today that can even hold a candle to Google from over 10 years ago including Google itself. Unfortunately, the closest thing is still Google.
Case in point is car parts - find an obscure part from a Japanese Honda, for example, and attempt to find it in DDG. I'll wait. :P
Also every time this comment is posted, someone tries to argue that it doesn’t come from Bing despite zero evidence so it’s a TIL for more than you think.
It seems like there are millions of how-to informational articles now that are inherently designed to be clickbait. It's not that they don't have useful information, but they make you dig through a lot more verbiage than is necessary, because apparently some search engines think longer = more informative.
Just a random example I tried a bit ago. A search of "guitar tuner" gave results like Fender's online tuner site (stuff with plenty of upsells for Fender gear) a site that had a basic online tuner page – filled with ads, and a tutorial at the web site of a company that sells music lessons and runs music camps.
I recall in the early 2000s it was popular to fill the bottom of a page with keywords in the same color as the background color, to trick the crawler into thinking the page was full of relevant content. After a little while that stopped working and would actually get your site penalized in ranking. The bad actors are never going to go away, they’re going to keep getting more clever and search engines like Google and Bing with billions in the corporate warchest ought to keep the edge in that arms race.
There are huge YouTube channels posting this scam content, and they never seem to go away. There are real ones in there too, but there are way more spam words than real ones.
FWIW, here's the link for Schadenfreude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo
It's maddening.
I’m not saying I think they should win outright but they should at least be holding their own if they are giving it their all.
Also, it's a huge company. Maybe there are internal structures that when you work hard to advance your career within the company it doesn't align with advancing the overall company.
But sometime back, it stopped doing it. Or can't do it anymore.
Web-search is now up for disruption, when that happens.
Clearly the use of these links creates a worse experience for users.
Not sure why you're carrying water for Google but I'm confident in their ability to filter obvious spam from their search results.
Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.
That's a double edged sword.
One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example).
They needed to help the less educated, too.
A cool example I read recently noted that the English word "son" has two different meanings in Spanish: son, a conjugation of the verb ser, to be, and son, relating to sound and music.
Edit: as an aside, I just did a search for son and the first page was almost entirely about the recent horror movie, with one hit for the Korean footballer Heung-min Son
Like squeaky-clean trying to read up on a paradox?
Google could have an advanced mode for search or something. Instead they put other information aggregators out off business but did nothing to replace their value. We were better off with the paper version of Yellow Pages for some queries -- at least it was moderated and effort was put into compiling it.
I don't think it is a good business move for Google in the long turn to be a search engine for Wikipedia and Stack overflow and for people that are to lazy to type to top domain for the URL. Forwarding non URLs to Google search in Chrome might be the smartest dark pattern from Google ever.
The thing to remember as a Dev, no matter how well intended your project is, users will always find a way to use it in a manner you never thought about that is the most advantageous way for the user.
Image search has been useless for me for a long time because of Pinterest. Many times Pinterest will show you an image but when you click on it it takes you to a page with completely different content. Maybe Google has a good reason for not penalizing Pinterest, but it’s weird to me that they are not more aggressive in sanitizing the quality of their searches.
It also seems relevant that Google has actively removed features like the ability to report SEO spam or block domains — if they cared about the user experience, you'd think there'd be an easy menu with advanced 1990s technology like “Never show results from this domain” or “Report this result as spam”. Yes, there are lots of SEO spambots out there but there are also millions of people who would zealously report spam sites for the many queries which are basically useless now.
As a simple example, on the weekend I was searching for manuals for my discontinued refrigerator. There are a ton of bottom-feeder sites which will list any part number imaginable and some which are even using fake forum sites with templated exchanges between users where someone gives a link to a malware/phishing/porn page followed by several other fake users thanking them. Google has chosen to make reporting things like that almost impossible, so unsurprisingly they remain common. I suspect that's due to their desire to avoid paying humans to distinguish between valid complaints and fake complaints from competing SEOs but either way from my perspective the results are unambiguously worse than they were a decade ago and I have no reason to believe anyone will care about this unless revenue slips.
/pinterest\..*/
and here's the (lack of) results when I google image search "pinterest fish": https://i.imgur.com/pMQ2JQK.png
One curious example for a non-commercial term the other day was a search for 'population nairn'. It returned a "people also ask of":
"What is the fastest town in Scotland"?
Answer: walkwithdinosaurs
Nonsensical question and answer.
But it's still frustrating when my skill in using words to trick machines into doing what I want gradually becomes useless.
If you search "examples of bougainvillea not pruned", you get pruning tips.
Often the first page of results will already have the tag "Without: --keyword that changes everything but is inconvenient for the algorithm--. Force include this word?"
it's to the point where I find what I want when I search torrent search engines.....and not via any search engines on the web.....
Google ruined itself years ago, or maybe "we" ruined it.
I agree that Google search has been coopted. It now requires a keener awareness of what is and isn't being artificially promoted. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it something that unsophisticated users fall prey to (by design)? Also sadly yes. But 'all but worthless'? That's a huge overstatement.
Just like most people are happy with their experience at Apple Stores whereas I feel like they’re pandering and annoying because I know exactly what I’m looking for or what the problem is and they’re still asking me basic questions unintentionally wasting my time. I’m not the target demographic they’re catering to. It’s fine, I just deal with it.
In practice any product with more than a few users is going to have to separate out the different needs, situations, and personalities of the users. Personas and market segmentation are two of many ways to slice up the user base.
Some products can use that slicing to only address small niches and just say "to hell with everybody else". Indie games, for example, often address very specific audiences. Ditto a lot of books. Academic books especially might be written for an audience in the thousands or even hundreds.
But products like Google are going for extremely large audiences. Inevitably, needs will conflict. They can try to sort that out in product, and I think they've done a surprisingly good job of guessing what people actually want based on them typing a few words into a box. But when there's a conflict, it's no shock to me they're going to favor the vast majority of their audience over the relatively small niche of persnickety software developers like myself.
But it's just a matter of time before the astroturfers start marketing more effectively via Reddit for SEO purposes.
What? That's the whole purpose of search algorithms isn't it? I'm not sure I understand your complaint.
the point of the story is that I'll take "anything related in the slightest to my query for $500" when hitting the Feeling Lucky button. when I hit search, I want specifics to my search term. don't go making 6 degrees of separation results.