If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
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abhinavsharma.com
Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).
I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by just trying to be a Google search clone.
You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about.
Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.
It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.
When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the only intrinsic business force is direct monetisation paths... completely different incentives.
Imagine that every Internet user pays just one dollar a month. That's still billions worth of revenue, and it can be segmented further such as basic features available for free and more advanced users (such as large-scale API access) can pay more.
At the moment I'm not aware of any company whose primary service is search. I believe the demand would be there - OS manufacturers currently have to either put up with Google (even if their goals diverge - for example it doesn't work well with Apple's privacy-focused marketing) or Bing.
A third player whose primary business is search (as opposed to using it as a loss-leader to lure people into their ecosystems, like Google and Bing are) could get some use, not to mention that programmatic access to large web index would no doubt be a service many companies would pay for. Think Algolia or hosted ElasticSearch but pre-seeded with a broad index of the web.
At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.
I think you can only specify searching one site at a time. With site: search filter.
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Google’s custom search engine’s where you can give a whitelisted amount of sites isn’t very good. At least not any more. It didn’t include lots of pages it’s main index does. Or the rankings were all out of sorts rendering not useful.
Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a decade.
There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.
It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation. Google has been came such a monster, even we know it's dying, but its momentum will keep it going for a very long time. And if it can correct its trajectory just a little bit, the collapsing process will be even longer.
Very debatable.
Exactly. Heroin is pretty addictive, pretty fast.
Otoh, there is no lethal dose that we know of for magic mushrooms (psylocibin). You can take a lot and have a hell of a trip but no one ever died from a psylocibin overdose. And it’s not addictive in the sense that you’ll get physical effects of you stop taking it. It builds a tolerance that will make it have much less effect if you take too much too often so it kinda takes care of the problem this way.
Alcohol which is freely available to any adult can make you addicted and will Jill you if you take too much of it.
What about sugar? We’re pretty much all addicted to it, and it can kill in the long term (obesity, diabetes…)
I’m not a drug expert but I think it’s very detrimental to say that all drugs are bad, they’ll make you an addict and kill you, and they’ll liquefy your brain. This is FUD and it results in shaming. It also creates abysmally poor public policy like the “war on drugs” which has been nothing but a colossal failure and a misery generating system.
Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.
I do suspect the main thing people complain about currently with Google is the abundance of ads and the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.
Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not at 10B queries/day.
> the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.
That's not the algorithm's fault per se; that's instead the fact that recipes can't be copyrighted, and so these sites can freely steal + repost one-another's recipes, and so you'll find the same recipe word-for-word on many sites, thus making an exact match in the recipe part not contribute highly to ranking any particular site. The 2000-word blog post, on the other hand, is actual Intellectual Property unique to the site posting it. So it only appears in the one place; and so when your query matches it, it ranks quite highly indeed.
Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.
$10 a month for a personal search is a bit much. $10 a month for work related search is cheap. Give me results specific to my industry without having a super long query.
Compare and contrast: phone-number directory listings. Who should Google cite as the authoritative source for lists of name-to-phone number associations? Nobody. All the lists are copying from each-other, curating and correcting the data taken from one-another, gathering their own original data for additions, and everything in between. Every portal overlaps every other portal, but mostly has the same stuff.
Compare and contrast, in the physical world: printings of public-domain literature. If Google indexed bookstores, which printing by which publisher would you want them to rank first on a search for e.g. Pride and Prejudice?
Quotes have ~always been an exact match on the tokenized query text, not a substring match on the corpus text. No synonyms, reordering, gaps, etc, but the matches -- and failures -- are sometimes not obvious at first blush.
If you search for "don't stop me now", for instance, that "don't" tokenizes to "don t", so it will match the tokenized strings "don't", "don t", "don-t", "don, t", etc ... but not "dont", because that's outside tokenization.
On the other hand, snippets mostly are substring matches of the query text, so if you see a result to a literal query that doesn't have a snippet, you know it's probably one of the weird matches.
term -term
For example:
steve -steve returns 0 results
test -test returns 4,780,000,000 in my search
starting with google/youtube videosIf you search for ["test" -test] you'll get no results; quoting "test" removes the synonyms.
It's probably not new behavior per se, but synonyms have gotten a lot broader over the years, so it was a lot easier to punch [term -term] ten years ago and hit a term which had no synonyms.
The point wasn't as to what the synonyms were for a specific search term but that they have been added as implicit terms, which makes google search no longer exact.
"Exact tokenized matching" can look like "exact string matching" a lot of the time. Until you hit some of the edge cases it's like kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/
If you use quotes around a phrase, it will reorder terms and make substitutions with synonyms in addition to straight up ignoring the quoted phrase no katter how many times you add +. If you then fiddle with settings (randomly not available depending on star alignment and device) to change it to 'verbatim' it will still reorder and split up tokens in the phrase.
Control. They've moved from helping you find what you asked for, to trying to influence you to changingnwhat you ask for to the thing that paid them the most.
Similarly they're they're forcing creators to alter content to match their metrics or fall into obscurity.
It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it.
I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.
It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.
Even more ironically and many here would have experienced this themselves: the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing
Weirdly the same is the case for reddit.
What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.
First page is full of results from a handful of sites.
I think Google has it's place. However, I also think that an additional search engine like the one I described would be a very nice and useful tool. At least for me.
Google trying to interpret what you want is, in my opinion, the largest reason that the search has become so bad. It guesses very poorly, and I end up having to try to guess what the magic incantation is to get it to give the what I'm searching for.
This. So much this.
And it is so...bloody...annoying.
Came here to write exactly that
Why are we still using it?
There's nothing better out there.
Google still has the lead with the answer box and older results. They’ve been collecting data for longer and I suspect their indexing heuristics are incredible.
I switched my default over to Bing about two months ago and it is surprisingly good. Subjectively I would say it is better more often than it is worse.
How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.
In fact it doesn't even give me a single useful piece of information. #1 result is a link to expedia. #2 is to hotels.com, #3 to the trip advisor. Scroll down Google Hotels widget. Then on the 3rd browser viewpoint page I get actual query results.
Not sure how that could be improved to be honest.
Next entry was a non-ad from Tripadvisor.
This makes it basically unusable for anything that isn't a technical question, for which it is still reasonably good if you restrict to sites where it will likely get a reasonable answer.
If special interest groups aligned with google have a position on what you're searching though, it will simply be spammed outright and any evidence to the contrary either concealed or "fact checks" which consist of minor modifications on the core underlying fact in question spiked with something that is obviously false so that the fact check can say "false" whilst actually the underlying fact in question is not at all false. Even when those special interest groups are right, google is still useless because it will give you such a slanted view of the territory you will be utterly clueless as to what other sides of the debate even exist as anything more than silly strawmen. Most questions in this class people would be better served by just petitioning Blackrock and similar directly and asking them what they should think.
For commercial stuff it's almost as bad, I find myself having to figure out the underlying financial realities of the industry that produces x, then getting a summary of the market space by volume and associated data, then speculating on stuff that might exist within that market space that might be nice in light of whatever flaws afflict the market space in question, and maybe if I get lucky I'll find something through the reams and reams of valueless SEO optimised pop-up spewing complete and utter bullshit desperately attempting to capitalise on my assumed stupidity with their cookie cutter a-b tested "sales pitches". Most of the time I end up just going to alibaba or similar, finding vendors shipping actual large units with decent reviews, and then working backwards from there to what I'm looking for.
Watching google fall from something amazing to probably-worse-than-microsoft-all-things-considered tier was quite the eye opener.
The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.
I think it's down to personal preference or something.
I'm 100% convinced that the difference comes down to how searches are formulated. At least, the people who I know that experience poor quality searches seem to enter their queries as natural-language questions rather than search terms.
used brave as my daily search engine for a couple of months and I must say this was not the case for me. Results for global EN topics were indeed better than ddg/bing in some cases (nowhere near an order of magnitude better, though), but results for any non-EN or local queries (think searching for major websites running for 15 yrs) were extremely poor in most cases.
But what really annoys me (and maybe I'm doing something wrong) is that one page of (slow) results is not enough. I understand that Google's 1,000,000+ results is also not necessary. But I often need more than 20. Come to think of it, I rarely need pages 2 and beyond when using Google. So maybe that's saying something about the quality of the Brave results? They're just not as good.
People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't in 2008. Which is obvious because in 2008 there was only reddit and like 3 other sites, now there's dozens of relevant ones.
Removes sites that copy SO answers etc...
Even the data collected from a personal blocklist would be useful for them, without explicitly reporting sites, but again they just don’t care.
They’ve been in the business of parsing websites for 25 years, surely they can tell ad-infested spam websites apart from good ones.
> trusted Google users
> (after manual review)
> already exists and works on Google Maps
If you don't write like a drunk two year old and fill everything with key phrases now you simply don't appear in results, so any site that can become known has to be rewritten by gpt into barely intelligible garbage that dances around the point for four paragraphs when it could be communicated in four words..
Google meets my expectations for a search engine but maybe I'm not expecting enough from search?
I have also used some competitors. They are fine for most things (finding the hours of a local store, a restaurant's menu).
However, when the going gets tough (troubleshooting a technical issue, looking for a recommendation) I fall back to google.
Yes, I would love this. I was recently looking for reviews of a certain woodworking tool. The vast majority of websites googled returned were clearly bot created sites. I came away thinking I wanted a curated list of a few sites actually created by humans.
Reddit?
But here is the thing:
My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are living and the "future is real". They do not understand the drawbacks or they just don't care.
And I dare to assume that this pictures the vast majority of Internet users.
Or said another way: If 99% are happy with Google, can the remaining 1% pay enough to finance "Google pro" ?
I'm browsing with Firefox on Mac with adblockers, and have some knowledge of what the potential scams are.
Is Google actually helping the average user more than a hypothetical alternative?
Don't know, tricky question to answer, but whatever the answer is it's likely a society wide change, involving regulation and new business models and ethical consumer choices, not just a new search engine.
These are all truly excellent and refreshingly imaginative ideas, in a conversation too often starved of critical thinking (elsewhere in this thread commenters, unable to imagine any alternative at all, are incredulously asking "what would you even replace it with?").
I would just say that search in it's traditional form is valuable too, and highly efficient. Or at least it can be when done well. I think millionshort search results are a good example of what traditional search can be.
But when I want to do serious research on things like eczema, diet, backpain, exercise. Google absolutely fails (also Google scholar) I have to buy books, go through Reddit,listen to YouTube lectures etc that point to the correct literature and then you get to know the experts, different opinions etc.
All you find is these generic sites with basic advice which is common knowledge lik WebMD. Not bad, but they dominate the entire search.
I would think a heavy version of Google focused on in depth/experts would be great.
Sure, in the sense that someone who had their legs broken sucks at running. Compared to yesterdays, Google today has to deal with a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search. It's easy to fetch good water when the well is clean and no one is trying to actively poison it.
I think their #1 problem is their product managers trying to do "something" to add said something to their resume and making the product horrible to use in the process
Examples include: - Grid view tab switcher in Chrome Android - Removing dislike count on YouTube
* If I search for recipes, the Google algorithm seems to heavily favour recipes with a short novel prepended to them. The “novel” does not have to be particularly relevant to the content - I’ve seen recipes with “novels” that I’m not convinced wasn’t partially algorithmically generated. Every human being I’ve ever spoken to hates this.
* Google will search for what it believes to be alternatives to terms, even when those terms are placed into quotes (which used to prevent this behaviour). This can be very irritating when Google’s alternative terms are incorrect.
Both of these are regressions over earlier behaviour, and don’t seem to have any obvious benefit to them.
What has so radically changed the last couple of years to make spam take top spots on the SERP?
The person passionate about beetles who would have a great website in 2002 now posts 38 post Twitter threads (at best) or Instagram/Facebook posts that are lost forever.
It’s sad as we had this amazing “long tail” effect where a company like Google could set out to organize the worlds information.
Unfortunately the economics drive new behavior, and the next cohort of big web companies sought to monopolize human attention. The more profitable ones like Facebook are masters of psychological manipulation, and the second string cohorts like Reddit who aren’t very smart/manipulative adopt a more hands off approach where undesirable content like porn juices engagement.
I've been looking at several of the options talked about here. My favorite so far is Neeva (https://neeva.com) due to their "spaces" concept and how it provides a simple building block I can explore to address many of the use cases I have for search.
Search needs innovation and people trying new things.
Today we have more possibilities to manage that than in the early days. Many things can be automatically generated/crawled/MLed or crowdsourced. Browser extensions can help to categorize almost all important websites.
Data sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow or Wikipedia already have many websites categorized. We just need to combine the data.
I did a few experiments myself trying to drive hierarchies from tag data. It works surprisingly well. There is even some academic work in this direction.
I think it's more like that rather than an either/or.
I personally use Bing for 95% of my searches and have done so since it launched. Or re-launched.
Instead of targeting SEO per-se (as it's difficult to determine a good website with SEO vs a spam website with SEO), target how they're making money.
They're not doing so exactly because they have no incentive.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Even useful sites in commercially related niches use affiliate links as a source of revenue.
This makes it much harder to be a good search engine.
I have no idea how to quantify how much the decline is because of that.
Right now SEO it's an arms race between google and every SEO agencies, with a keyword being attached to some company that may have 0 relevance to the user.
Doesn't help, that depending on the query, the first results are ads only superficially related. You can search for the name of a popular brand of a car/hotel/insurance, and the first results are the competitors. If you don't want to be below the fold, you need to pay, even if your website it's exactly what the user it's looking for.
It was never the case. As soon as google started to be popular, people were hired to manipulate its search results. "Natural" SEO was never a thing. You always had to use shady tactics in order to get a good ranking because everybody was doing the same.
In that sense Google's monopoly is actually preferable for marketeers. It would be a lot harder to manipulate search engine results if the public was split among 20 of them.
Google refuses to hire humans to do stuff like this. Their service is terrible. Maps requires free labour of millions of users to get information updated.
These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that democracy has failed so lets replace it, replace with what? Its the best we can get given the alternatives, and its flaws will always be exploited.
There will be people that do not have favorite hobbies. There will be people with no ambition who benefit from being told what they can or should do to contribute. Those people, in order to have their needs met could choose to take on a Necessary Task, even if it isn't their favorite thing. Maybe they learn to love it and excel at it.
Don't want to do anything to contribute to society despite being physically and mentally able? No needs met. Meet them yourself, you magnificent lone wolf. Want your needs met but don't want to do Necessary Task that you hate? Find a purpose and pursue it.
Have the talent and desire to be a heart surgeon? Go for it, and you'll be rewarded. Want to make life sized statues of the Beatles out of used printer cartridges? Eh, fine but maybe also get a day job.
Sorry but Capitalism is a broken system that is not meeting mine or million's of others needs, much less enabling us to pursue what we're actually passionate about. I at least know that I am passionate about building and supporting technology but I still struggle to pursue it professionally because I had the poor luck to be born without the resources to get a piece of paper that says I know how.
It seems like everyone just thinks it's how you describe the contemporary world
No, what they're describing isn't capitalism. Not even close
It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)
* It blocks all the GitHub and Stack Overflow copycat sites out of the box.
* I can add additional sites to the block list with two clicks.
* It up-ranks (semi-)official documentation like the Python docs or MDN over blog spam sites.
* I can manually up-rank sites (and even pin them to the top of the results) if I'd like to see them more often.
Kagi is awesome because where Google thinks it can guess what you want, Kagi gives you an easy way to tell it what you want.
I was looking for this and it really annoys me how it thinks it knows what I want.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some limit to prevent abuse, but it hardly gets in the way of my normal usage.
Apparently all of this is to offset the costs from paying Google and Bing to run searches for them (the site basically takes results from Google and Bing and then combines them together with their own special sauce) but with a pricing model like this it seems like Kagi will remain a niche tool solely used by the wealthy.
The main paradigm shift necessary will be to pay at all for something that was "free" and is provided "free" to this day - even if the quality is worse.
They need to support their efforts somehow. Instead of showing ads or selling your data, they are going to charge a fee to use it.
I'm logged into Google all the time. I do this to get sharing working across Chrome. Others doe the same with Firefox. Some don't, because privacy.
I hear you think logins are 1000x more hostile than paying with your eyeballs. How would you suggest resolving this clearly conflicted view with logging in vs. how the revenue is made on a given site?
But that is changing. Internet marketing companies are now teaming up with websites so the websites to their dirty work for them and you end up getting tracked anyway -- but with much higher certainty as to who you are. That means that now, yes, logins are more hostile.
The web continues to get smaller and smaller.
As long as it remains niche, it might actually stay that way indefinitely. I’m just worried about Google taking inspiration from them. I bet whatever “tricks” they use now would get a lot less effective if they did.
To my knowledge besides the old experiments with client side search, Google has never allowed (even paid) api access to their search. I thought they did not do this, because it would have allowed somebody to jump start a search engine that might eventually become a competitor.
Kagi seems to be open about their Google relationship, so I assume they have agreement in place.
This even feels like some experiment from Google to create a premium, paid, search product (like what they did with YouTube).
No, they are underestimating the difficulty of funding a good search engine.
I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down.
Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you searched for "python", it would show your results but would also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff really quickly.
Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ...
(/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.)
we started out with topics and then moved to web, and are now folding topics into the web search experience, it's really hard stuff to get right
our first main filter was blogs, which is getting renamed to posts for a mix of reasons, adding forums shortly, along with other more specific topics
re: https://breezethat.com/ -- & better on laptop / desktop atm, premium version will be ad-free
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating
the difficulty of a good search engine
Boutique search engines pop up all the time here on HN, but they can't compete fairly against Google, without the resources to crawl a billion webpages day after day.
At the time you would get tons of results from a myriad of small blogs, forums, niche websites. Nowadays it's Pinterest, blogspam and more SEO optimised algorithmic crap. If you're lucky you get a forum result that might actually be relevant.
Given the joke that if you can't Google it it doesn't exist, it follows that the Internet has considerably shrunk in the past two decades.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fc32/72302461b74217662085a8...
The original article's description of how Google search signals work doesn't even scratch the surface of all the signals it's using.
However, I think Google has severely degenerated from just two years ago, when most of the problems were fully in effect.
Google is a bit of a product of the situation of scams being the easiest way anyone makes online.
https://neeva.com/ better than pretty much any solution (Qwant, DDG, etc) I've personally tested. It also indexes specific websites like StackOverflow, GitHub, and GMail.
Edit:
Neeva does require an account to create because eventually the product is going to require a subscription.
"To continue searching and access all of Neeva's features, create your free account. Already a Neeva member? Sign in"
Yeah, no.
1. I have more than one GitHub account (one is for work, one is for personal stuff). I would like to somehow keep them separate, but at least being able to add multiple GitHub accounts for indexing would be cool.
2. Could Neeva offer something for segmenting the parts of my online presence? For instance, there's personal me and then there's work me. I'd like to turn a different profile on when I'm doing different things.
3. I don't know if it's possible to partner with ProtonMail, but I'd love to index that and my Proton Calendar as well.
Also didn't know the free tier is permanent, but I think that's probably a good move. Thanks for what you do!
But essentially we all have de facto accounts on Google anyway.
They track and monitor usage and then map you to a user account when you finally login somewhere.
I'm totally fine with that being upfront and made clear from the get go!
If you trust these people are doing what they say, it's a pretty good deal for securing your internet spaces and trying to get away from google, imo.
Humans are incredibly good at solving engineering problems they can see from a mile away, although it takes time to solve.
1) New system comes out that indexes/controls/regulates a naively created dataset
2) Data consumers adopt that system and experience benefits
3) Data suppliers learn rules of system and take advantage of it to improve the positioning of their data, thus breaking the intent of a system built on the assumption of naive creation
4) Users complain about the broken system
5) New entrants realize that the original system actually solved the core problem really well, and there are no easy ways to solve the 'gaming the system' problem
6) Flawed system remains the best available option indefinitely
It's like entropy, there's just no fighting it.
EDIT: And to extend this beyond Google - do you see a lot of long text blocks in 7 second tik tok videos? That's because the creator found a way to game the algorithm.
Perhaps there is no border to be defined since nearly all SEO is abuse?!
The only acceptable SEO should be "provide website content that is more relevant/interesting for the viewer".
And where is the line between "provide website content that is more relevant/interesting for the viewer" and SEO? If I realise that (to take an example from something found on Google) I could take the sentence "Identify the best customers and convert more" and rewrite it as "Marketing automation helps you identify the best customers and convert more", is that SEO because I'm intentionally adding a keyword, or is that making the content more relevant to the user by being more explicit in what I'm saying?
This does of course not imply that these things can be proven, which implies that no action can be taken. Not everything that is immoral is punishable.
Sites with people hired to optimize the robots.txt file are ranked higher than those without. If we ban all websites that hire people to optimize their robots.txt, then a lot of the web isn't indexed and the search results suffer.
Or if we ban every creator on tik tok who posts a lot of text in a short video, then a lot of creators are going to be de-platformed and moved elsewhere.
The point of what I wrote is that 'humans are really god at following rules, so much so that they often are able to manipulate rules to their advantage, without breaking said rules.
That's why this is such a hard problem to counter.
Their only job is to stack order the internet. Down ranking a site to the 1,000,000th result is the same as banning them. They necessarily do this all the time (like for every search with more than 10 potential hits).
For bot detection, when was the golden age? I'd say that, rather than follow the above description, it started as non-existent and there was basically a smooth descent downward to where we are now.
There’s no comparing how things were in the 90s and early 00s to now.
Every social media company before Facebook faltered or began losing a good chunk of their user base fairly quickly. Until that stopped happening with Facebook and IG for over a decade now.
Reddit’s position has also been here for a decade now.
I can't find shit with DDG and the experience is like using Google from 20 years ago when it didn't have any of its bells and whistles.
I’m glad it works for you, it just reminds me how different are everyone’s expectations of good search results.
"pizza near me" - Google suggested a well rated place within 5 miles. DuckDuckGo suggested a pizza place 91 miles away??
"busted kids lip" - Google says gauze and a cold pack. DuckDuckGo says salt water??
"best monitor for mac" - Google says Dell Ultrasharp with 4.5 stars and 738 ratings on amazon. DuckDuckGo says BenQ 4 stars with 174 ratings on amazon?
how is this better?
It's true building a good search engine is an gigantic undertaking but if Google (or someone else entirely) is aware of the current issues, they may have ideas to tackle those problems and then we can all share a better internet.
Same for the argument with democracy and any other similar arguments, pointing out problems within our current institutions doesn't remotely mean that we want to abolish everything and start from scratch.
Has anyone considered the possibility that all this Machine learning and AI models is what made Google and YouTube searches worse?
The Amazon recommendations engine, the poster child of ML in 2014 isn't any good at recommending products that I actually want to buy either.
1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion.
2. You block Google from indexing the sites.
3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit.
4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarantee them decent traffic because they'll only be competing against a dozen sites on your search engine, instead of millions on Google.
5. A large number of respectable sites leave Google and are only available on your search engine. Businesses start becoming eager to join your exclusive network and ask to join your mission.
6. Google is left with blog and affiliate SEO spam, and you become the hero of the search engine world.
As your search engine tips in to popularity all sites on it are overrun with spammy SEO content as marketers search for the next way to get more eyeballs on their ads.
Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?
So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit. YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.
Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.
Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?
Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.
It's not that the comments are plain ads (these will be easy for the reader to discern), it's dishonest product reviews. It's an unsolved problem in e-commerce websites and even in real life.
Even if you succeed in securing an island of quality content: How big is your audience? I don't remember the exact quote but somebody said that television is the way it is because that's what people want.
Yahoo should have chosen to become a media company. Now they would have all the knowledge to mix search results in a way that is rewarded by the market. It's the academics of the early internet who want the best results. Everybody else wants to be entertained.
And that's just the first sentence!
It's also just kind of frustrating because it's the kind of response that comes from a place of refusing to engage with a hypothetical exercise. Failing to meet these exercises with the spirit of open-ended curiosity, as they loosen suspension of disbelief just enough to make it possible to canvas the space of strategic possibilities, is a misunderstanding of the exercise, and it's just the kind of sleepwalking response that turns potentially fruitful conversations into dreary dead ends.
But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.
That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once I’ve had a chance to actually investigate the new options.
EDIT: Maybe I should note that I’ve also been relying a lot more on Reddit too in the past year since Apollo has a decent search interface for Reddit and I’ve gotten used to processing new subs quickly and getting information out of them. If nothing else I usually at least have a stack of new terminology to feed my search queries elsewhere.
At some point the internet has to go to a circle of trust model with real identities tied to online content of any sort. I see no other way to curb this pending disaster than being able to block bad actors and bad actors having very limited means to publish under an alias.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag...
Note: This extension "can read and change all your data on all websites". Perhaps that's necessary for what they are offering, but it seems very dangerous, especially for a 1-week old extension with 24 users and 2 ratings.
Also, the "website" link (https://insight.space) on the Chrome extension page just says "The domain name insight.space is for sale!".
Do other folks have reason to trust this?
(General discussion of why Google Search is bad that does not actually engage with the specific details of the OP's arguments seems inappropriate in this thread; there have been innumerable HN threads about the general issue.)
I also like this concept — I once toyed with the idea of a search engine/extension that would run a search in one engine by default and then notify you if other search engines would have returned significantly different search results. I'm excited to try this out!
I agree that it's hard to trust an extension that runs on any website, and I guess one way you could work around this would be to manually limit it only to run on the domain where you do your primary web searching. It wouldn't have the full functionality, but it would provide the bulk of the functionality — without most of the risk.
I would love to see Google results get better. But the web itself is a mess.
I’d agree that the average HN user and certain professions like developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to Google and recently stuck with Kagi.
If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter words into their browser’s navigation/search bar and are happy to get useful results.
It’s worth to remember that Google is the default search engine in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).
Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new Windows computer from work. She didn’t notice that she was using Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change the browser as well as the search engine.
If this is because Google has gotten worse or Kagi is better I can't tell, but either way I think we are at a point where Googles dominance is threatened for the first time, at last from my sample of one.
But there are other signals like how many of these "google isn't good anymore" posts we see on HN nowadays and the above example of a user not even noticing they aren't using Google.
I can't imagine trying to build a new search engine when the landscape is intentionally (if justifiably) hostile to new search engines.
Also, many folks (outside the hackernews crowd) never change their defaults and Google pays Apple 15B per year, as well as Samsung and many others, to be that default.
Disclaimer: I work at you.com
From my limited understanding whatever beacon does can also be done in the backend it just makes it a little more complicated for developers?
They introduced that feature here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScDcj-hX5ns
Maybe people don't know there are alternatives? How does OP expect them to switch to Hypersearch if they aren't even using DDG which has been around for a very long time?
I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on
For example one software platform I use all the time has community forum that is almost useless because every post to the forum is simply met with "open a ticket with support" with no actual resolution, these post flood the google search results, however other search engines bubble up blogs, other forums, reddit, or other sources not just the set of sites over and over again.
"DRM bad" was common here long before the days people were figuring out that getting their blue ray player working with their TV was going to be a pain in the ass.
Just wait and a few more years and it will be mainstream that Google actually sucks.
The competitor website is not a slightly suboptimal result for the query: it's literally the wrong result if I'm not adding "alternative" to the search query. I'm sorry.
"google search sucks" message might lack finesse, but I think it conveys something real--like, a search engine completely optimized to the user using state-of-the-art algorithms, etc. does not exist, perhaps because Google hangs out around "good enough" and would kill anything on the way up.
Google was never good for much else. Generating good content is expensive, so most of it is not on the free Web. Never has been. People are expecting it to provide buying advice, or intelligent counsel for their problems, or wisdom from experts. Google was never good for that.
People have forgotten that Google searches for tech stuff 10 years ago used to exclusively returns results from sites like Experts Exchange with solutions behind paywalls. I'm glad Google did something about that. And, of course, thankful that sites like Stack Overflow came along.
- Its location feature is better than DDG or anything else - It has gotten worse a bit, but if I tell it to show me results from Colombia, 95% of the results it will return are from actual websites from Colombia. DDG will throw anything from Latin America, for example. Not to mention the disaster with Bing.
- Its image search feature is still more precise than others. Reverse search won't return sometimes what I'm looking for and I have to resort to Yandex/TinEye/Bing, but still. Oh, and it can search for SVGs, which others can't.
- Double quotes aren't returning exact matches, but other operators are working fine as far as I can tell. Filetype operator is great and way bigger than DDG's, cache operator is great for looking for a cached version of a website that is not working at the moment, the minus operator still works (sans the advertisements).
> They don't need to worry about becoming more mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position where they basically have no competition.
Two may not be ideal but there is still competition there…
If enough people use Bing/O365 instead of Google/Gsuite, that Google sees a significant shift in traffic, they should feel pressure to be less unfriendly and start innovating again.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt...
I set up multiple browser profiles recently; work and personal. For work, I need Google. I'm a software engineer and I find that alternatives just aren't good enough for those kinds of searches yet.
For personal, I'm trying to use an alternative. It's ok most of the time but sometimes the results aren't great so then I try searching again in Google.
I'd like if there was an extension that augmented the alternative with Google results in the sidebar. If possible, in a way that preserved privacy.
It's an interesting question though. I think the answer is that most people don't really care? The bubble we live in is filled with other people who, like us , are very knowledgeable about this domain, pay attention to what's going on behind the scenes, and have very strong opinions on it. 99% of the rest of the world doesn't give the quality and nature of Google search a second thought.
One of google search's biggest advantages is the ability to save a click for the user. If I search for "NCAA scores" google will show me the live scores directly instead of showing me a link to the ncaa website which also shows me the score but at the expense of me having to click on the link.
IMO, the right way to dethrone google search would be to have better (or more) QOL features.
Are web search engines still “a thing” that people have opinions about? To me they're just kind of there and mediocre and unremarkable — the beige wallpaper of modern life, corporate blue and 12pt Arial; like a dreary shopping centre on a Tuesday; as exciting as a press release.
- It's better than most alternatives, and in many cases there isn't even an alternative
- People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high
- People don't care
I think people not carrying is the saddest part.
>People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high
I think this shouldn't be a problem since query is the only thing you need when searching. You should be able to personalize and narrow down the search from UI of search engine not rely on search engine amassing data about yourself to do it for you.
I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.
Google search is fast, accurate enough for the most users, very widely adopted.
GMail is fast, good with SPAM, free.
Google has some practices that might be considered as evil but this affects a relatively narrow list of people, it definitely doesn't "suck" for everyone. Lotus Notes, on the hand...
Huge social costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706
Huge economic costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237
Its amoral/cynical/evil practices and business model affect everyone.
>> To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
If Facebook is bad for Democracy, why do so many people, especially those who decry the state of democracy, still use it?
If sugar and processed foods are so bad for us, why do so many people consume so much?
If the education system is tilted incredibly against children born into disadvantage and for those with advantage, why do the parents of the later, including liberal ones who fly the flag of equality and justice, hoard as much of quality educational resources for their own children as they can?
(I'm sad that no one else is pointing this out)
If prison food sucks why do prisoners eat it?
Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?"
http://web.archive.org/web/20070110035128/http://www.encyclo...
Edit: NSFW
Would have been nice to know at the beginning of the article that this guy has something to sell with his own search product.
2 some people depend on Google services
3 there aren't too many alternatives
4 alternatives that exist are not integrated in the way Google services are
That being said, it amazes me how no good search engines exist. By good I mean relevant results and less poisoning with advertising. It shouldn't be an impossible undertaking. Probably no one could find business sense in a decent search engine. If that is the case, I wonder if is possible to make a community backed search engine, similar to how Wikipedia works.
Here, read about the problem from one of the very few remaining non-GoogleBingYandex crawlers remaining:
Normal searches give me the same information, news results feel less biased (they present articles from both left.and right viewpoint), better code search (especially with the code snippet extractor), less DMCA removed content
The only things I reach out for google are: - Business hours of stores - Google maps
Also, I don't often search for images but duckduckgo safety filter still let a few nsfw pics to go through.
People are on Google because of habit
The biggest barrier to any competitor for any product/service anywhere is a "good enough" incumbent.
I don't think that PageRank or similar algorithms provide any competitive edge at this stage. The real advantage of PageRank in the past is that it was difficult to game, but nowadays, backlinks are all about money and SEO anyway.
About two months ago, the opposite happened. Google gave me so much spam and advertising, the search got worse, now I ended up using DDG. It still sucks, for sure, but somehow it sucks less than google now.
It changed when I installed DucDuckGo browser on my phone. It has really good internet decrapifying features and it uses ddg search by default and so far I didn't have a single reason to change that default.
I hope ddg will relese similar browser for desktop. Maybe I'll be able to switch to it then.
Here's the law: "The value of information is inversely proportional to the size of its intended audience." And its correlary: "The wider the audience, the less valuable a piece of information will need to be." These both stem from the basic premise that accurate information is more valuable the more scarce it is.
What this creates basically is a situation in which the quality, depth and timeliness of a piece of information or media service will, over time, always tend towards the most broadly applicable content, despite being less and less specifically useful.
In Google's case we can use cars as an example. Ideally, depending on the exact search term, you might want results providing information about buying them or maybe fixing them. However, maybe more advertising money can be made from using that search term to sell Forza or Gran Turismo video games, so the algorithms will detect this and shift accordingly. And since these games are being talked about on social media a lot, the algorithms pick that up too. Maybe some news mentioned the car or a celebrity bought one. The result might be that you're scrolling through ads from Microsoft and Sony, online shopping results of all the related gaming products, summaries of tweets about it, news snippets, etc., and almost nothing about what you were originally looking for. Searches for historical events like Pearl Harbor could have you scrolling past movie reviews before you finally get to a Wikipedia link.
Ochlocracy is mob rule. It's the evil flip side of democracy, in which people actively make a choice based on considered opinions. In an ochlocracy, the choice is made by the whims of the mob as a whole, and they themselves don't even know the choices they're making. As Google and other companies optimize their services, the numbers will always lead to targeting the largest swath of people and as a result the overall quality naturally suffers.
There's more to this, but this is the general problem. In order to keep growing from now on, every year Google's overall quality will have to suffer in order to be more applicable to larger numbers of people.
It also made massive capital investment in server farms, for fast results, especially google suggest. A way of converting profit into economic moat.
That is true and make sense why it is so hard to search solutions nowdays. Especially software related.
1) I personally use Google, because it works for me. I will admit freely that part of this may be that I've gotten used to framing queries such that it works with the search engine that I'm used to using, and that's probably true for many people commenting on HN.
2) Every so often, these posts will inspire me to do my own non-scientific experiments such as using the same query, say, "Dua Lipa Levitating" or "Go modules vs packages" on say, DDG, Bing, and Google. When I did this experiment most reently, I generally find that Bing and Google are both more personally useful for me and DDG is less useful (but as the old latin saying goes, "De gustibus non est disputandum"). I will note that DDG had the more obstrusive advertising at the top of the results (Stubhub and Urban outfitters), and Bing and Google did not have any adds that I could find for that first query.
Given my personal evaluations, it tends to cause me to discount what many of the DDG enthusiasts have to say about DDG being is way better, simply because it doesn't accord with my own quickie experiments. But hey --- maybe it's because they enter in search queries differently than I do.
3) Given the hyperbolic and/or highly emotive nature of some of the comments about "holding users hostage" and complete lack of nuance over "violating users' privacy", again, it causes me to have a hard time taking everything else that rhwy have to say seriously.
4) I sometimes suspect people are remembering the past with rose colored glasses. I remember the search quality of Alta Vista (and with all due respect to the people who worked on Alita Vista and having had friends who worked there), the results were pretty crappy, and Google's results were heads and shoulders above somoe of the other competitors that were available back in the day.
5) All of this is my personal opinion; and users should feel free to use whatever search engine they want, and competition is a good thing.
[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-le...
To me it seems Google has given ample time to either migrate off of it or to become a customer.
So I stopped reading at the end of the page.
SearXNG funneled through protonVPN
Median response time is 0.9 for most engines
Most people won't change the default settings for their search engine.
Next question...
DuckDuckGo is ok too.
TL;DR there's no reason to default to direct Google.
I've been waiting for a Kagi invite for a while because I've heard good things on HN about it. Finally got one a couple weeks ago. Finally switched off of it and back to Google yesterday. The results weren't even in the same ballpark, despite me really wanting it to succeed.
Have you posted feedback about bad results on kagifeedback.org?
It is shocking how competitors are that bad really.
And yes, I recognise your name from previous posts; you spent quite a lot of time in China right? I was in Suzhou for about 4 years. And after that HK for 2.
My answers are Amazon, Siri, and Alexa. Not Google. Google will continue to lose as these assistants become more powerful.
Who is this “everyone”?
This is basically the outcome that antitrust prosecutors were concerned for with Microsoft.
Imagine if Android couldn't bundle a browser, or integrate any of Google's SAAS products.
Everyone is not using Google.
That's a lie.
Allowing normal people to use computers is cruel in the same way making a dog order its food over the telephone is.
Google is smart but sleepy and somewhat distracted from their core business with 99 other projects they have.