Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel
surgehq.ai
surgehq.ai
1. w3schools
2. pinterest
3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers)
4. all the code clones for SO
5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2, alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects can sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole.
6. The best of lists. Google for the love of god, please ban them.. they are always always SEO spam and product placements. Often the blog post itself says "to put your product on this list pay us a $1000 and we will include them in our list."
7. Quora and similar answer sites.. okay it's a mixed bag but you have to be very careful on these sites as most often the answers are just spam. I never read any answer with a link in it. But I think it's more Quora's problem than google. But if google is strict with them they may do a better job at moderating I guess. Also now quora hides answers and asks for a payment. Did they learn nothing from experts-exchange!
MDN has a better overall information and is more in depth. And more up-to-date.
On the other hand, w3schools has that one three-line CSS snippet that you need to copy-paste to center your DIV vertically or whatever, without 5 paragraphs of intro.
For the Stackoverflow / Github clones, we partner with https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter and their lists are available as presets at the bottom of the filter configuration.
The main complexity will actually be in the frontend: how to make it easy to edit several instances, and check in what list you'll add a new filter?
https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
https://blog.probabletrain.com/hide-w3schools-from-search-re...
With some lists to block the SO and Github clones:
https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio...
That's bad, but I can somewhat sympathize with it as these sites are not really purposefully gaming SEO. It's rather Google's poor handling or relevancy and recenctness.
That's an entirely different situation from scammers like pinterest. They clone content without permission and then rank higher than the original. They broadcast content to be open to search engines yet when you visit, it's behind a login.
The behavior of duplicating content will normally tank your ranking. Faking content to not be behind a login where it really is behind a login, may get you fully delisted.
But not pinterest, they seem to get a free pass for anything.
don't they just steal content and then host it? pinterest is the worst when trying to prevent users to use their website when they're not logged in.
> "please mark this issue as resolved so I can please my incompetent overlords with a point in a metric they are interested in because of the mentioned incompetence".
I agree that users tend to ask the right questions, but the lack of any coherent answer seems to be systematic.
Pinterest is spam if you don't have an account, which I would recommend to nobody because of such policies in the first place. Twitter did the same recently but at least it isn't as prominently featured in search results.
I don't know about w3schools. It did help me a few times. I guess because the content might be out of date? I am no web developer so I sometimes use it as a reference.
I think the worst aspect is that Google seems to favor news sites. Perhaps it is their SEO, but if a term you are looking up accidentally is part of a news article that was copied by tens of news outlets, you have to visit the dark net, page 2+ of Google results.
I actually find alternativeto so useful that I usually just go directly to it instead of my search engine when looking for FOSS alternatives. Having to go to the alternative page before clicking the official site link is a small hassle compared to finding what's the official from name search, but it used to be better when the description page and the alternative page were the same. If I were to guesa, they probably changed because it would be confusing for people searching for alternatives and finding the software description.
Most commonly asked questions you will be getting one of the three responses: 1. assume the user is at fault 2. it’s a “feature”, get over it 3. the official helper doesn’t know anyway so he/she just pasted a link to some random tutorial they found online which doesn’t work anyway
There really isn’t much that Google unless they kinda remove Microsoft at all.
How hard would it be to pay a small team to go through this tangled mess and clean it up and keep it that way? How little do they care about the attitudes of their users??
Wow I've never had this pop up for me tbh. I wish alternativeto would come up more often, it's a really great resource and it's all crowd-sourced so it's very valuable information. Definitely wouldn't classify it as seo spam
So I think there's a need for personalized search engines where one can pick their sources - we designed You.com keeping that in mind.
fwiw i hate w3schools too, if anyone's counting
People love it because they don't have to read. Just copy and paste and you can get back to work. And that's fine. It's a nice thought that programmers should understand their code, but remember that article about 99% developers. They get work done, ideals only stand in the way.
The actual issue with w3schools is that the code that's available for copy-pasting is terrible. A lot of it looks like it either hasn't been updated since 90s or 00s, or at least whoever wrote it hasn't done web development since then. That's not necessarily bad, but for example JavaScript was much more of a pain back then, and you can now write much more maintainable code. Same for how HTML has progressed.
I wouldn't replace w3schools with some bleeding edge frontend practices, or even with the newest web standards, because those are even worse than using spaghetti code from the 90s. The former is way too complex for just copy-pasting, and the latter requires you to read about browser compatibility and other caveats, so it is harmful to just copy-paste it.
What I wish would replace w3schools, is a site that takes into account both why people love using w3schools, and still sets them on the right path to write maintainable code with at least some best practices considered.
"In this random language I'm using this week, is it strlen? len? length? count? And iIs it a static function or an object method?"
or
"How do I get the day of the week from a datetime variable again?"
Stupid little things where I just need a reminder. Half the time, the answer is in the search results themselves and doesn't even require a clickthrough. W3 is fine for those sorts of questions... it's brief and to the point, and the fact that it doesn't go into thorough explanations or weird edge cases is even a good thing.
We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually book through them since I did not want to get into the google payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not explore).
On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.
[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/ita-software-acquisi...
Also, it looks like the Matrix might go extinct soon:
> This interface runs on a deprecated web platform. At some point in the near future, we will be forced to shut it down. We unfortunately do not have a timeline on when this will happen. We welcome feedback about features missing from the new interface, we read all feedback and open bugs accordingly.
2. I don't use it, I point out for others facts about service OP recommends so they don't waste their time or you prefer everyone wasting their time?
The difference between Kayak/Google and the others is that Expedia and friends are online travel agencies. Kayak and Google are really just search engines. It makes a world of difference.
Let's say you want to get from the West Coast to Europe on a business class flight, but want to save some money.
Realistically, it's cheap and easy to get from West Coast airport to another, and similarly cheap and easy to get form one European airport to another.
Google flights will let you search for the best combination of flights that depart from any combination of up to 6 airports, and arrive at up to 6 airports. The technology they purchased (ITA) will let you do this as well, but limits you to a single country. Google flights? No problem with destination airports in multiple countries.
So, you could search for a flight that originates in some combination of, say Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver BC, and lands in some combination of London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Milan or Frankfurt. (Or any other 6 large European airports).
Google Flights will also show fares for a specific trip length (say, 14-days) over an entire month.
Want to filter by a maximum flight duration? No problem. Number of connections? Done. Specific airline or alliance? Easy.
In a traditional search engine, I'd have to run close to 400 individual searches to get the data that Google Flights gives me in a single screen.
It works well for domestic flights as well. I recently helped someone who had to attend a wedding across the country find a flight that was less than $180/person, when they thought they were going to have to pay over $800/person. Just by using Google Flight's tools for about 10 minutes.
There's plenty to complain about in the Google ecosystem, but Google Flights is amazing.
So damn annoying when the top search results all lead to shitty SEO-optimised sites that use a whole page to blather on and on, leading to a tiny information nugget at the end. No value, just excellent SEO scamming.
As these scam artists get better and better at this, Google gets less and less useful.
When I see a site like that, I can be quite sure there is no value to me from that site. I want to blacklist it - not forever (though I'd settle for that) but so I don't see it in search results again.
The crazy thing is that this could even be a benefit for Google themselves. They could aggregate these signals and use them to identify SEO scammers, since their algorithms clearly can't. I'm sure that Google aren't happy with the lacklustre performance of their search in modern times.
There are numerous extensions to block domains, like uBlacklist: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... (not affiliated)
It does surprise me that Google wouldn't want to capture this signal. Maybe it is too susceptible to abuse?
But in the modern era, I feel that being able to use human signals like that - on top of the fancy algorithms - could well be a killer network effect for them.
The incentive to block one's competitors from 10,000 different accounts is likely why they no longer offer this function?
I wish I could do that at Hacker News too.
I really just don't want anything from medium.com.
news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"])
news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"]) + tr
news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(a[href*="medium.com"]) + tr + tr.spacer
This is not to say it’s not interesting, because it is, but what typically happens is that I end up in the “want to know more” state, but then don’t actually get to know more. This is not really on the medium authors, it’s more just my social media consumption taking me back to HN and then never looking into it again, but that also means that my time on the medium article was sort of wasted doesn’t it?
I can’t for the life of me remember a single medium article that had any sort of impact on me or anything I do tech wise.
It's happened so much that I just won't click on anything that's on medium.com.
I've said before, google is now basically what I'd call a "smart" portal site. For most stuff, you already know the handful of sites you might want to look at, and google just sort of brings you there from a relatively clean interface, as opposed to a traditional portal that would have lots of categorized nested links to traverse. In most cases you're not searching for a random site that you wouldn't know existed if it wasn't indexed, like in 1998. So the whitelist approach actually works pretty well.
HN comments: [Show HN: No Trash Search](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774456)
It is absolutely impossible to find anything anymore, I gave up on google for all intents and purposes and use it exclusively as reddit indexer.
They get crowds of people and/or scripts to blacklist all other sites.
I’m guessing YT works with a system that is ‘eventually consistent’, but having to click the button 2-3 times before a video disappears doesn’t seem particularly consistent to me.
I can’t think of any reason why a spam Pinterest link has any value, yet it’s ranked high.
There are a lot of real world people I meet who speak highly of all the great creative ideas they get from there.
If your Pinterest board is public and you let others see it that’s nice, but the Pinterest developers should never have let that show up in my search results, your board is not and will never be more interesting than the original content you have pinned from other places on the internet, shitty aggregate pin pages hurt original content producers by ranking better and stealing page views and preventing users from navigating to the original content without jumping through hoops in the Pinterest user interface.
Any ranking manoeuvrability that Google offers can and will be used against them.
The SEO scammers out there would just automate millions of proxy IP addresses to blacklist all of their competitors sites.
https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
Thanks, will add this!
The problem is, since these sites dominate the SERPS, there is little incentive for anyone to offer the result you want. As a consequence, the web page that would satisfy your request probably doesn't exist.
Google still solves all my questions, if I'm asking the right questions, I guess is what I'm getting at.
I used to think this way too, but I've come to realize that Google has turned from a search engine that returns results based on my input to an answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query - usually with the intent of selling me something or returning SEO spam. I've also found that the old google-fu techniques are now so unreliable that they must have been deprecated. I can't tell you how often I use quotes in my query and see results that don't contain that text at all.
> dog apple dangerous
Today you should search:
> can dogs eat apples
And you get way better results with the second form. I've noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way to google is still the former overlap a lot with the crowd that keeps complaining google is worse now than it was before.
Otherwise, it there truly is a “right way of asking Google questions”, why doesn’t Google release and promote a guide about it so people can be more successful in their search?
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dog%20apple%20dangerou...
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=can%20dogs%20eat%20app...
Also worth comparing (seems to focus more on diabetes than cyanoglycosides. Diabetes is the bigger chronic problem, and cyanoglycosides are the bigger acute problem, so which is a bigger danger largely depends on how disciplined the owner is.):
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+dangerous+about+feed...
Though, even when I was doing indexing changes at Google, the common practice was to do A/B testing with both the most common queries and a uniformly random sample (see reservoir sampling) of queries in order to justify a go-live of indexing changes. The former explicitly over-weights common queries, and the latter still optimizes for the common case. (In case you're wondering, the worst query I had to manually check in A/B testing was [flesh hook suspension].)
Google used to turn off some of the query re-writing logic (that tries to fix your query) if you used a query operator. (It has been a while, but I think maybe even their "Kansas" user info database kept track of the last time you used an operator, and would turn off some of the cleverness if you had recently used a search operator, as it was a good signal that you were a power user capable of optimizing your own queries.) My understanding is that they don't disable any of the too-clever bits for power users any more, and that everything uses all of the cleverness of learn-to-rank all the time.
I suspect it has gotten even worse with learn-to-rank, as it must be incredibly difficult to intentionally under-weight the uncommon/difficult queries.
They did keep track of when users re-issued similar queries in a short period, as a signal that the ranking algorithm wasn't doing well. I think an optimal system would use learn-to-rank for the first query in a related sequence of queries, and then switch to turning some of the smarts off, and finally switching to a learn-to-rank algorithm trained only on later queries in these related query sequences. That way, they can avoid the secondary learn-to-rank instance from over-fitting the median/easy queries.
Google has come full circle and turned into Ask Jeeves.
I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, means that lots of long-tail queries don't do very well on Google.
I just wish I could find obscure things again.
Though, there's also a use case for people trying to find third-party information about various websites, particularly in trying to figure out if the website itself is a scam. You really want to have the navigational result up at the top unless you have a very high degree of confidence that the site is a scam, but in all cases you want high quality reviews of the site to follow up the navigational link.
Google is _not_ a good guideline for asking the right questions. It is trying to make as much money as possible and it will scramble anything it can think of to do that. Don't use that as a guideline for how you are thinking about questions.
2. ???
3. Make as much money as possible
oh Haha, funny old meme. Step 2 though is very clearly to show more ads and more content, to show more 'full results pages', etc, rather than just show me the 1 thing I needed and be on my way.
I should include that Google said next to each result ('"555-555-555" is not on this page') and then show the page. Totally knows that the results are unrelated to my query, but shows them anyway. Why?
And by that you mean, Google is telling you how to think, and that you should think in some way and not in some other way. I'm quite sure I am not comfortable with that.
Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist entire sites from the results - inevitably those sites that have the most ads would be the most likely to be blocked, resulting in lower revenue for Google.
Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut.
Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue. People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but was missing that je ne sais quoi.
All of these recipe sites (that I've seen) will drop the ingredients + directions on the bottom of the page.
Last one is the killer, a site that quickly gives you the info you are looking (or quickly shows you it doesn't have the info) for is punished by google search ranking.
I LOL'ed. Thank you for that.
I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who clicks on pinterest results in eg. image search, and immediately click back to find another image somewhere else.
Did I spend a minute or two trying to read a 1000 word article, because I was looking for how many pixels there is in a 4k monitor? Or did I spend 2 seconds visiting a chart?
It usually takes me at least a minute to recognize a search-optimized text if it's a topic I am unfamiliar with. Let's say I am googling something about windproofing underfloor insulation. The article starts with some basics about underfloor insulation in general, so I skim through the introduction, start hunting for the part of the article where it actually starts talking about windproofing and realize it's been cobbled together out of six random introductions or generated by GPT-3.
Five to ten years ago no other engine was close - the fact that duckduckgo was even try was comical. Google had an effectively monopoly. That might not be true at all five to ten years from now if the trend continues.
If you go looking in splogs, spam overflow and other spam sites at best you are going to get wrong answers, at worse you will get answers that "aren't even wrong".
I guess I just want different results to the same query than the author
- W3 Schools
- StackOverflow
I will definitely agree with you that the author seems to want very different things from their search results than we might though. I will always always prefer the official docs (which I can pick through) when I make as vague a search as "<language> throw exception". If I wanted to know "how do I <verb> <noun> in <language>", then that's what I'd Google.
It's also verbose and requires effort and working memory to parse, when I could get a trivial one line answer or code snippet from a stackoverflow post specific to my question. Yes, in an ideal world we would all read the manual, but unfortunately manuals are inconvenient. And in my experience the vast majority of stackoverflow answers are correct.
If it was was Clojure or some other language that has an awful online manual it is one thing but the Python manual is good.
And... I'm guessing w3school?
Because that's the software equivalent to recipe spam.
Mostly yes, you just search efficient documentation.
https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=delete+a+file&check_...
Top result: https://docs.python.org/3/library/configparser.html?highligh...
Top 4 result is "Miscellaneous operating system interfaces", which does hold the answer, but it is not obvious, and browsing through that page is quite a chore before you finally get to `os.remove`, which says that it deletes "a path", which even I, a seasoned developer need to look twice to make sure that path removing a path and a file is the same thing. https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html?highlight=delete%2...
Yesterday, I searched "best after-sale service of AC". What I was shown was SEO'd pure junk. Absolute junk as the first result.
Next few were the same, but more focused on affiliate programs rather than providing genuine info.
Down the line was Quora, where _sales rep of AC companies_ wrote answers that _theirs_ had the best service.
I wad very disappointed.
You.com showed me better result right away.
My Kagi and You use is now on par with my Google use. They mights surpass Google soon.
I still find Google to be the best for programming answers btw.
I would also say that Google's ad business is in direct conflict of interest with its search business.
I use DDG, FF, and Bromite on my smartphone. Sometimes Brave, too. I have Brave as my secondary browser (FF as the main, LibreWolf for personal stuff) on my daily driver as well.
I used Brave Search and DDG a lot. Nothing can go wrong with them if all I am asking is the capital of Belgium or trying to navigate to a subreddit.
With special, not so straightforward searches, I rely on You and Kagi.
I really appreciate You's different kinds of search results and grouping them. They are clear that they use some kind of AI model to tailor search results, and I have an account there.
I really like Kagi for showing me sites that I wasn’t even aware of. I can boost or shove down sites. I turned off Quora and Pinterest right away. No extensions, no scripts. Love that.
As I said, Google’s adbiz is in direct conflict with its Search division. Search should show the best result for the Searcher. Ad div would want the pages to be shown that are crawling, infesting with Google Adsense ad. When more of these pages are visited, they have better metrics to lure more people to Adsense thus making $$$.
This is clear conflict of interest.
http://shitmyself.com/thumb/thumb_800_5e84542c26a8815f33d767...
These engines are stealing the sites traffic. The whole point was to be a search engine, not an encyclopedia. If you want to be the latter, produce your own content.
It's my opinion. I don't use those engines because of that. They jeopardize their sources. It's unsustainable.
etc
searchcode seems to not let you say things like "in the main api", or in libraries, it's all usages, it's also actually the code itself. so "boto3 list_buckets" a common query I do (that google actually does well).
publicwww seems to be searching google?
When I do a code-related search, most often I'm looking for a documentation entry.
So, for example, if I search for "python string replace", Google returns me a bunch of crappy pages.
I can fix it with "site:python.org string replace".
SearchCode does a terrible job [1]. So does Public WWW [2].
Now, Google nails with the first result, pointing to Python's built-in types page. But it would be perfect if it could just add a #str.replace fragment to the URL [3] and save me some scrolling. Instead, it sends me to the top of the page...
[1] https://searchcode.com/?q=python+string+replace
[2] https://publicwww.com/websites/python+string+replace/
[3] https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.replace
Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use Bing. As the article points out, Bing is really awesome for searching for recipes.
Looks like I need to start trying out Neeva & You.com. They had some nice features in this article.
Neeva seems to be stealing all the important content from the recipe website which is a highly discussed issue. Bing tries to walk this line by making you still go to the website to read the instructions. Obviously people have trashed Google for doing this same thing on other kinds of websites. Though blogger recipe websites have somewhat encouraged this behavior due to their insane amount of ads & life stories they're well known for.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qqpggk/new_youcom_pr...
Used to be if you included "term" or -"term" you'd only get results that did/n't include those terms. But it seems Google has gone all in on the "I don't think you really meant that" approach [], and the hard filters have become suggestions at best.
--
[] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard filters on top.
As an example, if I search for 'gilbert gottfried' and set the date filter 1 apr -> 3 apr, I still see stories about his death.
The issue is that "power users" that are even aware of quotes and and hard filtering are now the long tail that google is no longer optimizing for. They'd much rather focus on the 99% of searches by, for lack of a better term, normies, and as a consequence, rather than expecting users to learn to think, their search features and performance are regressing toward a totally dumbed down mean. And I think society is worse for it.
It's extremely frustrating how much "content" is displayed on the page versus how much is hidden in the page source.
"When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?"
Edit, yes I'm wrong, did a mental s/mars/moon/ without noticing.
BTW, a big reason for this is the search quality folks at Google left the building and got replaced with growth marketers.
Is this the transition they made to AI powered rankings a couple of years ago?
To me it just seems like a query that is likely to trip any imperfect entity up, since a "when" question usually implies that the event in question is known to have happened.
Still can't figure it out. Lots and lots of articles about dead Russian generals.
There's got to be some way where the search engine doesn't second guess you. You can never find the answer to something adjacent to a popular question with the current state of things.
Even on colonel level the losses seem to be small - I think that this https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-cris... this was the first Ukrainian ground force colonel KIA that I recall, there was at least one air force colonel before that.
The other thing is that Russia is operating WW2 style. It’s a top down system where the lower level people have no autonomy. American colonels and generals die in helicopter shoot downs and accidents. Russian generals get assassinated on the front screaming at soldiers to move trucks, etc.
> Showing results for "When did Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon?"
> Show instead for "When did Neil Armwrong set foot on the Moon?"
However, it seems to only work for actual spelling errors (e.g. if I typed Armstrong incorrectly) vs. context errors.
So to answer your question, I'd expect Google calling out its interpretation, but not necessarily a "never".
The interesting part to me is that Google will show redirected queries from typos (“Did you mean “When did *Neil* Armstrong set foot on Mars” ?”) but not disclose the term it completely ignored.
I makes it look like it parsed and validated all the search terms before coming up with the prominently displayed date, which makes it worse.
On your point, it’s broken because it shouldn’t display “Never”, and instead skip the date widget and show that the page results are for the moon, like it does for typos and other kind of corrected search terms.
Or alternatively _always_ show which part of the query the results are based on. Failure to be transparent creates the problem.
It seems very improbable that a kid would ask that question without having any preconceived notion whatsoever of a person with that name famously stepping foot on an extraterrestrial body. It's overwhelmingly likely that they have the famous 1969 event in mind, and that's why Google's response is appropriate.
Of course I'm not disputing that it wouldn't be even better for the Google response to explicitly correct the mistake in the query. I'm only disputing the fact that it's "broken." If you were asking this question of a human as some sort of test (but the human didn't know they were being tested), it would clearly be a "gotcha," and you could likely "fool" highly educated people who know full well that it was the Moon and not Mars.
Aside: Going to get real confusing when another Neil Armstrong born in the 2010s does set foot on Mars in the 2030s. I wonder if we will still get the first response from Google, 1969, and if you will still consider it to be 'not broken' then too.
This is I think the critical point.
It’s one of the core assumption that is correct for us to have in our day to day interactions with other real people, and we also are able to adjust the probability levels looking at the person or the context, and follow up depending on the reaction to our answer.
None of that applies to Google Search [0], and we are fed with “most probable” results without qualifiers, little to no sensible adjustments, and very little control or opt out options.
Billions of people use Search every day, at these scales what is “improbable” actually happens millions of times, and I feel too many people are willing to throw the odd ones out under the bus, even if the current situation isn’t perfect either for the 90 part of the 10/90 split.
[0] search personalization based on logged in profile could be used, but in practice they only apply that to very crude adjustments like country, language and frequent searches.
However, in this particular case, I think the very low probability of someone genuinely asking when Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars, combined with the very low probability of any measurable harm being done to those people by Google's response, makes me conclude that this is reasonable expected behavior and not something I would call "broken."
On the Google side, I think it’s an issue that has more consequences than just the moon landing.
For instance, for me “When is the francis election” (where I would have men “french or france instead of francis”) gives me a big and bold “Mar 13” with smaller below “Anniversary of the election of Pope Francis Observances” and an long anniversary Year/Week/Date table taking 80% of the widget display.
And as with the other examples, there is nothing showing the word approximations that has happened regarding to the original query.
There must thousands of other instances where a search result will come up with a big widget, an answer in big and bold font, except it will be completely wrong and have a direct impact on the user missing a deadline or taking the wrong action.
Of course users are supposed to know better and check the full result, but as you point out, if it’s almost always what they expected, they’ll learn to rely on it and be more complacent.
It also seems rather unlikely that someone would search for "2+22", but not obviously any more or less unlikely than "2+2", and building a calculator into your search engine is trivially easy compared to handling natural language queries, so it's not a useful comparison.
> Whether the user meant to ask a different question is irrelevant.
Of course it's relevant. If Google can correctly determine what question the user meant to ask, then obviously Google should provide an answer that provides value to the user instead of trolling the user with nitpicking about spelling or what have you. If you ask Google for the "capitol of India" you'll get New Delhi, even though that is the "capital" of India, and arguably the "capitol" of India is actually the Chandigarh Capitol Complex, so the result is "objectively wrong".
I would argue that it's roughly just as clear that the query intends to refer to the Moon as it is that the query intends to refer to the Canadian Neil Armstrong who was killed in a plane crash in the Antarctic in 1994.
Yes, people probably don't make this exact query in good faith very often, but it raises significant concerns for other queries where google tries to supply an answer.
See for example: https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-...
I can't take seriously an example that still puts w3schools as the first search result. If I were searching for a simple answer about a language feature, I would want the search engine to give me a page from the definitive authoritative source on that language. w3schools isn't that.
I wish them many years of success and prosperity.
Meanwhile for Firefox, I just have to go to "Search" and the setting for default search engine is immediately obvious. Chrome seems to have a similar layout as well despite being produced by a search engine company. Edge is my daily driver, but it still took me way longer to find the default search engine setting in Edge compared to Chrome and Firefox.
Also, I have to compliment Firefox for making it really easy to search with a non-default search engine. I generally use Google, but I use Bing when searching for internal work stuff since it is integrated with O365 and SharePoint.
Didn't seem all that difficult to me.
I went to settings, put "search" in the search box. That highlighted in yellow "address bar and search" click "manage search engines" click, 3 dots next to google, click, make default, click. 4 clicks with guiding highlight throughout. Didn't even need to google how to google with edge.
I'm still using FF. However, switching search engines in Edge seems about the same difficulty as doing the same in FF or chrome.
Google also lags behind searching for torrent content, not surprisingly.
In fact, I'm going to say, I use Google knowing that it sucks in many areas, just because it's hassle to use multiple search engines, and the quality was acceptable enough that it got the job done.
But now, I do more searches in both Google and Duck.
Their Youtube search engine is starting to suck too, because it's deliberately mixing completely unrelated items in the result.
I use Yandex for image search, much more variety in results and the interface is also quite good to quickly go through a lot of images at once.
So they essentially don’t want you to click on the organic link that points to Volvo.com.
They want Volvo to know that all the traffic to them is being sent due to the Ad and not from any organic links.
This is what the not so evil company is doing, imagine if they are actually evil..
I liken it to a defense strategy.
Imagine if they didn't, and a search for Volvo XC 60 showed an ad for a Subaru!
[0] https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-use-google-calendar-in-dj...
I wonder if Google isn't ripe for that sort of competitor. I can think of a bunch of verticals that could easily get their own dedicated search site, including cooking. Bing and others are trying to beat Google in generic search, and it'll never happen because Google defines what that means, and it's a moving target.
I'm wondering why Google hasn't done this themselves? Whitelist a bunch of decent websites and give the search page a fun URL like "Cookle".
1. https://www.georgesequeira.com/writing/zapier-the-5b-unbundl...
- for web search, we have a better date filter than most, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=tiger+woods+after%3A2022-04-12
- for anything else, we have topics, e.g., click recipe tab from any general search on home page, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado
- we just launched a job finder, 14M listings with 20M by end of quarter, launched early due to the fast fiasco, https://breezethat.com/x/job-search-beta
- tons of other topics, some listed on page atm under "drops" at top, more advanced such as jobs in the pipeline
What I'm thinking of is a dedicated search site focused on a single topic. Take Breeze's guitar tab search and make a Guitargle.com. Then it could be promoted, marketed, refined and advertised on all sorts of apps - probably even on Google itself if they weren't paying attention. All the guitar apps could have integrated Guitargle search. Then make another vertical for the bird watchers search. And another for scholarships. All with different graphic designs based on the target demographic, with a "Powered By Breeze" at the bottom of each site.
Just a thought.
so in that context, Breeze becomes a portfolio of vertical searches, not unlike say Meredith or Hearst as publishers, etc.?
though prolly a few more shares if there's a fit on the team :) just starting to build our pipeline of potential candidates, DM is @DotDotJames on twitter :)
I can’t relate to this. That example, of the first result being the canonical documentation on the subject, is a search engine working exactly the way I want.
I always found the MDN documentation striking a better balance of being in-depth but not an essay.
Given the shortened attention spans, prevalence of fake news, and evidence that featured snippets are being misused by scammers, I think it's imperative Google condition its users not to blindly trust these top results. Instead, they're doing the opposite.
An anecdote: I recently saw a phrase new to me - "on the lamb". Googled "on the lamb meaning". Google's top answer was a confident claim that it's related to Quakers and their persecution in the 17th century.
But that answer was in fact a downvoted one on an English StackExchange page. The top consensus answer there was different.
A person with a short attention span or a tendency to be satisfied with factoids that match their beliefs is likely to simply accept Google's answers as correct and not dig deeper.
Such conditioning results in bigger social problems. In my country, a popular method of scamming people involves SEO-ing fake banking service numbers to the top of search results. When a person searches for "X bank customer service number", Google shows these fake numbers. People trust Google's answers, call those numbers, provide details like banking OTPs, and get scammed.
Google provides a 'Feedback' dialog for such results, but it's a corrective measure that relies on diligence of users and not a preventive measure.
I mean in the general population I would not be surprised, but on this site the community is generally pretty tech aware to know of alternatives at least.
not a search example but it's like Jamie Oliver's fried rice
example -- mango avocado -> click recipe at https://breezethat.com/?q=mango+avocado
The long tell me your life story format of just wrapping a recipe that's not original is also incredibly annoying, and sometimes I find I get tricked into just wading through ads for nothing of value. As I posted elsewhere here, I've become very loyal to a few high quality sites that I can count on. seriouseats.com is probably the only one I really like in web format, but honestly youtube is full of excellent 12-15 minute videos for just about any meal I can think of, and I tend to go there.
There are lots of criticisms of google search, but in this case, I think the Google result is better - anyone looking regularly for answers is conditioned to tune out the Geeksforgeeks and w3schools and other spam, so as long as good SO answers are from and center, I think google wins
I do use w3schools for SQL syntax though - I haven't found any better resource for this, and generally Google gives me MSDN articles about TSQL which are usually of no use to me.
They’ve since changed their stance, but I think the website has not substantially improved since w3fools’ inception.
But where Google fails and other search engine is to show results that are relevant to the user.
As some comments have said here for the query "python throw exception" some people want to get the official python doc when others want a snippet and when other want a tutorial, and some want other things. The fact that there is only one first result and it is the same for everyone IS the issue.
In my personal experience Google works very well for code queries much better than any queries on SEO topics
This is going to sound tongue-in-cheek but I mean it with all sincerity: isn’t it wild given the data they hoover up?
Time to disrupt the disruptor.
I say this as someone who is ultra-annoyed at the state of cooking results on Google (I want to make the cassoulet!). But there probably aren't enough of me to sustain a product --- and I'm not sure I'd even like that product, because even if Google gave me the most useful practitioner content it could, it still wouldn't be meaningfully curated. I can get recipes for anything from sites like Epicurious, but I'd sooner search for code tips on Expert Sex Change than try an Epicurious recipe. That's what Food52 and Serious Eats are for.
Similarly, programming is a weird callout here. I've never heard of the code search engine they mention ("Neeva"?) and, if that name comes up a week from now, I still won't have heard of it. Stack Overflow solved this problem pretty decisively, and they did it with a Google-first strategy, which is the reason the first example code search in this article has strong Stack Overflow results at the top of the SERP.
The fall leaves change colors along the windy path to Grandma's cottage with the crisp smell of freshly burnt firewood in the distance while my trusty spotted Labrador plays with me and my sister at the creek by the meadow. As Fido splashes playfully after a school of tadpoles, a scent of gingerbread cusps over the sunburnt field and tickles my senses like the first soft ray of sunshine on a dewdripped morning
I smell 1tsp of ground ginger as I remove a piece of driftwood and toss it on to the old cornhusks amidst overgrown willows as my companion chases after it. We race together back to the warmth of grandmother's kitchen overcome by the rapturous aplomb of allspice, cinnamon and cloves all at 1/4 tsp.
That was 40 years ago and I've longed to touch the perfection of those fretless childhood days of a memorized youth modified by dreams. This gingerbread loaf lets me relive the magic of a forgotten freedom with a preparation time of merely 90 minutes.
I close my eyes during the baking as I lie on my afghan rug in my Boston apartment knowing there's another generation of youth passing by idyllic days on those timeless Connecticut farms where the 1/4 cup of unsalted butter comes from.
I mean it's just insanity. I'm not doing them justice. The real stuff looks AI generated
I honestly don't think these people exist. It's just SEO food
you're right that google is giving people what they want, the people that are getting just aren't the ones searching, they are the people who are making money from you having to scroll through pages of ads before getting to the actual recipe.
I have no idea why Google won't do anything to these spam sites.
I have to say that most of the time, when I search for something related to python, it's difficult to land on the official doc, it's always something like tutorial point or something else, it's annoying. Same thing when I want to land on a wikipedia article.
Maybe it would be a cool thing if I could limit my search to a list of specific websites, like reddit, stackoverflow, wikipedia, official docs, cppreference.com, etc, to filter all blogspam.
Honestly I would actually use a search engine that lets you filter result from a list of websites, or maybe a search engine could decide to build a whitelist of trusty or quality websites (and being transparent about not letting those websites pay).
I would also love if tineye and google reverse image search had more options.
You’re holding it wrong :-)
As to this:
>> Google rating: “This search result page is just okay. I don't like the first search result (I already know what exceptions are in programming, so the official Python documentation is way more than I need). I have to scroll halfway down before finding the information that I want.
The Python documentation is the primary source for what is being searched for. I don't think it's too much to ask to "scroll halfway down". That comes across as a bit petulant, to be honest.
Another thing I've noticed is that some directions will use businesses ("take a left after McDonald's") as landmarks in navigation. I'm beginning to believe the routing noise was introduced to allow navigational ads.
If the effectiveness of a core product is being compromised for monetization, is this what's also happening to their Search?
The people at W3schools are a combination of all of the above: filthy SEO spammers who would readily make an antitrust stink if Google started just ripping off their content, but who in all likelihood don't care if Neeva does that, if they've ever even heard of Neeva.
They could even take the blacklists from all people with a high reputation and use that as a signal when they are building search results for others.
I'd prefer a browser extension that removes results locally. Actually all I need is probably just a rule in uBO.
Nobody I've seen touches Google in terms of Geospatial though, I wish there were a decent competitor.
It is reasonably common that I search for a string from a bit of code and find "0 results", even though that code is up on GitHub (and probably mirrored to a bunch of other sites). GitHub search finds it fine.
Same for searching for stuff on my own personal blog. Only about half of pages are indexed, even though many have been there years.
If I want someone's actual opinion and people I know don't have one, I have to check reddit or metafilter.
https://blog.google/products/search/more-helpful-product-rev...
I just use Github Copilot.
For example, if I wanted to remember how to throw an exception I'd just write that as a comment and let Copilot fill in the syntax. Between that and official docs, don't need a ton else.
Same applies to programming. Sometimes I want the one liner from w3schools, sometimes I’m willing to consume the reference documentation.
Fantastic article, thanks for sharing.
Displaying actual search results
Searching for what I actually typed into the search field
Page load times
Even with activity tracking enabled, Google thinks I am searching for one-liners opposed to in-depth articles.
Anyone else has other ways?
> What happened to page quality factors in ranking?
I've been wondering this myself. Whatever happened to penalizing webpages with intrusive popups? Or those that show different content to users than to search engines (paywalls)? (I'm sure the latter is because of lawsuits). And many years ago, there was SEO advice about not duplicating content from other sites, but these days, half the search results for e.g. Go related questions are blogspam copy/pastes from Stack Overflow.
Google Search used to be stricter.
So you end up with a Google that prioritises 2-3 promoted results above actual search results (some of which represent the opposite of what you're looking for!) and everything beneath is either a massive mainstream content factory, a Reddit/SO/Quora thread, or any one of a billion terrible blogs/news hosts that contain no content or simply regurgitate someone else's content with adverts, modals, etc galore.
In fact, the only reason why Google's search engine is fairly safe in its product space — the considerable head start on potential disruptors notwithstanding — is that there apparently exists no comparably successful method to extract revenue from running a search engine.
Not that many people are realistically going to pay a monthly fee to have a Google without the noise, despite the amount of noise there is (I probably would). And let's face it, if there was a market for that, Google Premium would probably exist already. Talk about vertical integration if they did though. Help pollute the ocean of the internet then sell people premium membership to sail across it rather than swim in it.
One of the biggest things that Google did wrong was try to act as curator. The moment they start screening results by compliance with Google standards, introducing stuff like AMPHTML etc, anything like that is the moment they make themselves no different to Facebook, Twitter and every other walled garden community.
The internet is supposed to be about broadcasting information, about exploration and chasing the horizon — not locking information behind forced memberships of social networks and paywalls, tardis-like megastructures where you're encouraged to become locked in yourself.
All that should matter is that a webpage's content matches a query. Not whether their website matches some random person's idea of good UX etc. Does the content match the query. That's it. Refined obviously to assess whether a page's content is too insanely well matched (old SEO bullshit) and maybe include that domain rank stuff (if it was based on conversions so it's self-moderating rather than Google saying "[majorpublication].com is better than [randomblog].com because big business website > random person's website")
Google could have been worse, of course. AMPHTML is pretty much over, right? They track your data, yes — but show me the company that doesn't do that. Apple? Apple probably do, they just track less or whatever. Just because it's in the marketing doesn't necessarily mean that they don't do it, it just means that they know people will buy their shit if they say they don't, or make a point of doing it less.
I don't blame Google for the way their search engine has turned out. As others have said, a big part of it is the sheer amount of noise out there now. But more importantly, the way capitalism works causes most companies to produce increasingly shitty products over time. This eventually creates the opportunity for someone new to release a great product, and eventually their great product becomes a good product, and eventually that will become a shitty dividend-paying product, and the cycle will continue.
(to clarify, the opportunity isn't just there for competitors, the opportunity also exists for Google to sort their shit out too).