Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

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As a consumer I am totally fine paying for things. But I hate being interrupted with ads for irrelevant shit I don’t want or need. Google and every other online advertiser is hilariously bad at guessing what I might be shopping for at the moment. Amazon comes close by remembering what products I looked at last. But Google is worse than dogshit when it comes to this.

I’ll give you a typical example where Google could be great but falls so short: I deliver to it on a silver platter a search query for a specific product “MRCOOL DIY 4th Gen 12k btu”. This is a very specific ductless mini split heat pump that retails for about $1750. I was looking to see if anyone had a cheaper price. Well Google Shopping mostly showed me results for either the 3rd Gen or a different BTU rating, in an apparent attempt to not show too few results. No a 36k btu unit isn’t a substitute. No, just the air handler isn’t a substitute. I have my credit card out and ready to go, buy Google is too busy showing me ads for window units!

You know where I found my answer? Eventually I gave up on Google and went to the manufacturer’s website, looked through the list of authorized dealers and saw that Costco was on the list. I then looked there directly and found the unit at $300 cheaper than elsewhere. Bad search engine, no cookie!

Slightly off topic but salutations to a fellow mini split owner, I have a Senville unit in my garage (which has been converted to an office/gym/also still a garage).

I really love the thing and installing it was my first big DIY project in many ways. I did all the work myself and the results have been awesome. It can make my garage absolutely frigid (although it's not quite as good at heating, I've got some work to do around shoring up the existing insulation).

They really do seem wonderful. I am building a separate building on my property that will be my backyard office and hopefully this unit is going up in a few weeks. Can’t wait to try it out.

If you already know the product you are buying down to the model, Google isn't tailored for you. It's meant for people who have a vague idea and then pick what's at the top of the search results. This is why SEO has grown to be an entire profession.

I think that's a very narrow interpretation of what a search engine does. Or a narrow interpretation of what the GP was doing. Probably both.

You can look at it as GP having a vague idea of how much he wants to pay for this product and where to pay for it, but Google failed to help him find clarity. Maybe the GP could have done better by searching "cheapest" or "sellers" or something like that, but one thing I've learned about modern search engines is that providing more query details nets you less applicable results.

It's like every search engine takes all keywords with an "OR" mentality when it really should be an "AND".

And a lot of this does come down to the advertising model. I wouldn't be surprised if this benefits google because having to try 3 or 4 search queries to find what you want puts more advertisements in front of you, and increases the odds you'll click on one.

Essentially I see two competing processes here.

Google still has powerful boolean operators. If you use those with intentionality, and pick the hidden 'verbatim' option, you'll have a decent chance of finding what you need. However, these are all vestigial features that a minority of users employ.

The vast, vast majority of users are funneled into product choices. In a way, it helps to see that as the core function, and everything else as a secondary funnel towards that primary funnel. The search engine is designed to work so that people use it, but the end goal is for ads/SEO to be effective for the great mass of users that are particularly vulnerable to them. The GP was looking for price differences, which is something many websites base their business off of, but that's still a tiny portion of the whole and not something Google needs to optimize for compared to the misleading but lucrative results the GP had to sift through.

> This is why SEO has grown to be an entire profession.

Ads are basically the SEO of our economy as they try to change the ranking of products in our brains.

More importantly Google wants to sell ads to everyone not just the company with the current cheapest product.

So they’re incentivized to be as vague as possible while still providing “useful” results.

Google Shopping results are so useless I rarely even bother trying.

I thought Google was a search engine. Why doesn’t it search as much as it misleads and distracts?

Google is an ad company that produces a search engine, rather than a search engine that features ads. Although it may have been the latter in the olden days

I’ll give you a typical example where Google could be great but falls so short: I deliver to it on a silver platter a search query for a specific product “MRCOOL DIY 4th Gen 12k btu”. This is a very specific ductless mini split heat pump that retails for about $1750. I was looking to see if anyone had a cheaper price. Well Google Shopping mostly showed me results for either the 3rd Gen or a different BTU rating, in an apparent attempt to not show too few results. No a 36k btu unit isn’t a substitute. No, just the air handler isn’t a substitute. I have my credit card out and ready to go, buy Google is too busy showing me ads for window units!

You're gonna LOVE Amazon.

/s

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