Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It's completely useless as a search engine now.
Bing returns the result for PyPI and the one for the non-micropython python.org result.
I don't see a big difference here (except maybe me learning about Snyk through google and not Bing?).
There's a problem here though, which is that there is no way for me or any other reader to discern whether the reality of the situation is "it's not reproducible and the commenter is misremembering basic facts about their search results due perhaps to some unrelated frustrations" and "it's not reproducible but the commenter's account is accurate."
I completely share the views about Google's search results being terrible, but it's still possible to overstate how bad they are. And I do find it fairly difficult to believe that Google would show some people paid programming courses as the top 4 results for that query when much more relevant results clearly exist and everyone attempting to reproduce this gets those more relevant results.
if only there were some way to somehow be able to share that information with everybody, some technology so that we can all access such potentially useful information about how google is functioning right now
sorry about the snark, but it's a vent for accumulative frustration from seeing a worsening trend in this regard.
Kafka would recognize this trend; computing is truly becoming a "bureaucrat's best friend".
In that sense, I'm not sure more AI would improve the situation. OTOH, better AI just might. There doesn't seem to be a "no AI" option on offer.
There could also be other things that make it non-reproducible as well.
It sometimes feels like search just returns whatever it has on hand that seems somewhat similar to your search. It may then do an asynchronous request to pull into cache results from a deeper backend search, but by the time the frontend gets them you've already been served your results. Subsequent searches from other people for the same terms would then get better results than you did, so this sort of optimization would on average improve search quality even if quality is poor for the first searcher.
I have no idea if search engines actually do this. But it seems to explain some of their more mysterious behavior, like immediately returning a bunch of results that have nothing to do with your search terms.
I guess there are probably a hundred Google employees reading this who know whether it’s accurate and we’re just speculating.
It's been publicly known that Google has been bubbling search results for years now, and that one individual's search results have no relation to another's.
I'm also reminded of a CTO complaining that his test sessions suggested the default Google ads on a page with little text content all related to dating. We pointed out that that from Google's point of view, this was probably a sensible ad-targeting decision for a user running an Incognito mode browser (or any browser without tracking cookies)...
I just installed Google Chrome on a fresh Windows 10 VM to repeat the experiment outside of Incognito Mode. First, I opened a video. Then, I checked the front page and confirmed that related videos had been added. Then, I closed Chrome, reset the VM's state to before I had visited YouTube, and checked the front page again. (I don't think this scenario would be too indicative of a prying user; I can easily imagine corporate systems that regularly wipe out browser data.) Again, the related videos were replaced with generic videos.
I then tried the same thing, except by clearing browsing data through Chrome's UI instead of resetting the VM. The results were the same.
Obviously, these observations could all have been manipulated by sufficiently conspiratorial fingerprinting. But the simplest explanation, in the absence of good evidence to the contrary, is that the site uses and respects browser cookies for its recommendations. Thus my request.
Of course, how can you scale this for every user?
"No, you didn't" "I didn't say that" "Seems like your are using on old version"
Google, Amazon, and Apple all allow trademark and product name squatting. It's gross and abusive.
Generic terms? Sure. But actual trade names for products? That's extortion.
These services aren't helping in discovery if the customer already knows the name. They're merely forcing themselves into that relationship and taxing it.
You then have to buy n-many ads across m-many services just to keep you in front of your competitors that would squat you.
User input/frustration will eventually lead them toward alternative search engines, or provide enough feedback to Google/Bing/etc to make them disable registered service name or company names from being used as ad terms.
I've been using Neeva for a while now. It's ad-free and (for me, anyway) on par with Google. I have one premium account ($5/month) and one free account (used for work) and have had no issues with either. By default, searches aren't saved, although enabling it can lead to better personalized searches.
Kagi's one I've heard great things about as well, although I'm not a fan of a business model that allows me to pay for X searches before hitting a barrier that prevents further use of the platform (theirs is 200 searches a month for $5, which seems way too low based on my use cases).
In any case, users will force the change, not any government or corporate pressure. Businesses' best chance of fighting it is to refuse to play along.
If you run over your allotment, you pay 1.5c thereafter.
That's a barrier. That's exactly what I was talking about.
Edit: Admittedly, I didn't realize that they just bill for follow-on searches, I assumed they stopped you. That charge per follow-on search is even worse.
I'm of the opinion ads themselves should be illegal. Companies can "advertise" in a catalog I can choose to look at, but would no longer be allowed to invade my attention with their bullshit constantly.
We've let marketers ruin too many good things as it is, lets just kill off the entire industry for the good of society.
Think about second order effects. YouTubers. News stations. Newspapers. Film crews. Publishers. Writers. Marketers (who do more than just ads). All impacted.
Many of the products we use everyday would no longer be viable. Even the premium tiers are supported by ads.
Engineering salaries would be broadly impacted.
The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads. I'd rather live in this world than one than one that has no ads. We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work. Maybe some aspire to that, but that society won't be building rocket ships and inventing immortality.
I do hate ads, but they're better than not having them. And I understand their utility and the overall ecosystem they support.
I think this is a bullshit myth the industry uses to justify itself. People are capable of paying for things, and to the extent they don't want to then maybe we really don't need whatever it was the ads were supporting.
I mean, a lot of the "content" exists purely as clickbait with a tiny bit of entertainment or information attached so it can product place or sell ads. Fuck it, we don't need it as a society.
>The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads.
Allowing jobs that make society worse for profit because "economy" is just the broken window fallacy. We are better off skipping the job part and just giving them money directly.
> We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work.
We'd be doing bullshit jobs less. How is that a bad thing? Lets redirect what productivity we do feel like engaging in on making the world better instead of making the people at the top of the economic food chain wealthier and playing on people's insecurities to get them to pay for shit they don't need.
In my idea world, if I am interested in buying some new product or service I consult a catalog. Opt-in marketing, not bullshit carrot and stick marketing, and certainly not the kind of completely unsolicited bullshit that keeps us from having unfiltered email, answering our phones, or using the internet without an ad blocker.
I can't imagine what it's like for the original employees to watch the company become what it has.
All the things that made Google so appealing, and gain market share, seem to have faded. It's a bit sad, to be honest. I remember being so excited to become a Gmail beta tester, back in the day.
https://www.wired.com/1999/09/arrest-of-a-web-pioneer/
(I had the misfortune of working for him )
Will they eat all of Google's lunch? Probably not, but if they can begin to chip away at the insane share (93%+) of the marketplace that Google controls, then it can only be for the betterment of the Internet.
Doesn't that just kind of describe google now though?
And, apparently depending on the style of your search terms or what you're searching for, one or two are better. I get noticeably better results from DDG, but I know that a lot of other people don't. I can only speculate that the difference must be search terms or topics.
For what it fails to find well I just prepend !g to my query and have it bounce me over to Google.
Google results are more often then not trash now, so I don't think the bar is too high for competitors now.
It does, yes, but not only Bing. At least report, it aggregates from about 400 different sources, and they also run their own crawler.
They used to have a list of the other engines they use, but I can't seem to find it anymore.
If I search for something like "micropython html parser" I expect the top results to say "Missing: micropython | Must include: micropython".
Yes Google, it was the first term I entered for a reason don't cha think?
Search for "micropython html parser" gets you https://pypi.org/project/micropython-html.parser/ as the first result with the quote: "This is a module ported from CPython standard library to be compatible with MicroPython interpreter."
And why should random searches make my results significantly worse than the default? That doesn't exactly absolve google of screwing up.
People just invalidating each other instead of the third party because a third party creates different experiences
The ads are personalised to you though
Google provides exactly what you're looking for ..
Exactly, I feel it is because with Google advertisers are the real customers and they could not care less about user experience unless it affects that bottom line. Case in point is the removal of the dislike button which users loved but advertisers hated. Google is a rich one trick pony right now anyway.
And the decline in Google Maps has been shocking. Maps has gone from always reliable to being "trust it if you like wasting time and burning fuel" bad.
I don't know what the hell happened at Google, but it ain't pretty.
Now I use ChatGPT for almost all my programming questions. Good riddance Google.
If I had unlimited money, I'd make a fresh search engine, zero filtering to start outside of blatant spam sites, and go from there. Focus on making results be powerful.
If the chat approach is gaining visits, then ad companies will follow, so what then?
The chat offers up the same seo ad laden tripe but further obfuscates it, and alternatives, while caging it in a conversational tone?
Is that better? Worse?
If these chat offerings only cause search to step back and attempt to recreate the early days of usable search then they would appear a success in my eyes.
Not to mention the constant pain that's localization/internationalization as well as some of the queries becoming worse and worse. The service is supposed to become better with time, not the contrary. Plus, of course, all the SEO garbage.
DDG first page of results all pointed to zoom.us links. Google (mediated through DDG !g) contained all sorts of spam links to sites like subdomains of uptown.com.
Crazy.
Agreed but tbf... every major search engine seems to suffer from the same.
I cannot recommend enough the 'ContextSearch web-ext' extension. It lets you easily search using any search provider. I constantly (1) highlight text (2) right-click (3) select search provider (from youtube to reddit to bing) (Note: my default is DDG):
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contextsearch...
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/contextsearch-web-...
GPT4 is going to do what Hawaii five-o, Bing Rewards, integrating windows search with Bing, and setting Bing as the default search engine for Edge on Windows never could. Make people use Bing over Google.
I've already set it as my default search engine across my devices as I move to cut Google out of my life entirely. I simply don't feel the need to use any of their services anymore. Their moat is gone.
The only downside I have noticed is that Bing Maps is a pretty bad service relative to Google Maps or Apple Maps and I will go out of my way to avoid using Bing Maps. Good mapping being integrated into a search engine is actually a pretty big deal since it's nice to use a search engine as a front-end for a mapping service, so this is a significant weakness.
Are you entering the micropython search term in quotes in the Google search box, because I've found that's a moderately good way to get rid of the normal Python results.
My search terms for that search would probably be:
"micropython" html parser
This is one of the sites it shows you for "log in to g mail"
It's the same with amazon, I purchase from there on a weekly basis and it goes well, but you read the comments on hacker news and it's apparently unusable now.
What gives?
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Google seems to have refocused around returning any result out of a set of popular links rather than deep dives. It feels like I must quote every term I enter now.
My only hope is that it will eventually bring back the notion of trust. Naybe finding a programming job will be harder outside of your network of friends. But won't require silly interviews anymore. Maybe we will get back to lifelong tenure at work?
Anyways I am just rambling here. What do I know anyways.