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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Search engines in general have realized that it's more profitable to show you irrelevant results than to show you nothing. Furthermore, they've realized it's more profitable to show you irrelevant results laden with their ads than show you highly relevant results from ad-free sites.

Perverse incentives at work!

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This is precisely what happened. When google merged with doubleclick.net the new company should have been named doubleclick.net and not google. The old google ceased to exist at that point and was swallowed by an advertising company.

I strongly agree with this bill hicks bit on advertising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gd01vfKfr0

Is there any good search engine these days?

grep

Not really. LLMs are good if you account for hallucination.

phind.com

Kagi (don’t use it personally)

I find Amazon really irritating for that. I do a search for a very specific thing, and a ton of results always come back, often having nothing to do with my search request. And sponsored results both at the top and scattered through the results.

Amazon is gotten so bad that unless I know an exact part number or model then I don't bother. I'll go somewhere else for any research and only come back to Amazon if I want to price shop what I found.

Amazon is so bad that I shop on Walmart's website now.

Even with an exact part number, it will often push related items first. I was searching for a specific thermal printer, literally using the PN (something like C18647585), and it still decided to show me "sponsored" and related thermal printers first. So it somehow knew that part number as a keyword for thermal printers, but just didn't want to show me the one result that actually would be helpful (it was a third party seller, so maybe that penalizes the result?)

I get better results by searching Amazon via DDG, Brave or Kagi. Amazon's search, especially for books, is nearly useless by comparison.

Luckily for us we have the high-quality, independent book data provider Goodreads! /s

I found goodreads search to be quite good, where's it lacking for you?

Amazon owns Goodreads. It's not independent. It's also not mentioned on the site afaik. (They also own IMDb and a bunch of other internet companies that aren't Amazon-branded). If you want something independent, try storygraph or librarything.

Yeah I knew about IMDB. I know a guy at Amazon that said IMDB used to actually be in Perl, they rewrote it in Java over a few years.

Goodreads is tolerable, but mainly as a data source. The product itself has been in maintenance mode for... a decade?... or basically since the Amazon acquisition.

They rolled out a completely new design semi-recently for... half of the pages... and left the other half on the 10+ year old styles.

It just feels like Amazon is happy to take advantage of its dominant position with Goodreads having a more complete catalog than any of the other more open offerings. And yet, they seem to invest no effort in modernizing or improving the site, making it more performant, etc. The moderation tools kinda suck too — doing super common things like merging (incorrect) duplicate listings is a PITA.

Also the app exhibits blatant conflicts of interest like prioritizing buying new books from Amazon over, e.g., digital library loans, with no option for users to configure that.

Nothing I'm saying here is new though - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads#Criticism.

There's Worldcat, though its site revise last year made it useless for me.

I'm finding Open Library (part of the Internet Archive) is increasingly useful for book search.

You might also have success with a major library (e.g., British Library, Library of Congress, major US city libraries (NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.), and some academic libraries. Watch that these aren't in fact backed by Worldcat though. (Many local library systems are.)

This is particularly bad if you search for a type of thing, e.g. "mechanical keyboard". Many of its top suggestions will be for nonmechanical keyboards and that won't be obvious without reading their descriptions carefully.

“Mechanical keyboard like”

What’s infuriating is how this lying has become normalized in “good” brands. For instance, try to buy a 60” TV. I do not think you can find one. They are all 59.5” and sold as ‘60” class’.

That usually means that discriminatory taxes or regulations are being dodged, for better or worse.

Perhaps that's one reason but it's also a >1% reduction in display area which is not nothing.

Aliexpress is the worst for this...

"keyboard non mechanical like cherry switch membrane touch rgb light clicky gaming blogging ergonomic xiaomi redmi arduino android ios windows laptop desktop computer tablet phone", and if you sort by price, the first one is $0.99.

Then you have 5 different colors of plasticky $15 keyboards and a usb card reader for $0.99 to choose.

Stop buying from Amazon. I haven’t bought anything from them in years. There is nothing that Amazon offers for sale that you can’t find somewhere else, aside from maybe entertainment content that they produce.

Don’t reward bad behavior or they’ll keep doing it.

What you can find on amazon that you can't find elsewhere (at least here):

- All your regular non-food needs in one cart.

- No-hassle refunds if there is a problem with the order.

The first one is just convenience and I could do without. The second one is where most other stores fail. Or at least enough of them that I don't want to risk having to phone their hotline or pay for shipping back because they or their delivery contractor fucked up - or is fraudulently claiming they tried to deliver when they made no such attempt at the specified address and instead want you to waste your time picking up the package at a random location accross town.

Also on the HN front page right now is an example of the price we pay when we prune "undesirable" websites from our search indices:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/sci-fi-writer-greg-egan-and-a...

I don't know if 4chan is included in the google index, but I've never gotten a 4chan result in any search I can recall.

why would you expect to get a 4chan page? none of that data is persistent? iirc google relies on links to the page, so that is impossible, plus the content rotates constantly when they drop off the last page

Because you get 4chan results in duckduckgo and yandex.

What's the query and result?

I still don't get how you expect it to work when the content rotates quickly and disappears

If you search 4 Chan on Google it does come up in the results and a safe search warning

Only a couple boards on 4chan update quickly, the vast majority contain threads which stand for months at a time.

Funny you say that. I got referred to the local AI models thread (/lmg/) on the technology board just the other day.

The invisible hand of the market at work. Nothing perverse about it. It generating more money and that the only metric that matter.

Nothing to see here.

Generating money for google is not the only metric that matters for the users. The incentives are perverse from the perspective of everyone other than google executives and investors with significant google holdings.

And we are seeing alternatives like Kagi pop up because of it.

Let's ask Infoseek about that.

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