Comment by sberens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sberens | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a set of queries that google returns poor results for?

I spent a few minutes looking at my search history (filtering chrome history by "google search"), and the vast of my queries are quite simple (e.g. people's names) that google does well on (in fact I find google search for people better than linkedin sometimes).

I also tried a few complex queries and compared them to Kagi:

"How much bitcoin does microstrategy own" -> Google returns the correct snippet from here[0] while Kagi only linked to articles about how much it acquired in the last few days.

"how to pronounce stratchery" -> Google returns the correct snippet from the Stratechery website[1] while Kagi's first result is a spam entry[2] with the wrong pronunciation (the second result is a tweet with the correct pronunciation).

I'd be curious to see more comparisons!

Edit: I just remembered Dan Luu's post (https://danluu.com/seo-spam/) but after looking through my search history, the queries he uses are not at all representative of my day to day searches.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/11/29/micro...

[1]https://stratechery.com/category/about/#:~:text=UPDATE%3A%20....

[2]https://www.howtopronounce.com/stratechery

You’ve subconsciously altered your search behavior to avoid categories that Google is horrible at.

Any product reviews will be SEO garbage (blogspam too 10 lists). Anything travel will be a page full of ads before organic results, if any. You just know to not even bother so you’re left with the queries that still work.

I was wondering the same thing. I see all these complaints that Google is awful and broken but it generally seems to work fine for me, apart from stuff that all the search engines struggle with.

Some example of something that's hard to find with Google but easy with something else?

I mean some recent global use stats are

Google 89.33% bing 4.15% YANDEX 2.8% Yahoo! 1.33% Baidu 0.83% DuckDuckGo 0.69% (oct 2024, https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share)

If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?

I sympathise with Giant Freakin Robot not getting clicks - I'd never heard of them. But that's different from Google being bad from a user point of view.

I just tried clicking on them all - they all work. Baidu is kind of funny as it's all in Chinese and searching The Sound of Music came back with Chinese which Google translated to "The Nun and the Seven Naughty Children!"

> If Google is so bad why don't people, myself included click on one of the other ones?

I believe because stickyness is a strong force. Google gets worse, but you know it and you know how it fails and what to do to make it better (i.e. how to word your query differently, what parameters to add etc when you get terrible results).

You don't know this for any other search engine, so you need to make a) an active decision to try another search engine, and b) learn how to use it so it delivers what you want.

And I assume that, for most people, Google isn't bad enough to make that kind of investment.

Earlier today I tried to find out what's currently happening in Sudan, is there any shift in the civil war etc. Google was pretty useless. News articles from 6 weeks ago, the best results were probably Wikipedia, but they ranked the Timeline higher than the actual article. I tried with "sudan civil war", "sudan civil war maps" etc.

I tried just now and Yandex actuall provided much better results for what I wanted. They had sudan.liveuamap.com, they showed polgeonow.com, which looks very interesting (can't say if accurate or trustworthy, but definitely topically relevant), sudanwarmonitor.org etc. Compared to Google, they show much less "top 1000 media sites" and more of what look to be topic-experts.

Bing found sudanshahid.org (again, don't know how accurate), multiple arcgis.com-hosted articles, and also included sudanwarmonitor.org. I'd say more Big News Corps than Yandex, but less than Google.

On this search, I'd say Yandex was best, Bing second, Google last. Yet still I use Google as my daily driver, I think mostly because I don't know how far I can trust Yandex, and I have a general bias against MS products. It's certainly not because they don't deliver better results -- but I know Google and it's "the devil you know", until Google becomes too hard to extract results from, at which point I'll be forced to switch.

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