No, it's pointing out that Google has shortcomings many are not (but should be) aware of, and that you should use the right tool for the right job.
2 karma · joined June 6, 2022
Since you're the second person who asked: iSteve.
> Google is actually generally terrible in cases like this. Any popular pop culture thing will totally drown out anything with the same name, even the original. Try searching for "fallout shelter" - the entire first page is about an old phone game. There are a couple non-game links on page 2, almost all are still about the video game for pages and pages.
No, this is pretty obviously deliberate on their part. When I discovered this a few months back after searching "isteve," and surprised not to find it on the front page, and the results instead being dominated by some 2013 FunnyOrDie parody doc about Steve Jobs, I literally went through page, after page, after page of results, to see how far down it would be, yet none of the pages contained any links to the blog. If it had been on the second or third page, I wouldn't have been so suspicious. Meanwhile, Yandex, DDG, and even (I checked just now) Bing all have results for it on the first page when you search "isteve".
Google's keyword suggestion feature is also telling: google "isteve", then add in a " b" or " u," and you get zero suggestions (presumably because people are searching "isteve blog" or "isteve unz").
I upvoted you, and though I can't speak or read Russian, I would be surprised if what you were saying wasn't true. However, Google extensively censors and distorts its search results too, while at the same time allowing SEO spam to abound, even when it comes to important areas like health information. If it were one or the other (i.e., great, relevant results with censorship, or mediocre results free from censorship), it wouldn't be so annoying. But the fact that Google actively goes out of its way to censor and manipulate its results, while at the same time allowing the overall quality to deteriorate, is extremely annoying.
They don't censor results for western sensibilities the way Google does. For example, if I search for a certain wrongthink blog I'm not supposed to be reading, google gives me literally 10 pages of results (I checked, out of curiosity) pertaining to a movie that shares its name--none relevant to the blog. Then when I tack on one additional specifier term (like part of the domain name, or the word "blog"), google magically relents and shows me the relevant results, as if to say, "ok, I'll let you search for that naughty thing, if you're 100% sure that's what you really want." Thanks, Google! By contrast, if you search the blog by name with Yandex (and DDG), it's on the first page.
Also, Yandex never nerfed the facial recognition features of their image search like Google, Bing, and the rest did. (I assume they did this because women complained it made it too easy to find their old nudes.)
Anyway, Yandex is good competition, and while not so much a complete alternative to Google, it's definitely a useful adjunct to it, and it's popular on /g/ for that reason.