What Google search isn’t showing you

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/what-google-search-isnt-showing-you

by the_decider • 4 years ago

205 181 4 years ago

newyorker.com

Seirdy6• 4 years ago

I'm glad they brought up Marginalia; it's one of my favorite engines.

Teclis[0] and Wiby[1] are similar contenders in the non-commercial search space.

[0] http://teclis.com/

[1] https://wiby.me/

What the article mentioned about the influence of PageRank definitely rings true. An interesting variation is used by the Secret Search Engine Lab's CashRank algorithm[2].

[2] http://www.secretsearchenginelabs.com/tech/cashrank.php

I listed a bunch of engines with their own indexes, FWIW:

https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

cryptolake• 4 years ago

I don't know, why i wasn't aware of these search engine, i'm having a blast discovering personal website, this is amazing.

aghilmort10• 4 years ago

list is great -- & knew you'd done your homework when saw Marginalia - also a fave

run search startup, Breeze, so have a similar list and I was like damn :)

Seirdy6• 4 years ago

My feedback:

I think what you're doing with Breeze seems interesting, but the value-add of making it a commercial offering isn't clear; what does it offer that anyone else can't easily replicate with Google Custom Search? I'm not saying that there isn't a value add, I'm only saying that it isn't obvious as a user.

Something has to be a scarce resource; my guess is that the resource here is "labor" in building the CSE parameters and finding the sites to add to collections. Perhaps the effort that went into this should be emphasized.

Are there plans to move things server-side? Making client-side requests to Google has privacy implications.

derbOac• 4 years ago

So I tried these search engines. They're fun to try but kinda remind me of search before Google.

I'm frustrated with Google search results lately, they don't reach far enough back and are diluted with all sorts of crud.

But these alternative search engines kinda just remind me of why people started using Google. When I use them, I don't get spam, but I don't really get things I'm interested in either. It's like they don't understand what I'm really interested in and I either get no hits, or get hits on things that are just completely unrelated. It's like old-school chat software or something, complete with all the computer misunderstandings and whatnot.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a lot of competition in search. I use DDG a lot. But I'm surprised at how positive people's comments are about these alt search engines, because to me they have problems on the opposite end of the spectrum. To me, what Google returns is a pretty good understanding of what I want, but corrupted by manipulative spam; the other ones generally return no spam, but also not at all what I want.

mattmanser• 4 years ago

I'm trying https://kagi.com/ at the moment, was mentioned here a few months back when it was still in beta and I finally remembered to switch one of my browsers to try it.

So far, pretty happy with it. Before that I'd been using ddg but found myself so frequently !g that it was almost pointless.

DDG feels absolutely rubbish at local searches, but I may have just lost patience with it.

To be honest, I don't think DDG has a future purely because of the name. No way I'm telling non-techy friends that as I'll just get "what? Ducky go? Duck what? Are you being serious or is this a joke?"

zozbot2342• 4 years ago

When it comes to these older sites, it's hard for an automated engine to discover what they're about because (1) they lack the kind of structured description that's far more common on modern sites - including, to some limited extent, spammy ones (although extensive structured descriptions would nonetheless tend to favor legitimate content) - and that powers "smart" suggestions in search results. Also, (2) the web directories that would've provided an accurate description back when those sites were current are now dead. What we'd need to improve the Web search ecosystem is for "non-commercial", hobbyist sites to work on addressing both of these problems.

willis936• 4 years ago

But these alternative search engines kinda just remind me of why people started using Google. When I use them, I don't get spam

In the past few months at least half of my Google searches have had spam in the top 3 results. Literally malware domains that community-made filter lists are aware of but somehow Google chooses to share anyway.

ufo• 4 years ago

With marginalia I think that is by design. They intentionally do not index any websites that are deemed "too modern", which includes most things one might be searching for. It does seem to be intended more for exploring unusual places.

amelius• 4 years ago

I just hope we can get a trust-based network combined with search. So if I trust some friends and search "best toaster", and one of my trusted friends has given a very high review score to a toaster, then I get that one as the top search result.

Extend this to online communities, and you can ask "what laptop would HN recommend for Linux?", etc.

Of course, there's a privacy issue to solve, but the functionality could be very useful compared to the crappy Google search results for commercial products.

andromeduck2• 4 years ago

Yes! I was trying to find an article on polish objections to Nord Stream 2 a week or two ago and couldn't find anything. Tried a million search combinations, tried date restricting but it all favotrd recency. Ended up finding it as a footnote on Wikipedia

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

Honestly kinda crazy the publicity my tiny project is getting for what it is.

Seirdy6• 4 years ago

You deserve every bit of it, and then some. The scope of Marginalia may be small, but it is one of the best examples of making the non-commercial web accessible to a much larger audience. I hope it inspires others to tackle similar projects.

I'll be able to support the project starting a few weeks from now, and would love some non-Patreon options.

loudtieblahblah3• 4 years ago

it'd be nice if these could be worked into SearX

zzo38computer• 4 years ago

It look like good, but perhaps should have some more options (that can be specified as a part of the search query text), and documenting these features. Some possibilities would include filters (by file format, domain name, scheme, etc), sort order, excluding, etc.

There are two menus for options ("Popular Sites", "Blogocentric Eigenvector", "Both Algorithms", "Experimental", "Allow JS", "Deny JS", "Require JS"), but does not explain them very well. (For example, I might want the search engine to not execute any scripts in web pages to determine their text, but if the text works when scripts are disabled that it can still be included in the search results (even if the web page has scripts, as long as those web pages work correctly even when scripts are disabled).)

Also, they have some documentation using Gemini format. I have a Gemini viewer in my computer, but it won't use it because of the "Content-disposition" response header.

undersuit2• 4 years ago

When I recently Googled “best toaster” on my phone

When I search for an opinion...

caaqil• 4 years ago

This "Google Search sucks" discussion is officially getting boring. We get it, it sucks; we already know. It's been discussed ad nauseum. This article is particularly bad because it's a rehash of (and commentary on) content that already appeared here, with no significant new information (much like the original article it's commenting on, which was also a rehash of HN threads and comments made by people popular with the HN crowd).

midhhhthrow• 4 years ago

I’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve done so many fairly basic searches and gotten back absolutely awful results. I imagine most of the web isn’t even accessible through. This is an important topic that deserves even more discussion, especially since there isn’t even another solution yet

teknopaul• 4 years ago

This. The Internet needs search. I took a screenshot the first time Google showed only ads and no organic search.

It's critical to the functioning of the free market that consumers have accurate information.

The fact that Google is crap is less important. The fact that Google squashes competition and there is no unbiased search engine, is of national interest.

Current situation is because of a combination of Google's monopoly abuse and the fact that US govt does not recognise that search engines are(is) the entry point to a significant market. If you believe in the free market, then the state of Google search indicates huge inefficiency. A lot of people treat the term free market to mean "I, personally, am free to get rich, however I can, at the expense of everyone else." Which is pretty much the opposite of what it really means. It really means "you are free to join the market and compete on equal terms." Under those conditions best product/price should win.

coastflow2• 4 years ago

It was pleasantly surprising to see the article cite Hacker News as a source ("“Google is dead. Long live Google + ‘site:reddit.com’ ”—became the No. 10 most upvoted link ever on the tech-industry discussion board Hacker News."), which likely inspired the pitch to write the article.

The article still adds value as the reporter got a Google spokesperson to comment, and also brings the issue to a much wider audience outside of Hacker News.

TechBro86152• 4 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if anyone is running a HN bot that can comment on the repetitive threads that come up on a monthly basis.

sa46• 4 years ago

I’ve thought about creating HN Tropes, similar to TV Tropes to categorize the repetitive discussions with comments that are easily predicted. I haven’t convinced myself it’d help things, might just fuel the fire.

toastal• 4 years ago

Just because you're bored and in the know, doesn't a) mean the problem has gotten any better and isn't relevant and b) hasn't given others, newcomers a place to express their grievance. The fact that it still persists and still gets upvotes shows people aren't done and discussions of alternatives still need to be had.

dazc2• 4 years ago

Nothing will change until the discussion enters the mainstream and every boring HN thread on the subject helps bring that goal closer.

I switched to DDG more than a year ago and I can honestly say that I've not had to revert to google search more than a handful of times since. A regular user would probably forget about Google in a breath if only they knew that such an alternative existed.

lattalayta• 4 years ago

It may be coincidence, but around the same time that the "Google Search sucks" articles and comments starting becoming more frequent I am now getting pop ups on the Google Search results page to rate the results between 1-5 stars.

loudtieblahblah3• 4 years ago

by the time it's boring for us technical folks, it's just beginning to penetrate in mainstream discussion

Nursie• 4 years ago

> those who want to know what a “genuine real-life human being” thinks of a certain product

Are SoL, as they say on the internet, because more or less any avenue where a genuine person can leave a review can also be used by a marketer to help steer you to the 'right' choice, their product.

I'm still with Bill Hicks on this one.

soared• 4 years ago

Typing “Reddit” after your query will get the job done quite easily :)

ramraj07• 4 years ago

Until (which is already happening) marketers start using Reddit to game their recommendations. Next it’ll be hacker news. So basically it’s the red queen thing in the internet.

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

If anyone wants a real answer for "best toaster": http://automaticbeyondbelief.org/

edgyquant4• 4 years ago

I bet it still can’t make a toaster strudel that isn’t either burned or cold in the middle.

jahewson• 4 years ago

Just make your own toaster.

https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toas...

onion2k• 4 years ago

I bet it can't too, because "toaster strudel" cannot ever work in a toaster. A toaster is specifically designed not to cook bread all the way through. The idea is to caramelise (toast) the outside of a slice of bread to the point where it's golden and crisp while still leaving the inside fluffy and bread-like. Good toast is fundamentally opposed to what a "toaster strudel" is.

To make good strudel you should heat it through consistently in a conventional over and then grill it.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

That one has actually been discussed on HN a few times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346596

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

This toaster has several failings. Probably the biggest one is it’s always live and will kill your if you touch the inside even if it’s not toasting. But then a number of minor failings like not having the railings that clamp in so it can’t handle thick cut toast or crumpets since it’s fixed to the side of bread.

pid-1• 4 years ago

The best toaster is having no toaster. Just eat "raw" bread, it's faster and likely healthier.

alexb_2• 4 years ago

Probably the most HN response to this question possible. "Well you wouldn't need x if you just did Y instead, which is just better"

Akronymus2• 4 years ago

And the technology connections video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

anonred• 4 years ago

Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should.

Cherry-picked quotes aside, this part of the article really did make me roll my eyes. Users self-censoring searches to a _single website_ because the rest of Google’s results are so unusable is somehow a feature, not a bug.

The same way that Google improperly handling quoted searches and returning pages _without that exact string_ is somehow a feature, not a bug.

aemreunal• 4 years ago

The same way that Google improperly handling quoted searches and returning pages _without that exact string_ is somehow a feature, not a bug.

Couldn't find it now but that was refuted by Danny Sullivan (I think) in an HN thread about the Google search results quality. They gave a pretty convincing explanation of why that may happen (spoiler: it has something to do with the tokenization of words on the website) and I, for one, believed them.

*Edit:* Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382

rahimiali• 4 years ago

Doesn't the comment right below the one you linked successfully refute Danny Sullivan's claim?

TechBro86152• 4 years ago

Yeah, I remember that – he basically said that the word might appear on the page but not in the results description. And that's BS, because it used to be that the description of every result contained at least one bolded token included in the search query.

If this is no longer possible, it's only because they're cheaping out on hardware and not actually indexing as much of the page as they could (no way to retrieve the matching token because it's not saved, but they can still match on it). This probably also leads to diluted results.

croes• 4 years ago

That's just another proof that google doesn't care about it's users.

If they quote a search term they expect to find the exact term visible on the website. Not in alt text, not in invisible text, not any meta data. Quotes means this exact phrase visible on the website.

coastflow2• 4 years ago

For easier access for discussion, the full paragraph is: "Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should. Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires. If they wanted, they could refine their queries, limiting results by, say, price point (“toaster $40 . . . $100”) or by listing certain terms to exclude (“ ‘toaster’ NOT ‘oven’ ”). As machine-learning algorithms have grown more pervasive, we’ve lost some of the fluency with search that older Internet adopters may have learned in a high-school Boolean tutorial. “There’s a shift now where, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you blame the search engine,” Sullivan said. At the same time, he admitted that many users have a desire for “more noncommercial information, more community-based information.”"

Maybe it's just me, but I thought the middle section of the paragraph wasn't relevant to the first sentence. I speculate, with charitable interpretations, that the order of events was:

1) The reporter asked Sullivan whether the frequent use of "Reddit" in search terms indicated a problem.

2) Sullivan asserted that Google is useful for searching for results restricted to a domain, then shifted to say that Google still gives relevant results if you use Boolean search terms.

3) Potentially after a follow-up question, Sullivan conceded that much of the results that Google returns is commercial instead of community-made.

From a writing perspective, I found it unclear whether the middle section that starts with "Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires" was analysis by the author or part of Sullivan's response. I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context, though it would have been clearer if the writing more explicitly indicated whether this was part of Sullivan's reported speech.

hericium• 4 years ago

Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires

No, Google made users passive to profit from controlling limited choices presented to them.

I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context

Looks like it to me, too. It's Google's propaganda for "we made you need us".

undersuit2• 4 years ago

I only use Google to search Reddit because the Reddit search is unusable, not because the Google results are.

Gigachad3• 4 years ago

Both are true. Reddit search is useless but google search can also be useless until you put reddit in.

kromem• 4 years ago

Maybe Google should buy Reddit, build a better search across it, and set AlphaGo to use karma scores on Reddit to better identify relevance across search results on Google proper.

cookiengineer• 4 years ago

Google messed up the internet because they don't allow installing other websites' searches easily.

We had an opensearchdescription.xml for literally most of the websites, and somehow Browsers (including Firefox and Safari) managed to mess that up.

I wish there was an easy browser extension that just persists searches correctly, and doesn't forget about them the next time I clear my browser cache.

Guess I'll have to implement it in my own one again :-/

Google is so full of content farms these days, it's ridiculous. And all of them are ranked higher than the sources because they use google ads on their pages. Just search for a quote that you read here on HN or on reddit or on SO...and you'll find hundreds of them ranked higher than the source.

Maybe someone should build a search engine that downranks all websites that have google analytics and google ads? Would certainly be an interesting experiment.

aghilmort10• 4 years ago

pretty much what we're up to at Breeze. we started out with topic searches, added web search, and are now blending the two. some examples:

1. web, blog tab in search results is ours, and our first iteration of making it easier to dial in topics directly from web results -> https://breezethat.com/

2. early pre-web-wide topics before we added web search, https://breezethat.com/topics

3. ladypedia, an experiment on tuning out ugender bias for Women's History Month on Wikipedia pages, https://breezethat.com/p/ladypedia

4. we're currently sussing out the extent to which sites are human-ranked vs. using other machine-extracted information from a page / site -- it's a lot of rapid iteration at the moment

5. we have similar thoughts as Ahrefs on publisher profit sharing, although we haven't established if we'll hit their 90/10 mark or not. we also have option for users to go premium and skip all ads

scim-knox-twox3• 4 years ago

Maybe someone should build a search engine that downranks all websites that have google analytics and google ads? Would certainly be an interesting experiment.

Try Kagi.com. Also, you can manually rank or even block domains you choose.

nightpool• 4 years ago

I've never had a problem using a specific website's search engine on Chrome? Your experiences may not be universal.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

because the rest of Google’s results are so unusable

I would suggest the correct framing here is "the rest of the internet is unusable".

How else is Google supposed to guess you want a personal opinion from Reddit other than... typing it in the search query? Google is a search engine, not God.

If you want an answer from a particular source you're going to have to specify that, Google can't know if you want Wikipedia, or Quora, or a news article or a TikTok video or one of the other thousand pages that plenty of users might be interested in.

The internet has exploded in size, so has the diversity of legitimate sources, the search engines are hardly at fault.

masswerk• 4 years ago

I would suggest an even more correct framing as in "the rest of the internet as discoverable by Google is unusable".

On a more serious side, I think, we may need to have another dimension to web search, regarding the type of origin, namely "conversational" versus "commercial" (to be applied to both text and image search). Something like this would provide a more generalized solution to the problem, instead of pushing one of the more commonly known origins to become yet another monopoly.

usui4• 4 years ago

I tried their "Best toaster" query and one thing I want to say is just how hilarious it is that "best x"-of-anything webpage HAS to have $CURRENT_YEAR in the title. Yelp does something similar to its Google search results.

As if nothing good or the best in its breed ever came out from $PREVIOUS_YEAR or any previous years before that!

Tell me you're a garbage SEO website without telling me, just slap on "in $CURRENT_YEAR" or use some capital letters, I love how easy it is to tell the wheat from the chaff!

edit: someone with a more negative outlook/rant than my glee https://reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/qowtws/cmv_seo_an...

mkr-hn2• 4 years ago

Best toaster: https://shop.panasonic.com/kitchen-and-home/kitchen-applianc...

It is, in fact, a 20+ year old design that's had some minor updates but is still essentially the same as the one it replaced.

edgyquant4• 4 years ago

I just have one of the bread toasters with two slots. It was like 12$ and I can’t imagine a better toaster. What you’ve linked to is a toaster oven, which isn’t what Americans tend to think of when we hear “toaster.”

Akronymus2• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y Toasters were IMO a basically solved problem.

edgyquant4• 4 years ago

I will say sometime I want the date in the title. For instance when looking up JavaScript topics where things move so fast, or even C++ where the year standArd can mean the difference between a language I want to use and not.

usui4• 4 years ago

Yup, I agree to that! Helpful for the newest JavaScript libraries/Ecmascript features/best practices in $CURRENT_YEAR.

But, wow! Who knew that the landscape of toastering moves this quickly and changes so much from year to year?!

prox• 4 years ago

Or doing the reverse were you need info for a very specific version, and it’s absolutely obliterated by results of newer versions.

dataflow• 4 years ago

As if nothing good or the best in its breed ever came out from $PREVIOUS_YEAR or any previous years before that!

Try to apply this to software (e.g., "I want the December 2018 version of Chrome, it was the best version of Chrome so far.") and observe the reaction you get.

HWR_14• 4 years ago

Not for minor builds, but it's trivial to find posts saying older versions of Windows/OS X/Firefox/Chrome are better. But you might have to go to a more substantive change like, with Chrome, Manifest3

Semaphor2• 4 years ago

As if nothing good or the best in its breed ever came out from $PREVIOUS_YEAR or any previous years before that!

That older one could still be the best, but this way you (or that’s how it’d be in a perfect world) know that they at least checked if anything better came out.

usui4• 4 years ago

Even better are the articles that were written last year or whichever period SEO abuse started skyrocketing, except slapped on with [Updated $CURRENT_YEAR]!

So fresh, so new! Except when you click, you realize the article is dated and was barely updated at all from when it was written!

0cVlTeIATBs• 4 years ago

And searching for "best toaster 2020" gives plenty sites with a year in the title, not 2020, though...

userbinator2• 4 years ago

Speaking of the "best toaster", this and related HN discussion comes to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29342936

Spivak• 4 years ago

I mean it’s just spam evolving to users realizing that, for a time, you could get better results by putting the year in the query.

antifa• 4 years ago

Honestly I just don't want Google giving me a list from 2015 with entirely discontinued products...

executesorder662• 4 years ago

As if nothing good or the best in its breed ever came out from $PREVIOUS_YEAR or any previous years before that!

I know most of these are blogspam sites and I hate them too, but the way I understand the rationale behind the year, and the way I would do it too is this:

Best $PRODUCT $CURRENT_YEAR can include products that were manufactured in $PREVIOUS_YEAR or $LONG_TIME_AGO. The $CURRENT_YEAR is saying that the list is up to date, not that all the items in the list were made in $CURRENT_YEAR.

zaSmilingIdiot• 4 years ago

I understand the point being made, but this is solved trivially by including a published date, eg: Best $product - published $exact_date

(or alternatively, instead of "published" use "updated").

This has the added benefit that those searching for $product towards the end of a year can decide whether such lists published/updated near the beginning of the year are relevant or not.

noahtallen2• 4 years ago

Totally. When I’m searching for the best option for some random thing, I’ll often add 2021 or 2022 to make sure the results are recent. And, inevitably, when I need to add “Reddit” to the search query, adding the year is still helpful to avoid showing 10 year old posts. I’m looking for recent recommendations in these types of searches, normally,

richardfey2• 4 years ago

So of I could filter out all search results with a year in the title, perhaps I'll get something more "authentically organic"?

kingcharles• 4 years ago

8 Best Toasters of 2022 - Good Housekeeping Published: Dec 9, 2021

Best toaster 2022: 12 toasters for every kitchen Published: Jan 12, 2022

For a laugh I tried "best toaster 2023" and there are already two worthy pages.

fouc2• 4 years ago

I notice this especially in Google Maps. Sometimes I want to search for things like "cafe" or "hotel" and get a list of all the actual matches nearby. Even for buildings that show up on the map itself when you zoom in. But no, google maps search has to get all clever, hide results, and only show "relevant" results. It's super annoying when I search "hotels" and all I get is the equivalent of an agoda.com or booking.com search, when I wanted to actually see all hotel buildings, including offline ones.

Gareth3217• 4 years ago

That's because the "relevant" results pay Google to be "relevant." It's definitely getting worse over time.

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

I don't think that's on Google.

The hotel industry is super heavily targeted with SEO spam. They're almost on par with online casinos in how much effort they put into manipulating search engines.

hackernewds• 4 years ago

But it is Google that sets the rules for how and what is sorted. SEO is downstream

fouc2• 4 years ago

To be clear, I'm talking about the places that are visibly on the map. You can scroll around and find cafes and hotels that simply don't get returned the moment you send a search query.

Places that are visibly there but not returned in search result.. It's the most bizarre thing.

metanonsense• 4 years ago

If relevant only was relevant. It happens so often to me that I search for something like "restaurant" and get top results 150 kilometers away.

roflc0ptic2• 4 years ago

On a tangential note, I recently started wondering about how legal brothels work, where prostitution is legal, what do legal brothels charge, etc, and google was supremely unhelpful. I don't know if these things are just so shady they don't have websites, or I'm looking in e.g. Germany and it's not in English, but I imagine American sex tourism is probably decently sized market. Dunno. Strong suspicion the morality police were preventing me from sating my abstract curiosity about sex work.

psyc2• 4 years ago

This sounds like a great example of where Reddit would be 100x more useful than Google's version of the web. There's no doubt in my mind that Google tries really hard to Disneyfy the web, unless you push it really hard not to.

judge20202• 4 years ago

Seems pretty useful to me[0,1], but this is google.com set to english.

0: https://i.judge.sh/WmhyQ/F_pp1uDoEG.png

1: https://i.judge.sh/H1t5n/G_6H65oODP.png

roflc0ptic2• 4 years ago

Eh, wasn't clear - was looking for specific brothels.

mhh__2• 4 years ago

You might just not be good at googling for that topic.

cube00• 4 years ago

It's difficult when you're searching for something where there's money to be made because all those sites are fighting for the top and using all the tricks in the book do it. See also: blockchain.

upsidesinclude• 4 years ago

Ah, the New Yorker. Just about a decade late

windows2020• 4 years ago

Everyone--note this moment. We're witnessing the fall of Google and Windows. Like IBM, it will take time to realize what happened. To some, it's obvious. But to others, it's all that's known.

judge20202• 4 years ago

I'm not sure IBM is doing too bad. Sure, they aren't the growth machine that is AAPL or MSFT, but relatively low PE for a tech company that's been valued at or above $100B for over 10 years is a pretty good success story.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/IBM:NYSE?window=MAX

executesorder662• 4 years ago

By "fall" I don't think they meant financially. Just in relevance.

mhh__2• 4 years ago

Meanwhile alphabet EPS is up 35% from last year.

drpixie• 4 years ago

Yes - IBM used to be computers, as in average people genuinely considered them to be the same thing, like "Hoover" was more or less synonymous with vacuum cleaner. Google was functionally synonymous with "the web". No longer.

scim-knox-twox3• 4 years ago

I recommend Kagi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835756

usui4• 4 years ago

If I put in "best toasters", there's a section called listicles that it lumps all such articles into. What a great feature.

Seirdy6• 4 years ago

Kagi's interesting. On the surface, it seems like a metasearch engine. But upon closer inspection, two of its sources--its news and "non-commercial" Teclis indexes--are actually developed by the Kagi team, and can be used independently on their own dedicated sites.

I do like the ability to boost and downrank certain domains myself. Its TinyGem platform also looks like an interesting "social bookmarking" approach that's more minimal and focused than other mainstream solutions. I'm currently working on a way to POSSE[0] my public bookmarks to TinyGem.

[0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE

dmje3• 4 years ago

I've been using Kagi for a few weeks now. Unlike when I trialled ddg, and found about 90% of my searches ended up being !g, I'm finding Kagi results to be genuinely excellent.

The "lens" functionality which lets you gone searches to a subset of site is really excellent and genuinely useful. Plus you can remove sites from results, too.

I'm really optimistic about where it's going. And yes, they have a "pay for it" model which reassures me they're thinking about the future.

ikt• 4 years ago

Unlike when I trialled ddg, and found about 90% of my searches ended up being !g

How long ago did you try DDG and do you have some examples of searches that didn't work on DDG but did on Google?

thematrixturtle• 4 years ago

I filled out a survey for them, and the suggested pricing scheme seems out of whack though: $120/year is going to be a complete non-starter for mass adoption.

Razengan• 4 years ago

Google messed up the internet because they don't allow installing other websites' searches easily. We had an opensearchdescription.xml for literally most of the websites, and somehow Browsers (including Firefox and Safari) managed to mess that up.

I’ve long thought that search should be provided by individual websites and cached/indexed by ISPs, like DNS etc.

You search for “foo”, your nearest Search Protocol Service (or called whatever) hosted on the ISP looks at all the content served by the ISP in the past which contained “foo”, then it asks those web servers for a detailed index for all occurrences of “foo” on their site.

If none found, query the next nearest search servers.

Search could and should definitely be decentralized.

caymanjim• 4 years ago

This would be even easier to game than Google SEO.

marginalia_nu7• 4 years ago

Search could and should definitely be decentralized.

While looking things up in an index partitions fairly well, search queries are typically extremely underspecified, so what you end up with is potentially millions of results.

This is why you need a search ranking, like this is not negotiable. If you don't have this, your results will be hot garbage. The crux being that this partitions in an orthogonal axis to document retreival.

If you don't solve this problem, you basically end up with YaCy. It's peer-to-peer, but it's slow as molasses and the results just aren't very good.

neonate• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/J4v6T

http://web.archive.org/web/20220311040818/https://www.newyor...

ankit219• 4 years ago

This is a meta post. A discussion rose up on HN, so much that people at New Yorker took notice, cited HN, and that article is posted here too.

A couple of observations since I last wrote my thoughts on this (last time i said this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348492) :

- People who work in tech do not constitute the avg internet user now a days who uses Google to search. Naturally, google evolved to serve the lowest denominator by default, and that would probably not be satisfying for advanced users. (which opens up space for a new competitor I think?) Half the searches are when people are asking basic questions - hence they do not even result in a click. I have searched multiple times for a random calculation because google is faster than opening a calculator on mac.

- Adding site:reddit.com is a feature, and it's a utility of the engine that Google is allowing us to concentrate search to a subset. Same goes with many other operators, it's just another phrase. Ideally, there could be a wrapper which does these things for us, but I doubt it would work well. That does not mean Google search is dying, but more like we are now realizing the dependency we had on Google and the laziness when it comes to finding things on the internet.

UweSchmidt• 4 years ago

Looking for an exact phrase (with "quotes") and limiting search to a specific site (maybe assisted by UI) is not difficult for the "avg internet users". It was possible to find just the most obscure and surprising information with a good search, and Google had the SEO spammers and content clowns beat for many years.

Now people use "site:reddit.com" to limit the results to a space that is moderated by humans and not completely commercialized.

The loss of Old Google might be worse for humanity than the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

andromeduck2• 4 years ago

what do you suggest? Bring back advanced search? Or just disable the training wheels.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

"Hacker News does not represent the totality of everyone who searches," he said. "Not all of them are going to be happy if all of our results are a hundred-per-cent Reddit."

How would he know whether they are/would be happy or not. The HN contigent is the only one that actually gives meaningful feedback. It seems like Google does not want that feedback.

Something about Danny Sullivan becoming a spokesperson for Google reminds me of when Microsoft bought out Mark Russinovich.

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

I haven't used Google directly in years, but here on HN I frequently get the idea it's going downhills.

What would be good to have is an independent search engine that both works well, and which is not backed by anonymized Bing or Google results.

richardfey2• 4 years ago

It feels like the New Yorker should pay royalties to Dmitri Brereton? It's a slightly better written rehash of the same points, including the mention of founders' concern about tension between useful search results and profitable ones.

zerof1l• 4 years ago

I thought I was the only one who started adding "Reddit" to some of my searches when I'm trying to do some research and learn about products.

nofunsir• 4 years ago

This site is maliciously messing with Reader Mode.

bambax2• 4 years ago

When I recently Googled “best toaster”...

Well if you google "best toaster" then yes, Google will (and should) show you ads and sponsored posts and articles that have been seo-ed to death, because it's a meaningless search.

Google isn't in the business of assessing toasters' quality. Google is in the business of finding information relevant to your search.

But relevancy goes both ways: you need to search for something specific to find it.

"When will I die" will not point to anything interesting. "Pancreatic cancer symptoms" might.

dazc2• 4 years ago

Not defending Google, but there are hundreds of online retailers that sell toasters [and other such utility items] and it really is an opportunity they are missing by not having a page that addresses such queries whilst allowing 'others' to do it instead.

esperent2• 4 years ago

It's not in any way a meaningless search and one of the main goals of decent search engine should be to figure out common shorthand searches like this and show meaningful results for them.

When I search "best toaster" it's shorthand for "show me roundup reviews of toasters + forums where people discuss toasters + very highly reviewed toasters on shopping sites". It's not shorthand for "show me loads of ads and SEO bullshit".

bambax2• 4 years ago

Ok, you may be right. But my point is that "best toaster" doesn't mean anything per se; do you want a fast toaster? Durable? Low energy consumption? Elegant? Large capacity?

There are many characteristics to any device and the "best" one depends on personal preferences. What's the "best car" for example? Does that even mean anything?

I don't think a generalist search engine should be used for shopping. You don't need Google to read reviews on Amazon and form your own opinion, again, depending on your own preferences.

People use Google as an oracle and then complain when that fails. But Google is a search engine. It's not the Pope.

dorianmariefr• 4 years ago

Cuisinart CPT-180 Classic Toaster

alexb_2• 4 years ago

Of course. Most people have figured out by now that "best toaster" will only get you horrible SEOd sites written by robots. This is why "best toaster site:reddit.com/r/toasters" gives you the actual best answer.

lynguist• 4 years ago

I want to add to the discussion that whenever I search for any kind of discussion topic on the internet I search on Google and add "-reddit" to it! I hate the reddit-style low-effort void anti-discussions. It's unreadable. I find every forum in the whole Internet better than reddit. The voting system turns everything into a one line joke and there are no founded opinions.

batperson• 4 years ago

Interesting, I do the opposite and add "reddit" to most of my searches.

narrator• 4 years ago

No love for http://Yandex.com ? It's the only search engine I know of that actually answers the question when searching for "what countries are using ivermectin" instead of giving out a bunch of anti-ivermectin editorials.

emptysongglass• 4 years ago

How much longer is Yandex going to exist? Aren't they at risk of default?

blakesterz• 4 years ago

"The search engine’s stated mission is to “show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of.” Its results, based on its own custom algorithm and data gathering, prioritize text-based Web sites that lack ads, mobile support, encryption, and other features that qualify as good S.E.O. “Google punishes sites that aren’t up to speed with modern Web technologies,”"

Does Marginalia really prioritize sites that lack encryption?? The other things seem like good ideas, but don't we all want to encourage encryption?

loudtieblahblah3• 4 years ago

i've never understood "encrypt everything". Your ISP still knows the domain you're going to, encrypted or not. It might not be able to see the specific pages/URLs if it's SSL.

But some sights just aren't... sensitive. They don't have logins, they don't have user-data stored. I don't get the point.

Does it matter if zombo.com really has an SSL cert?

mancerayder• 4 years ago

The attitude below: "Well, duh, what did you expect, I'm sick of these HN posts" is a depressing, cynical take.

Google is the search engine, and if a business, or a thought, or a piece of information, doesn't show up there, then it's invisible to 95% of the (Western) human population that doesn't use duckduckgo or Bing or whatever failed alternatives there are.*

I do find it very amusing that I'm not the only one that uses reddit as a keyword in search results, because the results are almost spot on.

* - Yes, I use duckduckgo as my default, but use g! a lot because the results aren't superb for tech items, and it too falls prey to SEO type manipulation with dubious stuff at the top, in my experience.

mediumsmart• 4 years ago

'Ukraine on fire'

Google gets you nowhere near a link to that film at this moment because Google is not a search engine.

DDG has it as the 3rd result so you can decide for yourself.

What Google search isn’t showing you

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