Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it(ixns.github.io) |
Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it(ixns.github.io) |
e.g., you.com lets you pick preferred sources, so that you can tailor your search experience to your needs.
They've also done a great job on recipes. https://you.com/search?q=oven%20roasted%20broccoli
Neeva and Kagi also seem promising, though their both waitlist/invite only still
I don't work for them, but I have gone the paid route with them and I am very pleased with them as my default search now.
Google tried it in 2009, failed. Microsoft tried it in 2013, failed. Startups across the board have tried it.
I think it is because "social" usually implies to a user that they are searching for a person, not the content they create. And previously, there wasn't a ton of UGC that was relevant to a query.
Disclaimer: I'm a You.com employee working on search.
1. search something
2. click links until you get your info
3. go back to the search page and upvote/downvote the results based on which ones were useful
I enter my search term hit enter, for a split second I can see the exact products I want to browse but those results are quickly swapped out for a bunch of unrelated products.
.edu is a TLD for US based educational bodies. So the reason you don't see a cookie banner is because the majority (AFAIK) of US states don't mandate a cookie banner, unlike EU and UK based sites (like the Natural History Museum, based in the UK). Does this mean the Natural History Museum is a less authoritative resource than anywhere else? I'd say the opposite, actually.
And for the "change a tire" example using a .edu TLD. That's a fantastic example of how to find search results that are almost completely useless for anyone outside the US. What's a "tire", anyway? Oh, you mean "tyre". What's a "flashlight". OK, you mean a "torch".
In summary: there's a world outside the US. It's lovely out here.
Why stop at British people? I can't believe this guy didn't consider Japanese-speaking people! Why didn't OP make an article for Chinese people?! Wow, can you believe OP didn't make an article for every single possible person on the planet?
Honestly, you make a good point at the start but I don't understand your rage at the end there.
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+to+fix+a+flat+tire
https://bikerepairvideos.com/fix-flat-tire/
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+are+pearls+made%3F
https://www.gemrockauctions.com/learn/did-you-know/how-are-p...
We need to reset the web. Try out as much of alternative search engines as you can. Use the one, or multiple, that suit you better. Maybe they will get some traction in a couple of years, maybe in a decade, or so. We'll be there where we were before Google, using Yahoos, Altavista, Excite et al. and waiting for the history to repeat in a form of a new incumbent that will again make search usable.
Also, I created a pure JavaScript (no dependency, tracking, or downloads!) bookmarklet that kills all the links in a page and turns it to plain text with a visual optimization algorithm applied to make it easier to read: https://locserendipity.com/Hyper.html
The internet is much better without all the cruft.
Sometimes I wonder how many of these comments are real, or fake. I have caught hacker news schillers many times before.
So you expect them to write an article on how to fix your tyres for free? And what about the hosting costs?
I had to look up some govt pdfs and tables recently and the government sites hosting the files hardly ever show up on the first page on Google anymore. It's a sad story.
This would be the case with any commercial service with financial goals, given enough time and the right motivations.
If commercial content is your problem, say it. Leave Google out of it.
https://code.you.com/search?q=onnxruntime+segfault
those you would not necessarily find on .edu domains but it's a similar spirit.
(you.com founder here)
Unfortunately there’s just too much inertia with the ads-based business model making it too hard for Google to not let itself get this way. Similar challenges with other ads supported businesses.
The first link clearly explains how to fix a tire and right underneath the first link, there's a link to Youtube video with described sections which you can click on immediately
The sites are full of tracking and ads, but that's hardly Google's fault imo
but if they did, they'd be pretty much wasting money! their stock holders could reasonably sue the board for choosing to not make money for a second.
/half-joking
If I don't find what I want right away, I usually assume I am not trying hard enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_bookmark
For searching in Hacker news, I saved the URL 'https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s' with the search key 'hn'. So when I want to search something around here, I just type
hn something
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=something
I don't think so.
"site:wikipedia.org how are pearls made"
"site:wikipedia.org how to change a tire"
Sundar has been quoted as saying “they are a business first” and a businesses political obligation is make profit for the owners.
These companies and technologies are meant to serve human beings, not a mathematical ideal in programmers heads.
While: $makeMoney == $howSocietyWorks; return $getUsedToIt
Ooh but politics is boring!
Only 13% of adults in the US have an advanced degree. Coddled engineers live in an emotional bubble ignoring the very real world that does not feel an obligation to a minority of coddled engineers.
When a brain is trained to follow along from childhood, I don’t really see how it’s an option to avoid it.
Also the 13% are not all engineers. Many are historians or similar who babble nonsense. We built many big buildings and bridges before web devs came along.
Centralized ledgers used to dictate agency and what effort we must put in (computed by elites with a currency monopoly; which in the US is legally a speech monopoly thanks to SCOTUS) are not really the same thing as a bridge.
There’s a big difference between things we need to engineer and TV 2.0. Whole lot of IT is rent seeking.
So, you want someone to help you and you are pissed when they don't want to do it for free?
(Sadim is the revers of Midas.)
If you dont get it, let's take an example. The flat tire mustard-yellow webpage. This page is not KYC'd. Are they laundering money through their website? Are they rallying people for a bloody crusade? A search engine cant know that (basically) but it knows a website that display ads is KYC'd so google can display them more easily.
For sure Google is pressed to help make a regulated web and stop the free zone. Knowing it's in their interest anyway (ads), they embrace it. I dont get why the internet dont get that already: it's all KYC :)
Google has at least 10x as many employees as it needs. That's based on decades of revenue being decoupled from costs, and from monopoly profits. It's the double-whammy of being in tech (where costs and revenues don't couple since incremental costs are close to zero), and having a super-profitable monopoly.
You can't fire 90% of the workforce; even morale and culture problems aside, at this point, the organization is structured to need too many people. On the other hand, organizing over 100k employees turns into this superorganism problem.
At >100k employees, the influence of anyone -- up to and including the CEO -- is very, very limited. Dynamics take over.
I've been bearish on Google for a long time, but I haven't shorted the stock. Market irrationality can last a lot longer than my wallet. Fundamentally, though, one could muscle through building a new, better Google for much less than the valuation of Google.
Google could also be worth a lot more with a breakup. There is negative synergy between, for example, advertising, Google Workspace, Android, hosting, etc. If those were independent businesses, with partnerships around things like data sharing, the total value could be much higher. Alphabet was a move in the right direction, but the move should have been much deeper. Right now, Alphabet is Google + a bunch of tiny startups.
At some point I really hope that we can all recognize that “seemingly harmless”, “engineering-oriented”, and “data-driven” are not virtues.
But in hindsight, this was a ploy from them to try and upsell AMP, which was in a lot of cases heavier than non-AMP websites, and it was a means to keep people inside of their ecosystem - and inside of their advertising network, because not all websites Google linked to had Google adverts on it.
They've given up on AMP. They've given up on improving search results quality. Dare I say they've given up on improving the web? I mean they're still putting some money into Chrome and HTTP/3 and the like.
Looking at the misnamed "Privacy Sandbox", Chrome is not just there to improve the Web (and therefore google usage), but also to control it (and steer advertisers to Google even if it undermines the Web as a whole).
They’re killing Firefox with it (RIP) and successfully killed IE with it (rest in piss).
We’re getting to a desktop browser hegemony again but I doubt a scrappy upstart will be able to save us.
> How we make money
> We plan to fund Andi through a freemium business model, with free anonymous search for everyone for ever, and paid plans for professionals and businesses, including APIs and using Andi for corporate information, with supplemental revenue from anonymous referral link attribution. We're focused on building the product right now, and will figure out the details once we're further along.
> We are committed to staying 100% advertising free. Commercial considerations or partnerships will have zero impact on our search results or recommendations. Our recommendations are always made based on the best results we can find for our customers, and are never subject to commercial influence.
> By sharing search revenue with content producers and media companies that join our network, our mission is to provide funding to great content and reduce media's reliance on invasive ad-tech. Contact us at info@andisearch.com to get involved!
There are only 2 employees[1] of the company so there is a low amount of revenue they need to be self-sufficient
What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open source web. As part of this I would like to see search and communications moved to the client, rather than the cloud. This seems like it would take a huge effort to build, however, and even more monumental effort to bring people into the network. So it feels like a pipe dream at this point. I do think there are a lot of other people out there craving for something similar, based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).
The only way you have not listed is gov't funding. And i dont think i would trust a gov't run search engine either. May be a well meaning librarian institution could make it work.
> I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail.
this hasn't really been tried yet - it could work, who knows?
Do I have to build the startup myself?
Or let Musk buy them.
I cannot imagine it being easy, but I find it hard to believe that Google aren't able to weed out the worst offenders. For a large number of queries the results are all SEO spam. Try searching for anything related to health and get a useful result. It's no longer possible.
Medicine researching on the internets always was among the hardest topics. And anyone who really understands Medicine has to write on any advice not to consider it as a real medical advice... I agree that google has degraded down to unusable in comparison to non-global searchable websites (like SO) but Medicine is very bad example to your point.
When Google started, the web was honest and innocent. People linked to the pages they liked, and Google could crowd source those links and raise up the most popular pages.
Now most of the web is lies meant to confuse search engines. Figuring out what pages are good is no longer a feasible task for software.
At this point, it's no different than an appstore in terms of volume. Ironically that's where we're heading with most websites being "3.0" and just SPAs and now PWAs even.
And who can blame us? Other sites still suck worse. I can't believe how bad walmart.com still is - the user experience is night and day. Walmart - the retailer embracing computerized tracking of spending by credit card number and other advanced data analytics a full decade before Amazon was even a glimmer in Bezo's eye took forever to realize the power of using their stores as local fulfillment centers? Provides a 3rd party marketplace that's less reliable than craigslist? Who the hell is in charge of online operations at these big companies and how do they still have jobs?
Then again just look at Sears - the company that literally invented mail order *in the 1800's* and how they completely missed the Internet - the ultimate mail order environment.
Ugh.
For example, I wanted to watch a bunch of videos of Mark Zuckerberg speaking from before 2010 and the YouTube search engine only showed me a limited amount of things I had already watched— it even had unrelated suggestions below those results based on my viewing habits.
So I went to Google and searched for videos and interviews of Zuck and found a bunch which were not easily surfaced on YouTube itself.
Same thing with Ina Garten/Barefoot Contessa cooking videos.
Now that I've found some fresh videos, the homepage recommendation algorithm has gotten better at surfacing new content related to these topics.
The problem is that Google is engaged in a war with SEO optimizers, and losing (or at least, barely breaking even). No business model will fix that. It's a hard problem that any successful search engine will struggle with.
For many search terms, the entire above-the-fold and sometimes multiple scroll heights are filled with:
- Ads
- Info cards
- People Also Ask
- Map/Business info
- Videos
- Related Products
- More Ads
The organic search results start after that and on mobile they may as well not exist.
If everyone is clicking the directly or indirectly sponsored/algorithmic content then what incentive does Google have to give you good, straightforward links to relevant webpages?
A typical employee at any large company is incentivized to:
- Maximize their salary
- Maximize their future earnings potential (e.g. CV)
- Have fun
- Have work-life balance
... and so on. That goes all the way up to the CEO. Pretending a corporation thinks and responds to incentives is folly. Running a corporation like Google is like herding cats. If everyone marched in the same direction, Google would cut through SEO optimizers like a chainsaw through butter. There is no wayh to do that with 100+k people.
Google fundamentally has no financial incentive to fix any problem, since organizations aren't intelligent, sentient beings which act on incentives. They have dynamics from the interactions of 100k+ individual agents.
There is no magical fairy which makes large organizations act in their own best interests or even try to survive. The only reason they do survive is that's as true of their competitors as themselves.
Neeva also lets me index my personal documents and includes those in search results as well. They are an early startup but I am excited about what they can build when they are not beholden to advertisers.
Google has an impossible task in trying to answer a query like "Portable air mattress reviews", because 99.99999% of the results are SEO-optimized crap
1 and 2 are trivial to detect. 3 is harder but still not impossible given Google's machine learning capabilities and existing datasets.
Downrank or ban ads & affiliate links and you remove any incentive for creating spam sites in the first place.
For example, all the stupid aliasing of search terms, and dropping of search terms.
This is helpful if you want to optimize for "sorta close, sell things!" such as "maytag A4453 fix timer", but you want advertisers to latch on to maytag=washing machine, and ignore the rest.
And it also helps when websites with google ads on them them get higher SEO, because suggesting that site might get a click, and profit!
EG, suggest a blog/spam site, because google ads are on it.
And it also helps with google voice search! Did the speaker mean here/hear? Did they mean Danny/Daniel/Danson when they said Dan?
Google has too much genericization in its search, and it is for profit naturally, but I think it is lazy profit, and it is becoming worse yearly.
And it is all their fault, no one else's.
Many product folks just don’t seem honest, even with themselves, about what benefits users. Do you really think your users benefit from ”more relevant” advertisements? Because your users don’t. Are new services and content so beneficial to users that they’d forfeit their privacy to fund it? If so, why obfuscate your having made that choice for them? Why not make it opt-in? Does that dialog box popping up just at the right time really give that overstimulated and frustrated user a choice? Either answer those kinds of questions honestly or admit that you’re just finding the smoothest path to maximize revenue. The hypocrisy is infuriating.
Give me a break.
My loosely held theory on the wide variance in people's judgement of DDG is that some people really like/have come to rely on how much Google personalizes results based on all the other data they have on you, even if they are in the "Google has gotten bad" camp. DDG doesn't do any of that: it's much more like going back 20 years where you have to put all the context you care about into a query, you're not searching "in a bubble". For me, that's a very positive feature, but others may find it frustrating and not even be able to articulate why they're not happy with the results. DDG does do a lot of the nice "enhancement" stuff Google pioneered long ago, like embedding the intro of the Wikipedia page in the sidebar for a query with a strong match, e.g. a person's name. So for me DDG is just the right level of "smart": it understands common queries well enough to immediately highlight useful details, but it doesn't try to be so smart that you as a user stop being able to understand what it's doing under the hood.
Also, I think Google could make a ton of money if they sold one ad per language at a time. As in, for the next 5 minutes the ad for all English speaking users will be for coca-cola, and then it will be for boscovs. Just like TV ads.
That is to say, a search engine could sell advertising without betraying it's users or compromising its own quality. It is possible, but would need constant vigilance against the temptations of greed.
There's a lot more to search than just search in the traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating services offering small complimentary functionality slices could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save for like image search, maps and translation) with a significantly smaller hardware footprint.
My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed, at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice, searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing lists, and so on.
As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put together an actually useful information gateway this way. Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work probably exceeds its difficulty.
Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the web were a very different place back then. I remember about 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh crap, it's over."
Of course it is. It shouldn't be at all difficult to train a large natural language AI model on SEO spam pages. But nobody will do it unless they can figure out a business model that makes it pay.
Or a non-profit organization is formed to do search spidering for the benefit of the whole world, much like Wikipedia or PBS.
In fact, I wonder how far a search engine could go with a curated list of "good actors" you exclusively serve up results from. Add a "search everywhere" link for people that prefer SEO hell.
I'm hopeful there are a lot of Mac users like me out there.
Every site would have to run their own data analysis and sell their own ads. Advertisers would be unlikely to take Google or anyone else's word, so audits would be necessary but difficult to conduct. It wouldn't completely end online advertising but would turn it back into something closer to the old traditional model where those selling ad space had a handful of semi-generic personality models for their readers/users and advertisers would select one that best matches the profile of their target customer. It destroys the economics of centralized data collection.
There are many other laws that could accomplish a similar end but through different means. The biggest barrier would be getting politicians to not care about the demands of huge tech companies that dump endless amounts of money into lobbying and campaign funding.
Corporations are intelligent, sentient entities which act on incentives. They don't have a conscious sense of self, but then neither do many natural organisms. That doesn't keep them from responding to their environment as if they're aware of it, and acting in incentive-driven ways.
Corporations seeking to maximise profits are exactly like humans attempting to maximise income. The problem is that corporations - like humans - have the wrong incentives, further diminished by limited predictive ability and poor heuristics.
So maladaptive behaviours emerge and stick. Both humans and corporations find a nice local minimum and don't move from it.
More intelligent behaviour would be able to predict and avoid existential threats without having to experience them first. But it's a question of predictive ability, not a binary absence of all intelligence.
So it's not that Google can't do better because it has too many employees. It can't do better because its cultural heuristics - which include it internal culture and the external culture it operates in - don't allow it to.
I can set up "incentives" for an anthill, in the form of a mixture of sugar and borax. Emergent behavior takes over.
The behavior of corporations, at the scale of Google, Facebook, or similar, is almost entirely emergent dynamics. Same thing for countries, for that matter.
On the other hand, they have an incentive - increased competition, they can still monetize better pages, search is what makes them money.
No one is incentivised to grow head count. They are incentivised to do more, produce more revenue, and expand the reach of the company; most of these goals require the application of more smart people to a problem. They are not getting a promotion or salary bump because their group increased from 200 to 300 people over the previous quarter, they are receiving rewards for being able to effectively direct those people in order to achieve some specific goal. Increasing head count by 50% while delivering 250% growth in revenue/engagement/view/etc is what is being rewarded.
- If I have a job at Google as an IC, I can look for IC jobs.
- If I have a job managing 10 people, I can get a manager-level job.
- If I have a job managing 100 people, I can get a director-level job.
- If I have a job managing 1000 people, I can look for a VP-level job.
- If I have a job managing 10,000 people, I can look for a C-suite job.
Average tenure in a position in the tech industry is around 3 years. No one will know or care what objectives a Google manager achieved, or whether those were hard or easy to achieve. If you want to grow rapidly in your career, the things which matter are:
- Connections, network, and references
- What shows up on an interview (e.g. self-improvement)
- What shows up on your CV (e.g. how many people you managed, or the brands you worked on)
The place techies get stuck in career growth is by trying to do the "right thing." By the time you're trying to rise to the top of a corporate ladder, the competition is extreme, and the people who succeed play the game as optimally as they can.
I might be able to look one level up. An IC might be able to manage a small team. However, your odds of having an IC move directly into the C-suite require nothing short of a miracle (a Nobel prize, being the author of Linux, or something similar).
Actually delivering value is a huge advantage too, but as far as I've seen is not prerequisite for getting ahead.
Appearing to deliver value is strongly advantageous. Delivering value helps you do that. Other methods:
- Good salesmanship (e.g. making easy things look difficult)
- Stealing credit (can be personal, or e.g. for market conditions)
- Lying (e.g. cooking books)
Delivering value is probably the easiest way to appear to deliver value at the IC level. The higher one moves in the corporate ladder, the more important the others become.
In any public company the CEO is just another employee. Maybe he even has less freedom than others.
Yes, responsibility and compensation are vastly greater, but in the end you don't really realize personal goals.
Perhaps this is the point you are making: if one is data-driven and engineering-oriented without regard to the consequences, that could be seen as a vice.
Despite the amazing engineering/science, it is hard to come to peace with von Braun or Teller (just to pick two examples).
Hopefully we can get to the point of putting purpose (I think “mission” is a bit too hackneyed and neat to work here) first in discussions of culture, whether corporate or engineering culture.
In fact, I'd wager that if we had a way to filter for content that is written without the goal of being monetized, we'd have a better web and us consumers would be more inclined to reward and give back to the creators generously.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism#Protestant_cultu...
If someone is so clueless about changing a tyre that the best place they can start is google, then organically taking them to the garage's page is a win. Maybe they'll find the information useful, maybe they'll decide they're out of their depth and call the number on the screen.
For them to show up as the first organic result is a huge win. All they have to do with that win is not screw it up. And 9 meg of trackers, a page full of popups, and pointless CTAs (do you want to hire someone who can't change a tyre?) is screwing up that easy win.
You don't have to be scummy to turn search results into profit. That garage came so, so close of being a great example, before they threw it away and made a bad example.
If the "business people" were to disappear we'd do just fine. The whine of incessant marketing does tend to disturb the peace.
So why would Google serve the more direct and helpful result from the edu domain!
I think they are genuinely struggling in an adversarial environment. Imagine every hacker in the world specifically focused on your system and the payoff is millions or even billions of dollars.
But clearly there are also a lot of motivations to de-emphasize the organic results on the search page in favor of ads, “algorithmic answers” that give you an answer without clicking away from Google, and redirects to Maps, Youtube, and Shopping which are revenue-generators for Google.
Maybe that also comes with a budget de-emphasis for fighting the war in the organic results vs surfacing relevant content from these other sources.
This would also put pressure on content creators to tone down the ads or explore alternative monetization models.
"...offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN....."
Or as it reads?
https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neeva-free-basic-and-neev...
I also spend 50£/month on Patreon to support the creators I watch regularly.
https://www.goodyear.com/en-US/learn/tire-care-maintenance/h...
On Kagi you have to go until the 10th result to get something from Bridgestone, which explains the same thing while being less aggressive about selling tires:
https://www.bridgestonetire.com/learn/maintenance/how-to-cha...
So the trade-off seems to happen between seeing fewer ads and having better tolerance for imprecise queries.
The Bloomberg Terminal is extremely expensive and yet companies pay for it because it makes their traders' jobs so much more efficient. I don't see why companies wouldn't do the same for a search engine that filters out all the bullshit so their employees don't have to waste their time wading through it.
(Kagi founder here)
Google has 4.3B users, so 1% of that is 43M. With a $5 subscription, Kagi would have $215M in monthly revenue, enough to pay for 14,000 developer salaries.
A more reasonable target might be 500k users at, let's say, $10/mo.
Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but not every thing has to be that.
Imagine a search engine that truly is private, containerized search and does not need to sell you anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites. That search engine would be bliss.
A listing of top global educational institutions would only have a few thousand entries.
It's not without some irony that I note that the early, and much belated, Internet was largely edu domains, along with a handful of tech firms, government agencies, and military entities.
I'm a Kagi private beta tester and love it. Will become a paying customer.
One question: I do remember a page that told me how much I searched and what that would mean once Kagi becomes a paid service. I can't find that info anymore. In light of the mail us Kagi users got today, does that mean that it's going to be a flat rate for starters?
We do not yet know if the flat fee will be viable for the company and we hope to learn that very soon.
If you want to save your search history perhaps you can open a suggestion on https://kagifeedback.org
Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran `ls` in a shell with a glob pattern, it just decided to sort of “add in” a few other files loosely based on your query (or heck, files that aren’t based on it at all)? Oh, now imagine if `rm` did that.
Sadly this happens with lots of search tools now. Why the heck is the default state on a new Mac to funnel what you type to everything, e.g. I searched for “Chrome” and hit Return and the FIRST thing it did was throw me into the App Store and call up some not-even-a-web-browser scam app with Chrome in its name, instead of selecting the Chrome already installed on my computer and opening it? More and more it seems that you have to turn off all kinds of poor defaults to put tools into a useful state, or there is simply no way to get them there at all.
But anyway, this is the behaviour I think people are being trained to expect from searches. I sometimes have to show new users our business systems (which manage residential property data) and it's seen as a drag that you have to have some level of precision when searching for anything.
It's like a spellchecker. As they've got better over time you can be less and less accurate with words you're not quite sure on and they still find the word you meant.
I was watching a new movie yesterday (The Lost City) with closed captioning on. The character said "synonym". The cc text said "cinnamon".
I see a lot of homonyms in the cc, but that one was the funniest.
If they still need a feedback loop on their search results page, maybe they should hire some other guys to tweak their search engine!
I'm a perfectly capable human who can communicate my intent, and make corrections on my own if needed. What kind of deranged hubris must these engineers have to build systems that try to proactively act on what they think I actually meant?
Google should respect their users' privacy.
There used to be a 'verbatim' mode that would do exactly that. The quotes symbol were also a way to enforce verbatim mode.
Sadly this behaviour of "let me assume what you want" is not exclusive of google as I also now experience this on ddg.
Personally, I'm ok with a bit of "oh, this is what I think you meant" rather than a literal interpretation of my query. It's not perfect but neither are my queries.
And I would be willing to be substantial sums of money that any metrics Google has with respect to "adding value to the user" are actually more directly track "adding value to the business".
Not the user. To Google.
Marginal search results adds value for Google because it keeps people searching, which is how Google makes its money. If you find what you want, you stop feeding money into Google.
Google can do this because it has a virtual monopoly on search. If a strong competitor were to emerge, Google couldn't play these revenue optimization games, and would have to go back to being a search engine.
I usually use ddg but I do find google useful for the more weird queries I have.
A lot harder to track me using linux instead and constantly pushing my company to allow people to use linux machines for dev
This is exactly the ridiculous kind of hyperbole I come to HN for.
If you honestly can’t find any value in using Google despite its unreliability, you were probably expecting too much of it to begin with.
>Professors are paid generous salaries to share knowledge with the paying customers of the University (students). So, let’s find some paid unpaid University knowledge on how to change a tire by using our new trick!
But the bottom of the page says
>Prepared by: [students] For Dr. Bruce Magee's English 303 (Technical Writing) Class, Winter 1997-1998.
The professor is actually an English professor and the page was written by students as an assignment. I looked into this because I was wondering, "what would a professor be teaching that he's writing notes on tire changing?". There's probably some professor out there that does that in an academic context, but there's probably a lot of things that no professor actually gets paid to write about. Maybe they would write about something miscellaneous like that anyway and put it online, but they would be doing so out of the culture of web savvy professors having personal pages where they upload stuff they think is helpful.
It's good, but not really _that_ often useful.
It's certainly better than nothing but there could be specific gotchas for your situation. Most common would be needing certain tools or techniques for your model of car. It'd probably be best to either look up the manual for your car online or find a youtube video for changing the tires for your model of car.
Car troubles? YouTube chrisfix car_problem
Knowlage stuff? Wikipedia query
Programming question? Stackoverflow question
... and so on
Everything is based around SEO spam. If someone has a website, and they're producing content, their point is to monetize the browsing of the website itself, or promote their main product via the website.
This incentivizes a certain kind of content, which is marketing content.
These days I'm back to searching social networks like Reddit or Hacker News for (at least somewhat) unbiased information.
Google is a fuzzy-search address bar at this point for me.
Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.
this right here is why you never make any progress and never fix anything and you never understand why everything sucks, you keep rewarding perverse incentives and greed and then try to work around it as if greed were not the central problem.
making money is not noble, making money does not represent increasing value, it only represents cornering tokens of others' labor time, which you have just observed takes the form of profiteers intentionally seeking ways to waste your time.
improving the world is noble, and whether you make money or not, you get to live in a better world.
linus was awarded a salary because people were EMBARRASSED that they were profiting so much off his free work.
you all should be a lot more ashamed.
How ridiculously naïve! You should be ashamed that you have the utter privilege to hold such utterly ridiculous thoughts without the fear of starving or not having shelter.
My first result ...
How to fix a flat tyre - in simple steps with video - RAC https://www.rac.co.uk › drive › advice › repair-a-flat-tyre
An excellent first result thank you google.
It's probably location dependent, but I wonder if there's a bit of randomness in there as well to give websites with equivalent information similar exposure.
marginalia_nu, the author of another search engine, is looking for ways to cooperate.
Another method could be to analyze how many external requests a page makes and put that into the calculation.
Of course, there are exceptions, but I think this might help.
"what is an iris" when wondering about anatomy brings up Wikipedia as the first link. Perfect.
With the .edu trick the first link is about the flower, and there's nothing about the human eye anywhere on the first page of results.
what is an iris site:*.edu
First listing (eye): https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215826/http:/...
Second listing (flower): http://www.ladybug.uconn.edu/FactSheets/iris.php
https://www.umkelloggeye.org/conditions-treatments/anatomy-e...
e: ah it looks like it is a .edu that redirects to a .org
https://www.kellogg.umich.edu/patientcare/conditions/anatomy...
First result https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215133/http:/...
Short but description of the iris and the function in the eye.
For textual links 2 out of 9 responses for eye irises. and 7 out of 9 for the flower.
embedded in the same page is 'Images for what is an iris site:.edu' and 10 out of 10 of those links are for eye irises.
Switching over to image search the first 20 are all about eye irises.
The amount of money that dealerships pour into SEO and advertising is unreal. They also chase every single thing that Google says with complete abandon. (Remember AMP? ya, that was something we chased because dealers asked us to and then forgot about 12 months later.)
I realize this is about Google but I think there will always be a struggle until everyone can boycott playing the game and I just don't see that happening.
Reddit is what the internet used to be back when it was useful.
site:reddit.com/r/worldnews change a tyre
site:reddit.com/r/diy change a tyre
As an aside, anyone knows if you can still find "who links to?". I used to do this to hear how people feel about my site/app. I would do something like `link:foo.bar.com` I don't remember if it was link: or linkto: but it seems it no longer is supported? :(
Unlike Analytics at that at least does not require you to give Google any more information about your users - just to verify that you control the domain.
how to change a tire, nets videos of tire changing and the first 5 results are all different sites explaining how to do it.
how are pearls made, gives me an inline box answering the question.
half the things I search it offers me a "did you mean (my search) reddit" which I usually did...
google isn't great, but it's still the best by far (I like the algorithm that knows what i search and assists me with it), i'm not sure what this person has done to theirs...
It is because of a power issue.
It would have to be a protocol change. Google owns the largest browser. Google doesn't want it to be a browser setting. End of story. Unless you gather political power to force google and others to have this, it will not change.
I attempted to reproduce the experiment and I got a full page of useful results, all of them videos or numbered lists of the steps as in
> Step One: Find the Puncture. Once you're in a safe place, hop out of the car, and find the flat tire. ...
etc.
Maybe Google read HN and fixed that query but how to replace flat tires yields similar results.
Maybe it's because I'm not logged in into Google and they are less aggressive on showing me ads?
Maybe it's because I'm not from an English language country and they know from my IP address. Let's try with come cambiare una gomma bucata. Other useful numbered lists and videos.
I'm not always happy with Google's results but there seems to be something wrong in the experiment here.
It's showing this result as a featured snippet because it's easy to distil into steps, and Google is hoping you'll just read the result and not leave Google.
The real 'no.1 result' is this much better article from a trusted UK-based motoring organization: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/car-maintenance/how-to-ch...
Of course, Google's attempts to stop you leaving, and hoover up as much of the ad market as possible, also drives publishers to ever more desperate things to make money.
If it had a filter to only show pages that didn't have cookie popups then maybe I'd look at it again.
what's next?
Edit: yeah that's good advice too. Though the *.edu trick also seems to be pretty useful so far.
Bringing awareness
Google spends billions of dollars a year to give everyone their own personalized set of bad search results.
That's the justification for its invasive tracking.
Google: "We to build a dossier about you, your life, your friends, and your family members in order to give you better results!"
Us: "So... they could be worse?"
This is what I got in return:
Row 1: 2 buttons marked "on a bike" and "scooter"
Row 2: single scrollable row of images of tire fixing kits with the prices.
Row 3: step by step recipe on how to fix flat on a car (7 steps long) followed by the link to the corresponding article and small image on the right side.
To me it looks straight to the point and one can't bitch about single row of ads of a relevant products.
[1] kagi.com
If this is the quality I can expect going forward, I have zero problem paying the $10/mo down the line
I have first hand experience with this. My niche, hyper local online service (of which everyone loves) was completely undiscoverable through Google despite the niche having nearly zero relevant results of any kind, and zero competition of any kind. It seems Google didn’t like the concise, no BS one-pager for my service.
My options were to continue to spend on Facebook ads perpetually or to create SEO spam content. Within literally a month or so of generating fluff articles I was gaining a ton of organic traffic and could stop ad spending altogether.
A good example of larger company doing this is Digital Ocean. Fortunately they’ve been extremely ethical about it and the content is genuinely very good and helpful.
Look at youtube. They show ads and there is a non-stop stream of complaints about how long/bad/annoying they are. They offer a paid subscription to remove all ads and people laugh at the audacity youtube has to ask for money.
Users DO NOT want to see/watch ads. Users DO NOT want to pay a subscription for "free" content.
Just look at the story of Vid.me, a youtube competitor start-up that promised ad-free and sub-free videos. It was a huge hit until it hit bankruptcy.
That is only 1% of all Google users maybe, but it is the seed we need.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654318/youtube-50-millio...
But create enough value, provide truly differentiated and unique experiences that ad-supported models can't, include privacy etc and there is a case to be made that over time a sizable enough segment will pay for that value that you can have a sustainable business.
That is certainly our bet at Neeva, and so far we have seen a lot of growth, interest and folks opting for the premium (paid version) over the basic. Even without a full push to encouraging the premium.
Most people underestimate the value of their attention. Youtube earned 7 billion USD in ad revenue last quarter.
The value of our attention is a shock to most people. I suspect that YouTube may actually be losing money (as compared to ad revenue), even at the $12 / month--a price many users find outrageous.
I am calling this the 'ad gap', which is difference between what an advertiser is willing to pay, and what the user is willing to pay to avoid the ad.
One way to look at it is that users are irrational. But it can also be seen as a testament to the effectiveness of advertising.
Oh it is definitelt a Google problem.
I was in mood yesterday and I tried Google versus Kagi and You Code. Results of N out of N queries in other search engines were miles better in other search engines than Google.
I have now switched completely to code.you.com and Kagi from Google.
They are ready.
Searching for $PATH results in this. Yes, I definitely wanted these results:
> PATH (People Acting To Help), Inc. is a comprehensive Behavioral / Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities center located in Northeast Philadelphia.
> Better health moves humanity forward | PATH The scope of our work is vast because it must be. Billions of people are still underserved or marginalized by inequitable systems. To close the gaps, we advance progress in dozens of health areas, from epidemic preparedness, HIV/AIDS, and malaria, to maternal and newborn care, sexual and reproductive health, tuberculosis, and more.
SEO spammers decided to improve their tools/techniques. Google realized they could earn just as much by replacing their grep-for-the-web search-engine with some NLP, ML and fuzzy matching on what I strongly suspect to be a tiny subset of the index they had before.
I understand the reasoning and I admit it does a really good job at correcting mistakes but I often wonder if anyone working on the search-engine actually uses it to find development related information.
Maybe I'm in some kind of A-B testing hell but my results often show 1 relevant random url and a tiny a stackoverflow box with other relevant information and then always the same 10-20 stackoverflow/github copycats. Scrolling down just loops those same sites over and over again. Similarly I've never had Google link to the official python docs, it's always some spammy website that copy pasted a docstring and decorated it with ads/share buttons.
I don't understand how that's not bothering people that actually work on the search-engine.
Will give it a spin, but so far I like what I see.
EDIT: I immediately boosted all `github.com` and `reddit.com` results. That's a killer feature!
EDIT 2: better than Brave Search on mobile: there's a search button to enter a new search, and the textbox doesn't move around like Brave or Google do causing you to click on the first suggestion. I bloody hate that. Well done Kagi.
Love how I can easily banish garbage seo-only sites from results
I appreciate how it groups results into a more compact section if they're from forums or review sites. The UX give you the ability to scan for relevant links quicker
e.g. Searching for a generic "best wireless headphones" looks like this https://i.ibb.co/GPyb6Zp/kagi-exmple.png
I've never run a search engine, but I don't imagine that offering "Unlimited" searches where "unlimited" means "do not abuse" would meaningfully hurt their margins. As a benefit, you avoid losing customers that then need to ask "Do I make more than 5*80 searches a month? How many is that a day? What do I if I go over?". It also just feels like I'm being nickle-and-dimed.
I love that they're charging for the service, it makes me feel like they're building something sustainable. I just don't love the fee structure.
> Kagi will come as a free version with limited use; and an unlimited use, paid option at $10 a month, both versions having great search results with less spam and completely ad-free, tracking free, and with none of your search data being retained
Here are the queries from the original article in Kagi:
how to fix a flat tire
https://www.wikihow.com/Fix-a-Flat-Tire
Also, it predicts a video is best to answer this question and gives 3 YouTube thumbnails listed at the top of the results. They all seem generally helpful based on the title.
how are pearls made?
https://www.thepearlsource.com/blog/facts-about-pearls/how-a...
1. Quotes on abstraction
2. How does jpeg represent images
In case of code.you.com vs. Google: 1. Write a recursive max function for lists in Scala
Not much different from Google, but surely a search dedicated for code only feels better.
Of course Google has PageSpeed, which supposedly influences rankings by downranking sites that are very heavy to load, so I mean, that's an aspect to take into account, but I still believe the above to be largely true.
Google will never do it because those ads & analytics can be Google's and benefit their bottom line.
Those sites generate plenty of value ... for Google. Even if they're not showing Google adverts, those sites normalize the idea that "websites have adverts", so users don't question it on other sites.
If Google started returning sites with low numbers of adverts first then users would start demanding more sites with fewer ads. Google really don't want to show fewer adverts.
[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating...
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for...
[2] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/more-detai...
Google is hopeless anyway, so here's something for the next search engine that wants to bring back the Web: downrank by the number of 3rd party domain requests, attempts of tracking, and possibly also popups.
Or do you mean sites like reddit, facebook, etc. by "apps"? In that case, downrank them seems fine - they can always provide lighter version.
Customers' interests come first, and the customers pay well for tracking and targeting.
First result is
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-trucks/how-t...
2nd, 3rd, and 4th resultsa are videos
5th is wikihow (which by the way IMO is often a really bad site. There is lots of junk content on wikihow)
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-trucks/how-t...
Which is equally good.
If, on average, users perceive more value from Google, they use Google more, and Google earns more ad rev. Even if this lowers value substantially for the "relative few".
It's basic utilitarianism, and it sucks to be in the "relative few"...
I too, wish that quotes were respected, and Google would stop giving results for what it thinks I meant to search for like it knows what I meant better than I do - even if that is the case...sometimes.
Right now maximizing the number of searches people preform even if it degrades overall search quality is probably the goal.
It threw me off for a few seconds and I went back to the recording to figure out it took the word “choose” completely out of grammatical context to form a new clause of just “Jews”, as if I’d been speaking in complete sentences, then suddenly just decided to interject a random word between two half-sentences.
"Wrapped up like a douche"
"When the rain washes you'll clean your nose"
The entertainment never ends!
I haven't found Kagi's results to be significantly better than Google's results, but unlike DDG they're not hugely worse than Google. It's all the extra stuff that makes me want to use Kagi instead of Google:
* Ability to banish sites from results forever. E.g. I never want to see the Concordia Lutheran High School's website when I search for things in the Common Lisp HyperSpec with clhs.
* Ability to weight sites higher. E.g. there are two mirrors of the Common Lisp HyperSpec that appear in results, one at http://clhs.lisp.se and one at http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/. The lisp.se mirror is hilariously slow for me (5-10 seconds to load) while the lispworks one is instant. Google always ranks lisp.se first which tricks me into clicking it and wasting my time. Kagi lets me weight that site lower so the lispworks site comes first. Banishing lisp.se would also work, but just upweighting it means I can still find it if the other mirror ever goes down or something.
* I reported a minor bug to Kagi and they fixed it within a few days. I doubt that would happen with Google.
* Supports DDG-style bang queries, which I use occasionally.
* No goddamn ads/tracking (I use uBlock Origin, but it's the principle of the thing). I've almost entirely de-Googled my life at this point (Youtube is the only holdout for me).
So it's not that it gives better results than Google, it's that the results aren't any worse and the extra quality-of-life features are really nice.
Basically, when I used DDG, I found myself frequently using !g to search Google instead. For Kagi, I haven't really found myself doing that anywhere near as often.
So yeah, you have to fill out a survey (took a couple of minutes and I got an invite the same/next day), so it's not the easiest to recommend right now. Two weeks and they go free+premium according to an email today.
I think it's just that I, like a lot of HN, have been getting super disillusioned with Google lately - and most importantly the preponderance of obviously machine-generated zero-value spam pages for everything I search for - so I was desperately trying to find something better. DDG constantly disappointed for my searching. Kagi doesn't do that. So I'm happy. $10/month happy? I'm not sure.
Generally, there's a growing group of people who are feeling about Google the way a lot of us felt about Facebook 10+ years ago - it's time to stop relying on it and maybe cut it out entirely (and yes, I know there are plenty of people who felt this way about Google for years already). So I pay for Fastmail now. I guess I'll likely be paying for Kagi now. Quality is getting expensive, but at least I'm paying with my money rather than my data.
And for this I will HAPPILY pay $10 a month. It's the most freaking annoying thing about Google. Obvious link farm sites with zero way to remove them.
(kagi founder here)
Not paying $10/m per person in my household, though. That'd be way too high.
[EDIT] Though I guess with no retained search history, we could just share one account anyway, so it doesn't matter. I was thinking about keeping those separate. Unless there are per-user settings that we might not all want to share.
Even then we won't have search without an account, among other things because bots would probably kill us.
(kagi founder here)
We're just getting started but working really hard to make this something special. There is a fairly active slack community if you have any other suggestions and want to share. thx.
Good luck with the product! I'd also suggest giving priority to sites which use <pre> or <code> blocks in their HTML.
So for example if you google "Food", all the results _will_ contain the string "Food" somewhere in the page (if you don't believe me, try it). It can also match somewhere in the comments or metadata which is useless..
So the feature is still there but it's nowhere as useful as it once was.
I recall a Google engineer who confirmed this once but maybe one of them lurking in the thread can clarify it?
Even if you added quotes to the part number (such as “foo123-x”, google would return results for “foo234-x” or “foo123-y” and bold them as if they had matched. The real part numbers could be 10-20 characters long, so it was more difficult to spot discrepancies.
I learned very quickly not to trust the results even when adding quotes. If I had assumed the quotes had worked, I would have grabbed bad documentation without even realizing it.
edit: It is a pain in the ass though
To be clear, that aspect was mostly tangential to my point.
I think the point is Google is really bad at understanding web apps, online services, or really any site that isn’t information rich.
The majority of web apps for example only really need a landing page and a sign up form. But if that’s all you have Google’s algorithm is going to show zero interest. And it seems that’s the case even if you put in the work and optimize the content and provide plenty of meta data.
Imagine you own a pizza joint, but the only way Google shows your site to any of your potential customers is if you dedicate to publishing an article about pizza every month. That’s basically the boat a lot of us are in with web apps, and other online services.
You keep using that phrase, but it doesn't select for information richness, it selects for verbiage. This is at best orthogonal and more usually opposed to information richness.
site:news.ycombinator.com reddit.com lwn.net servethehome.com head-fi.org doom9.org ....
As a result even the content made with earnest intent to communicate has to read exactly like blogspam in order to rank.
(you.com founder here)
We know its possible to do in the Internet of 2004.
The Internet of 2004 no longer exists, the Internet of 2022 is a very different problem for search to solve.
of course, google gets paid to show them, and I don't think anyone here realistically expects google to voluntarily stop intentionally fucking up search results unless it somehow means a larger paycheck to them
Let's face it, the heyday of honest results are just as mythical as the political "good ol' days".
I honestly don't get your snark. Those were the good old days of the Internet, when SEO spam and PageRank wasn't a thing. Then Google came and made the Internet even better, then it turned to shit, and here we are. And web rings were great, you take that back.
So yes, there was a period of time when the Internet was in some ways better than nowadays. Now I'm not saying that everything that happened since is bad, but Internet search and signal-to-noise ratio has definitely fallen off a cliff.
Let's enjoy the good days of siloes and SEO optimization. I doubt it'll get better.
I honestly switched to google from alltheweb and altavista initially because of the easier name and muscle memory taking hold. To this day I believe Altavista was better when google first took off.