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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :)