Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by rsync on Thursday December 08, 2016 @04:42PM (#13134565)

""the magic is gone.""

Not only is the magic gone, but the boring, day to day fabric of functionality is gone.

Have you tried to really search for anything with google in the past five years ?

I don't mean meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful ... I mean a specific, meaningful, concise search with multiple keywords, all of which are key words ... and the resulting pages do not contain one or more of those words.

I know all about allinsite: and quotation marks and so on ... those are, as far as I can tell, randomly interpreted by google. Who knows if they even work, ever.

A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for ... I would pay that to have search with full control over search results with logical operators that actually worked.

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by guycook on Thursday December 08, 2016 @05:09PM (#13134754)

I know exactly what you mean. "Half" "of" "my" "searches" "look" "like" "this" "these" "days". I can understand throwing out one of many keywords when I'm down on page 6, but when I search with only 4 terms and the very first result has 2 words s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶k̶ o̶u̶t̶ I start to wonder who exactly this search box is for.

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by mojuba on Thursday December 08, 2016 @05:24PM (#13134857)

True, and one other thing I've noticed is e.g. "Half of my searches" can bring say 200,000 results, but "Half of my" yields 50,000. A few other weird things that's been there for years and nobody seems to care. As long as consumer-level searches work and ads are clickable, Google's clock is ticking.

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by gniv on Thursday December 08, 2016 @07:41PM (#13135728)

I wouldn't put too much stock on those numbers. They are probably statistical estimates, not actual counts.

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by lobster_johnson on Friday December 09, 2016 @01:19AM (#13137051)

Under "Search tools", click on "Verbatim". It will cause the query to actually honor the words you typed.

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by swang on Friday December 09, 2016 @02:56AM (#13137378)

does this honor typos? i like spellcorrect changes but i hate all the other assumptions they make about my search terms.

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by lobster_johnson on Friday December 09, 2016 @11:34AM (#13139699)

It will show a "Did you mean:", but doesn't automatically rewrite it. Example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gam+of+throes&tbs=li:1

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by niels_olson on Thursday December 08, 2016 @05:12PM (#13134788)

I just searched for "Calcifying Fibrous Tumor", and got exactly what I wanted, the most recent review article on that tumor. What are you looking for?

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by ChuckMcM on Thursday December 08, 2016 @05:32PM (#13134918)

"best free credit card" :-)

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by paulcole on Thursday December 08, 2016 @06:35PM (#13135366)

> meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful

I would wager that this describes a shockingly high percentage of the average person's searches. I know it's true for me.

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by l33tbro on Thursday December 08, 2016 @05:20PM (#13134839)

This was a decent thread lamenting Google of yore.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9565464

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by patrickk on Friday December 09, 2016 @06:43AM (#13138180)

> A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for

Somewhat meta, but I cannot find this item on https://hn.algolia.com or using a Google search ("site: news.ycombinator.com $1000 for") can you post a link if you have it?

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by mkl on Friday December 09, 2016 @08:11AM (#13138532)

I found it with Algolia using [ask hn pay]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114954

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by patrickk on Friday December 09, 2016 @08:15AM (#13138548)

Thanks! I noticed it's "$1k/mo" so I suppose it's difficult to chalk this up to the google algorithm ;)

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by AznHisoka on Thursday December 08, 2016 @06:09PM (#13135180)

i share the same experience. i have been using google to find articles that share a specific opinion so i do very specific searches in hopes of finding editorial opinion pieces. what i get back are lame how-to guides and wikipedia articles.

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Re:Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About F... by knight17 on Thursday December 08, 2016 @09:31PM (#13136234)

Earlier they had a blog search option which I used a lot to find pages written in a personalised style, but they shelved this. Now there is no way to find such pages under the current system other than trying yor luck with searching for site:blogspot.com and site:wordpress.com; but these two blog hosts are not even half the universe of all the blogs out there.

What I do now is to create a Google Custom Search Engine with all my RSS feed subscriptions; it resembles this earlier feature as I feed it lots of personal blogs that I read, but it is not even close to the earlier blogsearch.

Similarly there was a discussion/forum search which was also useful; that too was removed.

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