site:<reddit/ycombinator/stackoverflow/tripadvisor/random niche forum.com> "something someone interested in the same question/topic would say"
.. all in an attempt to filter over-commercialized bullshit. There's an opportunity here for a startup to capture an audience hungry for real information and leverage them into becoming the next hub for over-commercialized bullshit.
If you're searching for a real human's thoughts on a particular mountain bike for one example, it will be nothing but product pages. Add in the word Reviews and you get the productized review sites. Even searching for "Best trails in {my area}" gives me an ecommerce site's blog laden with product links and not-so-subtle sells.
Want to read a discussion about a book? Google will only show you product pages with review sections on the first page, on the next page the search results have already devolved into unrelated nonsense or spin sites.
It's hard to find the humans on the internet through all the commercial pages. I can't blame Google entirely of course, they are helped by the SEO industry's incessant bombardment in the 2010ish era that filled the web with so much pointless crap, and the ongoing efforts of e-commerce stores with deep pockets to be the only heard voice for particular subjects.
Reddit is a pretty good source of quality reviews for products ranging from niche (mechanical keyboards) to mainstream (MacBooks).
If you read a newspaper, you clearly know when someone is trying to sell you something, but on Google search, you don't. I don't mind being marketed to, but I would like to know when I'm marketed to, and the vast majority of google results are organic search marketing.
DDG: 1. WebMD 2. Walmart 3. examine.com 4. Wikipedia 5. Amazon 6. some site apparently dedicated to r.k. 7. livescience.com 8. some webshop 9. HuffPo with the clickbait title you mentioned 10. Some kind of webmd clone
Google: 1. WebMD 2. healthline.com 3. examine.com 4. Dr. Axe (no idea what this is but doesn't seem to be purely spam) 5. livescience.com 6. Wikipedia 7. HuffPo clickbait 8. Some kind of webshop 9-10. Amazon
I wouldn't say it all spam, though there are questionable sites in top 10, but there are also a number of legit ones.
I note though "rasberry ketones" is not a correct spelling, it should be "raspberry". Maybe that's the reason you've got bad results?
That's really a shame (and an opportunity for someone else).
+ nice: open books (deeplearningbook.org)
+ not nice: online seminars (udemy, udacity, edx)
+ not nice: wikipedia copycats (investopedia)
+ not nice: SEO optimized business analytics sites recognizable by their top 10 this, top 20 that (kdnuggets)
+ not nice: commercial software (mathworks)
+ not nice: big companies hitchhiking on buzzwords (sas)
What would be nice are websites and people that are often linked from HN. For example http://www.inference.vc rather than sas. Or https://distill.pub/ rather than investopedia. Or https://www.tensorflow.org rather than mathworks. If good sites are showing up in the top results more often, there will also be more incentive to keep up the good work as well.
It's an easy distinction to make for a human, I'm sure Google's omniscient AI can easily be trained to make that distinction. And it would also work in Google's favor, at least with respect to users who do not have ad blockers - if (as a general rule or thanks to explicit user choice) "commercial pages" are demoted, the google ads become more valuable.
these are all hidden from most search results and consumers are now forced to settle for SEO optimized trash results, rather than discussions
what if human judgement was better than the AI powering the results indexing, for particular keywords that don't seem to be machine learned well enough
No, because you don't show them to us.
I have abandoned other Google services as well now. Firefox is now my preferred browser for development. Apple Maps is good for navigation. Gmail I still use, as one notch above mailinator: it's my dumping ground for unwelcome mandatory site signup. All the mail I want to receive is on Fastmail. Microsoft's office software is vastly better than G Suite. And so on.
I trust Google as much as I trust Facebook or any other advertising network: not at all, and I welcome and adopt alternatives.
I've had a 't' custom search engine address bar hotkey for Twitter for years.
Edit: makes me wonder if the web is evolving in the direction of more social/curated search, less global search
how to avoid that ?
e.g specific sites for any particular demands, or any other tricks
One thing to note when using filetype in bing by specifying xls it also catches other file extensions (xlsx) while google in my experience only would find xls.
Yes I use bing sometimes and especially when troubleshooting Linux error logs I find it parses a copy paste better. Just my experience. Important to note I do not use profiles.
That's why I keep ddg.gg as my default search engine. Ctrl-K, and type:
!r "something"
!hn "something"
!so "something"
!ta "something"
And for some niche sites I submitted "bang" suggestions which were accepted.
Works great for technical search, e.g. !cppr for C++ reference.
In a rare case I need Google, I just add !g to my search.
Websearch has passed over the great divide and is now a utility. "Beating" Google in search is only half of it...without the advertising business, you can't survive long enough to show off your tech. Without the 80% mobile platform, you don't have a way of putting it in front of people when they need answers right away.
Of course this all assumes you can ACTUALLY build a better search...doubtful, Google may be evil but the search is still giving people what they want
Accept that 1998 is gone and that window has closed
Inflection points are when giants get mauled. New houses with new windows get built, old windows don't get re-opened.
Amazon's echo and or whatever is coming next in AI is the biggest threat Google has ever faced. They've moved past the stage of being nimble, it'll take everything they've got to not get buried (at worst) or stagnated (most likely) in the shift. AI will fracture (is fracturing) and distribute search as a concept all over the place, constantly stealing microshare from the traditional search bar / page with every thing that has AI in it that people interact with. Google knows this, it makes them very desperate, they're still young enough to be very paranoid (the same reason they knew to go get Android, the iPhone caused a new inflection).
But Google works very well. Competitors like Bing, Duckduckgo, Qwant, etc. are really bad by comparison -- and I don't know what I would do better even if I had infinite ressources.
Search on a specific site is likewise much better on Google than on said site; if you want to find a family of products on Amazon it's much more efficient to search for it via Google images with site:amazon.com; same for Alibaba, etc. And those are companies that one imagines has the ressources to build good in-house search. Yet they don't, or can't.
Or put another way: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+ad+revenue
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
(Brought to you by Google Search: so ubiquitous it has become it's own meme.)
IBM survived two world wars.
Products come and go, and no single company will own all profit streams.
No.
A) doing websearch well is expensive
B) doing websearch well consistently over time is very hard -- if you remember when Google started, about every 6 to 9 months a cool new websearch would come out, and 5 months later would be garbage. Google managed to buck that trend, mostly (it still goes through cycles of crap results)
C) even if you have the money to do it right, and consistently do it right, you have an uphill battle of market perception. Users will perceive Google results as better than yours, as long as they're marked as coming from google: even if the Google results are perceived as worse when compared to yours without branding.
I think filtering out crap, without filtering out the long tail of esoteric content sites would be key to getting better results. But you have to be prepared to play a long game on marketing and user acquisition.
- You can't just take incumbents out of the market at will, there are some external conditions that must be right;
- Not every niche is the same, you must get the correct one;
- That is a completely inverted way to think about the problem. You first innovate (or lay plans to do so), then you start looking for niches your innovation fits.
If somebody really wants to try to apply "The Innovator's Dilemma" disruption onto Google, it's not a bad idea to look at posts asking "and how do you expect to monetize this?" on this thread, and try to answer that question.
I've been working on a sort of "social network for links" for that exact purpose: I personally love finding cool new websites and links, and I just don't see that happening with modern search engines.
So I made Float[1]. I like to think of it this way: if Google is for search, then Float is for exploring.
Still pretty early but core features are here...let me know what you think!
[1] https://float.am
Is web search still the main problem, now so much content has moved off the web and into apps and walled gardens? Could the big challenge for Google be a startup that somehow solves the problem of searching all of that content (assuming that is a problem which can be solved)?
I can't think of an example where people en masse have stopped using something useful to replace it with something that provides "no real benefit".
Also, technology has spread all around, so you can have your own indexing/search ..
As opposed to a search engine that helps you find exactly what you're looking for, I see as wiby as more of a "serendipity engine" that helps you find what you weren't looking for.
The best tool to suggest things that interest, that you need or want without collect too much personal information could kill all 3 with just one shot.
I think this is the challenge for anybody trying to take on Google with internet search. Google makes most of its money from the search. They are probably smart enough to keep the "A team" assigned to this problem.
Hackers dislike the direction Google Search is taking, but I think they are trying to defend themselves against the competition. No startup can challenge Google on the hardcore internet search. Where they might be able to do that is providing direct answers to most of the questions. This is because for large part of the questions you don't need to index the whole web (just my gut feeling). Get data from Wikipedia, social media sites, price comparison engines etc. The problem becomes more of building partnerships than pure technical stuff.
HN.
It's not hard, click here: https://news.google.com/news/
Then click here: https://www.bing.com/news
Try it on your phone for an exaggerated experience.
Also, except breaking news, there is no difference I could find. Except that google news takes me to some annoying amp pages for some links.
As I pointed out in my original comment, Bing also uses an AMP cache and sends users to AMP pages from the Bing app, which is why saying that anything different about them is ironic makes little sense.
OK, but it hacks the scrolling in the same way amp pages do. So I assumed it was amp.
> promote AMP pages, as you claim.
100% it promotes amp pages.
> Bing also uses an AMP cache and sends users to AMP pages from the Bing app
I am not talking about bing "app". I don't know if such a thing exists. I am talking about www.bing.com/news. Click that link and bask in the glory of blazing fast performance.
That's the first of your problems.
> 100% it promotes amp pages.
When I go to Google News, there are no pages marked as AMP. In my original comment, I talked about AMP results in news searches on Google search, which do exist, just like in the Bing app. Those provide a better experience for me, and I suspect 99% of all users, than the AMP-less DDG results, which is why Google and Bing show them.
> I am not talking about bing "app". I don't know if such a thing exists.
https://blogs.bing.com/search/September-2016/bing-app-joins-...
You've demonstrated an even poorer understanding of AMP than the person I originally responded to.
If you look at the mission statement for their search team it is now something like "answer your questions" - which is great 90% of the time, but what no longer exists (with most people not realizing) is a good general search engine for the WEB, meaning the collection of websites out there.
There is no longer a sense of serendipity or of finding a cool new website, and maybe finding web pages on the web is just a nostagic thing with no real benefit, but there's no doubt that Google has moved away from that as real objective. The reality is that the web has become overwhelmed by listicles and minimum pages that go one inch past Google's definition of spam, but otherwise muck up the web. It would be amazing for a search engine to sift past all that cruft and low-effort material to find actually interesting and unique content.
In a way, simply by not being Google is already an advantage because everyone is catering to Google. If you use a different standard you can easily get different results - it's just a matter if those would be useful for anyone? Everyone mostly wants to see the "right" answer and Google has conditioned us to expect it.