Every Google result now looks like an ad

Re:Every Google result now looks like an ad by Thorentis on Tuesday January 21, 2020 @06:04PM (#22112725)

Huh, I've just realised I'm much the same. Google is used by me primarily for (and in this order in decreasing proportion): Wikipedia search, Stackoverflow search, company name search, medical related search, current event search (sports scores, election results), (smallest minority of the time) other random queries.

Everything else I get from HN, Reddit, FB, etc.

The instant google results are the vast majority of the time taken from wikipedia. Sports scores and election results are taken from other sites that Google has started top present quite nicely, but that I could easily get elsewhere. Company name searching is basically just using Maps indirectly.

Google as a raw search query product is dying. A competitor could probably service 90%+ of queries just by being great at serving instant result previews at the top for a set of the most popular data (mass-media, wikipedia, local maps).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Every Google result now looks like an ad by bentcorner on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @12:03AM (#22114778)

I use ddg as my default search and try !g when I'm not finding something, and it's rare that I find something on google that I couldn't find elsewhere.

Usually I find success when it's extremely niche results (usually rare error messages) that have only a few hits on google on some random forum that the other crawlers just didn't index.

[ Parent | on HN ]