How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by reaperducer on Friday January 24, 2020 @01:01PM (#22140777)

Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce.

I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.

There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.

At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.

I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.

To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by smichel17 on Friday January 24, 2020 @01:38PM (#22141139)

I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by praxulus on Friday January 24, 2020 @03:24PM (#22142089)

If you have a typo in the name, Google will fix it for you, whereas your browser will happily take you to a domain that is probably owned by a scammer.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by xp84 on Friday January 24, 2020 @04:00PM (#22142414)

One could argue that since Google is JUST as happy to take money from scammers for an ad for the keyword WellsFrago as the Registry would be to sell the domain WellsFrago dot com ... I'm not sure either approach is technically safer than the other if you're prone to typos. I think (gasp) bookmarking the important sites you need is the only safe approach.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by takk309 on Friday January 24, 2020 @02:01PM (#22141339)

My wife does this all the time. If she wants to go to Prime video she types "Amazon Prime Video" into her address bar then clicks the first Google result, often the ad for Prime Video.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by unlinked_dll on Friday January 24, 2020 @09:18PM (#22144203)

To be fair, the actual page navigation to amazon prime video is not straightforward.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by sdoering on Friday January 24, 2020 @03:14PM (#22142000)

If I do not like a company but need to visit their site, I also do this just to increase the cost for said company as Google Ads are 'cost per click'.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by xp84 on Friday January 24, 2020 @03:58PM (#22142380)

^ This works really well except for if the company you don't like is Google :D

Oh, I tried an alternate approach and it didn't work... Search bing for Google and you just get a second bing. https://imgur.com/a/YntBiYc

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by bluGill on Friday January 24, 2020 @02:49PM (#22141802)

I started doing that years back. I'm a bad speller and sometimes the url is example.net where example.com exists as some scam that I wouldn't want but looks like the real example.net. Google will correct my spelling and find the correct string to put after the name.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by eckza on Friday January 24, 2020 @12:58PM (#22140751)

I switched to DDG about a month ago, and the results are always dead-on for me.

I don’t even notice that it’s not Google anymore.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by suifbwish on Friday January 24, 2020 @01:06PM (#22140832)

In theory websites could kill off googles dominance by blacklisting their crawler and only caring about traffic from DDG and other lesser known engines

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by rstupek on Friday January 24, 2020 @02:26PM (#22141586)

and probably kill themselves off the internet at the same time

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by suifbwish on Saturday January 25, 2020 @11:44AM (#22147067)

If enough websites did it, google would become just a giant resolver for corporate content that everyone already knows about. It would effectively fork the internet into google and non google. We just need a few search engines that can compete of quality.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by incompatible on Friday January 24, 2020 @10:38PM (#22144479)

I think that they are more likely to do the reverse: ban bots but add an exception for Google.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by aphextim on Friday January 24, 2020 @12:44PM (#22140576)

I bounce between DDG and Qwant. I usually can find what I am looking for from one of those two options.

https://www.qwant.com/

https://duckduckgo.com/

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by baruchel on Friday January 24, 2020 @02:43PM (#22141745)

I strongly suggest using https://lite.qwant.com rather than the main page in order to keep a more minimalist display.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by aphextim on Monday January 27, 2020 @11:43AM (#22160996)

Thank you for this!

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by BitwiseFool on Friday January 24, 2020 @06:43PM (#22143432)

Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of Qwant before.

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Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? by braythwayt on Friday January 24, 2020 @12:43PM (#22140574)

* Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce*

Not necessarily. The great unwashed masses may not be searching for ecommerce, but people not searching for ecommerce may not be monetizable.

Let's say we run a basketball web site that has a search engine. People sometimes type the word "travel" into the search bar.

We can show them results related to the rules violation of "travelling," and/or results related to physical travel such as "trusted partners" who provide charter trips to playoff games.

It could be that we know that 90% of the searches for the word "travel" are for the rules violation. But the remaining 10% are the ones that click on ads. And we get a kickback when someone clicks on an ad on our site.

If all we care about is the web site's revenue, we might choose to prioritize showing travel to basketball games, even though we know it's only relevant for 10% of the users who query the word "travel."

It may only be 10% of our users, but it's 100% of our revenue from keyword searches for "travel." So we show the monetizable results, and maybe--if we are feeling generous--we'll show a little line, "Showing results for travel to games. Click here to search for travel (violation)."

--

TL;DR: We don't need to assume that Google is trying to provide good search results for everyone. They might be trying to provide the results that maximize their immediate revenue.

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