Lately I’ve been wondering if a niche search engine popular with hackers and not the general public could run circles around Google search results just because scammers and content farms wouldn’t be incentivized to game it like they are Google.

It frustrates me a lot. I don’t even know how to find useful information online anymore for everyday things like “how hot is too hot outside for a cat?” I invariably land on a garbage page with paragraph after paragraph of unintelligible keyword fluff. I keep thinking that one of the paragraphs will have a the content I’m looking for, but more and more I get to the end and realized I just scanned a whole page of referral links and content that was clearly farmed out to be written by someone who either doesn’t know English or GPT2 or something.

P2P distributed search, help make it better. https://yacy.net

Google doesn't care. Just having one FTE proactively blacklisting scams would clean up most of the mess. It is way easier to clean high ranking scam/SEO sites then to make a new one.

But Google are getting money of scams so ...

> I don’t even know how to find useful information online anymore for everyday things like “how hot is too hot outside for a cat?”

Maybe this wasn't a real example, but searching exactly this (quotes not included) returned the answer in a knowledge box at the top of the page and the first several organic results had the answer very clearly in the text.

I almost never even register the knowledge box at the top because I don’t _just_ want the answer, I also want at least a little context and chance to vet the credibility of the answer. In this case it says appropriate internal temperatures for cats, but I’m looking for the kind of answer my vet would give me if I asked if it’s okay to leave my cat on the balcony during the summer. I don’t want to take her temperature. The majority of the links on page one repeat the 105 degree internal tidbit so I could easily filter them as irrelevant, but they are all couched in paragraphs of keyword fluff and narration “many cat owners like to let their cats play outdoors during the summer months but how sunny is too sunny for your furry feline companion blah blah blah”

The knowledge box can be 100% wrong, I reported a case where the shown answer was taken from a pop-quiz site - but it wasn't the actual answer, just the first possible (and diametrically wrong) of multiples choices for a user to click on.

Yea I'm very curious about this too. Oddly enough, it's not the first time I've heard someone on HN complain about a search query being hard for Google to answer, tried it, and found the answer in the first result (and the next half dozen).

Humans are lazy. It would be more effort, after constructing their argument, to actually sit down and test that the argument passes a basic sense test. So, they don't. And most of the people reading (and upvoting to signal "I agree") won't either. Why should they? They agree with it, there's no sense in fact checking things you agree with, right?

You can see this in the recent Google 2FA threads too, lots of people were quite sure Google is doing this to get their phone numbers. The facts don't line up with that, but who has time for facts? They know they're right, and so do the people upvoting. If you point out the facts a handful of confused people might agree, yeah, what you're saying does seem to match reality, but that's no match for the self-assurance of those who haven't checked at all.

Much of the time you can get a long way on just lots of people believing you, without any basis in reality. But Mother Nature couldn't care less what you believe, and it's tricky for people who think this way to sense where the line will be until they've stepped over it.

Better versions of the (apocryphal) story of King Cnut the Great can get this across. The courtiers pretend to believe their King's claim to command the sea, but the sea of course couldn't give a shit, it's just water, it obeys Mother Nature's laws (in this case Gravity via a fairly circuitous process causes Tides) but not the whims of men.

In this case, you’re the courtier of King Cnut. I just did the search and the first correct result is the sixth and the first five are incorrect, including the seemingly definitive answer at the top of the search.

Lazy? People who think this way? Mother Nature? Claiming to command the sea? I’m just talking about SEO spam.

When I do that search, neither the knowledge box nor the top 3 results answer the question.

note that you cannot trust the knowledge box, I can't recall a specific example but I've seen some wildly wrong things in those.

Interesting to see someone else see this.. I've been noticing siilar for some of my sites, but also for other searches - recently 'liquid dog nutrition' eg.. so I too get the feeling that putting article based stuff front and center they are encouraging users to click ads - and for commercial sites to pay to play or get shut out.. it's terrible when you have a great site on page 3 of google results and see the crap they put ahead of you on page one - while shady sites pay to advertise there.

more and more like (a worse version) of the yellow pages every quarter.