11 ms·

If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?

285 points by abhinavsharma 5y ago

dash2 5y ago
I use search.brave.com and it's usually OK. It fails on some complex queries. Unfortunately SEO spam for Google also catches Brave.
ncmncm 5y ago
Because Microsoft sucks too? Because browsers default to connecting to it?
anothernewdude 5y ago
Inertia
johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's tyrannical regime on internet ends.
- sithadmin 5y ago
  Amazon did build one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com
  - johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
    Oh thank you. We should definitely promote this more.
    - google234123 5y ago
      It died in 2008 - it's now just the search engine on Amazon.com Feel free to promote Amazon :) Prime is pretty good
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  How, exactly, does Google keep users hostage for money?
  - johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
    G Suite Workspace users are being kept hostages by Google unless the users pay more money[1]. [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-legacy-free-edition-leaving-users-worried/ https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-le...
    - tssge 5y ago
      Can't they just migrate off of it? I guess the only part being held hostage according to the article are their Play Store purchases, if even that (the article says the purchases' fate is unclear). To me it seems Google has given ample time to either migrate off of it or to become a customer.
kauguste281 5y ago
Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever). I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by just trying to be a Google search clone.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away. You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.
  - vopi 5y ago
    idk if you know this but kagi has a "discussion" filter (among other filters)
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    I feel this same way about a lot of aspects of Google search.
  - sph 5y ago
    > Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back. It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.
    - tomxor 5y ago
      Which is why we need more competitors in this space. When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the only intrinsic business force is direct monetisation paths... completely different incentives.
mountainriver 5y ago
The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it. I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on
- theonemind 5y ago
  Rhetoric aside completely, I can say with all honesty Google doesn't serve me as well as it did in 2014. "google search sucks" message might lack finesse, but I think it conveys something real--like, a search engine completely optimized to the user using state-of-the-art algorithms, etc. does not exist, perhaps because Google hangs out around "good enough" and would kill anything on the way up.
- lexandstuff 5y ago
  I agree. People have forgotten that Google searches for tech stuff 10 years ago used to exclusively returns results from sites like Experts Exchange with solutions behind paywalls. I'm glad Google did something about that. And, of course, thankful that sites like Stack Overflow came along.
- ikiris 5y ago
  Its only even really trendy here on HN. This place is getting less and less useful over time.
- syshum 5y ago
  No it is far far far less useful than it was a few years ago, I routinely now have to use a couple different search engines to find solutions to technical problems because google tends to weight sources it thinks I should be using for and not the sources I would like. For example one software platform I use all the time has community forum that is almost useless because every post to the forum is simply met with "open a ticket with support" with no actual resolution, these post flood the google search results, however other search engines bubble up blogs, other forums, reddit, or other sources not just the set of sites over and over again.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  Only on HN. Virtually none of the "problems" described on HN at the intersection of tech and society are seen as problems out in the real world.
gotaquestion 5y ago
I've been using DDG for several years and every once and a while I prefix my search with "g!" to search google, and it isn't any better, so I stopped doing that. Maybe people don't know there are alternatives? How does OP expect them to switch to Hypersearch if they aren't even using DDG which has been around for a very long time?
- ShinTakuya 5y ago
  I find DDG is well optimised for software folks and geeks, because it's the main demographic that uses it. It's hard for me to recommend it to my friends though since often basic queries fail compared to Google, especially with relation to country specific queries like that I'd make here in Australia.
high_pathetic 5y ago
That's two blanket statements in one headline. Google search is fast, accurate enough for the most users, very widely adopted. GMail is fast, good with SPAM, free. Google has some practices that might be considered as evil but this affects a relatively narrow list of people, it definitely doesn't "suck" for everyone. Lotus Notes, on the hand...
- eevilspock 5y ago
  It is far, far, FAR from free. Huge social costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706 Huge economic costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 Its amoral/cynical/evil practices and business model affect everyone.
rr808 5y ago
I use Bing. I dont know why everyone complains it finds anything I want, though I guess I dont really need anything too complicated. I like to encourage competition, the points are handy too.
FpUser 5y ago
Not sure about everyone but for my searches Google always gives me way better results that the competitors. So while I dislike google as a company I still do use their search and youtube for the lack of true alternative. Rest of their stuff I successfully avoid.
tsian2 5y ago
I think normal people have just changed how they use it without much fanfare. If people want to quickly find a specific site they are looking for they know it's the place. But if they want to explore the world of cat memes they know it's not the place for something like that any more (it'll only show you 143 results, many with weak relevancy).
openfuture 5y ago
I'm not..
scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
This is a very complicated answer when the reason is very simple - monopoly power. Would have been nice to know at the beginning of the article that this guy has something to sell with his own search product.
JohnFen 5y ago
Not everyone is still using it. It's been a few years now since the quality of Google search had fallen to the point where I just stopped using it entirely.
vivekraghunatha 5y ago
(Founder of Neeva here) On OP's question -- don't underestimate the power of defaults. Google owns Chrome and Android. Google pays Apple to be the default on Safari. Google pays Firefox to be the default. Bing is default on Edge. And so on. All the platforms make it very hard to change the defaults. And on platforms like Safari, as a user, you can't even change the default search provider if you want to.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Because everything else sucks way worse, obviously. I mean,...have you actually tried using Bing? Next question...
moltke 5y ago
The truth is that normal people like abusive software. Using software that gives them freedom also gives them the responsibility to understand the behavior of the machine which is something they do not want. No amount of evangelism or possibly even education will fix this. IMO for their own good people who behave this way should not be allowed to use computers and should delegate the task to people who are willing to think through the consequences of using a particular piece of software. Allowing normal people to use computers is cruel in the same way making a dog order its food over the telephone is.
hobz22 5y ago
i use opera on android, firefox in windows, safari on mac and duckduckgo for everything and have been for YEARS. I'm offended you're including me in your cohort. lol
TechBro8615 5y ago
Give it time.
turbinerneiter 5y ago
Im so used to the UI (down to the fonts, things I can't even name), that DuckDuckGo looks off to me. So although it is set as my standar search engine, I g! most of the time.
- cruelty2 5y ago
  Maybe you could write a Greasemonkey extension to redirect requests from Googles page to DuckDuckGo
post_break 5y ago
I use DDG most of the time, then when I cant find technical stuff I g!. And let's be honest, bing is the king for porn.
- dddnzzz334 5y ago
  > bing is the king for porn. I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.
  - post_break 5y ago
    All I know is that I've fed bing some of the most obscure keywords to find what I'm looking for and it's been like "oh I know exactly the video you're looking for I've got you".
  - mathteddybear 5y ago
    Curious thought, isn't in this area that the most important thing to avoid showing to the user certain undesirable result by accident? Not implying that bing ever failed to do that.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      That's why all search engines have a 'safe search' toggle. And on Bing it's much easier to find than on Google.
traceroute66 5y ago
Just use Startpage, its Google without the tracking. DuckDuckGo is ok too. TL;DR there's no reason to default to direct Google.
- disintegore 5y ago
  You still get Google results in the end, which are growing more full of blogspam and affiliate link farms every year.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    Google results are the one thing keeping me on Google. Not sure why getting the almost indisputably best results would be bad. Even if they are getting worse, they're still miles ahead of anyone else. I've been waiting for a Kagi invite for a while because I've heard good things on HN about it. Finally got one a couple weeks ago. Finally switched off of it and back to Google yesterday. The results weren't even in the same ballpark, despite me really wanting it to succeed.
    - freediver 5y ago
      > The results weren't even in the same ballpark, despite me really wanting it to succeed. Have you posted feedback about bad results on kagifeedback.org?
    - Melatonic 5y ago
      What kind of stuff did you have trouble with? I have not used Kagi in a bit but I found it pretty solid
SllX 5y ago
My standard line on this is that Google today is not as good as Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago, but it is still the best available option today because nothing is as good as or better than Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago. That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once I’ve had a chance to actually investigate the new options. EDIT: Maybe I should note that I’ve also been relying a lot more on Reddit too in the past year since Apollo has a decent search interface for Reddit and I’ve gotten used to processing new subs quickly and getting information out of them. If nothing else I usually at least have a stack of new terminology to feed my search queries elsewhere.
- dariusj18 5y ago
  Also, the internet is a far better and worse place than it was 10 years ago. So much more content, but astronomically more bad actors.
  - 93po 5y ago
    I think it's also only going to get worse when the amount of bad content and blog spam is 1000 times the ratio it is today due to really human-like AI writing. I am sure Google will find ways to detect this, but it will be a cat and mouse game for decades because at some point we won't be able to tell apart bad, lazy human writing from AI writing. At some point the internet has to go to a circle of trust model with real identities tied to online content of any sort. I see no other way to curb this pending disaster than being able to block bad actors and bad actors having very limited means to publish under an alias.
ct0 5y ago
If you're referring to google search specifically, a major tool to combat the spammed ads in search that has helped me is available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt... https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
Gualdrapo 5y ago
I still use it mainly for non "standard" search: - Its location feature is better than DDG or anything else - It has gotten worse a bit, but if I tell it to show me results from Colombia, 95% of the results it will return are from actual websites from Colombia. DDG will throw anything from Latin America, for example. Not to mention the disaster with Bing. - Its image search feature is still more precise than others. Reverse search won't return sometimes what I'm looking for and I have to resort to Yandex/TinEye/Bing, but still. Oh, and it can search for SVGs, which others can't. - Double quotes aren't returning exact matches, but other operators are working fine as far as I can tell. Filetype operator is great and way bigger than DDG's, cache operator is great for looking for a cached version of a website that is not working at the moment, the minus operator still works (sans the advertisements).
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Generally I have found google to always work the best (location wise) when you just put a zip code at the end of your search query
penjelly 5y ago
i use brave and brave.search, havent had search issues since switching over.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
falcolas 5y ago
The moat is worse than we think. New search engines are not only hobbled by the bandwidth and processing power and storage required to spider the web, but by the websites who will preemptively disallow them because they're not Google. I can't imagine trying to build a new search engine when the landscape is intentionally (if justifiably) hostile to new search engines.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Can't you just set your user agent to Google bot?
  - pixl97 5y ago
    You cant set your IP range to a Google IP
- nr2x 5y ago
  robots.txt is a joke tho.
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    Elaborate? It is the best thing web has for crawling rules. Yea ofc crawling rules can be broken and violated but all serious internet search engines respect robots.txt.
sithadmin 5y ago
I'm defaulting to Brave, then falling back on DuckDuckGo, then Bing, then Google these days. Feels a lot like the early web again.
fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that democracy has failed so lets replace it, replace with what? Its the best we can get given the alternatives, and its flaws will always be exploited.
- bsder 5y ago
  > Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. No, they are underestimating the difficulty of funding a good search engine. I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down. Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you searched for "python", it would show your results but would also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff really quickly. Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ... (/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.)
  - aghilmort 5y ago
    building Breeze, which does pretty much that minus the cool UI angle, and yeah, only way for it to work at scale is premium like neeva, kagi, etc. we started out with topics and then moved to web, and are now folding topics into the web search experience, it's really hard stuff to get right our first main filter was blogs, which is getting renamed to posts for a mix of reasons, adding forums shortly, along with other more specific topics re: https://breezethat.com/ https://breezethat.com/ -- & better on laptop / desktop atm, premium version will be ad-free
np- 5y ago
We’re all just searching Reddit anyway and it’s just easier to use Google to search Reddit than to use Reddit’s own search tool.
HstryrsrBttn 5y ago
Koshkin 5y ago
Paraphrasing Stroustrup, there are only two kinds of services: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  But now with the benefit of hindsight, we do know how it turned out for c++. right?
ubvhgidft 5y ago
> If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? If prison food sucks why do prisoners eat it?
- dymk 5y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+alternate+search+engines https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+alternate+search+eng...
- philovivero 5y ago
  If Vladimir Putin sucks, why is everyone letting him be in charge over there? If Donald Trump sucks why did we ele-- If Barack Obama sucks-- The FBI sucks. Facebook sucks. C sucks. The WWW sucks. Fiat currency sucks. Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?"
  - mcbutterbunz 5y ago
    The truth is, everything sucks. The more you use something the more you see its faults. The grass is always greener...
  - dariusj18 5y ago
    Rule 44 of the internet http://web.archive.org/web/20070110035128/http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Rules_Of_The_Internet http://web.archive.org/web/20070110035128/http://www.encyclo... Edit: NSFW
Shadonototra 5y ago
because it is good, the only people who complain about it are on pro-mozilla mediums, even though mozilla sells their users to google, the irony :)
dkersten 5y ago
I actually don’t use google (search or other services aside form YouTube) very often. As for “everyone”, I assume habit and momentum. People are used to it so it’s hard to change to something else. Many people also don’t know what alternatives there are.
frenchy 5y ago
This article is really not that good, it suggests a bunch of obvious reasons why Google has a moat (Chrome, everyone's personal data) and misses some others (brand recognition). Then it goes and an explains reason why OP thinks Google sucks (to be fair I agree with him, but they're pretty subjective). Finally, OP claims that people are abandoning Google. Their single data point is that since 2009 there have been fewer searches for mortgages, because that couldn't possibly have been the result of an mortgage-driven recession in 2008.
Havoc 5y ago
Recently managed to finally de-google my search. SearXNG funneled through protonVPN
- snowl 5y ago
  My searxng is slow to search. How long does it take for you to search?
  - Havoc 5y ago
    Slower than a google search certainly, but not problematically slow Median response time is 0.9 for most engines
Jean-Philipe 5y ago
I tried switching to DDG a few times over the past few years and always found that it got in my way, especially when working. So I usually got annoyed enough after a few weeks and switched back to google. About two months ago, the opposite happened. Google gave me so much spam and advertising, the search got worse, now I ended up using DDG. It still sucks, for sure, but somehow it sucks less than google now.
andrewstuart 5y ago
Because people stick with something thats "good enough". The biggest barrier to any competitor for any product/service anywhere is a "good enough" incumbent.
karaterobot 5y ago
By the end of the article, this is full-on marketing the OPs product, so be aware of that when thinking about how the problem and solution are framed. It's an interesting question though. I think the answer is that most people don't really care? The bubble we live in is filled with other people who, like us , are very knowledgeable about this domain, pay attention to what's going on behind the scenes, and have very strong opinions on it. 99% of the rest of the world doesn't give the quality and nature of Google search a second thought.
nightski 5y ago
I'm not using it directly. Have been using DDG for about 10 years now.
alligatorplum 5y ago
This feels like one of those things where people only notice the bad experiences, bad search results, and ignore all the times it was right, good/neutral search results. One of google search's biggest advantages is the ability to save a click for the user. If I search for "NCAA scores" google will show me the live scores directly instead of showing me a link to the ncaa website which also shows me the score but at the expense of me having to click on the link. IMO, the right way to dethrone google search would be to have better (or more) QOL features.
frb 5y ago
I don’t think that most people care about using Google or quality of search results at all. I’d agree that the average HN user and certain professions like developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to Google and recently stuck with Kagi. If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter words into their browser’s navigation/search bar and are happy to get useful results. It’s worth to remember that Google is the default search engine in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new Windows computer from work. She didn’t notice that she was using Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change the browser as well as the search engine.
- gnyman 5y ago
  I had a similar experience with trying to switch a few times during the last few years and only within the last few months I've actually managed to keep using another search engine for more than a week, and it happened to be kagi. If this is because Google has gotten worse or Kagi is better I can't tell, but either way I think we are at a point where Googles dominance is threatened for the first time, at last from my sample of one. But there are other signals like how many of these "google isn't good anymore" posts we see on HN nowadays and the above example of a user not even noticing they aren't using Google.
helph67 5y ago
Because `common sense' ain't!
richardsocher 5y ago
They don't know yet about you.com? - No spam, no ads, you control the ranker with your source preferences, hardcore private mode that doesn't save anything nor uses your location (even DDG saves your queries and gives location-based results), many developer apps that include what you want - eg code snippets in a StackOverflow app, AI apps like you.com/write that would write essays for you, etc. Also, many folks (outside the hackernews crowd) never change their defaults and Google pays Apple 15B per year, as well as Samsung and many others, to be that default. Disclaimer: I work at you.com
- timothylaurent 5y ago
  You's been a refreshing break from the Google-sphere - and it gets better and better - The mobile browser is also great!
- Ennea 5y ago
  you.com does not even load in Firefox with beacon.enabled set to false in about:config.
  - richardsocher 4y ago
    Hi Ennea, Honest question since this is the first time I hear this issue. What's the use case the changing that setting in your config? From my limited understanding whatever beacon does can also be done in the backend it just makes it a little more complicated for developers?
- JSONderulo 5y ago
  Great stuff, Richard. I've been using you.com since the beginning of the year and it continues to get better.
  - richardsocher 4y ago
    So happy to hear. We'll keep making it better :)
- soniman 5y ago
ncann 5y ago
- It's free - It's better than most alternatives, and in many cases there isn't even an alternative - People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high - People don't care
- pixl97 5y ago
  - Near monopolies are hard to get away from
- mrkramer 5y ago
  >People don't care I think people not carrying is the saddest part. >People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high I think this shouldn't be a problem since query is the only thing you need when searching. You should be able to personalize and narrow down the search from UI of search engine not rely on search engine amassing data about yourself to do it for you.
dleslie 5y ago
It's the bad default of the devices that most people use. This is basically the outcome that antitrust prosecutors were concerned for with Microsoft. Imagine if Android couldn't bundle a browser, or integrate any of Google's SAAS products.
jeffbee 5y ago
We have to have this discussion daily, apparently, but nobody, absolutely nobody in this thread and certainly not the article, has established an objective basis for "Google sucks". The most likely alternate theory, which the article doesn't bother discussing, is that Google does not in practice "suck" at all.
compiler-guy 5y ago
The web itself sucks more and more, and Google results reflect that. Much good discussion migrated to siloed locations like facebook groups. There are thousands of pages of technical content that are barely redone versions of each other. Each SEO'd to within an inch of its life. These are quite similar to the dozens of identical off-brand products one finds on amazon. I would love to see Google results get better. But the web itself is a mess.
- RSHEPP 5y ago
  This has a what seems to be a positive effect in my life though. I use the library much more than I used to. Instead of finding blogs using Google like the first part of my career, I find books at the local library.
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GeekyBear 5y ago
For the same reason that Google pays Apple and Mozilla huge sums every year. Most people won't change the default settings for their search engine.
cryptica 5y ago
I stopped using Google search. The only Google product I use now are Maps and Android. I used DuckDuckGo for a while and more recently I switched to Qwant. They're all approximately the same. I don't think that PageRank or similar algorithms provide any competitive edge at this stage. The real advantage of PageRank in the past is that it was difficult to game, but nowadays, backlinks are all about money and SEO anyway.
scotty79 5y ago
I had trouble switching to DuckDuck Go search previously. It changed when I installed DucDuckGo browser on my phone. It has really good internet decrapifying features and it uses ddg search by default and so far I didn't have a single reason to change that default. I hope ddg will relese similar browser for desktop. Maybe I'll be able to switch to it then.
nyx_land 5y ago
Because there is effectively no alternative. Bing and engines that are different frontends for Bing results aren't alternatives, don't kid yourself; it only exists still because Microsoft is another company like Google that shoves their subpar product onto people (by making it the default search on their subpar OS that took over the world) and hopes they never seek out alternatives. Most people are too dumb and lazy to seek out better alternatives, so they stick with the default search engines for Edge or Chrome. For everyone else, there is no real alternative, so while Google's search results are getting objectively worse, it doesn't matter because it's at least a lesser of two evils. They don't need to worry about becoming more mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position where they basically have no competition.
- matheweis 5y ago
  > Bing and engines that are different frontends for Bing results aren't alternatives, don't kid yourself; it only exists still because Microsoft is another company like Google that shoves their subpar product onto people > They don't need to worry about becoming more mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position where they basically have no competition. Two may not be ideal but there is still competition there… If enough people use Bing/O365 instead of Google/Gsuite, that Google sees a significant shift in traffic, they should feel pressure to be less unfriendly and start innovating again.
gumby 5y ago
Is that a notion page? I couldn't use space to go to the next page (the oldest pagination system in the (computing) world). So I stopped reading at the end of the page.
quantified 5y ago
GSuite is poor compared with alternatives. Corporations make choices based on more criteria than just UI and functionality.
humanwhosits 5y ago
I've started using DDG for most searches, and a private email provider instead of gmail
- paulpauper 5y ago
  duck duck outsources to bing, so you are really using bing
  - mostlysimilar 5y ago
    https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... >> To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      You’re giving the PR fluff that DDG has written. Even that is saying essentially what parent said. Most of those 400 sources are for the insane answers which are in the hundreds. Bing is by far their biggest index of results.
zanethomas 5y ago
Everyone is not using it.
zanethomas 5y ago
Everyone? Not me.
xlaacid 5y ago
oh, its an ad for their garbage extension. I see.
ipunchghosts 5y ago
I use yandex
- narrator 5y ago
  Yandex is nice because it acts like a normal search engine on controversial topics. Google search results are heavily curated on any politically controversial topic. This is all new since 2016, and especially the last 2 years. This is why forums are downranked. Someone could post wrongthink on a forum and google automatically identifies and downranks sites with wrongthink.
asimpletune 5y ago
I would gladly pay for a really good search engine if anyone is listening.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Me too. There's https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/, but their selling point is slightly different (I don't really care about ads per se, or privacy, I just want to get good search results (without paid promoted results or weird interstitial results modals, looking at you "people also clicked on" Google box!) and maybe be able to do advanced queries (search by file type, date, booleans, etc. I would also like to be able to ban sites from my results, for example, all of the spammy websites that scrape stackoverflow and mirror the pages, which Google somehow hasn't blocked themselves yet...
  - darinf 5y ago
    With Neeva you can set preferred providers, more of this, less of that. See Site Preferences in Settings.
- snielson 5y ago
  Kagi is listening. Sign up and give it a shot. I've tried them all (Neeva, Brave, Bing, Yandex, etc.) and I like Kagi the best. They are planning to make it a paid service when it gets out of beta.
- aghilmort 5y ago
  listening / founder of https://breezethat.com https://breezethat.com - best used on desktop atm; free is ad-based, premium is ad-free, both have curated topic filters with more on way
paulpauper 5y ago
google needs better date filtering. old threads from reddit keep being marked as new.
- aghilmort 5y ago
  where after: & before: filters aren't working? e.g., this comparable example of date-based query, https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1504901028520640514 https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1504901028520640514
Lamad123 5y ago
you.com is amazing, I'm not shilling for them, but I managed to find a couple youtube videos and a few other tings I couldn't find with google or DDG and Bing.
- Crash0v3rid3 5y ago
  Some examples would be nice
grey_earthling 5y ago
I'm kind of surprised that HN hears “Google” and still thinks “web search” — I assumed the headline was about the company as a whole, and my mind first went to Gmail/Google Drive/their office stuff, Android/Chrome, and YouTube. Are web search engines still “a thing” that people have opinions about? To me they're just kind of there and mediocre and unremarkable — the beige wallpaper of modern life, corporate blue and 12pt Arial; like a dreary shopping centre on a Tuesday; as exciting as a press release.
not2b 5y ago
The author missed the most important reason that Google search results often suck: tens of thousands of people are working very hard to make it suck. They call themselves "SEO specialists", and their job is to get their shitty site to the top of the rankings. It's an ongoing battle. Sure, Google wants to make money, but to do that they need to protect their search moneymaker and keep it dominant, so their incentive is to make the users happy. They aren't sucking on purpose.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  The web has - as it inevitably would - adapted to being searched by Google. This makes it much harder to be a good search engine. I have no idea how to quantify how much the decline is because of that.
- moistly 5y ago
  Search isn’t Google’s moneymaker, advertising is. And those shitty SEO’d sites are choc-a-bloc with advertising. Google has little incentive to downrank them.
  - asiachick 5y ago
    Google loses if people stop using it. Google has every incentive to downrank them.
    - glenstein 5y ago
      Google has incentives to degrade the quality of search results for the benefit of its profitability, up to the extent that is able to without turning away too many users. I think it's more like that rather than an either/or.
      - not2b 5y ago
        They have competition: if we get to the point where Bing/DuckDuckGo results are clearly better, people will start moving, and that will hurt their revenue badly.
jessriedel 5y ago
142 comments so far and no one is has mentioned the actual punchline of the OP: the Hypersearch chrome extension the author is pitching. Personally, I find the pitch compelling, but am very interested to hear from anyone who has used it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojagelicdlhnmldaiplbppfbolnnag https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag... Note: This extension "can read and change all your data on all websites". Perhaps that's necessary for what they are offering, but it seems very dangerous, especially for a 1-week old extension with 24 users and 2 ratings. Also, the "website" link (https://insight.space https://insight.space) on the Chrome extension page just says "The domain name insight.space is for sale!". Do other folks have reason to trust this? (General discussion of why Google Search is bad that does not actually engage with the specific details of the OP's arguments seems inappropriate in this thread; there have been innumerable HN threads about the general issue.)
- gnicholas 5y ago
  I can't speak to Hypersearch, but I've used their Hyperweb mobile extension and Insight Browser mobile app. They're great! I've even had the chance to chat/work with Abhinav a bit, and he's a nice and sincere guy. I also like this concept — I once toyed with the idea of a search engine/extension that would run a search in one engine by default and then notify you if other search engines would have returned significantly different search results. I'm excited to try this out! I agree that it's hard to trust an extension that runs on any website, and I guess one way you could work around this would be to manually limit it only to run on the domain where you do your primary web searching. It wouldn't have the full functionality, but it would provide the bulk of the functionality — without most of the risk.
eevilspock 5y ago
If the Earth's ecosystem is being destroyed, why are we, in particular those that are not poor, still consuming so much plastic, energy and stuff in general? If Facebook is bad for Democracy, why do so many people, especially those who decry the state of democracy, still use it? If sugar and processed foods are so bad for us, why do so many people consume so much? If the education system is tilted incredibly against children born into disadvantage and for those with advantage, why do the parents of the later, including liberal ones who fly the flag of equality and justice, hoard as much of quality educational resources for their own children as they can? (I'm sad that no one else is pointing this out)
russellbeattie 5y ago
There are so many websites, apps and media services that are slowly being affected by what I call "information ochlocracy", where those types of organizations which rely on large numbers of people for their existence, will naturally start to target the widest audience/viewership/user base, and the quality of the service as a whole suffer as a result. Here's the law: "The value of information is inversely proportional to the size of its intended audience." And its correlary: "The wider the audience, the less valuable a piece of information will need to be." These both stem from the basic premise that accurate information is more valuable the more scarce it is. What this creates basically is a situation in which the quality, depth and timeliness of a piece of information or media service will, over time, always tend towards the most broadly applicable content, despite being less and less specifically useful. In Google's case we can use cars as an example. Ideally, depending on the exact search term, you might want results providing information about buying them or maybe fixing them. However, maybe more advertising money can be made from using that search term to sell Forza or Gran Turismo video games, so the algorithms will detect this and shift accordingly. And since these games are being talked about on social media a lot, the algorithms pick that up too. Maybe some news mentioned the car or a celebrity bought one. The result might be that you're scrolling through ads from Microsoft and Sony, online shopping results of all the related gaming products, summaries of tweets about it, news snippets, etc., and almost nothing about what you were originally looking for. Searches for historical events like Pearl Harbor could have you scrolling past movie reviews before you finally get to a Wikipedia link. Ochlocracy is mob rule. It's the evil flip side of democracy, in which people actively make a choice based on considered opinions. In an ochlocracy, the choice is made by the whims of the mob as a whole, and they themselves don't even know the choices they're making. As Google and other companies optimize their services, the numbers will always lead to targeting the largest swath of people and as a result the overall quality naturally suffers. There's more to this, but this is the general problem. In order to keep growing from now on, every year Google's overall quality will have to suffer in order to be more applicable to larger numbers of people.
crobertsbmw 5y ago
I use DuckDuckGo and it seems like it’s gotten worse on the last couple months. Whenever I search for programming questions I expect staovetflow to be on top bit lately I’ve been getting geeksforweeks blog or some BS showing at the top of the search results every time. I don’t get it. It’s not just google…
- code2life 5y ago
  Have you tried you.com? I use it for coding all the time and works great, SO results come pre-ranked based on most voted answers and honestly saves me so much time .https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I%20convert%20from%20int%20to%20string%20in%20java&fromSearchBar=true https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I%20convert%20from%20int... . The best part - it's not google, so it has no ads or junk content
malwarebytess 5y ago
I wonder what googlers think about discussions like this? It doesn't seem like a rare opinion among techies that Google search has been declining in usefulness. Honestly, Google obfuscates the internet instead of making it accessible.
- tytso 5y ago
  Googler here, so here's a sample size of one. 1) I personally use Google, because it works for me. I will admit freely that part of this may be that I've gotten used to framing queries such that it works with the search engine that I'm used to using, and that's probably true for many people commenting on HN. 2) Every so often, these posts will inspire me to do my own non-scientific experiments such as using the same query, say, "Dua Lipa Levitating" or "Go modules vs packages" on say, DDG, Bing, and Google. When I did this experiment most reently, I generally find that Bing and Google are both more personally useful for me and DDG is less useful (but as the old latin saying goes, "De gustibus non est disputandum"). I will note that DDG had the more obstrusive advertising at the top of the results (Stubhub and Urban outfitters), and Bing and Google did not have any adds that I could find for that first query. Given my personal evaluations, it tends to cause me to discount what many of the DDG enthusiasts have to say about DDG being is way better, simply because it doesn't accord with my own quickie experiments. But hey --- maybe it's because they enter in search queries differently than I do. 3) Given the hyperbolic and/or highly emotive nature of some of the comments about "holding users hostage" and complete lack of nuance over "violating users' privacy", again, it causes me to have a hard time taking everything else that rhwy have to say seriously. 4) I sometimes suspect people are remembering the past with rose colored glasses. I remember the search quality of Alta Vista (and with all due respect to the people who worked on Alita Vista and having had friends who worked there), the results were pretty crappy, and Google's results were heads and shoulders above somoe of the other competitors that were available back in the day. 5) All of this is my personal opinion; and users should feel free to use whatever search engine they want, and competition is a good thing.
  - malwarebytess 5y ago
    thanks for your 2c.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
It's trivial to switch search engines, so Google invests in PR to make it stickier. All those cool google projects that are constantly in the news? The ROI is PR. It also made massive capital investment in server farms, for fast results, especially google suggest. A way of converting profit into economic moat.
Guest19023892 5y ago
I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google. 1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion. 2. You block Google from indexing the sites. 3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit. 4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarantee them decent traffic because they'll only be competing against a dozen sites on your search engine, instead of millions on Google. 5. A large number of respectable sites leave Google and are only available on your search engine. Businesses start becoming eager to join your exclusive network and ask to join your mission. 6. Google is left with blog and affiliate SEO spam, and you become the hero of the search engine world.
- samwestdev 5y ago
  Great way to kill both Reddit and SO lol
- pyro123 5y ago
  Couldn't that backfire though. Most people imo would find it it infuriating to jump between search engines at first leading to plenty new alternatives taking over ultimately leading to the demise of the above mentioned sites.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  I think this would spark all out search engine war. It would further degrade quality of search engines actually their usability since web content would be fragmented between different search engines. But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.
- windex 5y ago
  Doesn't google have something called the Google CSE where you specify which sites you will exclusively include in search results?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
tluyben2 5y ago
Google is still the fastest way to find things. The rest, including ddg just is not as good.
- xeromal 5y ago
  My phone randomly searches on bing from time to time and it blows my mind how shitty the search is. Fault Google, but it either knows what my brain wants, or my brain expects what Google provides.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    I had to use Bing in China ; the things are search for are not censored, but it works as well as Altavista does begin 2000; 10 pages of spam and then maybe stack overflow. I downloaded actual manuals like in the 80s to cope. I created [0] just to be able to find things faster locally when in China (last time was December 2019 though). It is shocking how competitors are that bad really. [0] https://git2pdf.com/ https://git2pdf.com/
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      I used bing while in China as well, it worked ok for what I needed. Much better than baidu where every image search for any innocuous term tended to bring up a bunch of porn.
      - tluyben2 5y ago
        Yeah, baidu was even worse. I asked my Chinese tech colleagues how the hell they got anything done at all with baidu and they said they just read manuals and don’t search. This was hardware and embedded, so cannot speak for other disciplines. And yes, I recognise your name from previous posts; you spent quite a lot of time in China right? I was in Suzhou for about 4 years. And after that HK for 2.
        seanmcdirmid 5y ago
pgt 5y ago
Your honour, leading the witness. Everyone is not using Google.
DeathArrow 5y ago
1 changing is difficult 2 some people depend on Google services 3 there aren't too many alternatives 4 alternatives that exist are not integrated in the way Google services are That being said, it amazes me how no good search engines exist. By good I mean relevant results and less poisoning with advertising. It shouldn't be an impossible undertaking. Probably no one could find business sense in a decent search engine. If that is the case, I wonder if is possible to make a community backed search engine, similar to how Wikipedia works.
kdazzle 5y ago
I use Ecosia, and the results are usually good enough. Google’s results are often better, but now there are only like 4 results on the first page.
t0bia_s 5y ago
-> People are increasingly asking the questions that really matter in their Facebook and WhatsApp groups, Twitter, Discord and Slack communities, etc. That is true and make sense why it is so hard to search solutions nowdays. Especially software related.
yoyopa 5y ago
because stumbleupon is gone
octoberfranklin 5y ago
Because their crawler gets special privileges from cloudflare and the other CDNs. Here, read about the problem from one of the very few remaining non-GoogleBingYandex crawlers remaining: https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#willneverhappen https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#willneverhappen https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#stopevilcensorship https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#stopevilcensorship
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Duckduckgo is vastly superior to Google in my experience. Normal searches give me the same information, news results feel less biased (they present articles from both left.and right viewpoint), better code search (especially with the code snippet extractor), less DMCA removed content The only things I reach out for google are: - Business hours of stores - Google maps Also, I don't often search for images but duckduckgo safety filter still let a few nsfw pics to go through. People are on Google because of habit
nathias 5y ago
Because they invested 20 years of majority of online capital into becoming the infrastructure of the web, much like Microsoft spent all of theirs to become the infrastructure of PC. These corporate strategies should be illegal.
cehrlich 5y ago
I have switched to Kagi for everything other than trying to find stuff that's on Google Maps. Search results are consistently better. I think their backend is mostly just Bing?
pictur 5y ago
It was ideas that mattered in the early 2000s. but nowadays marketing is much more important than ideas. In other words, an alternative that can work better than Google can of course be made, but its good work alone is never enough to compete with it. Or maybe I don't know.
Axien 5y ago
Google is already losing substantial market share. Let’s do an experiment. If you want to buy a blender, what is the first site you try? What about directions? Today’s weather? My answers are Amazon, Siri, and Alexa. Not Google. Google will continue to lose as these assistants become more powerful.
JamesAdir 5y ago
I think people are forgetting that large portion of data once available for search engines in blogs and forums is now dead. This data is live only on closed Facebook groups - which you can't search even if you are on Facebook and blogs are dying slowly with Facebook and twitter, with Facebook as a closed garden and twitter is on the way to become one. I don't know why people so eager on Reddit content, since their push to more monetization, the algorithm is aimed to create more traffic and not quality discussions. You can see it on the front page with many posts are more flammatory in nature.
endisneigh 5y ago
The fact SEO wasn’t mentioned once makes this lose all credibility imho
adipginting 5y ago
Google does not suck. It is the best search engine by far. Nobody else can compete. Our individual experience may vary though
simy 5y ago
site:Reddit.com
dhanna 5y ago
I don’t think you realize that web search is the largest computational problem in existence.
mrkramer 5y ago
I have plenty ideas on how to improve quality of search of Google but I figured out competing with Google would be akin to slow painful death so I wouldn't start my own search engine atm. If somehow we could influence the Google's management to listen to our suggestions. Maybe the root problem is indeed business model which eventually shapes how features are introduced and how UI/UX turns out to be. Google is smart but sleepy and somewhat distracted from their core business with 99 other projects they have.
dwighttk 5y ago
I’m not
jbn_norse 5y ago
What people, entrepreneurial subculture, and professionals don’t understand is that Google is in the business of delivering a crappy product because of how it relates to advertising psychology. It’s that simple. An example can be observed in SEO which doubles as a product framework in the context of performing a job for Google by altering content in the hopes of producing behavioral modification. This is almost always misunderstood by their best and brightest for lack of self awareness or actual intelligence. No one has ever been able to compete because quite frankly no one has any idea what the hell they’re doing. I do, however
- mrkramer 5y ago
  Google's algorithms are blackbox; nobody knows how they work so webmasters are trying to game the Google one way or another, vicious cycle that never ends. I agree with you nobody actually knows wtf they are doing because information asymmetry and information overload in the 21st century are brutal. Mass communication freed us but at the same time it is easy to get caught in never ending echo chambers.
  - jbn_norse 5y ago
    Agreed. I blame it on the advertising media complex
loonster 5y ago
SEO ruined search.
adamlynch 5y ago
I kinda wish the opposite of hypersearch existed. Let me explain. I set up multiple browser profiles recently; work and personal. For work, I need Google. I'm a software engineer and I find that alternatives just aren't good enough for those kinds of searches yet. For personal, I'm trying to use an alternative. It's ok most of the time but sometimes the results aren't great so then I try searching again in Google. I'd like if there was an extension that augmented the alternative with Google results in the sidebar. If possible, in a way that preserved privacy.
OnlyMortal 5y ago
I don’t use it. DuckDuckGo for searching and a Mac or iOS. Who is this “everyone”?
ratsmack 5y ago
I haven't used google for at least three years, because I started to use Bing. Compared to what Google had become, Bing is far superior in my experience.
rufus_foreman 5y ago
Everyone isn't still using it. That's a lie.
gattis 5y ago
I'd ditch google if someone just built a way to grep the web.
kdot 5y ago
A domain block list would solve most of the search quality and spam problems, I don't understand why Google removed it.
xyzzy21 4y ago
Some of us DO NOT use Google or anything from them.

285 points by abhinavsharma 5y ago

I use search.brave.com and it's usually OK. It fails on some complex queries. Unfortunately SEO spam for Google also catches Brave.

ncmncm 5y ago

Because Microsoft sucks too? Because browsers default to connecting to it?

anothernewdude 5y ago

Inertia

johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago

I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's tyrannical regime on internet ends.

sithadmin 5y ago
Amazon did build one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com
- johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
  Oh thank you. We should definitely promote this more.
  - google234123 5y ago
    It died in 2008 - it's now just the search engine on Amazon.com Feel free to promote Amazon :) Prime is pretty good
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
How, exactly, does Google keep users hostage for money?
- johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
  G Suite Workspace users are being kept hostages by Google unless the users pay more money[1]. [1] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-legacy-free-edition-leaving-users-worried/ https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-le...
  - tssge 5y ago
    Can't they just migrate off of it? I guess the only part being held hostage according to the article are their Play Store purchases, if even that (the article says the purchases' fate is unclear). To me it seems Google has given ample time to either migrate off of it or to become a customer.

kauguste281 5y ago

Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results. Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever). I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by just trying to be a Google search clone.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
Google had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away. You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.
- vopi 5y ago
  idk if you know this but kagi has a "discussion" filter (among other filters)
- Melatonic 5y ago
  I feel this same way about a lot of aspects of Google search.
- sph 5y ago
  > Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back. It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.
  - tomxor 5y ago
    Which is why we need more competitors in this space. When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the only intrinsic business force is direct monetisation paths... completely different incentives.

mountainriver 5y ago

The “google search sucks” rhetoric is getting a bit old. It works really really well and is free. I rarely ever have issues with it. I think it’s just getting trendy to dog on

theonemind 5y ago
Rhetoric aside completely, I can say with all honesty Google doesn't serve me as well as it did in 2014. "google search sucks" message might lack finesse, but I think it conveys something real--like, a search engine completely optimized to the user using state-of-the-art algorithms, etc. does not exist, perhaps because Google hangs out around "good enough" and would kill anything on the way up.
lexandstuff 5y ago
I agree. People have forgotten that Google searches for tech stuff 10 years ago used to exclusively returns results from sites like Experts Exchange with solutions behind paywalls. I'm glad Google did something about that. And, of course, thankful that sites like Stack Overflow came along.
ikiris 5y ago
Its only even really trendy here on HN. This place is getting less and less useful over time.
syshum 5y ago
No it is far far far less useful than it was a few years ago, I routinely now have to use a couple different search engines to find solutions to technical problems because google tends to weight sources it thinks I should be using for and not the sources I would like. For example one software platform I use all the time has community forum that is almost useless because every post to the forum is simply met with "open a ticket with support" with no actual resolution, these post flood the google search results, however other search engines bubble up blogs, other forums, reddit, or other sources not just the set of sites over and over again.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
Only on HN. Virtually none of the "problems" described on HN at the intersection of tech and society are seen as problems out in the real world.

gotaquestion 5y ago

I've been using DDG for several years and every once and a while I prefix my search with "g!" to search google, and it isn't any better, so I stopped doing that. Maybe people don't know there are alternatives? How does OP expect them to switch to Hypersearch if they aren't even using DDG which has been around for a very long time?

ShinTakuya 5y ago
I find DDG is well optimised for software folks and geeks, because it's the main demographic that uses it. It's hard for me to recommend it to my friends though since often basic queries fail compared to Google, especially with relation to country specific queries like that I'd make here in Australia.

high_pathetic 5y ago

That's two blanket statements in one headline. Google search is fast, accurate enough for the most users, very widely adopted. GMail is fast, good with SPAM, free. Google has some practices that might be considered as evil but this affects a relatively narrow list of people, it definitely doesn't "suck" for everyone. Lotus Notes, on the hand...

eevilspock 5y ago
It is far, far, FAR from free. Huge social costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706 Huge economic costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 Its amoral/cynical/evil practices and business model affect everyone.

rr808 5y ago

I use Bing. I dont know why everyone complains it finds anything I want, though I guess I dont really need anything too complicated. I like to encourage competition, the points are handy too.

FpUser 5y ago

Not sure about everyone but for my searches Google always gives me way better results that the competitors. So while I dislike google as a company I still do use their search and youtube for the lack of true alternative. Rest of their stuff I successfully avoid.

tsian2 5y ago

I think normal people have just changed how they use it without much fanfare. If people want to quickly find a specific site they are looking for they know it's the place. But if they want to explore the world of cat memes they know it's not the place for something like that any more (it'll only show you 143 results, many with weak relevancy).

openfuture 5y ago

I'm not..

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago

This is a very complicated answer when the reason is very simple - monopoly power. Would have been nice to know at the beginning of the article that this guy has something to sell with his own search product.

JohnFen 5y ago

Not everyone is still using it. It's been a few years now since the quality of Google search had fallen to the point where I just stopped using it entirely.

vivekraghunatha 5y ago

(Founder of Neeva here) On OP's question -- don't underestimate the power of defaults. Google owns Chrome and Android. Google pays Apple to be the default on Safari. Google pays Firefox to be the default. Bing is default on Edge. And so on. All the platforms make it very hard to change the defaults. And on platforms like Safari, as a user, you can't even change the default search provider if you want to.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Because everything else sucks way worse, obviously. I mean,...have you actually tried using Bing? Next question...

moltke 5y ago

The truth is that normal people like abusive software. Using software that gives them freedom also gives them the responsibility to understand the behavior of the machine which is something they do not want. No amount of evangelism or possibly even education will fix this. IMO for their own good people who behave this way should not be allowed to use computers and should delegate the task to people who are willing to think through the consequences of using a particular piece of software. Allowing normal people to use computers is cruel in the same way making a dog order its food over the telephone is.

hobz22 5y ago

i use opera on android, firefox in windows, safari on mac and duckduckgo for everything and have been for YEARS. I'm offended you're including me in your cohort. lol

TechBro8615 5y ago

Give it time.

turbinerneiter 5y ago

Im so used to the UI (down to the fonts, things I can't even name), that DuckDuckGo looks off to me. So although it is set as my standar search engine, I g! most of the time.

cruelty2 5y ago
Maybe you could write a Greasemonkey extension to redirect requests from Googles page to DuckDuckGo

post_break 5y ago

I use DDG most of the time, then when I cant find technical stuff I g!. And let's be honest, bing is the king for porn.

dddnzzz334 5y ago
> bing is the king for porn. I would disagree. It is nice at the start but it shows the same things on the same search result forever. That is not something that you'd want in a Porn search engine, you'd want it to have some amount of randomization.
- post_break 5y ago
  All I know is that I've fed bing some of the most obscure keywords to find what I'm looking for and it's been like "oh I know exactly the video you're looking for I've got you".
- mathteddybear 5y ago
  Curious thought, isn't in this area that the most important thing to avoid showing to the user certain undesirable result by accident? Not implying that bing ever failed to do that.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    That's why all search engines have a 'safe search' toggle. And on Bing it's much easier to find than on Google.

traceroute66 5y ago

Just use Startpage, its Google without the tracking. DuckDuckGo is ok too. TL;DR there's no reason to default to direct Google.

disintegore 5y ago
You still get Google results in the end, which are growing more full of blogspam and affiliate link farms every year.
- spiderice 5y ago
  Google results are the one thing keeping me on Google. Not sure why getting the almost indisputably best results would be bad. Even if they are getting worse, they're still miles ahead of anyone else. I've been waiting for a Kagi invite for a while because I've heard good things on HN about it. Finally got one a couple weeks ago. Finally switched off of it and back to Google yesterday. The results weren't even in the same ballpark, despite me really wanting it to succeed.
  - freediver 5y ago
    > The results weren't even in the same ballpark, despite me really wanting it to succeed. Have you posted feedback about bad results on kagifeedback.org?
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    What kind of stuff did you have trouble with? I have not used Kagi in a bit but I found it pretty solid

SllX 5y ago

My standard line on this is that Google today is not as good as Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago, but it is still the best available option today because nothing is as good as or better than Google of (at this point more than) 10 years ago. That said there have been a stack of new search engine posts on HN in the last few months and I may have to update my priors once I’ve had a chance to actually investigate the new options. EDIT: Maybe I should note that I’ve also been relying a lot more on Reddit too in the past year since Apollo has a decent search interface for Reddit and I’ve gotten used to processing new subs quickly and getting information out of them. If nothing else I usually at least have a stack of new terminology to feed my search queries elsewhere.

dariusj18 5y ago
Also, the internet is a far better and worse place than it was 10 years ago. So much more content, but astronomically more bad actors.
- 93po 5y ago
  I think it's also only going to get worse when the amount of bad content and blog spam is 1000 times the ratio it is today due to really human-like AI writing. I am sure Google will find ways to detect this, but it will be a cat and mouse game for decades because at some point we won't be able to tell apart bad, lazy human writing from AI writing. At some point the internet has to go to a circle of trust model with real identities tied to online content of any sort. I see no other way to curb this pending disaster than being able to block bad actors and bad actors having very limited means to publish under an alias.

ct0 5y ago

If you're referring to google search specifically, a major tool to combat the spammed ads in search that has helped me is available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt... https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

Gualdrapo 5y ago

I still use it mainly for non "standard" search: - Its location feature is better than DDG or anything else - It has gotten worse a bit, but if I tell it to show me results from Colombia, 95% of the results it will return are from actual websites from Colombia. DDG will throw anything from Latin America, for example. Not to mention the disaster with Bing. - Its image search feature is still more precise than others. Reverse search won't return sometimes what I'm looking for and I have to resort to Yandex/TinEye/Bing, but still. Oh, and it can search for SVGs, which others can't. - Double quotes aren't returning exact matches, but other operators are working fine as far as I can tell. Filetype operator is great and way bigger than DDG's, cache operator is great for looking for a cached version of a website that is not working at the moment, the minus operator still works (sans the advertisements).

Melatonic 5y ago
Generally I have found google to always work the best (location wise) when you just put a zip code at the end of your search query

penjelly 5y ago

i use brave and brave.search, havent had search issues since switching over.

deleted 5y ago

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falcolas 5y ago

The moat is worse than we think. New search engines are not only hobbled by the bandwidth and processing power and storage required to spider the web, but by the websites who will preemptively disallow them because they're not Google. I can't imagine trying to build a new search engine when the landscape is intentionally (if justifiably) hostile to new search engines.

ALittleLight 5y ago
Can't you just set your user agent to Google bot?
- pixl97 5y ago
  You cant set your IP range to a Google IP
nr2x 5y ago
robots.txt is a joke tho.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  Elaborate? It is the best thing web has for crawling rules. Yea ofc crawling rules can be broken and violated but all serious internet search engines respect robots.txt.

sithadmin 5y ago

I'm defaulting to Brave, then falling back on DuckDuckGo, then Bing, then Google these days. Feels a lot like the early web again.

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago

Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that democracy has failed so lets replace it, replace with what? Its the best we can get given the alternatives, and its flaws will always be exploited.

bsder 5y ago
> Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. No, they are underestimating the difficulty of funding a good search engine. I liked the runnaroo search very much as did several of my friends. The guy who ran it couldn't fund it. He shut it down. Altavista (Yeah, that far back) had a nice feature where it would draw a cluster graph of your search results. So, if you searched for "python", it would show your results but would also draw a little graph and you could see that "Hey, there are two clusters here--programming and reptiles." You could then click on the "programming" node and the "reptiles" cluster would go away. It allowed you to drill through irrelevant stuff really quickly. Note how that feature doesn't exist today--in spite of orders of magnitude more programmers being thrown at search, graph algorithms, and nifty Javascript web UIs. I wonder why ... (/sarcasm in case you missed it. I don't wonder why. Such a feature would let you drill through irrelevant Ad and SEO garbage too quickly and would impact Google's revenue.)
- aghilmort 5y ago
  building Breeze, which does pretty much that minus the cool UI angle, and yeah, only way for it to work at scale is premium like neeva, kagi, etc. we started out with topics and then moved to web, and are now folding topics into the web search experience, it's really hard stuff to get right our first main filter was blogs, which is getting renamed to posts for a mix of reasons, adding forums shortly, along with other more specific topics re: https://breezethat.com/ https://breezethat.com/ -- & better on laptop / desktop atm, premium version will be ad-free

np- 5y ago

We’re all just searching Reddit anyway and it’s just easier to use Google to search Reddit than to use Reddit’s own search tool.

HstryrsrBttn 5y ago

Koshkin 5y ago

Paraphrasing Stroustrup, there are only two kinds of services: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago
But now with the benefit of hindsight, we do know how it turned out for c++. right?

ubvhgidft 5y ago

> If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? If prison food sucks why do prisoners eat it?

dymk 5y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+alternate+search+engines https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+alternate+search+eng...
philovivero 5y ago
If Vladimir Putin sucks, why is everyone letting him be in charge over there? If Donald Trump sucks why did we ele-- If Barack Obama sucks-- The FBI sucks. Facebook sucks. C sucks. The WWW sucks. Fiat currency sucks. Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?"
- mcbutterbunz 5y ago
  The truth is, everything sucks. The more you use something the more you see its faults. The grass is always greener...
- dariusj18 5y ago
  Rule 44 of the internet http://web.archive.org/web/20070110035128/http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Rules_Of_The_Internet http://web.archive.org/web/20070110035128/http://www.encyclo... Edit: NSFW

Shadonototra 5y ago

because it is good, the only people who complain about it are on pro-mozilla mediums, even though mozilla sells their users to google, the irony :)

dkersten 5y ago

I actually don’t use google (search or other services aside form YouTube) very often. As for “everyone”, I assume habit and momentum. People are used to it so it’s hard to change to something else. Many people also don’t know what alternatives there are.

frenchy 5y ago

This article is really not that good, it suggests a bunch of obvious reasons why Google has a moat (Chrome, everyone's personal data) and misses some others (brand recognition). Then it goes and an explains reason why OP thinks Google sucks (to be fair I agree with him, but they're pretty subjective). Finally, OP claims that people are abandoning Google. Their single data point is that since 2009 there have been fewer searches for mortgages, because that couldn't possibly have been the result of an mortgage-driven recession in 2008.

Havoc 5y ago

Recently managed to finally de-google my search. SearXNG funneled through protonVPN

snowl 5y ago
My searxng is slow to search. How long does it take for you to search?
- Havoc 5y ago
  Slower than a google search certainly, but not problematically slow Median response time is 0.9 for most engines

Jean-Philipe 5y ago

I tried switching to DDG a few times over the past few years and always found that it got in my way, especially when working. So I usually got annoyed enough after a few weeks and switched back to google. About two months ago, the opposite happened. Google gave me so much spam and advertising, the search got worse, now I ended up using DDG. It still sucks, for sure, but somehow it sucks less than google now.

andrewstuart 5y ago

Because people stick with something thats "good enough". The biggest barrier to any competitor for any product/service anywhere is a "good enough" incumbent.

karaterobot 5y ago

By the end of the article, this is full-on marketing the OPs product, so be aware of that when thinking about how the problem and solution are framed. It's an interesting question though. I think the answer is that most people don't really care? The bubble we live in is filled with other people who, like us , are very knowledgeable about this domain, pay attention to what's going on behind the scenes, and have very strong opinions on it. 99% of the rest of the world doesn't give the quality and nature of Google search a second thought.

nightski 5y ago

I'm not using it directly. Have been using DDG for about 10 years now.

alligatorplum 5y ago

This feels like one of those things where people only notice the bad experiences, bad search results, and ignore all the times it was right, good/neutral search results. One of google search's biggest advantages is the ability to save a click for the user. If I search for "NCAA scores" google will show me the live scores directly instead of showing me a link to the ncaa website which also shows me the score but at the expense of me having to click on the link. IMO, the right way to dethrone google search would be to have better (or more) QOL features.

frb 5y ago

I don’t think that most people care about using Google or quality of search results at all. I’d agree that the average HN user and certain professions like developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to Google and recently stuck with Kagi. If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter words into their browser’s navigation/search bar and are happy to get useful results. It’s worth to remember that Google is the default search engine in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new Windows computer from work. She didn’t notice that she was using Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change the browser as well as the search engine.

gnyman 5y ago
I had a similar experience with trying to switch a few times during the last few years and only within the last few months I've actually managed to keep using another search engine for more than a week, and it happened to be kagi. If this is because Google has gotten worse or Kagi is better I can't tell, but either way I think we are at a point where Googles dominance is threatened for the first time, at last from my sample of one. But there are other signals like how many of these "google isn't good anymore" posts we see on HN nowadays and the above example of a user not even noticing they aren't using Google.

helph67 5y ago

Because `common sense' ain't!

richardsocher 5y ago

They don't know yet about you.com? - No spam, no ads, you control the ranker with your source preferences, hardcore private mode that doesn't save anything nor uses your location (even DDG saves your queries and gives location-based results), many developer apps that include what you want - eg code snippets in a StackOverflow app, AI apps like you.com/write that would write essays for you, etc. Also, many folks (outside the hackernews crowd) never change their defaults and Google pays Apple 15B per year, as well as Samsung and many others, to be that default. Disclaimer: I work at you.com

timothylaurent 5y ago
You's been a refreshing break from the Google-sphere - and it gets better and better - The mobile browser is also great!
Ennea 5y ago
you.com does not even load in Firefox with beacon.enabled set to false in about:config.
- richardsocher 4y ago
  Hi Ennea, Honest question since this is the first time I hear this issue. What's the use case the changing that setting in your config? From my limited understanding whatever beacon does can also be done in the backend it just makes it a little more complicated for developers?
JSONderulo 5y ago
Great stuff, Richard. I've been using you.com since the beginning of the year and it continues to get better.
- richardsocher 4y ago
  So happy to hear. We'll keep making it better :)
soniman 5y ago

ncann 5y ago

- It's free - It's better than most alternatives, and in many cases there isn't even an alternative - People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high - People don't care

pixl97 5y ago
- Near monopolies are hard to get away from
mrkramer 5y ago
>People don't care I think people not carrying is the saddest part. >People have amassed too much data on Google services and the cost of moving/switching is too high I think this shouldn't be a problem since query is the only thing you need when searching. You should be able to personalize and narrow down the search from UI of search engine not rely on search engine amassing data about yourself to do it for you.

dleslie 5y ago

It's the bad default of the devices that most people use. This is basically the outcome that antitrust prosecutors were concerned for with Microsoft. Imagine if Android couldn't bundle a browser, or integrate any of Google's SAAS products.

jeffbee 5y ago

We have to have this discussion daily, apparently, but nobody, absolutely nobody in this thread and certainly not the article, has established an objective basis for "Google sucks". The most likely alternate theory, which the article doesn't bother discussing, is that Google does not in practice "suck" at all.

compiler-guy 5y ago

The web itself sucks more and more, and Google results reflect that. Much good discussion migrated to siloed locations like facebook groups. There are thousands of pages of technical content that are barely redone versions of each other. Each SEO'd to within an inch of its life. These are quite similar to the dozens of identical off-brand products one finds on amazon. I would love to see Google results get better. But the web itself is a mess.

RSHEPP 5y ago
This has a what seems to be a positive effect in my life though. I use the library much more than I used to. Instead of finding blogs using Google like the first part of my career, I find books at the local library.
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GeekyBear 5y ago

For the same reason that Google pays Apple and Mozilla huge sums every year. Most people won't change the default settings for their search engine.

cryptica 5y ago

I stopped using Google search. The only Google product I use now are Maps and Android. I used DuckDuckGo for a while and more recently I switched to Qwant. They're all approximately the same. I don't think that PageRank or similar algorithms provide any competitive edge at this stage. The real advantage of PageRank in the past is that it was difficult to game, but nowadays, backlinks are all about money and SEO anyway.

scotty79 5y ago

I had trouble switching to DuckDuck Go search previously. It changed when I installed DucDuckGo browser on my phone. It has really good internet decrapifying features and it uses ddg search by default and so far I didn't have a single reason to change that default. I hope ddg will relese similar browser for desktop. Maybe I'll be able to switch to it then.

nyx_land 5y ago

Because there is effectively no alternative. Bing and engines that are different frontends for Bing results aren't alternatives, don't kid yourself; it only exists still because Microsoft is another company like Google that shoves their subpar product onto people (by making it the default search on their subpar OS that took over the world) and hopes they never seek out alternatives. Most people are too dumb and lazy to seek out better alternatives, so they stick with the default search engines for Edge or Chrome. For everyone else, there is no real alternative, so while Google's search results are getting objectively worse, it doesn't matter because it's at least a lesser of two evils. They don't need to worry about becoming more mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position where they basically have no competition.

matheweis 5y ago
> Bing and engines that are different frontends for Bing results aren't alternatives, don't kid yourself; it only exists still because Microsoft is another company like Google that shoves their subpar product onto people > They don't need to worry about becoming more mediocre when they've made sure to put themselves in a position where they basically have no competition. Two may not be ideal but there is still competition there… If enough people use Bing/O365 instead of Google/Gsuite, that Google sees a significant shift in traffic, they should feel pressure to be less unfriendly and start innovating again.

gumby 5y ago

Is that a notion page? I couldn't use space to go to the next page (the oldest pagination system in the (computing) world). So I stopped reading at the end of the page.

quantified 5y ago

GSuite is poor compared with alternatives. Corporations make choices based on more criteria than just UI and functionality.

humanwhosits 5y ago

I've started using DDG for most searches, and a private email provider instead of gmail

paulpauper 5y ago
duck duck outsources to bing, so you are really using bing
- mostlysimilar 5y ago
  https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... >> To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    You’re giving the PR fluff that DDG has written. Even that is saying essentially what parent said. Most of those 400 sources are for the insane answers which are in the hundreds. Bing is by far their biggest index of results.

zanethomas 5y ago

Everyone is not using it.

zanethomas 5y ago

Everyone? Not me.

xlaacid 5y ago

oh, its an ad for their garbage extension. I see.

ipunchghosts 5y ago

I use yandex

narrator 5y ago
Yandex is nice because it acts like a normal search engine on controversial topics. Google search results are heavily curated on any politically controversial topic. This is all new since 2016, and especially the last 2 years. This is why forums are downranked. Someone could post wrongthink on a forum and google automatically identifies and downranks sites with wrongthink.

asimpletune 5y ago

I would gladly pay for a really good search engine if anyone is listening.

phendrenad2 5y ago
Me too. There's https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/, but their selling point is slightly different (I don't really care about ads per se, or privacy, I just want to get good search results (without paid promoted results or weird interstitial results modals, looking at you "people also clicked on" Google box!) and maybe be able to do advanced queries (search by file type, date, booleans, etc. I would also like to be able to ban sites from my results, for example, all of the spammy websites that scrape stackoverflow and mirror the pages, which Google somehow hasn't blocked themselves yet...
- darinf 5y ago
  With Neeva you can set preferred providers, more of this, less of that. See Site Preferences in Settings.
snielson 5y ago
Kagi is listening. Sign up and give it a shot. I've tried them all (Neeva, Brave, Bing, Yandex, etc.) and I like Kagi the best. They are planning to make it a paid service when it gets out of beta.
aghilmort 5y ago
listening / founder of https://breezethat.com https://breezethat.com - best used on desktop atm; free is ad-based, premium is ad-free, both have curated topic filters with more on way

paulpauper 5y ago

google needs better date filtering. old threads from reddit keep being marked as new.

aghilmort 5y ago
where after: & before: filters aren't working? e.g., this comparable example of date-based query, https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1504901028520640514 https://twitter.com/DotDotJames/status/1504901028520640514

Lamad123 5y ago

you.com is amazing, I'm not shilling for them, but I managed to find a couple youtube videos and a few other tings I couldn't find with google or DDG and Bing.

Crash0v3rid3 5y ago
Some examples would be nice

grey_earthling 5y ago

I'm kind of surprised that HN hears “Google” and still thinks “web search” — I assumed the headline was about the company as a whole, and my mind first went to Gmail/Google Drive/their office stuff, Android/Chrome, and YouTube. Are web search engines still “a thing” that people have opinions about? To me they're just kind of there and mediocre and unremarkable — the beige wallpaper of modern life, corporate blue and 12pt Arial; like a dreary shopping centre on a Tuesday; as exciting as a press release.

not2b 5y ago

The author missed the most important reason that Google search results often suck: tens of thousands of people are working very hard to make it suck. They call themselves "SEO specialists", and their job is to get their shitty site to the top of the rankings. It's an ongoing battle. Sure, Google wants to make money, but to do that they need to protect their search moneymaker and keep it dominant, so their incentive is to make the users happy. They aren't sucking on purpose.

BurningFrog 5y ago
The web has - as it inevitably would - adapted to being searched by Google. This makes it much harder to be a good search engine. I have no idea how to quantify how much the decline is because of that.
moistly 5y ago
Search isn’t Google’s moneymaker, advertising is. And those shitty SEO’d sites are choc-a-bloc with advertising. Google has little incentive to downrank them.
- asiachick 5y ago
  Google loses if people stop using it. Google has every incentive to downrank them.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    Google has incentives to degrade the quality of search results for the benefit of its profitability, up to the extent that is able to without turning away too many users. I think it's more like that rather than an either/or.
    - not2b 5y ago
      They have competition: if we get to the point where Bing/DuckDuckGo results are clearly better, people will start moving, and that will hurt their revenue badly.

jessriedel 5y ago

142 comments so far and no one is has mentioned the actual punchline of the OP: the Hypersearch chrome extension the author is pitching. Personally, I find the pitch compelling, but am very interested to hear from anyone who has used it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojagelicdlhnmldaiplbppfbolnnag https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hypersearch/feojag... Note: This extension "can read and change all your data on all websites". Perhaps that's necessary for what they are offering, but it seems very dangerous, especially for a 1-week old extension with 24 users and 2 ratings. Also, the "website" link (https://insight.space https://insight.space) on the Chrome extension page just says "The domain name insight.space is for sale!". Do other folks have reason to trust this? (General discussion of why Google Search is bad that does not actually engage with the specific details of the OP's arguments seems inappropriate in this thread; there have been innumerable HN threads about the general issue.)

gnicholas 5y ago
I can't speak to Hypersearch, but I've used their Hyperweb mobile extension and Insight Browser mobile app. They're great! I've even had the chance to chat/work with Abhinav a bit, and he's a nice and sincere guy. I also like this concept — I once toyed with the idea of a search engine/extension that would run a search in one engine by default and then notify you if other search engines would have returned significantly different search results. I'm excited to try this out! I agree that it's hard to trust an extension that runs on any website, and I guess one way you could work around this would be to manually limit it only to run on the domain where you do your primary web searching. It wouldn't have the full functionality, but it would provide the bulk of the functionality — without most of the risk.

eevilspock 5y ago

If the Earth's ecosystem is being destroyed, why are we, in particular those that are not poor, still consuming so much plastic, energy and stuff in general? If Facebook is bad for Democracy, why do so many people, especially those who decry the state of democracy, still use it? If sugar and processed foods are so bad for us, why do so many people consume so much? If the education system is tilted incredibly against children born into disadvantage and for those with advantage, why do the parents of the later, including liberal ones who fly the flag of equality and justice, hoard as much of quality educational resources for their own children as they can? (I'm sad that no one else is pointing this out)

russellbeattie 5y ago

There are so many websites, apps and media services that are slowly being affected by what I call "information ochlocracy", where those types of organizations which rely on large numbers of people for their existence, will naturally start to target the widest audience/viewership/user base, and the quality of the service as a whole suffer as a result. Here's the law: "The value of information is inversely proportional to the size of its intended audience." And its correlary: "The wider the audience, the less valuable a piece of information will need to be." These both stem from the basic premise that accurate information is more valuable the more scarce it is. What this creates basically is a situation in which the quality, depth and timeliness of a piece of information or media service will, over time, always tend towards the most broadly applicable content, despite being less and less specifically useful. In Google's case we can use cars as an example. Ideally, depending on the exact search term, you might want results providing information about buying them or maybe fixing them. However, maybe more advertising money can be made from using that search term to sell Forza or Gran Turismo video games, so the algorithms will detect this and shift accordingly. And since these games are being talked about on social media a lot, the algorithms pick that up too. Maybe some news mentioned the car or a celebrity bought one. The result might be that you're scrolling through ads from Microsoft and Sony, online shopping results of all the related gaming products, summaries of tweets about it, news snippets, etc., and almost nothing about what you were originally looking for. Searches for historical events like Pearl Harbor could have you scrolling past movie reviews before you finally get to a Wikipedia link. Ochlocracy is mob rule. It's the evil flip side of democracy, in which people actively make a choice based on considered opinions. In an ochlocracy, the choice is made by the whims of the mob as a whole, and they themselves don't even know the choices they're making. As Google and other companies optimize their services, the numbers will always lead to targeting the largest swath of people and as a result the overall quality naturally suffers. There's more to this, but this is the general problem. In order to keep growing from now on, every year Google's overall quality will have to suffer in order to be more applicable to larger numbers of people.

crobertsbmw 5y ago

I use DuckDuckGo and it seems like it’s gotten worse on the last couple months. Whenever I search for programming questions I expect staovetflow to be on top bit lately I’ve been getting geeksforweeks blog or some BS showing at the top of the search results every time. I don’t get it. It’s not just google…

code2life 5y ago
Have you tried you.com? I use it for coding all the time and works great, SO results come pre-ranked based on most voted answers and honestly saves me so much time .https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I%20convert%20from%20int%20to%20string%20in%20java&fromSearchBar=true https://you.com/search?q=how%20do%20I%20convert%20from%20int... . The best part - it's not google, so it has no ads or junk content

malwarebytess 5y ago

I wonder what googlers think about discussions like this? It doesn't seem like a rare opinion among techies that Google search has been declining in usefulness. Honestly, Google obfuscates the internet instead of making it accessible.

tytso 5y ago
Googler here, so here's a sample size of one. 1) I personally use Google, because it works for me. I will admit freely that part of this may be that I've gotten used to framing queries such that it works with the search engine that I'm used to using, and that's probably true for many people commenting on HN. 2) Every so often, these posts will inspire me to do my own non-scientific experiments such as using the same query, say, "Dua Lipa Levitating" or "Go modules vs packages" on say, DDG, Bing, and Google. When I did this experiment most reently, I generally find that Bing and Google are both more personally useful for me and DDG is less useful (but as the old latin saying goes, "De gustibus non est disputandum"). I will note that DDG had the more obstrusive advertising at the top of the results (Stubhub and Urban outfitters), and Bing and Google did not have any adds that I could find for that first query. Given my personal evaluations, it tends to cause me to discount what many of the DDG enthusiasts have to say about DDG being is way better, simply because it doesn't accord with my own quickie experiments. But hey --- maybe it's because they enter in search queries differently than I do. 3) Given the hyperbolic and/or highly emotive nature of some of the comments about "holding users hostage" and complete lack of nuance over "violating users' privacy", again, it causes me to have a hard time taking everything else that rhwy have to say seriously. 4) I sometimes suspect people are remembering the past with rose colored glasses. I remember the search quality of Alta Vista (and with all due respect to the people who worked on Alita Vista and having had friends who worked there), the results were pretty crappy, and Google's results were heads and shoulders above somoe of the other competitors that were available back in the day. 5) All of this is my personal opinion; and users should feel free to use whatever search engine they want, and competition is a good thing.
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  thanks for your 2c.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

It's trivial to switch search engines, so Google invests in PR to make it stickier. All those cool google projects that are constantly in the news? The ROI is PR. It also made massive capital investment in server farms, for fast results, especially google suggest. A way of converting profit into economic moat.

Guest19023892 5y ago

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google. 1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion. 2. You block Google from indexing the sites. 3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit. 4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarantee them decent traffic because they'll only be competing against a dozen sites on your search engine, instead of millions on Google. 5. A large number of respectable sites leave Google and are only available on your search engine. Businesses start becoming eager to join your exclusive network and ask to join your mission. 6. Google is left with blog and affiliate SEO spam, and you become the hero of the search engine world.

samwestdev 5y ago
Great way to kill both Reddit and SO lol
pyro123 5y ago
Couldn't that backfire though. Most people imo would find it it infuriating to jump between search engines at first leading to plenty new alternatives taking over ultimately leading to the demise of the above mentioned sites.
mrkramer 5y ago
I think this would spark all out search engine war. It would further degrade quality of search engines actually their usability since web content would be fragmented between different search engines. But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.
windex 5y ago
Doesn't google have something called the Google CSE where you specify which sites you will exclusively include in search results?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

tluyben2 5y ago

Google is still the fastest way to find things. The rest, including ddg just is not as good.

xeromal 5y ago
My phone randomly searches on bing from time to time and it blows my mind how shitty the search is. Fault Google, but it either knows what my brain wants, or my brain expects what Google provides.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  I had to use Bing in China ; the things are search for are not censored, but it works as well as Altavista does begin 2000; 10 pages of spam and then maybe stack overflow. I downloaded actual manuals like in the 80s to cope. I created [0] just to be able to find things faster locally when in China (last time was December 2019 though). It is shocking how competitors are that bad really. [0] https://git2pdf.com/ https://git2pdf.com/
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    I used bing while in China as well, it worked ok for what I needed. Much better than baidu where every image search for any innocuous term tended to bring up a bunch of porn.
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      Yeah, baidu was even worse. I asked my Chinese tech colleagues how the hell they got anything done at all with baidu and they said they just read manuals and don’t search. This was hardware and embedded, so cannot speak for other disciplines. And yes, I recognise your name from previous posts; you spent quite a lot of time in China right? I was in Suzhou for about 4 years. And after that HK for 2.
      - seanmcdirmid 5y ago

pgt 5y ago

Your honour, leading the witness. Everyone is not using Google.

DeathArrow 5y ago

1 changing is difficult 2 some people depend on Google services 3 there aren't too many alternatives 4 alternatives that exist are not integrated in the way Google services are That being said, it amazes me how no good search engines exist. By good I mean relevant results and less poisoning with advertising. It shouldn't be an impossible undertaking. Probably no one could find business sense in a decent search engine. If that is the case, I wonder if is possible to make a community backed search engine, similar to how Wikipedia works.

kdazzle 5y ago

I use Ecosia, and the results are usually good enough. Google’s results are often better, but now there are only like 4 results on the first page.

t0bia_s 5y ago

-> People are increasingly asking the questions that really matter in their Facebook and WhatsApp groups, Twitter, Discord and Slack communities, etc. That is true and make sense why it is so hard to search solutions nowdays. Especially software related.

yoyopa 5y ago

because stumbleupon is gone

octoberfranklin 5y ago

Because their crawler gets special privileges from cloudflare and the other CDNs. Here, read about the problem from one of the very few remaining non-GoogleBingYandex crawlers remaining: https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#willneverhappen https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#willneverhappen https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#stopevilcensorship https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html#stopevilcensorship

jokethrowaway 5y ago

Duckduckgo is vastly superior to Google in my experience. Normal searches give me the same information, news results feel less biased (they present articles from both left.and right viewpoint), better code search (especially with the code snippet extractor), less DMCA removed content The only things I reach out for google are: - Business hours of stores - Google maps Also, I don't often search for images but duckduckgo safety filter still let a few nsfw pics to go through. People are on Google because of habit

nathias 5y ago

Because they invested 20 years of majority of online capital into becoming the infrastructure of the web, much like Microsoft spent all of theirs to become the infrastructure of PC. These corporate strategies should be illegal.

cehrlich 5y ago

I have switched to Kagi for everything other than trying to find stuff that's on Google Maps. Search results are consistently better. I think their backend is mostly just Bing?

pictur 5y ago

It was ideas that mattered in the early 2000s. but nowadays marketing is much more important than ideas. In other words, an alternative that can work better than Google can of course be made, but its good work alone is never enough to compete with it. Or maybe I don't know.

Axien 5y ago

Google is already losing substantial market share. Let’s do an experiment. If you want to buy a blender, what is the first site you try? What about directions? Today’s weather? My answers are Amazon, Siri, and Alexa. Not Google. Google will continue to lose as these assistants become more powerful.

JamesAdir 5y ago

I think people are forgetting that large portion of data once available for search engines in blogs and forums is now dead. This data is live only on closed Facebook groups - which you can't search even if you are on Facebook and blogs are dying slowly with Facebook and twitter, with Facebook as a closed garden and twitter is on the way to become one. I don't know why people so eager on Reddit content, since their push to more monetization, the algorithm is aimed to create more traffic and not quality discussions. You can see it on the front page with many posts are more flammatory in nature.

endisneigh 5y ago

The fact SEO wasn’t mentioned once makes this lose all credibility imho

adipginting 5y ago

Google does not suck. It is the best search engine by far. Nobody else can compete. Our individual experience may vary though

simy 5y ago

site:Reddit.com

dhanna 5y ago

I don’t think you realize that web search is the largest computational problem in existence.

mrkramer 5y ago

I have plenty ideas on how to improve quality of search of Google but I figured out competing with Google would be akin to slow painful death so I wouldn't start my own search engine atm. If somehow we could influence the Google's management to listen to our suggestions. Maybe the root problem is indeed business model which eventually shapes how features are introduced and how UI/UX turns out to be. Google is smart but sleepy and somewhat distracted from their core business with 99 other projects they have.

dwighttk 5y ago

I’m not

jbn_norse 5y ago

What people, entrepreneurial subculture, and professionals don’t understand is that Google is in the business of delivering a crappy product because of how it relates to advertising psychology. It’s that simple. An example can be observed in SEO which doubles as a product framework in the context of performing a job for Google by altering content in the hopes of producing behavioral modification. This is almost always misunderstood by their best and brightest for lack of self awareness or actual intelligence. No one has ever been able to compete because quite frankly no one has any idea what the hell they’re doing. I do, however

mrkramer 5y ago
Google's algorithms are blackbox; nobody knows how they work so webmasters are trying to game the Google one way or another, vicious cycle that never ends. I agree with you nobody actually knows wtf they are doing because information asymmetry and information overload in the 21st century are brutal. Mass communication freed us but at the same time it is easy to get caught in never ending echo chambers.
- jbn_norse 5y ago
  Agreed. I blame it on the advertising media complex

loonster 5y ago

SEO ruined search.

adamlynch 5y ago

I kinda wish the opposite of hypersearch existed. Let me explain. I set up multiple browser profiles recently; work and personal. For work, I need Google. I'm a software engineer and I find that alternatives just aren't good enough for those kinds of searches yet. For personal, I'm trying to use an alternative. It's ok most of the time but sometimes the results aren't great so then I try searching again in Google. I'd like if there was an extension that augmented the alternative with Google results in the sidebar. If possible, in a way that preserved privacy.

OnlyMortal 5y ago

I don’t use it. DuckDuckGo for searching and a Mac or iOS. Who is this “everyone”?

ratsmack 5y ago

I haven't used google for at least three years, because I started to use Bing. Compared to what Google had become, Bing is far superior in my experience.

rufus_foreman 5y ago

Everyone isn't still using it. That's a lie.

gattis 5y ago

I'd ditch google if someone just built a way to grep the web.

kdot 5y ago

A domain block list would solve most of the search quality and spam problems, I don't understand why Google removed it.

xyzzy21 4y ago

Some of us DO NOT use Google or anything from them.