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When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar. None of which is interesting. Google is still good at finding specific things. Like when you commit an act of google programming or want to buy a book. But it’s really terrible and finding interesting content. You could say that the web is flooded with shit, and be right, but HN is evidence that not everything on the internet is terrible, google just isn’t your portal to it anymore. So we visit HN, but that means google has become yahoo, aol search and all those other search engines it replaced by being a combination of relevant, interesting and exploratively fresh. I mean, 2018 was the year I adopted DuckDuckGo as my standard search engine, and it wasn’t because of privacy. Sure privacy helps, but to be honest, it was because it gives more interesting results. I’ll still use !g when I’m searching for something I know google will find, but if I’m just exploring a topic I’ll almost never use google. |
Can you be more specific and give examples of "things" you're searching for and what you mean by "uninteresting"?
For me, I have been issuing 50+ random searches on Google every single day for years. I've been using Google since 2000 and it almost always finds what I'm looking for. Yesterday, I searched for "replace Moen faucet cartridge" and it returned plenty of pages showing exactly how to do it. A week ago I searched for "install Windows 10 from USB drive" and again, it found plenty of helpful pages that answered that question. And recently, I ran across a cook I never heard of before named "Alice Waters". A Google search told me she owned a restaurant and what her specialty was.
In my experience, the topic has to be obscure or brand new for Google searches to be useless. For some trivia, I did find a weird effect of the search algorithm for a person named "Bettina Warburg". She's a young woman who's given several presentations on blockchains[1]. However, for some reason, the Google, Bing, and DDG search results have a side box citing someone else that was born in 1900 and died in 1990[2][3][4]. Something about her is tripping up the search engines. Bing in particular has the odd logic of placing the photos of the still-living BW above the text of the BW who died.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bettina+warburg
[2] http://google.com/search?q=bettina+warburg
[3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=bettina+warburg
[4] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bettina+warburg