Comment by dingnuts

7 months ago

this is my experience as well. sometimes I accidentally search Google and I find it extremely annoying and the results to be demonstrably worse most of the time

the example I like to show people is searching "how to fix a leaky faucet"

Kagi shows helpful answers and videos from sites like This Old House.

Google shows ads for plumbers near me. If I had wanted a plumber, I would've searched for that.

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dingnuts

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mining  7 months ago

Searching "how to fix a leaky faucet" on Google turned up the page from "This Old House" immediately (top 3 results, top 2 were wikiHow and a YouTube video that seemed OK at a glance).

I'm not sure why my personal results are often so much better than posts like this one whenever I do the experiment - maybe it's based on location?

  • dpkirchner  7 months ago

    Do you use an ad blocker? I can confirm the results: plumber ads that extend below the fold, followed by one useful article from Home Depot, then a useless "people also ask" blob of links, some videos (likely useful, faucets aren't complex), and another useless "people also" blob.

    I am in the US, if that matters.

    • mining  7 months ago

      I searched on mobile, so no ad blocker. There were no ads for that query, and all of the content up to maybe the 5th result was an acceptable answer to the query (i.e. on a site that wasn't plastered with ads)

      If I search "plumber" the first 3 results are ads.

      I'm in Australia.

fuzztester  7 months ago

>>the example I like to show people is searching "how to fix a leaky faucet"

>Kagi shows helpful answers and videos from sites like This Old House.

>Google shows ads for plumbers near me. If I had wanted a plumber, I would've searched for that.

JFC.

This illustrates one of my biggest complaints about current Google (which has been the case for sometime):

They make their software behave as though they know what I (you) want, better than I do (you do).

So they give you the results they think you need, rather than those you really want.

Infuriating squared.

And idiots cubed.

  • fuzztester  7 months ago

    >So they give you the results they think you need, rather than those you really want.

    Correction: I should say, their stupid machine learning algorithms think you need.