For what it's worth, I still use Google all the time, for a wide variety of uses, from extremely specific programming questions, to vague "should you take painkillers when you have a fever?" type questions, ranging across pretty much everything, and I have not noticed any decrease in results quality or had any trouble finding what I wanted.
You do need to know how to ask, but if you know how to ask, Google knows how to answer very well indeed.
I wonder if this new "Google sucks" meme is manufactured by some competing interest. I know it sounds a bit conspiracy-theory-like, but there have been many articles over the last few months repeating this theme.
>I wonder if this new "Google sucks" meme is manufactured by some competing interest.
It's not manufactured by anything beyond Google sucking. I've spent the better part of a year quietly raging as an essential tool loses its edge. I wondered for a long time if I was alone. Surely, I though, I must be crazy, others would also speak out if Google were getting that bad.
And finally, they are.
I wish, instead of spraying their pants about Google Suggest and cribbing the social media mechanism of the moment, Google would focus on what matters and make their core product work as well as it used to.
Instantly returning spammy, junky results doesn't do dick to improve the search experience.
I wish, instead of spraying their pants about Google Suggest and cribbing the social media mechanism of the moment, Google would focus on what matters and make their core product work as well as it used to.
I'm sure they are, but in the presence of increasing numbers of spammers and content mills that's an AI-complete problem.
It's always the same spammy site that comes up over and over again. Surely they can fix this. At this point even a mechanical turk paid to manually blacklist some spam website could improve the situation.
it's not an AI problem. It's not wanting to hurt the bottomline. Sites with more ads than anything else are banned from DuckDuckGo, for example. And that is a search engine run by 1 person only, if I am not mistaken.
Maybe so. But I think the more likely explanation is that people are starting to find better results by using Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, IMDB, Blekko, DuckDuckGo, etc. that Google, comparatively, looks worse than it did before.
After reading this article, I switched my default search engine to Blekko. But then I had to switch it back, because honestly the results were nowhere near what I was looking for.
I guess you have a good tolerance for 'spam' or your keyword generation algo for search is very good. I haven't been able to get good results from google for sometime. In fact this year (oh I should say last year), I wasn't able to get results that answered my queries on the first page many a times.
When I moved to DuckDuckGo, I was a happy man. Now DuckDuckGO is my default search engine. I use Blecko when I am exploring for sites and content. I use vertical specific search sites for certain domains, citeseer and mendeley for work related stuff, and surprise, surprise, I find twitter to be a good source for searching too!
google search sucks is not a meme, at least for me it's a reality.
Really? I have had enormous troubles with using the web interface for gmail. I have receive "Trouble receiving that message..." almost weekly and now I know not to depend the availability of my emails if they are more than a year old. The worst part is that I am a student, and I barely get more than 10 emails a day. Imagine how traumatized a busy working individual would be.
You do need to know how to ask, but if you know how to ask, Google knows how to answer very well indeed.
I wonder if this new "Google sucks" meme is manufactured by some competing interest. I know it sounds a bit conspiracy-theory-like, but there have been many articles over the last few months repeating this theme.