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The man who killed Google Search?

(www.wheresyoured.at)
1884 points elorant | 7 comments | 23 Apr 24 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 1.266s | source | bottom
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nbittich ◴[23 Apr 24 18:29 UTC] No.40135406[source]▶
Everytime I need to make a search on Google, I start to feel anxious, already convinced I'm not going to find anything useful about the problem I'm trying to solve. This often means I already tried everything else. It's a sad situation.a product shouldn't make you feel anxious.
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imzadi ◴[23 Apr 24 19:17 UTC] No.40136014[source]▶
I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.
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ianbutler ◴[23 Apr 24 19:24 UTC] No.40136093[source]▶
I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google, seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on technical matters now.
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1. kelnos ◴[23 Apr 24 20:10 UTC] No.40136688[source]▶
Strange, I rarely don't find what I need on Kagi, and when I do and fall back to Google, the results there are no more helpful.
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2. dingnuts ◴[23 Apr 24 20:34 UTC] No.40136930[source]▶
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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3. fuzztester ◴[24 Apr 24 00:27 UTC] No.40139019[source]▶
>>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.

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4. mining ◴[24 Apr 24 01:03 UTC] No.40139252[source]▶
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?

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5. fuzztester ◴[24 Apr 24 01:14 UTC] No.40139316{3}[source]▶
>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.

6. dpkirchner ◴[24 Apr 24 12:39 UTC] No.40143657{3}[source]▶
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.

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7. mining ◴[25 Apr 24 10:47 UTC] No.40155813{4}[source]▶
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.