this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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I hear a lot of people complaining about how they can't find stuff with Google, but it seems to work fine for me? i don't know what I'm doing differently
I use brave as well, but in my opinion Google searches work better for me? I guess I'm just more used to it or something, for some reason I find things quicker on Google and also I often rely on the search bar calculator with chrome which doesn't work as well on brave (since in order to get my answer, I have to press enter after entering in an expression. not sure if there's a way to change this)
edit note: I mostly use search engines to look up random information or for programming
An example of search engines failing me miserably last month:
I wanted to hire a photographer, so I started searching using keywords like "wedding photographer MAJOR_CITY_NAME", "photography MCN", "event photographer MCN", etc. The top results I got were all mostly along the lines of "top ten wedding photographers in MCN" i.e. listicles with links to a few photographers who probably paid the listicle creator? There were maybe one or two links to a photographer's website itself in the first page.
I'm okay with ignoring the first page of results and moving on to following pages. But rather than giving me individual photographer's websites in subsequent pages, I started getting listicles for "top ten wedding photographers in OTHER_CITIES". I'd click through multiple pages of results to find maybe 5 direct website links.
What actually helped me find a photographers eventually was entering the exact same key words on Instagram. Almost every single one of them that I found on Instagram had an excellent website and the city name, and their addresses were mentioned clearly on their websites. So, it wasn't a case of them not having enough information on their website. It's just that search engines chose to prioritise listcles of photographers from other cities rather than giving me links to individual websites of photographers in my own city.
In this case, I got lucky because photographers have a presence on Instagram which has a functional search engine. What if I want to find a plumber, or someone else? I'm forced to just trust a listicle creator because search engines don't want to give away links to single purpose websites and only want to keep us on websites with a shit ton of content (that may or may not be what you need) and ads.
/rant
Why the hell are you not switching to Google Maps when you're searching then? If you want something in a specific area, especially local work, you search on Maps...
Bro,
I have been using Google before 2000
Had an early invite to Gmail. Got mobile search results over text message before smart phones.
Google maps didn't even launch until 2005.
Some of us went places and did things before Google+
I don't disagree that if I want to go somewhere I might search g maps.
But the search results are really shit lately.
I miss competition with several web spiders
Just sounds like people don't know how to use the services available to them. Even if I don't specifically go to maps to search, searching "wedding photographer" immediately puts a maps result at the top of the list with 3 photographers in my area.
I remember Lycos, Altavista, Looksmart, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc -- You are putting some awfully rose tinted glasses on saying that those had anywhere close to the results that Google was putting out at the time; or even now for that matter.
Even now, the competition is garbage with 1 exception -- OpenAI's GPT3.5 and GPT4. If they can get the hallucinations under control, it's incredibly good at distilling information you are looking for. Unfortunately, it is also TERRIBLE for any kind of up-to-date information.
Every time someone says "Google couldn't find this thing", I say -- "what were you searching for exactly" - and I put it in, and I get perfect results. I have no idea what people are doing, or maybe if Google is geo-blocking certain things, but I have not once had anyone show me empirically that their results are any worse today than before.
Additionally - nobody should be using Google for search without an Adblocker.