I suppose that’s true, they are always going to want EVERYONE to book through their hotel. Don’t know if they have to kick back money to the services, I don’t use hotels that much.
Likely ease of booking helps them get more business than they would otherwise.
My problem with the way Google search results acts these days is not that it’s hard for ME to use - it is, but I search the Web all day so I know how to navigate it. And you guys seem to be figuring out how to navigate it. You know when you search something and results seem off.
But less savvy people, especially kids, seem to take the results page itself as the answer to their query. Especially since everyone is on a phone, so the “answer” is whatever fits on the top of their phone screen.
My niece is into the Titanic and I asked her a question about it. She Googled it and just read the first result snipped that came up and even I knew it was very, very wrong but she was like “hey it’s what Google says.” As if Google itself is an actual knowledge resource but it’s NOT, it’s a way to FIND actual knowledge.
My mom does it all the time. Types in a question, Google “gives an answer,” end of search. No verification, no deeper dive. Just whatever shows up first. This is great for finding an actor’s age but for a lot of stuff, it takes more deeper digging to find the right answer.
As someone who works At The Internet, I know that Google’s Structured Data, particularly the FAQ type, is really the hot new thing in SEO. Put a set of questions & answers on your page, mark it up behind the scenes as a FAQ, bam now your site’s text shows up not just as a search result on Google but the answer to a question. Or the perceived answer to a perceived question. No fact checking involved!
I can generally find what I want on Google with proper terms. Though this is still the case, sometimes it is on the second page instead of the initial results. It has been optimized for ads for a long time and I don’t notice it has become worse recently.
Those of us who remember Alta Vista, Yahoo, Netscape etc. remember Google was certainly better. But not dramatically better - the idea you couldn’t use the Interwebz without Google is untrue although many of their innovations broke new ground. The idea personalized ads justify any invasion of privacy is ridiculous.
One of my annoyances these days is when I ask a question in Google my search results are filled with links to Quora answers. Quora is the Dane Cook of answer sites, and not to be trusted. But it *always seems to beat StackExchange or other better quality information like actual source material. If I want to know the thickness of a heat shield, my first result shouldn’t be to the opinion of some rando on Quora.
I think Google is just losing the SEO war, and they don’t care because the people who work the hardest on SEO tend to be large commercial companies that Google makes a lot of money from. This isn’t going to change until their search gets so bad or their competitors get so good that they visibly start shedding users. The same is happening to Amazon - their vendors are good at gaming the search engine, and Amazon doesn’t care because they make momey from those vendors.
The next competitor to Google will,probably be a real-time Large Language Model like ChatGPT but which updates its training data constantly… I’m already using ChatGPT for some things instead of Google.
For a brief time it was possible to ban a site from your search results on Google. It was easy if you knew it was there. Mouse over the result, click on the dots that appear, select “don’t show me results from this website” or something similar, and then it was gone, never to annoy again.
For me it was Pinterest that was annoying. It would be all over searches for recipes, but I can’t view the page without an account, and I have no interest in getting one.
I can’t figure out how to block sites anymore. Maybe there’s a way, but it’s not easy to find. There is a thing now called “Remove Result” but that is not the same thing at all, and not what I want.
Pinterest used to dominate image searches, but it seems like they’ve adjusted things so that happens a lot less often now.
Yeah, I should have mentioned Pinterist. I won’t get an account there, and at least for a while it seemed like most of the images being served up came from Pinterist. Gah.
This is a lesson in how even people who start out with a principled idea eventually get co-opted by special interests and money, or by political power.
What’s going to be worse for me as a Canadian is that after bill C11 the CRTC in Canada will have influence over Google searches, being able to demand the injection of Canadian content or anything else they think I should see rather than what I actually value in my search. They’re going to do the same to Facebook and Twitter. Looks like I’ll be using a VPN at that point, which will lower the value of geographic searches. Oh well.
You can just force that.
VPNs will become very popular in Canada after C-11. I give it 3, 5 years before the feds ban VPNs.
Probably. We’re also looking at moving to Starlink, but I’m guessing Canada will try to ban those too at some point.
Yeah, I use DuckDuckGo but I’m not sure why at this point. Privacy and all that, but the search engine is far inferior to Google. Also, I’ve noticed that in searches about anything politically controversial, DDG is much more likely to return right-wing crank sites.
I tried that ONCE about 20 years ago and got exactly 1 hit. I figured I should just retire then. Unfortunately, I can’t remember one of the words; one of them was “coelacanth” and the other was something equally obscure and completely unrelated. The hit was to a piece of extremely avant-garde literature.
Back in the day that was called a “Googlewhack”. The goal was to get exactly 1 hit. Anything more was a failed Googlewhack.
If you’re into British comedy, you might like Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure.
I doubt that’s even possible anymore, at least without using Boolean operators. Trying it now always returns a bunch of stuff that’s relevant to only one of the words.
Coelacanth Trotskyism: Top hit is for an archived issue of History Today magazine in which the words appeared in unrelated articles. The next four are general reference articles about one or the other, from Wikipedia, the Smithsonian Institution, Britannica, and “Trey the Explainer on Twitter”. Then there are four “Images”, all of which appear to feature only one or the other. Next is an article from a 1998 issue of International Socialism called “The Legitimacy of Modern Art” which I am not even going to attempt to read, but based on the quote the author compares something or other to a coelacanth at some point. Possibly the hit was due to the fact that this article was thought highly enough to be archived in the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism Online. Next is an idmb review of a 2001 video entitled “100 Reasons Why Evolution Is So Stupid!” I think creationists try to make some sort of point or something about coelacanths, and presumably the guy takes a swipe at Trotsky at some point. Note that this search returned no commercial sites at all on the first page. Presumably Trotsky would be proud.
**Coelacanth extrajudicial:**Top hit is the Smithsonian coelacanth article. The next thing up is the “Images” bar, three of which are identical and all link to the same etsy.com listing for coelacanth fossils (which is also the second overall result) and the other is a coelacanth iron-on patch you can buy. There don’t really seem to be any relevant hits for this one, in the sense of a quote using both words in the same paragraph. So it seems like if it can’t come up with anything else, it will try to sell you things.
Coelacanth yokozuna (the highest rank in Japanese sumo wrestling): There’s a species of coelacanth called the “yokozuna slickhead”? Are you kidding me??
Coelacanth primogeniture: The top several hits don’t include one word or the other. The images are weird; two of them are links to “list of words” .txt files, then to the American Heritage Dictionary, which apparently has an appendix on “Indo-European roots” which might include both words…then, I guess segueing from that, it starts trying to sell you dictionaries, including by the eighth image, “Curious George’s Dictionary”, which I am pretty sure doesn’t include either of those words, even though George is a very clever monkey. But clicking on Curious George actually takes you right back to the AHD Indo-European roots article! The sixth hit actually seems like the most relevant, an article from the Review of Periodical Literature in 2002. It’s paywalled, but the quotes are
by D Pratt · 2006 — Bryer’s piece is a historical coelacanth, which discusses 'the origins and consequences of … society than if primogeniture had prevailed. Lord Palmerston.
But again, the actual non-image search results were completely devoid of commercial sites. Weird.
Correction to the above: I’d forgotten I’d recently given up on DDG and switched to Yahoo! as my default. It says something that I hadn’t noticed any difference.
Here’s a real example of how they compare to Google. I was looking for information on a politician I had recently heard of who was running for Illinois State Senate. I wanted to know if she won, and more generally about how the race had gone, what the issues had been, who her opponent was, etc. My search term was “Illinois State Senate race 2022 Rachel Ventura primary”.
On Yahoo!, the first entry was Ballotpedia, showing that she did in fact win. Next was her campaign website homepage, which wasn’t very useful. Then came a slew of random news stories from various dates in 2022, many of them election night stories from a about her primary and general election wins. Almost all hits were from the same local newspaper, the Daily Herald, which is paywalled. Not until the bottom of the fourth page did I find a link to an unpaywalled article which succinctly described the general outline of the primary race; who her opponent was, what the points of contention were, and how nasty it got.
On Google, the first hit was also Ballotpedia. The second was a link to a particular subsection of her campaign website devoted to press clippings, which in turn linked to multiple articles fully satisfying my curiosity. Scrolling down, I see that Google returned hits to campaign stories from a far broader range of news outlets than Yahoo!, and also multiple links to the homepages of groups which had endorsed her.
Because it is my nature to beat everything into the ground, I also tried the search on DDG, and its results were middling; first page was Ballotpedia, campaign site homepage, and lots of election night stories. But the second page had some informative articles, including some Google hadn’t picked up on. Results were more varied than Yahoo!, but it did have a lot more hits from the Daily Herald.
Here’s a pretty good article on that.
A thing that bugs me:
I type in [word] into the search box. Google asks me “did you mean to search for [ward]?” and conveniently (not) provides lots of results for [ward], pretty much burying any possible results for [word]. Approximately 95% of the time no, I didn’t want to search for [ward], I wanted to search for [word]. I can see why they do that because the other 5% of the time it’s helpful, and over all searches they get it may be helpful a lot more of the time – but.
But that should be an option on which you can click ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and if you click ‘no, Google, I meant what I typed’ then all those results for [ward] instead should go away with that one click. Even if there really are only three results for [word].
This was complained and answered a couple times already upthread.
Looking back further (I had only gone back through the December discussion), I see that it was indeed complained about by others upthread; but I don’t see that it’s been answered, at least not in the fashion in which I think Google should answer it: by providing a one-click method of restricting the search to what was actually asked for.