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Google, the worst search engine to ever exist in all universes for all time
9 points by bbarnett 31 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
It's become beyond terrible. The aliasing is ridiculous now. Responses are abysmal. Normal search is utterly and completely useless for me.

The only way to even hope to get a result is via 'web' search. I never, ever get a hit on what I want otherwise.

And the aliasing? It's like trying to get grandpa with a hearing aid to understand what you're asking for. "Huh?" "Huh?", replies Google, with inane wrong results.

No, Google, searching for 'textile' is not the same as 'text'. Searching for 'ascii' is not the same as 'unicode'. I get this every single search. I had these two in the last 15 minutes. Google even bolds terms like "text editor" in its output, when I search for textile. No Grandpa, I said "textile"!

Why? Why do you think anyone ever at any time and place in any universe or any situation would want some alias of what they asked for? Do you go to a restaurant, and ask for 'steak', and end up with pork? A salad with romaine lettuce, and a plate with iceburg shows upon your table?

No one, ever, at any time ever wants something different than what they ask for, unless they already use generic terms. "A salad", instead of "A salad with romaine lettuce".

No, it's not spam and sites trying to game Google. Quotes and web search immediately resolve the issue.

And dropping search terms! We're not even talking about "OK, there's nothing left to find, so let's give results with missing search terms".

Nope. Missing term results are right at the top. Even if quotes are used, sometimes.

This all makes Google useless. It's junk. It's garbage. I used to be Google's Number 1 supporter, but the caliber and quality of what Google does today in search, is pathetic. So basically:

- I have to use web always (click on a tab for every search)

- I have to put quotes around every single search term

- I still have to deal with missing terms

And here's the awesome kicker.

If I use an add-on via firefox to default to web only? I immediately get captchas. Others have noticed this, even if it's editing their default search engine to include udm whatever. EG, it's not the plugin.

It's Google applying a negative score if you default to that, causing some to hit some limit where captchas trigger.

No Google, trying to get around your horrid and terrible and ridiculous and inane and moronic and lame and stupid and absurd and useless and pathetic default search by using 'web' isn't spammy.

Note: this submission has been edited after I calmed down a bit, removing inflammatory and excessive language. Yeah. Google has made me their enemy with their endless deluge of stupid.



If it’s any comfort to you, I read your whole post and enjoyed it. Since it’s on the topic of search engines being stupid, I think I have to share this article: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline


So where is yours?


Do you mean why doesn’t he make a search engine? If so, that’s very silly.

First of all, if he is working on a search engine, why would he tell people while complaining about Google? That would just make it seem spammy.

Also even if he isn’t working on a search engine, how will the people who have the skills to make a good search engine know that there is a market for it unless people complain regardless of their own lack of skills?


Give me a couple dozen million dollars and I'd be happy to build one.


It wouldn’t cost 24 million.

If you make a small search engine as a prototype to develop better ranking and other things, that only costs time and mental energy. If you make a meta-search engine in the style of Searxng, that also only costs time and mental energy, and if you made it get all available result pages from it’s sources and then make sure they match the query and re-rank them, it’d probably be very powerful.

If you downloaded the entire Common Crawl (300 billion pages) so that you could index it, it would take up about 816 Terabytes, which using the cheapest surplus HDDs that I found would cost about $6000 for storage. If you used SSDs at standard market value instead, it would be about $40000.

It might cost 24 million if you wanted to serve thousands of queries per second right off the bat, but that would just be dumb. You could either build copies of your search engine and sell them as appliances, or you could make it available as an online service, and then just raise the subscription price until you have few enough customers not to use all your bandwidth. You could also charge per query. The Common Crawl is bigger than Bing, and possibly about the same size as Google, except that it includes archives of pages that don’t exist anymore. You can be damn sure you’d have customers.




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