
Giving up on Google - thaumaturgy
http://robsheldon.com/giving-up-on-google
======
InfinityX0
I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching
this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways
to tear down big brother and look for holes. So, we notice every spam entry.

I work in search and I can't recollect a time EVER having been frustrated with
what Google gave me - and having to go to another engine. And I live, eat, &
breathe the thing.

I understand I have a notoriously small sample (as compared to the entire
world of search - and I generally search for terms that have been optimized by
similar search professionals), but the idea is that really, 10 good search
results is pretty much impossible - what matters is that there is always
three-four results on every page that are relevant. And without fail, Google
continues to deliver this - at least for me.

This process is what occurs for every monopoly. We hate the Yankees,
Microsoft, whatever. It's natural to want to bring down something so
dominating. But for me, Google is doing an absolutely incredible job.

The only potential I see for something like DDG unseating them (or even
gaining legitimate market share) is if Google loses the ability to pivot. If
this occurs, the dilution of the algorithm is possible, which could turn their
product to crap.

BUT, given their history of 200+ algorithm changes per year, they have shown
that not to be the case. Because of this, I imagine Google will be with us - &
strongly with us - for the entirety of our lifetimes.

~~~
blacksmythe

      >> I  really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. 
    

I think that this is a case where we were comparing Google to what existing
before (Yahoo, etc), and thought "this is great". Now we compare Google only
to what we think it 'should' be.

~~~
thaumaturgy
For me, I remember how great Google was when I started using it around 1999,
compared to AltaVista or Metacrawler; it was great because it was able to find
results that the other two just couldn't, and it did it quickly.

Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.

~~~
patrickaljord
> Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.

You're spoiled then.

~~~
thaumaturgy
"It could be worse" is always a valid rebuttal to any complaint.

But it doesn't actually move the conversation forward at all.

~~~
patrickaljord
But I didn't mean "It could be worse", I meant google search is actually
amazing and I find what I'm looking for 99% of the time.

------
danilocampos
I am often annoyed by Google. Its word clustering is too clever by half.

At one point I was debugging, I think, an NSTableView object. Google says "eh,
fuck it, iPhone dev is much more popular, here's UITableView. Have fun with
that."

And so then I have to wrap NSTableView in quotes to force Google to use my
input as I've provided it.

I wish I could turn this kind of stuff off.

~~~
petercooper
I can't think of any good examples now, but in some IDEs in the 80s and 90s
they had an "expert mode" you could toggle on and off to extend the number of
menu options and the like. A similar setting on Google would be great.

I know a little of Google's syntax like the + and " workarounds, but having a
literal search as default would be worthwhile for many users. I recall that I
switched to Altavista back in the mid 90s because it offered a feature like
that.

~~~
danilocampos
From your mouth to Marissa Meyer's ears.

My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode."

No instant search.

No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search.

No word clustering/auto-substitution.

It would be awesome.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, please.

The image search has been a pet peeve of mine, especially because of the way
the results are provided to the end users. It seems they do everything they
can to stop people from visiting actual websites through the image search.

Instant search was fun for about 30 seconds. Then it's back to work and then
it is rather annoying. At least you can disable it (just to the right of the
search bar there is a little settings menu).

The word clustering and auto-substitution are a real pain in the ass,
especially when it keeps coming up with stuff that just isn't right but is
more popular. I really can't stand that. I find myself using quoted queries
far more frequently than in the past.

2008 sounds just about right, they can market it as 'google classic' for all I
care.

~~~
petercooper
_2008 sounds just about right, they can market it as 'google classic' for all
I care._

It makes me wonder if, perhaps, Google2010 is just Google's _New Coke_ ;-)

------
dasil003
I don't understand the Gmail complaint _at all_. Sure it has its weaknesses
such as the policy to not spend the resources stemming emails causing search
to suck, but Gmail pretty much defined the usable webmail interface for power
users.

 _The interface on my webmail software feels like a mail client should -- easy
navigation, threaded conversations, multiple window panes, and it's fast.
Google on the other hand took years before they could be bothered to add
buttons to Gmail, and even now Gmail's interface is an ugly monument to 90's
era design principles._

Uh, in 2004 when Gmail launched it was one of the first widespread AJAX apps.
It made Hotmail / Yahoo feel like molasses, gave you 200x storage, and added
the idea of labels instead of folders. They obsessed tremendously over
performance to make it usable by people who hitherto had only been able to
tolerate desktop mail clients.

Now I realize a lot of things change in 6 years, but hell, Dreamhost is still
using SquirrelMail. The author just throws it out there like amazing webmail
is a foregone conclusion, yet I've not seen any webmail that beats Gmail even
by a little bit. Can someone enlighten me?

~~~
Jeema3000
A lot has changed since 2004. Yahoo for example has 3 pane viewing, tabbed
email and chat, you can scroll through and see every email in your Inbox ever
received without having to click any links.

It feels pretty much like a desktop application, actually...

~~~
sandipc
threaded emails is a major reason to choose gmail over yahoo (in 2010)

~~~
avar
GMail doesn't even respect In-Reply-To, and frequently screws up threading on
any technical mailing list I subscribe to. It's good at its ad-hoc
"conversation" grouping, not threading.

------
ggrot
Maybe a minor quibble, but isn't DDG powered by Yahoo BOSS with features added
on top? Yet, Rob then goes on to say "Yahoo can't be taken seriously" and
points out queries where Yahoo does a poor job of handing synonyms - DDG has
the same problem for the exact same query if you try it. Furthermore, the
other queries which he suggests give irrelevant results on Google seem to give
me irrelevant results on DDG.

~~~
alecco
Among the differences, DDG blocks MFA content mills and junk sites. If you
report one they add it quite fast.

~~~
moultano
Yahoo certainly tries to do that too, although I guess you're getting the
union of yahoo/bing's spam-fighting and DDG's spam fighting.

I suspect that of the two, yahoo's has a much bigger impact given the size of
the teams involved.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Actually I remove tons of spam from the Yahoo, Bing & other feeds.

~~~
moultano
What order of magnitude is tons? Not to take away from what you're doing, but
historically 90% of new domains are spam.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I'd have to check for exact numbers, but for a large % of searches I'm
removing links from those APIs.

------
zmmmmm
I've tried several times to give up my Google habit. Once for an extended
period with DDG. However each time, despite the correctly mentioned issues
with spam, gaming etc, I still experienced severe withdrawal symptoms (and I
made myself use the alternatives for 2 weeks at least, so I wasn't just
hankering for the familiar).

Ironically, of all Google's services, search is the one I could most easily
replace and would most like to replace, if an equally good competitor emerges.
On the other hand, giving up Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and even Buzz
at this point would be hard as my life is interwoven into them in many complex
ways. The fact that my whole life is stored in these accounts but the same
account lets google track my searches and associate them to me scares me and
actually makes me _want_ to replace Google as my search engine.

~~~
clofresh
I agree that Google search is the easiest to replace. I've been using DDG for
a few weeks now and I've been happy with it. I tried to look for a good
competitor to Gmail but every other competitor is just plain bad. It's like
everyone just gave up on email after Gmail came along.

------
jsz0
My biggest peeve about Google is how subpar their search is outside of Web &
GMail. YouTube is the one that burns me the most. I often have to go to web
search and append youtube at the end of my query to find the relevant result.
The same _exact_ search on YouTube gets me nothing relevant. The same is true
of Android Market. A simple misplaced space, typo or misspelling breaks your
search. It's like time warping back to web search circa 1996. I've never
understood why Google doesn't apply all their knowledge about search to these
other services.

------
fluidcruft
Well, as a single sample, I tried the first thing that came to mind in google
and duckduckgo. "breast shimming" which refers to the process of adjusting the
magnetic field of a MRI scanner to obtain images of the breast (relevant to a
project I'm working on). Every single duckduckgo result is irrelevant. Most of
googles results are relevant. It's too bad because google is somewhat hit or
miss for me. Someone needs to sic duck duck go on pubmed.

~~~
sagarm
Did you turn safe search off on DDG? When I gave these queries a go, I noticed
that DDG stripped "breast" out of the query. The results seemed much more
relevant once safe search was disabled.

Not that I'd want to go around with safe search disabled all the time...

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yes, this is a safe search problem. Presumably
[http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming&kp=-1](http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming&kp=-1)
is what you want.

Edit: FWIW, I fixed this: <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+shimming> should
now work as well.

~~~
fluidcruft
Excellent! Safe search didn't occur to me.

------
alanh
Just last Friday, I was pleasantly surprised to find Duck Duck Go is the only
search engine (of those I tried) that shows me a hex color when I search it,
e.g. <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23004499>

And not long before, I searched for my oldest still-surviving site (on
Angelfire). I discovered that while Google returned 20 garbage sites, they
didn’t include mine; my site was the _only_ one DDG returned.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
The balance is between offering a cool feature and the danger that all those
features accrete into cruft. If you wanted something similar for Google, you
can create your own "Subscribed Link" to do this:
<http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/>

I've created a subscribed links to mimic the UNIX cal command, for example:
[http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-
googl...](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-google/)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
It's a case by case thing. In this case, the query space is pretty segmented
to avoid cruft.

------
Matt_Cutts
I left a few comments below, but I wanted to say thanks for mentioning some
searches that Google didn't do well on. They're interesting searches, so I
thought I'd break them down:

\- [avaya 103r manual] It's a fair complaint to say some low-quality results
are returned, but there's a reason. Do that search and Google says "About
1,510 results." That's a minuscule number of results--it usually means the web
has very little content that matches that query in any way. That's why the
lower-quality and foreign results show up: we're scraping the bottom of the
barrel of the web to find any results at all, and there's not many pages that
have that those words. If you go to avaya.com and search for [103r], they
don't find any results either. It's hard for Google to return useful Avaya
results when avaya.com doesn't have that word anywhere on the site. :)

\- You were looking for specs on a Gateway mt6840 motherboard, specifically
the socket. Instead of trying to solve that in one query, I'd go for doing it
in two steps. I did the query [site:gateway.com mt6840] to see if there was
any authoritative result, and the #1 result was
[http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Oasis/1014554R/1014...](http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Oasis/1014554R/1014554Rsp2.shtml)
which has specs for that motherboard, but not the socket. But that spec sheet
mentions that the motherboard uses a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T2450. So
then I searched for [T2450 socket] and got a Wikipedia page that says the
T2450 uses Socket M. Just to be safe, searching for [MT6840 "socket m"], which
returns a page on computing.net that's a forum with some ads, but the page
mentions "945GM-based laptops support Socket M Core 2 Duo CPUs." The Gateway
spec sheet says the MT6840 uses a 945GM chipset, so Socket M seems like a safe
bet.

\- The last search was about an OpenSolaris machine that wouldn't boot and
that said "Error 16" instead. The complaint was that the results were
stale/old. I did the search [opensolaris boot "error 16"]. Then over on the
left-hand side, click "Show search tools" and click "Past year" to get results
from the past year. The #1 result shows a long discussion about debugging this
(which implies it's not a trivial issue). The #2 result is a discussion that
points into opensolaris.org, which then points to this bug:
<http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6774616> . My point on this
query is that you can use the left-hand search bar to restrict the results to
a certain time range (e.g. only results from the last week, month, or year).

We do try to provide tools (e.g. estimated number of results, or the ability
to restrict results by date) to help find the answers--or to find out if there
aren't good answers on the web.

And in some cases like your #2 search, we could do a better job of
synthesizing information. If page A says that a motherboard uses this
chip/chipset and page B says that this chip/chipset uses this socket, then we
could infer what socket the motherboard uses. Inferring information like this
is really tricky though because the web can be really noisy.

I'm not saying Google shouldn't do better on these searches. You're clearly a
power searcher, and I share your frustration when it's really hard to find
what you want using Google. I'll pass this article around within the search
quality group at Google and see if we could do better on searches like these--
thanks for the feedback.

~~~
anigbrowl
Matt, it's great that you think enough of us here to give direct feedback. I
wish I could give you some example searches too, but most of what has bugged
me lately relates to stuff which might brush up against NDA terms, so I don't
feel comfy giving specifics.

Overall I still love Google, I must use the search service 50 times a day so
complaints about shortcomings are a bit like grumbling about the paintwork on
my free new car :-) So I'll try and identify two recurring (and relatively
new-feeling) headaches:

1\. quotes. When I put it "in quotes" I don't want ti speell-checked, or
cleaned, or made case-insensitive, or whatever else. I would rather get not
results and experiment with other strings, than think I've got results that
turn out not to be exactly what I searched for. It _seems_ to me like
punctuation often gets stripped even if it's inside quotes. For some kinds of
searches involving bits of source code or so, this can be a drag.

2\. Content farming. I know you are constantly struggling against people
gaming the system and so forth. I don't blame Google when I get 50 results of
generic junk referring to obscure search terms...the "find [niche product]
resellers, hints, tips!" types that are totally generic. but what _does_ piss
me off is that a few months ago Google offered a button that would let zap
such results, and I could label clutter as clutter. Now on a deep search, I
often spend several minutes trying to think what terms are common enough to
content farms that -excluding them will prune the results sufficiently that
the remaining search results are worth checking one by one.

You remember that Bing ad where someone says something random and their geeky
partner starts hypnotically chanting associated but unhelpful phrases,
implying an overbroad result set? Sorry, but they had a point.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Thanks for the feedback. Punctuation is tricky, because it only adds value for
power searchers, but indexing it would swell the index size quite a lot.
Otherwise, using double-quotes should do an exact search.

On content farms, we've definitely heard that feedback. One point up for
debate is whether to respond with algorithms-only, or whether we should update
our quality guidelines to call out low-quality content farms as a type of
webspam. Both DuckDuckGo and Blekko seem delighted to remove sites that most
people don't like from the search results. Here's a link for DDG for example:
<http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25532/> . The question is:
would you feel comfortable if Google removed results that a lot of people
don't like from our index? And how do you balance the goal of reducing clutter
and junk with the goal of being fair and comprehensive?

~~~
imajes
Yes!

and if people wanted a fuller result, you can say, "more lower quality links
found. Click here to view all" similar to the way that searching in gmail lets
you search in trash & spam.

------
andrewacove
>> legitimate search results have become cluttered by old, stale web forums
and mailing list postings.

QFT. I spent the beginning of the year teaching myself Rails, and I can't
count the number of times I cursed Google's search results. Multiple different
copies of the same mailing list post, just from different mirrors. And almost
everything pointed to some old version of Ruby or Rails that wasn't relevant
anymore.

And searching on Google Groups is _worse_.

------
frossie
I also switched to DDG at the prompting of an HN commenter, and agree entirely
with the points made in the OP.

The only downside really is just in the formatting of the results - I can get
11-12 results in a google search in a full-height window and about 8 in DDG.
Sure, some of that is due to the very nice "disambiguator" box (or whetever
they call it), and the results are indeed generally higher quality, but it is
also due to large title fonts and designey white space, so I personally would
like a bit of that back.

(No I haven't sent this to DDG feedback because for all I know it is a
personal peeve and everybody else likes it this way)

~~~
edanm
"(No I haven't sent this to DDG feedback because for all I know it is a
personal peeve and everybody else likes it this way)"

The way I see it, Gabriel's job is to decide whether it's a personal peeve or
not. Your job is to ask for new features and "complain" about the old
features, so that he can hear what real users think.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yes, please complain (although be nice about it) :)

The design is continually in flux based on user feedback, but recently I've
been stepping back to take a more holistic approach and really push it
forward.

I will be working with a professional designer on this and the duck.co
community (if anyone wants to participate). I hope this will become evident
(and useful) within a few months from now. So by all means, give design
feedback!

------
sjs
Giving up on a blog that can't display the article in full without JavaScript.
Progressive enhancement folks!

(Web apps get a pass, but if your site only needs to display text it should
not _require_ JS.)

~~~
thaumaturgy
Thanks for the heads-up. Actually it _is_ designed to gracefully fall back
without JavaScript, but there appears to be a display bug I wasn't aware of.

I'll fix it soon but right now I have a server down.

(BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you noscript guys add to web
development efforts? Ugg.)

edit: fixed.

~~~
pyre

      > (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you
      > noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.)
    

I can't quite form words around the feeling, but this feels like a very
backwards statement to me.

~~~
thaumaturgy
It's relatively easy these days to make sites that use JS in a smart way to
dynamically load content. In the case of this personal site, if JS is on, then
all the links do is request a "stripped-down" version of only the content of
each post, and then swap that into the main content area. There are no http
requests then for the images, background, css, and so on, which is nice for
the server.

That's all well and good, but then I have to go back and make that also all
work for noscript users. So, for example, I can't just have a list of items on
the left, and then on page load, have JavaScript just "click" the top item in
the list. Instead, I have to put in extra effort to get the backend to handle
the default home page, and so on.

On this site, that wasn't really that hard. On more complex sites, it can be
very hard.

...and I'm one of the "silly" web developers, that actually tries to work with
the .5% or so of people that have JS turned off. With jQuery and everything
else out there, most web developers don't seem to bother.

~~~
jasonkester
I think that's the "backwards" he was talking about. You're building your
links to call javascript, then scrambling later to find ways to make them work
without.

The accepted way of doing this is to build your links to point to URLs, then
use script to override them with whatever dynamic wackiness you think is
helpful. You get all sorts of bonuses by doing it that way (such as ctrl-
click, save target as, etc.) without any of the downside you go on about.

And it's not any harder to implement.

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _You're building your links to call javascript, then scrambling later to
> find ways to make them work without._

Not exactly. I'm building JavaScript to call links, and then making sure that
everything works sans JS.

I dunno why I'm catching flak for this. The display bug had nothing to do with
JavaScript; it was primarily a CSS issue. The JS in that page only
coincidentally fixed the CSS issue, which is exactly the kinds of backwards
testing I was talking about (and obviously didn't do the last time I updated
it).

See, in order for the layout to work with a minimum number of images, there's
a CSS trick in some overlapping layers. The JS in the page coincidentally
extends one of those layers when it inserts the fairly unobtrusive text
control links that allow you to scale the page text as large or as small as is
comfortable to read on your display (something the noscript folks don't even
realize isn't there). Without that element, the content layer wasn't being
resized correctly.

I'm on your guys' side here. I know all the "accepted ways"; I have to explain
them to my clients when I justify the costs they're charged, and the benefits.
Sometimes they want to know how many people this will actually affect, and I
have to tell them, "maybe a few", and then try to justify doing it anyway.

And, it _is_ harder to implement. I can build a site that will look exactly
right no matter what size display you're reading it on; fonts and images will
all scale, and the site will look right at 800x600 or 1600x1200, without lots
of scrolling or empty space. The catch is, to do that, I need JS to work, and
spending time trying to figure out the least ugly way to display the site sans
JS is not "not any harder".

Feel free to browse my page source, it's fairly easy to read, if
unconventional in places.

~~~
jasonkester
The lesson is still the same though: Deliver a simple HTML page to the client
that can be viewed correctly and in full without scripting or CSS turned on.
Then, optionally, use scripting to enhance what's already there.

By doing it any other way, you run into the issues you're running into.

~~~
thaumaturgy
OK, I give up. :-) I could continue trying to sort this out with you, or I
could just go back to work. Thanks for the advice!

------
doubleyooexwhy
Wow, that blog design is beautiful.

Anyways, I'd love to switch to DDG, but too often it tells me "No more
results. Try Google.", and almost every time a subsequent search on Google
provides me with many more (relevant) links for the same query.

If DDG could be configured to basically be a proxy and fetch all of its
results from Google, that'd be cool.

~~~
alecco
The text gets chopped for Chrome/OSX.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Argh. I will fix this. Sorry.

edit: fixed.

------
auxbuss
I've been on duckduckgo for a few weeks. It's different in a very good way.
The only time I reverted to google was to try instant, which I find a great
improvement.

It's brilliant that there is still quality innovation going on in the search
space. It's an old industry now, after all.

------
seltzered
Just wanted to vouch as well for yegg's amazing response. He fixed some l-key
issues I complained about on duckduckgo within just a couple weeks, and
responded to me within a day.

Maybe yegg could drop a comment on how he manages his time to do all this?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
No magic bullet. Here's the process:

\--All feedback gets pushed to my personal email inbox--gmail :)

\--I try to do 0-inbox, i.e. keep my inbox at zero messages. This is usually
not attainable, but means it functions essentially as a to-do list.

\--I respond to all feedback ASAP (unless anonymous).

\--If it is something simple that I know how to fix I try to do it that day.

\--If it is something a bit more complicated, I respond, and put it on the bug
queue. I'm currently using <http://speckleapp.com> for that, made by an HNer
(<http://elliottkember.com/>).

\--Every few days I set aside a large block of time to go through that bug
queue. If easily fixable, I fix it and respond back: "Fixed!" If not, I put it
in another category, and explain why it is a complex issue and how and when it
might get fixed (or not).

------
moondowner
Not going to comment on Google, but about Duck Duck Go, I really like the
service! Especially the !Bang feature and the keyboard shortcuts. I'm using it
as a secondary search engine (after Google that is ;))

If someone wants to add Duck Duck Go to search engines in Opera, here's how
(my own screenshot): <http://twitpic.com/24ex2e>

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Note, you probably don't want that &v=d part.

~~~
moondowner
You're right, with "&v=d" added to the URL it displays "I'm feeling ducky" and
"relevant results" whereas without it displays more 'standard' results.

------
aantix
This article inspired me to install the Duck Duck Go Search plugin (
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161971/> ); I'm going to give
it a week.

~~~
spooneybarger
I would suggest more than that. After 1 week, I hadn't really seen what DDG
added in value. My experience says, give it 2-4 weeks.

~~~
sorbus
I'm inclined to think that if you can't see why a product is useful to use
after a week, it's probably not worth it. But then, my experiences with DDG
have mostly consisted of comparing its results with google, and finding that
the interface is a lot less usable.

------
all
This article prompted me to do likewise. For the past 24 hours and running, I
have used Duck Duck Go exclusively instead of Google. It is like a breath of
fresh air. I tried DDG a few months back and it was a bit on the rough side.
It has made tremendous strides in the intervening time.

As for Google, they have gone past their prime. As the other comments note,
2008 was the peak. Yahoo is in the midst of what may be the longest running
identity crisis ever to hit a company. And the name of the game for both
Google and Bing is to keep you on their site with their advertisements for as
long as they possibly can. Like some tentacled monster, they don't want to
just serve you and let you go. The cheap tricks masquerading as a flashy UI
ruin the user experience and make me not want to go back. Duck Duck Go
actually keeps you coming by serving salient information (aka 'value') and
then lets you get on with life. Kinda reminds me of the difference between the
personality ethic and the character ethic from Covey's 7HHEP.

This was a great post. Thanks for putting it forward.

------
Alex3917
As far as I can tell Google is basically giving up on the search business.
About a month ago I reported a couple spam sites that were in the top ten
results for a fairly popular search phrase. Over a month later they're still
there. These are sites that are literally just a list of keywords with no
actual content of value on the site, and Google does nothing even though they
come up at the top of the results for a phrase that gets several hundred
searches per day. That has to be in the top .1% of all searches, and while I
realize they probably get tens of thousands of complaints per day this one
would have literally taken less than 20 seconds to recognize it was a scam
site and delete it from the index. And since clearly any algorithm should have
moved this to the front of the queue based on both the popularity of the term
and also the good standing of my account, the only real conclusion is that
Google has basically just given up on trying completely.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Alex3917, do you remember the sites (or the query) you did?

~~~
three14
I'm curious if Alex3917's response to this was set to dead as a result of
automated spam filters or if there's something else going on.

------
Goladus
I can't recall ever being seriously annoyed at google search until instant
search. There have been times when I've been disappointed with the results.
I've shared many of the experiences he mentions in the article.

Instant search has not saved me _any_ time and a couple times it has gotten in
my way.

------
nadam
A comparison article on search not mentioning Bing? Yahoo and Duck Duck Go
both use Bing as far as I know. Of course there are cases when Bing is weaker
than Google. For example your 'streamline/streamlining' example. (As Duck Duck
Go also uses Bing of course they have the same problem). On the other hand in
other cases Bing is better than Google.

I searched for this a while ago:

'impact of basic research on GDP'

There were no relevant results on Google, and the first result was relevant on
Bing. (and of course on Duck Duck Go and Yahoo, which use Bing.)

Edit: It seems that now google also gives back relevant result on my search
query, so this example is not relevant anymore.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
DDG uses Bing, but usually not straight up. In this case, the first result is
the same but others in the top ten are either different or in a different
order. Not that they're necessarily better though :)

------
dRother
I have seen a blank page on Google, too within the past couple of days. Never
saw anything of the sort before. It was when I clicked to try a search on
News, and I couldn't get that search to come up with anything different -
until I turned of 'Instant'.

Oh well, whatever. I'm sure they logged an exception and will fix that soon.

As for people gaming the results, it is a huge problem, but it's a problem
that is bound to plague any market leader in search.

------
poundy
One of the issues with Duck Duck go is that it does filter results to the
country of the user. As an UK user, when I put in the word flowers or "local
programmers", I expect the results to be inclined towards UK pages as this is
what will help me. Google does this well! There is no point in showing me
stuff in NJ or Canada.

------
protomyth
My biggest complaint is that queries with something like OpenBSD don't have
the word OpenBSD on the page. I have resorted to adding the names of
configuration files I know need to be changed in my queries (e.g. pf.conf).

I do really wish I could have a "NO" button when it asks "Did you mean this?".
It might give some feedback.

------
ggchappell
> ... Yahoo really isn't in the search business anymore, at least among the
> tech-savvy.

Was Yahoo! _ever_ in the search business, among the tech-savvy?

This is a serious question. I've been webbing since '93, but I never made any
serious use of the Yahoo! search box. I thought I was typical. Am I wrong?

~~~
megablast
One of the great aspect of Google, it has remained very useful to the tech
savvy, but still managed to appeal to the majority as well.

------
clyfe
I don't yet use duck duck go because of the tiny lag (couple ms) that takes to
display the results. The google results are almost instant, and i'm relly
annoyed by the ddg small lag.

------
exportgoldman
It's almost like you need a anti-spam filter program for google to remove all
the spam/farm sites from the results.

I wonder why google can't store a list of results I simply never want
returned.

------
Sid_ram
I love the privacy policy on DDG - so elegant and clear. If google wants my
business, I need to be able to u derstand their privacy policy. I am too
suspicious.

------
patrickaljord
Someone needs to tell him instant can be turned off.

------
diziet
Really curious why the website cuts the right border of the text without
allowing js for some external site...

~~~
thaumaturgy
The external site is my business server, which hosts the JS package that the
personal site uses. I wasn't aware of the border issue until just a bit ago.
Sorry 'bout that.

~~~
diziet
You fixed it real quick, and I quite very much liked the scale tool.

------
known
Google "search engine"

~~~
tristanperry
Oh. Wow. EPIC, EPIC FAIL.

Actually, they're doing it for other things too:

[web based email] [adverts for publishers] [traffic analytics]

I'm sure there's more.

Wow. That truly is an epic fail. Google have removed Google from the SERPs.

LOL! I love(d?) Google, but they are definitely screwing something up
somewhere. These rubbishy results occur when I'm logged out too (well, I don't
have Web History or personalized search enabled so I guess that's n/a)

------
billmcneale
Reminds me of "Close your Facebook account" day.

Good times.

------
GrandMasterBirt
Amen brother. I found instant to be uncomfortable. Sometimes DDG results were
not as good as google's, but pretty good. Gabriel is also incredibly
responsive and tries to solve problems quickly, every problem I've asked about
has been solved or had a serious effort to try to solve. Its so "personal"
that I just feel like its a search engine that cares about me, vs me being
just another face in a crowd.

In any case, I still love gmail, everything else has been crap.

Also try replacing google EVERYWHERE on an android device, quite well embedded
and hard to change in 100 places and still browsers use google as the search
engine.

------
mkramlich
Google may be becoming more optimized for the larger number of non-tech/non-
elite users, while becoming less optimized for the smaller number of elite
users. If so, we've seen this phenomenon happen with other businesses in the
past, nothing new. A side effect of becoming popular with the masses.

