At this point there's so much noise in Google Results that they're becoming an option of last resort. Not only is there a lot of noise, there's no real usable information from others on the quality of the results.
If I'm looking for a local vendor I go to Yelp, if I'm buying something I go to Amazon, and if I'm looking for coding help I go to Stack Overflow. I don't know that we necessarily need one site to replace Google; it seems to me that the era of free text search being the dominant paradigm may just be over.
I know what you mean about searching for local vendors or buying something; my experience is that a Google search isn't great for either of those. I still find Google pretty useful for coding help, though, and personally I don't tend to go straight to somewhere like Stack Overflow.
Could you give an example or two where Stack Overflow gets you an answer more quickly than a Google search?
Here's my example: In gdb, I want to list all of the threads in my running program. A Google search for "gdb list threads" gives me the answer in the first result. The same search on Stack Overflow doesn't seem to give me the answer in the first few results. This is hardly scientific, of course, so I'm interested to hear of coding questions where Stack Overflow does a better job than a Google search.
Mea culpa. SO was definitely my weak example there... if they had a better on-site search it wouldn't be an issue but I guess they mostly just optimize for Google search. So a lot of the time I end up Googling tech issues, but then clicking on the SO link because I know there will be multiple answers on that page instead of just one.
No worries, I also notice that SO comes up in Google results quite a lot and that's generally how I access it as well so I also do a Google search for tech issues and then end up clicking on the SO link.
Your post yesterday got me thinking about why Google is still pretty useful for coding questions but not so for searches of a more commercial nature. I guess it isn't worth so much money to game Google for the former (Experts Exchange notwithstanding).
"the era of free text search being the dominant paradigm may just be over"
Perhaps it is the era of a global single instance search engine that is starting to come to an end - maybe we need a sensible way of having topic specific search engines and/or trusted content sites and allowing an easy way of treating these as if they were a global search engine.
Pretty much the same interface but a better implementation.
And yes, I know "meta" search engines have been around for a long time but, as far as I recall, don't try and identify the best places to perform your search - they just search run your search through a pile of generic search engines and aggregate the results.
This happened ~10 years ago when search-engine results were too messy for the throngs that were looking for the Dancing Baby, so the business world invented portals. Then portals became useless because their curatorial layers were not scalable, but by then search engines had made improvements and the pendulum swung the other way.
It's a natural see-saw between specialization and generalizations (there's probably a one-word term for this in evolutionary biology). We see the same in thin-client/thick-client talk in client-server/webapp contexts.
If I'm looking for a local vendor I go to Yelp, if I'm buying something I go to Amazon, and if I'm looking for coding help I go to Stack Overflow. I don't know that we necessarily need one site to replace Google; it seems to me that the era of free text search being the dominant paradigm may just be over.