I had a go for a ‘dev’ related search. I just tried one trivial thing.
I searched for ‘jq modify value’ as it’s something I previously found hard to find skimming the enormous man page. I got:
1. A stack overflow question which implicitly answered the question but was actually about someone wanting to modify a file in-place.
2. A blog post from Monsanto. I clicked on it and I was greeted with a big model box that I didn’t read.
3. Something from w3 schools (which unlike stack overflow seems to get first class treatment in the results) about css and jquery.
4. Some “generated code” that was totally crazy looking python full of comments in Chinese.
5. A video that looked like it might contain the answer
6. A box asking me to sign into GitHub.
I clicked the G icon for Google and the first result was a stack overflow question about how to modify a field with jq. The top answer was sane but there were some weird comments on it (the answer to the question in the You.com results had good constructive comments). I didn’t look at the later results which is unfair as the first result from You.com also contained the answer.
It seems to me that it must be extremely hard to break into this space. Microsoft tried (including building entirely their own indexes and suchlike) and, roughly speaking, failed despite often producing high quality results that bettered Google. Any bad results from an upstart send people back to Google. Bad results from Google send them back to the search box to try again. I can’t blame them for wanting people to set the app as a chrome default with extra extension-powered abilities.
Personally I also find it weird to be connecting ‘private’ search with other accounts. I guess it is private+personalised but I’m not sure I really want personalised.
Maybe things would be different for other queries.
I searched for ‘jq modify value’ as it’s something I previously found hard to find skimming the enormous man page. I got:
1. A stack overflow question which implicitly answered the question but was actually about someone wanting to modify a file in-place.
2. A blog post from Monsanto. I clicked on it and I was greeted with a big model box that I didn’t read.
3. Something from w3 schools (which unlike stack overflow seems to get first class treatment in the results) about css and jquery.
4. Some “generated code” that was totally crazy looking python full of comments in Chinese.
5. A video that looked like it might contain the answer
6. A box asking me to sign into GitHub.
I clicked the G icon for Google and the first result was a stack overflow question about how to modify a field with jq. The top answer was sane but there were some weird comments on it (the answer to the question in the You.com results had good constructive comments). I didn’t look at the later results which is unfair as the first result from You.com also contained the answer.
It seems to me that it must be extremely hard to break into this space. Microsoft tried (including building entirely their own indexes and suchlike) and, roughly speaking, failed despite often producing high quality results that bettered Google. Any bad results from an upstart send people back to Google. Bad results from Google send them back to the search box to try again. I can’t blame them for wanting people to set the app as a chrome default with extra extension-powered abilities.
Personally I also find it weird to be connecting ‘private’ search with other accounts. I guess it is private+personalised but I’m not sure I really want personalised.
Maybe things would be different for other queries.