Just compared "chinese food baltimore" search results between Google and Wolfram Alpha.
Google gave me a list of ten places in my area to get chinese food including phone numbers, locations (mapped out and in text) and links to all their websites; Wolframalpha gave me general nutrition information about random foods.
One could go on and on and on, of course, with similar examples.
All that this shows is that some tools are better than others at certain tasks.
Google search is still better than all competitors at many, many things. However, (of course! it ought to be this way!) some of their competitors are better than Google at very specific things.
How is Google's failure to do as well as another search tool at a single task indicative of why Google is (no longer, I think it's implied) any good?
Agreed. What made me (and presumably the author) post this article is not the relevance of the result, but how much of the page is now taken up by advertising.
I'm a marketer, so I do certainly like advertising, but what irks me is the sheer vertical volume of the page taken up by monetized ads.
Google does not consider a site quality of the top 1/3 of the page is ads, yet here they take the space on the page which has the most attention. It is their search engine, yes, but at the same time I think no one can argue that they are making the monetized links take up more and more space in order to boost CTR and their bottom line.
They are a company after all, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
I would point out that Wolfram Alpha claims gold is at $1577 USD/oz versus $1597 USD/oz on two other gold sites. A big difference? No, absolutely not, but if you want to know the price of gold, you probably want to have faith that they get the gold price right.
Gold can easily fluctuate $20 or more within a few minutes. Different sites will always show different prices depending on how quickly they update. Nobody should be using a generic search engine for trading.
Perhaps we're moving to a point where rather than use one search engine for everything, we learn how to use the best ones for few distinct categories of searches.
It puts a greater burden on users to know what to look for, but it eliminates the need for some engines to figure out what exactly the user wants.
I'm sorry, but are people not able to ignore this? I, like everyone, use Google all the time and I didn't even notice this till now. There are times when pointing out something that could be improved makes the experience worse.
On top of that, isn't this complaint ignoring relevant differences between Google and Wolfram Alpha? In particular, the fact that Wolfram Alpha is funded by Wolfram's other income and Google makes money from its search engine (and therefore needs to put ads in a prominent place).
Keeping in mind that whenever Google displays an immediate answer interested peoples go up in arms about them "favoring their own products" which somehow led to antitrust investigation in EU/US (new developments on that even today), I fundamentally agree that search is about showing the answers instantly and Google must have plans in place for doing so and ignore the antitrust nonsense or else they will be left behind.
Google gave me a list of ten places in my area to get chinese food including phone numbers, locations (mapped out and in text) and links to all their websites; Wolframalpha gave me general nutrition information about random foods.
One could go on and on and on, of course, with similar examples.
All that this shows is that some tools are better than others at certain tasks.
Google search is still better than all competitors at many, many things. However, (of course! it ought to be this way!) some of their competitors are better than Google at very specific things.
How is Google's failure to do as well as another search tool at a single task indicative of why Google is (no longer, I think it's implied) any good?