[GTALUG] Google is ruled a monopoly so Firefox is at serious risk

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I'm going to whine about search.  I'd really like hints for better
search.

> From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

> Well I would say google had the best search for many years which is what
> made them popular.  These days their search is terrible.  I don't know if
> there is anyone actually good out there, because google probably killed
> of most of the search competition over the years, so now they don't have
> to be good anymore and can prioritize other things instead.

Why is Google's search less good?  There are a couple of reasons that
I can think of:

- SEO, a whole field of endeavour designed to screw up search.

- synthetic crap web pages.

- (perhaps) Google guessing that your search was too precise and
  therefor yielding results that are out of scope.

If it is applicable, scholar.google.com seems much better.  But I
almost never think to use it.

> Google search is not quite as bad as search on amazon, but they are
> heading in that direction.

Amazon search is bad because they want to push things at you that you
didn't ask for.  Really bad.  They prioritize partly by criteria that
are not in your interest:

- sold by Amazon itself

- prioritized by giving extra money to Amazon (Amazon's Choice)

- deprioritized if it is sold for less on other sites (really! this is
  probably and should be illegal)

- things that a vaguely related to your search queries

The very first chunk of items are "sponsored" listings.  Notice that
these, on each page.

If you try to change this by sorting by price, low to high, it leaves
the very first chunk unchanged (they are not, in Amazon's mind,
actually search results!).  Then it starts with low cost things that
don't match the search terms well.  So sorting is useless.

For example, I just now searched for "Ryzen mini PC", sorted by price,
low to high.  The first 15 actual results (as opposed to unsorted ads
at the top) had Intel processors.  Sheesh!

But AliExpress search is much much worse.  Who would have thought that
possible?