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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 08:54:46AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 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.

For a long time, google supported putting things in quotes to indicate
"must be in result" and putting a - in front of someting to say "must
not be in result".  They mostly ignore that now and give you results
that contain what you explicitly said you did not want.  That's not an
SEO problem.

Actual matching keyword search worked very well back when google did that.
They clearly no longer do, and I don't know if anyone else does either.
I will accept that perhaps for most users that is not the way they
understand doing searching, but for those that understood it, it was
very powerful and very accurate.  Now no one gets accurate results with
google anymore.

And while sometimes entertaining, the list of other things people searched
for really isn't helpful.

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

Well I am usually looking for web sites, not academic papers.

> 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.

If I want to buy a case for my phone, being able to search for cases
that fit only that model of phone and which are cases would be helpful.
A case for a different phone is not going to interest me, and neither is
a different model of phone, and I am definitely not looking for a charging
cable or a tablet or whatever else they decide to put in the results.

> 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?

Ouch, I must admit I have not tried that in a long time.

-- 
Len Sorensen