Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgerb | Hacker News Reader

I've been doing the exact same thing for quite some time now. Google is filled with so many garbage results. For most things I want to see short and sweet answers by real people.

Just yesterday I searched for "index funds vs etf reddit", as I'm really new to any sort of investing. The first reddit result on google has a simplified response that is to the point.

Now try searching google for "index funds vs etf" and the results are littered with investing sites and long lists of information, that is more than likely helpful, but much more verbose.

View on HN

Google is filled with so many garbage results.

In this case I would just replace 'Google' with 'the internet'. Switching search providers isn't going to make a marked difference the vast majority of the time, as at the end of the day, if the vast majority of the internet is filled with 'garbage' a search engine can only do so much to avoid it.

Stop trying to deflect blame from Google. They go out of their way to show garbage. They sacrifice their search results as much as they can get away with, in order to show more ads. Reddit does not do this nearly to the degree as Google. It’s not even close. There are ways to filter through the noise, it just doesn’t involve companies with financial conflicts of interest.

>They go out of their way to show garbage.

Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results.

If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.

Look around at this thread for evidence. Targeted searching on other platforms that rank results based on votes from small communities yields much more relevant and trustworthy results.

Try searching for "financial advisor" on Google. I did it on my phone, and the only thing on my screen is ads.

Disagree. Google has gotten much worse and not because of the internet but because of their own priorities shifting.

Considering you’ll often find more informative links posted on reddit than you will see in your google results, I think it may be a problem with Google. At least for my anecdotal experience.

Which is what makes other people having similar experiences interesting. Because if enough of us feel like this, then there would be a need for a better search engine. Not sure who’s going to make it though, libraries?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com