What I hate about Google is that they say that they need our information to "improve our experience", yet we can't even tell them what sites we prefer, or which should be omitted, in/from our search results.
I concur. It's such a pain to go back and requote random words in my query on every search because Google decided it knew what I wanted better than I do.
This isn't a constructive comment. Elaborate why you dislike Google/Google Search, in a way that adds to the discussion. I think there are many valid reasons, and this isn't one.
In general I agree with you, though I would add that Google doesn't have any kind of good reputation for documenting how their consumer facing tools work, and have been getting flak for years about perceived biases in their search results and spam filters.
I find Google to be bloated, filled with manipulative distractions, and worst of all it often answers me with search results according to what it thinks I want (based on previous searches) rather than directly responding to my straight forward request.
Searching Google is the real dark art these days, especially if you don't use personalized results. I am constantly frustrated by Google straight up ignoring my most important search terms.
At least with DuckDuckGo I know that it's searching for what I told it to, rather than searching for something easier to find, which seems similar to a machine, but completely different to me.
I really reallyREALLY dislike that they use Google as an internal search engine. It's hideous to use and navigate since it also opens a new tab and basically prohibits you from using the site in any normal fashion if you don't like being tracked and using Google
This! So much. I'd rather have a search be truthful and return no results than return shit I dont care about. This applies to many things outside google as well.
Google's 'featured snippets' are universally fucking shit.
It's a bit of a rant I guess, but I'm annoyed but the extent to which Google has become less useful as a search engine while trying to do all of this 'extracting knowledge from the web' stuff. Because it's really not doing a great job of the latter.
This was always the most baffeling thing to me -- how could google be so bad at search? But the answer, I suspect, is simple: they want you to make a new google search rather than jump straight to the site.
Normally I only use Google, but I've also experienced this. In contrast with a few years ago, more recently Google gave me such bullshit that I was like, "Just give me the pages that have these keywords, this is so obvious" and I went to duckduckgo.com. There, with literally the exact same query, every one of the top links was relevant and had my search terms. On Google none of the first page of links had what I searched for. This certainly supports "they show me what they want me to see", rather than what I asked for.
On the flip side, I still find Google useful and I must say that I often am happy to read what they decide to give me: even if it's not what I searched for.
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