Thats only because the search for wikipedia is good; but for example !python isn't as great. It is nice for convenience but relying on site's internal search is kind of a cop out, albeit smart for their purposes.
Google has provided this for years with the "site:" feature (e.g. search for "lists site:python.org"). In addition, Google uses its own results, since as the article correctly mentions "most site’s internal search engines suck".
Same thing with bing. It's a fine search engine for lots of things, but for searching documentation it's really weak, showing sites like w3schools and tutorialspoint far above the results I actually want.
It kind of makes sense that w3schools would spend much more time on the SEO game than docs.python.org, but it just drives me back to google
Yeah, too bad it fails at some searches and falling back to google is needed
For controversial stuff, the bubble is definitely a minus. For factual queries, it just makes things easier (yes, when I type 'python' I don't mean the reptile)
On the contrary, my experience is that I prefer the Google results even when I want to search in a site that has an internal search engine, such as Wikipedia, StackOverflow and Reddit. Both the formatting and the quality of the results are better in Google.
I would agree; I've almost never seen a site that provides a better way to directly search its own content than the major search engines provide. Wikipedia might come closest because their search compares the user input to article titles, and that's often helpful (mainly because the article titles are chosen to describe the article content, and aren't clickbait). But pretty much anything else uses a search approach that is far inferior to what Google or Bing provide, and it won't find what you want.
I search a lot for programming topics and when I get frustrated I switch to Google and get literally the same results. I’d say it’s pretty good for web search and keeps up to date.
The downside is things like Sports and other knowledge items which shows a widget I’ve never understood in my life.
This is true in principle, but in practice, the use of 3rd party search has died down over the last decade. This is not the phenomenon of a superior way winning out.
Either search is not an important feature, and a suboptimal, DIY implementation that looks OK is good enough. Or, search is a primary feature and then you need control over it. IE, if you have an online store, travel site or dating app with a search based UI, then you'll probably roll your own.
There are cases where google really is the best way. As you say, stackoverflow, wikipedia & such. Even so, you'll eventually roll your own. Spolsky original UI concept totally leaned on Google for search, but SO still has its own.
At some point, you'll need results to take inventory into account or make autocomplete smarter about tags... and now the headache is yours anyway.
It would have been cool if the web had really developed into the hopeful, "semantic web era" where this kind of approach works. That didn't happen. Half the game is over control, and controlling UIs matters the most.
Also, the power of pagerank has dwindled as the web itself changed. Links aren't what they used to be. That makes Google relatively worse at what it was once best at. Google search as a whole is much, much richer but most of what makes Google good today has less to do with your use case anymore.
TLDR, Maybe google search works for searching wikipedia, which is perfectly loyal to the original WWW concept. Even they have a DIY search. If you work at Reddit though, and your search sucks, google will not fix this. Your search will just suck, and your app will be less usable.
I agree, although sometimes it works. The same is true of other search engines, although they are sometimes better, sometimes worse, than Google. (But often I don't need web search that much anyways. I have man pages, Wikipedia, books, etc.)
weird example considering just how bad Reddit's internal search is and always has been -- that's a site I've always preferred to search with an external search engine, be it Google, DDG, or Kagi lol
For years I just used Google as the "I'm too lazy to search directly in Wikipedia" search box. Now I just properly use Wikipedia's search box. So thanks, AI?
It really is as good as google for most things, in my experience. I use it by default and when it can't find what I'm looking for, Google usually doesn't do much better.
Too bad usually the general search engines are smarter than individual sites' search engines, I don't get how it's really useful than not having the bang.
It is in some use cases. For programming related queries, it oftentimes gives me better results than Google because it's not trying to be clever and guess what I could actually mean.
I have to use !g a lot because of inferior results from the default search. It can be tough to even get a relevant wikipedia entry to show up in the top 5.
Yeah but I actually like the fact that Google knows what I search, because it adapts the results to what I care about. When I search for "python" I don't want to learn about snakes.
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