Tag: search

  • Google Search is Dying

    Michael Tsai: I’ve noticed two separate things: If I know the right Reddit or Stack Exchange to search, or if Amazon or Hacker News applies, I get much more useful results than searching Google (or any other general search engine). This avoids SEO spam issues and can surface posts that don’t seem to be accessible…

  • Google employees are organising to protest the company’s secret, censored search engine for China

    BuzzFeed News reported that Google employees are organising to protest the company’s secret, censored search engine for China. Google employees are demanding greater transparency from their employer and confronting management with their ethical concerns about a project named Dragonfly, a controversial censored search app for the Chinese market. Instead of looking at this from their…

  • DuckDuckGo bangs

    The Next Web wrote about DuckDuckGo bangs. While its main draw is privacy, DuckDuckGo has another killer feature you may not have heard of. In fact, it should cause you to consider ditching your existing search engine for DuckDuckGo — yes, even Google. I’m talking about bangs. Bangs have transformed how I search ever since…

  • Google is practically begging Firefox users to switch their default search engine

    Search Engine Land reported on Google begging Firefox users to switch their default search engine. Why would Google give up the top two-plus inches of its search results page like this? It goes back to the November announcement that Mozilla was dropping Google in favor of Yahoo as the default search engine in its Firefox…

  • You should use DuckDuckGo

    Casey Liss wrote about why you should use DuckDuckGo. Like Casey, I switched to DuckDuckGo when I upgraded to iOS 8. DuckDuckGo promises not to track you and that is a huge deciding factor for me. So when Apple added it as one of the built-in search options, it became my default search engine. Of…

  • Yahoo’s decline

    John Gruber wrote a very good piece on Yahoo’s decline. I would argue that Yahoo lost its way early. Yahoo was an amazing, awesome resource when it first appeared, as a directory to cool websites. Arguably, the directory to cool websites. It was hard to find the good stuff on the early web, and Yahoo…

  • Relevance of Google Search and advertising

    Let’s take a look at a specific part from this excellent article published by AppleInsider back in April. It wasn’t a fluke that the Moto X flopped. Google has only ever flopped in its hardware experiments. But make no mistake: Google desperately needs a hardware business, and it knows it needs a hardware business. That’s…

  • Google’s ad-driven web

    Marco Arment writes about the future of MetaFilter. A depressing look at the ad-funded web today, and what it’s like to depend completely on Google for your business. Google owns the ad-driven web: their search brings all of your pageviews, and their ads bring all of your income. You’re just along for the ride, hoping…

  • Using Instagram as a real-time search engine

    Joe Weisenthal writes on Business Insider about his use of Instagram to conduct real-time search. Instagram isn’t perfect, but for the most part you don’t get re-posts (though re-gramming is a thing on a small scale) and you can fairly quickly establish whether a person’s photo makes sense in the context of their previous images.…