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cmn32480
on Sunday September 11 2016, @05:48PM
from the there's-gotta-be-a-downside-to-this dept.
from the there's-gotta-be-a-downside-to-this dept.
According to a post on the Google Online Security Blog, beginning in January 2017 Google Chrome will begin flagging all sites that use traditional HTTP rather than HTTPS for passwords or other sensitive information as "insecure". It also indicates that Google plans to eventually start flagging ALL traditional HTTP-only sites as "insecure". While HTTPS has always made sense for truly sensitive information, a pure HTTPS web does have implications for legacy tools - essentially if anyone is not using the absolute latest of one of the "big three" web browsers, they will always potentially be just one security update away from being locked out of the web.
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Google to Start Punishing HTTP-Only Sites
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C++ is the best example of second-system effect since OS/360.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Sunday September 11 2016, @06:36PM
Their results are crap? What search engine are you using then? Everything else I've tried makes Google look positively psychic in comparison.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 11 2016, @07:23PM
I've discovered that if I know what I am looking for, but not where it is, Bing tends to do better than Google. When I don't know what I am looking for Google is better.
For example, looking for docs for projects and libraries or HOWTOs vs. finding a library to do something.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday September 11 2016, @08:26PM
I've found Bing to be similar to Google in terms of quality. But, I personally use duckduckgo most of the time. Results are generally better and they don't try to guess what I'm wanting to find, they give what I ask for.
Google was never a good search engine it was fast and had a larger index, but mainly because it didn't try to understand what it was looking for. To this day it's still a crude search engine that has problems with things like finding terms that are near each other, but not next to each other and There's a ton of crap links for link farm sites on the first couple pages whenever I use it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by isostatic on Sunday September 11 2016, @11:31PM
DuckDuckGo is terrible. I use it as a default, and if guess 40% of the time I end up going to google instead after ddg fails.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday September 12 2016, @12:25AM
It depends what you're looking for. I find that even just typing in error messages into the major search engines tends to be rather inconsistent. And god help you if you're looking for something more complicated or where there's multiple ways of phrasing it.
For all the efforts at making the search engines smarter, they're even dumber than they were 15 years ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @07:26AM
For a proper judgement/comparison you should then switch to using Google by default and seeing what percentage it fails and switch to ddg if Google fails to see if ddg does better.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday September 12 2016, @02:39PM
I used to use google, and never felt the need to go elsewhere
However in a vain attempt to reclaim some control over my online presence I moved to DDG. It works half the time, maybe even most of the time.
Here's a query I just used though
tuc conference 2016
As I wanted to know when it's finished.
https://www.tuc.org.uk/events/congress-2016 [tuc.org.uk]
Would be a page I expect to come up with - which is the page for the TUC conference 2016.
DDG comes up with
https://www.tuc.org.uk/equality-issues/gender-equality/tuc-womens-conference [tuc.org.uk]
Which is a conference from 2015. Second result was the TUC homepage, and it's not until about result 8 that the TUC 2016 conference is mentioned, and it's a copy of the program.
Google comes up with the right page as the first result.
lib dem conference 2016
comes up with the right result on DDG, so no need to go to google for that.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 12 2016, @09:20AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @11:46AM
"just stick !bing or !google in the search box"
!g works as a shorthand for !google.
I also often use !gm (Google Maps), !gscholar, !gtranslate, !w (Wikipedia)...
(Just checked, !b works as !bing.)
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 12 2016, @01:54PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 11 2016, @11:37PM
Hmm, I haven't been terribly impressed with Bing - not as bad as most, but still seems to be 75% irrelevant results. Google seems to usually be the opposite, especially in response to a well-phrased natural language query.
>Google was never a good search engine...
Clearly you have forgotten Yahoo, Excite, etc. before Google came along - when you felt lucky to get a relevant search result on only the third page. I suppose on some absolute goodness scale it might not be great, but it completely blew the socks off everything else available.
Even today Firefox continuously pisses me off by switching the default search engine back to Yahoo, where I still feel lucky to find more than one or two relevant results on the first page.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday September 12 2016, @12:20AM
None of the engines were good, hence why Google was able to get a foothold. It was just as bad as the other search engines, but it was fast and had a larger database of sites that were cataloged more frequently. It used to be a bit of a rite of passage going from search engine to search engine and none of them were really any good.
I've found Bing to be about as good as Google. Most of the time when I'm on Google I find the first couple pages to be full of things that are irrelevant, or are full of largely worthless resources there to capture clicks for ad revenue like how to and expert sex change and what have you.
I find that unless I happen to know what I'm looking for and type in the exact correct phrase that I wind up spending a lot of time manually screening out shit matches. As often as not I find that unless I choose the exact correct set of synonyms for what I'm looking for that the site is expecting that I wind up going through a huge amount of irrelevant items. And God help you if you're searching for something and don't know consecutive words. Last time I checked Google didn't even have a keyword for near, which meant that if the words appeared anywhere in the page in any order, even if they were literally the first and last word in the document, it would still match.
But really, none of the search engines are particularly good. I give DDG a lot of credit for the basic things like not distorting the results trying to give me what I think I want rather than what I want.
Perhaps it's the stuff I'm looking for, but I've yet to find a search engine that really gets it right and I think that Google has been very bad for the search engine market as there's been very little forward progress in the last decade on search technology. Most of the improvements have been in dealing with SEO strategies that put garbage on the first place. And that wouldn't be a problem if there were more search engines available.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @07:54AM
You haven't used Google in the 1990'es.
Altavista had a large index. No matter what I searched for, it would give about a billion results. And the one I was looking for would be around result number 437,126,984.
Google would return maybe a hundred results for the same search words, and the one I was looking for was often number one and nearly always on the first page of results.