Is it really? Eeeew.
I am not sure if I think their calculations are entirely useful for the âauto mechanicâ search. The boxes on the right disappear if you search for âWhy is the sky blue?â (as someone above suggested). The organic search results would still only take up 25% of the search page since the empty spaces are included in the total area. In other words, you could only say that you are seeing half of the organic search results that you would normally get.
I have never run into the local search carousel before. I would agree that it is a bit annoying to have it there. The fact that google sets my location to Atlanta, GA when I live in California makes it really not useful for me.
Out of curiosity, what kind of results would you want if you searched for âauto mechanicâ.
Most of my google searches look like this:
UINavigationController reference
I get no ads. But I get results before I type the fifth letter.
Teh Intewebs are controlled by programmers.
My phone has informed me via Google Maps that I am in Antarctica on more than one occasion.
Thank you so much for this. I tried it and I got the results I wanted!
Since I âfeltâ the change in Google search results Iâve been looking for a search engine to replace it.
In my desperation I even tried Bing.
I work in translations and years ago we used to rely on the number of hits shown by Google to help us decide if we should use one term over the other. It used to be so simple. For example: âpersonal protective equipmentâ got more hits than âpersonal protection equipmentâ. Now, if you search for the latter, Google suggests searching for the former, and if you ignore it, the search automatically includes the abbreviation âPPEâ and ignores the quotation marks. Searching for âpersonalâ âprotectionâ âequipmentâ comes up with some funny, unusable results. Manually enabling the âverbatimâ option is a waste of time.
I see that Duck doesnât show hits, but at least it searches the term Iâm looking for and not what IT THINKS I may be looking for.
Happy user is happy.
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Out of curiosity, what kind of results would you want if you searched
for âauto mechanicâ.
Three ads
Two yelps
One actual local
Seven map-based (including four from plus.google)
Wikipedia
Two more locals
Offers for me to learn to become an auto mechanic
âŚis what I actually get.
So you type in queries where the most reasonable conclusion is that you are looking for something nearby and you donât include the mapped of results as part of your organic search calculations? Go learn usability.
Apparently Iâm in Oklahoma? Google has become slightly more useful the the yellow pages in the last 5 years.
Why wouldnât you expect it? If I search for âcar mechanicâ more likely than not Iâm looking for a local business to fix my car.
The big deal is stupid monitors that are really wide and not tall when lists are almost always vertical instead of horizontal. If you did that search on a 1920x1200 monitor instead of âI watch HD video all dayâ size, you would get lots more useful results on the first screen. But 1200 pixel tall monitors are rare and going away.
[quote=âxzzy, post:5, topic:2192â]searching for auto mechanic in that duckduckgo thing yields no information relevant to finding someone to fix my car[/quote]Type your city after âauto mechanicâ.
How Users are Killing the Relevance of this Article
Liberate your surfing.
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We do. And further disclosure, we get affiliate revenues from those results. Be sure to read our sparkling new policies!
Lately Iâve been finding more and more that searching for health-related questions on google turns up all the quack sites first. All the ones that scare you away from any medical intervention. The ones that donât believe in chemotherapy, all the scare stories about medications because one person one time had a bad experience and now they are yelling loudly about it on the internet.
After seeing this post I tried my most recent query on duckduckgo and came up with some WAY more sane websites.
So maybe if you need local info, google is still great, but if youâre a person who looks up health information online, google is no longer a safe option.
The last time I was at the doctor (I swear it was not for anal fissures, I swear it wasnât) I literally watched him look up reference information on Wikipedia while he was diagnosing me.
Granted I had a common condition (for the last time, it was not anal fissures) but I was still annoyed at Dr. Googles for being so overt about it. At least pretend the medical degree matters, man!
Ok maybe it was anal fissures.
You canât even find the actual results to your search.
Try looking at the monitor.
1200 pixel tall monitors are rare and going away.
Only because theyâre being superceded by 1536, 1600, and 1800 pixel tall displays.
While everyone over age ten has to hit Ctrl + a dozen times to make the font large enough to read.
I suppose Iâm old-fashioned. Iâd expect a selection of websites featuring the words âcarâ and âmechanicâ. If I wanted anything else, I wouldnât use a web search tool.
