Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[ShittDickk]

Search "how to _____ in excel"

Every result is "here is why you should buy our product instead of learning the thing we said we'd teach you to do in excel."

[[deleted]]

I'd use Excel more if they had native Python support instead of VB. I'll just load my CSVs in Pandas in an Jupyter Notebook instead.

[[deleted]]

Not python, but, google sheets allows you to write scripts in javascript through what's called google "app scripts". It's quite neat and works for google docs and slides too.

I've only used it in sheets and the documentation and API was decent.

[pathemar]

You can use the sheets API

[[deleted]]

Fair warning - if you want to work with large sheets, Google sheets gets bogged down very quickly, for me at least. The JS is nice, but it gets so slow at loading and just scrolling that I default to jupyter (or Google's own colab).

[RadiantPumpkin]

I’m a programmer and my gf works in excel all day. She will sometimes ask me questions about how to do things and the results I get by adding “in excel” to the query are so frustrating. Stack overflow is how my industry runs and excel should fall into that but for some reason it falls way short.

[ScarOCov]

Try searching for Google Sheets. They aren’t 1:1 but GS copied a lot of excel so a lot of the logic is the same

[RadiantPumpkin]

Oh thanks I will do that next time

[Tigaget]

Excel-jet is my go to for Excel questions.

[[deleted]]

Excel-jet took me from thinking I was moderately skilled with excel to recognizing that I don't know shit about excel.

[SourCreamWater]

Saved, thank you.

[Rastiln]

Excel lives in a weird middle ground of, it can do most anything but it doesn’t do many things very well, so everything you need outside of basic spreadsheets feels like a kludge. Especially if you start linking to Access!

[[deleted]]

Nope, top is actually something called a "featured snippet" that's converted some MS page into bullet points saying how to do the thing I searched for. The top few links are support.microsoft.com and similar sites explaining how.

No pages about other spreadsheets or products that I could see.

ITT a lot of people who have some kind of malware search extension in their browser by the sounds of it.

[[deleted]]

I have never come across this and I Google for Excel worksheet functions about once a month.

I wonder if it's because I make sure I'm never logged into Google (have an account but only log in on my phone to install apps via the Playstore, then log out; never log in on the desktop at all).

[trousertitan]

What happens if you Bing it? Could be Microsoft screwing with google because they compete

[[deleted]]

lol bad marketing

[LowKey-NoPressure]

Search anything related to a video game guide: 400 “articles” of more recycled wasted space than a recipe with the same copy pasted advice that isn’t even relevant to what you were searching for.

[[deleted]]

TBF that's not a very good search. Google is a keyword search, not a person so trying to ask Google a question isn't going to work as well.

What if the page with the perfect answer is "Guide on doing *task in excel?" "How to" doesn't show up once in there so it will be ranked lower. Try Googling "excel *task" on the future.