13 ms·

Is it time to stop trusting Google search?

287 points by bauta-steen 9y ago

visarga 9y ago
A lot of people discuss about Google's faults and improvements. If there's anything I want from Google is cheap API access to search for deep searches (much more than the first 1000 results). There's no systematic way to get deep into results, and running even a few thousand queries breaks the bank. It's useless for automated search agents.
lowglow 9y ago
PSA use DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/
- badnerd 9y ago
  I second DuckDuckGo, especially because of the !bang modifiers. Makes it easy to also get to Google — just incase the query is too vauge, which DuckDuckGo still needs work on.
moepstar 9y ago
Not sure if this is just me, but Google Search results are getting less and less relevant for my queries and at the same time, provide more and more spammy sites as results. Finding a useful site on page 2 and beyond? Good luck! I've switched to DDG half a year ago or so and haven't looked back much. I only once in a while use the !g bang and almost always come back disappointed. Sure, there are also some spam results on DDG (and probably there are going to be many more once it gains more relevance to be spammed) but for now and my searches i exclusively use DDG on my private computers as well as at work... So, to summarize, i think the relevancy of Google as a search engine will, imho, continue to drop and also the perceived "truthiness" of statements found thereon as well. To add, i also don't necessarily think of this as a "Google" problem - the same people that will believe in a statement gathered from a quick search will also believe in the same thing when they see it in a Facebook post, Whatsapp chainmail or whatever....
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  I should report my null result, however it's completely boring, uninteresting. I always find what I look for pretty fast.
- johndoe489 9y ago
  Even putting politics & world events aside, Google Search doesn't seem to get better. For me the biggest disappointment is when they turned off the ability to search for "an exact match within quotes", as well as the ability to use +plus and -minus to refine results. (EDIT: could be wrong about that, I thought it was disabled at some point) But the most dumbfounding is the fact that you still get several year old results whenever you search for a bug, hardware/driver issue, or even simple programming questions related to a not too old framework or API. Every time I have to go into the advanced options to restrict the results to one year, or one month.. you'd think they would make recent activity the default and then let the user know they can "search older results".
  - muxator 9y ago
    Really? Naively, I was still continuing to put my "queries in quotes" and using + and - to refine my search. When did it stopped being supported?
    - johndoe489 9y ago
      My bad. I could swear it was removed at some point but I can't find articles. A quick test reveals maybe the change is that you can't do an exact "ascii" search, ie. google searches for an exact sequence of words, but the casing may be different , there-may-be-dashes and so on.
      - redtuesday 9y ago
        To use the plus sign like behaviour you now need to use quotes (since 2011). Instead of: mars +landings +failures you now have to do: mars “landings” “failures” Source: https://searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-98189 https://searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-...
briga 9y ago
We used to rely on gossip and hearsay to determine what was true. Now we rely on social media and search engines. Which are basically just gossip and hearsay amplified a million-fold. One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. Everyone is biased, but if enough people are talking about something the bias tends to cancel out. I do like the fact that people are finally starting to take a closer look at the hold algorithms hold over our lives. Maybe tech companies are going to start addressing some of their flaws.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source this may be true in the sense that if you have a lot of news reports it is more likely that one of them might be accurate but in terms of the average accuracy of a single report I am sure it is much lower. the current internet information free-for-all seems to me to mostly be pushing people toward a position of not believing in or trusting in anything. the effect of this is not some kind of enlightened skepticism but that people will believe and accept anything, no matter how bat-shit insane, because they have no criterion for judging the accuracy of information.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    How does > pushing people toward a position of not believing in or trusting in anything. cause > people will believe and accept anything, no matter how bat-shit insane ? I'd say that both of those are possible extremes of not being able to tell which sources are trustworthy, i.e. some will distrust all sources equally, and some will trust all sources equally. Which extreme someone tends to likely depends on their subject-matter experience. E.g. when I was a child, my parents bought me a time-travel comic (the German series Mosaik) which always had some background information on the epoch. I always enjoyed reading that and trusted the accuracy of their description. When they had an issue on April Fool's, it took my parents a while to convince me that giant tunnel-boring ladybirds on the moon were not real. Nowadays I'm obviously better able to distinguish truth from falsehood, but if I'm just learning about something for the first time, I might easily be taken for a fool again.
Mayzie 9y ago
I find Google annoying to use ever since they removed the AND (+) operator (i.e. that search term MUST be present on the page). Whenever I need a query that involves the AND, I always have to resort to Bing to get a result. Putting things inside quotation marks in Google doesn't help one bit - they're not a replacement. Removing features and not replacing them causing irrelevant results is what's degrading Google for me.
- heeen2 9y ago
  Put the term in quotes to get the same behavior
  - Neuron4ger 9y ago
    "like" "so", or "like so"? Because the latter means that it should be present on the page, as well as in that order. I'm not sure about the former though.
    - gmueckl 9y ago
      The former forces both "like" and "so" to be present in the result without any further relation between them. It's awkward and unintuitive, but it was specifically introduced when they remapped +.
  - kbp 9y ago
    This stopped working like this a long time ago; if you put something in quotes, Google will still sometimes return pages that don't include it, or that contain "synonyms" for it. You need to turn on the verbatim option for the old behaviour, I think.
    - retailbuyout 9y ago
      Verbatim has worked for many years.
      - zeep 9y ago
zerr 9y ago
Time to time I use alternative search engines (Yahoo, Bing) - it's an eye-opening indeed.
xvilka 9y ago
Still Google provides best results for niche, highly specific queries, usually technical ones.
- johannes1234321 9y ago
  With niche queries Google often tries to "improve" my query to more mainstream stuff ...
  - blakesterz 9y ago
    Google still almost always gives me what I want but when they "improve" my results by excluding words for me it ALWAYS fails. This morning I went looking for an Ansible role and the first few results it "helpfully" excluded the word ANSIBLE for me. I see this behavior quite often and I really do not understand it.
    - zeep 9y ago
      The way I see it is that Google is getting closer and closer to showing you only what they want... They tell you that they are guessing what you meant so that if it is completely unrelated, you don't get too suspicious.
      - scholia 9y ago
        Or maybe they are showing you what most people want, on the grounds that most people search for the same stuff. In the context of billions of users doing billions of searches, HN readers could be fairly extreme outliers...
alvil 9y ago
Agregators and spam. Can't agree more.
sudshekhar 9y ago
Unrelated thought: With the growth of 'category kings' (Amazon, Stackoverflow, Wikipedia etc) does anybody else feel that google's search becomes less and less useful? I never understood the 90's obsession with domain names until I skimmed several news articles from that era. The main logic was: 1. People will go to a couple of websites for most their needs, the ones with memorable names will be easier to go to. 2. Things like search engines (Google) weren't as hot as curation directories (yahoo) because nobody expected so much fragmentation on the web. 3. The more fragmented the market in an industry, higher the value of search ads. If you know the most options and high quality reviews are available on Amazon, you don't really bother with as many reviews. While this analysis failed for the past few years, with the amount of consolidation happening in the industry recently its possible search engines loose their main source of income (e-commerce) and start being used more from ideleness/curiosity perspective. Wonder if google should pre-emptively start penalizing the aggregation marketplaces and promote direct providers (essentially try to be the Ebay for everything) to prevent such an outcome.
- blakesterz 9y ago
  >> does anybody else feel that google's search becomes less and less useful? Not for me, not at all. I do like your thoughts on domain names though, I've never considered that.
  - sudshekhar 9y ago
    > Not for me, not at all. At the risk of being presumptious, I would classify searches into broadly two categories: 1) Finding good providers/discussion places regarding something you need, say news, goods, experiences etc 2) Finding more info about a specific piece of content/goods . Eg: Product reviews, solutions to some technical doubts etc For most people I know, 1) is pretty much sorted. They have a list of places they check for clothes, groceries, jobs etc. News is read from specific websites/apps. Reddit/HN/Fb/Twitter provide most the social interaction and discovery aspects. 2) is where I see Google providing much more value. But the way things are proceeding, most of the top links relevant to a google search are generally from aggregators themselves. Amazon for most ecommerce, Tripadvisor for travel, Stackoverflow for tech, Practo (in India) for doctors etc. Let's assume Stackoverflow introduces points for using (and help 'improving') their own search. Most people will open stackoverflow first before searching on google. Amazon has already achieved this level for most things related to e-comm (specially less expensive products). There will still be a market for Google ofcourse, but it will be a much smaller chunk than currently being predicted. I actually stumbled across this line of reasoning when somebody asked me if its a good idea for individual service providers (docs/merchants etc) to open their own websites. For 99% of them it isn't. Ofcourse, any counter comments are welcome!
tyingq 9y ago
Here's a graph depicting Google's quarterly revenue, in billions, versus total number of internet users, also in billions. https://imgur.com/a/eBB9E https://imgur.com/a/eBB9E The gap that opens up between the two roughly shows how much more advertising they are pumping at us. Some of it understandable, like their acquisition of YouTube. A lot of it, though, is just turning search results into nothing but ads above the fold. Investors are expecting to see that gap grow at the same, or higher pace. From my perspective, that means anything that doesn't advance that goal is a low priority. Whether that's accurate news, quality of the organic search results, etc.
- MarkMc 9y ago
  Part of the gap can be explained by: (1) Increasing income of internet users, (2) The average user spending more time on the internet, (3) Google getting more effective at matching advertisers with Google users
  - tyingq 9y ago
    I believe that, but nobody other Google really knows how much of the gap is things that are either good/neutral for consumers, and how much of it isn't. Certainly some part of it is pushing the organics down, long forced ads in front of videos, etc. However, investors are expecting that continued ~20% YoY growth...which will further widen the gap. I don't see how that's possible without doing more things that are bad for consumers.
    - MarkMc 9y ago
      I'm actually a Google shareholder and yes I do expect continued 20% growth, at least for the next decade. But increasing the ad/content ratio is only a small component of that growth. Here are my estimates for the major components of Google's revenue growth over the next 10 years: 1. Number of Google users * avg income per user grows 3% per year 2. Time spent on internet by average user grows 5% per year 3. Ad/content ratio gows 3% per year 4. Google ad effectiveness grows 8% per year
mythrwy 9y ago
Very low quality article. Rehashes a few talking points from media about Google having bad results in searches, throws in the election stealing with fake news conspiracy theory and presents the whole steaming pile with hot pink highlights as something worth reading. Fails to explain why I should not trust Google search (other than some bad results may pop up... a fact I'd previously believed to be well known about the Internet in general).
azangru 9y ago
The way this journalist is using Google is so different from the way I use Google that I find it hard to understand what the problem is. Trying to think what I googled recently. Let’s see... - what new pages have appeared about ReasonML over the past week - ditto for rxjs - any code samples of doing server-side rendering when using redux-observable? - any examples of applying functional javascript patterns to drawing on canvas? - what javascript conferences are planned for the coming year? - how is the phrase "the good wife" used in the books (searchable via Google Books)? is the title of the eponymous series an obvious allusion to some literary work? (haven’t fugured that one out, by the way) For all these searches, I was very happy with what the relevance of what Google found.
- pavlov 9y ago
  You use Google for very specific niche queries where you already know enough about the topic to judge the veracity and usefulness of the results. If someone makes a site that associates ReasonML with ISIS and Google surfaces that as the #2 result, you'll just laugh it off. The article is talking about people using Google for news and contested political topics. The extent of damage resulting from poor/misleading/fake results for the search "Texas church shooter" is much greater than for "ReasonML".
  - azangru 9y ago
    > You use Google for very specific niche queries where you already know enough about the topic to judge the veracity and usefulness of the results. <...> The article is talking about people using Google for news and contested political topics. Yes indeed. Could it be that search engines are in principle ill suited for searching for news and contested political topics, especially if one has no way of judging whether a particular result is correct or not? Or, more generally, that searching without knowing how then to verify the quality of the results is a pretty silly undertaking? In other words, shouldn't all responsibility be on the user of a search engine, and not on the search engine itself?
bob_theslob646 9y ago
Why is the verge so negative on Google? Stop trusting them for search? Maybe if you are searching for simple things, but for more advanced searches Google is, by far, the best.
- tyingq 9y ago
  First hand experiences? https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16309752/google-rehabs-near-me-search-adwords-crackdown https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16309752/google-rehabs-ne... https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15259400/burger-king-google-home-ad-wikipedia https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15259400/burger-king-goog...
chatmasta 9y ago
I switched to DDG on mobile at the recommendation of others on HN. I've been on it for a few months and it's great. 90% of the time it gets me what I need. When it doesn't I just add a !g and get the google results. Most of the time when I'm adding the !g is because I need a specific google feature like knowledge box or maps. I haven't enabled it on my laptop because Google and I have been finding answers to my programming problems for 10 years. We have a nice relationship.
serveboy 9y ago
I cannot use Google without the Google Search Filter extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filter/eidhkmnbiahhgbgpjpiimdogfidfikgf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filt... Having the results you are most interested in highlighted and the bad ones removed seriously upgrades the search experience. Would be nice if Google had this functionality built in. I know they had the remove results thing builtin back in the day, but I find highlighting trusted sites even more important.
jacksmith21006 9y ago
Use Google search all day and just find it amazing at getting what I am looking for. Never seen Google filter in a way that helps them. I will get negative Google articles and they would be the first Google filtered it there was an issue.
codingdave 9y ago
I wasn't aware that there was a perception that Google's results had any indication of the truth of the content it returned. I thought everyone just knew that anything on the web is just as likely to be false, spam, shills, or just bad marketing as it is to be an accurate worthwhile piece of content. So while Google may have its flaws... I wouldn't go to them to solve this problem. I'd teach the people more critical thinking and encourage them to apply it to whatever they read.
- mtgx 9y ago
  Maybe there wasn't one. But Google has moved from a "top 10 results" strategy to a "we'll give you the best answer for your question" search strategy. They did this for one because that's what kind of service they'd ideally like to be for their users, but also because that's the only way voice search can work - by giving you just one answer. The problem with this is that while before the #1 result on their search engine didn't actually have to be the best most relevant result that there is on the internet, but just one of the best answers, now it has to be the absolute best and most accurate result, because of this shift in strategy of only showing you one answer. They can't afford any mistake with this. And that's way harder to solve as a problem than the problems they had before with the top 10 results.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    In this case, it apparently wasn't an answer, though. It was a box saying "popular on Twitter". That's not much of an endorsement. It's a cliché to say that people should think more critically. In this case it's just a matter of knowing what "popular on Twitter" means when it comes to breaking news. It's not really about whether you trust Google and more about knowing that Twitter rumors are often inaccurate, however you run across them.
odammit 9y ago
tl;dr: there needs to be a tl;dr on every web page so People don’t have to read content they don’t care about to get an answer to something they googled. Yeah? Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t google much. I go straight to BBC or the Guardian for news. I get my tech news from email lists or HN. When I’m curious about random stuff, I’ll end up on Wikipedia. What i use google for is getting to a deep link in a site i know i want to go to: * shortcuts to amazon * shortcuts to stackoverflow * probably specific porn term When I use google I’m usually looking for a specific answer to something that I’m not sure where to find it. The two most recent example are: - safety rating and electric range of the Volvo T8 - a recipe for chicken tortilla soup And here is where i get to “maybe”. I want an answer to those questions. What do i get? 40 paragraphs of SEO unique content around some experience someone had as a child with their grandma and then a recipe for chicken tortilla soup buried in there somewhere. I’ve started and worked for a few big content sites and i know the SEO game well. Websites that want to show up in google can’t just focus on what their core competency is, they also have to be content site and have writers. It kinda sucks because I just hit the back button when I’m expecting a succinct answer and I’m confronted with a novel (and i think that’s still a big penalty to them) and try to find the quickest answer without reading a life story or opinions on a car.
sgt101 9y ago
It's interesting that newspapers used (before they all went effectively bust or got bought by monsters) to make a big deal about editorial independence and journalistic integrity. This caused people to trust them (in time). How come Google doesn't appoint a board of editors and grant them independence ?
weberc2 9y ago
Maybe we shouldn't be thinking of Google as a source of truth, and instead educate people on the differences between popular/relevant and "true". I don't trust Google or progressives or the alt-right to arbitrate truth; epistemological fractures are already the cause of much of our political dysfunction, no need to bring that into search as well.
bowlich 9y ago
I switched to Startpage last quarter as my default search engine. I did this mostly to make myself consciously aware of every time that I actually use Google. My experience thus far. Google beats out Startpage when it comes to queries related to programing issues. If I have an error, or some issue Google seems to do a decent job of sending me to the right documentation or relevant Stackoverflow question. Google also seems to do a decent job if I'm searching for particular commercial services if those services have physical location that it can point me to (Restaurants, brick-and-mortor stores, etc). All search engines seem to fail horribly if I'm looking for contractors/service providers in my area. Try searching for who actually provides internet coverage for your street address and you'll end up with every provider under the sun listed in the results. Try searching for a plumber, electrician, chimney sweep, roofer, etc. and you'll get SEO crap for people not even in your state. I've found going directly to government registries (broadband.gov, Arizona Registrar of Contractors [https://roc.az.gov/] https://roc.az.gov/]) to be the only way to get around this. What I've really found disappointing is how search results for humanities related topics have really gone down hill in the last decade. For example, I just searched for "The Rebel Camus." The results are always Wikipedia, Amazon, and then after that an assortment of either encyclopedias, links to Youtube, Goodreads (or similar sites). Used to be, that I would get taken to the personal website of a scholar, hosted at a University, whose life studies revolve around that topic -- links to scholarly papers, coursework, suggested readings on the topic.
- apeace 9y ago
  > Google beats out Startpage when it comes to queries related to programing issues. I have found that Duck Duck Go has excellent results for programming issues. You should try it! I can echo what you said about services with a physical location. Typically when I'm looking for something nearby, I will search in DDG with the g! modifier to take me straight to Google. The place that I want almost always appears on the right, with map, phone number, hours of operation, etc.
rodolphoarruda 9y ago
DDG aside, what other options do we have?
alexasmyths 9y ago
" Google search promoted false reports about the suspect, suggesting that he was a radical communist affiliated with the antifa movement" This is bad, but Google is not there to provide the truth, but rather to search the internet. I agree we should all be wary, but I don't think it's a search Engine's job to sort truth from fiction,
ravenstine 9y ago
Just type "george takei lies" into both Google and DDG and tell me which set of results isn't just a list of his tweets.
FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
Google is not an oracle. Trusting search results is the problem especially, when the algorithm reutrns popular/relevant results, is the problem. Using Facebook as your primary news source is the problem. It's become fashionable for media outlets lately to beat up on tech companies and blame them for the general public's lack of critical reasoning and analytical skills. Many decry that democracy is under threat. However, it is often said that an educated and well-informed citizenry is necessary for a viable democracy.
voidr 9y ago
After these I find it hard to trust Google's results on subjects like politics: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/25/google-tweaks-search-to-help-combat-fake-news/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/25/google-tweaks-search-to-he... https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/7/google-fires-james-damore-criticizing-diversity-pr/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/7/google-fires... https://theintercept.com/2017/08/30/google-funded-think-tank-fired-google-critics-after-they-dared-criticize-google/ https://theintercept.com/2017/08/30/google-funded-think-tank... I switched to DDG. I still occasionally use Google to search for local businesses. Google might have good intentions, however you could say the same thing about SOPA, PIPA, and SESTA as well. Using "bots" or "algorithms" isn't a way forward either: https://youtu.be/KwzJlvx4ndk?t=205 https://youtu.be/KwzJlvx4ndk?t=205 I just want a search engine that considers me a grownup, gives me the raw unfiltered data and let's me make my own conclusions.

287 points by bauta-steen 9y ago

A lot of people discuss about Google's faults and improvements. If there's anything I want from Google is cheap API access to search for deep searches (much more than the first 1000 results). There's no systematic way to get deep into results, and running even a few thousand queries breaks the bank. It's useless for automated search agents.

lowglow 9y ago

PSA use DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/

badnerd 9y ago
I second DuckDuckGo, especially because of the !bang modifiers. Makes it easy to also get to Google — just incase the query is too vauge, which DuckDuckGo still needs work on.

moepstar 9y ago

Not sure if this is just me, but Google Search results are getting less and less relevant for my queries and at the same time, provide more and more spammy sites as results. Finding a useful site on page 2 and beyond? Good luck! I've switched to DDG half a year ago or so and haven't looked back much. I only once in a while use the !g bang and almost always come back disappointed. Sure, there are also some spam results on DDG (and probably there are going to be many more once it gains more relevance to be spammed) but for now and my searches i exclusively use DDG on my private computers as well as at work... So, to summarize, i think the relevancy of Google as a search engine will, imho, continue to drop and also the perceived "truthiness" of statements found thereon as well. To add, i also don't necessarily think of this as a "Google" problem - the same people that will believe in a statement gathered from a quick search will also believe in the same thing when they see it in a Facebook post, Whatsapp chainmail or whatever....

kowdermeister 9y ago
I should report my null result, however it's completely boring, uninteresting. I always find what I look for pretty fast.
johndoe489 9y ago
Even putting politics & world events aside, Google Search doesn't seem to get better. For me the biggest disappointment is when they turned off the ability to search for "an exact match within quotes", as well as the ability to use +plus and -minus to refine results. (EDIT: could be wrong about that, I thought it was disabled at some point) But the most dumbfounding is the fact that you still get several year old results whenever you search for a bug, hardware/driver issue, or even simple programming questions related to a not too old framework or API. Every time I have to go into the advanced options to restrict the results to one year, or one month.. you'd think they would make recent activity the default and then let the user know they can "search older results".
- muxator 9y ago
  Really? Naively, I was still continuing to put my "queries in quotes" and using + and - to refine my search. When did it stopped being supported?
  - johndoe489 9y ago
    My bad. I could swear it was removed at some point but I can't find articles. A quick test reveals maybe the change is that you can't do an exact "ascii" search, ie. google searches for an exact sequence of words, but the casing may be different , there-may-be-dashes and so on.
    - redtuesday 9y ago
      To use the plus sign like behaviour you now need to use quotes (since 2011). Instead of: mars +landings +failures you now have to do: mars “landings” “failures” Source: https://searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-98189 https://searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-...

briga 9y ago

We used to rely on gossip and hearsay to determine what was true. Now we rely on social media and search engines. Which are basically just gossip and hearsay amplified a million-fold. One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. Everyone is biased, but if enough people are talking about something the bias tends to cancel out. I do like the fact that people are finally starting to take a closer look at the hold algorithms hold over our lives. Maybe tech companies are going to start addressing some of their flaws.

saas_co_de 9y ago
> crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source this may be true in the sense that if you have a lot of news reports it is more likely that one of them might be accurate but in terms of the average accuracy of a single report I am sure it is much lower. the current internet information free-for-all seems to me to mostly be pushing people toward a position of not believing in or trusting in anything. the effect of this is not some kind of enlightened skepticism but that people will believe and accept anything, no matter how bat-shit insane, because they have no criterion for judging the accuracy of information.
- yorwba 9y ago
  How does > pushing people toward a position of not believing in or trusting in anything. cause > people will believe and accept anything, no matter how bat-shit insane ? I'd say that both of those are possible extremes of not being able to tell which sources are trustworthy, i.e. some will distrust all sources equally, and some will trust all sources equally. Which extreme someone tends to likely depends on their subject-matter experience. E.g. when I was a child, my parents bought me a time-travel comic (the German series Mosaik) which always had some background information on the epoch. I always enjoyed reading that and trusted the accuracy of their description. When they had an issue on April Fool's, it took my parents a while to convince me that giant tunnel-boring ladybirds on the moon were not real. Nowadays I'm obviously better able to distinguish truth from falsehood, but if I'm just learning about something for the first time, I might easily be taken for a fool again.

Mayzie 9y ago

I find Google annoying to use ever since they removed the AND (+) operator (i.e. that search term MUST be present on the page). Whenever I need a query that involves the AND, I always have to resort to Bing to get a result. Putting things inside quotation marks in Google doesn't help one bit - they're not a replacement. Removing features and not replacing them causing irrelevant results is what's degrading Google for me.

heeen2 9y ago
Put the term in quotes to get the same behavior
- Neuron4ger 9y ago
  "like" "so", or "like so"? Because the latter means that it should be present on the page, as well as in that order. I'm not sure about the former though.
  - gmueckl 9y ago
    The former forces both "like" and "so" to be present in the result without any further relation between them. It's awkward and unintuitive, but it was specifically introduced when they remapped +.
- kbp 9y ago
  This stopped working like this a long time ago; if you put something in quotes, Google will still sometimes return pages that don't include it, or that contain "synonyms" for it. You need to turn on the verbatim option for the old behaviour, I think.
  - retailbuyout 9y ago
    Verbatim has worked for many years.
    - zeep 9y ago

zerr 9y ago

Time to time I use alternative search engines (Yahoo, Bing) - it's an eye-opening indeed.

xvilka 9y ago

Still Google provides best results for niche, highly specific queries, usually technical ones.

johannes1234321 9y ago
With niche queries Google often tries to "improve" my query to more mainstream stuff ...
- blakesterz 9y ago
  Google still almost always gives me what I want but when they "improve" my results by excluding words for me it ALWAYS fails. This morning I went looking for an Ansible role and the first few results it "helpfully" excluded the word ANSIBLE for me. I see this behavior quite often and I really do not understand it.
  - zeep 9y ago
    The way I see it is that Google is getting closer and closer to showing you only what they want... They tell you that they are guessing what you meant so that if it is completely unrelated, you don't get too suspicious.
    - scholia 9y ago
      Or maybe they are showing you what most people want, on the grounds that most people search for the same stuff. In the context of billions of users doing billions of searches, HN readers could be fairly extreme outliers...

alvil 9y ago

Agregators and spam. Can't agree more.

sudshekhar 9y ago

Unrelated thought: With the growth of 'category kings' (Amazon, Stackoverflow, Wikipedia etc) does anybody else feel that google's search becomes less and less useful? I never understood the 90's obsession with domain names until I skimmed several news articles from that era. The main logic was: 1. People will go to a couple of websites for most their needs, the ones with memorable names will be easier to go to. 2. Things like search engines (Google) weren't as hot as curation directories (yahoo) because nobody expected so much fragmentation on the web. 3. The more fragmented the market in an industry, higher the value of search ads. If you know the most options and high quality reviews are available on Amazon, you don't really bother with as many reviews. While this analysis failed for the past few years, with the amount of consolidation happening in the industry recently its possible search engines loose their main source of income (e-commerce) and start being used more from ideleness/curiosity perspective. Wonder if google should pre-emptively start penalizing the aggregation marketplaces and promote direct providers (essentially try to be the Ebay for everything) to prevent such an outcome.

blakesterz 9y ago
>> does anybody else feel that google's search becomes less and less useful? Not for me, not at all. I do like your thoughts on domain names though, I've never considered that.
- sudshekhar 9y ago
  > Not for me, not at all. At the risk of being presumptious, I would classify searches into broadly two categories: 1) Finding good providers/discussion places regarding something you need, say news, goods, experiences etc 2) Finding more info about a specific piece of content/goods . Eg: Product reviews, solutions to some technical doubts etc For most people I know, 1) is pretty much sorted. They have a list of places they check for clothes, groceries, jobs etc. News is read from specific websites/apps. Reddit/HN/Fb/Twitter provide most the social interaction and discovery aspects. 2) is where I see Google providing much more value. But the way things are proceeding, most of the top links relevant to a google search are generally from aggregators themselves. Amazon for most ecommerce, Tripadvisor for travel, Stackoverflow for tech, Practo (in India) for doctors etc. Let's assume Stackoverflow introduces points for using (and help 'improving') their own search. Most people will open stackoverflow first before searching on google. Amazon has already achieved this level for most things related to e-comm (specially less expensive products). There will still be a market for Google ofcourse, but it will be a much smaller chunk than currently being predicted. I actually stumbled across this line of reasoning when somebody asked me if its a good idea for individual service providers (docs/merchants etc) to open their own websites. For 99% of them it isn't. Ofcourse, any counter comments are welcome!

tyingq 9y ago

Here's a graph depicting Google's quarterly revenue, in billions, versus total number of internet users, also in billions. https://imgur.com/a/eBB9E https://imgur.com/a/eBB9E The gap that opens up between the two roughly shows how much more advertising they are pumping at us. Some of it understandable, like their acquisition of YouTube. A lot of it, though, is just turning search results into nothing but ads above the fold. Investors are expecting to see that gap grow at the same, or higher pace. From my perspective, that means anything that doesn't advance that goal is a low priority. Whether that's accurate news, quality of the organic search results, etc.

MarkMc 9y ago
Part of the gap can be explained by: (1) Increasing income of internet users, (2) The average user spending more time on the internet, (3) Google getting more effective at matching advertisers with Google users
- tyingq 9y ago
  I believe that, but nobody other Google really knows how much of the gap is things that are either good/neutral for consumers, and how much of it isn't. Certainly some part of it is pushing the organics down, long forced ads in front of videos, etc. However, investors are expecting that continued ~20% YoY growth...which will further widen the gap. I don't see how that's possible without doing more things that are bad for consumers.
  - MarkMc 9y ago
    I'm actually a Google shareholder and yes I do expect continued 20% growth, at least for the next decade. But increasing the ad/content ratio is only a small component of that growth. Here are my estimates for the major components of Google's revenue growth over the next 10 years: 1. Number of Google users * avg income per user grows 3% per year 2. Time spent on internet by average user grows 5% per year 3. Ad/content ratio gows 3% per year 4. Google ad effectiveness grows 8% per year

mythrwy 9y ago

Very low quality article. Rehashes a few talking points from media about Google having bad results in searches, throws in the election stealing with fake news conspiracy theory and presents the whole steaming pile with hot pink highlights as something worth reading. Fails to explain why I should not trust Google search (other than some bad results may pop up... a fact I'd previously believed to be well known about the Internet in general).

azangru 9y ago

The way this journalist is using Google is so different from the way I use Google that I find it hard to understand what the problem is. Trying to think what I googled recently. Let’s see... - what new pages have appeared about ReasonML over the past week - ditto for rxjs - any code samples of doing server-side rendering when using redux-observable? - any examples of applying functional javascript patterns to drawing on canvas? - what javascript conferences are planned for the coming year? - how is the phrase "the good wife" used in the books (searchable via Google Books)? is the title of the eponymous series an obvious allusion to some literary work? (haven’t fugured that one out, by the way) For all these searches, I was very happy with what the relevance of what Google found.

pavlov 9y ago
You use Google for very specific niche queries where you already know enough about the topic to judge the veracity and usefulness of the results. If someone makes a site that associates ReasonML with ISIS and Google surfaces that as the #2 result, you'll just laugh it off. The article is talking about people using Google for news and contested political topics. The extent of damage resulting from poor/misleading/fake results for the search "Texas church shooter" is much greater than for "ReasonML".
- azangru 9y ago
  > You use Google for very specific niche queries where you already know enough about the topic to judge the veracity and usefulness of the results. <...> The article is talking about people using Google for news and contested political topics. Yes indeed. Could it be that search engines are in principle ill suited for searching for news and contested political topics, especially if one has no way of judging whether a particular result is correct or not? Or, more generally, that searching without knowing how then to verify the quality of the results is a pretty silly undertaking? In other words, shouldn't all responsibility be on the user of a search engine, and not on the search engine itself?

bob_theslob646 9y ago

Why is the verge so negative on Google? Stop trusting them for search? Maybe if you are searching for simple things, but for more advanced searches Google is, by far, the best.

tyingq 9y ago
First hand experiences? https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16309752/google-rehabs-near-me-search-adwords-crackdown https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16309752/google-rehabs-ne... https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15259400/burger-king-google-home-ad-wikipedia https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15259400/burger-king-goog...

chatmasta 9y ago

I switched to DDG on mobile at the recommendation of others on HN. I've been on it for a few months and it's great. 90% of the time it gets me what I need. When it doesn't I just add a !g and get the google results. Most of the time when I'm adding the !g is because I need a specific google feature like knowledge box or maps. I haven't enabled it on my laptop because Google and I have been finding answers to my programming problems for 10 years. We have a nice relationship.

serveboy 9y ago

I cannot use Google without the Google Search Filter extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filter/eidhkmnbiahhgbgpjpiimdogfidfikgf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filt... Having the results you are most interested in highlighted and the bad ones removed seriously upgrades the search experience. Would be nice if Google had this functionality built in. I know they had the remove results thing builtin back in the day, but I find highlighting trusted sites even more important.

jacksmith21006 9y ago

Use Google search all day and just find it amazing at getting what I am looking for. Never seen Google filter in a way that helps them. I will get negative Google articles and they would be the first Google filtered it there was an issue.

codingdave 9y ago

I wasn't aware that there was a perception that Google's results had any indication of the truth of the content it returned. I thought everyone just knew that anything on the web is just as likely to be false, spam, shills, or just bad marketing as it is to be an accurate worthwhile piece of content. So while Google may have its flaws... I wouldn't go to them to solve this problem. I'd teach the people more critical thinking and encourage them to apply it to whatever they read.

mtgx 9y ago
Maybe there wasn't one. But Google has moved from a "top 10 results" strategy to a "we'll give you the best answer for your question" search strategy. They did this for one because that's what kind of service they'd ideally like to be for their users, but also because that's the only way voice search can work - by giving you just one answer. The problem with this is that while before the #1 result on their search engine didn't actually have to be the best most relevant result that there is on the internet, but just one of the best answers, now it has to be the absolute best and most accurate result, because of this shift in strategy of only showing you one answer. They can't afford any mistake with this. And that's way harder to solve as a problem than the problems they had before with the top 10 results.
- skybrian 9y ago
  In this case, it apparently wasn't an answer, though. It was a box saying "popular on Twitter". That's not much of an endorsement. It's a cliché to say that people should think more critically. In this case it's just a matter of knowing what "popular on Twitter" means when it comes to breaking news. It's not really about whether you trust Google and more about knowing that Twitter rumors are often inaccurate, however you run across them.

odammit 9y ago

tl;dr: there needs to be a tl;dr on every web page so People don’t have to read content they don’t care about to get an answer to something they googled. Yeah? Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t google much. I go straight to BBC or the Guardian for news. I get my tech news from email lists or HN. When I’m curious about random stuff, I’ll end up on Wikipedia. What i use google for is getting to a deep link in a site i know i want to go to: * shortcuts to amazon * shortcuts to stackoverflow * probably specific porn term When I use google I’m usually looking for a specific answer to something that I’m not sure where to find it. The two most recent example are: - safety rating and electric range of the Volvo T8 - a recipe for chicken tortilla soup And here is where i get to “maybe”. I want an answer to those questions. What do i get? 40 paragraphs of SEO unique content around some experience someone had as a child with their grandma and then a recipe for chicken tortilla soup buried in there somewhere. I’ve started and worked for a few big content sites and i know the SEO game well. Websites that want to show up in google can’t just focus on what their core competency is, they also have to be content site and have writers. It kinda sucks because I just hit the back button when I’m expecting a succinct answer and I’m confronted with a novel (and i think that’s still a big penalty to them) and try to find the quickest answer without reading a life story or opinions on a car.

sgt101 9y ago

It's interesting that newspapers used (before they all went effectively bust or got bought by monsters) to make a big deal about editorial independence and journalistic integrity. This caused people to trust them (in time). How come Google doesn't appoint a board of editors and grant them independence ?

weberc2 9y ago

Maybe we shouldn't be thinking of Google as a source of truth, and instead educate people on the differences between popular/relevant and "true". I don't trust Google or progressives or the alt-right to arbitrate truth; epistemological fractures are already the cause of much of our political dysfunction, no need to bring that into search as well.

bowlich 9y ago

I switched to Startpage last quarter as my default search engine. I did this mostly to make myself consciously aware of every time that I actually use Google. My experience thus far. Google beats out Startpage when it comes to queries related to programing issues. If I have an error, or some issue Google seems to do a decent job of sending me to the right documentation or relevant Stackoverflow question. Google also seems to do a decent job if I'm searching for particular commercial services if those services have physical location that it can point me to (Restaurants, brick-and-mortor stores, etc). All search engines seem to fail horribly if I'm looking for contractors/service providers in my area. Try searching for who actually provides internet coverage for your street address and you'll end up with every provider under the sun listed in the results. Try searching for a plumber, electrician, chimney sweep, roofer, etc. and you'll get SEO crap for people not even in your state. I've found going directly to government registries (broadband.gov, Arizona Registrar of Contractors [https://roc.az.gov/] https://roc.az.gov/]) to be the only way to get around this. What I've really found disappointing is how search results for humanities related topics have really gone down hill in the last decade. For example, I just searched for "The Rebel Camus." The results are always Wikipedia, Amazon, and then after that an assortment of either encyclopedias, links to Youtube, Goodreads (or similar sites). Used to be, that I would get taken to the personal website of a scholar, hosted at a University, whose life studies revolve around that topic -- links to scholarly papers, coursework, suggested readings on the topic.

apeace 9y ago
> Google beats out Startpage when it comes to queries related to programing issues. I have found that Duck Duck Go has excellent results for programming issues. You should try it! I can echo what you said about services with a physical location. Typically when I'm looking for something nearby, I will search in DDG with the g! modifier to take me straight to Google. The place that I want almost always appears on the right, with map, phone number, hours of operation, etc.

rodolphoarruda 9y ago

DDG aside, what other options do we have?

alexasmyths 9y ago

" Google search promoted false reports about the suspect, suggesting that he was a radical communist affiliated with the antifa movement" This is bad, but Google is not there to provide the truth, but rather to search the internet. I agree we should all be wary, but I don't think it's a search Engine's job to sort truth from fiction,

ravenstine 9y ago

Just type "george takei lies" into both Google and DDG and tell me which set of results isn't just a list of his tweets.

FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago

Google is not an oracle. Trusting search results is the problem especially, when the algorithm reutrns popular/relevant results, is the problem. Using Facebook as your primary news source is the problem. It's become fashionable for media outlets lately to beat up on tech companies and blame them for the general public's lack of critical reasoning and analytical skills. Many decry that democracy is under threat. However, it is often said that an educated and well-informed citizenry is necessary for a viable democracy.

voidr 9y ago

After these I find it hard to trust Google's results on subjects like politics: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/25/google-tweaks-search-to-help-combat-fake-news/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/25/google-tweaks-search-to-he... https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/7/google-fires-james-damore-criticizing-diversity-pr/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/7/google-fires... https://theintercept.com/2017/08/30/google-funded-think-tank-fired-google-critics-after-they-dared-criticize-google/ https://theintercept.com/2017/08/30/google-funded-think-tank... I switched to DDG. I still occasionally use Google to search for local businesses. Google might have good intentions, however you could say the same thing about SOPA, PIPA, and SESTA as well. Using "bots" or "algorithms" isn't a way forward either: https://youtu.be/KwzJlvx4ndk?t=205 https://youtu.be/KwzJlvx4ndk?t=205 I just want a search engine that considers me a grownup, gives me the raw unfiltered data and let's me make my own conclusions.