5 ms·

Google has had terrible search quality as of late. I'm finding myself using DuckDuckGo more and more just to find very basic things that used to be easy with Go

by rl3 8y ago

Google has had terrible search quality as of late. I'm finding myself using DuckDuckGo more and more just to find very basic things that used to be easy with Google. This is just in the last couple months or so. Not sure if that's the case here, but if it is I wouldn't be surprised.

fucking_tragedy 8y ago
Google seems to prioritize affiliate network blogs that aggregate basic information on a subject. This makes it difficult to locate information that exists on a term that isn't just surface level facts you can find by browsing Wikipedia.
orbital-decay 8y ago
I've found the quality to be dropping since they started to treat synonyms too loosely in the last few years. Google can mix two completely unrelated topics due to some word being a synonym for your search keyword... in a completely different context.
nottorp 8y ago
Quality has been going down in the last few years, not months, if you ask me. I've got a simple (for me) use case for which Google completely fails every time. It's mostly for programmers/sysadmins though. Paste an error message from a daemon, kernel etc in google and see what you get. With a little luck, 95% of the results on the first page won't be related to your problem. I'd say 20% won't be related to the piece of software you're dealing with at all. This can be sort of mitigated by selecting 'Verbatim', but for some reason you can't turn that on forever, you have to select it on every search. Add censoring of search results, and Google loses its usefulness completely.
- Legogris 8y ago
  You know you can use quotes to get verbatim per phrase, right..?
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    This doesn’t actually work. There is a drop down option under search tools that’s called something like “verbatim search”. I only discovered it recently so I haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet, but presumably it works.
  - rangibaby 8y ago
    Google doesn’t always respect quotes
    - dec0dedab0de 8y ago
      I dont know too much about search engines, but I think that's a side effect of how they normalize their ngrams
  - nottorp 8y ago
    Why would I have to do that? Not to mention that no, I don't think quotes are respected by google any more.
    - fjarlq 8y ago
      Quotes are indeed still respected by Google: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 For example, this search without quotes doesn't mention Dennis Ritchie's NYTimes obituary on the first page of results: https://www.google.com/search?q=became+more+interested+in+computing+than+math https://www.google.com/search?q=became+more+interested+in+co... Add quotes and the obituary becomes the first result: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22became+more+interested+in+computing+than+math%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22became+more+interested+in...
      - DanBC 8y ago
        That's not what people mean when they say "not respected by Google". They're not saying quotes never work, they're saying sometimes you use quotes and google returns a page that doesn't include the quoted word.
obelix_ 8y ago
Once upon a time I could find blog posts of people reviewing things, travel, software, equipment etc. Now I just find pages and pages of review aggregators. The advantage of finding a blog was didn't take more than a few clicks to figure out if the blogger and me shared thinking, lifestyles, financial means etc. Now all that is gone. We just have ridiculous aggregation.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  The world has changed though. Now that blogger is more likely than not an affiliate con man rather than a random enthusiast on software or travel. Not that review aggregators are the answer, but right now I don’t know that there is one.
- astura 8y ago
  Problem is that there's a ton of money in the "review industry," (through referrals) it's very lucrative, so the big ones are spending a lot to rank high.
- dazc 8y ago
  The problem is exacerbated by search quality guidelines that need to be followed if you're going to rank for any competitive search term, especially when there are clear incentives for doing so - such as site speed and deploying ssl. Coming next is the 'insecure site' warning that's likely going to cull many more hobby sites.
  - lawl 8y ago
    > Coming next is the 'insecure site' warning that's likely going to cull many more hobby sites. Good. Setting up https shouldn't take more than an hour now with LetsEncrypt even if you have no clue about the process. I can totally understand outdated webdesign, can't understand not having https.
    - ozfive 8y ago
      I can, because I just converted a site to https, which had a combination of relative and absolute href and src parameters on it in a confused manner. This was combined with html embedded in table records. It wasn't a simple search and replace task since several admin functionalities were also included in the site. Think about all of the sites that have relevant information that aren't selling anything that would love to get things like this fixed, but just can't throw money at the problem. Before you say oh it shouldn't cost that much. Think about where some of these sites are hosted and for how little. Some people don't even have the means to pay for such a fix, but they have important information to share. This probably should have been a rule applied to sites that sell things and not sites that just have information. I am all for making money, but I also feel like doing some charity work for this problem as well. I heard the deadline is the 24th. Anyone else interested in doing this collectively for a couple sites?
mjal 8y ago
If it helps, you can click Tools on the right under the search bar on the results page and click Verbatim. I've found that I tend to get better results when I'm looking for something specific.
- prepend 8y ago
  This three click ritual that I have to do on probably 75% of my searches and 99% of my conscious searches reminds me on the 90s when I would have to inconveniently cntrl+alt+del on windows very frequently. It’s an example of how google is getting more anti user. They obviously have data on this feature usage. They make a bit of a pain and don’t make it a user preference. I fear this means it’s one of the myriad of little features that developers put in that are eventually de supported. I imagine the following scenario in a design meeting: PM: SO THE NEW FEATURE IS AMAZING, WE WILL SHOW USERS THE MOST LIKELY RESULTS THAT THEY WANT TO SEE. AND THIS LEADS TO MORE AD CLICKS. DEV: BUT WHAT ABOUT WHEN IT DOESNT EVEN HAVE WORDS FROM THE SEARCH? PM: THATS NOT AN ISSUE, OUR ALGORITHM SHOWS THAT 80% OF OUR USERS CLICK ON THESE RESULTS DEV: HOW WILL I SEARCH STACKOVERFLOW? HOW ABOUT I ADD AN OPTION TO JUST USE THE EXACT TEXT? PM: WE HAVE TO FOCUS ON SCOPE, CANT WASTE TIME ON BONUS FEATURES DEV: ITS NOT A BONUS FEATURE ITS HOW SEARCH WORKS BEFORE YOUR CHANGE. IT TAKES 30 SECONDS. PM: WELL EXACT SEARCH MAKES US LESS AD REVENUE DEV: ITS REALLY USEFUL PM: OK MAKE IT HARD TO GET TO SO USERS DONT GET CONFUSED DEV: OK, AND ILL MAKE A SETTING SO ITS NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL PM: NO SETTING THAT WOULD BE A COMMITMENT TO KEEP THE FEATURE <dec shudders thinking of how she will be hated my millions of users who are inconvenienced, wonders where her life has gone, dreams of a better world, starts typing...curtain>
  - dang 8y ago
    Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? It's basically yelling. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    I dislike this meme of thinking that PMs are all useless and devs are the only sane people in product development.
saas_co_de 8y ago
100% for years I would try ddg about once a year and end up going back to Google because it just didn't work for me. About six months ago I tried ddg again and have not gone back. Ddg has gotten better and Google has gotten worse.
afpx 8y ago
Google’s search results would probably be useful to me if I happened to be the most generic, average person in the world. I’m guessing this is an explicit business decision and not inferior technology.
- smt88 8y ago
  Recently, I searched "united states" and Google picked up the word "us" in a page footer -- "Contact us". It's not just averaging of results. That's a problem, but the aggressive reinterpretation of terms is insane and makes it impossible to search for some things.
  - andrewshadura 8y ago
    Probably it actually meant "Contact United States".

by rl3 8y ago

fucking_tragedy 8y ago

Google seems to prioritize affiliate network blogs that aggregate basic information on a subject. This makes it difficult to locate information that exists on a term that isn't just surface level facts you can find by browsing Wikipedia.

orbital-decay 8y ago

I've found the quality to be dropping since they started to treat synonyms too loosely in the last few years. Google can mix two completely unrelated topics due to some word being a synonym for your search keyword... in a completely different context.

nottorp 8y ago

Quality has been going down in the last few years, not months, if you ask me. I've got a simple (for me) use case for which Google completely fails every time. It's mostly for programmers/sysadmins though. Paste an error message from a daemon, kernel etc in google and see what you get. With a little luck, 95% of the results on the first page won't be related to your problem. I'd say 20% won't be related to the piece of software you're dealing with at all. This can be sort of mitigated by selecting 'Verbatim', but for some reason you can't turn that on forever, you have to select it on every search. Add censoring of search results, and Google loses its usefulness completely.

Legogris 8y ago
You know you can use quotes to get verbatim per phrase, right..?
- gnicholas 8y ago
  This doesn’t actually work. There is a drop down option under search tools that’s called something like “verbatim search”. I only discovered it recently so I haven’t had the opportunity to test it yet, but presumably it works.
- rangibaby 8y ago
  Google doesn’t always respect quotes
  - dec0dedab0de 8y ago
    I dont know too much about search engines, but I think that's a side effect of how they normalize their ngrams
- nottorp 8y ago
  Why would I have to do that? Not to mention that no, I don't think quotes are respected by google any more.
  - fjarlq 8y ago
    Quotes are indeed still respected by Google: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 For example, this search without quotes doesn't mention Dennis Ritchie's NYTimes obituary on the first page of results: https://www.google.com/search?q=became+more+interested+in+computing+than+math https://www.google.com/search?q=became+more+interested+in+co... Add quotes and the obituary becomes the first result: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22became+more+interested+in+computing+than+math%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22became+more+interested+in...
    - DanBC 8y ago
      That's not what people mean when they say "not respected by Google". They're not saying quotes never work, they're saying sometimes you use quotes and google returns a page that doesn't include the quoted word.

obelix_ 8y ago

Once upon a time I could find blog posts of people reviewing things, travel, software, equipment etc. Now I just find pages and pages of review aggregators. The advantage of finding a blog was didn't take more than a few clicks to figure out if the blogger and me shared thinking, lifestyles, financial means etc. Now all that is gone. We just have ridiculous aggregation.

bradleyjg 8y ago
The world has changed though. Now that blogger is more likely than not an affiliate con man rather than a random enthusiast on software or travel. Not that review aggregators are the answer, but right now I don’t know that there is one.
astura 8y ago
Problem is that there's a ton of money in the "review industry," (through referrals) it's very lucrative, so the big ones are spending a lot to rank high.
dazc 8y ago
The problem is exacerbated by search quality guidelines that need to be followed if you're going to rank for any competitive search term, especially when there are clear incentives for doing so - such as site speed and deploying ssl. Coming next is the 'insecure site' warning that's likely going to cull many more hobby sites.
- lawl 8y ago
  > Coming next is the 'insecure site' warning that's likely going to cull many more hobby sites. Good. Setting up https shouldn't take more than an hour now with LetsEncrypt even if you have no clue about the process. I can totally understand outdated webdesign, can't understand not having https.
  - ozfive 8y ago
    I can, because I just converted a site to https, which had a combination of relative and absolute href and src parameters on it in a confused manner. This was combined with html embedded in table records. It wasn't a simple search and replace task since several admin functionalities were also included in the site. Think about all of the sites that have relevant information that aren't selling anything that would love to get things like this fixed, but just can't throw money at the problem. Before you say oh it shouldn't cost that much. Think about where some of these sites are hosted and for how little. Some people don't even have the means to pay for such a fix, but they have important information to share. This probably should have been a rule applied to sites that sell things and not sites that just have information. I am all for making money, but I also feel like doing some charity work for this problem as well. I heard the deadline is the 24th. Anyone else interested in doing this collectively for a couple sites?

mjal 8y ago

If it helps, you can click Tools on the right under the search bar on the results page and click Verbatim. I've found that I tend to get better results when I'm looking for something specific.

prepend 8y ago
This three click ritual that I have to do on probably 75% of my searches and 99% of my conscious searches reminds me on the 90s when I would have to inconveniently cntrl+alt+del on windows very frequently. It’s an example of how google is getting more anti user. They obviously have data on this feature usage. They make a bit of a pain and don’t make it a user preference. I fear this means it’s one of the myriad of little features that developers put in that are eventually de supported. I imagine the following scenario in a design meeting: PM: SO THE NEW FEATURE IS AMAZING, WE WILL SHOW USERS THE MOST LIKELY RESULTS THAT THEY WANT TO SEE. AND THIS LEADS TO MORE AD CLICKS. DEV: BUT WHAT ABOUT WHEN IT DOESNT EVEN HAVE WORDS FROM THE SEARCH? PM: THATS NOT AN ISSUE, OUR ALGORITHM SHOWS THAT 80% OF OUR USERS CLICK ON THESE RESULTS DEV: HOW WILL I SEARCH STACKOVERFLOW? HOW ABOUT I ADD AN OPTION TO JUST USE THE EXACT TEXT? PM: WE HAVE TO FOCUS ON SCOPE, CANT WASTE TIME ON BONUS FEATURES DEV: ITS NOT A BONUS FEATURE ITS HOW SEARCH WORKS BEFORE YOUR CHANGE. IT TAKES 30 SECONDS. PM: WELL EXACT SEARCH MAKES US LESS AD REVENUE DEV: ITS REALLY USEFUL PM: OK MAKE IT HARD TO GET TO SO USERS DONT GET CONFUSED DEV: OK, AND ILL MAKE A SETTING SO ITS NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL PM: NO SETTING THAT WOULD BE A COMMITMENT TO KEEP THE FEATURE <dec shudders thinking of how she will be hated my millions of users who are inconvenienced, wonders where her life has gone, dreams of a better world, starts typing...curtain>
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? It's basically yelling. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  I dislike this meme of thinking that PMs are all useless and devs are the only sane people in product development.

saas_co_de 8y ago

100% for years I would try ddg about once a year and end up going back to Google because it just didn't work for me. About six months ago I tried ddg again and have not gone back. Ddg has gotten better and Google has gotten worse.

afpx 8y ago

Google’s search results would probably be useful to me if I happened to be the most generic, average person in the world. I’m guessing this is an explicit business decision and not inferior technology.

smt88 8y ago
Recently, I searched "united states" and Google picked up the word "us" in a page footer -- "Contact us". It's not just averaging of results. That's a problem, but the aggressive reinterpretation of terms is insane and makes it impossible to search for some things.
- andrewshadura 8y ago
  Probably it actually meant "Contact United States".