8 ms·

Google has become more and more useless lately, at least if you are searching for specific tech info and not "10 weird hacks to". For example, I've been doing l

by scoutt 8y ago

Google has become more and more useless lately, at least if you are searching for specific tech info and not "10 weird hacks to". For example, I've been doing lately some Android AOSP and BSP customization for a custom board. To get useful information and avoid "top 10 Android tricks" and Android hacking/cracking forums I often end up with a query composed of 10% search terms and 90% filters. Or if you do a search for name surname it may return results for "name" with "missing: surname". That is, how on earth if I search about (for example) Peter Petrelli a result about Peter Thiel would be the same thing? That's a full 50% of my search query that Google is discarding...

IpV8 8y ago
I installed a browser extension that adds a blocklist to google's search results. So every time I visit a '10 wierd hacks to...' type of page I block the entire domain from ever showing up in my results again. It take a while to filter them all out, but it drastically increased my search experience. Anyways I use duck duck go nowadays so now my plugin is irrelevant...
- fps_doug 8y ago
  Same here. There's still times where a !g actually improves the results but usually duckduckgo's results are fine.
- snaky 8y ago
  I wish there were a way to exchange that block lists between the users of this extension.
- stefanfisk 8y ago
  Which extension are you using? Personal Blocklist broke for me a while back, and now my days are filled with scrolling past w3schools.com to get to developer.mozilla.org
  - dhimes 8y ago
    A duck duck go search of something like <what I'm looking up> javascript mdn give me developer.mozilla.org at the top every time. It's somehow better than site:developer.mozilla.org for some weird reason.
    - frosted-flakes 8y ago
      Just put !mdn in your DDG search and it will take you right to MDN. Same with !g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc.
      - Nition 8y ago
        In Firefox, right-click the search box at developer.mozilla.org and select "Add a Keyword for this search". Put a keyword, something like m. Then you don't even need a search engine. Just type m your search term here in the URL bar to search the site directly.
        dhimes 8y ago
        Wow! That's wicked cool- thanks for the tip! EDIT: I'll add for others that this keyword is stored as a bookmark, so you can find it in your bookmarks and edit/delete/etc.
      - dhimes 8y ago
        !mdn uses mdn's search and returns their results, but I actually prefer ddg's. And using only mdn has the side-benefit of including relevant SO results (and others) lower on the front page sometimes.
  - whalabi 8y ago
    Anecdotally, so many of us do exactly that scroll. It must be millions of us, but apparently not enough for Google to decide MDN > w3schools. Tyranny of the majority I guess.
- jpindar 8y ago
  Google used to have that function. But it was very useful, so of course they removed it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
DamnInteresting 8y ago
Agreed, the results with the "missing" flag are the worst. I can abide synonymous substitutions, for instance if I search for "interesting articles" and the results include "fascinating", "intriguing", etc. But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms. I increasingly suspect that Google is entering the lengthy death-by-design-by-committee phase that will ultimately unseat them as the top player in their space.
- gipp 8y ago
  > But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms. Then you've never worked on a search engine. There's a real bias in the comments here because the way technical people search for technical topics is dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine. Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability. No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.
  - fromthestart 8y ago
    Normies ruined search engines. No, really. Especially if Google is using search queries and clicks to update ML models - non technical people "pollute" the algorithms with poorly formed queries and overwhelming numbers of clicks on non technical articles. There's probably enough of a niche now for a genuine technical search engine. Which treats keywords like Google used to, maybe with some regex thrown in and what not. None of this full question nonsense. I personally believe that allowing people to search with full queries has had a negative effect on society - very little critical thought goes into which parts of your question are actually important, and searching is no longer a learnable skill; just ask a literal question and let Google do all the thinking for you.
    - pmart123 8y ago
      It is an interesting viewpoint. One of the advantages of Twitter is that people can weight, or Twitter itself can weight who is posting and sharing that information. For instance, if Fred Wilson writes something about startups or VC, I generally find it interesting, if he writes about public markets, I largely ignore it. Originally, page rank probably solved quality of the source well enough, but as more interesting content is appearing in podcasts or niche, subscription blogs, does the approach need to be drastically different? What I mean is rather than Google's algorithm likely boosting the popularly clicked and shared post, "10 Things I learned as a VC Intern", should Google's ML algorithm weight that click based on the expertise of the search user or subject matter density, etc.? Like should Linus Torvalds clicking on a link be given far more importance on a technical/software related query than myself?
reaperducer 8y ago
Even for non-technical searches, Google is becoming increasingly worthless. I think a lot of it is about giving too much weight to (its flawed) geolocation. Last night I searched for "Vintage computer store $location" while I was in $location. All I got back was Best Buy locations, eBay listings, irrelevant Yelp lists, and local newspaper articles about computers in general. Today I'm in a different place, but performed the identical search, including the $location where I was last night, and guess what -- helpful results! Google is trying too hard to be Yelp, and not hard enough to be a search engine.
- mostlysimilar 8y ago
  I barely think of Google as a search engine for the web anymore. Modern Google is more like an "ask a commonly asked question and get an answer" engine. My problem with this is that the usefulness of web searching seems to have been sacrificed in order to be good at answering the common questions. It's great if I have a question a bunch of other people have asked too, not so good if I'm looking for anything more than that.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    It's great if you want a major brand, shopping site, or easily answered question that wikipedia and sport sites can answer. Which has been the direction they've been going in for years with updates to prioritise brands, recency and frequency of update etc. Add in the search bubble from your history, and "Google knows best" including also words and considering even quoted terms optional. Not much search engine left. Course it makes it ever more useless for the difficult, the rare and the old. The personal homepage, blog, or random site with the best knowledge on something esoteric almost never shows any more. Bing isn't much better, DDG became best - it's certainly not worse any more - almost by default.
    - mostlysimilar 8y ago
      What's interesting re: getting better results is how much my own behavior has changed in response to how Google behaves now. In 2006 I would never search "how do I ___", "what is ___", because "how", "what", etc. were just noise, and sites weren't formatted as a question/FAQ like that. I knew to use a series of keywords to find pages that contain the content I was looking for. I wonder too how much the decline of personal homepages, blogs, random sites, etc. has to do with how much harder it has become to find them in Google.
colordrops 8y ago
This may be a controversial opinion, but it also seems that Google's (intentional or unintentional) biases are severely hobbling results. Unpopular political opinions and non-mainstream narratives are increasingly de-ranked. I get a sense that naive individuals at Google are applying their world views when training algorithms to weight results based on content. This didn't used to be the case. It used to be, if I searched for it, I could find it, no matter how popular or controversial it was. I used to live in China and it reminds me of how Baidu works.
- enumjorge 8y ago
  This is an interesting one because we’re also seeing an increase in propaganda and misinformation being propagated online by some pretty resourceful players. Doing absolutely no curation can also have some pretty significant consequences.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    The mainstream narrative has always been propaganda. This is not new. The powers that be are not happy that propaganda other than their own is slipping through.
- driverdan 8y ago
  > Unpopular political opinions and non-mainstream narratives are increasingly de-ranked. Citation? Examples?
- sampleinajar 8y ago
  I'd really like to see this tested somehow, because I have friends along the political spectrum that complain of the same thing. I'm not sure how google is somehow hindering results for left, right and middle.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    I think they mean that when they search 'donald trump news' they have a set of results in their mind they expect to see, and Google gives them back something different. That's a really hard issue to solve...
h3throw 8y ago
Yeah the listicle type results have really started to increase in search relevance for me. ESPECIALLY when I search on mobile. I think mobile Google Search is a truly awful experience with an extremely cluttered results page that I can never properly navigate.
smitty1110 8y ago
Search isn't a Google product anymore, it's a learning tool like reCaptcha. Sure, the ads at the top of your search results are a product, but the real value of search is that they can capture everything you do to learn more about you. So every time you refine your search and try again, they learn a little bit more about what you're interested in, or what you're doing, and maybe what you're working on for your job, and advertisers will throw money at them to get the "better" information for targeting. Search is just the latest casualty of the war for your attention online.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
tobr 8y ago
Today I searched for a phrase including the word “Swedish”. First result was an article that contained the word “German”, which Google had helpfully bolded in the excerpt, as Swedish and German are basically the same thing I guess?
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  I guess you're lucky they didn't return a page about Robert Bork where the surname was repeated two times.
- TheSoftwareGuy 8y ago
  sounds like they're allowing substitutions based on their word2vec stuff. and doing it a little too liberally
rchaud 8y ago
This is a UX issue, not a technical one. Google doesn't want people abandoning the site if they see zero results for their searches. So if a particularly obscure search doesn't bring up anything, Google will show you some results it thinks is close. I find the message "missing: [term]" more helpful than not. Anytime I see that, I don't click the link. That sends a small signal to Google (compounding with the scale of search queries) that their #1 link isn't what the user was looking for.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  That would make sense if the bad search results were limited to searches that have few results. But Google's results are suboptimal for all searches.
moultano 8y ago
Can you remember any of your queries? I'm happy to pass them along to debug. If you have your search history turned on you can find them here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=19 https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=19
- Doxin 8y ago
  One example that continuously irks me that recently started happening is if I search for "python list index" (without the quotes) the official reference material is ranked 7th. I don't need a tutorial or a second hand source, I need the information I'm looking for which is in the official python documentation. Not on programiz, or tutorialspoint (twice), or w3schools, or geeks4geeks.
  - moultano 8y ago
    Thanks!
sf_rob 8y ago
I just put quotes in half my queries these days. A hilarious example of this last week; searching 'email CTR' brought up pages with email/center... Google of all companies should care about CTR!
bryan2 8y ago
I'm working on a project that involves the bsp too. If you found any great resources I'd really appreciate a link.
jondubois 8y ago
Maybe you didn't mean literally but for me it doesn't show me anything about Peter Thiel.
imhelpingu 8y ago
Google is becoming a service that no longer performs searches and instead attempts to project reality back at me based on a keyword cue. This is how the AI takes over society.
wnevets 8y ago
Is google becoming useless or the majority of the content people are putting on the web is useless?
danielecook 8y ago
The quality has definitely gone down. It seems a lot of sites that play the SEO game heavily have floated to the top and far fewer smaller sites with quality content show up.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  I've been using Qwant as a search engine, so far its much more palatable than others I've tried (like DuckDuckGo).
bigiain 8y ago
Googlebombs have "been a thing" for 20 years... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb "Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result. In September 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men's Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text "dumb motherfucker" to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise."
thirdsun 8y ago
My biggest problem with Google search these days is their recent push towards localized results. I speak two languages, english and german. I set my search preferences accordingly and expect the results within those languages to be ranked by their actual quality. However it seems Google favors results in my local (german) language, which often don't appear to be the best results if both languages were weighted equally. Particularly when searching for "{popular game/album/film} review" I perceive the returned results as subpar, simply because my local media landscape doesn't seem as thorough, high-quality and in-depth to me.
- weinzierl 8y ago
  google.com will give you German ranking from Germany. You can still workaround that with google.com/ncr. The results are night and day for programming related questions. I've heard a while ago that they want to deprecate ncr though. Personally I use Google only for local searches and DuckDuckGo for almost everything else. Works well for me.

by scoutt 8y ago

IpV8 8y ago

I installed a browser extension that adds a blocklist to google's search results. So every time I visit a '10 wierd hacks to...' type of page I block the entire domain from ever showing up in my results again. It take a while to filter them all out, but it drastically increased my search experience. Anyways I use duck duck go nowadays so now my plugin is irrelevant...

fps_doug 8y ago
Same here. There's still times where a !g actually improves the results but usually duckduckgo's results are fine.
snaky 8y ago
I wish there were a way to exchange that block lists between the users of this extension.
stefanfisk 8y ago
Which extension are you using? Personal Blocklist broke for me a while back, and now my days are filled with scrolling past w3schools.com to get to developer.mozilla.org
- dhimes 8y ago
  A duck duck go search of something like <what I'm looking up> javascript mdn give me developer.mozilla.org at the top every time. It's somehow better than site:developer.mozilla.org for some weird reason.
  - frosted-flakes 8y ago
    Just put !mdn in your DDG search and it will take you right to MDN. Same with !g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc.
    - Nition 8y ago
      In Firefox, right-click the search box at developer.mozilla.org and select "Add a Keyword for this search". Put a keyword, something like m. Then you don't even need a search engine. Just type m your search term here in the URL bar to search the site directly.
      - dhimes 8y ago
        Wow! That's wicked cool- thanks for the tip! EDIT: I'll add for others that this keyword is stored as a bookmark, so you can find it in your bookmarks and edit/delete/etc.
    - dhimes 8y ago
      !mdn uses mdn's search and returns their results, but I actually prefer ddg's. And using only mdn has the side-benefit of including relevant SO results (and others) lower on the front page sometimes.
- whalabi 8y ago
  Anecdotally, so many of us do exactly that scroll. It must be millions of us, but apparently not enough for Google to decide MDN > w3schools. Tyranny of the majority I guess.
jpindar 8y ago
Google used to have that function. But it was very useful, so of course they removed it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

DamnInteresting 8y ago

Agreed, the results with the "missing" flag are the worst. I can abide synonymous substitutions, for instance if I search for "interesting articles" and the results include "fascinating", "intriguing", etc. But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms. I increasingly suspect that Google is entering the lengthy death-by-design-by-committee phase that will ultimately unseat them as the top player in their space.

gipp 8y ago
> But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms. Then you've never worked on a search engine. There's a real bias in the comments here because the way technical people search for technical topics is dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine. Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability. No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.
- fromthestart 8y ago
  Normies ruined search engines. No, really. Especially if Google is using search queries and clicks to update ML models - non technical people "pollute" the algorithms with poorly formed queries and overwhelming numbers of clicks on non technical articles. There's probably enough of a niche now for a genuine technical search engine. Which treats keywords like Google used to, maybe with some regex thrown in and what not. None of this full question nonsense. I personally believe that allowing people to search with full queries has had a negative effect on society - very little critical thought goes into which parts of your question are actually important, and searching is no longer a learnable skill; just ask a literal question and let Google do all the thinking for you.
  - pmart123 8y ago
    It is an interesting viewpoint. One of the advantages of Twitter is that people can weight, or Twitter itself can weight who is posting and sharing that information. For instance, if Fred Wilson writes something about startups or VC, I generally find it interesting, if he writes about public markets, I largely ignore it. Originally, page rank probably solved quality of the source well enough, but as more interesting content is appearing in podcasts or niche, subscription blogs, does the approach need to be drastically different? What I mean is rather than Google's algorithm likely boosting the popularly clicked and shared post, "10 Things I learned as a VC Intern", should Google's ML algorithm weight that click based on the expertise of the search user or subject matter density, etc.? Like should Linus Torvalds clicking on a link be given far more importance on a technical/software related query than myself?

reaperducer 8y ago

Even for non-technical searches, Google is becoming increasingly worthless. I think a lot of it is about giving too much weight to (its flawed) geolocation. Last night I searched for "Vintage computer store $location" while I was in $location. All I got back was Best Buy locations, eBay listings, irrelevant Yelp lists, and local newspaper articles about computers in general. Today I'm in a different place, but performed the identical search, including the $location where I was last night, and guess what -- helpful results! Google is trying too hard to be Yelp, and not hard enough to be a search engine.

mostlysimilar 8y ago
I barely think of Google as a search engine for the web anymore. Modern Google is more like an "ask a commonly asked question and get an answer" engine. My problem with this is that the usefulness of web searching seems to have been sacrificed in order to be good at answering the common questions. It's great if I have a question a bunch of other people have asked too, not so good if I'm looking for anything more than that.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  It's great if you want a major brand, shopping site, or easily answered question that wikipedia and sport sites can answer. Which has been the direction they've been going in for years with updates to prioritise brands, recency and frequency of update etc. Add in the search bubble from your history, and "Google knows best" including also words and considering even quoted terms optional. Not much search engine left. Course it makes it ever more useless for the difficult, the rare and the old. The personal homepage, blog, or random site with the best knowledge on something esoteric almost never shows any more. Bing isn't much better, DDG became best - it's certainly not worse any more - almost by default.
  - mostlysimilar 8y ago
    What's interesting re: getting better results is how much my own behavior has changed in response to how Google behaves now. In 2006 I would never search "how do I ___", "what is ___", because "how", "what", etc. were just noise, and sites weren't formatted as a question/FAQ like that. I knew to use a series of keywords to find pages that contain the content I was looking for. I wonder too how much the decline of personal homepages, blogs, random sites, etc. has to do with how much harder it has become to find them in Google.

colordrops 8y ago

This may be a controversial opinion, but it also seems that Google's (intentional or unintentional) biases are severely hobbling results. Unpopular political opinions and non-mainstream narratives are increasingly de-ranked. I get a sense that naive individuals at Google are applying their world views when training algorithms to weight results based on content. This didn't used to be the case. It used to be, if I searched for it, I could find it, no matter how popular or controversial it was. I used to live in China and it reminds me of how Baidu works.

enumjorge 8y ago
This is an interesting one because we’re also seeing an increase in propaganda and misinformation being propagated online by some pretty resourceful players. Doing absolutely no curation can also have some pretty significant consequences.
- colordrops 8y ago
  The mainstream narrative has always been propaganda. This is not new. The powers that be are not happy that propaganda other than their own is slipping through.
driverdan 8y ago
> Unpopular political opinions and non-mainstream narratives are increasingly de-ranked. Citation? Examples?
sampleinajar 8y ago
I'd really like to see this tested somehow, because I have friends along the political spectrum that complain of the same thing. I'm not sure how google is somehow hindering results for left, right and middle.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  I think they mean that when they search 'donald trump news' they have a set of results in their mind they expect to see, and Google gives them back something different. That's a really hard issue to solve...

h3throw 8y ago

Yeah the listicle type results have really started to increase in search relevance for me. ESPECIALLY when I search on mobile. I think mobile Google Search is a truly awful experience with an extremely cluttered results page that I can never properly navigate.

smitty1110 8y ago

Search isn't a Google product anymore, it's a learning tool like reCaptcha. Sure, the ads at the top of your search results are a product, but the real value of search is that they can capture everything you do to learn more about you. So every time you refine your search and try again, they learn a little bit more about what you're interested in, or what you're doing, and maybe what you're working on for your job, and advertisers will throw money at them to get the "better" information for targeting. Search is just the latest casualty of the war for your attention online.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

tobr 8y ago

Today I searched for a phrase including the word “Swedish”. First result was an article that contained the word “German”, which Google had helpfully bolded in the excerpt, as Swedish and German are basically the same thing I guess?

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
I guess you're lucky they didn't return a page about Robert Bork where the surname was repeated two times.
TheSoftwareGuy 8y ago
sounds like they're allowing substitutions based on their word2vec stuff. and doing it a little too liberally

rchaud 8y ago

This is a UX issue, not a technical one. Google doesn't want people abandoning the site if they see zero results for their searches. So if a particularly obscure search doesn't bring up anything, Google will show you some results it thinks is close. I find the message "missing: [term]" more helpful than not. Anytime I see that, I don't click the link. That sends a small signal to Google (compounding with the scale of search queries) that their #1 link isn't what the user was looking for.

JohnFen 8y ago
That would make sense if the bad search results were limited to searches that have few results. But Google's results are suboptimal for all searches.

moultano 8y ago

Can you remember any of your queries? I'm happy to pass them along to debug. If you have your search history turned on you can find them here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=19 https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=19

Doxin 8y ago
One example that continuously irks me that recently started happening is if I search for "python list index" (without the quotes) the official reference material is ranked 7th. I don't need a tutorial or a second hand source, I need the information I'm looking for which is in the official python documentation. Not on programiz, or tutorialspoint (twice), or w3schools, or geeks4geeks.
- moultano 8y ago
  Thanks!

sf_rob 8y ago

I just put quotes in half my queries these days. A hilarious example of this last week; searching 'email CTR' brought up pages with email/center... Google of all companies should care about CTR!

bryan2 8y ago

I'm working on a project that involves the bsp too. If you found any great resources I'd really appreciate a link.

jondubois 8y ago

Maybe you didn't mean literally but for me it doesn't show me anything about Peter Thiel.

imhelpingu 8y ago

Google is becoming a service that no longer performs searches and instead attempts to project reality back at me based on a keyword cue. This is how the AI takes over society.

wnevets 8y ago

Is google becoming useless or the majority of the content people are putting on the web is useless?

danielecook 8y ago

The quality has definitely gone down. It seems a lot of sites that play the SEO game heavily have floated to the top and far fewer smaller sites with quality content show up.

StudentStuff 8y ago
I've been using Qwant as a search engine, so far its much more palatable than others I've tried (like DuckDuckGo).

bigiain 8y ago

Googlebombs have "been a thing" for 20 years... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb "Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result. In September 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men's Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text "dumb motherfucker" to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise."

thirdsun 8y ago

My biggest problem with Google search these days is their recent push towards localized results. I speak two languages, english and german. I set my search preferences accordingly and expect the results within those languages to be ranked by their actual quality. However it seems Google favors results in my local (german) language, which often don't appear to be the best results if both languages were weighted equally. Particularly when searching for "{popular game/album/film} review" I perceive the returned results as subpar, simply because my local media landscape doesn't seem as thorough, high-quality and in-depth to me.

weinzierl 8y ago
google.com will give you German ranking from Germany. You can still workaround that with google.com/ncr. The results are night and day for programming related questions. I've heard a while ago that they want to deprecate ncr though. Personally I use Google only for local searches and DuckDuckGo for almost everything else. Works well for me.