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Has anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless? Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according t

• daniel_reetz 7y ago
  I see the same behavior. I think it's time to assemble a list of examples.
  • brlewis 7y ago
    I bet googlers on HN who work on ranking would appreciate that. Here's a recent one from me: typical tcp packet size
    • CDSlice 7y ago
      What exactly do you mean by that? When I search it up I get a SO answer saying what the max packet size is and another (closed) SuperUser answer that says that their is no average tcp packet size because that depends on the specific application. Both of those seem pretty good to me, but I'm not a low level networking guy.
      • dunkelheit 7y ago
        I think the problem is that google confidently and authoritatively displays (in a big and bold font) "65535 bytes" which is an answer to a different question.
      • brlewis 7y ago
        I definitely wasn't asking for maximum packet size, which a search feature showed in huge print as the answer to my question. I don't expect the search algorithm to know my precise intent, but I'd like it to weigh the word "typical" highly. Between google, bing and duckduckgo, only duckduckgo presented this above the fold: https://etherealmind.com/average-ip-packet-size/ https://etherealmind.com/average-ip-packet-size/
        • Kique 7y ago
          I'm seeing that etherealmind link as #4 on Google, and then #3 on DDG. And the results above it on DDG are also related to the maximum size, and the entire sidebar on DDG is the same stackoverflow link about the maximum size. Not sure if DDG is really that much better than Google here.
        • icebraining 7y ago
          In Google, after that card, I get their "People also ask", and the second question is "What is the average packet size?", which links to https://superuser.com/questions/964682/what-is-the-average-size-of-a-packet-sent-via-tcp-ethernet https://superuser.com/questions/964682/what-is-the-average-s... Seems ok to me. It should also be noted that the etherealmind.com link doesn't actually contain the word "typical", so if you think Google should try to outsmart users less, it's not reasonable to blame it for not showing that link.
  • bogdanoff_2 7y ago
    "thesaurus that organizes words by category" - gives a bunch of online dictionary pages. I was trying to find a specific physical book I remember using in high-school. "techniques for interpreting statically typed languages" - gives a bunch of super basic articles/questions about statically vs dynamically typed and compiled vs interpreted languages. DuckDuckGo actually gave better results for this. I feel what's happening is that google is looking at what people are clicking during searches and then using that data to calculate absolute ranks for pages and websites. Those ranks are then not necessarily appropriate for different, less common queries or searching behaviors. However, this algorithm probably performs better in 99% of cases for some internal metrics, so Google ends up keeping it.
    • icebraining 7y ago
      > "techniques for interpreting statically typed languages" - gives a bunch of super basic articles/questions about statically vs dynamically typed and compiled vs interpreted languages. DuckDuckGo actually gave better results for this. But is there any good result that includes all those words and which Google failed to find?
      • bogdanoff_2 7y ago
        I don't remember the exact phrasing I ended up using, but I think I remember finding through DDG a StackOverflow question that was essentially "how to make an interpreter for a statically typed language" and it did not appear on Google. To answer your exact question: I don't know, perhaps not.
• oliveshell 7y ago
  Absolutely-— for a year or two now. These days, if I have success with even a mildly technical Google search, it’s because I’ve enclosed every single term in quotation marks and/or turned on verbatim search, which doesn’t even work that well. Google is trying so hard to think for you that they’re ruining their core product.
  • specialist 7y ago
    I had totally forgotten about "verbatim tool". Thanks. Further, I see there's now an option to disable "relevant" (personalized) searches. https://www.google.com/preferences https://www.google.com/preferences "Private results Private results help find more relevant content for you, including content and connections that only you can see." Followed by checkbox. The linked explainer suggests the "relevant" (personalized) search is informed by your activity with other Google products. Skeptical me thinks that's hardly the whole story. "Search results from your Google products" https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1710607 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1710607 Either way, I may try google search for a while, see if there's any benefit over DDG.
    • mises 7y ago
      Does any one know how to erase "personalized search" information from being not logged-in?
      • specialist 7y ago
        Sorry, no. I have a "least effort" approach. Browser plugins and use DDG. I assume everything about me is still being recorded by someone somewhere.
  • manfredzab 7y ago
    Hey -- do you have an example? (I work on Search.)
• frogpelt 7y ago
  Same here. Often, I have to rephrase my search 5-10 times before I see a result worth clicking on.
  • manfredzab 7y ago
    Hey -- do you have an example? (I work on Search.)
    • concordDance 7y ago
      Not the parent, but a recent example of a failed search for me was: "Saerang story lord of the rings" The most important term got dropped and needed to be quoted to actually find what I wanted. A separate and more concerning problem with Search is the emphasis on shallow information without outgoing links for more depth. The majority of searches on many topics (medical topics for example) will have the top results be "terminal" webpages that offer only a very shallow look at a topic without any way of finding more detailed information. For example, when I attempted to look for a comprehensive breakdown of biodegredation of plastics (e.g. what kinds of environments reduce/increase biodegrading time, what types of plastics have longer times and why) I just kept finding pages by various advocacy groups that talked in vague generalities and offered no opportunities for further research.
• petard 7y ago
  Do you experience this for dev-related searches or all types? I often have trouble finding relevant content for dev-related searches due to SEO content farms that wrap Stack Overflow content in an ad-infested user interface or worse.
  • MrMember 7y ago
    Dev related questions are one of the few times I still use Google over DDG. Maybe it's because I do a lot of searches for fairly basic concepts when learning something new but a relevant SO result is almost always in the top three.
• huffmsa 7y ago
  Those blog style articles are the "original reporting" they're trying to promote.
• logicchains 7y ago
  Twice in the last month I found Bing gave me a better search result than Google (thing I was looking for in the first couple answers, not even on the first page in Google). That never happened to me before.
  • kikokikokiko 7y ago
    For something like two years I've been using bing more and more. Google is filtering/censuring the results so much about anything remotely controversial, i.e. torrents, streams, politics on a certain political spectrum, news etc... Basically Google is telling me I should not be using its services anymore, and I'm ok with that. Bing will at least let me find the links I tell it I want it to find.
  • ldng 7y ago
    Bing probably has benefited from more people using Duckduckgo.
• wtallis 7y ago
  I've noticed over the past year that a Google search for almost any medical term will bury the wikipedia article on the third or fourth page of search results. The first three pages are all sites with extremely watered-down content and little to none of the cross-referencing links that make wikipedia a good exploratory tool (and a natural fit to PageRank). Google has obviously decided that anyone searching for a medical term should only be shown pages that are equivalent to what a doctor would tell a scared patient in the first three minutes after delivering a diagnosis. Sure, those WebMD pages are probably going to be a bit more accurate than the wikipedia article, but largely because they're saying much less and have fewer opportunities to be mistaken. It feels rather condescending and patronizing.
  • Medicalidiot 7y ago
    As someone in medicine, this drive me up the wall. I don't want to go to uptodate every time I have a question and want the basics of a disease or drug. Where Wikipedia fits my requirements perfectly, Google constantly feeds me nonsense WebMD, blogs, and hospital systems. Now, whenever I search for anything medically related I add wiki at the end.
    • blackbrokkoli 7y ago
      Set Duckduckgo as your default search engine and add "!w" anywhere into your search query. This will take you directly to the corresponding wiki article. It is a breeze to actually work with a search engine instead of against it! There are >10k of these bangs, so I'm pretty sure you can even use this tool to directly search at other medicine related sites and portals (check here https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang) if necessary .
    • lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
      I feel like more people would have better search experiences if they knew about/used custom search. For example for wikipedia I've got my browsers set up so I can type "wiki <search term> and have that powered by wikipedia; why hit google at all. You can set up the same thing for anything else that implements the open search standard (youtube is the other one i use regularly). To me searching the web for a wiki page seems pretty irrelevant. Instructions for setting up wikipedia's : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching_from_a_web_browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching_from_a_web_brow...
• naringas 7y ago
  yes, they've been doing that for a while but it's gotten worse. also top results tend to be from sites trying to sell something. which makes sense because businesses can hire SEO consultants and spend their resources getting google to show them in the top results. however people who just put stuff up and leave up for free don't hire SEO consultants.
• pyb 7y ago
  Recently ? This has been an issue for at least a few years, IME.
  • charlesism 7y ago
    Imo, the shark-jumping moment for any search engine is the day when they deprecate the "0 results" page. I mean, when the user searches for "alice bob" and the search engine pretends the user searched only for "alice" to avoid showing an empty page. Google certainly started doing that earlier than one year ago.
• klohto 7y ago
  Oh thank god, I thought I was going crazy or my problems were so unique. For instance just recently I hit 4 separate TEIID errors and googling the IDs led to unrelated pages either to TEIID itself or pages containing completely different IDs. Using quotes helps of course, but useful results were on 3 page or later. Can we create a github repo with examples? I believe dev experience using Google is going really downhill.
  • manfredzab 7y ago
    Yes, please -- or at least paste a few examples here (I work on Search.)
• outime 7y ago
  Almost every thread that's somehow related to Google Search has this same question (which often goes to the top) and the same answers. It's difficult to imagine that most of the people haven't seen this a bunch of times as well. And while I agree with this, I'd love to know why people keep asking and/or upvoting this same question over and over. Is it for the sole purpose of bashing Google or what is it? Honest question.
  • MiroF 7y ago
    1. This is a big community and I haven't noticed this in every thread. 2. Google hasn't changed - so until they do, I suspect they will continue to be criticized. People generally will continuously criticize things that continuously screw them over.
  • andrewvc 7y ago
    Yes, people have been switching to DDG for years now, yet still google is utterly dominant. Candidly, I'm mystified by the complaints. Google's search works great, and has for years for myself and everyone I know IRL. Any post about any product that isn't brand new on HN is going to get comments along the line of "Company X? Their product is garbage, it used to be great! I've been using <alternative that requires a ton of extra effort to setup> and once I got it going it was amazing!"
    • snazz 7y ago
      I won’t argue about your experience, but DDG isn’t any harder to use than Google aside from the fact that you need to change your default search engine. That’s not a “ton of extra effort to setup”.
      • crispinb 7y ago
        When trying DDG again for a while, my use of g! gradually increases as a necessary tactic to surface what I'm looking for. When it gets to over about 80% I go back to using Google again with a sigh.
• charlesism 7y ago
  > Has anyone found that recently Google search > is becoming more and more useless? Absolutely. I use DDG now. Google spams me with ads, and ignores my search terms. This 'search disease' seems to be spreading, too. Retailers like Amazon, NewEgg, Ebay, and others happily insert results that they want the user to buy, instead of putting the user in control. On Ebay, half the time they remove filters I want to use. Amazon haphazardly injects their off-brand products into my results, even if I sort by price. NewEgg and Walmart show me results of partner retailers whom I don't know whether to trust. Maybe this state of affairs works for the average user. It doesn't work for me. It mainly causes me to wade through pages of useless results, trying to filtering them out by eye.
  • ldng 7y ago
    Yes that trend is worrisome. But when confronted about it those site will respond but "the user asked for it !", "We protect our clients from scams". And I totally agree, it is really annoying.
• ryanianian 7y ago
  It is basically impossible to find things with google anymore. Quotes don't work. You have to go to Tools on the results page, and change "All results" to "Verbatim". (You must do this for every search it's not a persistent setting.) Even then you'll often follow results and Control+F to find one of the key words as part of your query and it won't be on the page. Even DDG has been following similar patterns lately - it's a terrible time to be online anymore.
• helloguillecl 7y ago
  I just noticed the same problem. Searching for "lithium" wont let me find the wikipedia article for the metal. News and youtube song from Nirvana are showed instead. PD: Google knows I'm very interested in renewable energy, they constantly suggesting me news regarding the said matter.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    That's curious, you don't get the large info card (on the right, if on desktop/laptop)? That has a direct link to Wikipedia.
  • kikokikokiko 7y ago
    It's probably because of "personalized results". If Google knows that you listen to Nirvana it will assume you want to hear the song, instead of showing you the MOST RELEVANT RESULT, that is the freaking Wikipedia article about the metal. They lost the plot, sometimes things just work and you should not overthink it, the original Google page rank algorithm is a beautiful insight into how distributed knowledge graphs work and self organize. Now they destroyed it's usefulness.
• jrumbut 7y ago
  I was having this problem more and more until I realized "hey, those sites all have search engines" and now for general questions I search directly on SO and for deeper dives I go to Github. Github's search is, in general, very good at finding what you searched for, all of what you searched for, and nothing but what you searched for. The one thing I want, and it's vague and complex, is a way to filter out the several hundred or thousand very very similar repositories that come into being due to a popular tutorial, school lab assignment, or frequently forked and slightly modified repository using the rare function I'm looking into.
• jedberg 7y ago
  Try using verbatim search. It’s under “Search tools -> All Results”. Sadly I can’t figure out how to direct link it.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    Add &tbs=li:1 to the URL. Example: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=search+my+exact+words+dammit https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=search+my+exact+wor...
    • jedberg 7y ago
      Wow so intuitive. :) Thanks for the info!
• rdtsc 7y ago
  There was talk years ago by Paul Graham perhaps at one of the Pycons. It was about not being afraid to do what other big companies do and take them on. When it came to search, that big company was Google, of course. He predicted that over time, due to various reasons, Goole will move into personalizing the search results too much where they'd stop being useful or interesting. "It's true if it's true for you" is the phrase he used. And it seems to me that he was essentially right. So, say I search for corn, but Google thinks corn is bad for me, cause I've been eating too much of it, and potatoes are better, so they just go ahead and substitute corn with potatoes to help me out. On one hand it's nice, they think they understand what I really need. On the other hand, it's very bit creepy when it goes overboard.
• mda 7y ago
  Any actual examples? I hear this complaint but usually little to support, did it really get worse? I get bad results from time to time, but it is good in most cases.
• chimi 7y ago
  Yes, this is because Google isn't optimizing their search results to return you the information you want, but rather to optimize their revenue. Showing you regurgitated spam sites like wikihow and pinterest means you go back to the search results to find something relevant, which increases the probability you click on an ad. Furthermore, if they show you spam sites, which also have google ads on them, then you're more likely to click on an ad and give google money than if they show you wikipedia, which doesn't have ads. They don't want you to go to wikipedia, because it won't make them any money. They are sacrificing their product quality for profit. This is the general trend in corporations with a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, rather than their customers. In this case, the customer is the ad buyer, not the searcher, so those of us looking for things are actually 4th in line for prioritization, as it's like this: Shareholders come first Ad buyers come second Ad real estate providers third Searchers forth We need a search engine where the search results are the product, rather than the people searching. We are the product being sold to the Ad buyers.
• m0zg 7y ago
  Probably fallout from trying to juice the stagnating ad revenues. In a perfectly relevant search nobody would ever click on ads. I heard from Bing engineers (circa '09-10) that every time Bing would release a relevance improvement, Google would increase their relevance metrics shortly thereafter, suggesting that their relevance is being artificially held back. It makes economic sense, and it'd be super easy to implement, so I believe it.