7 ms·

Perhaps they should pay more attention to their core, I see their search product as lacking vision, dated and misaligned with the needs of the user.

• cschmidt 7y ago
  I've become fed up with Google search results lately. They very clearly want to provide me with an "answer" that keeps me on Google, rather than sending me away to the website I'm looking for. I've switched to DDG.
• hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  I feel like Google Search is barely usable without UBlock Origin. The first page and a half is often ads now, with organic results getting pushed further and further down. This really highlights the true problem of monopoly - even Google itself had much better UI in the early/mid aughts before they had really demolished all competition, now that they are the monopoly it's how can we just squeeze more ad dollars out of each and every search result.
  • pmoriarty 7y ago
    It's ironic that Google search has wound up looking very much like AltaVista did back around 2000 when Google first showed up and ate their lunch because they were able to provide a fast and lean search experience, with no ads!
• garganzol 7y ago
  Not only lacking, but it is degraded from what we had 7 years ago. Back in the days I used to tweak search query a bit and was getting different results. Now when one tweaks a query, they get the same results over and over again, thus rendering any search attempts useless.
  • sylvinus 7y ago
    To be fair, you have to consider that the size of the web has continued to increase exponentially during the past 7 years, plus all the SEO tactics that are getting complex as the stakes are raised. Not an excuse to have a degraded service, but the challenge of just maintaining quality is huge.
    • heavenlyblue 7y ago
      Everything grows exponentially, but I could bet that the web had grown about 3X (between 2012 and 2019) given the first result I clicked given by Google. Also given the fact that I worked for an SEO company I can definitely tell you that’s bot the money-making enterprise anymore since it mostly consisted of opportunists who happened to know about internet before anyone else before.
  • Spooky23 7y ago
    The internet has changed a lot in seven years and has transformed in the last 20. It’s more like AOL in the 90s. Between Facebook, Twitter and other content silos, the internet as it was in 2002 is mostly gone.
  • tudorw 7y ago
    Agreed, all the changes have made things worse for everything aside their bottom line, if there are any HUI/GUI/UX/UI/HCI people out there that think they can do better I'm holding a contest on Instagram, #icandobetterthangoogle, the prize? The global domination of the search industry :)
  • QuesnayJr 7y ago
    It's degraded so much that I have to wonder if it's just optimizing for a different set of users. If you do a natural language query for celebrity news, it works really well now.
    • snaky 7y ago
      Indeed. That's unfortunate, but there's no place for (free) services aimed at power users in the Internet.
      • perl4ever 7y ago
        The logical end of this is where every query returns one of about five most popular pages. But then, why do you need a search engine?
    • skinnymuch 7y ago
      Really for anyone going deeper it isn’t good. I know someone who works on patterns amongst celebs. Basically celeb news, but geekier. They have complained similarly about not being able to drill down for specific words. They already know the general celeb news so that doesn’t help.
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      In 1999, Google Web Search optimised for ~100 million users. In 2019, Google Web Search optimised for ~10 billion users. Expanding self-selected elite groups rarely sustains intelligence and skill levels. This isn't a swipe at general intelligence, it's just a flat fact of mass media, one that's been widely recognised (though often lamented on a moral basis) for well over a century. I've labled this "the tyranny of the minimum viable user". The other factor is that manipulating the medium has become increasingly attractive. That's not just old-school SEO (black or white), but propaganda, psyops, and similar activities. Google are very much part of this battleground, and seem to have taken considerable time coming up to speed with even grasping this. I suspect they're now aware, if not sufficiently competent. A friend, Woozle, has described this as a fundamental epistemic paradox as systems grow -- what was previously useful for a few becomes increasingly attractive to manipulators. Though Shoshana Zuboff's Three Laws predate their observations by about 30 years.
  • swalsh 7y ago
    To be fair, this is likely not because their technology degraded, but rather these particular sites SEO's technology is vastly improved. They have probably automated their targeting so as to be highly ranked on even the most esoteric phrases.
  • ageitgey 7y ago
    It's so frustrating that Google auto-removes more and more words out of your query in order to increase "relevance". A lot of times, a search like "How to do <FEATURE> in <PRODUCT>" returns a bunch of results where it helpfully auto-removes "<FEATURE>" from the query rendering the results totally useless. Example: https://twitter.com/ageitgey/status/1182308994968428544 https://twitter.com/ageitgey/status/1182308994968428544
• nmfisher 7y ago
  They should probably pay more attention to the people who actually pay their bills, too. Support for AdWords is basically non-existent. Good luck getting help with billing, too.
  • philipov 7y ago
    That's the power of having such huge scale compared to your customers. If a few people drop your product because of defects or poor service, it's just a rounding error in your profits and can simply be ignored. Meanwhile, the pressure to conform guarantees a critical mass can't accumulate for a boycott or other cooperative action against you. It is a market failure of a different category than Monopoly, but no less damaging.
  • Gustomaximus 7y ago
    Worth than 'support' they have people actively trying to convince you to do activities to googles benefit over your own. Those guys have lost their credibility.
• ossworkerrights 7y ago
  Let then not pay attention. A gap in the market would be a great event for new comers. Isn’t that how google came to be - established search engines at the time became too disconnected from their end users, and google filled in the gap?
• swalsh 7y ago
  I don't think another company will make a better search product doing exactly the same thing Google does. But I do believe there is a real opportunity for, what I'd call a "decentralized" search product.
• culot 7y ago
  Just recently all of the search projects seem to have gotten significantly worse. Image search has been crippled with removal of the size options. Web search seems like a parody or cheap imitation anymore, presenting even worse result than usual, and instead of being able to customize the search to fix that, you end up with Bing-like results giving you crap you explicitly tried to exclude. Then there's all those silly, frivolous overly-rounded corners mucking up the GUI. On the up side: I do look forward to competitors stepping forward to fill the space that Google used to fill. That is inevitable.
  • wklauss 7y ago
    > Image search has been crippled with removal of the size options One quick tip: you can still access the old image size options on the Advanced Search
  • sharperguy 7y ago
    Whenever I try to search for anything now on Google I get the same article 20 times from different news outlets, but no substance to find the source of what the articles are talking about.
  • PeterStuer 7y ago
    Search is a perpetual battle between the ranker and the content servers trying to game it. I'd agree that over the last two years the 'SEO' gamers have been outplaying Google.
    • zozbot234 7y ago
      > I'd agree that over the last two years the 'SEO' gamers have been outplaying Google. I agree 100%. Sometimes though it feels like the Web itself is deteriorating as the bulk of new Internet users increasingly only care about a handful of social media platforms. Where's the "sources of truth" about website quality when we need them? We used to have DMOZ/ODP providing something like that, it had a lot of problems but by and large it worked. But now DMOZ is dead, and there's nothing as of yet to replace it.
  • 7y ago
• scarface74 7y ago
  Search is not their core. Advertising is.
  • username90 7y ago
    The search service generates more revenue than the rest of ads together. (if I recall correctly from their previous statement, it is at least very close)
    • smiths1999 7y ago
      But the search revenue comes from ads. Or are you merely pointing out that search ad revenue is the largest piece of total ad revenue? To be honest, I don't understand how everyone can remember the "quality" of their Google searches from 7 years ago. I can't even remember the quality from a year ago. The things I find most frustrating with search (such as maternity blogs being the first options when looking for medical information related to a newborn or tutorial sites being at the top of the results rather than the official language docs) rank highly because those are the things people are clicking on. As an example, I think the crown on HN is more likely to read the official documentation rather than go to a site such as TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow. On the other hand, the average programmer most likely just wants to go to TutorialsPoint or StackOverflow and copy-paste the solution they are looking for. And I think there are many more average programmers than there are visitors to HN. From Google's point of view, they are giving the user what they want. All that being said, it is easy to criticize Google, but dealing with search at the scale of the internet is non-trivial. It isn't clear to me that Google's algorithms from 7 years ago would do just as good of a job today as they did 7 years ago. There is a lot more junk and abuse online, people are figuring out ways to hack their search ranking or spamming useless articles.
      • AJ007 7y ago
        I don’t recall Google’s search quality 7 years ago. I do recall it the first time I used Google. I also recall it when the Demand Media eHow/Livestrong content farm spam decimated their results. One thing that’s worth pointing out, that most technical users miss, are the ads. If you are blocking ads in the results, you have a totally different search experience.
• wdr1 7y ago
  But aren't those up 20%? Your theory suggests the problem is the top line, whereas the article suggests it's the bottom line.