13 ms·

I feel like Google is increasingly becoming useless as a general purpose search engine. When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly

I feel like Google is increasingly becoming useless as a general purpose search engine. When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly tailor the query, the results are usually filled with low quality, SEO optimized promotional sites, clickbait articles/YT videos or aggregators. With some luck there is a good blog post with quality links on page 2 or 3. Good results are now mostly restricted to areas where Google can utilize structured data sources (Maps/Business data, Wikipedia, ....). This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors. The interesting question is why! Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Are they overly fixated on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice? Or are regular search results allowed to become worse on purpose, in order to maximize ad revenue? It is something a near-monopoly could afford to do.

dorkinspace 7y ago
I'm so glad to see others having this same opinion. I was just chatting with a friend about google search results and how, recently, they have become much worse than they used to be. It seems that if you don't tailor your search terms perfectly all you get is ads, clickbait youtube videos, and review sites built to push a product.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Look at the DDG hockey stick graph. No other search provider has that sort of growth. It's not just you that's tired of poor search results from Google.
  - josteink 7y ago
    Sounds interesting. Got a link for that? And I’m saying that as a DDG user.
    - nsomaru 7y ago
      https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
  - pb7 7y ago
    It's going to need to sustain that growth for a decade to be of any reasonable size. Google gets approximately the same number of search queries per day as DDG has in its entire lifetime (~11 years). Edit: The problem in sustaining this growth isn't just marketing either. With increased traffic come increased server, maintenance, and engineering costs which may not be possible to support with untargeted ads as advertisers won't pay big money to show ads that have poor conversions.
    - dylz 7y ago
      I'm curious how untargetted they are - if I'm searching for python, how untargetted is a python book ad? I'd be more inclined to purchase that rather than a remarketing adroll targetted ad that's just spewing me the same item that I purchased 30 minutes ago
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  The dumb thing is that you can get the original search, but it’s buried in the advanced search as “verbatim” results. Why would I not want verbatim results?
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    You, I, and most people posting here probably already know how to phrase searches with exactly the terms that are relevant. Most people in the world probably don't. I too dislike how Google performs worse for my queries now than it used to. But I look at my non-technical relatives using Google and it's now magical how relevant the results are for vague queries regarding common information. Making precise queries for technical information work worse while vague queries for commonly referenced information work better is probably the right trade-off for a business that wants to make money. As much as I loath it for my own use cases.
navigatr 7y ago
> Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Or are they over-excited about/reliant on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice? Those SEO'd pages are optimized for generating revenue, so they're packed to the brim with Google ads and referral links. Prioritizing such pages generates revenue for Google, too.
agumonkey 7y ago
Google is indeed the seed if its own "death" (being overly dramatic). The web has changed because of it and searching is now both annoying and irrelevant since websites have a lot less value now that everything is rigged.
- pmart123 7y ago
  They’ve become the ultimate rent seeker, which wants me to believe it is signaling their demise in the near-term, but it probably means the opposite, they have the ability to leverage their monopoly.
- potta_coffee 7y ago
  Your comment really nails the issue. There's a vicious feedback loop in place.
  - MisterOctober 7y ago
    it really is kind of startling -- to quote old Hamlet - "oh, what a falling-off was there!" 90s web : content good, looks rubbish 2019 web : content rubbish, looks good trying to help my kid with research reports &etc is a nasty chore these days -- for the amount of effort it takes to find a decent informative non-wikipedia page these days, may as well go to the physical library
    - potta_coffee 7y ago
      I guess I'm getting old but I really miss the 90's web. Also, libraries are just rooms with computers these days, at least in my town. I miss 90's libraries more than I miss the 90's internet.
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      I'll add some other factor: emitional. Old web was a mess of people making things as expression, excitment. I think it matters to feel being 'connected' to someone rather than parsing a rendered data structure. I felt the same reading old encyclopedias, you can feel the author way of thinking a bit. It feels a bit more enjoyable.
ddingus 7y ago
I tried a Reddit search today. I do a few from time to time to gauge subreddit activity. I know 80 to 90 percent of the results. Google was useless. It is as if some subreddits, like one of mine, no longer exist. Duck returned great results. And some new, unexpected results. This kind of thing, along with hidden result links has forced me off Google search. For fun, in my own head, they are Noogle now. NO Google. Search Noogle for Nosults.
- gniv 7y ago
  > Search Noogle for Nosults. After searching both Google and Duck, I still don't know what "Nosults" is supposed to be.
  - edoceo 7y ago
    I think it's a joke about "no results" smashed together
    - ddingus 7y ago
      It is. Nothing more than a personal coined word.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    The only link for "nosults" may well be this thread. Interesting index depth and speed test. I coined that phrase just today.
    - gniv 7y ago
      Ah. OK. In that case, I'd still like to know for which query DDG was much better than Google, if you can share.
i_am_proteus 7y ago
I feel the same way. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years, and when I started, I was prepending !g to about half my searches. Now I find myself rarely using !g, and telling friends "try DDG" when they can't find results on Google. Not surprisingly, Google is still better for shopping searches. edit- DDG bangs for those who were unaware: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
- potta_coffee 7y ago
  I've been using DDG exclusively for a while. Honestly I find the results better when I'm searching for things like information about programming, etc.
- apazzolini 7y ago
  Thanks for the tip about !g.
  - kirill5pol 7y ago
    They also many other very useful shortcuts. For example !gm is google maps, !gsch is google scholar, !arx is arxiv.org, !w is wikipedia. There’s a lot that I don’t know: DuckDuckGo.com/bang should have others
- Pxtl 7y ago
  Yeah, I've been giving DDG a try for the last few weeks again. For "I want to look for keywords" I use DDG and find it does well. For "I want to search a structured database", Google still wins because of its above-the-fold no-article "this is what you're looking for" results. Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result. Or if I want to search for a product or local business.
  - F-0X 7y ago
    >Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result. I prefer to use WolframAlpha for such things.
notatoad 7y ago
Google isn't "becoming" useless. Google, and every other search engine, has always been relatively useless at generic queries. The fact that they're building out structured experiences for some of these queries is helpful, but the ones they haven't built out structured experiences for aren't any worse than they used to be. If you can form a sufficiently specific query, Google is still exceptionally good at returning useful information, with few ads or infoboxes or anything else other than organic search results. If your search terms are too generic, Google essentially gives up and just serves you ads instead.
- the_duke 7y ago
  > has always been relatively useless at generic queries I beg to differ here. Years ago I felt like I could discover useful information about a topic through Google with relative ease. Results would contain informational links that let me explore the subject. This basically impossible now; with Google Search at least.
  - ambicapter 7y ago
    How can you tell whether or not this is a google search issue or an internet landscape issue?
    - Gracana 7y ago
      By comparison to other search engines. Duckduckgo seems to give me better search results and is less influenced by advertisements and trends. What finally pushed me away from Google was its incorrect assumption of equivalence between different terms. I'd search something like "printer scaling draftsight" and it would return results with "printer" "scaling" and "autocad" all in bold. Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.
      - spurgu 7y ago
        > Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted. Yeah I've noticed this a lot in recent months/years. Have been finding myself putting most of the keywords of the query in quotation marks to get any kind of results relevant to my actual query. Like 'printer "scaling" "draftsight"' just so that G wouldn't make some stupid assumptions.
mancerayder 7y ago
There's a loosey goosey replacement of words with synonyms. It took me three times to google how to turn off 'smart replies' from Signal on my Android phone. I kept getting, turn off word suggestion, autocorrect and so forth, and signal I had to make an additional effort to quote. Personalized search, they call it?
- Pxtl 7y ago
  Some of those I like - the autocorrect is excellent, for example. But the "synonyms" I find often frustrating.
potta_coffee 7y ago
Google has the technology, they've just diluted its usefulness with tampering / interfering with the results. They're killing the golden goose.
throwaway35784 7y ago
The ai incentive isn't searcher satisfaction, it's revenue maximization. The longer it takes you to find a good result the more likely you area to click an ad. The more often they show you adwords supported sites like ehow and YouTube the more likely you'll click an ad. Consider the trend in ads for ad supported sites as an indicator. The customer is the ad buyer. They want more of those. They have maximized product supply. They can't produce more product, they can only resell existing products by more ads in search results as a ratio plus more ads on the organic links. There is no measurable financial incentive for them to show you organic results without adwords.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
They started moving on from being a general purpose search engine years ago, when they started "knowing best". Round about the brand and recency updates, which must be 7 or 8 years ago, maybe more. No longer did you need to search "buy camera" rather than "camera" to show you wanted to spend money, it was now presumed. Your +term (broken with arrival of G+) or quoted "term" would be varied as much as optional terms. Nearly all the changes since have been along those lines. Google thinks the only reason to use the net is to shop. The results you get, that are prioritised make some sense in that context. It's just made it useless for all those times you don't want to book a hotel, buy a phone etc.
ForHackernews 7y ago
> The interesting question is why! You get what you measure. Google grew this monster themselves with pagerank and monetizing links.
pavedwalden 7y ago
Originally, Google was very effective at looking at the interconnections of content people had put online and using that to infer which pages were most relevant. SEO tactics immediately started gaming this system to create false signals of relevance, but for many years Google did an impressive job of staying ahead of that game. I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.
- drankula3 7y ago
  I would agree with this if not for my recent experience with duckduckgo. While Google's search result quality has sharply deteriorated in recent months, duckduckgo's results have stayed flat for the most part, to the point where ddg's result quality is more often superior to Google. If it were a matter of SEO manipulation, wouldn't ddg's quality decline too?
  - jonfw 7y ago
    Duckduckgo has an inherent advantage- nobody cares They have a tiny percentage of the market, so there will be a tiny percentage of money invested in gaming their algorithms.
  - chii 7y ago
    And also, why doesn't DDG grow in market share if Google's results are worse? My hypothesis is that Google's results aren't bad - they are actually serving a set of results which satisfies the laymen, and it's only the technical, highly niche users with whom the results don't align.
    - artifaxx 7y ago
      DDG is growing exponentially, Google is just massive and it takes a while to grow big enough to notice https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
naravara 7y ago
Google Scholar is still quite useful for general information, but it's also generally pretty dense and hard to parse so it will take a bit of work. The days of just having a question and being able to find an easy layman-level answer about it are gone (outside of Wikipedia). There was an economics paper published recently making an argument that we have more to fear from shitty AI/robots than good ones and I think it's spot on. (In other words, they're good enough to justify firing the person who used to do the job, but they're objectively worse at the job. What ends up happening is aggregate wealth goes down because not only are the jobs gone, but the job itself is being done less efficiently than before.) The point where Google (and Yelp and a bunch of other services) started to turn was when they stopped just being a thing you go to when you need them to being things that get in your face to anticipate your needs. They're bad at anticipating our needs in any way that's actually useful for us a lot of the time, so it ends up putting a lot of cognitive load on us to make sure the apps/services are working as intended. Instead of just using technology as a tool as we need it, we end up needing to babysit technology that's being fussy, opaque, and unpredictable. And babysitting is the best case scenario, in other cases it's being outright hostile.
- pasttense01 7y ago
  A problem with Google Scholar is that 75% or so of the results are behind paywalls.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    And the quality of results there seems to have gone downhill now too. I can turn to Scholar to find a lost article, only to have to go through pages. Again, I think it's also geared towards the common and the popular at the expense of the detailed and the idiosyncratic - it's just using a different definition of common and popular. Ten years ago, I gave up subject specific databases for Google Scholar. For most of that time, I was happy. Nowadays I wish I had access to a subject specific db. As for paywalls: I sometimes find better results by adding filetype:pdf to the title of an article in DDG than I do in scholar. They're both completely hit and miss. I think they're trying to respect copyright more nowadays than before. Unfortunately, of all the unreasonable copyrights in the world, journals and academic books are the most unreasonable, since they're trying to get libraries to buy them.
frozenlettuce 7y ago
usually I need to append "reddit" to the end of my search string in order to find something that is not blogspam or autogenerated-seo-optimized content
mrfusion 7y ago
I wonder if they could just flip a sign and penalize seo tactics and make search good again. I mean all the seo’d sites have self labeled themselves as having worthless content. You really just need a search that filters them out.
uoaei 7y ago
It's "too" general purpose. They're aiming for the "80" part of the "80/20 rule", and in the process are really good at answering natural-language queries but very bad at keyword-ified queries. So many people use their service for answering otherwise basic questions that it's become a basic-question-answering system. I suspect also, under the hood, that when the user leaves the search page and never returns they consider that a successful serve and reinforce that sort of behavior more. Whereas I leave to search the same thing on other engines because Google became useless for my job, which requires specific answers to technical questions. So I think there might be some built-in positive-feedback loops that are reinforcing this sort of behavior. Either that or peoples' queries really are that boring, all the time.
darkerside 7y ago
This may be an unpopular opinion, but could it be that structured days is generally what people are looking for? It might feel like search results are low quality because... most of them are. Google has commoditized search and delivers extremely high quality results for specific types of data. Now, anything that doesn't fit into that box feels like it's relatively low quality.
charlesdaniels 7y ago
> This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors. Here's a thought I had while reading your comment... what about a hybrid of HN/lobste.rs/reddit and old-school hierarchical lists. Basically, a place where people can upload websites and such that are relevant to a search term. Say you wanted to know about "how to make bread". You would first check if this query is already defined, creating it if not. Then, you could comment/post links on the topic, and see other's links sorted by some hybrid of upvotes/downvotes and human moderation/curation. The point would less be about having a discussion, but more crowd-sourcing "what pages are most relevant to this query". From the perspective of a user who doesn't participate, this looks like a hierarchically sorted collection of queries/topics and links relevant thereto, sorted by relevance.
dang 7y ago
(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515498. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515498.)

dorkinspace 7y ago

I'm so glad to see others having this same opinion. I was just chatting with a friend about google search results and how, recently, they have become much worse than they used to be. It seems that if you don't tailor your search terms perfectly all you get is ads, clickbait youtube videos, and review sites built to push a product.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Look at the DDG hockey stick graph. No other search provider has that sort of growth. It's not just you that's tired of poor search results from Google.
- josteink 7y ago
  Sounds interesting. Got a link for that? And I’m saying that as a DDG user.
  - nsomaru 7y ago
    https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
- pb7 7y ago
  It's going to need to sustain that growth for a decade to be of any reasonable size. Google gets approximately the same number of search queries per day as DDG has in its entire lifetime (~11 years). Edit: The problem in sustaining this growth isn't just marketing either. With increased traffic come increased server, maintenance, and engineering costs which may not be possible to support with untargeted ads as advertisers won't pay big money to show ads that have poor conversions.
  - dylz 7y ago
    I'm curious how untargetted they are - if I'm searching for python, how untargetted is a python book ad? I'd be more inclined to purchase that rather than a remarketing adroll targetted ad that's just spewing me the same item that I purchased 30 minutes ago
bobthepanda 7y ago
The dumb thing is that you can get the original search, but it’s buried in the advanced search as “verbatim” results. Why would I not want verbatim results?
- philipkglass 7y ago
  You, I, and most people posting here probably already know how to phrase searches with exactly the terms that are relevant. Most people in the world probably don't. I too dislike how Google performs worse for my queries now than it used to. But I look at my non-technical relatives using Google and it's now magical how relevant the results are for vague queries regarding common information. Making precise queries for technical information work worse while vague queries for commonly referenced information work better is probably the right trade-off for a business that wants to make money. As much as I loath it for my own use cases.

navigatr 7y ago

> Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Or are they over-excited about/reliant on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice? Those SEO'd pages are optimized for generating revenue, so they're packed to the brim with Google ads and referral links. Prioritizing such pages generates revenue for Google, too.

agumonkey 7y ago

Google is indeed the seed if its own "death" (being overly dramatic). The web has changed because of it and searching is now both annoying and irrelevant since websites have a lot less value now that everything is rigged.

pmart123 7y ago
They’ve become the ultimate rent seeker, which wants me to believe it is signaling their demise in the near-term, but it probably means the opposite, they have the ability to leverage their monopoly.
potta_coffee 7y ago
Your comment really nails the issue. There's a vicious feedback loop in place.
- MisterOctober 7y ago
  it really is kind of startling -- to quote old Hamlet - "oh, what a falling-off was there!" 90s web : content good, looks rubbish 2019 web : content rubbish, looks good trying to help my kid with research reports &etc is a nasty chore these days -- for the amount of effort it takes to find a decent informative non-wikipedia page these days, may as well go to the physical library
  - potta_coffee 7y ago
    I guess I'm getting old but I really miss the 90's web. Also, libraries are just rooms with computers these days, at least in my town. I miss 90's libraries more than I miss the 90's internet.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    I'll add some other factor: emitional. Old web was a mess of people making things as expression, excitment. I think it matters to feel being 'connected' to someone rather than parsing a rendered data structure. I felt the same reading old encyclopedias, you can feel the author way of thinking a bit. It feels a bit more enjoyable.

ddingus 7y ago

I tried a Reddit search today. I do a few from time to time to gauge subreddit activity. I know 80 to 90 percent of the results. Google was useless. It is as if some subreddits, like one of mine, no longer exist. Duck returned great results. And some new, unexpected results. This kind of thing, along with hidden result links has forced me off Google search. For fun, in my own head, they are Noogle now. NO Google. Search Noogle for Nosults.

gniv 7y ago
> Search Noogle for Nosults. After searching both Google and Duck, I still don't know what "Nosults" is supposed to be.
- edoceo 7y ago
  I think it's a joke about "no results" smashed together
  - ddingus 7y ago
    It is. Nothing more than a personal coined word.
- ddingus 7y ago
  The only link for "nosults" may well be this thread. Interesting index depth and speed test. I coined that phrase just today.
  - gniv 7y ago
    Ah. OK. In that case, I'd still like to know for which query DDG was much better than Google, if you can share.

i_am_proteus 7y ago

I feel the same way. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years, and when I started, I was prepending !g to about half my searches. Now I find myself rarely using !g, and telling friends "try DDG" when they can't find results on Google. Not surprisingly, Google is still better for shopping searches. edit- DDG bangs for those who were unaware: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang

potta_coffee 7y ago
I've been using DDG exclusively for a while. Honestly I find the results better when I'm searching for things like information about programming, etc.
apazzolini 7y ago
Thanks for the tip about !g.
- kirill5pol 7y ago
  They also many other very useful shortcuts. For example !gm is google maps, !gsch is google scholar, !arx is arxiv.org, !w is wikipedia. There’s a lot that I don’t know: DuckDuckGo.com/bang should have others
Pxtl 7y ago
Yeah, I've been giving DDG a try for the last few weeks again. For "I want to look for keywords" I use DDG and find it does well. For "I want to search a structured database", Google still wins because of its above-the-fold no-article "this is what you're looking for" results. Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result. Or if I want to search for a product or local business.
- F-0X 7y ago
  >Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result. I prefer to use WolframAlpha for such things.

notatoad 7y ago

Google isn't "becoming" useless. Google, and every other search engine, has always been relatively useless at generic queries. The fact that they're building out structured experiences for some of these queries is helpful, but the ones they haven't built out structured experiences for aren't any worse than they used to be. If you can form a sufficiently specific query, Google is still exceptionally good at returning useful information, with few ads or infoboxes or anything else other than organic search results. If your search terms are too generic, Google essentially gives up and just serves you ads instead.

the_duke 7y ago
> has always been relatively useless at generic queries I beg to differ here. Years ago I felt like I could discover useful information about a topic through Google with relative ease. Results would contain informational links that let me explore the subject. This basically impossible now; with Google Search at least.
- ambicapter 7y ago
  How can you tell whether or not this is a google search issue or an internet landscape issue?
  - Gracana 7y ago
    By comparison to other search engines. Duckduckgo seems to give me better search results and is less influenced by advertisements and trends. What finally pushed me away from Google was its incorrect assumption of equivalence between different terms. I'd search something like "printer scaling draftsight" and it would return results with "printer" "scaling" and "autocad" all in bold. Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.
    - spurgu 7y ago
      > Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted. Yeah I've noticed this a lot in recent months/years. Have been finding myself putting most of the keywords of the query in quotation marks to get any kind of results relevant to my actual query. Like 'printer "scaling" "draftsight"' just so that G wouldn't make some stupid assumptions.

mancerayder 7y ago

There's a loosey goosey replacement of words with synonyms. It took me three times to google how to turn off 'smart replies' from Signal on my Android phone. I kept getting, turn off word suggestion, autocorrect and so forth, and signal I had to make an additional effort to quote. Personalized search, they call it?

Pxtl 7y ago
Some of those I like - the autocorrect is excellent, for example. But the "synonyms" I find often frustrating.

potta_coffee 7y ago

Google has the technology, they've just diluted its usefulness with tampering / interfering with the results. They're killing the golden goose.

throwaway35784 7y ago

The ai incentive isn't searcher satisfaction, it's revenue maximization. The longer it takes you to find a good result the more likely you area to click an ad. The more often they show you adwords supported sites like ehow and YouTube the more likely you'll click an ad. Consider the trend in ads for ad supported sites as an indicator. The customer is the ad buyer. They want more of those. They have maximized product supply. They can't produce more product, they can only resell existing products by more ads in search results as a ratio plus more ads on the organic links. There is no measurable financial incentive for them to show you organic results without adwords.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

They started moving on from being a general purpose search engine years ago, when they started "knowing best". Round about the brand and recency updates, which must be 7 or 8 years ago, maybe more. No longer did you need to search "buy camera" rather than "camera" to show you wanted to spend money, it was now presumed. Your +term (broken with arrival of G+) or quoted "term" would be varied as much as optional terms. Nearly all the changes since have been along those lines. Google thinks the only reason to use the net is to shop. The results you get, that are prioritised make some sense in that context. It's just made it useless for all those times you don't want to book a hotel, buy a phone etc.

ForHackernews 7y ago

> The interesting question is why! You get what you measure. Google grew this monster themselves with pagerank and monetizing links.

pavedwalden 7y ago

Originally, Google was very effective at looking at the interconnections of content people had put online and using that to infer which pages were most relevant. SEO tactics immediately started gaming this system to create false signals of relevance, but for many years Google did an impressive job of staying ahead of that game. I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.

drankula3 7y ago
I would agree with this if not for my recent experience with duckduckgo. While Google's search result quality has sharply deteriorated in recent months, duckduckgo's results have stayed flat for the most part, to the point where ddg's result quality is more often superior to Google. If it were a matter of SEO manipulation, wouldn't ddg's quality decline too?
- jonfw 7y ago
  Duckduckgo has an inherent advantage- nobody cares They have a tiny percentage of the market, so there will be a tiny percentage of money invested in gaming their algorithms.
- chii 7y ago
  And also, why doesn't DDG grow in market share if Google's results are worse? My hypothesis is that Google's results aren't bad - they are actually serving a set of results which satisfies the laymen, and it's only the technical, highly niche users with whom the results don't align.
  - artifaxx 7y ago
    DDG is growing exponentially, Google is just massive and it takes a while to grow big enough to notice https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

naravara 7y ago

Google Scholar is still quite useful for general information, but it's also generally pretty dense and hard to parse so it will take a bit of work. The days of just having a question and being able to find an easy layman-level answer about it are gone (outside of Wikipedia). There was an economics paper published recently making an argument that we have more to fear from shitty AI/robots than good ones and I think it's spot on. (In other words, they're good enough to justify firing the person who used to do the job, but they're objectively worse at the job. What ends up happening is aggregate wealth goes down because not only are the jobs gone, but the job itself is being done less efficiently than before.) The point where Google (and Yelp and a bunch of other services) started to turn was when they stopped just being a thing you go to when you need them to being things that get in your face to anticipate your needs. They're bad at anticipating our needs in any way that's actually useful for us a lot of the time, so it ends up putting a lot of cognitive load on us to make sure the apps/services are working as intended. Instead of just using technology as a tool as we need it, we end up needing to babysit technology that's being fussy, opaque, and unpredictable. And babysitting is the best case scenario, in other cases it's being outright hostile.

pasttense01 7y ago
A problem with Google Scholar is that 75% or so of the results are behind paywalls.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  And the quality of results there seems to have gone downhill now too. I can turn to Scholar to find a lost article, only to have to go through pages. Again, I think it's also geared towards the common and the popular at the expense of the detailed and the idiosyncratic - it's just using a different definition of common and popular. Ten years ago, I gave up subject specific databases for Google Scholar. For most of that time, I was happy. Nowadays I wish I had access to a subject specific db. As for paywalls: I sometimes find better results by adding filetype:pdf to the title of an article in DDG than I do in scholar. They're both completely hit and miss. I think they're trying to respect copyright more nowadays than before. Unfortunately, of all the unreasonable copyrights in the world, journals and academic books are the most unreasonable, since they're trying to get libraries to buy them.

frozenlettuce 7y ago

usually I need to append "reddit" to the end of my search string in order to find something that is not blogspam or autogenerated-seo-optimized content

mrfusion 7y ago

I wonder if they could just flip a sign and penalize seo tactics and make search good again. I mean all the seo’d sites have self labeled themselves as having worthless content. You really just need a search that filters them out.

uoaei 7y ago

It's "too" general purpose. They're aiming for the "80" part of the "80/20 rule", and in the process are really good at answering natural-language queries but very bad at keyword-ified queries. So many people use their service for answering otherwise basic questions that it's become a basic-question-answering system. I suspect also, under the hood, that when the user leaves the search page and never returns they consider that a successful serve and reinforce that sort of behavior more. Whereas I leave to search the same thing on other engines because Google became useless for my job, which requires specific answers to technical questions. So I think there might be some built-in positive-feedback loops that are reinforcing this sort of behavior. Either that or peoples' queries really are that boring, all the time.

darkerside 7y ago

This may be an unpopular opinion, but could it be that structured days is generally what people are looking for? It might feel like search results are low quality because... most of them are. Google has commoditized search and delivers extremely high quality results for specific types of data. Now, anything that doesn't fit into that box feels like it's relatively low quality.

charlesdaniels 7y ago

> This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors. Here's a thought I had while reading your comment... what about a hybrid of HN/lobste.rs/reddit and old-school hierarchical lists. Basically, a place where people can upload websites and such that are relevant to a search term. Say you wanted to know about "how to make bread". You would first check if this query is already defined, creating it if not. Then, you could comment/post links on the topic, and see other's links sorted by some hybrid of upvotes/downvotes and human moderation/curation. The point would less be about having a discussion, but more crowd-sourcing "what pages are most relevant to this query". From the perspective of a user who doesn't participate, this looks like a hierarchically sorted collection of queries/topics and links relevant thereto, sorted by relevance.

dang 7y ago

(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515498. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515498.)