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Ask HN: Is Web Search Broken?
These days I have been having hard time to find great content on search, too many irrelevant search results popping up whenever I searched for some subject I want to learn.
Do you think it's because of search or SEO pumped content? Maybe both?
- gas9S9zw3P9c 6y agoFor me, yes. These days, pretty much all my searches are prefixed with specific domains, such as `site:news.ycombinator.com`. It's a small whitelist of domains like, reddit, HN, stackoverflow, twitter, wikipedia, etc. If I don't do this, I usually don't get what I'm looking for. Instead, I'm overwhelmed by low-quality self-branding content on Medium, dev.to, towardsdatascience, Quora, etc. There are too many of these now. Overall, my search has shifted to largely social sites, especially semi-anonymous ones like HN/reddit. The upvoted content (and comments) I find there tends to be miles better than anything Google surfaces on their first page. This has definitely changed over the recent years, it used to not be like this.
- firatcan 6y agoThanks for your answer. Yeah, I felt like the same way. There are too many SEO pumped content. These days, I am starting check until 4th page of Google. Before I only need to go 3rd search result. I am only talking about content by the way, I still find what I am looking for if I am searching something else
- Nicksil 6y agoMy personal experience has lead me to believe yes, it's broken. Or at least severely damaged. Thanks in large part to the SEO/marketing awfulness. A week or so ago I noticed I've begun to adapt to this poor state of search results by almost immediately navigating to the second "page" and beyond. Not all that long ago, searching beyond the "first page" was almost taboo. Nowadays it's become the norm for me.
- firatcan 6y agoI started searching at my favorite sites first. For instance, If I am looking some resource for my startup, most of the time I first check out YC, a16z, first round or other reliable sites first.
- CM30 6y agoYes, in both cases. Web search via search engines is filled with low quality content, rehashed stuff from mainstream media outlets and bad attempts at trying to 'guess' what the user wants rather than showing them what they're actually looking for. And on site search makes Google search look like perfection by comparison. Trying to search a social media site, internet forum, blog or wiki is often a complete nightmare, and gets you nothing close to what you actually want to find. If your ideal page doesn't come up via auto suggest, then trying to find it is probably going to be a miserable experience.