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Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I

Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I really hope they have plans to improve this or find an approach that works as a middle ground for generic SEO content.

verdverm 6y ago
I would agree search seems to have gotten worse. I wonder how much of the search abuse / manipulation they are dealing with given the current situations and upcoming elections?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
blueboo 6y ago
This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links. [badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted? Even [homeopathy covid] is pretty good.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Did you actually search “nude stallman”? I can’t bring myself to do it for obvious reasons but I am curious what you saw.
  - krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
    The worst recesses of hell, lurking in the back of your mind, suddenly brought to the forefront. The sort of thing you sleep to get away from.
- slantyyz 6y ago
  I tend to think search results could benefit from a little bit of curation. For example, when I search anything HTML, CSS or Javascript related, W3Schools manages to be the top link in many of the cases. While W3Schools is fine, I guess... I have to ask if they truly represent the best result for my search query.
  - pricecomstock 6y ago
    It feels a little dirty, but this FireFox extension will fix that for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-w3schools/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-w3school...
- IdiocyInAction 6y ago
  Searches on highly-specific/technical terms often fail for me. Also, for programming, I often get spammy sites instead of more "official" sources. For your example, the while loop in python, I would expect the official python resource to be first. I find this even worse in other languages. I would prefer not to see W3Schools, Tutorialpoint or GeeksForGeeks to be so highly ranked. This problem is even worse when I search for ML stuff, with pages upon pages of Medium blogspam.
- z3t4 6y ago
  The search AI probably opted out because of your preferences... I often search error messages, but sometimes I don't find anything and I think to myself: - Am I the only person in the world who got this error!? Or I finally find a forum post and the answer is "just google it"
- chongli 6y ago
  SEO hackers to outstrip any single team SEO hackers are taking advantage of Google's biggest weakness: they are an advertising company that makes money on search ads. If search were run by a nonprofit like Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, it could be made to filter out sites with ads on them. SEO hackers would have no way to get their foot in the door unless they drop all of their ads, removing their own revenue source. This would create a space on the internet for non-commercial activity to flourish without ads and all of the tracking garbage that comes with it. A form of cultural ad blocking that, in the long run, could be a lot more effective than the technical arms race of client-side ad blockers.
- underbluewaters 6y ago
  Recipes are a good example. Not only am I confident that Google isn't providing the most useful or authoritative results, it's easy to see that they have forced authors to morph their content into a terrible cookie cutter format. Scrolljacking, obnoxious ads, and pages upon pages of introductory text are the norm. At this point I often use image search and just guess at how they made it rather than try to slog through the results.
slantyyz 6y ago
I don't know if it's a combination of overreliance on algorithmic rankings + seo or what, but if I search for something like "Panasonic GH5" (something I searched recently), I want to see the top two ranked items as the Panasonic product page, followed by the Wikipedia page. When I run that search on Google in Canada, there is a Panasonic link on the first page (third link), but it's for the US store listing, which has less info on it than the normal product page. But as you say, search is in a horrendous state. So is video discovery on Youtube. It seems like my front page recommendations on Youtube have turned to garbage in the last 12 months.
- chongli 6y ago
  I agree that Google search is horrendous but Youtube is actually manageable. If you want decent recommendations you need to curate your viewing history. If you watch some random video and find a lot of annoying related videos showing up in your recommendations then go into your history and delete that one video from the history. Now Youtube will "forget" you watched that video and stop recommending things related to it. I use Youtube in a very specific way: I subscribe to a bunch of channels that I like and only watch what those people post. My recommendations tend to be very focused around things related to my interests. Occasionally I will look up a random video for whatever reason and I'm always careful to delete it from my history unless I actually want more recommendations related to it.
  - rawoke083600 6y ago
    I agree and will go further. I love YouTube, the content and the concept. I watch more YouTube than any other streaming service (except for Space-Force on NetFlix - damn it's good !). Sure not every video that is recommended will be what you like.. but it's quite a hard problem I think to recommend something in EVERY GRID POSITION that you will like.. Usually I'm willing to watch at least 2/5 to 4/5 videos being recommended AND I have "discovery" most of my fav channels I still follow to this day via their algorithms. But maybe it's just me :)
    - slantyyz 6y ago
amelius 6y ago
> Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. I bet they simply optimized for the average person on the web, and we're outliers.
- Andrew_Quentin 6y ago
  Everyone is an outlier to an 'average.'
jgalentine007 6y ago
I have to append 'reddit' to a lot of queries now to find relevant information it seems. I was researching standing desks recently and was having a hard time getting through the cruft with regular google searches.
reaperducer 6y ago
Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I ran into this over the weekend. I had a question about something I took a photo of in a small village, and I knew a priest I met there would have the answer. I went to Google to find the parish web site, and it's simply not in Google. Not at all. Lots of sorta-kinda matches in places thousands miles away, even when I specified the very unique village name, state, and ZIP Code. So I dug through the pile of dross that comes home with me after I travel and found an old parish bulletin that had the web address printed on it. It turns out the church has a web site — a pretty nice one — but Google doesn't know about it. Or it's so heavily down-rated by Google that it didn't come up in the first seven or eight pages of results, no matter how I formed the search query. So I went to the parish's web site to see if he has an e-mail address. The web site indicated that he is no longer the priest there. So I put his name into Google to see where he'd been moved. (I've been told by other priests that unless you're tied to a school or other institution, priests in America are shuffled around every four to six years.) His name is fairly uncommon, so I expected Google to show me links to church bulletins or announcements about arrival or going away parties, or even church employee rosters, of which there are thousands on the web. But instead, it was page after page after page of SEO spam for "Complete phone number for $priest_name!" "Is $priest_name cheating on you? Find out!" "$priest_name in your city want to meet you!" The few I clicked through just in case had none of the promised information. I gave up on Google, and phoned the parish office when it opened this morning. He retired six months ago. Here's his phone number. Time wasted with the company that promised to take all of the world's information and make it available to everyone: 20-40 minutes. Time spent getting the information the old fashioned way: 2 minutes. Thanks for nothing, Google.
- darkmx0z 6y ago
  You are getting that because other people do not care about what you are searching for :( their AI is maximizing the chances of quickly finding what most people want, not what you want.
  - reaperducer 6y ago

verdverm 6y ago

I would agree search seems to have gotten worse. I wonder how much of the search abuse / manipulation they are dealing with given the current situations and upcoming elections?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

blueboo 6y ago

This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links. [badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted? Even [homeopathy covid] is pretty good.

birdyrooster 6y ago
Did you actually search “nude stallman”? I can’t bring myself to do it for obvious reasons but I am curious what you saw.
- krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
  The worst recesses of hell, lurking in the back of your mind, suddenly brought to the forefront. The sort of thing you sleep to get away from.
slantyyz 6y ago
I tend to think search results could benefit from a little bit of curation. For example, when I search anything HTML, CSS or Javascript related, W3Schools manages to be the top link in many of the cases. While W3Schools is fine, I guess... I have to ask if they truly represent the best result for my search query.
- pricecomstock 6y ago
  It feels a little dirty, but this FireFox extension will fix that for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-w3schools/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-w3school...
IdiocyInAction 6y ago
Searches on highly-specific/technical terms often fail for me. Also, for programming, I often get spammy sites instead of more "official" sources. For your example, the while loop in python, I would expect the official python resource to be first. I find this even worse in other languages. I would prefer not to see W3Schools, Tutorialpoint or GeeksForGeeks to be so highly ranked. This problem is even worse when I search for ML stuff, with pages upon pages of Medium blogspam.
z3t4 6y ago
The search AI probably opted out because of your preferences... I often search error messages, but sometimes I don't find anything and I think to myself: - Am I the only person in the world who got this error!? Or I finally find a forum post and the answer is "just google it"
chongli 6y ago
SEO hackers to outstrip any single team SEO hackers are taking advantage of Google's biggest weakness: they are an advertising company that makes money on search ads. If search were run by a nonprofit like Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, it could be made to filter out sites with ads on them. SEO hackers would have no way to get their foot in the door unless they drop all of their ads, removing their own revenue source. This would create a space on the internet for non-commercial activity to flourish without ads and all of the tracking garbage that comes with it. A form of cultural ad blocking that, in the long run, could be a lot more effective than the technical arms race of client-side ad blockers.
underbluewaters 6y ago
Recipes are a good example. Not only am I confident that Google isn't providing the most useful or authoritative results, it's easy to see that they have forced authors to morph their content into a terrible cookie cutter format. Scrolljacking, obnoxious ads, and pages upon pages of introductory text are the norm. At this point I often use image search and just guess at how they made it rather than try to slog through the results.

slantyyz 6y ago

I don't know if it's a combination of overreliance on algorithmic rankings + seo or what, but if I search for something like "Panasonic GH5" (something I searched recently), I want to see the top two ranked items as the Panasonic product page, followed by the Wikipedia page. When I run that search on Google in Canada, there is a Panasonic link on the first page (third link), but it's for the US store listing, which has less info on it than the normal product page. But as you say, search is in a horrendous state. So is video discovery on Youtube. It seems like my front page recommendations on Youtube have turned to garbage in the last 12 months.

chongli 6y ago
I agree that Google search is horrendous but Youtube is actually manageable. If you want decent recommendations you need to curate your viewing history. If you watch some random video and find a lot of annoying related videos showing up in your recommendations then go into your history and delete that one video from the history. Now Youtube will "forget" you watched that video and stop recommending things related to it. I use Youtube in a very specific way: I subscribe to a bunch of channels that I like and only watch what those people post. My recommendations tend to be very focused around things related to my interests. Occasionally I will look up a random video for whatever reason and I'm always careful to delete it from my history unless I actually want more recommendations related to it.
- rawoke083600 6y ago
  I agree and will go further. I love YouTube, the content and the concept. I watch more YouTube than any other streaming service (except for Space-Force on NetFlix - damn it's good !). Sure not every video that is recommended will be what you like.. but it's quite a hard problem I think to recommend something in EVERY GRID POSITION that you will like.. Usually I'm willing to watch at least 2/5 to 4/5 videos being recommended AND I have "discovery" most of my fav channels I still follow to this day via their algorithms. But maybe it's just me :)
  - slantyyz 6y ago

amelius 6y ago

> Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. I bet they simply optimized for the average person on the web, and we're outliers.

Andrew_Quentin 6y ago
Everyone is an outlier to an 'average.'

jgalentine007 6y ago

I have to append 'reddit' to a lot of queries now to find relevant information it seems. I was researching standing desks recently and was having a hard time getting through the cruft with regular google searches.

reaperducer 6y ago

Google Search is in a horrendous state right now. Search results have been getting worse each year, with interesting information being buried 20 pages down. I ran into this over the weekend. I had a question about something I took a photo of in a small village, and I knew a priest I met there would have the answer. I went to Google to find the parish web site, and it's simply not in Google. Not at all. Lots of sorta-kinda matches in places thousands miles away, even when I specified the very unique village name, state, and ZIP Code. So I dug through the pile of dross that comes home with me after I travel and found an old parish bulletin that had the web address printed on it. It turns out the church has a web site — a pretty nice one — but Google doesn't know about it. Or it's so heavily down-rated by Google that it didn't come up in the first seven or eight pages of results, no matter how I formed the search query. So I went to the parish's web site to see if he has an e-mail address. The web site indicated that he is no longer the priest there. So I put his name into Google to see where he'd been moved. (I've been told by other priests that unless you're tied to a school or other institution, priests in America are shuffled around every four to six years.) His name is fairly uncommon, so I expected Google to show me links to church bulletins or announcements about arrival or going away parties, or even church employee rosters, of which there are thousands on the web. But instead, it was page after page after page of SEO spam for "Complete phone number for $priest_name!" "Is $priest_name cheating on you? Find out!" "$priest_name in your city want to meet you!" The few I clicked through just in case had none of the promised information. I gave up on Google, and phoned the parish office when it opened this morning. He retired six months ago. Here's his phone number. Time wasted with the company that promised to take all of the world's information and make it available to everyone: 20-40 minutes. Time spent getting the information the old fashioned way: 2 minutes. Thanks for nothing, Google.

darkmx0z 6y ago
You are getting that because other people do not care about what you are searching for :( their AI is maximizing the chances of quickly finding what most people want, not what you want.
- reaperducer 6y ago