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Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generi

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic Search drove this decline.

echelon 6y ago
My guess is that you're part of an unprofitable long tail. Why optimize for your use case when they can capture customers that bring more money with far less effort? I wager that most people don't perceive a decline in search results quality. At least not to an extent where they'd notice and switch to using Bing.
- spiritplumber 6y ago
  I'd guess because people who are looking for something specific, are more likely to buy the damn thing if they find it, if it's something buyable.
- remram 6y ago
  I'd be surprised if there was a long tail of customers. There is probably a long tail of searches for most customers. Google giving up on difficult searches and focusing on showing promoted links, AMP sites, and "rich" result boxes is probably a sound business strategy too, and is unlikely to make users switch search engines this late in the game (Bing/DDG don't seem to do better anyway).
- yakubin 6y ago
  Google Search users aren't Google's customers. Making Google Search useful to its users is not what makes it profitable. It only needs to be mildly better than the competition, so that people use it and can be used for collecting data and serving ads. So GP may not be "an unprofitable long tail". GP may in fact be "a profitable typical long tail for whom Google Search is frustratingly unhelpful".
dawnerd 6y ago
I was kinda thinking the same too until I went back and gave bing and DDG a shot and well, Google is still way better for my searches. I think its more of the seo spam that popping up thats making the results look less useful.
- bick_nyers 6y ago
  That would be an interesting problem, how do you algorithmically filter out SEO and focus on useful information? A signal vs. noise problem, but on human text, with the added challenge that the noise is trying to outsmart you. Maybe an adversarial ML network with an SEO-generating bot working against you?
  - Const-me 6y ago
    Technically, trivially simple: detect and penalize ads. You can even reuse an ad.blocker's database for the detection.
kenny11 6y ago
Same here. I can remember how refreshing it was when Google was new and you could trust it to give you results for what you actually searched for instead of what it thought you searched for, like AltaVista and the rest of its competitors were doing at the time. I guess it's time for something new to do the same thing to Google that it did to those companies years ago.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Other sites still offered old-school website directories, I remember using those for years, well after Google became #1. I'd much prefer going back to something like that now than bother with Google's approach; depending on the search term, I already know what the top sites are going to be, and I know they won't have what I'm looking for.
akkartik 6y ago
Yeah. I wonder what fraction of searches actually end with no clicks, just the requestor bouncing from the search results page. Anecdotally, I suspect that metric is also trending in the wrong direction.
minikites 6y ago
>I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing drove this decline It's the switch from lexical/syntactic search to semantic search. There are benefits and drawbacks to each and it would be nice for Google to give you the option to try each.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  Thank you for the clarification, I edited my original post to add "/ Semantic Search" because it's an important addition.
Hydraulix989 6y ago
I'm really starting to prefer DuckDuckGo at this point. There was one time when I thought they would always live in Google's shadow, but in this brave new world of content censorship and commercialization-induced bias, I find that I get noticeably "better" results on the more neutral alternative.
- narrator 6y ago
  Anything in google that hits the political "twiddler" does not produce useful results. This was in the Zachary Vorheis leak of Google internal documents. https://saraacarter.com/google-whistleblower-state-attorney-generals-need-to-look-at-google-bias-in-real-time-news-feed/ https://saraacarter.com/google-whistleblower-state-attorney-...
- D13Fd 6y ago
  I wish DuckDuckGo actually found the stuff I'm looking for. I've given it a solid try a few times and it's just not as good, and I can't justify spending twice as long as I need to on a search.
fossuser 6y ago
When I search Google now I mostly get spam. “Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads. “Product Review” -> same as above, spam. “Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes. Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful. Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occasionally you get a useful blog. General knowledge is Wikipedia, news is axios. Amazon for most purchases (except for products that have their own brand and sites that are at risk of being faked). Etsy for boutique stuff. Most of the rest of the web is junk. I think we could probably go back to curated 90s era web portals and have a better experience.
- jjbinx007 6y ago
  Occasionally I open a private window and try browsing the web on my phone or laptop without an ad blocker. It doesn't take long before the autoplaying videos and Taboola crap makes me close the browser.
  - purerandomness 6y ago
    You can set extensions to work in private windows in the settings. Agree, the web is unusable without an ad blocker.
- axaxs 6y ago
  Agreed with everything above. If I ever X vs Y in google, I append site:reddit.com I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but it's about the largest forum. I really miss Forum search in Google.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > I really miss Forum search in Google. You may find this useful: https://boardreader.com/ https://boardreader.com/
    - axaxs 6y ago
the__alchemist 6y ago
I agree, but it still seems far ahead of any competitor. Eg DuckDuckGo, Bing etc... anecdotally for the things I search for.
bmitc 6y ago
It drives me crazy how Google never fails to remove the most unique and yet most important words of my search term. It basically does this 99% of the time now.
- vkou 6y ago
  If you force the term to stay, you'll get two search results, neither of which answer your question. The web of 2021 sucks.
  - another-dave 6y ago
    I'd prefer to recognise immediately that there are no results & reframe my query that to start to scan down through the results, maybe click into one & start to read only _then_ to realise it doesn't relate, back to Google — "oh, they didn't actually search for what I told them to search for" & then reach the same point they could've given me at the start. At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess when limited results" / "give me my exact search query" (maybe there is somewhere & I've missed this)
    - lmm 6y ago
      > At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess when limited results" / "give me my exact search query" (maybe there is somewhere & I've missed this) There is, one of the drop-downs gives you the option of "all results" or "verbatim". It doesn't actually work, of course.
  - plorkyeran 6y ago
    Google's search index of the web of 2021 sucks. Getting two search results which match the exact terms I got is no longer particularly strong evidence that those were the only pages with those terms, and quite a few times I've had it fail to find pages which do exist and should have matched the search I did.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > It drives me crazy how Google never fails to remove the most unique and yet most important words of my search term. It basically does this 99% of the time now. Which is ironic, because one of Google's original innovations was to make a space an AND connector instead of OR (which its competitors used to maximize result counts). Back then, they understood that fewer, more specific results were better.
neogodless 6y ago
I find it really obnoxious that if I search on 5-6 terms, Google will return popular results that include 1-2 of the least specific but most popular terms. If I put anything in quotes, it will ask if I really mean something less specific than what I put in quotes! Well yes if we get to a generic enough level, you will return the best relevant results to those generic terms. Who cares if they relate to the specific search I started with?
arbirk 6y ago
Totally agree. And there are spampages on nearly all results
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Arnt 6y ago
Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago. Because every search I've done today produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results, above the fold. I can't say I've really counted how many days that's true. I can't even say that I really remember what searches I did yesterday or the day before. But if I'm not totally weird and google searches were dramatically better in the past, then they must have produced the desired results every time on almost every day.
- rplnt 6y ago
  Default search might have gotten better, but it also became virtually impossible to do any complex queries. Google is being too smart and it's extremely hard to find old results, foreign results, other meanings of a popular keyword. It's always trying to force you to the same results, whatever you try. Oh, and if it's anything you can buy you get loads of ads followed by spam.
- purerandomness 6y ago
  > every search I've done today produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results, above the fold. Same for me, but that's because I just stopped searching for things that I know will not give me good quality results as they used to be circa pre-2010 back when search tools like +, -, and "" still worked and the results weren't filled with generated SEO texts.
- eitland 6y ago
  > Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago. Oh, I forget some people doesn't know why Google enjoy their current position: Back before 2007 they completely blew competition out of the water: If something was accessible on the Internet and wasn't behind a noindex spell, Google would find it. Compared to other search engines that both then and now work more like Google does today it was totally amazing. Then things started to go sideways: - first there was: did you mean <something else with similar spelling>? (this was actually user friendly) - then there was: we didn't find many results for <search term> so we included <related but different search term>, use double quotes to search for "<search term>" - then there was fuzzing: expnding all my search terms into the unrecognizable unless I double quoted them - and the latest few years they have also ignored my double quotes somewhere in between there they messed up the + operator that used to mean "make sure this term is included" as well as ~ that used to mean I wanted Google to fuzz that term. Sometimes I can get better results by trying to think how my wife would phrase the question, i.e. instead of searching for - <search terms including a weird mispeling from a dialog box> I search for - <why does my computer show search terms including a weird mispeling from a dialog box> But other times nothing works.
deleted 6y ago
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vishnugupta 6y ago
Not to mention that it’s infiltrated by quora, Printerest, and Wikipedia.
gxx 6y ago
For me Google "verbatim" is the best way to get focussed results although it's too bad it doesn't allow date ranges. Bing search with appropriate use of guotes, + and - operators and date ranges usually beats non-verbatim Google search, and it can sometimes be better than Google verbatim.
- dgellow 6y ago
  I had no idea "Verbatim" was a thing! For those who don't know, after a search, click on "Tools", then "All results", and select "Verbatim".
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > For me Google "verbatim" is the best way to get focussed results although it's too bad it doesn't allow date ranges. One word of caution: I use verbatim mode and I regularly (but not always) get Wikipedia clones as my top result. It must be skipping some of their anti-spam filtering.
- diegocg 6y ago
  The verbatim mode is exactly what most people here are missing. But, for some reason, it's something that can't be configured - you need to set it in every new search. Three freaking clicks. I don't understand what goes on corporations. I guess power users aren't a target demographic anymore.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    I’m suspecting that they generate results from statistics ahead of time and just serve you the closest cached result, unless it is strictly necessary to do an actual search.
colordrops 6y ago
The main problem with google search is that results are driven mostly by interests other than the user doing the search.
polote 6y ago
It really depends on what you are looking for. If you are searching on a term that is used by business you will get mostly shitty content. But if you search for things that make no money, for example. "diff with prosemirror" or "travelling with monitors" you will get very relevant results. I don't think it has a lot of to do with new search algo. I think it is the opposite, the algo is mostly the same as a decade a ago, but now it is abused by SEO expert. And Google doesn't seem to care yet
ImpressiveWebs 6y ago
Google doesn’t want people to find alternative sources for news, healthcare, and politics. They now force all the mainstream sources to the top, regardless of whether the search terms entered have any relation to the actual results. And this seems to have carried over to other subjects as well, because I can never find obscure pages any more. This should destroy Google, but for some reason it doesn’t, and it baffles me that they are still surviving in this.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  This is has been my experience as well. When I search using very specific terms for a any topic tangentially related to something popular, all I get is the News articles. I suspect it is because the best sources of information do not serve adds, but news, spam, and social media do.
- throwaway53453 6y ago
  Thank the media for slandering the company, accusing it of perpetrating genocides, political strife, Russian election hacking conspiracy, etc... The reason they do this is being scared of liability, not a top-down desire to control.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > alternative healthcare I don't blame Google for this. 99% of alternative medicine is quackery and it's almost impossible to separate wheat from chaff in an automated way.
  - godshatter 6y ago
    Why should Google care about this? Maybe I'm trying to find examples of egregious claims made about a particular alternative medicine. I only want Google Search to filter based on search terms, not it's creators opinions about what I'm searching for.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Same could be said for any site that is smaller in scale than the #1 result. If I'm looking for a review of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I will see links to Amazon, Pitchfork, Rateyourmusic and other sites well before I find something written by a regular person on their personal blog. Same goes for products. I will see a page of Amazon links before anything on say, a boutique Ecommerce website with a Shopify backend.
sbierwagen 6y ago
I was trying to remember the name of a song. Not an obscure song: "Toe Rag" by The Rifles, a modestly well known indie band. I even remembered a chunk of the lyrics! But I got nothing. Here's let's cheat, and copy and paste exactly two lines from the song. https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friends+I+couldn%27t+tell+you+their+names https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friend... I don't know what other people see, but I just get SEO garbage listicles. Nothing even remotely relevant. Add "lyrics"? You get lyrics..... for other songs! https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friends+I+couldn%27t+tell+you+their+names+lyrics https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friend... You have to quote the entire string! Which won't work if you misremembered a word or two.
- resonantjacket5 6y ago
  if you use double quotes you only need "See them more than my" lyrics. Though if you do "see them more" you get "Further Than the Stars" song instead.
tomxor 6y ago
> Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms This feels very true... the majority of my searches go like this: 1. Search with all relevant terms with some parts that should be exact combinations in quotes => nothing or BS results 2. Remove words that Google is fixating on without context => no or seemingly unrelated results without search terms at all 3. Reduce specificity to 2 or 3 words, topic and subtopic (trying to locate context only and search the rest myself) => sometimes ends me on sites where I can then just browse for the result i'm after 4. Worst case reduce to single search term to find huge context sites and manually search myself. Sometimes at this point I just give in and manually navigate to other sites where I know I can manually browse and narrow down context myself and then try to find what I'm looking for... it really feels like a curl web scrape and grep would work better than Google at this point (yes I know google "site:", it's doesn't work properly anymore).
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I started writing down the search queries for such bad results from different search engines to publish one day a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'. But this needs to be public effort to create any meaningful action from search engines. How many of you would be willing to contribute to such platform by submitting your bad search results?
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  Update: I have created a post on this with some examples on my problem validation platform[1]. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame-search-submission https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame...
tablespoon 6y ago
> Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. I thought the main issue here was Google directing searchers to its own services and scraping data from non-Google websites to present on its own pages? It's declining search result quality is certainly an issue, but I don't think this link is about that at all.
c7DJTLrn 6y ago
Agreed, I have issues daily with Google: * shows results despite having zero actual matching results * ignores parts of the query even if they are surrounded in quotes * gets completely thrown off by keywords (and, or, etc) and symbols (=, ;, etc)
reaperducer 6y ago
Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. A lot of people say this is because Google is worse at returning the desired search results for various reasons (algos, ads, spam, etc). I've come to suspect it is more deliberate on the part of Google. I've said it before, so I'll belt out the chant again: "Google doesn't make money from providing the right search results. Google makes money from keeping you searching for the right search results." This is especially true for the vast majority of people on the internet who do not know there are any (better or worse) alternatives to Google.
- numpad0 6y ago
  I’ve seen it: I happened to enter exactly the same query from two separate IPs used by communities without deep cultural connections in between, and only one of them returned the desired results. That felt like a thick wall of glass separating worlds have suddenly come into my view.
  - hobs 6y ago
    ooh yeah, especially when I am doing some specific database programming stuff and my results come up with amazing perfect resources and a noob's results come up with absolute shit... its bad.
- Const-me 6y ago
  And another reason, Google makes money when you click on low-quality machine generated search results, because these pages are almost always monetized with google ads. This causes a conflict of interests: when they improve search, they earn less money.
  - jayqd3 6y ago
    Your remark is very good. How do they balance rich answers which lead to zero-clicks with the revenues which are based on a-clicks? Thanks.
- deleted 6y ago
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dreamer7 6y ago
I have noticed an eerily accurate prediction of my search term though. Several times, when I hit a bug and attempt to learn more about it, Google makes precise auto-complete suggestions
Der_Einzige 6y ago
You are 100% correct about the switch to Semantic Search and dense vectors being one of the main reasons. BERT shouldn't be anywhere near my search results.
dougb5 6y ago
It's infuriating when Google prefers the documents that ignore some of my keywords even when there are plainly pages that include them all. I get the sense that there's an over-weighting of broad semantic match, to the detriment of lexical match, in their current ML model, whatever form it is now. It's harming quality for a segment of technical users like ourselves but might be "better" in the aggregate over all users, according to at least some of their internal quality metrics. Back in the 90s, search engines were driven largely by sparse vector representations of the documents such as TF IDF vectors before latent semantic indexing, topic modeling, and other dense vector representations like sentence embeddings entered the fray (not to mention non-content features that use the web graph, click stream, etc.). A lot of NLP applications use a mix of dense and sparse features but it's hard to get the balance right in a way that works for all inputs. Google's pendulum has swung too far in the "dense" direction, as it certainly seems "dense" a lot more often lately!
- visarga 6y ago
  They are missing the mark on excellence. Apparently having thousands of PhD's and product managers does not make for a better search experience.
  - PoignardAzur 6y ago
    Having hundred of millions of smart people heavily incentivized to game whatever metrics you come up with is a bit of a handicap too.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
>>Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade I have ZERO doubt in my mind that a Google search update that decreases their ad revenue would be rolled back and metrics tweaked to make it so. So...
londons_explore 6y ago
Everyone please post examples of search terms that have gotten worse. Specifically, it's handy to have the query, and the URL that you think would be the best result. Google engineers can then peer in and see why that URL didn't rank highly. The most common reason is it's behind an invisible captcha or blocked by robots.txt, so do check that.
- asddubs 6y ago
  yesterday I was trying to figure out how to look up the nameservers of a domain including the vanity/parent nameservers using a tool like nslookup or host, it took me a good 10 rephrasings before i found a stackoverflow post answering the question, and not just a tutorial on how to set up vanity nameservers at X registrar/hosting company
marcodiego 6y ago
Probably a side-effect of SEO[0]. Its in the best interest of the vender, not of the user. I should be banned, forbidden of fought against by google themselves. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
DanBC 6y ago
And the natural language questions sometimes get stuck. For example, [what's the difference between cauliflower cheese and cauliflower mornay] seems like it should return a page that tells you what the difference is, but it doesn't. It returns a bunch of recipes.
- notahacker 6y ago
  The highlighted responses to suggested natural language questions are comically bad. Answers to different questions, complete failure to apply simple contextualisers like 'today', and treating some random on Quora or some splog as an authoritative source for identifying a fact that has authoritative sources. I know it's difficult to do this stuff without human curation, but it's like a campaign to discourage people from taking NLP seriously.
cmckn 6y ago
I don't think the "problem" here is bad search results -- I think the lack of clicks is thanks to search results becoming much richer. The "card" style answers that show up more and more often mean I don't have to actually visit the site where the information originated (which publishers despise, for good reason). Take a common search I made last year as an example, "covid king county" -- I almost never ended up visiting the county's coronavirus dashboard because Google had the graphs I wanted in the search results. I think it's a popular opinion on HN that Google search sucks, but I just don't agree. I used DDG on all my devices for the better part of last year, and bailed when I noticed by g! usage ratcheting up.
- jader201 6y ago
  Yeah, the parent and most its children are focusing on something not even related to the article — this is about providing what the user is looking for without the need for more clicks. While it’s an unpopular opinion on HN, there’s no denying that from a user perspective, that’s only a good thing.
  - rurp 6y ago
    Card results might be a good thing overall, but they certainly aren't only good. In many cases, adding the cards takes revenue away from the exact people who collected or created the content to make them possible in the first place. We'll never know how many websites shut down or never got created to begin with given Google's history of crushing the revenue from various sites on a whim.
  - bridanp 6y ago
    I definitely read this like the two of you. If the information being shown by Google results is what I need, there isn't a need to click further. On top of that, many of us have been "trained" that products like ZScaler are going to block most sites and register a hit with InfoSec. I'm not going to click on bobsfunmainframefacts.com if Google scraped the needed info for me.
- visarga 6y ago
  It sucks at searching for exact things, it would often subtly by essentially change the meaning of the search. Like confusing searches for the desired "weight of scooter" with the max "weight of rider" on the scooter. What a shame, it was even a shopping related search, where the money are. They could have led me to a sale. When people are trying variations on a search it's a clear sign of failure. They should do something about it, like use a verbose natural language interface or select a different strategy for ranking or enable the exact in-depth mode. Apparently the NLP community can do natural language Q&A in papers, but Google can't do it in search. Other pain points: searching in depth all results on a query, not just the top skim and remembering context between searches. And Google Assistant itself is too poorly integrated and dumb. Where's the GPT-3 like language skill? So many TPUs what are they doing all day long? They have more text and images than any other entity on the internet, Google bot has been sucking it up for so long (not to mention links, keywords and clicks). It should show in the quality of their AI. It's a shame to have OpenAI steal their thunder like this.
ekianjo 6y ago
For coding questions it still works relatively well. For "reviews", or anything remotely tied to commercial interests, it's indeed pure garbage: pages and pages of low quality links.
amaccuish 6y ago
And half the time I click the wrong thing because the related pages thing slides into view just as I click. That javascript can burn in hell
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
So there needs to be a significant cost in production of the content - youtube for example - want to see how to (a recent example) lay laminate floor, well you need to have a camera and a person and, hell, a room with laminate flooring needed - that's a big cost. Lowes has made a video, so have dozens of contractors. It's amazing how tool rental firms have not advertised on there ... actually that is a bit weird... SideNote - for some reason I replied to an email outreach from Rand, and he actually replied back within a few hours, clearly having read my words and come up with a real answer. I was frankly shocked. Either he works an inhuman amount or he has secretly invented AGI to respond to his emails for him. Kudos and good luck
benibela 6y ago
It seems to just return the most popular sites Mostly ignoring what is on the sites
deleted 6y ago
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bfrog 6y ago
Yep, I haven't used Google search in a few years now, ddg has been better at not spamming me
vimax 6y ago
It sure has made switching to duck duck go easier
Pmop 6y ago
Don't forget AMP. I accidentally typed google in the url and decided to use it to see how's it going after so many weeks of not using Google. Got redirected to a blank page with AMP's frame which instantly reminded me why I no longer use Google for search.
perl4ever 6y ago
I got so annoyed with Google that I set my default to duckduckgo and/or Bing, but now I've gotten in the habit of switching back to Google constantly, because once I am directly faced with the quality of the other options, they suck.
ejjpi 6y ago
We are in this situation because people never wanted to pay anything on the web, so we have become the product. That's the price to pay when you want everything for free.
pyinstallwoes 6y ago
Google results in the past year or two seem extremely odd to me. I see less results than I used to, I see more of the same sites than I used to, and a lot of content that I try to find that I know I used to be able to, I can't. Oh, and then there's a bunch of weird links that come up to obvious content generated by AI being peddled. Odd.

echelon 6y ago

My guess is that you're part of an unprofitable long tail. Why optimize for your use case when they can capture customers that bring more money with far less effort? I wager that most people don't perceive a decline in search results quality. At least not to an extent where they'd notice and switch to using Bing.

spiritplumber 6y ago
I'd guess because people who are looking for something specific, are more likely to buy the damn thing if they find it, if it's something buyable.
remram 6y ago
I'd be surprised if there was a long tail of customers. There is probably a long tail of searches for most customers. Google giving up on difficult searches and focusing on showing promoted links, AMP sites, and "rich" result boxes is probably a sound business strategy too, and is unlikely to make users switch search engines this late in the game (Bing/DDG don't seem to do better anyway).
yakubin 6y ago
Google Search users aren't Google's customers. Making Google Search useful to its users is not what makes it profitable. It only needs to be mildly better than the competition, so that people use it and can be used for collecting data and serving ads. So GP may not be "an unprofitable long tail". GP may in fact be "a profitable typical long tail for whom Google Search is frustratingly unhelpful".

dawnerd 6y ago

I was kinda thinking the same too until I went back and gave bing and DDG a shot and well, Google is still way better for my searches. I think its more of the seo spam that popping up thats making the results look less useful.

bick_nyers 6y ago
That would be an interesting problem, how do you algorithmically filter out SEO and focus on useful information? A signal vs. noise problem, but on human text, with the added challenge that the noise is trying to outsmart you. Maybe an adversarial ML network with an SEO-generating bot working against you?
- Const-me 6y ago
  Technically, trivially simple: detect and penalize ads. You can even reuse an ad.blocker's database for the detection.

kenny11 6y ago

Same here. I can remember how refreshing it was when Google was new and you could trust it to give you results for what you actually searched for instead of what it thought you searched for, like AltaVista and the rest of its competitors were doing at the time. I guess it's time for something new to do the same thing to Google that it did to those companies years ago.

rchaud 6y ago
Other sites still offered old-school website directories, I remember using those for years, well after Google became #1. I'd much prefer going back to something like that now than bother with Google's approach; depending on the search term, I already know what the top sites are going to be, and I know they won't have what I'm looking for.

akkartik 6y ago

Yeah. I wonder what fraction of searches actually end with no clicks, just the requestor bouncing from the search results page. Anecdotally, I suspect that metric is also trending in the wrong direction.

minikites 6y ago

>I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing drove this decline It's the switch from lexical/syntactic search to semantic search. There are benefits and drawbacks to each and it would be nice for Google to give you the option to try each.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
Thank you for the clarification, I edited my original post to add "/ Semantic Search" because it's an important addition.

Hydraulix989 6y ago

I'm really starting to prefer DuckDuckGo at this point. There was one time when I thought they would always live in Google's shadow, but in this brave new world of content censorship and commercialization-induced bias, I find that I get noticeably "better" results on the more neutral alternative.

narrator 6y ago
Anything in google that hits the political "twiddler" does not produce useful results. This was in the Zachary Vorheis leak of Google internal documents. https://saraacarter.com/google-whistleblower-state-attorney-generals-need-to-look-at-google-bias-in-real-time-news-feed/ https://saraacarter.com/google-whistleblower-state-attorney-...
D13Fd 6y ago
I wish DuckDuckGo actually found the stuff I'm looking for. I've given it a solid try a few times and it's just not as good, and I can't justify spending twice as long as I need to on a search.

fossuser 6y ago

When I search Google now I mostly get spam. “Product vs. Product” -> list of spam websites that just show them side by side with ads. “Product Review” -> same as above, spam. “Product referral code” -> sites with spam and no codes. Interesting web content is in Reddit (and youtube), Google exists as a tool to search Reddit since the “new” Reddit site is awful. Programming questions are mostly stack overflow, but occasionally you get a useful blog. General knowledge is Wikipedia, news is axios. Amazon for most purchases (except for products that have their own brand and sites that are at risk of being faked). Etsy for boutique stuff. Most of the rest of the web is junk. I think we could probably go back to curated 90s era web portals and have a better experience.

jjbinx007 6y ago
Occasionally I open a private window and try browsing the web on my phone or laptop without an ad blocker. It doesn't take long before the autoplaying videos and Taboola crap makes me close the browser.
- purerandomness 6y ago
  You can set extensions to work in private windows in the settings. Agree, the web is unusable without an ad blocker.
axaxs 6y ago
Agreed with everything above. If I ever X vs Y in google, I append site:reddit.com I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but it's about the largest forum. I really miss Forum search in Google.
- Shared404 6y ago
  > I really miss Forum search in Google. You may find this useful: https://boardreader.com/ https://boardreader.com/
  - axaxs 6y ago

the__alchemist 6y ago

I agree, but it still seems far ahead of any competitor. Eg DuckDuckGo, Bing etc... anecdotally for the things I search for.

bmitc 6y ago

It drives me crazy how Google never fails to remove the most unique and yet most important words of my search term. It basically does this 99% of the time now.

vkou 6y ago
If you force the term to stay, you'll get two search results, neither of which answer your question. The web of 2021 sucks.
- another-dave 6y ago
  I'd prefer to recognise immediately that there are no results & reframe my query that to start to scan down through the results, maybe click into one & start to read only _then_ to realise it doesn't relate, back to Google — "oh, they didn't actually search for what I told them to search for" & then reach the same point they could've given me at the start. At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess when limited results" / "give me my exact search query" (maybe there is somewhere & I've missed this)
  - lmm 6y ago
    > At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess when limited results" / "give me my exact search query" (maybe there is somewhere & I've missed this) There is, one of the drop-downs gives you the option of "all results" or "verbatim". It doesn't actually work, of course.
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  Google's search index of the web of 2021 sucks. Getting two search results which match the exact terms I got is no longer particularly strong evidence that those were the only pages with those terms, and quite a few times I've had it fail to find pages which do exist and should have matched the search I did.
tablespoon 6y ago
> It drives me crazy how Google never fails to remove the most unique and yet most important words of my search term. It basically does this 99% of the time now. Which is ironic, because one of Google's original innovations was to make a space an AND connector instead of OR (which its competitors used to maximize result counts). Back then, they understood that fewer, more specific results were better.

neogodless 6y ago

I find it really obnoxious that if I search on 5-6 terms, Google will return popular results that include 1-2 of the least specific but most popular terms. If I put anything in quotes, it will ask if I really mean something less specific than what I put in quotes! Well yes if we get to a generic enough level, you will return the best relevant results to those generic terms. Who cares if they relate to the specific search I started with?

arbirk 6y ago

Totally agree. And there are spampages on nearly all results

deleted 6y ago

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Arnt 6y ago

Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago. Because every search I've done today produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results, above the fold. I can't say I've really counted how many days that's true. I can't even say that I really remember what searches I did yesterday or the day before. But if I'm not totally weird and google searches were dramatically better in the past, then they must have produced the desired results every time on almost every day.

rplnt 6y ago
Default search might have gotten better, but it also became virtually impossible to do any complex queries. Google is being too smart and it's extremely hard to find old results, foreign results, other meanings of a popular keyword. It's always trying to force you to the same results, whatever you try. Oh, and if it's anything you can buy you get loads of ads followed by spam.
purerandomness 6y ago
> every search I've done today produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results, above the fold. Same for me, but that's because I just stopped searching for things that I know will not give me good quality results as they used to be circa pre-2010 back when search tools like +, -, and "" still worked and the results weren't filled with generated SEO texts.
eitland 6y ago
> Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago. Oh, I forget some people doesn't know why Google enjoy their current position: Back before 2007 they completely blew competition out of the water: If something was accessible on the Internet and wasn't behind a noindex spell, Google would find it. Compared to other search engines that both then and now work more like Google does today it was totally amazing. Then things started to go sideways: - first there was: did you mean <something else with similar spelling>? (this was actually user friendly) - then there was: we didn't find many results for <search term> so we included <related but different search term>, use double quotes to search for "<search term>" - then there was fuzzing: expnding all my search terms into the unrecognizable unless I double quoted them - and the latest few years they have also ignored my double quotes somewhere in between there they messed up the + operator that used to mean "make sure this term is included" as well as ~ that used to mean I wanted Google to fuzz that term. Sometimes I can get better results by trying to think how my wife would phrase the question, i.e. instead of searching for - <search terms including a weird mispeling from a dialog box> I search for - <why does my computer show search terms including a weird mispeling from a dialog box> But other times nothing works.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vishnugupta 6y ago

Not to mention that it’s infiltrated by quora, Printerest, and Wikipedia.

gxx 6y ago

For me Google "verbatim" is the best way to get focussed results although it's too bad it doesn't allow date ranges. Bing search with appropriate use of guotes, + and - operators and date ranges usually beats non-verbatim Google search, and it can sometimes be better than Google verbatim.

dgellow 6y ago
I had no idea "Verbatim" was a thing! For those who don't know, after a search, click on "Tools", then "All results", and select "Verbatim".
tablespoon 6y ago
> For me Google "verbatim" is the best way to get focussed results although it's too bad it doesn't allow date ranges. One word of caution: I use verbatim mode and I regularly (but not always) get Wikipedia clones as my top result. It must be skipping some of their anti-spam filtering.
diegocg 6y ago
The verbatim mode is exactly what most people here are missing. But, for some reason, it's something that can't be configured - you need to set it in every new search. Three freaking clicks. I don't understand what goes on corporations. I guess power users aren't a target demographic anymore.
- numpad0 6y ago
  I’m suspecting that they generate results from statistics ahead of time and just serve you the closest cached result, unless it is strictly necessary to do an actual search.

colordrops 6y ago

The main problem with google search is that results are driven mostly by interests other than the user doing the search.

polote 6y ago

It really depends on what you are looking for. If you are searching on a term that is used by business you will get mostly shitty content. But if you search for things that make no money, for example. "diff with prosemirror" or "travelling with monitors" you will get very relevant results. I don't think it has a lot of to do with new search algo. I think it is the opposite, the algo is mostly the same as a decade a ago, but now it is abused by SEO expert. And Google doesn't seem to care yet

ImpressiveWebs 6y ago

Google doesn’t want people to find alternative sources for news, healthcare, and politics. They now force all the mainstream sources to the top, regardless of whether the search terms entered have any relation to the actual results. And this seems to have carried over to other subjects as well, because I can never find obscure pages any more. This should destroy Google, but for some reason it doesn’t, and it baffles me that they are still surviving in this.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
This is has been my experience as well. When I search using very specific terms for a any topic tangentially related to something popular, all I get is the News articles. I suspect it is because the best sources of information do not serve adds, but news, spam, and social media do.
throwaway53453 6y ago
Thank the media for slandering the company, accusing it of perpetrating genocides, political strife, Russian election hacking conspiracy, etc... The reason they do this is being scared of liability, not a top-down desire to control.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> alternative healthcare I don't blame Google for this. 99% of alternative medicine is quackery and it's almost impossible to separate wheat from chaff in an automated way.
- godshatter 6y ago
  Why should Google care about this? Maybe I'm trying to find examples of egregious claims made about a particular alternative medicine. I only want Google Search to filter based on search terms, not it's creators opinions about what I'm searching for.
rchaud 6y ago
Same could be said for any site that is smaller in scale than the #1 result. If I'm looking for a review of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I will see links to Amazon, Pitchfork, Rateyourmusic and other sites well before I find something written by a regular person on their personal blog. Same goes for products. I will see a page of Amazon links before anything on say, a boutique Ecommerce website with a Shopify backend.

sbierwagen 6y ago

I was trying to remember the name of a song. Not an obscure song: "Toe Rag" by The Rifles, a modestly well known indie band. I even remembered a chunk of the lyrics! But I got nothing. Here's let's cheat, and copy and paste exactly two lines from the song. https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friends+I+couldn%27t+tell+you+their+names https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friend... I don't know what other people see, but I just get SEO garbage listicles. Nothing even remotely relevant. Add "lyrics"? You get lyrics..... for other songs! https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friends+I+couldn%27t+tell+you+their+names+lyrics https://www.google.com/search?q=See+them+more+than+my+friend... You have to quote the entire string! Which won't work if you misremembered a word or two.

resonantjacket5 6y ago
if you use double quotes you only need "See them more than my" lyrics. Though if you do "see them more" you get "Further Than the Stars" song instead.

tomxor 6y ago

> Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms This feels very true... the majority of my searches go like this: 1. Search with all relevant terms with some parts that should be exact combinations in quotes => nothing or BS results 2. Remove words that Google is fixating on without context => no or seemingly unrelated results without search terms at all 3. Reduce specificity to 2 or 3 words, topic and subtopic (trying to locate context only and search the rest myself) => sometimes ends me on sites where I can then just browse for the result i'm after 4. Worst case reduce to single search term to find huge context sites and manually search myself. Sometimes at this point I just give in and manually navigate to other sites where I know I can manually browse and narrow down context myself and then try to find what I'm looking for... it really feels like a curl web scrape and grep would work better than Google at this point (yes I know google "site:", it's doesn't work properly anymore).

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

I started writing down the search queries for such bad results from different search engines to publish one day a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'. But this needs to be public effort to create any meaningful action from search engines. How many of you would be willing to contribute to such platform by submitting your bad search results?

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Update: I have created a post on this with some examples on my problem validation platform[1]. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame-search-submission https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame...

tablespoon 6y ago

> Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. I thought the main issue here was Google directing searchers to its own services and scraping data from non-Google websites to present on its own pages? It's declining search result quality is certainly an issue, but I don't think this link is about that at all.

c7DJTLrn 6y ago

Agreed, I have issues daily with Google: * shows results despite having zero actual matching results * ignores parts of the query even if they are surrounded in quotes * gets completely thrown off by keywords (and, or, etc) and symbols (=, ;, etc)

reaperducer 6y ago

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. A lot of people say this is because Google is worse at returning the desired search results for various reasons (algos, ads, spam, etc). I've come to suspect it is more deliberate on the part of Google. I've said it before, so I'll belt out the chant again: "Google doesn't make money from providing the right search results. Google makes money from keeping you searching for the right search results." This is especially true for the vast majority of people on the internet who do not know there are any (better or worse) alternatives to Google.

numpad0 6y ago
I’ve seen it: I happened to enter exactly the same query from two separate IPs used by communities without deep cultural connections in between, and only one of them returned the desired results. That felt like a thick wall of glass separating worlds have suddenly come into my view.
- hobs 6y ago
  ooh yeah, especially when I am doing some specific database programming stuff and my results come up with amazing perfect resources and a noob's results come up with absolute shit... its bad.
Const-me 6y ago
And another reason, Google makes money when you click on low-quality machine generated search results, because these pages are almost always monetized with google ads. This causes a conflict of interests: when they improve search, they earn less money.
- jayqd3 6y ago
  Your remark is very good. How do they balance rich answers which lead to zero-clicks with the revenues which are based on a-clicks? Thanks.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dreamer7 6y ago

I have noticed an eerily accurate prediction of my search term though. Several times, when I hit a bug and attempt to learn more about it, Google makes precise auto-complete suggestions

Der_Einzige 6y ago

You are 100% correct about the switch to Semantic Search and dense vectors being one of the main reasons. BERT shouldn't be anywhere near my search results.

dougb5 6y ago

It's infuriating when Google prefers the documents that ignore some of my keywords even when there are plainly pages that include them all. I get the sense that there's an over-weighting of broad semantic match, to the detriment of lexical match, in their current ML model, whatever form it is now. It's harming quality for a segment of technical users like ourselves but might be "better" in the aggregate over all users, according to at least some of their internal quality metrics. Back in the 90s, search engines were driven largely by sparse vector representations of the documents such as TF IDF vectors before latent semantic indexing, topic modeling, and other dense vector representations like sentence embeddings entered the fray (not to mention non-content features that use the web graph, click stream, etc.). A lot of NLP applications use a mix of dense and sparse features but it's hard to get the balance right in a way that works for all inputs. Google's pendulum has swung too far in the "dense" direction, as it certainly seems "dense" a lot more often lately!

visarga 6y ago
They are missing the mark on excellence. Apparently having thousands of PhD's and product managers does not make for a better search experience.
- PoignardAzur 6y ago
  Having hundred of millions of smart people heavily incentivized to game whatever metrics you come up with is a bit of a handicap too.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

>>Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade I have ZERO doubt in my mind that a Google search update that decreases their ad revenue would be rolled back and metrics tweaked to make it so. So...

londons_explore 6y ago

Everyone please post examples of search terms that have gotten worse. Specifically, it's handy to have the query, and the URL that you think would be the best result. Google engineers can then peer in and see why that URL didn't rank highly. The most common reason is it's behind an invisible captcha or blocked by robots.txt, so do check that.

asddubs 6y ago
yesterday I was trying to figure out how to look up the nameservers of a domain including the vanity/parent nameservers using a tool like nslookup or host, it took me a good 10 rephrasings before i found a stackoverflow post answering the question, and not just a tutorial on how to set up vanity nameservers at X registrar/hosting company

marcodiego 6y ago

Probably a side-effect of SEO[0]. Its in the best interest of the vender, not of the user. I should be banned, forbidden of fought against by google themselves. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

DanBC 6y ago

And the natural language questions sometimes get stuck. For example, [what's the difference between cauliflower cheese and cauliflower mornay] seems like it should return a page that tells you what the difference is, but it doesn't. It returns a bunch of recipes.

notahacker 6y ago
The highlighted responses to suggested natural language questions are comically bad. Answers to different questions, complete failure to apply simple contextualisers like 'today', and treating some random on Quora or some splog as an authoritative source for identifying a fact that has authoritative sources. I know it's difficult to do this stuff without human curation, but it's like a campaign to discourage people from taking NLP seriously.

cmckn 6y ago

I don't think the "problem" here is bad search results -- I think the lack of clicks is thanks to search results becoming much richer. The "card" style answers that show up more and more often mean I don't have to actually visit the site where the information originated (which publishers despise, for good reason). Take a common search I made last year as an example, "covid king county" -- I almost never ended up visiting the county's coronavirus dashboard because Google had the graphs I wanted in the search results. I think it's a popular opinion on HN that Google search sucks, but I just don't agree. I used DDG on all my devices for the better part of last year, and bailed when I noticed by g! usage ratcheting up.

jader201 6y ago
Yeah, the parent and most its children are focusing on something not even related to the article — this is about providing what the user is looking for without the need for more clicks. While it’s an unpopular opinion on HN, there’s no denying that from a user perspective, that’s only a good thing.
- rurp 6y ago
  Card results might be a good thing overall, but they certainly aren't only good. In many cases, adding the cards takes revenue away from the exact people who collected or created the content to make them possible in the first place. We'll never know how many websites shut down or never got created to begin with given Google's history of crushing the revenue from various sites on a whim.
- bridanp 6y ago
  I definitely read this like the two of you. If the information being shown by Google results is what I need, there isn't a need to click further. On top of that, many of us have been "trained" that products like ZScaler are going to block most sites and register a hit with InfoSec. I'm not going to click on bobsfunmainframefacts.com if Google scraped the needed info for me.
visarga 6y ago
It sucks at searching for exact things, it would often subtly by essentially change the meaning of the search. Like confusing searches for the desired "weight of scooter" with the max "weight of rider" on the scooter. What a shame, it was even a shopping related search, where the money are. They could have led me to a sale. When people are trying variations on a search it's a clear sign of failure. They should do something about it, like use a verbose natural language interface or select a different strategy for ranking or enable the exact in-depth mode. Apparently the NLP community can do natural language Q&A in papers, but Google can't do it in search. Other pain points: searching in depth all results on a query, not just the top skim and remembering context between searches. And Google Assistant itself is too poorly integrated and dumb. Where's the GPT-3 like language skill? So many TPUs what are they doing all day long? They have more text and images than any other entity on the internet, Google bot has been sucking it up for so long (not to mention links, keywords and clicks). It should show in the quality of their AI. It's a shame to have OpenAI steal their thunder like this.

ekianjo 6y ago

For coding questions it still works relatively well. For "reviews", or anything remotely tied to commercial interests, it's indeed pure garbage: pages and pages of low quality links.

amaccuish 6y ago

And half the time I click the wrong thing because the related pages thing slides into view just as I click. That javascript can burn in hell

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

So there needs to be a significant cost in production of the content - youtube for example - want to see how to (a recent example) lay laminate floor, well you need to have a camera and a person and, hell, a room with laminate flooring needed - that's a big cost. Lowes has made a video, so have dozens of contractors. It's amazing how tool rental firms have not advertised on there ... actually that is a bit weird... SideNote - for some reason I replied to an email outreach from Rand, and he actually replied back within a few hours, clearly having read my words and come up with a real answer. I was frankly shocked. Either he works an inhuman amount or he has secretly invented AGI to respond to his emails for him. Kudos and good luck

benibela 6y ago

It seems to just return the most popular sites Mostly ignoring what is on the sites

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bfrog 6y ago

Yep, I haven't used Google search in a few years now, ddg has been better at not spamming me

vimax 6y ago

It sure has made switching to duck duck go easier

Pmop 6y ago

Don't forget AMP. I accidentally typed google in the url and decided to use it to see how's it going after so many weeks of not using Google. Got redirected to a blank page with AMP's frame which instantly reminded me why I no longer use Google for search.

perl4ever 6y ago

I got so annoyed with Google that I set my default to duckduckgo and/or Bing, but now I've gotten in the habit of switching back to Google constantly, because once I am directly faced with the quality of the other options, they suck.

ejjpi 6y ago

We are in this situation because people never wanted to pay anything on the web, so we have become the product. That's the price to pay when you want everything for free.

pyinstallwoes 6y ago

Google results in the past year or two seem extremely odd to me. I see less results than I used to, I see more of the same sites than I used to, and a lot of content that I try to find that I know I used to be able to, I can't. Oh, and then there's a bunch of weird links that come up to obvious content generated by AI being peddled. Odd.