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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
by 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 agoOccasionally 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 agoYou can set extensions to work in private windows in the settings. Agree, the web is unusable without an ad blocker.
- axaxs 6y agoAgreed 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 agoThis is awesome, how did I not know it existed. Thank you!
- Shared404 6y agoAlways happy to help! I try to "collect" search engines, so I'm always interested in finding more/sharing the ones I've found.
- edoceo 6y agoNow I'm waiting for your Show HN curated list of alternative search engines
- Shared404 6y agoI've thought about doing it before. I don't have quite enough to justify a Show HN though. You can see the list here[0], and if you see more feel free to send them my way! [0] http://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/ http://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/
- rurp 6y agoOne I just recently discovered is symbolhound.com. It's nice because it lets you search for characters that google absolutely refuses to treat as search terms. I needed to debug some makefiles and bash scripts the other day (not my strong suit!) and it helped me understand some of the weird syntax I was seeing. As others have mentioned, Google no longer respecting literal search terms has made it much worse for many types of searches. DDG had been great at this, but sadly has been following in Google's footsteps the past few years.
- Shared404 6y agoOoh thanks! I'll throw that on the list!
- 6y ago
- nafizh 6y agoYesterday I discovered, if you go to the 2nd page of the search results the "site:example.com" no longer works. The user hostility is shocking.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lrem 6y agoCan't reproduce: http://pub.lrem.net/2021/03/Teifo4sh/serp.jpg http://pub.lrem.net/2021/03/Teifo4sh/serp.jpg
- FpUser 6y ago>"I really miss Forum search in Google" I absolutely hated when they did remove it. I was able to sort of mitigate it by adding "forums" and "discussions" to search terms but it is not the same of course.
- ergot_vacation 6y agoYou too eh? Over the past decade I've gone from loving reddit to actively avoiding it in most cases, but if I'm looking for specific info on a niche topic, adding "reddit" to a search is often the only way I can get real content written by and for real human beings instead of SEO spam. Sinister twist though: the SEO crowd has gotten wise to this. I've noticed recently that they've started throwing "reddit" into their spam as a random keyword.
- georgiecasey 6y agoI wouldn't object to all product review searches to be Google ads now because it's all spammed anyway
- bick_nyers 6y agoQuora can be good too, my go to is usually "question reddit", and if that is not sufficient then "question quora". Quora is spammy too though, so it is hit or miss, but when it hits, it hits good.
- Mrnothing_ 6y agoI hate quora don't have a report for spam sell
- ddingus 6y agoA lot of us Quorans were putting real insight there. Seriously. First few years was amazing. As they wound down the top writer program, which is really where the "hits good" seeds are, they decided to pay people to ask questions. Signal to noise ratio began to trend toward unfavorable. But traffic shot right up! There have been other decisions contributing to the Quora we see today, but the paid questions really had the most impact in my view. That said, yeah. There is still a lot of high value contributions to Quora. They are just a little harder to find now. One thing I feel they missed the boat on was the credits system. Early on one could accumulate those and use them as a sort of currency. I "spent" some of my pile asking specific people for insight and it worked out well. I had others do the same with me. Basically, one could get to a domain or subject expert and the site was still "family", so it would lead to a high value exchange. For a little while, their text question UI hinted at what a Quora could be. Well connected Quorans could toss a question in via SMS and get solid responses back, sometimes quickly. (Came down to follower counts, writer status, and a few other things) These options were not abused much that I could tell and they hinted at a means to query people without draining said people, and or everyone participating having some give and take. Was a fleeting moment, but one I ponder from time to time. I would subscribe to a "group" that has the UX and overall dynamics of something like what I just described right.
- queuebert 6y agoYou can search Reddit from DuckDuckGo by adding '!r' to your search terms. This is how I search most of the time these days for the exact reasons you mention above. DuckDuckGo has many other bang shortcuts like that too, like '!w' for Wikipedia. Actual search engine results are too manipulated, but they make great link aggregators.
- CiceroCiceronis 6y agoAlso, you can set up custom search prefixes for more obscure sites you visit regularly using Firefox (potentially Chrome too).
- bentcorner 6y agoNote that "!r <foo>" is different than "site:reddit.com <foo>". The former redirects you to reddit's own search, the latter keeps you on DDG but restricts the results to reddit.com. I prefer "site:reddit.com" but honestly it's only because I'm used to it. I search in-app on mobile frequently (which I assume is the same as the on-site search) and it's generally pretty good. It usually finds something for me but sometimes using an external search engine works better.
- typon 6y agoFor pretty much any product or review related search I just do "<product name> reddit" and then scour the somewhat up voted posts for information. Have to deal with tons of dead links though for any post older than a couple of years. The Web really seems like it's an awful place. The original dream of hyper links is really dead. It's all about jumping from walled garden to walled garden through tricks and luck.
- cryptoz 6y agoGoogle is having trouble determining the date of reddit posts and is also making their filter rules useless. You try to filter last month, a result says 3 days ago and you click, but reddit says it was 2y ago!
- typon 6y agoAgreed, this is infuriating
- zip1234 6y agoand reddit has gotten much less useful with all their push for login and using their app...
- Spivak 6y agoThis in no way absolves their god awful mobile experience but if you're logged into Reddit with the new UI turned off or use the Old Reddit Redirect add-on it's basically as if nothing on Reddit changed since 2011.
- londons_explore 6y agoThe new UI is great! It keeps the programmers occupied so they stop messing with the old UI that I actually want to use.
- typon 6y ago
- monkeybutton 6y agoIMO Google Image search has gone down hill significantly too. Getting full pages of pinterest results was bad enough but now on my phone you have to scroll past multiple screens worth of Google Shopping ads or images tagged with the "Product" icon before you see any actual, organic photos of the thing you're looking for.
- tompagenet2 6y agoI know this sounds implausible, but I find Bing image search so much better than Google.
- kikokikokiko 6y agoNot just for images. Bing seems to be a lot more closer to what Google search used to be a few years ago. Anything related to torrents or streams is pretty much impossible to find on Google. Any news not spouted from mainstream sources, gone from Google. My default search deck nowadays is a mix of Bing and DuckDuckGo.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoit's nice to see my vague worries, bothering me in the back of my head put into words. Also good to know that i'm not crazy for thinking googles results are surpisingly poor and generic. I sometimes get the same feeling using google that i get reading a poorly transalated manual from a Chinese company. Generic, admire the fact some effort has been made, little laugh inside. Except this is google (and ironically, the chinese copywriters are probably using Transalate)
- AlexandrB 6y agoYandex is surprisingly good at image search and allows you to crop the source image in-browser.
- superdisk 6y agoYandex is CRAZY good. There's a Firefox plugin that lets you reverse image search from the right click menu, and it opens a tab for Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu and TinEye. Yandex is the king every time.
- dundarious 6y agoI have a cat that is always ravenous for anything edible, even if it's not exactly typical cat fare, e.g., my leftover salad, berries, etc. Trying to search for "can cats eat X" after he manages to get a few sneaky morsels is almost pointless. There are so many spammy sites for every value of X, and I have no idea if it's a sophisticated problem to systematically exclude this type of useless content, but Google's top results are chock-full of sites that all seem to follow the format below, where the question is not answered at all: Is it safe for cats to eat X? Cats are mischievous and we love them. X is not typical cat food. Let's go over some background on X before we answer the question. Cats are obligate carnivores. Thanks for reading, make sure to subscribe or buy these products!
- ratww 6y agoYep, this is Content Marketing. People use SEO tools to gauge how good a blog post is going to rank, and the current sweet spot seems to be around 1000 words, so they end up filling it with fluff. Some of those are even machine generated. The answer to the "can cats eat X", of course, can't be at the beginning or at the end. The reason is that the user must stay a long time and read the text, otherwise Google punishes the website for having a more than acceptable "bounce rate". Putting the answer in the title (what has been dubbed "Anti-clickbait") also makes the site "less clickable" and will make it drop from the results. Trust me, I tried. This is why we can't have nice things.
- dmart 6y agoI don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam from the results. It must be profitable somehow for the majority of search results to be utterly useless.
- samatman 6y agoThe point of content marketing blogspam is to pester the reader with AdWords and the occasional affiliate link. Old-school useful content is rarely monetized, just someone sharing their passion for something. Occasional affiliate link, with the obligatory apologetic "hey web servers cost money, so I included some affiliate links here!" The uselessness is just a side effect of Google directing you toward paying customers.
- samvher 6y agoI haven't heard of Axios before - how would you characterize it? Looking at the website I can't quite tell if it's an aggregator or how they generate content, and if there is any particular leaning to what they host.
- ckolkey 6y agoThey write their own content. It's a site who's focus is short, concise stories.
- numpad0 6y agoWhat really astonish me is they sometimes give me straight up malvertising fake domains, like “general-<word>-info. xyz” second or third from topmost these days! wtf.
- nwienert 6y agoThere's a common thread in every one of the good sources of search information: user curated content. Usually: voted on/curated by members who are specialized in some way (reddit, so, hn, wikipedia to a degree). The fallbacks are editorial sites. If you make a search engine that focused on indexing user-curated sites + results outside of that that are themselves curated/voted-on by your search engine users (ie, you and others could upvote axios and Amazon as a good source), I think you'd have an interesting model. Basically, take the HN/reddit model to search itself.
- ChefboyOG 6y agoThis is the essence of what Google implements. Links between sites are a form of user curation, user behavior (clicks, read throughs, bounce rate, etc.) are like inferred votes. The problem is, everything is gameable. Marketers abuse reddit as well, it just isn't quite as profitable as ranking #1 on Google. If a major search engine implemented a voting model, it too would spring an entire industry of "optimizing" for rankings via upvotes.
- nwienert 6y agoIt's nothing like what Google implements. Which is easier: enforcing one account per person and then identifying bad-voters, or not doing that and having N pages, and N*M page links? Further, you'd now have direct access to customizing results per-user. Use my votes.
- hef19898 6y agoOh yeah, try finding honest product comparisons and test. It is spam or "aggregated tests" on shopping sites. latest examples: cameras and tires. Cameras worked reasonably well on youtube (required some diging to get the "influencer" stuff out of the way). Tires required going through various forums. because every single video or review for tires I was looking for was product placement, spam or both. in the end price and availability decided the tire question. sometimes I miss the times when you had magazines catering for a certain domain doing honest tests and reviews. Well, even back then magazines started to prefer Canon over Nikon or the other way round.
- rchaud 6y agoAnd people say SEO is snake oil! You are absolutely correct. So many of the top results are basically machine-generated pages, perfectly optimized for search robots, not so much for humans.
- blueboo 6y agoMy experience is puzzlingly contrary to the unanimously-shared frustration above. I tried this with a bunch of products ripe for spamming: instapot review, nvidia 3070 review, and Apple Watch review, and the first page results were almost entirely reputable. I also tried “huggies vs pampers pull ups” and the result is quite a good variety of forum threads, blogs, and reputable articles. “Quasar formation” leads to Wikipedia, but also academic articles and astronomy.com. “How beer is made” is even better quality. Is most of the web junk? Have I gotten astronomically lucky in not finding it? Are these somehow the exceptions that prove the rule? (Ironically I think my search terms caused this comment to be flagged as spam..!)
- fossuser 6y agoThe results are better when the products are more common/famous (Nvidia card, instapot) since there will likely be reviews from The Verge or something that rank highly. It's less common stuff that tends to give you mostly crap.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago"Most of the rest of the web is junk." Google today limits how much of "the web" (their index) they will let you see. You are only seeing what they choose to allow you to see. Google, not the user, determines "relevance" and Google automatically excludes results. in theory this sounds useful. In practice, Google is now limiting max number of results to 200-300 or 500 if you add &filter=0. Retrieving 501 search results for a single search is not allowed. Sorry. Try a search for some common phrase like "the web". Surely this phrase occurs on more than 500 web pages. Yet Google will limit you to only 231 results. Does that represent the entire www. Then you try "repeat the search with the omitted results included". Google then limits you to 466 results. WTF. What if you searched page titles for some string. Is every string you search going to be found in less than 500 pages. Google search results today are not representative of the entire www. Not even close.
- ecf 6y ago> Interesting web content is in Reddit I’ve found this to no longer be the case after Reddit has starting doing nefarious tricks with the date of a post. For example, I’ll click on a link in Google showing it’s from last week when in reality the post is 2 years old.
- amelius 6y agoAccording to Google search, 90% of the web is content farms. Probably some financial positive feedback loop is responsible for this.
- bcrl 6y agoAmazon search is similarly broken. Try to find an ECC DIMM on Amazon. Everything I try results in dozens of listings for non-ECC DIMMs. Even searching for " ECC" doesn't work all that well. It's sad that in these days of advanced neural networks, we can't get a simple binary attribute matched correctly in search results.
- necovek 6y agoI guess it's location based too (like Google is). Searching for "ECC DIMM" returned a bunch of actual ECC memory chips available to ship overseas on the first page of results on Amazon.com, though I'd still suggest being more specific when searching for ECC RAM myself (eg. RDIMM or UDIMM or...).
- bcrl 6y agoI did, and that helped a little, but it's just sad that what should be a solved problem by now isn't. Nearest neighbour search is so not helpful to me in many cases.
- fomine3 6y agoThat's because they called "non ECC"
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- teawrecks 6y ago"Most of the rest of the web is junk." That's true. But out amongst that is the result you actually wanted that google doesn't have any incentive to lead you to.
- _cs2017_ 6y agoProduct vs Product -- I hate those generic websites that compare everything to everything. I am absolutely sure that Google can detect and downrank them. Why doesn't it? Maybe most users like those links, and Google is happy to oblige by keeping them at the top? In that case, I suppose, I should blame the mass market taste rather than Google. I think the future of search is in finding trusted results, such as those upvoted by reddit or HN or SO, assuming the upvoting system is robust enough to withstand spambots etc. The question is whether a big enough fraction of the population actually care to get good search results.
- Proven 6y agoWhy? Because they get clicked on by users who want to buy crap and won't read anything long, or don't want to visit 4 pages to compare 3 products.
- anitil 6y ago> Google exists as a tool to search Reddit I didn't realize that I'd migrated over to this. All my searches now are 'xxx reddit' or 'xxx stackoverflow'
- D13Fd 6y agoI tend to do that too. But for product reviews, I am certain that the fake review problem will hit Reddit soon, if it hasn't already. This technique is way too common, and manufacturers are going to start including Reddit in their fake-review spam just like they do with Amazon reviews. It's only a matter of time.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoSomething that might help is that reddit has voting, so astroturfing requires fooling users which lots of blogspam wouldn't.
- D13Fd 6y agoThe problem with that is that upvotes can be faked too.
- hunter-gatherer 6y agoIndeed. Everything now is "the best <insert search query> in <insert current year>". Shit had gotten ridiculous.
- Gustomaximus 6y agoI think 2 changes would really help to improve: 1) Bring in tabbed search result like Cuil search used to have. Easily lets you go to similar/variant topics from UX POV and must be a good way for a search engine to learn what people want more. 2) Add a 'dont show this site' option. So they can easily see when people get annoyed with a result and use that as a ranking signal against search terms. E.g. if people press that for a particular KW but not usually Google knows they got that result wrong and if people press it for almost everything you know its a site people dont want to see. And at a personal level its great to custom remove stuff, like when Pinterest was dominating so much a year or so ago. Would be a great way to community curate results.
- markogresak 6y agoI get better “ Product vs. Product” and “Product Review” results with ddg these days. Once I took the time to read one of the sites and it’s obvious it’s generated content, and awful at that. I still reading pros and cons of one of the product and the same thing was mentioned under both, just with different wording. GPT-3 or similar is going to make this way worse. The only time I still use google (via !g on ddg, what an awesome feature) is to search for local info or in native language. But even here ddg is getting better, especially if I append the name of my city or country.