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Google used to be better, I feel. Nowadays when you add a particular word to make the search specific (otherwise it's too general), Google decides for you, the

Google used to be better, I feel. Nowadays when you add a particular word to make the search specific (otherwise it's too general), Google decides for you, there aren't many results with that keyword, so it excludes the word and gives you a list of irrelevant things. Yeah I know to put the words I want in quotes, but why doesn't it do that by default?

loonster 6y ago
Google works much better when you use the information they know about you. At the office, I get much better work related searches than at home. This has the benefit of profiling my coworkers and not just me, and the searches/ sites visited are generally work related. Edit: I don't like Google's intrusiveness either. I do not use it much at home. The searches are better when you teach it with better data. Searching in a a place that others have taught it with similar good results (work) will yield better results than if it was learned at places searching for terms that are similar but in different fields.
- 2snakes 6y ago
  There's an idea: you get better results based on the corporate IP you're coming from. :(
- bellyfullofbac 6y ago
  On the topic of profiling, I remember starting at a new company and getting ads for surface-to-air missiles. Then I learnt the imprecise geo-location "located" my computer in the town a few miles away where there's a helicopter manufacturer which is part of a defense contractor..
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Does this apply to Google Scholar as well.
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  I think that’s part of the problem, their new algorithm essentially railroads you into the same results that you’ve looked at before which becomes self reinforcing. Part of the magic that’s missing now is the kismet of searching for something and finding a tangentially related result that happens to be better than the thing you were looking for. Now you have to be aware that your results are being filtered by your past behaviour and that of your cohort and actively fight against it which is terrible user experience.
eitland 6y ago
Lately I've actually been getting better results and I have complained about search quality for over a decade: first time I wrote about it must have been around 2008 I think. A time or two I have even seen it admit that no results matched my query (for those who wonder: this is a good thing! Knowning there are no known results is a valid and useful result in its own right!) It is still not consistent but now it is at least not consistently annoying. Sadly this means it is now marginally better than DuckDuckGo.com who more or less consistently thinks it knows better than me if I search for something unusual. I'll still use DDG first and only fall back to Google.
input_sh 6y ago
> Yeah I know to put the words I want in quotes That also doesn't work reliably anymore. Somewhere along the line Google changed it from "exact words" to "exact words and synonyms", with its definition of a synonym being pretty dumb. Search for something obscure to do with "nginx" and Google shows you results for apache2, even bolding apache2 to indicate a match. Using DDG's !bangs is far superior.
- twobitshifter 6y ago
  Bang for what engines? DDG has a similar problem with the usage of “-dogs“. This just means fewer dogs in results, not excluding all results with dogs. If you want more dogs you can actually do “+dogs” which somehow changes the weighting of terms.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    Using "nginx" in DDG will never return websites that have apache2 (and not a single mention of nginx) as a match, Google will. As for the last sentence, I was using the said example to generalise that it's far better to learn which website is right for the query and add a bang. In this case "<something obscure> nginx !sf", which will return serverfault.com results, which also won't do this stupid thing of equating apache2 and nginx.
whitepaint 6y ago
I've read similar comments so many times. Am I the only one who thinks Google has become way way better than it used to? Very often I get immediate answers even without needing to click on any site. It's truly magical.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  I agree with you. There are way too many "X used to be better" for all of them to be true, most likely you don't remember all the bad parts. I remember when half of search results would be pages literally filled with nothing but keywords to get hits. I remember getting a ton of programming results from forums that couldn't even format code snippets properly. Not to be dismissive of other people's subjective experience but it seems to be like nostalgia glasses remembering things in a more favorable way from the past.
- CRConrad 6y ago
  > Very often I get immediate answers even without needing to click on any site. It's truly magical. Yeah, why should anyone else but Google be able to monetize a website? If you click through to anywhere else but Google, you risk diverting some ad money to someone else than Google! The horror! Naah, much better to read the Google-approved cooypasta... Also, ~90% of those "immediate answers" are directly copied from Wikipedia anyway; if those are what your after, why not just go directly there and see the whole article in stead of just Google's snip of the intro? (Furthermore, ISTR reading somewhere that WP isn't all that enthusiastic about that "magic".)
bob1029 6y ago
I noticed this effect too, but then I considered it might be something related to actually becoming competent. Do you think concert pianists bother to pull up lists of scales on google after the 10,000th hour of practice?

loonster 6y ago

Google works much better when you use the information they know about you. At the office, I get much better work related searches than at home. This has the benefit of profiling my coworkers and not just me, and the searches/ sites visited are generally work related. Edit: I don't like Google's intrusiveness either. I do not use it much at home. The searches are better when you teach it with better data. Searching in a a place that others have taught it with similar good results (work) will yield better results than if it was learned at places searching for terms that are similar but in different fields.

2snakes 6y ago
There's an idea: you get better results based on the corporate IP you're coming from. :(
bellyfullofbac 6y ago
On the topic of profiling, I remember starting at a new company and getting ads for surface-to-air missiles. Then I learnt the imprecise geo-location "located" my computer in the town a few miles away where there's a helicopter manufacturer which is part of a defense contractor..
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Does this apply to Google Scholar as well.
throwaway316943 6y ago
I think that’s part of the problem, their new algorithm essentially railroads you into the same results that you’ve looked at before which becomes self reinforcing. Part of the magic that’s missing now is the kismet of searching for something and finding a tangentially related result that happens to be better than the thing you were looking for. Now you have to be aware that your results are being filtered by your past behaviour and that of your cohort and actively fight against it which is terrible user experience.

eitland 6y ago

Lately I've actually been getting better results and I have complained about search quality for over a decade: first time I wrote about it must have been around 2008 I think. A time or two I have even seen it admit that no results matched my query (for those who wonder: this is a good thing! Knowning there are no known results is a valid and useful result in its own right!) It is still not consistent but now it is at least not consistently annoying. Sadly this means it is now marginally better than DuckDuckGo.com who more or less consistently thinks it knows better than me if I search for something unusual. I'll still use DDG first and only fall back to Google.

input_sh 6y ago

> Yeah I know to put the words I want in quotes That also doesn't work reliably anymore. Somewhere along the line Google changed it from "exact words" to "exact words and synonyms", with its definition of a synonym being pretty dumb. Search for something obscure to do with "nginx" and Google shows you results for apache2, even bolding apache2 to indicate a match. Using DDG's !bangs is far superior.

twobitshifter 6y ago
Bang for what engines? DDG has a similar problem with the usage of “-dogs“. This just means fewer dogs in results, not excluding all results with dogs. If you want more dogs you can actually do “+dogs” which somehow changes the weighting of terms.
- input_sh 6y ago
  Using "nginx" in DDG will never return websites that have apache2 (and not a single mention of nginx) as a match, Google will. As for the last sentence, I was using the said example to generalise that it's far better to learn which website is right for the query and add a bang. In this case "<something obscure> nginx !sf", which will return serverfault.com results, which also won't do this stupid thing of equating apache2 and nginx.

whitepaint 6y ago

I've read similar comments so many times. Am I the only one who thinks Google has become way way better than it used to? Very often I get immediate answers even without needing to click on any site. It's truly magical.

ehsankia 6y ago
I agree with you. There are way too many "X used to be better" for all of them to be true, most likely you don't remember all the bad parts. I remember when half of search results would be pages literally filled with nothing but keywords to get hits. I remember getting a ton of programming results from forums that couldn't even format code snippets properly. Not to be dismissive of other people's subjective experience but it seems to be like nostalgia glasses remembering things in a more favorable way from the past.
CRConrad 6y ago
> Very often I get immediate answers even without needing to click on any site. It's truly magical. Yeah, why should anyone else but Google be able to monetize a website? If you click through to anywhere else but Google, you risk diverting some ad money to someone else than Google! The horror! Naah, much better to read the Google-approved cooypasta... Also, ~90% of those "immediate answers" are directly copied from Wikipedia anyway; if those are what your after, why not just go directly there and see the whole article in stead of just Google's snip of the intro? (Furthermore, ISTR reading somewhere that WP isn't all that enthusiastic about that "magic".)

bob1029 6y ago

I noticed this effect too, but then I considered it might be something related to actually becoming competent. Do you think concert pianists bother to pull up lists of scales on google after the 10,000th hour of practice?