8 ms·

The Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate purchase,

The Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate purchase, the noise is just overwhelming. I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French). They've learned to imitate user participation, reviews, blogs, anything that you care to name that you used to look for to ferret out the really good pages. I'll be more specific: about a century ago, in internet years that is, it was a good idea to add "review" to the search terms to see what actual users were saying about a product. This has become an extremely bad idea now, since SEO specialists (I am using neutral language here) noticed this, and have registered 1.5 quintillion domains along the line of best-barbecue-reviews.com and reliable-handbag-reviews.com and what have you; and these domains are the last places to contain actual reliable reviews of anything, being paid advertising in disguise, instead. And Google loves to find search terms in domain names. And that's just a tiny, tiny part of it. P.S. Please don't turn this into a thread of recommendations for VPN providers - it will probably get flagged as off-topic.

nodata 15y ago
Google's search results are extremely... crap. There I said it. It used to be that I could search for something, say this: word1 word2 and Google would give me the results for pages which contain both those words. Then Google decided I didn't mean what I searched for, so I had to prefix my searches with plus signs, like this: +word1 +word2 And now this week I find out that even that doesn't work any more. It's crap. Maybe duckduckgo does it right. I'll give it a go.
- speckledjim 15y ago
  Never had any issue. Give some examples of what doesn't seem to work for you.
  - brudgers 15y ago
    Your results are likely to be different because of Google's practice of "personalizing" results based upon the consumer's profile. Any discussion of the quality of Google's results should be preceded with "For me."
    - speckledjim 15y ago
      That's a cop out. Provide examples, on a clean browser/incognito/no cookies/etc
- mostly_harmless 15y ago
  maybe I'm just used google's crap, but after using DDG for a week, I found that it gave results that i didnt want more often. Then again, maybe it is just the interface, Google has a cleaner interface IMO making it easier to see results. And its also likely that i didnt get used to some of the special additions in DDG like tags and what ever else.
- silverbax88 15y ago
  Google results have always been crap, they were just 'less crap' than other search engines until the past couple of years, where Google has been overwhelmed by spammers and, frankly, is losing that battle.
- oinksoft 15y ago
  I agree completely, but because no other engine provides decent results while indexing so much, there's really no viable alternative right now. DDG is good for very mainstream things, but does not do a good job of finding user profile page X on site Z, etc. All the time I'm having to quote my terms because Google tries to correct them. Same thing with Google disregarding search terms, I always have to prepend those pluses like you do there. Auto-correction should be enabled, not default behavior. The worst is that a search for "some-thing download" or "some-thing pdf" is positively cluttered with phony search results from torrent aggregators, etc. Why is Google indexing these? The switch to a JS-heavy page from a simple HTML one means that I inadvertently clear my results with a new, unintended query, or navigate several searches back when I intend to just do one. Sometimes search doesn't even work. "Instant" is a failure. They removed the "Instant off" option from the search page, and I'm sure there's something when you're logged in, but I'm not often logged in to Google services.
- lsb 15y ago
  Duckduckgo's innovations are pretty cool, especially bang-commands (to search on google maps, add "!m" to your query). But the underlying search is Bing. Perhaps Google is personalized and Bing doesn't, or perhaps DDG doesn't pass a uid token to Bing, but it's just not as good actual results, which matter to me about 10% of the time. (Luckily, the query parameters to google.com/search are the same as to duckduckgo.com/ so a simple massage of the URL works well.)
  - joshuacc 15y ago
    "a simple massage of the URL works well" As does prefixing your search with "!g".
    - lsb 15y ago
      Well, I'll be jiggered.
  - snowwindwaves 15y ago
    I came to the same conclusion after switching from google to duck duck go for 2 months. I found what I was looking for faster with google.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  So there is Blekko (http://blekko.com http://blekko.com) which does use what we (yes I work there) consider better social signals for ranking search. Try this and let me know what you think: Go to blekko.com, enter your two words and append /monte to the search. That will put three columns up, results from Blekko, Google, and Bing. Pick the column with the best search results and see which service delivered them. It is a great way to see what is what.
  - msbarnett 15y ago
    Interesting. Blekko was a distant third for my go-to search engine confuser "ruby god" in the three-engine monte, and I was going to write it off for my purposes when it occured to me to try "god /ruby", which to your credit is much closer to being competive with google, and drastically outperforms bing.
praptak 15y ago
It looks like indeed the public sources aren't cutting it anymore. Maybe there is a niche to be filled: I mean something that would use recommendations (maybe not limited to explicit ones) from one's actual friends to get valuable info on products and services. After all that's what most people successfully used and there might be some potential in using the internet to boost this process. I'm not saying which Google product fits here, because HNers already grumble about it getting too much coverage :)
- yaakov34 15y ago
  Look, you and I and just about all the readers here can figure out where to find this type of information. But for a lot of internet users - maybe most of them - the internet is viewed through the slit of Google Search, so to speak. And this used to be fine, since Google would helpfully point you on your way to where you want to go. We used to laugh at people who came to some forum or newsgroup and asked "how much should this cost" or whatever. Can't you google that, buddy? Well, you really can't anymore. Oh, and for the category of products at which you hinted - spam-flavored pseudo-viral marketing is even more annoying than search engine optimization. But yes, I do get the idea of going directly to trusted sources and skipping the search engine; the problem is that search engines were invented because they are so convenient, and it would be a shame to lose that.
Hisoka 15y ago
The best approach these days is to compare the results for "<PRODUCT> sucks" with "I love <PRODUCT>" and see who wins
- yaakov34 15y ago
  Great, and now that you let the secret out, the wires to the domain registrars are on fire, bringing us names like "i-love-my-acme-grill.com". :)
wisty 15y ago
The issue is, it's no longer web 1.0. You don't have a few thousand geeks with domains, you have about a billion users with blogs, tweet streams, and facebook pages. And so Pagerank, which implicitly works off domains is busted.
- rwmj 15y ago
  Pagerank has nothing to do with domains. It applies a score to individual pages.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    It does involve domains as well. That's why demandmedia and the like used to have higher rankings. Any old ehow article isn't linked to by many, but taken as an aggregate they are. I've always felt that they should be ranking individual pages and completely disregard the domain. We'd see a lot more expert content that way.
    - rwmj 15y ago
      What you're describing is not PageRank, but the extra information that Google's current and secret algorithm uses. The PageRank algorithm doesn't involve domains, and no amount of downvoting is going to change that -- check your facts.
      - a3camero 15y ago
        I'm not sure that there is a HN downvote but I upvoted you anyway.
lhnz 15y ago
How could this be solved though? There are few easy-to-attain signals that will help you to differentiate search results in a way that approximates the opinion of an intelligent human. I believe we have reached the point in which Google's search results are only useful for one reason: speed of information retrieval. If you wish to get high quality information you visit sources that you trust. These are either (a) content providers that have provided high quality information to you previously, or in the cases in which you've not had to search for some information before (b) socially curated information from user communities in which you trust and are a part of. Here's an example: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mp3+player+reviews http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mp3+player+reviews Most of the content rated highly by Google has either nothing to do with reviews or is hideously out-of-date, note the 2007 'reviews' in the second result down. It's junk all the way down. For a lot of people the Google search bar has been denigrated to a fancy URL bar; it takes them to places only when they know where they're going: you avoid browsing for fun. So what can be done... An extension that allows you to join an invite-only group of Hacker News users who will remove any rubbish search results from Google? Using the +1 as a signal to try and make the search results better? I can only see the former idea as being difficult to game. The latter would be unused apart from for very popular searches to the extent that a determined spammer with a botnet wishing to cheat would probably be able to affect many search results. Better minds might know better ways.
- yaakov34 15y ago
  Hey, I come here to offer useless kvetching and complaints, not solutions :). Seriously, if I knew how to solve it, I'd be the CTO of Google. But I'll make a couple of guesses. I think they need to go for a lot more human input. It goes against the grain of everything they do, they want to solve everything algorithmically. But SEO is just too good at abusing algorithms. I think they need to get more humans involved, and force the SEO guys to tone it down. And one tiny specific suggestion: drop the strong signal of a search term being in the domain name. Maybe leave it for proper names, but drop it for all generic words, please. It used to be a good signal. It used to be that when you saw your search echoed in the domain name, you knew you found what you wanted. Now, I cuss and skip it, because I know it's spam. It's been abused beyond belief. EDIT: Yes, lots of people suggest "going social" on the problem. That's a lot harder for most people to manage than just using a search box. And searching for "trusted social group for reviews" is just going to take you to mytrustedsocialgroupforreviews.com. Guess what's there.
rakkhi 15y ago
There is some innovation in this space. For example did you try Blekko maybe with some relavant hashtags. For comparison: http://blekko.com/ws/buy+vpn+/monte http://blekko.com/ws/buy+vpn+/monte Or duckduckgo? It will be interesting whether G+ social signals help Google improve this going forward
jonknee 15y ago
> I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French) I recently did the same thing and didn't have a hard time finding a provider. Both StrongVPN and WiTopia showed up at the top of the SERPs (and StrongVPN also in AdWords), I went with WiTopia after then searching for reviews of both.
gojomo 15y ago
And yet in a category where the natural results have become useless, the AdWords above and to the right can still be valuable. Ability-to-pay is a useful filter, and Google often looks more closely at the content and people behind those paid-advertiser landing pages. As long as people aren't leaving en masse for another search engine, there is a margin at which Google makes more money when the AdWords remain useful, but the natural results are not. Of course, Google still has to keep the natural results about as good as the external competition. But those other search engines have to fight the same SEO trickery that Google does. Competitors don't have the same ad revenues to finance the fight. Competitors don't have the same ad inventory to serve as a backup reservoir of market-filtered results. And competitors don't have the benefit of many-years of user-habit to try Google first. So, Google's scale advantage keeps growing, even if natural-search quality is middling.

nodata 15y ago

Google's search results are extremely... crap. There I said it. It used to be that I could search for something, say this: word1 word2 and Google would give me the results for pages which contain both those words. Then Google decided I didn't mean what I searched for, so I had to prefix my searches with plus signs, like this: +word1 +word2 And now this week I find out that even that doesn't work any more. It's crap. Maybe duckduckgo does it right. I'll give it a go.

speckledjim 15y ago
Never had any issue. Give some examples of what doesn't seem to work for you.
- brudgers 15y ago
  Your results are likely to be different because of Google's practice of "personalizing" results based upon the consumer's profile. Any discussion of the quality of Google's results should be preceded with "For me."
  - speckledjim 15y ago
    That's a cop out. Provide examples, on a clean browser/incognito/no cookies/etc
mostly_harmless 15y ago
maybe I'm just used google's crap, but after using DDG for a week, I found that it gave results that i didnt want more often. Then again, maybe it is just the interface, Google has a cleaner interface IMO making it easier to see results. And its also likely that i didnt get used to some of the special additions in DDG like tags and what ever else.
silverbax88 15y ago
Google results have always been crap, they were just 'less crap' than other search engines until the past couple of years, where Google has been overwhelmed by spammers and, frankly, is losing that battle.
oinksoft 15y ago
I agree completely, but because no other engine provides decent results while indexing so much, there's really no viable alternative right now. DDG is good for very mainstream things, but does not do a good job of finding user profile page X on site Z, etc. All the time I'm having to quote my terms because Google tries to correct them. Same thing with Google disregarding search terms, I always have to prepend those pluses like you do there. Auto-correction should be enabled, not default behavior. The worst is that a search for "some-thing download" or "some-thing pdf" is positively cluttered with phony search results from torrent aggregators, etc. Why is Google indexing these? The switch to a JS-heavy page from a simple HTML one means that I inadvertently clear my results with a new, unintended query, or navigate several searches back when I intend to just do one. Sometimes search doesn't even work. "Instant" is a failure. They removed the "Instant off" option from the search page, and I'm sure there's something when you're logged in, but I'm not often logged in to Google services.
lsb 15y ago
Duckduckgo's innovations are pretty cool, especially bang-commands (to search on google maps, add "!m" to your query). But the underlying search is Bing. Perhaps Google is personalized and Bing doesn't, or perhaps DDG doesn't pass a uid token to Bing, but it's just not as good actual results, which matter to me about 10% of the time. (Luckily, the query parameters to google.com/search are the same as to duckduckgo.com/ so a simple massage of the URL works well.)
- joshuacc 15y ago
  "a simple massage of the URL works well" As does prefixing your search with "!g".
  - lsb 15y ago
    Well, I'll be jiggered.
- snowwindwaves 15y ago
  I came to the same conclusion after switching from google to duck duck go for 2 months. I found what I was looking for faster with google.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
So there is Blekko (http://blekko.com http://blekko.com) which does use what we (yes I work there) consider better social signals for ranking search. Try this and let me know what you think: Go to blekko.com, enter your two words and append /monte to the search. That will put three columns up, results from Blekko, Google, and Bing. Pick the column with the best search results and see which service delivered them. It is a great way to see what is what.
- msbarnett 15y ago
  Interesting. Blekko was a distant third for my go-to search engine confuser "ruby god" in the three-engine monte, and I was going to write it off for my purposes when it occured to me to try "god /ruby", which to your credit is much closer to being competive with google, and drastically outperforms bing.

praptak 15y ago

It looks like indeed the public sources aren't cutting it anymore. Maybe there is a niche to be filled: I mean something that would use recommendations (maybe not limited to explicit ones) from one's actual friends to get valuable info on products and services. After all that's what most people successfully used and there might be some potential in using the internet to boost this process. I'm not saying which Google product fits here, because HNers already grumble about it getting too much coverage :)

yaakov34 15y ago
Look, you and I and just about all the readers here can figure out where to find this type of information. But for a lot of internet users - maybe most of them - the internet is viewed through the slit of Google Search, so to speak. And this used to be fine, since Google would helpfully point you on your way to where you want to go. We used to laugh at people who came to some forum or newsgroup and asked "how much should this cost" or whatever. Can't you google that, buddy? Well, you really can't anymore. Oh, and for the category of products at which you hinted - spam-flavored pseudo-viral marketing is even more annoying than search engine optimization. But yes, I do get the idea of going directly to trusted sources and skipping the search engine; the problem is that search engines were invented because they are so convenient, and it would be a shame to lose that.

Hisoka 15y ago

The best approach these days is to compare the results for "<PRODUCT> sucks" with "I love <PRODUCT>" and see who wins

yaakov34 15y ago
Great, and now that you let the secret out, the wires to the domain registrars are on fire, bringing us names like "i-love-my-acme-grill.com". :)

wisty 15y ago

The issue is, it's no longer web 1.0. You don't have a few thousand geeks with domains, you have about a billion users with blogs, tweet streams, and facebook pages. And so Pagerank, which implicitly works off domains is busted.

rwmj 15y ago
Pagerank has nothing to do with domains. It applies a score to individual pages.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  It does involve domains as well. That's why demandmedia and the like used to have higher rankings. Any old ehow article isn't linked to by many, but taken as an aggregate they are. I've always felt that they should be ranking individual pages and completely disregard the domain. We'd see a lot more expert content that way.
  - rwmj 15y ago
    What you're describing is not PageRank, but the extra information that Google's current and secret algorithm uses. The PageRank algorithm doesn't involve domains, and no amount of downvoting is going to change that -- check your facts.
    - a3camero 15y ago
      I'm not sure that there is a HN downvote but I upvoted you anyway.

lhnz 15y ago

How could this be solved though? There are few easy-to-attain signals that will help you to differentiate search results in a way that approximates the opinion of an intelligent human. I believe we have reached the point in which Google's search results are only useful for one reason: speed of information retrieval. If you wish to get high quality information you visit sources that you trust. These are either (a) content providers that have provided high quality information to you previously, or in the cases in which you've not had to search for some information before (b) socially curated information from user communities in which you trust and are a part of. Here's an example: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mp3+player+reviews http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mp3+player+reviews Most of the content rated highly by Google has either nothing to do with reviews or is hideously out-of-date, note the 2007 'reviews' in the second result down. It's junk all the way down. For a lot of people the Google search bar has been denigrated to a fancy URL bar; it takes them to places only when they know where they're going: you avoid browsing for fun. So what can be done... An extension that allows you to join an invite-only group of Hacker News users who will remove any rubbish search results from Google? Using the +1 as a signal to try and make the search results better? I can only see the former idea as being difficult to game. The latter would be unused apart from for very popular searches to the extent that a determined spammer with a botnet wishing to cheat would probably be able to affect many search results. Better minds might know better ways.

yaakov34 15y ago
Hey, I come here to offer useless kvetching and complaints, not solutions :). Seriously, if I knew how to solve it, I'd be the CTO of Google. But I'll make a couple of guesses. I think they need to go for a lot more human input. It goes against the grain of everything they do, they want to solve everything algorithmically. But SEO is just too good at abusing algorithms. I think they need to get more humans involved, and force the SEO guys to tone it down. And one tiny specific suggestion: drop the strong signal of a search term being in the domain name. Maybe leave it for proper names, but drop it for all generic words, please. It used to be a good signal. It used to be that when you saw your search echoed in the domain name, you knew you found what you wanted. Now, I cuss and skip it, because I know it's spam. It's been abused beyond belief. EDIT: Yes, lots of people suggest "going social" on the problem. That's a lot harder for most people to manage than just using a search box. And searching for "trusted social group for reviews" is just going to take you to mytrustedsocialgroupforreviews.com. Guess what's there.

rakkhi 15y ago

There is some innovation in this space. For example did you try Blekko maybe with some relavant hashtags. For comparison: http://blekko.com/ws/buy+vpn+/monte http://blekko.com/ws/buy+vpn+/monte Or duckduckgo? It will be interesting whether G+ social signals help Google improve this going forward

jonknee 15y ago

> I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French) I recently did the same thing and didn't have a hard time finding a provider. Both StrongVPN and WiTopia showed up at the top of the SERPs (and StrongVPN also in AdWords), I went with WiTopia after then searching for reviews of both.

gojomo 15y ago

And yet in a category where the natural results have become useless, the AdWords above and to the right can still be valuable. Ability-to-pay is a useful filter, and Google often looks more closely at the content and people behind those paid-advertiser landing pages. As long as people aren't leaving en masse for another search engine, there is a margin at which Google makes more money when the AdWords remain useful, but the natural results are not. Of course, Google still has to keep the natural results about as good as the external competition. But those other search engines have to fight the same SEO trickery that Google does. Competitors don't have the same ad revenues to finance the fight. Competitors don't have the same ad inventory to serve as a backup reservoir of market-filtered results. And competitors don't have the benefit of many-years of user-habit to try Google first. So, Google's scale advantage keeps growing, even if natural-search quality is middling.