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Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have, period

Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have, period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.

danuker 5y ago
For this reason I started using Yandex. Few advertisers pay for non-Russian ads, and the results are better than DuckDuckGo (in my opinion).
cainxinth 5y ago
I take your point, but don’t you think you’re overstating things a bit? The internet is still incredibly useful and so is Google search (granted, it takes more effort and sophistication to avoid the spam).
- eddieh 5y ago
  I don't think its overstated. The web is broken and search especially so. Now days I look for curated list to find interesting webpages and topics. Google ruined itself years ago, or maybe "we" ruined it.
  - cainxinth 5y ago
    The original commenter said: "Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless." I agree that Google search has been coopted. It now requires a keener awareness of what is and isn't being artificially promoted. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it something that unsophisticated users fall prey to (by design)? Also sadly yes. But 'all but worthless'? That's a huge overstatement.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  I don't think I'm overstating things. Yes, the internet is useful, but consider how the ability to accurately search is the real key to the whole of it. As the original post points out, this hits us in day-to-day matters just as much as in trying to find/discover useful research on a particular topic. The simple fact is this: not only must nearly every link you click be viewed with suspicion, so must every search result you're given by Google, and pretty much every other engine. What is most useful is a presentation of naked results (with functional boolean operators, exclusions that work, a lack of "suggested" terms, etc.), but that doesn't shape and cause more interactions, direct people to the "proper" sites, or improve the bottom line. I remember the internet when it was usable for much more than consumption; it is only marginally so today.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    When you say "most useful", I have to ask, most useful to whom?
    - flenserboy 5y ago
      Agreed — Google search is most useful to Google. I'd prefer it be most useful for the actual user of the service, but that makes me crazy, I guess.
      - pb7 5y ago
        What if I told you that it is, but you’re not the target user? When you’re serving billions of users, there are going to be niche groups not worth catering to. I would bet most people are quite happy with the results. Just like most people are happy with their experience at Apple Stores whereas I feel like they’re pandering and annoying because I know exactly what I’m looking for or what the problem is and they’re still asking me basic questions unintentionally wasting my time. I’m not the target demographic they’re catering to. It’s fine, I just deal with it.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        You seem be saying there's a single "actual user", and that user happens to be identical to yourself. In practice any product with more than a few users is going to have to separate out the different needs, situations, and personalities of the users. Personas and market segmentation are two of many ways to slice up the user base. Some products can use that slicing to only address small niches and just say "to hell with everybody else". Indie games, for example, often address very specific audiences. Ditto a lot of books. Academic books especially might be written for an audience in the thousands or even hundreds. But products like Google are going for extremely large audiences. Inevitably, needs will conflict. They can try to sort that out in product, and I think they've done a surprisingly good job of guessing what people actually want based on them typing a few words into a box. But when there's a conflict, it's no shock to me they're going to favor the vast majority of their audience over the relatively small niche of persnickety software developers like myself.
mustacheemperor 5y ago
I’ve found DuckDuckGo can be better at some searches, and at others far worse. I was recently trying to search up how to do something in Excel and every result from DDG was some “excel-help” website that was actually just parroting common search terms as the headers on non-articles full of ads. The entire search space has apparently been hijacked by what is essentially a fake help site. I see results like that on google too sometimes but not across a whole results page. These sites seem to have emerged in earnest over the last 5 years or so, designed to present the appearance of relevant content to the search engine but existing only to serve ads.
- andrenotgiant 5y ago
  Most of DuckDuckGo's "10-pack" of traditional search results come from Bing: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text=we%20also%20of%20course%20have%20more%20traditional%20links%20in%20the%20search%20results%2C%20which%20we%20also%20source%20from%20multiple%20partners%2C%20though%20most%20commonly%20from%20bing https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text...
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Whenever DDG is mentioned, these "but it uses Bing" comments always pop up. Sure maybe somebody is in the lucky 10k with TIL moment, however these "but it uses Bing" comments leave out the fact that Bing doesn't know you made the search. That's kind of the point in DDG is to be able to search the web anonymously. I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lame because it just uses Bing" or something in between. It just seems to me these comments are missing the forest through the tree.
    - SllX 5y ago
      It speaks more to the quality of the results you can expect receiving non-personalized Bing results. From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).
makecheck 5y ago
Yep; I can’t believe what used to be bar-none the most useful set of search results will now seemingly scatter results into the list that have zero matches for my search term, as well as some with boldfaced words that I did not even type. And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  > I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from. Yup: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
- delecti 5y ago
  It's possible in Chrome and Firefox (and I assume other browsers, though can't say for sure) to add search shortcuts for other websites. If I know I want the wikipedia link, rather than searching google for the thing, I type "wp <thing>", and it takes me either directly to the wikipedia page, or to the search results. I think the default is the domain followed by a space, so "wikipedia.org <thing>", but that can be changed.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    this has always befuddled me. why use google at all to search a specific site rather than searching on the site directly? why give google the traffic? because lazy/convenience of google being the default page for new browsers and/or google the default search associated with the location bar?
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Because search is hard. Most domain sites search titles and descriptions of articles for keywords. Google will index the entire page and be able to provide more and better ordered results. Or use to. Now the quality and quantity of results forces site owners to implement their own search or use third parties.
seoaeu 5y ago
It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an adversarial process where marketers spend billions of dollars trying to distort the rankings
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  It's a bit of both. The company I work at has a pretty big SEO department, and it's definitely frustrating how they're able to game web search. But also last week I was trying to Google something about earbuds (I don't even remember what exactly), and searching for ("earbuds" -headphones) still brings up headphones as a bolded result because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms. Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms That's a double edged sword. One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example). They needed to help the less educated, too.
    - mwigdahl 5y ago
      Does it help the less educated to flat out ignore exclusion terms that are _explicitly_ provided?
      - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
        Doesn't seem to ignore it for me -- on the first page I only see "headphones" word in the search string itself, in "related searches" and in google maps listing shops that sell them.
wpietri 5y ago
I get this from their perspective. Their goal isn't to work just for people whose work makes them extremely precise in phrasing. I am sure that a lot of the mechanisms that make me bonkers are ones that make search results better for the average user. But it's still frustrating when my skill in using words to trick machines into doing what I want gradually becomes useless.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kderbyma 5y ago
it's so bad these days. If you are on mobile good luck finding anything of use if it doesn't involve ads somehow....non affiliated content, useful personal blogs - high quality ad free pages....good luck! it's to the point where I find what I want when I search torrent search engines.....and not via any search engines on the web.....
typon 5y ago
90% of my searches for stuff like "best bike to buy under $500" go something like: "best bike to buy for under $500 site:reddit.com"
- nacs 5y ago
  I do similar things for "real" reviews. But it's just a matter of time before the astroturfers start marketing more effectively via Reddit for SEO purposes.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  That's "getting a stupid answer" because of the kind of question. The problem is you can't rank bicycles under $500; they are all undifferentiated. The search results on Google for this question strike me as fairly reasonable, given the impossibility of the question and the deluge of affiliate spam they have to index.
admax88q 5y ago
> that their algorithms assumed you wanted What? That's the whole purpose of search algorithms isn't it? I'm not sure I understand your complaint.
- dylan604 5y ago
  not necessarily. the assumption part is the key. If I search wild turkey, I would accept listings on the bird or the specific whiskey. I would not accept listings of other brands of whiskey or scotch or other alcohol. I also would not accept listings on birds unless there was direct mention of wild turkey in it. Assuming I was interested in something other than what was requested is where it lost usefulness to me. Maybe others found it more useful, but when I search for a term I want that term in the results when I hit search. It's an entirely different concept when I hit Feeling Lucky. At that point, I'll accept any of the previous examples
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    The Google search results for wild turkey seem extremely reasonable to me. Did you try this example before using it?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      it's just an example. of course somebody on the internet did the exact thing i was meaning to be an example. kudos the point of the story is that I'll take "anything related in the slightest to my query for $500" when hitting the Feeling Lucky button. when I hit search, I want specifics to my search term. don't go making 6 degrees of separation results.
justnotworthit 5y ago
If you google "how do i search the web without e commerce results", you get "how to improve search in your ecommerce site". If you search "examples of bougainvillea not pruned", you get pruning tips. Often the first page of results will already have the tag "Without: --keyword that changes everything but is inconvenient for the algorithm--. Force include this word?"

danuker 5y ago

For this reason I started using Yandex. Few advertisers pay for non-Russian ads, and the results are better than DuckDuckGo (in my opinion).

cainxinth 5y ago

I take your point, but don’t you think you’re overstating things a bit? The internet is still incredibly useful and so is Google search (granted, it takes more effort and sophistication to avoid the spam).

eddieh 5y ago
I don't think its overstated. The web is broken and search especially so. Now days I look for curated list to find interesting webpages and topics. Google ruined itself years ago, or maybe "we" ruined it.
- cainxinth 5y ago
  The original commenter said: "Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless." I agree that Google search has been coopted. It now requires a keener awareness of what is and isn't being artificially promoted. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it something that unsophisticated users fall prey to (by design)? Also sadly yes. But 'all but worthless'? That's a huge overstatement.
flenserboy 5y ago
I don't think I'm overstating things. Yes, the internet is useful, but consider how the ability to accurately search is the real key to the whole of it. As the original post points out, this hits us in day-to-day matters just as much as in trying to find/discover useful research on a particular topic. The simple fact is this: not only must nearly every link you click be viewed with suspicion, so must every search result you're given by Google, and pretty much every other engine. What is most useful is a presentation of naked results (with functional boolean operators, exclusions that work, a lack of "suggested" terms, etc.), but that doesn't shape and cause more interactions, direct people to the "proper" sites, or improve the bottom line. I remember the internet when it was usable for much more than consumption; it is only marginally so today.
- wpietri 5y ago
  When you say "most useful", I have to ask, most useful to whom?
  - flenserboy 5y ago
    Agreed — Google search is most useful to Google. I'd prefer it be most useful for the actual user of the service, but that makes me crazy, I guess.
    - pb7 5y ago
      What if I told you that it is, but you’re not the target user? When you’re serving billions of users, there are going to be niche groups not worth catering to. I would bet most people are quite happy with the results. Just like most people are happy with their experience at Apple Stores whereas I feel like they’re pandering and annoying because I know exactly what I’m looking for or what the problem is and they’re still asking me basic questions unintentionally wasting my time. I’m not the target demographic they’re catering to. It’s fine, I just deal with it.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      You seem be saying there's a single "actual user", and that user happens to be identical to yourself. In practice any product with more than a few users is going to have to separate out the different needs, situations, and personalities of the users. Personas and market segmentation are two of many ways to slice up the user base. Some products can use that slicing to only address small niches and just say "to hell with everybody else". Indie games, for example, often address very specific audiences. Ditto a lot of books. Academic books especially might be written for an audience in the thousands or even hundreds. But products like Google are going for extremely large audiences. Inevitably, needs will conflict. They can try to sort that out in product, and I think they've done a surprisingly good job of guessing what people actually want based on them typing a few words into a box. But when there's a conflict, it's no shock to me they're going to favor the vast majority of their audience over the relatively small niche of persnickety software developers like myself.

mustacheemperor 5y ago

I’ve found DuckDuckGo can be better at some searches, and at others far worse. I was recently trying to search up how to do something in Excel and every result from DDG was some “excel-help” website that was actually just parroting common search terms as the headers on non-articles full of ads. The entire search space has apparently been hijacked by what is essentially a fake help site. I see results like that on google too sometimes but not across a whole results page. These sites seem to have emerged in earnest over the last 5 years or so, designed to present the appearance of relevant content to the search engine but existing only to serve ads.

andrenotgiant 5y ago
Most of DuckDuckGo's "10-pack" of traditional search results come from Bing: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text=we%20also%20of%20course%20have%20more%20traditional%20links%20in%20the%20search%20results%2C%20which%20we%20also%20source%20from%20multiple%20partners%2C%20though%20most%20commonly%20from%20bing https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text...
- dylan604 5y ago
  Whenever DDG is mentioned, these "but it uses Bing" comments always pop up. Sure maybe somebody is in the lucky 10k with TIL moment, however these "but it uses Bing" comments leave out the fact that Bing doesn't know you made the search. That's kind of the point in DDG is to be able to search the web anonymously. I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lame because it just uses Bing" or something in between. It just seems to me these comments are missing the forest through the tree.
  - SllX 5y ago
    It speaks more to the quality of the results you can expect receiving non-personalized Bing results. From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).

makecheck 5y ago

Yep; I can’t believe what used to be bar-none the most useful set of search results will now seemingly scatter results into the list that have zero matches for my search term, as well as some with boldfaced words that I did not even type. And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.

wlesieutre 5y ago
> I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from. Yup: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
delecti 5y ago
It's possible in Chrome and Firefox (and I assume other browsers, though can't say for sure) to add search shortcuts for other websites. If I know I want the wikipedia link, rather than searching google for the thing, I type "wp <thing>", and it takes me either directly to the wikipedia page, or to the search results. I think the default is the domain followed by a space, so "wikipedia.org <thing>", but that can be changed.
- dylan604 5y ago
  this has always befuddled me. why use google at all to search a specific site rather than searching on the site directly? why give google the traffic? because lazy/convenience of google being the default page for new browsers and/or google the default search associated with the location bar?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Because search is hard. Most domain sites search titles and descriptions of articles for keywords. Google will index the entire page and be able to provide more and better ordered results. Or use to. Now the quality and quantity of results forces site owners to implement their own search or use third parties.

seoaeu 5y ago

It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an adversarial process where marketers spend billions of dollars trying to distort the rankings

squeaky-clean 5y ago
It's a bit of both. The company I work at has a pretty big SEO department, and it's definitely frustrating how they're able to game web search. But also last week I was trying to Google something about earbuds (I don't even remember what exactly), and searching for ("earbuds" -headphones) still brings up headphones as a bolded result because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms. Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.
- oblio 5y ago
  > because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms That's a double edged sword. One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example). They needed to help the less educated, too.
  - mwigdahl 5y ago
    Does it help the less educated to flat out ignore exclusion terms that are _explicitly_ provided?
    - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
      Doesn't seem to ignore it for me -- on the first page I only see "headphones" word in the search string itself, in "related searches" and in google maps listing shops that sell them.

wpietri 5y ago

I get this from their perspective. Their goal isn't to work just for people whose work makes them extremely precise in phrasing. I am sure that a lot of the mechanisms that make me bonkers are ones that make search results better for the average user. But it's still frustrating when my skill in using words to trick machines into doing what I want gradually becomes useless.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kderbyma 5y ago

it's so bad these days. If you are on mobile good luck finding anything of use if it doesn't involve ads somehow....non affiliated content, useful personal blogs - high quality ad free pages....good luck! it's to the point where I find what I want when I search torrent search engines.....and not via any search engines on the web.....

typon 5y ago

90% of my searches for stuff like "best bike to buy under $500" go something like: "best bike to buy for under $500 site:reddit.com"

nacs 5y ago
I do similar things for "real" reviews. But it's just a matter of time before the astroturfers start marketing more effectively via Reddit for SEO purposes.
jeffbee 5y ago
That's "getting a stupid answer" because of the kind of question. The problem is you can't rank bicycles under $500; they are all undifferentiated. The search results on Google for this question strike me as fairly reasonable, given the impossibility of the question and the deluge of affiliate spam they have to index.

admax88q 5y ago

> that their algorithms assumed you wanted What? That's the whole purpose of search algorithms isn't it? I'm not sure I understand your complaint.

dylan604 5y ago
not necessarily. the assumption part is the key. If I search wild turkey, I would accept listings on the bird or the specific whiskey. I would not accept listings of other brands of whiskey or scotch or other alcohol. I also would not accept listings on birds unless there was direct mention of wild turkey in it. Assuming I was interested in something other than what was requested is where it lost usefulness to me. Maybe others found it more useful, but when I search for a term I want that term in the results when I hit search. It's an entirely different concept when I hit Feeling Lucky. At that point, I'll accept any of the previous examples
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The Google search results for wild turkey seem extremely reasonable to me. Did you try this example before using it?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    it's just an example. of course somebody on the internet did the exact thing i was meaning to be an example. kudos the point of the story is that I'll take "anything related in the slightest to my query for $500" when hitting the Feeling Lucky button. when I hit search, I want specifics to my search term. don't go making 6 degrees of separation results.

justnotworthit 5y ago

If you google "how do i search the web without e commerce results", you get "how to improve search in your ecommerce site". If you search "examples of bougainvillea not pruned", you get pruning tips. Often the first page of results will already have the tag "Without: --keyword that changes everything but is inconvenient for the algorithm--. Force include this word?"