27 ms·

Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

• FinanceAnon 5y ago
  Yes, it seems to come up on HN every week. I like to append "reddit" to many queries, for example "best bicycle for under $500 reddit", where you can read some interesting discussions, rather than a random SEO website with affiliate links.
  • MerelyMortal 5y ago
    That's what I do too, but one should be aware that marketers are gaming reddit. I recently tried looking in the Buy It For Life subreddit for a specific type of product, and it appeared to me that one company was taking advantage of that sub to promote their product.
    • Loughla 5y ago
      That's where multiple threads across multiple subs comes in handy. If you look at one thread in one sub, then more than likely you will find astroturf. But if you look in multiple threads and do some research, following up with searches related to the item in question, then read the comments, you should be good. For example: Pony clamps were brought back by another company, but are now being made in China. There isn't anything inherently wrong with that, but I was concerned the quality of the new product would be much less than the old, made in the USA clamps. So, I searched for the specific clamp style from Pony, read about it, then followed up with searches related to ancillary brands that were talked about in the threads. There were some out-and-out product endorsements from the new company, and assurances that the new clamps would be quality. There were also 'natural' comments that sounded suspiciously similar to what the company owner was saying. . . . I finally settled on a company that is made in Canada.
• notreallyserio 5y ago
  Way, way worse. There was a time you could force Google to only return pages with a specific term by wrapping it in double quotes (or further back, prefixing with a plus). This was useful when trying to learn about a specific error message/code. Now, it's a total crapshoot, and you may not get a single useful result at all.
  • sumtechguy 5y ago
    For many searches like that I use 'tools->all results->verbatim'. Seems to help.
    • akvadrako 5y ago
      I've been using the verbatim mode by default for a couple years. It does improve the results substantially.
      • finite_jest 5y ago
        Interesting, is it any different than putting the query in quotes?
        • notreallyserio 5y ago
          Google may ignore the quotes entirely, although it's not clear when.
      • alok-g 5y ago
        Same here. However, comparing what verbatim mode was before and is now, it has gone much worse. I just want barebones keywords search, with just the caveat to index just the words on the main part of a web page, not the surrounding ads, etc.
      • skinkestek 5y ago
        Depends on which experiment you are part of. For long stretches of time Google flat out ignores verbatim operator when I try it.
• deadalus 5y ago
  Yandex destroys Google when it comes to 'search by image'. The AI recognition is incredible and it can pull results from some very weird places. Bing video search is obviously the best choice when it comes to porn. Brave Search is getting very close to Google for almost 90% of text searches.
• GenerocUsername 5y ago
  Similarly, Google maps has begun giving me really bad routes and I live only 30 minutes outside a major tech city. It coincided with the little green leaf that promises to route me on 'eco friendly routes'. Don't see how sitting in the car longer can be more eco friendly
  • _ea1k 5y ago
    Yeah, the eco mode is really annoying. I don't understand why they added that, especially now that the types of cars we are driving are increasing in diversity. What's eco for a big truck might not be the same as a small EV.
  • seoulmetro 5y ago
    Oh my god there's an eco mode for driving now? That's hilarious... and scary.
• fsflover 5y ago
  Yes, since a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823. > Any pro tips on how to google Pro tip: try DuckDuckGo, https://ddg.gg https://ddg.gg.
  • jeffreyrogers 5y ago
    Google's search quality has definitely gotten worse, but DuckDuckGo is still worse than Google. I have DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but occasionally will Google something that DuckDuckGo can't find and Google has it on the first page.
    • hoffspot 5y ago
      I have this exact same usage pattern. I try to use Firefox and DDG exclusively but when a site borks or the search results are unusable in DDG, it's back into the Google ecosystem with me.
    • dash2 5y ago
      Yeah, ditto for search.brave.com. It's fine but sometimes Google is just more creative or accurate in what it returns.
  • mda 5y ago
    ddg is bing. So why would I bother with it?
    • fsflover 5y ago
      1. It hides personal information from Bing. 2. DDG has its own search crawler (and it's getting larger, the more people use it). You can also try SearX.
      • mda 5y ago
        Main search is powered by bing, lets not kid ourselves. ddg is not answering complex queries by using its own crawled index.
• sydbarrett74 5y ago
  Filter out any Pinterest links. Those will pollute your results.
  • Wistar 5y ago
    … and terribly so.
  • danuker 5y ago
    I have a feeling Pinterest results replaced the original pictures in results. They must have been pinned from somewhere, and similar image search won't show me where.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      pinterest is practically made to hack pagerank: get a thousand people to add a pin to their own board and now you have a thousand links pointing to that pin. I would think same domain linking would be downranked but what do i know sometimes i have good luck with tineye.com, but sometimes no dice. instagram for instance doesn’t get crawled - I found a good source of info once because someone had made an entire clone of all of instagram, with all the same usernames so it was easy to find the original after finding the clone via google image search
• ruiidont 5y ago
  Yes.
• napolux 5y ago
  Yes, recently looking for "stackoverflow like" stuff has in the first results clones of SO mixed with the original source. And they speak us about the "algorithm".
  • notreallyserio 5y ago
    IME Bing does a much better job of filtering out SO and GH clones.
  • alangibson 5y ago
    Those things are a curse. But Google had a long history of killing that kind of junk off eventually. See 'spun content' for example.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  (1) It's a long term trend and (2) It's no accident. If Google Search was perfect you'd never have a reason to click on an ad.
• sealeck 5y ago
  What do you mean by "worse" - it's hard to assess something defined in a qualitative manor quantitatively.
  • monkeybutton 5y ago
    For me its the batting average of "do I find what I'm looking for before giving up". I don't think my queries have gotten more esoteric over time and yet I've been striking out more and more in the last 3 years. Maybe I should start a personal log and actually quantify this so I can post it here in 5 years.
• vgeek 5y ago
  The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testing/already implemented some sort of multi armed bandit type optimization like on Youtube's search results where they just show any popular pages (ignoring relevancy) to see if they yield a click. I've used DDG for the past ~5 years, and it is typically worse without using a hashbang like !so for technical queries. I guess that is what the web has evolved to-- knowing which mega-site you want to search against rather than discover new sites?
  • nafizh 5y ago
    For what it’s worth, I have been using the new you.com headed by Richard Socher as my search engine for the last 2 weeks. The condensed search results with sections from reddit, wikipedia, stack overflow or arxiv is really great. It’s really suited for technical users.
    • ftkftk 5y ago
      Thanks for this, it looks quite usable.
    • a_e_k 5y ago
      I hadn't heard of that one before, but that's actually really nice. I really like how they're trying something new with the presentation and organizing the search hits by the source like that!
    • no-s 5y ago
      you.com looks good. I am USA and English centric. I’m annoyed at the futility of google search for ordinary technical topics. Bing, duckduckgo are also more futile as time goes on. What are the ways to direct more air into the likes of you.com? You.com was an “Show HN” topic 3 weeks ago[1]. The you.com improvement in 3 weeks is noticeable. This post has been simplified for sentiment parsers... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29165601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29165601
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  > google seems to want full sentences instead of just keywords now. "How do I do X?" seems to get me better(?) results then "X + some relevant keyword" Correct. Google will give you better results with full-sentence-like input. After several years of refining results, Google concluded that there's more benefit in teaching the machines to understand how humans ask questions than to teach humanity how to keyword like a computer expects (especially when you factor in that they get as many queries via voice these days as via text, and voice recognition in general always benefits from more information to disambiguate on). There's an entire semantic-analysis layer in front of the keywording layer these days to determine some semantics of the query to try and guess what category of thing you're looking for. I generally have no problem with a few keywords for software engineering searches. I usually go general-to-specific (for example, `react unit test useState`). You can drop the video results by adding `-youtube` to the query. > "Sal dulu a" would both recommend "Sal dulu antasma" and list it but now unless i search for that particularly, it doesn't show up. I'm not sure, but it's possible Google dropped 'a' as a signifier because of the semantic query support (as a single particle, it doesn't add signal to a sentence-like query). `sal dulu songs` gives me a list where Antasma shows up as item 3. In general, my advice for Googling these days would be "don't try to keyword it out." Think more like how you'd ask another human for a random fact they might barely remember. There's also still some symbols that are specifically understood by Google for tuning queries, listed here (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en). Worth noting: the `+` modifier got killed when Google+ came and went. To force a word or phrase to be part of the results instead of "fuzzy-matched," put it in "quotes". Quotes these days do double-duty as both "I want this literally matched" and "results must include this token."
  • photon-torpedo 5y ago
    > Correct. Google will give you better results with full-sentence-like input. Please show how to use a full-sentence natural-language query to search for images of a shirt without stripes. Thanks.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• alangibson 5y ago
  Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
  • aceazzameen 5y ago
    Not only that, we just need one that works the way Google used to work. You know, something like the old algorithm that made Google famous and made competitors obsolete.
    • alangibson 5y ago
      The hard part of what Google does is spam and abuse prevention. If you only indexed known-good sources I think the hard part would basically be done. Providing good search results, rich queries, sentiment analysis etc is all old hat by now.
      • jeffbee 5y ago
        "Known-good" sources have a serious habit of getting owned by malware and replaced by organized crime schemes. Anti-abuse can't be handled by whitelists, it needs to be an online system.
        • alangibson 5y ago
          Garbage sources have a serious habit of getting taken over. It's not that common with quality sites, but also not impossible. A simple downvoting system would be good enough.
          • marginalia_nu 5y ago
            The problem is that even quality sites die. And when they do, their domain gets poached and suddenly it's not a quality site anymore. But according to the ranking algorithms it's the same site, since its quality is measured by how many links it gets. Coopting quality sites is a bit of a cottage industry. There is also a significant amount of hacked wordpress sites. Their domain may be quite reputable, but they're unknowingly host to a ton of spam.
• thoughtstheseus 5y ago
  Google is a recommendation engine, not search. It recommends what you will click on, not necessarily what you want.
  • justinmchase 5y ago
    Perfectly stated.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• shkkmo 5y ago
  Yes, it seems like google (and search in general) has slowly been losing the war with SEO as more and more queries return pages of SEO affiliate blogspam and less and less organic, actually useful content.
• tchalla 5y ago
  I have stopped exclusively using Google search for 95/100 queries. Duckduckgo does the job and sometimes I bang to Google.
  • contravariant 5y ago
    Yeah, exactly what I did. I find that duckduckgo is much more similar to the google of the early 2000s much more than the current google. It doesn't work too well for ambiguous keywords or vague questions, but you can always add '!g' for those queries.
• digitalsushi 5y ago
  Or when I use the date filter for just the past year, and it's still pages from 2013 on the first page of results.
• thrower123 5y ago
  It's really bad if you don't use uBlock Origin, that's for sure. The amount of ad and sponsored results has gotten really bad in recent years for a lot of queries.
  • danuker 5y ago
    Even if you use it, "organic" results seem to be just links to e-commerce websites.
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avoid reddit (which also has a fair amount of astroturfing), but I haven't found a good alternative. I severely miss Google's old "discussions" (or was it forums?) filter.
  • honkycat 5y ago
    For me, Discord is the new reddit. When I want information about a product, I join the discord forum associated with that hobby and I ask for recommendations. Since Discord is a chat service like IRC, I get replies from humans instead of shady astro-turfed websites.
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      This is a decent solution, but not at scale. A big reason to even have all previous discussion archived is searchability and information availability. If the question has been answered it shouldn't be hard to find it. Having to have a human do the work of explaining something every time someone on the internet wonders about it is infeasible.
      • honkycat 5y ago
        How often is information like: "What is the best quality X for this price point" evergreen to the point it is even worth writing down? And the entire point of the discussion is that astro-turfing has papered over everything useful on the internet in order to sell low-quality crap. The fact it doesn't scale is exactly why I use this method. Nobody is paying people to sit in a discord chat and recommend fishing poles. I know the information I am getting is from an enthusiast, if not a professional.
        • 5y ago
• temporaryi3 5y ago
  Yes. Google is noticeably worse year on year for technical queries in particular, but everything else as well.
• diveanon 5y ago
  Absolutely, to the point I no longer use it. For me it was the pinterestizing of image search that finally made me realize how pointless google was. Why use a service that is just going to feed me ads in response to every query?
  • gandalfgreybeer 5y ago
    What do you use now?
    • diveanon 5y ago
      DDG for new searches, but mostly just bookmarks and in-site search when available. Searching the whole web isn’t nearly as useful as curating useful sites yourself.
• alangibson 5y ago
  I can't prove it, but if bet anything the reason Google is getting worse is the same reason everything gets worse: engagement. They are likey optimizing results not for relevance but for engagement more and more.
  • justinmchase 5y ago
    Not just that but bias, they intend to promote certain content and demote others and that introduction of human bias essentially dillutes the effectiveness of the algorithm; you don't get what you are searching for per-se but someones opinion of what you should get.
• wffurr 5y ago
  The topic here says "quantitatively". Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results? All of these threads devolve into anecdotes and reminisces about the "good old days" and complaining about Pinterest. None of which is in the least quantitative. I'd be interested to see some actual data or research on the subject, if it exists. Or maybe it's not Google that's gotten worse but the web itself? Again, quantitative results, please, not anecdata.
  • Reuzel 5y ago
    > Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results? Google has. They use this data expertly to improve search. Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions. And likely, exactly because it has become better for all its users in aggregate, it has to become a bit worse for a certain group of power users. There, we can only rely on anecdotes and personal experience, but these tell us it actually has gotten worse. Similarly, the web can become both worse and better. The really useful articles today are better researched, multi-modal, solid web of links, internet-first. Spam has also evolved. And "top 10 ways to do X"-McContent outranks better articles, because that is what the majority of Google users wants to see and clicks on. They truly have a better experience, while others' experiences suffer. It depends on what you measure.
    • willhinsa 5y ago
      > Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions. lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"? what if i told you that search is an adversarial problem, and that it's possible for google's tech to be getting better slower than the aggregate tech power used to game google search is getting better? is this not a patently obvious possibility? it's not some kind of gotcha impossibility for google's tech to get much worse over time, even if they weren't hamstringing themselves by lots and lots of user-hostile changes which benefit google's interests rather than their users.
• jpalomaki 5y ago
  My tips: use also the image search to quickly identify promising pages (charts, tables for example). Use the tools dropdown to specify the time period, for example last week or last 24h. If your WhatsApp started crashing today, relevant content is likely fresh. When searching for articles, try to write the search like journalist would write the headline. Use the double quotes aggressively to filter out unwanted pages (by hinting you want a certain phrase). I don’t think I usually go past the first page. Instead I usually refine the search. Can’t say about the quality. I still keep finding stuff and I don’t really have any way to measure how it was year or 5 ago.
• timdaub 5y ago
  These days for most queries I append a " reddit" or " hacker news" to circumvent the SEO bs pages.
• shiado 5y ago
  Yandex is the most entertaining search engine. Not always the best results but it reminds me of Google from 2003. Just look at these insane results, not a single DMCA takedown or SEO spam result to be found https://yandex.com/search/?text=free+movies https://yandex.com/search/?text=free+movies
  • chilling 5y ago
    Damn! This search gave me the fun. I felt again like in 2003 when searching for free movies give me an actual movie rather than "WHERE I CAN WATCH THIS MOVIE?"-site
  • alok-g 5y ago
    It's giving me better results than Google. I'll try it for some time. Thanks.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• freediver 5y ago
  If you email me, I will send an invite to Kagi Search beta which deals with the problems you mentioned, namely: - A ranking algorithm that penalizes commercial and ad/tracking bloated pages - Ability to "mute" or "prefer" domains - Ability to search for discussions - Customize type and appearance of search results Kagi Search is a new startup in the search space and we are currently in the closed beta. https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • alok-g 5y ago
    Signed up on kagi.com.
  • divmain 5y ago
    After having used DuckDuckGo for a couple of years and habitually using g!, I switched to Kagi recently. Much better experience, I like that I’m a customer and not the product, great search results. I have been surprised and impressed.
• 6510 5y ago
  Long story short: They replaced carefully crafted human readable rules with black box AI. After ranking results by profit it wasn't even necessary anymore to index or present other results. Equally unnecessary it then became to maintain or create any such websites. The future, if you ask me, is carefully crafted invitation-only websites. Get back to information exchange just for the sake of sharing, discovering and learning.
• maxdo 5y ago
  they talked so much about how important iphone for them, well.... i have google chrome on ios, go ahead and try to edit your query... good luck with that, it's just plain bad.
• webZero 5y ago
  Yes, I switched to DDG and its good enough for my needs
• leokeba 5y ago
  Yes, each time I'm looking for something specific I'm only getting results from more popular "similar requests", and of course sponsored ads, this is very infuriating. On a similar note, but this time for reasons that completely elude my reasoning, GPS navigation with google maps has become worse and worse over the years. It went from surprisingly good at avoiding closed routes and accidents at a time when there was likely a lot less real-time data available, to guiding me over and over again to the same closed roads that sometimes have been for weeks, even though they have troves of user data that clearly show everybody having to turn back and change course. WTF google ? Also, please implement something like traffic prediction, when I leave around 5pm when it's still fluid, I get an ETA like 40 minutes later, even though I know for sure that it's going to get way worse while I'm on the road and those 40 minutes become more like 90. If I can predict it, why can't google ? That's just crazy stupid.
• Reuzel 5y ago
  - There is way more content to sift through, including video. - There are way more Google users, including grandmas. - Conversations have moved from discussion boards to walled gardens and chats. - Google relies more on neural network embeddings, so does a better job when you type full sentences and semantic similarity. - Google relies on authority signals and incoming links to a website, so non-commercial, hobbyist, or controversial content ranks way lower. - Websites rely on Google for income, so they start producing what Google and its readers want to see. - Spammers rely on Google for income, so those surviving after decades, have created massively successful linking rings and spam production pipelines looking at keyword search statistics. - You were really good at Google searching years ago, having a harder time updating and letting go of what worked for you. Easier to blame Google for this. As for tips: Anything academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit. Try to join like-minded communities where you can ask expert questions, and research new things in your field. Exact keyword match still works by enclosing keyword in double quotes: "sal dulu antasma"
  • usmannk 5y ago
    > Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit. Do you find this better? In my experience it’s nicer to just put stackoverflow, reddit, or (often, in my case) seriouseats in my google query. Reddit search in particular is pretty miserable.
  • ichydkrsrnae 5y ago
    Exact keyword match does not work as well as it once did. I question whether it's working at all on YouTube.
  • micromacrofoot 5y ago
    >Anything academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit This is a completely miserable experience, and walls off useful information into classes of people who "are in the know" about where the most relevant information exists. And if you're that grandma searching for a birthday present for your grandson? Good luck. She's likely to be devoured by ads, if not an outright scam.
• mmaunder 5y ago
  The problem isn’t solvable by modifying search queries. The fundamental issue is that the web has filled up with content designed to trick Google into sending it visitors and to maximize ad revenue. So you have content that is thick with ranking signals and thin on useful and new data. You also have to scroll past many ads and filler to get to the answer to your search query. The fundamental problem is that Google and the SEO spammer’s interests are aligned. Google is both the search provider and ad network. I think this makes Google tremendously vulnerable to competitors who don’t have that conflict of interest, and presents a massive opportunity to those with enough courage and cash.
  • pixelgeek 5y ago
    This pretty much sums it up. The amount of crap and plagiarized content in most searches is what is killing most search results. Google makes money regardless of the quality or 'originality' of the content your search comes up with so they currently have no motive to change things.
  • ankit219 5y ago
    Agree with you. A lot of news publications tend to post about anything hoping searchers would land on their page for the answer. I google times for Football games, and the first link I get (in India) is from a news website, which does not even have the answer. I got so frustrated, I switched my region to US.
  • jccalhoun 5y ago
    There has been a cat and mouse game between google and scammers for a long time. Results get scammy and Google updates to get rid of them. I just hope they update soon to get rid of the latest version. I'm sick of so many results for things like "how to fix a clogged sink" all being long pages with stuff like "first let's talk about what a clog is" then "how they get clogged" and then "history of sinks" and then after you have scrolled and scrolled and scrolled you get the answer.
  • blindmute 5y ago
    But the search isn't profitable without the ads. What is the competitor's motivation to build a search engine?
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  Do you mean 'measurably?' Well i don't know what you're talking about, i can always find the ads i m looking for. I mean the most serious business would pay the most to have their ad on top of results right? Works for meee I also get SEO lessons from sites below the ads in the list, it's quite a sight to observe how they manage to all come up with the same content slightly rearranged, and still be clogging the frontpage.
• bmitc 5y ago
  Absolutely. Google definitely seems to favor consumer stuff and the most general query result possible. It's near impossible to find specific information about a certain product or item without wading through tons of shopping sites and empty review sites. And now Google removes nearly all of the specific search terms, where I normally have to click "must include" or preempt it by wrapping every word in quotes. Sometimes, I ask myself what's the point if I search for something because Google unrefines the search by removing words to return the most results in terms of quantity and generality.
• almog 5y ago
  I think that another reason not mentioned here for missing on organic results, is that many such results have moved from forums to closed garden facebook groups (and of course facebook's own search is even worse, possibly to encourage people to ""engage"" rather than find what they're looking for).
• wilde 5y ago
  I mean yesterday their result page for “twitter new CEO” looked like this: https://imgur.com/a/Zyze2Bt https://imgur.com/a/Zyze2Bt So… yeah. The funny bit is that the actual search algo got it right. I’m with others on appending Reddit to your search.
  • mda 5y ago
    Check it today? It is full of pictures and information about new Ceo.
• softwaredoug 5y ago
  I can't tell you quantitatively But googling programming language problems, there's way more blogspam. A lot of crappy websites that seem auto-generated often rank higher than useful stackoverflow results. There spammy sites often have my search verbatem in the title, so they get clicked on... It's pretty sad as IMO this is harming developers, blogging, and Google. I hope Google can fix the issue and reward useful content, not just content that's made itself look useful to generate clicks.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• passerby1 5y ago
  They are. I've solved the problem for myself by setting the "Verbatim" option to true in search engines' settings google url of browser.
  • Volker_W 5y ago
    Where can I find the "Verbatim" option?
    • passerby1 5y ago
      Search tools > "all results" change to Verbatim
• wmil 5y ago
  Google has gone downhill since they started pushing searches towards approved sources. Sadly your best bet when google is failing is to try Bing or other search engines.
• HamburgerEmoji 5y ago
  I search using DDG by default. Sometimes by habit I'll throw a !g on the search to tell it to use Google, but more and more often I have to think twice. If my search touches politics at all, Google is a no-go. Joe Rogan mentioned this phenomenon recently. Searching for a specific event, he explained, it was easily found on non-Google search engines, but Google hid it behind dozens of Ministry of Truth results. This is not exactly what you're asking, I know. My point is, if they're willing to screw around with some results, I have lost confidence in all of their results. Long gone are the days where the contract with Google was that you would provide some words, and that it would provide a list of pages with those words in them.
• Ciantic 5y ago
  For me it has, not probably Google's fault but especially coding related searches usually give me a lot of sites that just copies content from Stack Overflow. It's amazing that Google can't filter and punish those sites in the rank.
• jonathanstrange 5y ago
  Search results for products have become worse, they are basically useless. I don't think that's primarily Google's fault, though, aggregation blogs and "list sites" have basically outsmarted Google's algorithms. I still find what I want - honest opinions and unpaid reviews - by adding "reddit" to the query. But without that the normal results on the first page are complete rubbish.
• jasondc 5y ago
  Any product search now is to a list of Amazon referral links, product search on Google has become horrible
• Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  I've found that double-quotes are basically mandatory in any search now. (this is Google shorthand for "results MUST include this term", you probably know that.) I might be looking for some sort of broad topic, like how do a I do a particular thing in SwiftUI, and it will return a bunch of stuff about SwiftUI that sort of skirts the topic. A search for do "a particular thing" "SwiftUI" is more likely to succeed.
  • nickelpro 5y ago
    This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web. About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, but there are a huge number of contributing factors to that. I think we discount how much the rise of search engines as a discovery mechanism hurt the original PageRank algorithm. Things used to be easy to search for because humans were self-categorizing all the knowledge available (because we didn't have good search engines), and PageRank just made that self-categorization globally available. Now there's so much more noise on the web, and no one is manually organizing it like we did with the old "web rings", and that's not even beginning to explore the issue of sites manually gaming SEO. The algorithm's job is much harder today, and so we need to give it a little help finding what we want.
    • orourkek 5y ago
      > This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web. > About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, ... I remember double quotes being infinitely more useful 10 years ago than they are today and much more strict (i.e. good for technical searches). You could put actual code syntax into double quotes and it would return meaningful results containing that syntax. Nowadays there is no way I'm aware of to force google to respect every single character within double quotes — it's much more fuzzy now and frequently characters like `!;.,/\|{}[]` are ignored/dropped from inside quotes and the quality of (technical) results suffers. It's the 80/20 optimization problem discussed elsewhere in this thread...
• jrm4 5y ago
  Man, great anecdote I discovered yesterday: So "Cyrus" and "Joseph" are part of my grandfathers full name. If you Duck Duck Go his full name, no quotes, the front page is all him and relatives; ancestry dot com and whatever. If you Google it, no quotes? The front page is ENTIRELY "Miley Cyrus on Joe Rogan." Moreover, with quotes? Only 2 links total on the front page. So I'd say YES.
  • seoulmetro 5y ago
    I typed "Korean traditional architecture" into YouTube and got a link to a Mr Beast video. Google products are being strangled so as to make them utterly useless, but useful to Google's modus operandi.
• bluedino 5y ago
  I can't believe how much straight up spam/malware sites get into the first and second page of results. Sites that go to something like chickenaffairs.com, they seem to scrape content from other sites that happens to contain your search terms, get indexed in google, and then stay there somehow
• narrator 5y ago
  These days, if I want to search on something highly controversial, Yandex usually gives the best results. Google has perfected the "twiddler"[1] so it's impossible to find anything off narrative for many topics. [1]https://youtubecensorship.com/2019-08-18-google-youtube-rigged-news-and-video-results.html https://youtubecensorship.com/2019-08-18-google-youtube-rigg...
  • LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Interesting site, wasn't aware of it until now. Will revisit.
• cwojno 5y ago
  Google seems to also have a heavy recency bias. I've tried to search for news articles that were even a month old and have had trouble locating links to stories I know happened. I don't know any tricks to working around this. And if I don't recall specifically when the article came out (say, somewhere around 6 months ago), I'll usually give up. Any tips on finding "historical" results?
  • mda 5y ago
    Search tools -> Any time -> Custom range
    • cwojno 5y ago
      Nice. Last I looked into this, I couldn't select a custom range, it was limited to set times like, last 6 months or something. Thanks
  • rc_mob 5y ago
    I agree. I hate that any search I do will show CNN articles from this week. Dude google, if I wanted recent news I would use the news tab.
  • majkinetor 5y ago
    search web history that Google has, Use a bookmark tool such as diigo.
  • _dain_ 5y ago
    I've gotten so pissed off about this that I compulsively save to disk every interesting article I find.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  There are so many clones of Stack Exchange. Or how GeeksForGeeks shows up higher than the pages for the official Python docs. Or how searching for anything seemes to find an auto-generated page with that phrase that outranks any useful info. The authentic source of the content should be the first hit, not someone talking about it, or a clone, or an SEO page linking to the authentic content. That is a colossal failure.
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    It's actually surprising that for all Googles talents, they can't tell that site X is just cloning StackExchange or that official documentation should probably rank higher than some random site. Either they can't or they don't care.
    • Reuzel 5y ago
      These sites are easily detected as clones. How Google reacts is part of the adversarial game theory. For StackExchange clones, their tactic seems to be to push them to a secondary index. Hellban them, but keep them visible to the creators. You never start over, and try again with smarter duplicate evasion. You just see your site wither to insignificance, with sometimes a temporary bump to confuse you/annoy you/keep you uncertain about which changes helped. But sometimes this strategy can make it seem Google can't detect this, especially when using very specific keywords only found on StackExchange, there just may not be a better 18 pages than a duplicate page with a different "related questions" section. Official documentation underranking some random site is nearly always a temporary anomaly (or makes some sense, in the case of very verbose documentation, like W3C docs). If structural, nudge Google along with some reports. If malicious, these are the sites that Google is likely to completely nuke. All authority and investment gone. Any part of the spammer's link network contributing to artificial authority also exposed. Makes more economic sense to pick softer targets and spend more energy on staying hidden/not overdoing it, never sure of the threshold.
• mabbo 5y ago
  The goals of Google have changed. Or rather, they haven't. At one time, the premise was that good results would bring people back. Getting the exact right answer every time was the go-to means to get customers to return, and see more Ads. More ads meant more income, which meant a successful company. But now, Google has the dominant market power. Customers are going to Google by default, never considering an alternative. Everyone who wants to have their results above the fold have to pay to play- because everything above the fold is a paid ad. And below the fold, sure, we can have something the algorithm dug up for you too. But that isn't the point anymore. Google is a business. They don't optimize for accuracy, they optimize for money. It used to be that accuracy made money, so they did that. But that was never the end goal, and it's become far less important.
  • Philadelphia 5y ago
    People used to call that kind of stuff “being evil”
    • Nanplune 5y ago
      Haha yes! From pagerank to the "attention direction engine." Google's starting to resemble that fictional company in the Silicon Valley show, Hooli.
• sebow 5y ago
  On one hand, google has been shown several time to quite literally censor certain keywords/topics out of their results, so in that regard yes. As for the quality of results overall, depends if you value "what the crowd thinks". I personally don't, but i can see the value of it, especially when searching something very niche where the google search right now can semi-comprehend the context and give you the ~best answer. For me, I haven't daily-drove google search since 2015 (ddg, startpage,customized searx all work fine for me), so i can't say that i know the nitty-gritty besides using google to compare results between engines.It gave me the impression of becoming an echo-chamber due to the "fact-checking" role google assumed.
• underscore_ku 5y ago
  google,youtube search is trash now. it's adds search now
  • timbit42 5y ago
    When I can't find videos using YouTube's search that I've watched on YouTube before, I use DDG and it is usually the first result.
• zw123456 5y ago
  One thing I have noticed, not sure if this is recent or well treaded ground here on HN no doubt, but if you Hover over the "I'm feeling luck" button then leave and hover again, it gives a bunch of different options like "I'm feeling adventurous", I'm Feeling Puzzled, I'm Feeling Curious. I am not sure what changes to the algorithm is made when you use one of those, they do seem to give different results. I am sure it is probably documented someplace but I think it would be nice if they had a drop down menu there instead with perhaps a bit of elaboration. I have tried using different ones when the regular search is giving me pop culture type results due to perhaps ambiguity with the more interesting topic I am searching on. I always thought a good one would be "And now for something completely Different" that would give you random low ranked results just for fun :)
• acheron 5y ago
  Of course it's worse. Anyway, I haven't used Google for many years at this point, so whatever. However very recently I'm now having issues with DDG -- seeming to ignore when I quote things, returning only tangentially related pages, including my location(!) when I didn't ask it to, etc. Does anyone know if something notable changed at DDG in the past month or so?
• superasn 5y ago
  There was a very good thread on HN about this not long ago(1). Google search is getting worse because it is letting companies like Pinterest game it. Instead of fixing the spam they are instead encouraging companies to spend more and more time on SEO and coming up with their own shenanigans like better ranking for using AMP (defunct now). People who generally make great content (think a researcher or a great software maker) can't compete with billion dollar companies like Canva, Shutterstock and Pinterest who spend millions of dollars on SEO and have dedicated SEO employees who spend all day sending outreach emails and doing experiments. Henceforth the good content never even sees the light of the day; drowned by all this "SEO" optimized content. FWIW i still believe it's the job of the search engine to find great relevant content and show it to the user instead of the other way round. Though I know it's much easier said than done. (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25538586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25538586
  • joe_the_user 5y ago
    It's not even just gaming or priority. As others mention, it just straight up ignores substantial search terms or interprets them only to sell mainstream crap. It will return nothing rather than obscure terms that are present on the web.
  • seoaeu 5y ago
    I don't understand this narrative that Google is making the search results get worse or "letting" companies game it. Search result ranking is adversarial! If the results are worse than they once were, that just means that Google is less far ahead in the arms race than they used to be
    • mleonhard 5y ago
      An alternative explanation is that Google stopped caring about UX.
      • AwaAwa 5y ago
        A doodle a day, is the UX way.
• jrockway 5y ago
  I think people stopped writing and started making videos because a revenue stream (sponsorships, patrons, ads) exist there. Nobody pays people to write anymore, so people stopped doing it.
• Element_ 5y ago
  I find all of Google products are just constantly iterated upon for the sake of keeping staff busy and just seem to get worse as time goes on. Google News used to be an easy to read html list that just worked. Now if you leave it open in a tab for more than 5mins you get a warning that it needs to be reloaded because of a software update.
• kneel 5y ago
  Google results are 80% paywalls, subscription blackouts and mailing list nags. I use google to search for results on websites I trust, it's basically useless otherwise.
• mda 5y ago
  I don't think Google got worse, there are always a few issues with an argument "Google got worse" Which search result is worse compared to "the time Google was good"? We need solid examples, which is usually extremely hard to find on HN threads such as these. Even the parent does not have a single good example.
• alexfromapex 5y ago
  Yes the Internet needs several viable search competitors but since the cost of maintaining all the data and creating a good algorithm are so high the barrier to entry seems almost insurmountable without some really clever innovations.
• overgard 5y ago
  I feel like they're so much worse. It used to be I could be precise about what I wanted, but now if it's not in the initial results, it's almost pointless to try to refine it at all.
• propogandist 5y ago
  it's a SEO / blog spammers paradise, with terrible results, designed to drive usage of AdWords Now that YouTube has gotten rid of dislikes expect YouTube to go down the same path. There will be more trash content and you'll only know once you watch the video (comments can be deleted). YT injects ads in front of unmonetized videos now, so they'll have bigger metrics for engagement and make more $$ on pre-roll ads.
• rc_mob 5y ago
  Yes. Google and Duck Duck Go are both horrible for finding information these days. I am actively experimenting with alternate options.
• maze-le 5y ago
  If you want to have a nice, clean search experience like google did in the good old days (before everything was page-rank-gamed and hyper-individuialized) just switch to duckduckgo. Google search has become insufferable, it tries to 'guess' the context of your queries and it fails miserably in my opinion. DDG is not per-se better, but at least it is not riddled with SEO spam...
• elondaits 5y ago
  Recently (last few months) Google results got REALLY BAD for me due to its attempts to provide region-specific results. I live in Argentina, and sometimes I search for Argentinian things, but also more often I search in English for things related to work, travel, hobbies, etc. It's reasonable and OK that when I search for certain things Google provides region-specific results (e.g. "servicio meteorológico nacional" [National meteorological service] brings up the Argentinian agency and other local results instead of any from other Spanish speaking countries). This has been like that for many years now, and is OK. The new thing is that more and more often I've been getting results that include argentine or Spanish-language results that have NO relevance to the search, and are a super big stretch. I haven't saved examples, but I tested for 3 minutes and just came up with one... trust me that I've seen much worse than this. Let's say I search for "french tv cat puppet" (I watched an old show called Telechat when I was a kid). I get the following results: 1 & 2 - Kitty Cats - Wikipedia (a French Canadian TV show... OK...) 3 - Pacha et les chats @ imdb (the same show) 4 - YouTube (???? "Missing: french ‎cat ‎puppet", warns Google) 5 - "Carmel: Who Killed Maria Marta?" @ Netflix (this is a true crime show based on a very famous murder in my country) None of those results were ads. I have no idea why Google would show results 4 and 5 except to think that their index for my country is very very broken/corrupt. Another "not as bad but still very bad" example: If I search for "mccartney bear song" (see Rupert and the Frog Song, and the "We all stand together" song) the first two results are spot on, but the third one is a Spanish language result from a local paper titled "These is the full list of songs that The Beatles played in the Get Back documentary by Peter Jackson", the snippet has McCartney and the word "song" from "Song Of Love" in bold. Final one. I search for "retro toys with water inside"... the search terms are super poor, but the image results show me that Google got me (e.g. the Tomy Waterful toys). Image results - OK Video results - OK 1 - Handheld water game @ Amazon (OK...) 2 - Pinterest results (groan...) 3 - A hacked home decor Argentine site that redirects me to a page that sells a doll, no water. 4 & 5 - Relevant retro toy pages 6 - A hacked Argentinian government page (under the .gov.ar TLD, which is for government site) with the "classic fashion CHATHAM ELECTRONICS JAN-CAHG-1Z2" title. Apparently has been fixed so now it has a 404 error. I rest my case. It's a disaster.
• jeffwask 5y ago
  Yes. There is more and more sponsored content dominate searches. Technical searches often return 15 XXXExtremeProgrammingAdvice.com sites with scrapped junk. I switched to DuckDuckGo a few months back and I am very happy with the change.
• zinxq 5y ago
  There's a whole class of searches that no longer have value because of SEO. Try "best exercise bike" or anything that can be similarly monetized and you will of course end up at a well-crafted page designed to monetize you. My deepest apologies for saying this, but for any type of query that has a monetization angle, I now add "site:www.reddit.com" to the query to find actual discussion about it. Normal Reddit disclaimers apply as much of what you find is garbage but at least if you search "best exercise bike" confined to reddit you'll get real opinion not hellbent on monetizing you.
  • agentdrtran 5y ago
    It's staggering how much the results for any product query that isn't from Reddit or a site like Wirecutter is just unusable. I was recently looking for thin winter gloves and literally every page was an SEO referral scam.
    • blt 5y ago
      Yeah, it's been happening for so long that it's easy to forget it wasn't always this way.
  • jdgoesmarching 5y ago
    I use this so often that I have it bound to a keyboard text replacement on all my devices. Recently Google has started inserting non-reddit posts to the top of my results even when I include this. Weirdly I’d be less upset if they were ads, but they aren’t. Just some articles that Google thought I wanted to see more than the website I specified. It’s infuriating.
    • ichydkrsrnae 5y ago
      Do you know what infuriates me most about this? It's that Google hasn't addressed it when it's clear as fucking day that their search results have gone in the tank. But now that I've typed that, I can see exactly why they haven't responded: a search company telling the world that its search results are f**ed. That would do wonders for the stock
• soheil 5y ago
  Not sure why anyone would think an answer to such a question lies here. There are teams of PhDs working on search inside Google with high levels of secrecy. We are to somehow deduce based on just the output of some searches what quantitative effects those works have? I'm not even sure Google itself can answer that question.
• meristem 5y ago
  There are many comments along the lines of "curated search, yes, please, so much". Right now search is "free" (user is the product). How much would you be willing to pay for a non-ad-driven, curated search site?
• jliptzin 5y ago
  I think Google just seems to be trying their best against an army of SEO/content marketing parasites constantly trying to game their algorithm, look up a recipe website for an example of what the internet will look like if those guys win.
• napier 5y ago
  Yes. It’s broken. I’d pay $20/month for search that worked at least as well as Google used to back in the day.
  • rdist 5y ago
    Looked at https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/?
• StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  There are plenty of good comments in this thread about how Google search results aren't as good because of SEO and companies like Pinterest, "gaming the system". However Google itself is not blameless in making their search quantitatively worse through their injection of censorship and politics into their searches. Google manipulates searches on a whole variety of subjects - current, political and historical - on a regular basis. For example, Google, "Syria gas attack" and compare the top 10 results you get when you go to Duck Duck Go and search for the exact same term. Google will tell you its because it ranks "authoritative" sources higher. What metrics Google uses to determine how "authoritative" a source are not revealed. Unsurprisingly, Google's choice of "authoritative" sources always aligns exactly with the DC/Pentagon/State Department blob. Ironically, these attempts at censorship by Google just serve to further undermine what little trust many people have in "authoritative" sources all together (aside from making their search function much less useful).
• marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I do think it's a bit of a mixed bag of causes. Google has mixed incentives since their main income is the ads they sell both on the search results page and in the pages linked from the search results. Looking after the interests of the users is a tricky balancing act, and it would be really easy for them to start cannibalizing themselves to eke out a bigger profit margin. In the absence of serious competition to keep them honest, it is in their economic interest to show mediocre search results with a painful amount of ads. Google also appears to have pivoted toward a few particular use cases of search engines, finding where to buy things, and answering questions. I think a few uses fall in the cracks between those patterns. They seem to be optimizing for the results that most people will click, which is fine if you are most people, but will worsen the experience for the long tail consisting of all the users looking for something specific off the beaten track. The algorithms seem to actively resist attempts at refining the query away from the most popular results, which is a peculiar behavior that I don't understand the motivation behind. I think this is a big mistake, as it makes what was already easy easier to find, and what's already difficult even more difficult to find.
• ksec 5y ago
  That is why you are seeing way more Search Engine startup. No one at Googles understand anything about quality, nor the intuition to understand what is good and what is bad. So they decide to AB test the heck out of everything. It is a lot like Microsoft in the 90s.
• j45 5y ago
  Google has probably gotten better at its business, better search results in the ads than the search results themselves. By owning demand for search the attention can be guided.
• kingcharles 5y ago
  Why is it that all the biggest search engines on the planet are now practically useless? Google, Amazon, eBay... practically worthless.
• winddude 5y ago
  empirically yes, for a number of things. But it's still better than the rest.
• pkamb 5y ago
  There's clearly a new form of highly ranking SEO "blogspam" that I'm now seeing in the top results for many searches. It's a long article, with multiple headings and short paragraphs for each. Your search terms will be a near-match for one of the headings. The problem is that heading is 3/4 of the way down the page, so you have to scroll past pages of introductory paragraphs and basic info about whatever you're searching for. For example, for the search term: > how long does icloud photo upload take Included in the top results are the pages: - https://9to5mac.com/2018/12/31/upload-icloud-photos-iphone-ipad-mac/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/12/31/upload-icloud-photos-iphone-i... - https://www.blog.motifphotos.com/using-icloud-for-your-photos-how-to-upload-photos-to-icloud/ https://www.blog.motifphotos.com/using-icloud-for-your-photo... - https://backlightblog.com/how-to-upload-photos-to-icloud-from-your-iphone-mac-or-pc https://backlightblog.com/how-to-upload-photos-to-icloud-fro... Which all fit the mold of blog post I'm describing. General, multi-heading pages about a particular topic that rank highly for a specific contained within. The content, once you get to it, isn't necessarily bad. But what I want from the results is a single page / blog post with only the specific heading and paragraph. Or even better, the best Stack Exchange question and/or Reddit thread that fits the term.
• awinter-py 5y ago
  tips: do prompt engineering like you're programming VQGAN GAN image generators can be tricked into giving results with phrases like 'unreal engine', 'artstation', 'junjo ito', 'van gogh' https://minimaxir.com/2021/08/vqgan-clip/ https://minimaxir.com/2021/08/vqgan-clip/ same for google. 'gist' gives you a specific category of technical results. seems like the default is some combination of medium, SO + github issues
  • yc12340 5y ago
    > do prompt engineering Prompt engineering has always been a useful tool and still is. But a lot of problem, discussed here, can't be solved by any amount of fiddling. When Google does not even search long tail results, and there is nothing relevant in any of their "caches", doing prompt engineering only wastes one's time. It appears, that there is some sort of fallback (?), that brings results of unfulfilled queries into a cache, but it isn't fast enough to respond to the user in real-time. Maybe Google should openly admit, that their resources aren't infinite, and offer to e-mail a better results once they are ready. Seriously.
• peanut_worm 5y ago
  yes but competition is even worse
• rob_c 5y ago
  From a freedom of speech perspective unfortunately. Google does a very good job of crushing wrong think. I'm not even talking about the last 2 years when they've been openly policing I mean stuff that's critical of employees that google has had to fire for committing felonies on their infrastructure. This constant "refinement" is getting to the point that I regularly end up hitting page 4 or 5 on technical matters because google introduced a broken system to counter abuse from people claiming to be best friends with bigfoot in his UFO... I with they'd trust tech blogs more than they do... Esp from authors sticking to the subject matter not conspiracies or opinion pieces. A decent tech blog is worth 1000x more than musk has ever tweeted for instance imo.
• aero-glide2 5y ago
  Imo YouTube search is really bad. First 5 results are related to your query, rest are just the most popular.
• poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
  Amazing suggestions from commenters on better search engines. Why hasn't a group of passionate developers gotten together to build an amazing, open source, ad-free, tamper-proof search engine? Wouldn't that instantly be like a mega impactful, economy-changing kind of project?
  • Volker_W 5y ago
    Good question. Do you know of any projects in that direction?
• freakeinstein 5y ago
  You are right, I'm one of the people who is frustrated by this. I have been researching this for a very long time. To my understanding, page rank algorithm is dead. Current definition of the Web is not just for public websites, it's now including a good majority of paywall websites and smart device apps. So, if we really wanted to organize world's data, we sure need an entirely new algorithm that will give equal opportunity to all these information holders which Google's current business model can't deliver. Again, to make things right, the next disrupter is going to be a neutral algorithm that will make all these closed information searchable in the public without infecting any business's individual interests. I'm seeing an interim era of Boutique search engines (powered by better search & people curation) - just like the old Yahoo (yet another hierarchal * *) era. I also believe that a unified search algorithm will unfold following this "yahoo like interim" again, to reorganize the Web once again. I'm sharing a document that I'm updating on this exact issue, with the information I have collected so far: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cSMY5wXSKhJdMxeJEvTUJ21eNX6TN38GvCLjTZEUssc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cSMY5wXSKhJdMxeJEvTUJ21e... I'm working on a project as well, to try solving this: https://aquila.network https://aquila.network - with an open, neutral search protocol. Anyways, some web standards organization can do the same thing better than me, with more impact. If they do, I'm more than happy to see that as well..
• mberning 5y ago
  It is incredibly worse than it used to be. They hate organic content that is not under their control. Think forums, blogs, etc. you have to add stuff to your query to get it to bubble the organic content to the top. The worst is when you are searching for enthusiast information that is typically found on forums, newsgroups, etc. I will often include the word “forum” or “blog” on my queries to find what I am looking for.
• version_five 5y ago
  I'm reading The Age of AI whose authors include Eric Schmidt. There is a part where they mention that in 2015 Google moved from "human developed" search algos to "Machine Learning". I don't know what that means in practical terms, but when I saw it a light went on for why their search had become so bad. I'd just add that I think it's bad in the sense that many others have mentioned- lots of crap at the top, ads, very hard to find more obscure stuff. Otoh, I generally still find it better than bing / ddg for most mainstream searches I would do.
• tonymet 5y ago
  There are a few factors at work. Primarily, quality content and discussions are now all paywalled (e.g. journals, magazines, newspapers, comment threads, and original content). Secondarily, remnant content is trivial search engine marketing content. This content is low quality, low information, often false, with a low-grade reading level. Third, google is actively down-ranking & removing “controversial” content in the name of ML fairness & integrity. In many cases this may be just, but it’s also going to lower the overall content quality because almost everything innovative is going to be controversial . So you have at least three massive forces preventing quality content & discussions from being found on web search.
• bsanr2 5y ago
  I submitted a post about this some time ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113007 It's not just an issue of refining results to fit a majority of the population. Something is seriously wrong with it.
• bob332 5y ago
  Who cares. Stop using their spy machine and use duckduckgo
• bigyellow 5y ago
  Google is no longer a search engine - it's a behavioral management software. Stop using it unless you like being manipulated.
• supperburg 5y ago
  Without any doubt both YouTube and google search have gotten way worse compared to ten years ago. It was crazy when I realized that I may have lived through a brief window in history when search was at its historical peak before being corrupted by politics and money or whatever it is that’s caused this change.
• jcadam 5y ago
  I see others have mentioned DuckDuckGo. Allow me to suggest swisscows: https://swisscows.com/ https://swisscows.com/ I've been using it as my default search engine the last couple of months and it seems to do a pretty good job.
  • amai 5y ago
    Seems to be based on Bing, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swisscows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swisscows
• kypro 5y ago
  Perhaps unrelated, but generally when companies establish monopolies and are valued primarily on their profits rather than their user growth their incentive to build the best possible product will diminish rapidly. For the mega-cap tech companies today their incentives are to add friction to prevent user migration and to aggressively monotonise their existing user base. This is why today sites like Reddit mostly focused on adding app nag messages to their site and appending posts with distracting badges for additional revenue. It's also why companies like Google don't care about your thoughts when it comes to removing dislikes from YouTube and continue to promote paid search results and their own search content every year. Usually when the product becomes so bad that people forgot why they use it in the first place a competitor will come along with a user-first approach and disrupt the market, but this is a process that is likely to take decades rather than years or months. In the meantime you can expect Google and other tech monopolies to continue making their products worse from a user's perspective. I find myself using a mix of search engines these days. Google is still my primary when working (code-related searches still preform better imo), but typically use DuckDuckGo on non-work devices and very occasionally I'll use Yandex when I'm searching for things which might be influenced by political bias. In the case of this specific question though I'm not sure whether Google consciously changed their search algorithm in a way they knew would result in poorer results. What it might suggest is that Google isn't putting as much resource into optimising the quality of their search results as they have previously. I know in recent years I've found myself increasingly using the "site:" modifier to return results from specific high-quality forums and sites which I trust. I find the vast majority of results for general queries these days link to ad-riddled, low-quality content farms.
• anaphor 5y ago
  It works if you put it in "Verbatim" mode for that particular search, but I don't know how to make it permanent. Does anyone know if there's a way to always force it to use "verbatim" mode?
  • alok-g 5y ago
    I know of a way and have been using it for years. It's a bit too complex to describe here. Reach out to me via email if interested. My email is in my profile.
• nlstitch 5y ago
  I indeed had some troubles today actually. We're finally moving from JDK7 to 8 and I was searching for recommended JVM settings.. but I only got old results and those results where biased on old info and their old presumptions. ( e.g. people meanwhile found stuff out so its good to have more relevant info on those findings, let alone newer patch versions can fix things that where broken previously) Adding "last year" to the filters didnt help either; I just got general docs from Oracle, but no developer blogs with best practices, benchmarks or experiences from fellow devs.
• tmaly 5y ago
  I have tried to use DDG for technical queries but Google still trumps them in this regard. However, I have noticed that DDG has gotten considerably better in general non-technical queries over the past year.
• _peeley 5y ago
  When it comes to reaching actual content that isn't just an entry in an API doc somewhere, Google is basically just a vehicle for me to get to StackOverflow/Reddit at this point. For almost every search I've done without appending "reddit", the first page is full of bullshit zero-effort listicles. Like the other day I wanted to see what web frameworks Go has to offer, but when I search "golang web frameworks" I get a million links like "Top 10 Best Go Web Framework 2021!!" that are filled with obviously scraped or auto-generated content. I get that SEO is kind of a race-to-the-bottom scenario, but I always wonder - how are these random sites in business? I understand that they get a good amount of traffic from said SEO and "advertising" pays good money for that traffic, but do advertisers really not grasp that people spend all of five seconds on these pages before going somewhere else?
• cmaggiulli 5y ago
  My father has been saying this for years. I find Google to be useful by using search operators. I know for a fact that the YouTube recommendations algorithm is “worse” than before. It’s infuriating
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    YouTube is fucking horrible. I can't fucking stand the "People also watched" results 5 results into your search results. I don't give a fuck what other people watch, I want what I searched for (which is already fucking bad)!!!
• yumraj 5y ago
  Personal anecdote from yesterday. I was running into an issue with a docker container that I was trying to install on my NAS. I searched using just the actual error, one word, and the name of the container/service, again one word. So two words in total: “FakeUserAgentError caliber-web” DDG gives great results, where the first result is GitHub issues related to what I’m seeing and so on. !g gives me first two links as some crap websites that have scraped the above GitHub issues, then the GitHub issue mentioned above and some JP/CN websites which are supposedly about the error but I can’t make sense. Utterly useless results. This is the first time I’ve seen this, never before. DDG results were miles better than Google results. Note: I generally use DDG so not sure if this is recent development or not.
• Scarblac 5y ago
  Yes. It seems it has somehow stopped returning search results. It tries to answer my question, it shows summaries of Wikipedia articles, it has a host of sponsored links, it can point to things on the map. But I'm using a Web search engine and I was trying to find Web pages containing my search terms. That idea seems to have been lost somewhat. (yes, I guess if you scroll down far enough. But it's probably a matter of months before they're all gone)
• dmje 5y ago
  For me, very definitely. But. I've also turned off all search history etc so am probably shooting myself in the foot...
• theknocker 5y ago
  Google now tells us what we're searching for.
• willwhitney 5y ago
  Would it be bad if we made advertising... illegal? In small part because it would reduce the principal-agent disparity between what you want to do and what Google wants you to do, but more importantly because it would remove the incentive to create blogspam and game the results. Advertising serves a positive purpose by informing people about products that they will like and otherwise would not find. It also serves a negative purpose by attempting to cause people to make decisions which are not in their best interests. I am genuinely curious what proportion of ads seen serve each of those two purposes.
  • Volker_W 5y ago
    I want to be informed as good and as neutral as possible. Ad spaces are sold to the highest bidder.
• murple 5y ago
  They are pretty centralized this days and always try to show results from well-know sources: there services like youtube + facebook / twitter / instagram / wikipedia and other well-know sources and news portals.
• chimen 5y ago
  i get only spam websites, that redirect to Aliexpress, in top positions lately
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• axydlbaaxr 5y ago
  There's a whole legion of (underpaid) Search Engine Results Analysts out there that can tell you horror stories of why this is happening.
• sam0x17 5y ago
  Not only that, the alternatives have vanished and have also become worse as they adopt the same algorithmic changes google has made over the years (or just outright scrape google behind the scenes). This is shocking given the existence (now) of publicly available, open source indexing databases. You can literally build a search engine without indexing infrastructure, but everything out there is still crap.
  • Volker_W 5y ago
    > publicly available, open source indexing databases Where?
    • sam0x17 5y ago
      https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
• mongol 5y ago
  I am sure it is possible to surprise with a search service that is as much better as Google were to it's competition when it launched. I have no idea how to build it, but given that Google eqrch as of today is not very good, it must be possible.
• gvkhna 5y ago
  I’ve been using DDG for sometime now and can attest, it’s results are very good for technical queries. It’s fast and private.
• joshuakarl 5y ago
  My take: Github Copilot and similar products will replace many google queries in the near future, for code, but also for other specific domains. When I type a query, I'm essentially trying to summarize my context, and I can't compete with an advanced deep learning model that reduces my code to a 300-dimensional context vector. The same is true for a lawyer writing a legal document or a scientist writing an academic paper. Very curious to see the developments in the next few years.
  • fault1 5y ago
    Yeah, but Google does nearly the same thing with search personalization and context sensitive ranking. Almost all personalized information retrieval systems are some variant of this type of recipe since the late 90s no matter what mathematical model they use. Perhaps the problem for Google is that there is strong incentive for the content providers to play a cat and mouse game (aka SEO) with google. Depending on business model, anyone sufficiently popular in this space will probably have similar problems once companies have to either pay for content or revenue share. Github is a situation where people (open source developers) "donated" their code to Microsoft, but most of the world is not that egalitarian.
• pc86 5y ago
  This seems like much more of a qualitative statement than a quantitative one.
• Nanplune 5y ago
  I find it so offensive, the search engine is a fountain of knowledge and any small mod has such a profound impact on our well being Who are these people at google that feel entitled to deprive the human race of it's most precious resource? DDG has worked well for me
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  Well, by one measure, the quesiton's been asked on HN for at least the past 12 years: "google search quality" https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search+quality https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search+quality "google search worse" https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search+worse https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search+worse Notably, from 12 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999 (There are many other results.)
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  Similar experience, unfortunately, and this is common to other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo. I find it more difficult to find what I am looking for, and I spend more and more time searching directly on Reddit or Youtube.
• bmcahren 5y ago
  I recently wrote to somebody talking about a specific type of WiFi interference from idle wifi modems not transmitting traffic. No matter what you search Google for regarding the specific type of interference we were discussing, google dumbs it down for you and provides exclusively results for "Di'ja wanna know how 'ta choose the best wifi channel?" completely ignoring my technical terms even when I add plus signs and double quotes around them.
• trizic 5y ago
  It may be worse for some of us but is it getting better for the average/common person?
• taylodl 5y ago
  People still use Google to search the web? JK. I've been using DDG for years now so I haven't kept up as much with what Google is doing these days. I used to !g when DDG turned up empty-handed and I have noticed that's become more and more pointless. Is Dogpile still around? I haven't used them in years either.
• whateveracct 5y ago
  Google will frequently try to sell me something unrelated when I do a specific query. It'll throw up links to local stores that match the text somehow. It's obviously about getting me to spend money.
• chrstphrknwtn 5y ago
  Query: "Jeans" Result: Lots of "Best quality/value jeans for 2021" SEO optimised pages with Amazon/affiliate links and not a lot of useful information. Search engines seem to have become entirely online retail focussed. Even things like searching a location is now productised in "Top 10 hotels in location for 2021".
• quinnjh 5y ago
  Ive made multiple 4-5 word queries looking for specific information ive found before and will be presented with 1-3 pages of results. What happened? I remember always getting g o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o g l e pages and pretty much always being able to go to the 30th "O". I find it hard to believe the internet is now smaller than it was in mid 2000s Plenty of technical topics where i get better results from duck duck go (and i dont even like it)
  • seoulmetro 5y ago
    They're censoring searches. If Google were a tool like a saw, it'd have 2 or 3 of it's 200 cutting grooves left. People would say, oh it's just poorly maintained! But the reality is they shaved those grooves off because they were scared you'd finish cutting.
• _xnmw 5y ago
  Yes, Google has become worse because the problem is now much harder. I believe that Google's time is coming, because the fundamental idea of a single centralized global search engine won't work anymore in a world that produces petabytes of new content every second. PageRank (or any other ranking algorithm) cannot compete with the massive economic incentives of SEO spammers and content writers in every niche and every language on the planet. Machine learning is even more susceptible to adversarial input. The time has come for a distributed, decentralized search engine powered by the immensely powerful devices in our pockets, with rankings determined by our peers and local network, not by a single global ranking. I'm not saying a distributed search engine with localized results will replace Google (you still want the global standardized search results in some cases), but rather we need a better alternative to simply asking your friends/communities like Reddit. The combined spare computing power of every smartphone on the planet is probably greater than AWS or Google Cloud could ever be. If people were incentivized to sell their spare battery/CPU/network capacity for web crawling, perhaps by earning money, this would solve the advertising/privacy problem with Google's business model as well.
• easymodex 5y ago
  Yes oh god, anytime i search for something simple in my own language i get tons of auto translated articles (likely with google translate, heh) which are completely botched with no useful info, just clickbait and jumbled sentences using as many keywords as possible. The spam content is killing the web.
• numlock86 5y ago
  The only thing I noticed is that I almost have to scroll "2 pages" until I get to actual results and not just ads. If it keeps going like this actually having to click on page two isn't so far fetched anymore ...
• herpderperator 5y ago
  > For example, google seems to want full sentences instead of just keywords now. Are we really shaming Google for having superior NLP? If you want the answer to a question, ask the question! I see no problem with this progress.
• ggm 5y ago
  Good quantitative data is hard to find in this space. I'd welcome it, both as a user and out of interest in the data science. How would you quantify things? What search corpus bearing in mind the algorithm is possibly influenced by what terms are being used worldwide, weighting caches and the like.
• aaron695 5y ago
  You've asked ~4 different questions. Close to none of the replies acknowledge this. Yes, HN quantifiably is close to useless. They can't even understand the problem/questions let alone the answer. To answer some No, Google is not worse, it's just different. But I can't quantify it. I haven't kept old data. For Dorking check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shodan_(website) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shodan_(website) Google Dorking still works fine. Almost by definition it's up to you to find new Dorks as the old ones get closed. The fact Sal dulu a used to autocomplete to Sal dulu Antasma might have been Personal results, did it work for anyone else? Have you turned this off?
• webdoodle 5y ago
  I only use news.Google.com to search news articles, which it's somewhat okay at as long as it isn't a political related search (which it is extremely biased at). Otherwise I find google pretty much sucks at search anymore and don't even bother with it.
• cjohansson 5y ago
  Yes Google is following Facebook and YouTube business model of building echo chambers. You only get stuff that confirm your opinion so it's useless if you want the truth about any particular topic. DDG is better but it has problems too
• Shadonototra 5y ago
  i noticed the exact same thing.. it's almost impossible to google game dev programming things... IMPOSSIBLE to find good resources anymore, it almost as if old (and valuable) resources are not referenced anymore!
• zteppenwolf 5y ago
  Agreed, google search became a PoS for tech users. I can't find anymore things I know exists - that means I won't ever be able to find new stuff there.
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
  Walled garden. It will converge as the great reset converges. It is like closing the fence around your cattle.
• Volker_W 5y ago
  Yes, feels like websites that consist of 3 sentences of actual information spreed across 5 paragraphs are winning. Also, I don't like how google tries to demote controversial "wrong think". Why doesn't google show stuff like https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ or https://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq2.html https://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq2.html higher? I think it would be great if in the settings you could upload e.g. some python code that modifies some parameters. I would e.g. write something like change_score("pinterest.com", -7) change_score("based.cooking", +8) change_score("stroustrup.com", +4) Than you could share your code on e.g. hackernews. That way you could actually punish clickbait.
• rokahnhn 5y ago
  How about a company providing user agents which can undertake searches on one’s behalf (e.g. to Google, DDG, etc) and filter those results? There may not be a need to reinvent search but instead to filter search results. Such agents may preemptively download result pages and use machine learning and other users feedback to assess their relevance. It could also curate content more than ad blockers and Readability by, for example, hiding less relevant content (e.g. all recipes seem to follow some SEO-optimized format of posing pages of gibberish before presenting the actual recipe). This sounds like a browser or browser extension coupled with servers to maintain the relevance models. This may be coupled with a VPN so pages could be downloaded as that user and analyzed in the cloud and sent to the user only if/when needed.
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  > I think I might be stuck in some old habits of googling and I've lost touch with modern google. I'm with you on that 100%. When did we arrive at the point where relevant keywords don't return relevant results? Is training an AI on natural language processing more important than keeping your flagship product reliable? And the blog spam... I think google has gotten qualitatively worse. It's no longer a search engine, it is a recommendation engine. I flat out don't use it anymore for anything other than addresses. This wouldn't be so bad if most of the major competitors weren't just metasearch engines relying on google. Bing is no better. It's gotten to be what it was like in 1999, you can't rely on a single engine for anything. So "default search" in browsers doesn't serve as useful a purpose anymore. I find myself using an assortment of engines, including Brave (IMO currently providing the best experience, although that doesn't say much right now) and obscure engines like gigablast.
• seoulmetro 5y ago
  Yes. Extremely, much, worse. The same goes for YouTube. Does anyone have a solution though? Even DuckDuckGo is bad.
• gverrilla 5y ago
  we need a search engine that will punish SEO
• ddtaylor 5y ago
  DDG user for the last 5 years and very happy with it.
• dogleash 5y ago
  I've been using bing at least once a week for a few months. It's gone from "haha who uses bing?" to the thing I turn to when I need to pull something obscure out of the web and it's always in the first page or two. It feels like google of 10 years ago - in a good way.
• egberts1 5y ago
  had to learn how to ignore Google ADs in search results.
• skinkestek 5y ago
  This fall I have found better results for some queries using search.marginalia.nu For day to day work I use a mainstream engine like DDG first but they are insanely bad when it comes to respecting my queries. Earlier I used to fall back to Google who are equally bad but sometimes have slightly different results. Now I also fall back to search.marginalia.nu for certain types of queries since if it knows about the topic at all the pages it ranks on top are often far better than what Google and DDG comes up with. Another important thing is that with marginalia I know within a second if it had results. With DDG and Google I have to peek into every result to see if it is spam or ham. (There used to be that the preview snippets on front of Google showed where in the text the result came from but that probably was too useful and led to fewer ad impressions so they removed it.)
• otherotherchris 5y ago
  I can never be sure that Google and Bing (including DDG) are actually searching for what I tell them to, even after putting all my keywords in quotes, using intext:"keyword", or using "verbatim" mode. I strongly suspect Google is substituting synonyms and "near synonyms" with irrelevant garbage to maximize Adsense yield. DDG and Bing are worse, as they ignore the quotes altogether rather than just most of the time. Yandex has a vastly smaller index and ignores quotes a lot of the time as well.