14 ms·

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

• 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
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  It's not even just dumbing down. It's heavily weighting to selling one or another thing. It's been getting worse for years but it's really degenerated in the last several months. You can sort of fight it by including a term showing your topic in your search, I think.
• flacebo 5y ago
  The "people also searched for" box is not just useless, but also very much messing with usability for me. Every time I click on a link, go back, then trying to click on the next link, this box shows up and I accidentally click on that (because it shows up with a little delay and an animation). This filter takes care of that box completely: www.google.com##.exp-outline www.google.com##[style="display: block; opacity: 1;"] www.google.com##[data-hveid]>div:style(height: auto !important)
  • drainyard 5y ago
    I cannot stress enough how infuriating it is when a page loads content under my mouse cursor at such a delay that I can manage to point at a link and click on it _before_ the new content is loaded so that I click/tap an unexpected link. This happens _all_ the time on the Twitter app search bar.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      bad enough when it’s accidental, more infuriating when it’s done with a profit motive theverge.com presents a “show comments” button that shifts out of the way to reveal the worthless taboola links, I honestly don’t know how it isn’t considered click fraud
    • trulyme 5y ago
      This is infuriating on all UIs, but I haven't seen one that would implement a very obvious solution: if the area around click has changed in 100ms before the event, disregard the click. Either a webpage or a browser could do that. I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of it, so there must be some reason why it isn't done - does anyone know why?
      • der-ofenmeister 5y ago
        Great idea, although from an engineering POV I think this is really hard. Most websites are super JS-heavy and hence, from a browser's POV, change constantly. Quite a ton of difference between pixels on the screen changing and the underlying DOM changing.
• fxtentacle 5y ago
  Yes, that is also my observation. They will show content that completely does not contain your query words if that content is just popular enough. The result is that niche technical topics get drowned out by related popular discussions. Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't find it. But of course, it's still on GitHub. Similarly, Google will sometimes not find a single result for some Windows API function names, despite them being publicly documented on docs.microsoft.com.
  • Engineering-MD 5y ago
    You can test this- find a site you think is not indexed, search for the URL of Google, and then look at the cache and the date. I bet it’s been cached more recently than you expect.
  • fxtentacle 5y ago
    (same poster) BTW, amazon.com is in my opinion even more infuriating. I just searched for "Odense Marzipan" (which is a 100+ years old brand serving the royal danish court) and they show me pictures of gamepads made out of chocolate along with a note: Your search "odense marzipan" was automatically translated into "odicht marzipan". Then searching for "odicht" out of curiousity, they auto-correct it to "olight". So I start with almond-based sugar sweets, follow their auto-correct twice and now I'm staring at headlamps. And even Google has no idea what "odicht" might have been, so I really wonder how Amazon decided to auto-correct from an existing product into a non-word. Searching for "odense marzipan" including the quotes then works, but it yields the cringe-worthy message: Your search ""odense marzipan"" was automatically translated into "„odense marzipan“". (where the only difference between the first and the second thing is that they converted the ascii quotes to up and down sentence quotes)
    • vgeek 5y ago
      "We know what is best for you, consumer!"
• alecco 5y ago
  > The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries Google is simply maximizing profits by giving users results that would cause either more clicks on ads or show more ads. It's mission is to make money this quarter/year. If you believe any of their Silicon Valley-style new age talking points you probably don't have critical thinking skills. If their products are getting worse for you perhaps you are not part of a profitable segment for them.
• esyir 5y ago
  I often see this line of thought come up whether topics like this float around and wonder: how can we demonstrate /quantify /prove this. Especially since I'm already partial to agreement.
  • jonnycomputer 5y ago
    by doing it better?
  • ichydkrsrnae 5y ago
    Sundar Pichai knows we aren't Reddit script kiddies here at HN. He's going to need a seatbelt for that CEO chair if this devolves further.
• scollet 5y ago
  Let's expand the scope too. Try searching for any product outside your wheelhouse and it quickly devolves into an undergrad research endeavor. I can't trust the first or second page results because of SEO. Then every page after quickly veers off topic or just features sites that aren't as good at SEO.
• narag 5y ago
  I've thought about it and I think that the really infuriating thing is that somehow the program wrongly assumes that I made a typo, so it's wrong and telling me that I'm wrong. No! It's you!! You're wrong!!! DDG is heading this wrong direction too. Today I've searched for some ecommerce platform called Comerzzia and it showed me some Comerzia or Comercia or whatever shops near me. It shows maps if it thinks they're related and apparently I can't disable that feature.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  I've also completely switched over to DDG and I'm seeing similar things that infuriate me about Google. Most of all the fact that ignores my "literal" searches using double quotes. The documentation [0] says > Results for exact term [...]. If no results are found, we'll try to show related results. But very regularly it fails to find results I know exist in not so unpopular places. [0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
  • abruzzi 5y ago
    this always baffles me. If my search terms return zero hits, THAT is helpful and meaningful to know, when they change my search to enable hits, that isn't helpful, because it 99% of the time will not have the information I want, and frequently I won't know that they are ignoring search term, so I'll click through to half a dozen hits before I discover what theyve done. I got to the point that as soo as I clicked a link, the first thing I'd do on the landing page was command-f, and search for the most specific term in my google query. If it wasn't found, I'd instantly hit the back button and do the next hit. This really got to me about 6 months ago, so I changed all my default searches on all my browsers and mobile to DDG, and haven't looked back. I tried DDG ~5 years ago, and there was no way it could have replaced google for me then, but when I did it 6 months ago, it didn't seem any worse, maybe a little better.
  • ichydkrsrnae 5y ago
    This. You'd think from the responses herein that using quotes was a panacea. It isn't. I see what you see. I think it's ignoring the quotes.
• simplExpanation 5y ago
  Shocking that tight emotional connection is more valuable to most people than throwing spaghetti at the wall. It’s almost as if the government and big companies have spent a lot of effort understanding human biology, cognitive function and applying what was learned. While selling the masses on a contrived story keeps them believing there’s a universe of infinite life available to humanity if you just follow these steps… Things like human colonization of space, and political memes about wealth are taking advantage of the same biological quirks as religion. It’s just now we can quantify the effects rather than wave it off as mysticism. But the human story is already set on a path of building a bridge to nowhere.
• zerd 5y ago
  Google now also has an extreme recency bias. Most things I search for will give top results for recent SEO optimized blog posts/Youtube videos instead of established authoritative resources. If you search for something that happens to overlap with a recent movie name, good luck, it'll drown. And I constantly "have" "to" "search" "like" "this" because Google thinks it knows better than me.
  • gausswho 5y ago
    While I also am annoyed how much I need to enquoten to refine search, in most cases I wish it upped the bias further. My default search applies the 'Past year' filter because otherwise I get lots of outdated answers.
    • mohanmcgeek 5y ago
      For some cases where I know that the recent results are going to be verbose spam, I set the filter to before:2015
• atarian 5y ago
  I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but when I also look for technical stuff I see a lot of Stackoverflow copy-cats on the first page.
  • asdff 5y ago
    A lot of sites that just scrape github too end up high in the results. The actual github page isn't even on the first page if anywhere at all. The spam sites do a better job at crawling code than google does.
  • kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    And a lot of them have stolen content from other sites.
• moffkalast 5y ago
  > hashbang Maybe it's just me but those always seem vastly gratuitous. Like shouldn't the engine figure that out automatically? It's like half its job.
  • frosted-flakes 5y ago
    The engine should automatically detect that I want to be booted to a third-party site? Err, no. That would be infuriating behaviour if it happened without explicit instruction.
    • moffkalast 5y ago
      It should detect if a query is very likely to be something that appears on say stackoverflow and then offer it as a first search result. Does doing the hashbangs actually throw you directly onto the site? I'd assumed it just restricted results to that site.
  • YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    Most of the time they are nothing more than an site:xyz.com equivalent that is just easier to access and you can group them to say something like !dev and search hn, stackoverflow etc in one search without all the blog spam in between.
• abhchand 5y ago
  DDG works great for ~90% of my queries. I do fall back on Google every now and then, but DDG honestly delivers results that are just fine.
• cs702 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. The fundamental, unavoidable problem is that the cost of providing high-quality results on the long-tail of possible searches tends to grow faster than the revenues that can be earned from those increasingly rare, obscure, long-tail searches. Any search service seeking to maximize profit, like Google or DDG, ultimately always evolves to perform less and less well on the long tail of possible searches. The search service we all wish we could have -- a service seeking to maximize the quality of individual searches, no matter how obscure -- may not be feasible as a profit-maximizing business.
  • joe_the_user 5y ago
    The fundamental, unavoidable problem is that the cost of providing high-quality results on the long-tail of possible searches tends to grow faster than the revenues that can be earned from those increasingly rare, obscure, long-tail searches. I think even two years ago, Google searches had far more depth and yet Google was quite profitable (then the searches were still biased but now stuff is simply gone). Sure, if someone looked at the marginal profitability of every single search result, it would look like what we're seeing. But there was a time when good indexing of stuff that didn't turn a profit by itself was done as a service to attract people to Google and/or to improve the Internet generally. That time has passed, clearly but it was a decision.
    • cs702 5y ago
      I agree. In all likelihood, the decisions were made gradually to improve overall efficiency without losing search volume, but the unintended consequence was to degrade search quality, at first gradually in subtle ways, and then suddenly in very noticeable ways.[a] It's possible no one in the company's executive team has noticed the loss of quality. In fact, they may not think anything's wrong even now. [a] I'm paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/102579-how-did-you-go-bankrupt-two-ways-gradually-then-suddenly https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/102579-how-did-you-go-bankr...
• asdff 5y ago
  This combined with the fact that programmers have went from highly specific names like "winamp" to just capitalizing a random english word to name their tool makes it very hard to find relevant information.
  • Y_Y 5y ago
    Word.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  What I'm wondering is if the efficiency of the spider itself has dropped. I've often hunted for an old Reddit post I once saw a long time ago and found no hits - maybe I got the wording wrong, but I suspect the real reason is that lower-popularity reddit content is simply not getting indexed at all. Or maybe it's the extreme recency bias others have discussed. Of course, I have no evidence because I can't find the thing that I can't find.
• Blikkentrekker 5y ago
  Frankly, I mostly receive political articles and columns when asking for more more objective things. I remember once searching for how common same-sex relationships among teenagers are in Japan, as some say it is very common, and all I received were political opinion pieces that did not in any way come with the numbers I sought on Google, so I then tried DuckDuckGo and to my amusement what I received with the same query was mostly pornography. Neither particularly useful, but the contrast in how both prioritize was interesting to me.
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  Specialised search engines are getting better. i use github search for code search, and sometimes stackoverflow search for technical questions. i have a directory of duckduckgo !bang operators, for easy access https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html This helps to find the specialised search engine, if you need one. (it scans duckduckgo for any new !bang operators, in a nightly built, here is the script: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang ) I suspect, that most of these specialised search engines are powered by elasticsearch. It may be, that elastic is starting to cut into google search, from the low end.