7 ms·

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

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!"
  - chaoskanzlerin 5y ago
    well, this particular instance is amazon
- azalemeth 5y ago
  Thanks for introducing me to Odense marzipan (I have a job in Aarhus!) I very much get the feeling that amazon and eBay "Don't like" Denmark – the former redirects amazon.dk to amazon.de saying "we deliver!" and the latter doesn't exist (but it does wholly-own a local alternative). Going to Denmark always makes me aware of how good the local Danish things are, and how inflexible and annoying the "global" options usually are by comparison. Riding roughshod over the language is a good example of this.
  - bserge 5y ago
    They "don't like" many small countries. Perhaps based on population or GDP, who the fuck knows. They just redirect you to the nearest bigger country website and call it a job well done. Tbf, there are no issues buying from German or French versions. UK was the best choice but now customs is a pain in the ass so...
- narag 5y ago
  I've searched for a product with a unique name and Amazons can't find it. "Do you need help?" not even "I'm unable to find what you need". Nice. The product is there. It works adding the company name.
- 867-5309 5y ago
  I'm getting lots of results on Amazon UK, and also Google Shopping. maybe try setting your delivery location?
- nucleardog 5y ago
  Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available. A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variations on search strings. I eventually gave up and punched it in Google to get... kicked back to Amazon to a simple, cheap SATA bluray drive that had been there all along.
  - Accujack 5y ago
    >Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available This is exactly it. Amazon isn't a shopping site, they're a corporation using third party sellers to offload the risk and cost of providing a wide array of goods. They let customers experiment with product offerings, find products that sell using their web site, then cherry pick the most lucrative ones to produce and stock to compete with their own "customers". They're not a service for anyone but themselves.
    - mcovey 5y ago
      I almost always filter for items shipped from and sold by Amazon. The only times I buy from third-party sellers are when the seller is clearly the manufacturer or a large distributor.
  - spaniard89277 5y ago
    I just gave up on Amazon Spain about 2 years ago already. It's just completely impossible to filter and rank stuff properly, just loads of crap you don't want. I heard it's worse in Amazon US. What I don't get about this companies (because this seems a problem shared between google, YT and Amazon) is when they optimize for clicks or whatever their KPI, what are they thinking is the outcome in the mid term? I mean, IDK around you, but I'm the prosumer regular folks ask for recommendations. They may be safe for the time being but of course I'm going to contribute for their competitors getting klout. I don't have an alternative for YT, but people watches me using DDG and whe they ask for recommendations for buying stuff I don't even bother with Amazon. I'm not the type who pushes his decisions onto others, but I already got asked why I don't use google and amazon.
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  It must be a recent thing as well as I recall being able to get good results from them last year at Xmas when I was searching for some science books for the kids. This year my searches got absolute garbage in return.
- u10242 5y ago
  Just a theory, but "dense" in English translates to "dicht" in German.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Amazon.com search is probably the worst offender of all the awful search engines. You can spend hours trying to find something you know is on there.
- makeitrain 5y ago
  Yeah, Amazon search results are often infuriating. Most searches are flooded with similar items that need better filters and some notes on product differentiation. Amazon feels like a bazaar set up inside a Walmart where everyone is yelling at you to buy from them and you don't really know what you're going to get. I know it's a hard problem, but I can often look at the results and imagine some easy UX improvements. Maybe they have higher priorities than helping me buy insulated pants.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    I wish shopping for consumer goods was as nice as faceted search on Octopart or Digikey. It seems that even for Amazon-sold products, either the products don't have relevant data listed accurately and consistently, or the faceted search doesn't let you query it. (And that leaves aside the issue of the product page of a really nice wastebasket I bought years ago being hijacked by a meat slicer.)
    - iudqnolq 5y ago
      I just wish DigiKey let you filter by price, or even sort by price on mobile.
- DonaldFisk 5y ago
  Are others getting the same problem? I searched for "Odense Marzipan" on duckduckgo.com, google.com, amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk, and all of them return almond-based sugar sweets in the top links.
- smallerfish 5y ago
  Amazon is absolutely terrible. Try this search, for example: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=A1990+trackpad+replacement https://www.amazon.com/s?k=A1990+trackpad+replacement There is an actual product (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GKQB9T https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GKQB9T) with all of my keywords in the title. I found it via a google search because I gave up scrolling through Amazon. I actively avoid shopping Amazon where possible these days, just because it's such a trashy experience.
- blt 5y ago
  Maybe I am looking upon the past with rose-colored glasses, but I recall a time when shopping on Amazon was like shopping at a huge Target. A lot of well-known name brands mixed with some no-name stuff. It was a nice relief from the limited selection, daytime hours, lines, and out-of-stock errors at department and big-box stores. Now shopping on Amazon feels like shopping on eBay or Aliexpress with fast shipping. Everything name-brand could be counterfeit, and everything no-name is a complete gamble.
- matt_heimer 5y ago
  Searching on amazon.com for Odense Marzipan works for me and is not automatically translated. No quotes needed.
- bradlys 5y ago
  Amazon search is horrendous garbage. I was trying to buy replacement ear tips for my earbuds. I knew exactly what to search for. Yet, Amazon search only returned the Large size and none of the others. (Clicking on the large listing only had the large size available. No drop down selection or anything) I go to Google and type in the same search and put Amazon in the search too. Immediately shows up as first result and I was able to buy them. I figured they were out of stock and that’s why I couldn’t get them. Nope - Amazon search is just that bad.
- xnx 5y ago
  Google does a pretty good or better job of searching amazon.com than Amazon does, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22odense+marzipan%22+site%3Aamazon.com https://www.google.com/search?q=%22odense+marzipan%22+site%3...
mrweasel 5y ago
> Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Rather weird if true, but I can't really disagree with your observation. It seems like large parts of the web have disappeared in the last five to ten years. Google do most likely index the sites, but their current algorithm just don't use them, because it as much a promotion algorithm at it is search.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I have a public repo on GitHub that just doesn't show up on Google. Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Actually, that might be because of their antispam filters. They were always fighting websites with countless subdirectories or subdomains, having completely wiped them off their SERPs in the past. GitHub does fit the "huge website with lots of duplicate content" description very well. Then again, Twitter seems to be doing fine. But I have a suspicion that they have some sort of agreement (and GitHub doesn't), because I have to regularly "report as spam" (note how that implies Google decides what's spam and what isn't) Twitter emails and they still pop up in the inbox after a while.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      I mean, that's probably true, I just made this repo specifically to help people who are looking to control a DRV8830 chip from the raspberry Pico, and I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to find it if there is no combination of "raspberry pi" and "DRV8830" that would get you to that repo on Google.
    - verve_rat 5y ago
      Maybe, but then you get all the GitHub issue clone sites and all the Stackoverflow clone sites showing up at the top of the results with the original no where to be seen. It might be anti-spam, but how is it this shit?
kingcharles 5y ago
Yes, I actually find Bing is now better for the long tail. Most of my searches are for really old pages or really long tail stuff and Google just simply doesn't bubble them up, if it has them at all. I keep finding web sites lately from links on other sites and find myself asking "Why the fuck did Google not find this?" .. then I go back to Google and try to find it with keywords from the site, and nothing...
- coffeecat 5y ago
  I also recommend switching to Bing. It shows me the results I'm looking for pretty consistently, whereas Google/Duck will sometimes give me Google's home page or the Washington Post's home page instead of anything even resembling the query I'm searching for.
Clockface12 5y ago
Yeah. Absolutely infuriating if you specifically use quotes and you get all sorts of dross not containing what you're looking for. Clearly they have figured out in some way that giving the end user what they want does not maximise income. Google News too has become flaky. Often does not find stuff you know is there, or finds it one day, but not another. Hrmph.
- grangerg 5y ago
  I'm in a similar boat with the "Google Now" feed on Android. When I say "not interested", it fails to note that as expected, and I see the same news "story" pop up (usually different sites, but occasionally the exact same site!). It's likely related to the fact that it almost NEVER gets the subject/topic correct, so I can never use that option. There was a time I thought I'd trained it to stop telling me about what celebrity said or wore what, but those are creeping back into my feed.
  - systemBuilder 5y ago
    YouTube has started showing me the same videos over and over again! I keep telling it I don't want to see this content because I've seen it before and it keeps forgetting! I absolutely hate the Google has changed the semantics of search so that it doesn't really pay attention to your keywords unless you quote them. In Google's mind you're not serious about a keyword until you quote it! Garbage!
jck 5y ago
Google definitely changed something about how they index or prioritize GitHub sometime in the last year. I used to frequently use Google to(successfully) find GitHub repos based. Lately, this does not work for me anymore; adding "GitHub" to my search query helps sometimes but I'm forced to search directly in GitHub many times.
psadri 5y ago
Is there a market for a focused, specialized search engine, for example, relatively speaking -- google circa 2010 with all the specialized search operators etc... focused on technical content? What does the business model look like? Ads (it would be in front of a very valuable audience of technical folks)? Or paid subscriptions (perhaps the community votes which resources get crawled / indexed)

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!"
- chaoskanzlerin 5y ago
  well, this particular instance is amazon
azalemeth 5y ago
Thanks for introducing me to Odense marzipan (I have a job in Aarhus!) I very much get the feeling that amazon and eBay "Don't like" Denmark – the former redirects amazon.dk to amazon.de saying "we deliver!" and the latter doesn't exist (but it does wholly-own a local alternative). Going to Denmark always makes me aware of how good the local Danish things are, and how inflexible and annoying the "global" options usually are by comparison. Riding roughshod over the language is a good example of this.
- bserge 5y ago
  They "don't like" many small countries. Perhaps based on population or GDP, who the fuck knows. They just redirect you to the nearest bigger country website and call it a job well done. Tbf, there are no issues buying from German or French versions. UK was the best choice but now customs is a pain in the ass so...
narag 5y ago
I've searched for a product with a unique name and Amazons can't find it. "Do you need help?" not even "I'm unable to find what you need". Nice. The product is there. It works adding the company name.
867-5309 5y ago
I'm getting lots of results on Amazon UK, and also Google Shopping. maybe try setting your delivery location?
nucleardog 5y ago
Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available. A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variations on search strings. I eventually gave up and punched it in Google to get... kicked back to Amazon to a simple, cheap SATA bluray drive that had been there all along.
- Accujack 5y ago
  >Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available This is exactly it. Amazon isn't a shopping site, they're a corporation using third party sellers to offload the risk and cost of providing a wide array of goods. They let customers experiment with product offerings, find products that sell using their web site, then cherry pick the most lucrative ones to produce and stock to compete with their own "customers". They're not a service for anyone but themselves.
  - mcovey 5y ago
    I almost always filter for items shipped from and sold by Amazon. The only times I buy from third-party sellers are when the seller is clearly the manufacturer or a large distributor.
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  I just gave up on Amazon Spain about 2 years ago already. It's just completely impossible to filter and rank stuff properly, just loads of crap you don't want. I heard it's worse in Amazon US. What I don't get about this companies (because this seems a problem shared between google, YT and Amazon) is when they optimize for clicks or whatever their KPI, what are they thinking is the outcome in the mid term? I mean, IDK around you, but I'm the prosumer regular folks ask for recommendations. They may be safe for the time being but of course I'm going to contribute for their competitors getting klout. I don't have an alternative for YT, but people watches me using DDG and whe they ask for recommendations for buying stuff I don't even bother with Amazon. I'm not the type who pushes his decisions onto others, but I already got asked why I don't use google and amazon.
pixelgeek 5y ago
It must be a recent thing as well as I recall being able to get good results from them last year at Xmas when I was searching for some science books for the kids. This year my searches got absolute garbage in return.
u10242 5y ago
Just a theory, but "dense" in English translates to "dicht" in German.
kingcharles 5y ago
Amazon.com search is probably the worst offender of all the awful search engines. You can spend hours trying to find something you know is on there.
makeitrain 5y ago
Yeah, Amazon search results are often infuriating. Most searches are flooded with similar items that need better filters and some notes on product differentiation. Amazon feels like a bazaar set up inside a Walmart where everyone is yelling at you to buy from them and you don't really know what you're going to get. I know it's a hard problem, but I can often look at the results and imagine some easy UX improvements. Maybe they have higher priorities than helping me buy insulated pants.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I wish shopping for consumer goods was as nice as faceted search on Octopart or Digikey. It seems that even for Amazon-sold products, either the products don't have relevant data listed accurately and consistently, or the faceted search doesn't let you query it. (And that leaves aside the issue of the product page of a really nice wastebasket I bought years ago being hijacked by a meat slicer.)
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    I just wish DigiKey let you filter by price, or even sort by price on mobile.
DonaldFisk 5y ago
Are others getting the same problem? I searched for "Odense Marzipan" on duckduckgo.com, google.com, amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk, and all of them return almond-based sugar sweets in the top links.
smallerfish 5y ago
Amazon is absolutely terrible. Try this search, for example: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=A1990+trackpad+replacement https://www.amazon.com/s?k=A1990+trackpad+replacement There is an actual product (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GKQB9T https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GKQB9T) with all of my keywords in the title. I found it via a google search because I gave up scrolling through Amazon. I actively avoid shopping Amazon where possible these days, just because it's such a trashy experience.
blt 5y ago
Maybe I am looking upon the past with rose-colored glasses, but I recall a time when shopping on Amazon was like shopping at a huge Target. A lot of well-known name brands mixed with some no-name stuff. It was a nice relief from the limited selection, daytime hours, lines, and out-of-stock errors at department and big-box stores. Now shopping on Amazon feels like shopping on eBay or Aliexpress with fast shipping. Everything name-brand could be counterfeit, and everything no-name is a complete gamble.
matt_heimer 5y ago
Searching on amazon.com for Odense Marzipan works for me and is not automatically translated. No quotes needed.
bradlys 5y ago
Amazon search is horrendous garbage. I was trying to buy replacement ear tips for my earbuds. I knew exactly what to search for. Yet, Amazon search only returned the Large size and none of the others. (Clicking on the large listing only had the large size available. No drop down selection or anything) I go to Google and type in the same search and put Amazon in the search too. Immediately shows up as first result and I was able to buy them. I figured they were out of stock and that’s why I couldn’t get them. Nope - Amazon search is just that bad.
xnx 5y ago
Google does a pretty good or better job of searching amazon.com than Amazon does, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22odense+marzipan%22+site%3Aamazon.com https://www.google.com/search?q=%22odense+marzipan%22+site%3...

mrweasel 5y ago

> Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Rather weird if true, but I can't really disagree with your observation. It seems like large parts of the web have disappeared in the last five to ten years. Google do most likely index the sites, but their current algorithm just don't use them, because it as much a promotion algorithm at it is search.

gambiting 5y ago
I have a public repo on GitHub that just doesn't show up on Google. Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.
- bserge 5y ago
  Actually, that might be because of their antispam filters. They were always fighting websites with countless subdirectories or subdomains, having completely wiped them off their SERPs in the past. GitHub does fit the "huge website with lots of duplicate content" description very well. Then again, Twitter seems to be doing fine. But I have a suspicion that they have some sort of agreement (and GitHub doesn't), because I have to regularly "report as spam" (note how that implies Google decides what's spam and what isn't) Twitter emails and they still pop up in the inbox after a while.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    I mean, that's probably true, I just made this repo specifically to help people who are looking to control a DRV8830 chip from the raspberry Pico, and I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to find it if there is no combination of "raspberry pi" and "DRV8830" that would get you to that repo on Google.
  - verve_rat 5y ago
    Maybe, but then you get all the GitHub issue clone sites and all the Stackoverflow clone sites showing up at the top of the results with the original no where to be seen. It might be anti-spam, but how is it this shit?

kingcharles 5y ago

Yes, I actually find Bing is now better for the long tail. Most of my searches are for really old pages or really long tail stuff and Google just simply doesn't bubble them up, if it has them at all. I keep finding web sites lately from links on other sites and find myself asking "Why the fuck did Google not find this?" .. then I go back to Google and try to find it with keywords from the site, and nothing...

coffeecat 5y ago
I also recommend switching to Bing. It shows me the results I'm looking for pretty consistently, whereas Google/Duck will sometimes give me Google's home page or the Washington Post's home page instead of anything even resembling the query I'm searching for.

Clockface12 5y ago

Yeah. Absolutely infuriating if you specifically use quotes and you get all sorts of dross not containing what you're looking for. Clearly they have figured out in some way that giving the end user what they want does not maximise income. Google News too has become flaky. Often does not find stuff you know is there, or finds it one day, but not another. Hrmph.

grangerg 5y ago
I'm in a similar boat with the "Google Now" feed on Android. When I say "not interested", it fails to note that as expected, and I see the same news "story" pop up (usually different sites, but occasionally the exact same site!). It's likely related to the fact that it almost NEVER gets the subject/topic correct, so I can never use that option. There was a time I thought I'd trained it to stop telling me about what celebrity said or wore what, but those are creeping back into my feed.
- systemBuilder 5y ago
  YouTube has started showing me the same videos over and over again! I keep telling it I don't want to see this content because I've seen it before and it keeps forgetting! I absolutely hate the Google has changed the semantics of search so that it doesn't really pay attention to your keywords unless you quote them. In Google's mind you're not serious about a keyword until you quote it! Garbage!

jck 5y ago

Google definitely changed something about how they index or prioritize GitHub sometime in the last year. I used to frequently use Google to(successfully) find GitHub repos based. Lately, this does not work for me anymore; adding "GitHub" to my search query helps sometimes but I'm forced to search directly in GitHub many times.

psadri 5y ago

Is there a market for a focused, specialized search engine, for example, relatively speaking -- google circa 2010 with all the specialized search operators etc... focused on technical content? What does the business model look like? Ads (it would be in front of a very valuable audience of technical folks)? Or paid subscriptions (perhaps the community votes which resources get crawled / indexed)