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Somewhat tangential but I believe Google Search is going downhill, they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight. Recently, I've had to append wiki/red

Somewhat tangential but I believe Google Search is going downhill, they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight. Recently, I've had to append wiki/reddit/hn to queries I search for because everything near the top is shallow copied content marketing.

stevesimmons 5y ago
> they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight Google clearly isn't even trying. So many of these sites are polluting search results for months. It isn't a case of sites that pop up for a few hours until Google notices and blacklists them. Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.
- MrWiffles 5y ago
  Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.
  - kristiandupont 5y ago
    Oh come on! I am no fan of Google and their privacy policies etc., and I agree that results like the sites mentioned in this thread are annoying but I am not so cocky as to think I have any idea what Google is fighting. There are a lot of very smart people from all over the world putting everything they have into getting to the top of that site. It's not a trivial task for them.
    - kizer 5y ago
      Fair point. But again, that would be less of an issue if there were like 3 or 4 big search engines with different algorithms, all changing and adapting on their own schedules. Would be harder to game the system then.
    - motoxpro 5y ago
      You're so right. It's sad that even if you remove 99% of something, to the outside it looks like you are removing 0% because you have no reference.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      I disagree. Google has absolutely dropped the ball - I'm not saying that it's easy to algorithmically rank good/bad content, but they're not even trying. A stop-gap solution would be to simply penalize anything with ads. Legitimate websites will still have enough "SEO juice" (for the lack of a better term) to offset the penalty, but brand new copycats with otherwise no inbound links to them from other legitimate websites (and no other business model beyond scammy ads) will never be able to rank high, essentially removing the incentive from setting up these sites in the first place. Not to mention, these problems can be identified, prioritized and then tackled manually one-by-one. Stackoverflow copycats can be dealt with by downloading the SO data dump, parsing it and then severely penalizing any website where the bulk of the content matches the dump. Pinterest can be penalized by simply excluding it from image searches until they actually display the searched image without asking for login. So on and so forth. You can't win them all, and you can't train an algorithm to win every time either, but you can manually observe what's happening and deal with the biggest problems. The problem however is that the current status-quo is good for Google. They've got the monopoly on search (every other one is typically even worse when it comes to these issues), and spammy copycat websites happen to have Google ads or analytics so Google actually benefits from them too.
      - Kiro 5y ago
        How do you know Google is not already doing all those things? You said it yourself, you can't win them all and we're witnessing the result of that. If Google truly did nothing it would be an unimaginable chaos.
        Nextgrid 5y ago
        Because I’m not seeing the results. Let’s ignore SO copycats for now because that solution requires at least a slight amount of effort and look at the elephant in the room - Pinterest. Dealing with it is a simple “if image_search and domain == pinterest.com then skip” and they’re not even doing that. They have a site that’s been polluting image search results for years, isn’t even trying to hide (unlike the SO copycats which could technically churn out an infinite amount of domains to work around bans) and they can’t even deal with that.
    - MrWiffles 5y ago
      Consider it from a management/budgetary point of view. Super smart people? Oh hell yeah, and I don't fault them for this one bit. But bean counters? Why the hell invest in hiring those people, or budgeting for search quality improvements, when you have essentially no competition to speak of? Makes more sense to put those same smart people on projects that correlate people's activities outside of Google with activities they can observe either directly or indirectly to create a more wholistic picture of the consumer for advertisers. Those are much harder problems to solve, especially now that the public is finally becoming slowly more aware of the massive abuses of privacy the bean counters like I described above have been pushing for years. At the end of the day Google doesn't exist for the good of the public, they exist to return the highest possible investment for shareholders. It's literally the opposite of their job to improve search quality when competition doesn't force them to (because investors see that as a waste of money that could have been spent on further eroding people's privacy to enable higher and higher ad revenues.)
  - rhdunn 5y ago
    One of the problems with things like this is how do you know which site has copied from another, especially if you don't want a list of hard-coded exceptions. Related is if you have a lot of content from git repositories that are mirrored from different locations (GitHub, GitLab, etc.), all of which are showing the same content. Or if different sites are hosting versions of public domain texts. You don't want to derank those results, even if they are similar to the "copy a popular site" websites.
    - lazyeye 5y ago
      Google knows instantly how much time you spend on a page and how quickly you return to the search results because it is a useless copy/paste page from SO.
      - cutemonster 5y ago
        And probably they track content age too? Since they somehow can lookup by content (they can detect duplicated content), there's probably a date remembered too So they could know if a code snippet was already X years old? And from where, originally. (Unless it got edited a lot but that's not the case here?)
    - MrWiffles 5y ago
      > One of the problems with things like this is how do you know which site has copied from another, especially if you don't want a list of hard-coded exceptions. The core function of that is actually pretty simple: 1. Strip all X/HTML tags 2. Run `diff` Sure, it's not perfect, but an organization that pursues academic quantum computing research can sure as hell afford to run the results of the above against an AI to check for similarities.
      - rhdunn 5y ago
        The issue is not figuring out if site X has a copy of a page or text from site Y. The issue is how do you know which site is the source of the information. In other words, the technical bit is easy but determining what to do with that is hard. Especially if you don't want a lot of hard coded exceptions. In the case of things like other sites copying from stack overflow, github, etc. you can figure out which is the source of the information. Lets day you have decided to make github the source of that information, and derank any other sites that also have that information. As a result, you will derank gitlab for having git mirrors of projects, as the source will match that on github. You will also derank sites like lkml as that contains the commit message descriptions, and the patches will partially match content from the kernel source hosted on github. Lets also say you've decided to make wikipedia and other wikimedia sites the source of information. Congratulations, you've now deranked project gutenberg for hosting the same public domain texts as wikimedia, along with other sites like the official sites for authors like Jack London. Plus any blog that includes portions of these to discuss or analyze them. Do you want a blackbox AI making these decisions?
- vadfa 5y ago
  Is it legally a good idea for Google to go and blacklist individual sites?
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Child porn is the extreme. www.chillingeffects.org is the other.
  - briffle 5y ago
    Exactly, change the word blacklist to censor, and then it seems wrong.
    - labster 5y ago
      Change the flag button on this post to censor and I bet people wouldn’t click it. But people want some level of censorship, so long as they convince themselves they’re not against free speech.
      - SrslyJosh 5y ago
        Blacklisting by a private entity is not censorship. It's even sillier when you consider that what's being removed are copies and the original content is still there.
    - SrslyJosh 5y ago
      But that's not censorship. Google is not a government, and no one's speech is being suppressed by filtering out literal copies of something and leaving the original.
      - snerbles 5y ago
        Censorship can be conducted by private or public entities. https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
- gwittel 5y ago
  Pretty much this. It’s likely down to the lack of incentives for leaders and line workers. Ie: search spam volume isn’t a measure by which search team performance is graded
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Isn't that a bit narcissistic to think that your one problem in particular out of millions is a sign that they aren't doing anything at all?
- testudovictoria 5y ago
  > Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems. I assume they're optimizing for the most common denominator: standard, non-power users. Early search didn't return great results for human-like questions such as What are the wavelengths of the colors on the visible spectrum? The result might be within the first two pages, but that query had too many irrelevant search terms. A better query would have been wavelengths color visible spectrum. That query only has the necessary key terms. Sometimes queries required the user to know search operators (e.g. exact match, date range, synonyms) just to get relevant results. The average person probably didn't know that early searches gave better results when constructed in the second way. Google changed search to adapt to how normal people search. Now the human-like query will return good results. Combine that with locales, search history, and personal interests, even the most basic user can get worthwhile results from asking Google question. The cost is that power users who understand operators and the power of key terms get less relevant results but likely still correct.
  - stevesimmons 5y ago
    If Google actually used its search history, it would see I was a sw eng power user, and return the types of results that users like me want to see. Then again, I have been using Google Maps for 16 years and it still cannot show me distances in km rather than miles. A boolean setting ffs that I've had to manually switch probably a thousand times. If billions of dollars of AI R&D can't even figure that out...
    - Kiro 5y ago
      Funny how people complain about Google tracking them and then get angry when they are not being tracked enough.
  - acdha 5y ago
    I'm skeptical that it's all that much better for any group of user. I search for normal things all of the time and it doesn't do a good job at returning relevant results for things like businesses, recent movies / TV shows, etc. and natural language syntax doesn't make the results less bad. What it looks suspiciously like to me is a lack of an effective feedback loop for user frustration — if it takes a number of queries to get correct results or someone doesn't stop using Google search entirely, this would be easy to confuse with improved engagement and I'd especially believe that managers whose job it is to get a number to go up are not in a hurry to question whether that growth is meaningful.
gfiorav 5y ago
Here's an alternative explanation: the quality of the content has gotten worse. Everyone and their mother is doing SEO now. They're trying to maximize clicks, not quality content.
BLanen 5y ago
They seem to keep giving more and more confidence in their language semantic ai. Quoted words in the search should return only pages with that actually on the page. That used to work. Now it often shows pages that don't contain it all, not in the search results page itself, nor on the page when you go there. So you'd think it just ignored the quoted text and gave me results without it instead, right? Wrong. Removing the quoted text to either unquoted text or removing it entirely both result in different results. So it DOES process the quotes SOMEHOW. But it's not a clear RULE because probably it's also just processed as an input to the semantics engine. Just tell me you don't have any pages with the text instead, please. Which it actually also some sometimes... It's an unfixable mess. And I don't think this can be turned back. Building a competitor costs hundreds of billions. A competitor will likely end up taking the same approach anyway. I just wanted a list of google's big search engine updates but even searching this I get SEO-d blogspam ABOUT THE SEO IMPACT OF THE UPDATES.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Google Search has been going downhill _fast_ over the past 5 years or so. Since it's probably incompetence rather than malice, what the heck is going on at Google Search? It seems to me the "let's use AI for everything" camp has taken over the entire place even though it's making Search worse than it ever was. And please spare me the excuse that now Google can answer questions. It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant. I just hope the ML/AI mania that has taken over these big tech companies proves to be a fad that just goes nowhere like it did in the 70s and we return to plain old algorithms and good software engineering.
  - tekstar 5y ago
    Maybe some PM realized: Worse search results -> more Google searches -> more ad views
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 5y ago
prox 5y ago
I also a lot of strange domains (.it, .so) and tangential related domainnames. Clicking it gives a really weird content scraped jumble that seems AI generated. My malware extension also went on alert. And this is in the top ten in a search result!
- userbinator 5y ago
  I see tons of "non-standard" TLDs now, even in articles posted here, and I'm always wary of visiting them. To be perfectly honest, I tend to completely ignore TLDs with more than 3 characters.
  - prox 5y ago
    Yeah, in general I do too.
trumpeta 5y ago
ddg has the same issue though
ok_dad 5y ago
The other day, I searched for something and got a whole HN thread copied to some crap site but it had just enough veneer to seem legit. I figured it out when I searched for something from that thread and found the actual original HN thread that had way more context. Google has been good to me overall, but in the past few weeks I've really noticed the SEO spam, and I'm not sure what to do about it so that I don't find those dodgy sites. I think Google search is a marvel of modern software, but I'm a firm believer that their advertising business has warped their other products in a negative way, though I'm not the person to suggest a fix.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > found the actual original HN thread that had way more context. So the nitwits just harvested too early, before the HN discussion was fully grown?
  - ok_dad 5y ago
    It seems like the harvested from a permalink to a comment (the link you get from clicking the "x minutes ago" time) rather than the entire comment section and later what I found was the whole comment section here that gave better context for my query.
mritchie712 5y ago
I have the Algolia HN search bookmarked. For specific types of searches I go straight to that
systemvoltage 5y ago
Algolia should look into becoming the next search engine. I want it to absolutely destroy Google/Microsoft.
fsflover 5y ago
> Google Search is going downhill Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702.
akrymski 5y ago
Google will only get worse with time because the core idea of PageRank relies on honest linking. Google saw the web before link farms were a thing, which allowed it to compute authority from a clean graph. As time passes and linking becomes gamed, the web graph becomes messier and the reliance on PageRank diminishes. AI doesn't replace PageRank, but it can be pretty good at predicting the results you're likely to click on with enough behavioural data - which doesn't work for long tail queries really
3np 5y ago
This can be somewhat alleviated by running searx and adding domains to a filter list. You can also merge results with DDG and other search engines.

stevesimmons 5y ago

> they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight Google clearly isn't even trying. So many of these sites are polluting search results for months. It isn't a case of sites that pop up for a few hours until Google notices and blacklists them. Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.

MrWiffles 5y ago
Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.
- kristiandupont 5y ago
  Oh come on! I am no fan of Google and their privacy policies etc., and I agree that results like the sites mentioned in this thread are annoying but I am not so cocky as to think I have any idea what Google is fighting. There are a lot of very smart people from all over the world putting everything they have into getting to the top of that site. It's not a trivial task for them.
  - kizer 5y ago
    Fair point. But again, that would be less of an issue if there were like 3 or 4 big search engines with different algorithms, all changing and adapting on their own schedules. Would be harder to game the system then.
  - motoxpro 5y ago
    You're so right. It's sad that even if you remove 99% of something, to the outside it looks like you are removing 0% because you have no reference.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I disagree. Google has absolutely dropped the ball - I'm not saying that it's easy to algorithmically rank good/bad content, but they're not even trying. A stop-gap solution would be to simply penalize anything with ads. Legitimate websites will still have enough "SEO juice" (for the lack of a better term) to offset the penalty, but brand new copycats with otherwise no inbound links to them from other legitimate websites (and no other business model beyond scammy ads) will never be able to rank high, essentially removing the incentive from setting up these sites in the first place. Not to mention, these problems can be identified, prioritized and then tackled manually one-by-one. Stackoverflow copycats can be dealt with by downloading the SO data dump, parsing it and then severely penalizing any website where the bulk of the content matches the dump. Pinterest can be penalized by simply excluding it from image searches until they actually display the searched image without asking for login. So on and so forth. You can't win them all, and you can't train an algorithm to win every time either, but you can manually observe what's happening and deal with the biggest problems. The problem however is that the current status-quo is good for Google. They've got the monopoly on search (every other one is typically even worse when it comes to these issues), and spammy copycat websites happen to have Google ads or analytics so Google actually benefits from them too.
    - Kiro 5y ago
      How do you know Google is not already doing all those things? You said it yourself, you can't win them all and we're witnessing the result of that. If Google truly did nothing it would be an unimaginable chaos.
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        Because I’m not seeing the results. Let’s ignore SO copycats for now because that solution requires at least a slight amount of effort and look at the elephant in the room - Pinterest. Dealing with it is a simple “if image_search and domain == pinterest.com then skip” and they’re not even doing that. They have a site that’s been polluting image search results for years, isn’t even trying to hide (unlike the SO copycats which could technically churn out an infinite amount of domains to work around bans) and they can’t even deal with that.
  - MrWiffles 5y ago
    Consider it from a management/budgetary point of view. Super smart people? Oh hell yeah, and I don't fault them for this one bit. But bean counters? Why the hell invest in hiring those people, or budgeting for search quality improvements, when you have essentially no competition to speak of? Makes more sense to put those same smart people on projects that correlate people's activities outside of Google with activities they can observe either directly or indirectly to create a more wholistic picture of the consumer for advertisers. Those are much harder problems to solve, especially now that the public is finally becoming slowly more aware of the massive abuses of privacy the bean counters like I described above have been pushing for years. At the end of the day Google doesn't exist for the good of the public, they exist to return the highest possible investment for shareholders. It's literally the opposite of their job to improve search quality when competition doesn't force them to (because investors see that as a waste of money that could have been spent on further eroding people's privacy to enable higher and higher ad revenues.)
- rhdunn 5y ago
  One of the problems with things like this is how do you know which site has copied from another, especially if you don't want a list of hard-coded exceptions. Related is if you have a lot of content from git repositories that are mirrored from different locations (GitHub, GitLab, etc.), all of which are showing the same content. Or if different sites are hosting versions of public domain texts. You don't want to derank those results, even if they are similar to the "copy a popular site" websites.
  - lazyeye 5y ago
    Google knows instantly how much time you spend on a page and how quickly you return to the search results because it is a useless copy/paste page from SO.
    - cutemonster 5y ago
      And probably they track content age too? Since they somehow can lookup by content (they can detect duplicated content), there's probably a date remembered too So they could know if a code snippet was already X years old? And from where, originally. (Unless it got edited a lot but that's not the case here?)
  - MrWiffles 5y ago
    > One of the problems with things like this is how do you know which site has copied from another, especially if you don't want a list of hard-coded exceptions. The core function of that is actually pretty simple: 1. Strip all X/HTML tags 2. Run `diff` Sure, it's not perfect, but an organization that pursues academic quantum computing research can sure as hell afford to run the results of the above against an AI to check for similarities.
    - rhdunn 5y ago
      The issue is not figuring out if site X has a copy of a page or text from site Y. The issue is how do you know which site is the source of the information. In other words, the technical bit is easy but determining what to do with that is hard. Especially if you don't want a lot of hard coded exceptions. In the case of things like other sites copying from stack overflow, github, etc. you can figure out which is the source of the information. Lets day you have decided to make github the source of that information, and derank any other sites that also have that information. As a result, you will derank gitlab for having git mirrors of projects, as the source will match that on github. You will also derank sites like lkml as that contains the commit message descriptions, and the patches will partially match content from the kernel source hosted on github. Lets also say you've decided to make wikipedia and other wikimedia sites the source of information. Congratulations, you've now deranked project gutenberg for hosting the same public domain texts as wikimedia, along with other sites like the official sites for authors like Jack London. Plus any blog that includes portions of these to discuss or analyze them. Do you want a blackbox AI making these decisions?
vadfa 5y ago
Is it legally a good idea for Google to go and blacklist individual sites?
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Child porn is the extreme. www.chillingeffects.org is the other.
- briffle 5y ago
  Exactly, change the word blacklist to censor, and then it seems wrong.
  - labster 5y ago
    Change the flag button on this post to censor and I bet people wouldn’t click it. But people want some level of censorship, so long as they convince themselves they’re not against free speech.
    - SrslyJosh 5y ago
      Blacklisting by a private entity is not censorship. It's even sillier when you consider that what's being removed are copies and the original content is still there.
  - SrslyJosh 5y ago
    But that's not censorship. Google is not a government, and no one's speech is being suppressed by filtering out literal copies of something and leaving the original.
    - snerbles 5y ago
      Censorship can be conducted by private or public entities. https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
gwittel 5y ago
Pretty much this. It’s likely down to the lack of incentives for leaders and line workers. Ie: search spam volume isn’t a measure by which search team performance is graded
Nasrudith 5y ago
Isn't that a bit narcissistic to think that your one problem in particular out of millions is a sign that they aren't doing anything at all?
testudovictoria 5y ago
> Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems. I assume they're optimizing for the most common denominator: standard, non-power users. Early search didn't return great results for human-like questions such as What are the wavelengths of the colors on the visible spectrum? The result might be within the first two pages, but that query had too many irrelevant search terms. A better query would have been wavelengths color visible spectrum. That query only has the necessary key terms. Sometimes queries required the user to know search operators (e.g. exact match, date range, synonyms) just to get relevant results. The average person probably didn't know that early searches gave better results when constructed in the second way. Google changed search to adapt to how normal people search. Now the human-like query will return good results. Combine that with locales, search history, and personal interests, even the most basic user can get worthwhile results from asking Google question. The cost is that power users who understand operators and the power of key terms get less relevant results but likely still correct.
- stevesimmons 5y ago
  If Google actually used its search history, it would see I was a sw eng power user, and return the types of results that users like me want to see. Then again, I have been using Google Maps for 16 years and it still cannot show me distances in km rather than miles. A boolean setting ffs that I've had to manually switch probably a thousand times. If billions of dollars of AI R&D can't even figure that out...
  - Kiro 5y ago
    Funny how people complain about Google tracking them and then get angry when they are not being tracked enough.
- acdha 5y ago
  I'm skeptical that it's all that much better for any group of user. I search for normal things all of the time and it doesn't do a good job at returning relevant results for things like businesses, recent movies / TV shows, etc. and natural language syntax doesn't make the results less bad. What it looks suspiciously like to me is a lack of an effective feedback loop for user frustration — if it takes a number of queries to get correct results or someone doesn't stop using Google search entirely, this would be easy to confuse with improved engagement and I'd especially believe that managers whose job it is to get a number to go up are not in a hurry to question whether that growth is meaningful.

gfiorav 5y ago

Here's an alternative explanation: the quality of the content has gotten worse. Everyone and their mother is doing SEO now. They're trying to maximize clicks, not quality content.

BLanen 5y ago

They seem to keep giving more and more confidence in their language semantic ai. Quoted words in the search should return only pages with that actually on the page. That used to work. Now it often shows pages that don't contain it all, not in the search results page itself, nor on the page when you go there. So you'd think it just ignored the quoted text and gave me results without it instead, right? Wrong. Removing the quoted text to either unquoted text or removing it entirely both result in different results. So it DOES process the quotes SOMEHOW. But it's not a clear RULE because probably it's also just processed as an input to the semantics engine. Just tell me you don't have any pages with the text instead, please. Which it actually also some sometimes... It's an unfixable mess. And I don't think this can be turned back. Building a competitor costs hundreds of billions. A competitor will likely end up taking the same approach anyway. I just wanted a list of google's big search engine updates but even searching this I get SEO-d blogspam ABOUT THE SEO IMPACT OF THE UPDATES.

1_player 5y ago
Google Search has been going downhill _fast_ over the past 5 years or so. Since it's probably incompetence rather than malice, what the heck is going on at Google Search? It seems to me the "let's use AI for everything" camp has taken over the entire place even though it's making Search worse than it ever was. And please spare me the excuse that now Google can answer questions. It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant. I just hope the ML/AI mania that has taken over these big tech companies proves to be a fad that just goes nowhere like it did in the 70s and we return to plain old algorithms and good software engineering.
- tekstar 5y ago
  Maybe some PM realized: Worse search results -> more Google searches -> more ad views
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago

prox 5y ago

I also a lot of strange domains (.it, .so) and tangential related domainnames. Clicking it gives a really weird content scraped jumble that seems AI generated. My malware extension also went on alert. And this is in the top ten in a search result!

userbinator 5y ago
I see tons of "non-standard" TLDs now, even in articles posted here, and I'm always wary of visiting them. To be perfectly honest, I tend to completely ignore TLDs with more than 3 characters.
- prox 5y ago
  Yeah, in general I do too.

trumpeta 5y ago

ddg has the same issue though

ok_dad 5y ago

The other day, I searched for something and got a whole HN thread copied to some crap site but it had just enough veneer to seem legit. I figured it out when I searched for something from that thread and found the actual original HN thread that had way more context. Google has been good to me overall, but in the past few weeks I've really noticed the SEO spam, and I'm not sure what to do about it so that I don't find those dodgy sites. I think Google search is a marvel of modern software, but I'm a firm believer that their advertising business has warped their other products in a negative way, though I'm not the person to suggest a fix.

CRConrad 5y ago
> found the actual original HN thread that had way more context. So the nitwits just harvested too early, before the HN discussion was fully grown?
- ok_dad 5y ago
  It seems like the harvested from a permalink to a comment (the link you get from clicking the "x minutes ago" time) rather than the entire comment section and later what I found was the whole comment section here that gave better context for my query.

mritchie712 5y ago

I have the Algolia HN search bookmarked. For specific types of searches I go straight to that

systemvoltage 5y ago

Algolia should look into becoming the next search engine. I want it to absolutely destroy Google/Microsoft.

fsflover 5y ago

> Google Search is going downhill Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702.

akrymski 5y ago

Google will only get worse with time because the core idea of PageRank relies on honest linking. Google saw the web before link farms were a thing, which allowed it to compute authority from a clean graph. As time passes and linking becomes gamed, the web graph becomes messier and the reliance on PageRank diminishes. AI doesn't replace PageRank, but it can be pretty good at predicting the results you're likely to click on with enough behavioural data - which doesn't work for long tail queries really

3np 5y ago

This can be somewhat alleviated by running searx and adding domains to a filter list. You can also merge results with DDG and other search engines.