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I'm probably the only person who doesn't think Google search has deteriorated. I play security CTFs, so a lot of times I have to search for peculiar technical d

I'm probably the only person who doesn't think Google search has deteriorated. I play security CTFs, so a lot of times I have to search for peculiar technical details on various software. Also, like any other human being, I also make generic queries. In both cases, I feel like I almost always get to the desired webpage within the top few results.

jeffbee 5y ago
Well no, it’s you and me and the whole google search quality evaluation team and everyone who works on google search and like 99% of the general public as well. The meme of falling search quality infects only HN. Mostly what people are complaining about is that the quality of the web itself is in free-fall.
Ellipse0934 5y ago
It honestly depends on what you are searching for. Case 1: You just want the name of the website, or an article, example "Facebook" -> fb.com, "Gordan Ramsay" -> Wiki/official website/Celeb gossip website you are good. Not much competition here. Case 2: You are looking for something technical like "GNU rnano CVE-abcde"/"OpenBSD ARM64 Qualcomm Wifi driver not working", you are again in the fine territory, not much if any money to be made here so very less competition. There will be the official forums, websites, maybe some conference websites in this category. Case 3: "Chicken potpie recipe", "How to be more organised": This is the category where people are trying to game the SEO algos. How the hell do recipe websites with 27 popups, 12000 word essay on the secret family history ends up on top ? There are a huge number of passionately made simple recipe websites but they have to be "found" by us. For the second query I mention about being more organized I think most people are looking for some sort of a review article which looks at some various schools of thoughts regarding discipline, cleanliness pointing to further resources and exploring the why and what to do for this. Here the search engine needs to determine the context of the query which is fairly abstract and then the internal heuristics it uses are supposed to drive it to a meaningful list of websites. Maybe the average joe would like to click cosmopolitan's article but I would never do that. Based on my previous click history maybe google should determine what I kind of links am I looking for. But when they figure that out they'd much faster use this behavioral insight for advertisers. A great search engine is basically a primitive personal librarian, I'd pay a yearly subscription for one. The internet is vast and it has stuff that I don't know about. How my 7 word abstract query is gonna get me there is the question mark. Also, for a lot of queries the top results can be plagued by spammy/fraud results which are on top because they managed to trick the SEO algos. These bad actors were not as prevalent for 2005 google.
tsian2 5y ago
It's always worked fine for me when it comes to finding simple things with a search. I think it's deteriorated in some ways though. I don't find the advanced search operators reliable anymore (eg. give me all the news about a topic published between certain dates) and I think it caps collections of things very early now, rather than returning the "billion" of results it says it has (eg. give me more than the 1000 most popular cat memes that I've seen before, or all the books about beaches).

jeffbee 5y ago

Well no, it’s you and me and the whole google search quality evaluation team and everyone who works on google search and like 99% of the general public as well. The meme of falling search quality infects only HN. Mostly what people are complaining about is that the quality of the web itself is in free-fall.

Ellipse0934 5y ago

It honestly depends on what you are searching for. Case 1: You just want the name of the website, or an article, example "Facebook" -> fb.com, "Gordan Ramsay" -> Wiki/official website/Celeb gossip website you are good. Not much competition here. Case 2: You are looking for something technical like "GNU rnano CVE-abcde"/"OpenBSD ARM64 Qualcomm Wifi driver not working", you are again in the fine territory, not much if any money to be made here so very less competition. There will be the official forums, websites, maybe some conference websites in this category. Case 3: "Chicken potpie recipe", "How to be more organised": This is the category where people are trying to game the SEO algos. How the hell do recipe websites with 27 popups, 12000 word essay on the secret family history ends up on top ? There are a huge number of passionately made simple recipe websites but they have to be "found" by us. For the second query I mention about being more organized I think most people are looking for some sort of a review article which looks at some various schools of thoughts regarding discipline, cleanliness pointing to further resources and exploring the why and what to do for this. Here the search engine needs to determine the context of the query which is fairly abstract and then the internal heuristics it uses are supposed to drive it to a meaningful list of websites. Maybe the average joe would like to click cosmopolitan's article but I would never do that. Based on my previous click history maybe google should determine what I kind of links am I looking for. But when they figure that out they'd much faster use this behavioral insight for advertisers. A great search engine is basically a primitive personal librarian, I'd pay a yearly subscription for one. The internet is vast and it has stuff that I don't know about. How my 7 word abstract query is gonna get me there is the question mark. Also, for a lot of queries the top results can be plagued by spammy/fraud results which are on top because they managed to trick the SEO algos. These bad actors were not as prevalent for 2005 google.

tsian2 5y ago

It's always worked fine for me when it comes to finding simple things with a search. I think it's deteriorated in some ways though. I don't find the advanced search operators reliable anymore (eg. give me all the news about a topic published between certain dates) and I think it caps collections of things very early now, rather than returning the "billion" of results it says it has (eg. give me more than the 1000 most popular cat memes that I've seen before, or all the books about beaches).