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Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022

• ramoz 5y ago
  When I search “tim lee food blogger age” Google actually shows results with “age” striked out (so it shows top results as if age wasn’t part of the queried string). Trying to think why/how it’d conclude that age wasn’t necessary for good results.
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    Censoring terms of the search vector to find relevant results is a legitimate approach that works well. In this example, the article author gives a Wikipedia page as the desired top result. That document does not include the term "age" anywhere. Therefore you can see how the term is not necessary to the search.
    • ramoz 5y ago
      ty. I also tested the query in Bing, the results there were abismal
    • colordrops 5y ago
      It works like trash when searching for obscure technical problems, e.g. debugging some little used tool in linux. It seems more often than not the most important word in the search is omitted, making the results completely irrelevant.
    • pottertheotter 5y ago
      As a user, I can’t think of a time when censoring a term has given me relevant results. It just serves to frustrate me. If Google doesn’t want to return a blank page, they ought to have a small section at the top that says something like, “No results found for [search terms]” and then another section following that clearly states it is excluding a term. FaceBook Marketplace and Craigslist do something similar when there are no local results. They show results from outside your area but clearly call it out.
      • IAmEveryone 5y ago
        Could you all stop misusing the word "censoring" like that? It's almost worse than the way it's usually misused. Also, at least for me, Google does exactly what you describe at the right approach.
        • jeffbee 5y ago
          I'm not misusing it. Dropping dimensions from a document term vector for similarity computation is called censoring.
        • rleigh 5y ago
          While I agree this isn't technically "censorship" from one perspective, I do think it's important to consider this: by forcibly omitting search terms against your wishes, it is actively and deliberately preventing you from searching from what you wanted to search for. This is both frustrating for the user, and has a detrimental effect upon the quality of the search results.
          • sullivandanny 5y ago
            When most people search, they're generally looking for information that matches a topic, not necessarily every single word in a query. You can imagine the number of misses that would happen if we didn't compensate for misspellings, for example. Or for synonyms or plural forms. But in no way are people prevented from searching for exactly the words indicated, if they feel that's best. Use Tools > All Results > Verbatim from the search toolbar. Or put quotes around the word or words you want exactly sought.
    • sullivandanny 5y ago
      We wouldn't say the word is censored. It's just an indication we found a page tha that might be relevant even though it doesn't contain one or more of the search terms, and we want to help the user understand that. But yes overall, that's exactly why the approach can be useful, in case a page with the right information uses a slightly different related word. Also, that Wikipedia page is for a different Tim Lee -- a comedian, not the food vlogger.
  • IAmEveryone 5y ago
    It no longer does this because now your comment is the only result for the query. Before, it could not find a single result, said as much, and gave you the wikipedia page that included the age. What's wrong with that, again?
    • memer 5y ago
    • bspammer 5y ago
      I would prefer that they just returned 0 results and had a list of links for alternative queries. No doubt that’s bad for some opaque internal metric though.
    • ramoz 5y ago
      I realized after testing some more, that the query might not have had many relevant search results. It’s still a strange tactic. Age is contextually important in my query - Google didn’t recognize this
  • Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Query rewriting, a useless and use-hostile technique, strikes again! (No I am not talking about trying to fix spelling mistakes with "did you mean". I mean straight up removal or rewriting of correct English words) I am embarrassed by the whole field of NLP for making such a big deal out of a task that is fundamentally bad. Google optimizing for the "average user" comes at the expense of the whole world, because the "power users" who are optimized against literally build the internet for the normies. Cater to the normies for too long, and we see the status quo. Force the normies to get better at writing their queries. NLP will unironically have a large number of people with the title "query engineer" soon anyway due to the rise of increasingly large foundation language models proliferating. Welcome to the brace new world of botched semantic search!
    • Mezzie 5y ago
      > Google optimizing for the "average user" comes at the expense of the whole world, because the "power users" who are optimized against literally build the internet for the normies. Cater to the normies for too long, and we see the status quo. If I were feeling cynical, I would point out that catering to us was a great idea for early Google, but not so much now. The problem with power users is that the more control you give them, the more they learn about how your product works and what decisions you're making. Power users can pick out dark UI and other user-hostile patterns more easily. Early Google needed the power users, because we were an essential component of building Google's early dominance: It was us gesturing the normies over and saying "as the computer person (TM) in your life, you should be using Google. They're cleaner and their results are better." We were needed to both scale their user base and plug gaps since at the time there weren't dozens of engineers working on issues and search + web indexing was still in its infancy. Now, though? There's no benefit to Google in engaging with power users. They have the numbers of normies they need for profit, and all engaging power users would do now is lead to more conversations like this in the real world, which is not what they want. "Oh, you're still using Google? They suck now. Use X, Y, and Z." = conversations Google doesn't want.
    • sullivandanny 5y ago
      We cater to power users. If you absolutely, positively need a word or phrase to be on a page, use quotes. "age" or "tim lee" would tell us that exact word or that exact phrase has to be on the page. Which still doesn't help with this query, given that his age doesn't appear to be known, but you can do it for others.
  • sullivandanny 5y ago
    We show this to indicate to you that we found a page that might be relevant but which doesn't contain that exact word. And why we would conclude that is explained better if you search for ["tim lee" food vlogger "age"]. That's telling us to find only pages that have "tim lee" on it in that order, as well as the word "age" and food vlogger are nice to have but not required. And it turns out -- there's not a lot of pages. Certainly not many pages, it seems, about the Tim Lee you're looking for with his age. And that's because not everything we want is actually out there. There might not be a page that has his age. So back to why we dropped it. By showing you some pages that don't have the word age on it, we're able to show some other pages that are generally about him, which might get you closer to the answer. BTW, there is a Wikipedia page I've seen suggested as having the right answer for his age. But that's for a different Tim Lee -- not the food vlogger, and it also only lists his birth year, so knowing the exact age is hard
    • ramoz 5y ago
      Thanks for the follow up, I realized all of your points afterwards.
• echen 5y ago
  There's been a lot of HN discussion [1][2][3] about Google Search recently, and whether it’s gone downhill. I used to work on Search and Search Measurement at YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft, so I thought it would be fun to move beyond anecdotes, grab some data, and do a quantitative analysis. tl;dr I didn't have historical data, to see how Google Search has trended over time. But compared to Bing, Google still generally outperforms -- although some of its failures are pretty surprising! If there are particular areas of Google Search that people are interested in digging into, give a shout -- I love running these kinds of search / human eval analyses. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417061 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702
  • umeshunni 5y ago
    I think the broader theme that these outrage bait posts miss is that the web itself is rotting / deteriorating. Most interesting content isn't on the web anymore and is definitely not in text. Content that would be have been on an open web forum 10 years ago, are now hidden behind various data silos/walled gardens - whether it's Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or Discord. Each of these walled gardens have different levels of tolerance for the open web, from using it as an SEO channel (e.g. Reddit) to completely opaque to it (e.g Discord). Some car and photography forums I was on ~10 years ago are all barren now as the old users have moved on and new users prefer to communicate in a Facebook group or something like that. Interesting self-published blogs and recipes aren't on the web anymore, they're on YouTube channels or on someone's Instagram channel (or whatever its called).
    • pseudalopex 5y ago
      You're right walled gardens and video make search harder than it used to be. That doesn't make discussing the problem outrage bait.
      • philistine 5y ago
• CLLD 5y ago
  It's definitely deteriorating, and the worst part is that it completely ignores quotes if it thinks you meant something else, and shows the results for what it thinks you want. Completely useless in a lot of cases
  • IAmEveryone 5y ago
    Google corrects spelling in the way you mention, but removes quotes only if there are zero results for the search with quotes. Example, finding one result; https://www.google.de/search?q=%22but+when+therefore+is+an+adverb%22&client=safari&hl=en&sxsrf=AOaemvLLtbbNenjHpwNLAZYVeltkdwS_PQ%3A1641869886727&ei=PvLcYYPiK_Sy8gLppbCwAw&oq=%22but+when+therefore+is+an+adverb%22&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEAM6BwgAEEcQsAM6BAgAEA06BAgeEApKBAhBGABQ3i5Yoj1goEZoAXABeACAAVqIAfgFkgEBOZgBAKABAcgBCMABAQ&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.de/search?q=%22but+when+therefore+is+an+a... Getting this wrong is probably why people think we need more than definitive assertions from people operating from subjective impression. Changing a letter in the query, it says, right at the top: Showing results for "but when therefore is an adverb" No results found for "but when therefore is tan adverb"
    • CLLD 5y ago
      This has only happened to me twice so far, but it has given me the "Did you mean:" even when using quotes for searches that definitely have results (as I found them with duckduckgo). I can't remember what they were now
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • google234123 5y ago
      This isn’t completely true, Google search is very complicated and definitely had the ability to rewrite queries in some cases.
    • eitland 5y ago
      This seems to depend on a lot. I rarely see "No results found". That is a completely valid result in my opinion. I often see pages that doesn't contain my search string. Sometimes is is something trivial like query: "something about x y and z" result contains: "... something about x. Y and Z however..." which is understandable. Often though I have no clue how a result got there. Maybe it is linked to using a certain text (link bombing)? I don't know.
• theknocker 5y ago
• RandyRanderson 5y ago
  One reason it might deteriorated is that goog is constantly battling ppl 'optimizing' their content for Google while competitors likely see less than 1/1000 of this.
  • debesyla 5y ago
    That's a good point! A lot of online content is created for search clicks only, not quality. For example, I often search Google in lithuanian language and I keep getting whole lot of auto-translated blog/article farms as a result. Those translations almost always are shoddy, but these pages keep popping up in the first Google results because a) there is not a lot of native (language) content to push out these clickbaits and b) those clickbaits are on domains that are also, well, in the first results of other lesser languages... I think these auto-translated pages started to pop up two or three years ago...
  • colordrops 5y ago
    That would make sense if so many easy to detect low hanging fruit like blog spam, scraped stack overflow pirates, and listicles didn't make it to the top. Those are easy for google to de-rank and yet they don't.
    • IndexPointer 5y ago
      There are billions of dollars on stake from both sides, search engines and spammers, in an endless arms race that has been going on for more than 20 years. Trust me, it's beyond naive to say fighting webspam is a low hanging fruit problem.
      • colordrops 5y ago
        Why should I trust you? I trust my own eyes. I regularly see spam sites that get to the top of results that are seen by many people for months. These could be filtered with a one line change.
    • caconym_ 5y ago
      What's the source for it being easy? It seems easy, from the perspective of a human looking at results, but I'm not sure how much that's worth given the scale and complexity of the problem.
• pyrrhotech 5y ago
  One of the worst things I've noticed recently about Google Search is how it is very anti-startup because of the concept of the Google Sandbox, an essentially arbitrary length of time they put a huge negative penalty on your site to try to entice you to buy paid ads instead before your funding runs out waiting for organic traffic. Perhaps that's my biased opinion on their motivations as I've recently launched https://grizzlybulls.com https://grizzlybulls.com and yet even though Bing has tiny market share, I'm getting 10x more organic traffic from Bing rather than Google...
• elondaits 5y ago
  When I search for "databricks series b valuation" in Google (from Argentina, using Google.com in English) result #6 is: "Python get value from database - Büro Jorge Schmidt", which judging by title and preview seems to be a Python + MySQL tutorial. It returns a 403 error and might be a hacked site, since the home page is for a graphic design studio in Munich. Result #8 is something similar: "Intellij flatten packages - Músicos de Viaje". This is definitely a hacked site (from Spain, apparently) that redirects me somewhere else. Result #10: "How to calculate tax percentage in sql query". Another hacked site, this time for an evangelical church from Brazil. Now... how can Google think that any of these sites are relevant? Even if it doesn't realize the pages are hacked... even its crawler has been fed content that included the keywords... : A - The sites themselves don't match the query at all. B - No legit site about the subject would link to these sites. C - The results themselves (title, url, preview), as Google shows them, have nothing to do with the search!
  • creato 5y ago
    I just tried that search, all of the results look relevant and I definitely don't get any of the results you are getting. I wonder if you have some malware that is hijacking the results? I once had some malware (chrome extension) that was corrupting my search results. It was surprisingly difficult to remove (given that it was a chrome extension...).
    • fhe 5y ago
      just to add another data point, I tried the same search too, and all results look normal and relevant.
    • moises_silva 5y ago
      Same here, all relevant results.
    • elondaits 5y ago
      No, I get the same results on Safari on iOS (iPhone) so I have to eliminate the possibility of malware. Google results are personalized, based on location, search history, etc. The fact that I'm in Argentina has been adding a lot of noise to results on searches where my location is not relevant at all. In this case, I suspect that Google thinks these hacked sites with developer target content are relevant to me, because of my regular search history.
• AlbertCory 5y ago
  I've been gone from G for 4 1/2 years now. When I was there, the weekly meetings often featured "search quality" measurements that were rigorous in their objectivity (I thought). They bent over backwards to be non-self-deluding. I distinctly remember Udi Manber saying "if the web is slow, it's our fault" (actually, the speech was that everything is "our fault"), meaning, really, "take responsibility for problems and don't throw up your hands." However, the natural tendency of any organization is to reward the suckups and promote mediocre people who just get along with everyone. It wouldn't surprise me if that's what's happened with Google, too.
  • whakim 5y ago
    It seems weird to me that Google would take "search quality" seriously for 15+ years (including nearly a decade as one of the biggest companies in the world) and then suddenly stop. Are you able to share any of those objective measures of quality? Because it seems to me that most of the discussions around the declining quality of Google search amount to anecdata backed up by reasoning that doesn't really make a lot of sense to me (e.g., "Google only cares about short-term revenue!")
    • fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
      Could just be that sundar pichai wants a bigger paycheck and tunes the knob on more ads money but less good search results
      • whakim 5y ago
        To me, it seems crazy that a company would actively try to self-sabotage their bread-and-butter product in search of a bit of extra revenue when they're already making record profits. Not to mention that, as the author of the article points out, Google published a well-known quantitative paper on why that's a bad tradeoff.
        • fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
          It happens all the time though. Look at amazon, they flood their marketplace with cheap knockoff products that hurt the credibility of their ecommerce offerings, but the money generated is too much to shut off. So in the short run, amazon makes more money for a worse reputation, and in the long run ??? its unclear
• halpert 5y ago
  I believe the theory that Google is optimizing for ad revenue. Sites without ads get ranked lower. The biggest example I can think of is Wikipedia. When I search a proper noun with a Wikipedia article, I almost want to go look at that article. Recently, I feel like I really have to dig for it.
  • jbman223 5y ago
    Anecdotal evidence - but I feel like this could be completely valid. One of my biggest side projects for many years was a student tool centered around test scores. It was a niche use case with a huge amount of students using the tool on one day per year (1m+). There was exactly one competitor. I had a better domain but a much worse site in terms of design, speed etc. We were nearly the same in traffic, until I decided to monetize the site with a lot of Google ads. Immediately, Google shot my site up in the rankings, and actually seemed to penalize the competitive site. My traffic went up 10x and the competitive site remained flat. This happened for 3 years, then the niche use of both of our tools was “patched”.
    • csunbird 5y ago
      Could it be that the adverts you host add tags/content to your site, which is literally SEO without you actively doing SEO?
  • sio8ohPi 5y ago
    Do you have an adblocker that's accidentally blocking the side-bar? I find it difficult to find a proper-noun search that doesn't include a side-bar link to Wikipedia.
  • seventytwo 5y ago
    This seems accurate to me too. And it also seems the most likely - a profit maximizing corporation doing profit maximizing things? Not really a huge surprise.
  • MiddleEndian 5y ago
    Consider adding a search shortcut for wikipedia directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special:Search https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special...
• twofornone 5y ago
  Incidentally, I noticed very recently (in the last month or so) that searches in google maps (at least on mobile) are also starting to return completely irrelevant results. Something is seriously wrong at google.
  • flenserboy 5y ago
    The real question about G is this: who is really in charge there? Answer that, and the explanations for the whys of their behavior will fall into place. I'm not pretending to know the answer, but this question has helped me figure out what's going on with other companies and their strange directions taken.
  • seattle_spring 5y ago
    This drives me nuts when I'm trying to navigate somewhere, no pun intended. For example, I'll tell it I want to go to a trailhead for a lake but it will switch it to the literal middle of the lake itself.
    • mmis1000 5y ago
      That also happened to me. I once want to drive to a port. And google decides to direct me to drive straight into the port. (The residents even make a sign that says 'If google direct you to here, you are on the wrong way', It seems it had gone wrong for many years and never got fixed.) Who on the earth think list port/lake/ocean into driving target is a good idea???
  • Cipater 5y ago
    It started happening to me around November. I can understand if it shows me an establishment/location with a similar name but the results it gives have nothing in common with the location I'm searching for. It's baffling.
• fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
  One theory is that Google has made a substantial change to a neural network based search, and they are still working out the kinks in getting it to work. How could it not be A/B tested such that we wouldn't notice the bad searches? The answer to that I am not sure. I read their research publications, and the NLP research coming out of Google is far beyond any other company. I can only imagine what they aren't publishing.
  • ramoz 5y ago
    Do you have references for the theory?
    • fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
      Honestly its pure speculation. But I could see scenarios where neural network driven search is great 90% of the time, and misses the last 10%, but in aggregate improves their revenue and product. Users on HN complain about the results, whereas normal searchers dont. The SEO spam works since it answers the question/fulfills whatever distance metric they are using for the search query. Basic explanation of how one of these systems works: (offline computation) user query comes in -> algorithm runs across all the text on the page and computes the distance between the query and the meaning of the text (as represented by word embeddings called BERT). Maybe the SEO spam has a good distance metric there, causing flaws, but the search works very well for a large number of users when trying to actually extract an answer to a search. I work in NLP, but could easily be 100% wrong. References to my knowledge of their NLP is literally just reading all of googles most recent research
      • ramoz 5y ago
        Interesting. I wonder how they might be approaching continuous learning.I.e. The UI has mechanisms for user feedback that might be useful in some fine tuning process
    • astrange 5y ago
      https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-26/google-turning-its-lucrative-web-search-over-to-ai-machines https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-26/google-tu... But the quality issues I've seen (useless results unless you add "reddit") are a lot newer than that.
• behnamoh 5y ago
  Is it Google that's deteriorating, or is it the quality of the web in general that's gone downhill and Google just reflects that?
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    I think there's more quality content on the web now than there's ever been. It's seems like Google wants to prioritize the commercialized web, though, by boosting BuzzFeed-like online publications that post ad-laden articles full of referral links in their search results, along with social media. Even in the development space, Google will prioritize w3schools and content farms that constantly churn out how to guides. Blogs and forums seem to get deprioritized in search results these days.
• pcthrowaway 5y ago
  This article from HN a while back was great: How SEO is Gentrifying the internet. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/12/how-seo-is-gentrifying-the-internet https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/12/how-seo-is-gentrifyin... I just tried to find this article on google by searching "Can cats eat blueberries bad search results" (Can Cats eat blueberries is very relevant to the article) and it showed up on the first page of results, albeit at the end. On Bing I wasn't able to find it
  • why_only_15 5y ago
    I'm very confused by this article. They seem to just assume that breaking up Google would fix the problem, but they don't explain why. To me it seems that a fundamental problem of search on the internet is that it's adversarial, which means Google needs to make these ranking changes to try to make things better in the SEO war. How does breaking Google up fix this? Wouldn't all the new search engines just be worse at fighting SEO spam, leading to even more spam? disclaimer: i work at Google, though not on search.
  • Semaphor 5y ago
    Hah, I love that DDG, Bing and Google all return some article about cats being able to eat blueberries, while Kagi delivers your article at the first position :D
• bironran 5y ago
  I tried the query "databricks series b valuation" on Kagi (just a beta user there) and the results were: 1. Databricks Funding Rounds, Valuation and Investors (https://craft.co/databricks/funding-rounds) - not directly to the point but does include information about all rounds. 2. Databricks Raises $1B at $28B Valuation, Plans Massive - not answering the question at all. 3. *Databricks Closes $33M Series B Funding - FinSMEs* (https://www.finsmes.com/2014/07/databricks-closes-33m-series-b-funding.html) - Direct hit! didn't even have to click into the page. In my mind this is yet another proof of Google's search quality decline. I remember being so excited when I saw the first structured search result but now I tend to use other engines first.
• alexyz12 5y ago
  It was always pointed downhill because its not user-aligned. It's only a matter of time.
• jmspring 5y ago
  The first 1/2 to 2/3 of the page is ads. For slightly obscure things find myself having to tweak wording, use controls like omitting words.
• klondike_ 5y ago
  I think that Google is optimizing for the "average user" to the detriment of power users such as the HN crowd. Most people treat Google as an internet oracle and send queries like "how do I do X" while power users will search for keywords. One example of this optimization is the automatic answer boxes that show up for certain questions, which are wrong disturbingly often or don't include important details.
  • User23 5y ago
    I miss Altavista. I could generally either find exactly what I was looking for inside of three iterations of refining the search, or find that it wasn't to be found. I still just want a blazing fast full text search of the reachable WWW that understands regexes and a basic predicate calculus. Unfortunately the overhead and small potential user base means that under the current regime such a thing will never be made. Speaking of, if any government actually wants competition, they don't need to break up Google, they just need to force them to offer full access to their cache and compute at some reasonable rate, much like how the ILECs were made to carry the CLECs' traffic.
    • otherotherchris 5y ago
      Common crawl already exists and is nearly as good as Google's index.
      • marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Common crawl is just a dataset, not an index. The difficulty is not finding a sufficiently large haystack, it's getting at the needles.
    • bunabhucan 5y ago
      Do you miss Altavista or do you miss the size of the web in the late 1990s?
    • carabiner 5y ago
      All right, I think this comment is peak HN.
• maxdo 5y ago
  Google is focused on cloud race thinking search is done. Please try to remember any new successful product of them for the last 4 years.
• freediver 5y ago
  The article mostly talks about IA (instant answers) which are notoriously hard. The recent advances in machine learning have made the technology more approachable, so startups like Kagi Search (disclaimer: founder) can also leverage latest advances in NLP and compete on this ground. To give just a few examples: Query 1: how many stars in the usa flag Google: https://cln.sh/63sVzh https://cln.sh/63sVzh Kagi: https://cln.sh/bFEHsD https://cln.sh/bFEHsD Pretty surprising that Google would get something like this wrong. Query 2: when did moon explode Google https://cln.sh/fUhdJS https://cln.sh/fUhdJS Kagi https://cln.sh/5wDvXG https://cln.sh/5wDvXG Both engines feature the same article but for some reason Google decides this is not fiction, and gives a (wrong) answer. Query 3: do most rabbits have short or long ears Google: https://cln.sh/JuOeqq https://cln.sh/JuOeqq Kagi: https://cln.sh/BkZi6O https://cln.sh/BkZi6O Both engines use the same article for source, but Google completely misses the context. These examples show that a search startup has a chance to go neck-to-neck with Google and compete even in technology as sophisticated as instant answers. We invested considerable resources in the Kagi Search AI capabilities, discussed in some detail here https://kagi.ai/last-mile-for-web-search.html https://kagi.ai/last-mile-for-web-search.html What is mind boggling though from a product management perspective is that Google had nearly a decade head start and a cash purse of hundreds of billions of dollars to get this right. To be fair, it is likely that the vast majority of queries are answered correctly, but only the outliers get the public attention. Also Kagi is not without its own share of silly mistakes too, but just being able to be considered in the same basket as Google is already a huge thing for us.
  • crdrost 5y ago
    My favorite is, given that I have a baby and I am a trained scientist and I live in the US, I find myself converting milliliters to fluid ounces a lot. Right now the Google Assistant will correctly transcribe the request to a Google search... Only for the search to interpret “ml” as “miles” and, faced with the discrepancy between the length and a volume, cube the miles. So I am expecting an amount that is like 1 oz because I am converting like 30 mL... and I instead get 4 quadrillion ounces (exact number is 1 mi³ = 140,942,994,870,857 + 1/7 oz because of course it's got that extra 7th in there what were you expecting from our ridiculous US system, haha).
• kebman 5y ago
  If you search for anything political on Google, you'll notice that the results are clearly slanted in one direction, towards the opinion of a handful of pre-approved news outlets. This leads me to seek alternatives whenever I need neutral sources, for instance Yahoo search.
  • photochemsyn 5y ago
    I wonder if they're getting cash kickbacks from established corporate media outlets for pushing their material to the top of the search results. That would actually be less creepy than if its being done as some kind of information manipulation program. It's high time Google and other search engines were forced to expose the inner workings of their ranking algorithms to the public, particularly now that they have near-monopoly power in the sector. People should also be able to adjust the dials on the algorithm themselves.
    • otherotherchris 5y ago
      In Australia, Google is being blackmailed into boosting Fairfax, Newscorp and Seven West Media content higher up in their index. It's reached a point where most queries are useless if they contain a word or even a synonym for that word that has been recently used in a major media site owned by those three. I use Google through a VPN to avoid it. That breaks maps integration.
      • DaedPsyker 5y ago
        I'm curious, why go through the hassle of a VPN rather than another search engine? Are the other results so poor or do the others do the same as Google?
  • JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    Sounds like you want non-factual answers.
    • marginalia_nu 5y ago
• hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Ssh.com in search results is my latest pet hate. Give me official documentation or actual helpful data, or their thinly veiled advertising.
• Hard_Space 5y ago
  I share the view that Google SERPS have dropped in quality the last 5-7 years. Of great annoyance to me is the amateurish way that a search results page will find relevant Twitter results but then clicking on the results takes you to the root page of the Twitter user and not the result. Since many Twitterers are prolific posters, it can be very time-consuming or even impossible to find the result listed. Thankfully Inoreader takes me to the exact Twitter result.
  • hda2 5y ago
    The same happens with image search. Google is just broken in this regard.
• sgarman 5y ago
  Why does this company have AI in their name if they are just selling access to regular old humans?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• wolpoli 5y ago
  The web itself is deteriorating. Instant answers (IA) caused a shift in the way contents are written. Content optimized for IA tend to be repetitive and shallow. Viewing content written for IA is a frustrating experience and these tend to dominant the result page now.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    No idea if you're right or not, but I think it's an interesting take. It might be because of SEO, it might be more information in walled gardens, it might be the death of the personal web page. Both Google search and the internet are changing, as are our perceptions, so it's really hard to say why search quality is better or worse.
    • wolpoli 5y ago
      Whether search quality is deteriorating really depends what we expect from a search engine. Many of us on HN use search engine as a way to look for web pages with specific words. Search engines did start out performing word searches, but somewhere along the way, they started trying to answer questions. Many of the complaints such as Google dropping search terms are actually the result of the search engine trying to answer questions instead of performing keyword searches. Search engines these days are doing well for the easy questions, but of course they completely misunderstand questions with more nuances. A bit off topic: Some of the search queries in the article used Google like a keyword matching tool, while other queries in the article were using Google to answer questions. That's because we only have one search box trying to do everything. Would we be better served if we have a checkbox to tell the search engine that we just want to perform word searches?
      • visarga 5y ago
        It's easy to tell if it's a natural language question or keywordese. They can classify that.
        • tremon 5y ago
• yaur 5y ago
  Yesterday on HN someone claimed that they were more or less happy with code that they wrote 10 years ago. My question, is this a brilliant senior dev that I could learn something from or a grad student that doesn't know what they don't know? My impression is that 2015 could answer this question but 2022 google can not.
• MangoCoffee 5y ago
  search for clam antivirus: Google first link: https://alternativeto.net/software/clam-antivirus/ https://alternativeto.net/software/clam-antivirus/ DuckDuckGo first link: http://www.clamav.net/ http://www.clamav.net/ i don't understand why the search result, first link is alternativeto instead of clamav home page
  • Semaphor 5y ago
    For me, google gets it right. It’s their personalization.
  • pverghese 5y ago
    I dont understand how you people are getting bad results. My first link for clam antivirus is clamav.net. And the remainder on the first page are download links and wikipedia links about clamav. I'm not sure if you you people are trolling or what.
    • MangoCoffee 5y ago
      not trolling. it could be from my search history. even with my search history, cookies, whatever search "clam antivirus" should give me clam av home page for the first link
  • Miiko 5y ago
    Probably, your search history made Google believe that you like alternatives more than the originals? ;) Tried this search on Google myself, got clamav.net as the first link and alternativeto.net at #20
    • MangoCoffee 5y ago
      maybe but "clamav antivirus" should give me clamav home page as the first link. even if Google believe i want alternatives.
  • ghosty141 5y ago
    your history/profile seems to do this. I don't get any alternativeto links or similar on the first page.
• albertopv 5y ago
  For tech stuff Google is usually pretty good, sometimes I have to change a little my query, but it works. For non tech stuff is a disaster. I recently looked for a specific brand and model car tyre datasheet, I know it may be a nich, but still I got ONLY ads. Not a single result was about data, let alone datasheet, all were ads.
  • nottorp 5y ago
    Pasted any error messages in the search box recently?
  • xxs 5y ago
    >For tech stuff Google is usually pretty good, sometimes I have to change a little my query, but it works. I rarely search programming topics nowadays. However anything related to electronics/mechanics/disassembly - tear downs/etc. is pretty a rather futile experience.
• k8sToGo 5y ago
  Even on Google Maps many of the bad reviews are getting automatically filtered. My guess is to protect businesses. Many of the google services just keep getting worse and worse.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  What if someone wanted to get a large number of results, more than 300, for a common term found on the web. Is Google suitable for such a task. How could this be proven. Search for the term "example" and see how many results can be accessed. Is it greater than 300. By limiting the number of results that can be accessed, Google is "hiding" a portion of the web from the user. How do we explain this practice. Perhaps that portion is not deemed useful for user data collection or advertising purposes hence it is excluded. Perhaps Google wishes to prevent users from accessing large chunks of its index. Who knows. We need a search engine that exposes the full web and does not try to guess what someone is searching for. If the user requests all pages with the term example, then that is what the search engine returns. Google is far too limited. If one goes to a library and searches an academic database, she is never precluded from viewing all results. Even though she may only access the first few pages, she is always allowed to see all the results. She can view results that were low on the relevance scale to understand why they scored low. She can then subsequenty narrow her search. I have seen this implemented in non-academic databases as well. First a broad search is performed. It returns all results, not just a portion. These results are stored. Every single result is accessible by the user. (Not possible with Google. User only sees 200-300 max.) Then the user can narrow her search and search within those results. The user repeats using different searches until she has what she wants. The user controls the number of database items she wishes to search, based on the initial broad search. With Google, the user has no such access to all results from a broad search, nor the ability to search exclusively within that set. Google is extremely limited. Everything is geared toward user data collection and online advertising. It truly detracts from any search functionality they may have to offer. The user is the product, not the database.
  • visarga 5y ago
    They never let you past the 1000 mark, not even on paid API. It's frustrating when you want to do more advanced searches.
• zmachinaz 5y ago
  The article totally misses the point. Yes, for the digital morons (their turks) google may work perfectly fine. However, for people who actually look for real content google gets worse and worse. All the good material gets far lower ranking than the repetitive low quality medium posts with identical and non-existing content.
  • Schroedingersat 5y ago
    Far worse than this is it is destroying the quality of content produced by well meaning creators. Every review (and almost every site now) has to have the word 'best' wedged in 1000 times and text descriptions of what would be far better communicated by graphs or diagrams. The vocabulary and grammar has to he reduced to duck speak (which becomes more verbose, less clear, harder to read, and more ambiguous). There need to be a hundred repetitions of whatever key words are popular. And there needs to be 50MB of javascript and anti-responsive nonsense for what would more legible, more attractive, more accessible, and actually usable on a phone if it were plain HTML with no styling. Then you need further 20MB js libraries to progressively or dynamically load 100kB images. It's not just highlighting terrible content, it's actively destroying good content.
  • soco 5y ago
    And all those Pinterest hits oh my...
  • DOsinga 5y ago
    Not sure if the article misses the point then. If Google satisfies your "digital morons" by making it slightly harder for the more advanced users to get the results they want, couldn't that be the right thing to do? For example, over time, Google has been using synonyms more so that often the word you searched for doesn't appear in the page. This works for most people very well, but makes the self proclaimed experts complain
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Ironically, my work on my own search engine has led me to be a bit more patient with Google's problems. At least I think I understand them better. Search engines fail in weird ways. I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering what you entered. It may even be "better" in the sense that it's more likely to return at least something relevant, but in practice it's bad UX because it's so unintuitive what's happening. It's probably one of those unfortunate optimizations that are invisible when they work and frustrating when they don't. There is so much stuff on the Internet it's easy to start thinking there is guaranteed to be good results for any search, and that just doesn't seem to be the case. Especially with highly specified searches with 6-8 terms, you quickly enter the domain where you're reasonably unlikely to find an exact match.
  • psyc 5y ago
    I've taken this possibility into account after the numerous recent threads about this, but I don't think it holds up. I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines. The reason it feels like search has gone to hell, for me, is that for 20 years I took for granted that I could type the first terms that came into my mind into one search engine (Google) and the result I wanted was the first result. Outside of programming-related topics, anything I search returns pages of pop psychology listicles or news articles. Since I am literally never looking for pop psych listicles, Google (and, to be fair, the other search engines as well) has become a lot less usable. I agree that the open web has deteriorated, with crap drowning out real content. But I maintain that Google et al have failed, or been beat. The content is there, they just can't find it and/or rank it anymore.
    • marginalia_nu 5y ago
      > I'm very often able to find exactly what I'm looking for after 15 minutes of massaging search terms on 3-4 different search engines. If you are adjusting your query, then you are going to get different results, possibly including ones that contain the information you want (but not your original search terms). We've been tweaking search terms to find what we were looking for since day one, what's changed the most it's that it's gotten far less likely that you'll realize you need to do this. I think this is one of the real drawbacks of ML-algorithms, their failure modes are completely incomprehensible. Dumb algorithms we can grok, and learn to help along the way when it doesn't work. There is really no point where it will always work.
• darinf 5y ago
  If you are looking for an alternative, try Neeva. Being ad free means we aren’t beholden to advertisers, and unlike the other alternatives such as DDG, Neeva isn’t just a wrapper around Bing results. Hope you enjoy it.
• inshadows 5y ago
  Google search is OK for me in English. In my native language (central Europe), it's almost impossible to find content that is not eshop or someone selling something. I'm looking for HTML4 articles, phpbb forum discussion, etc. where people actually share knowledge, but I only get super-SEO optimized crap. The best I get is a blog spam from an eshop.
  • nickff 5y ago
    Does the content you're looking for exist in your language, and if so, can you find it on some other search engine? It seems like a lot of 'knowledge forums' are in English.
    • inshadows 5y ago
      Indeed it does. These are mostly queries for non-computer stuff, like I'm interested what's difference between various variants of pepper sprays, or merits of oil vs oil-less air compressor, etc. All the queries I can think of that would have Wikipedia page at the top in the english version give me only eshops and blogspam from sellers in my local language.
• greyman 5y ago
  I don't know if search is deteriorating as a whole, but certain searches seems to be manipulated for political reasons. The famous example is an Image search of "white couple" - really, try it, it is like only 50% correct. But I don't believe the image search itself would be that bad, rather certain queries are given manipulated results.
  • Jyaif 5y ago
    FWIW I did the same search on Bing and Yandex and got similar results: https://imgur.com/a/Nd9QCH2 https://imgur.com/a/Nd9QCH2 Either your theory is wrong, or the other search engines are also manipulating results for political reasons, or they are copying the results from Google.
  • danieljacksonno 5y ago
    I'm not convinced "white couple" showing interracial couples is a political move, or even on purpose. I think it simply is because very few people would describe in text a white couple as a "white couple" and not just as a "couple". In a majority white culture there is no reason to specify skin colour when both are white. It's just a couple. On the contrary, I think it would be very normal to write "black and white couple" for an interracial couple, and because "black and white" also contains "white" thus those images would show up when you search for "white couple". This is easy to verify by looking for the word "white" around the images Google returns for "white couple", and they are definitely there - often in the image title itself. However, if you just search for "couple" then you'll find what you are looking for. At least on my google 9 out of 10 results are a white couple.
  • planb 5y ago
    You're overestimating the smarts of google: Image search does not classify image contents. It uses the site text for ranking of the images on that site. It finds lots of "Black And White Couple Stock Photo" images - the image description in fact contains the string "white couple".
    • grumbel 5y ago
      While that's certainly possible, this feels like a mistake AltaVista would make 20 years ago, it seems weirdly out of place for Google doing that in 2022. They used to be a bit more context aware and not just present you results due to some bit of text matching. If I try the search on flickr.com, "white people" returns black&white pictures of people, while "white couple" returns swans. Meanwhile shutterstock.com returns mostly correct results.
• mrjin 5y ago
  Why only 2022 really? Put all other subtle things aside, myself feel it's getting harder and harder to distinguish Ads and genuine results without reading the contents carefully.
  • cookiengineer 5y ago
    > myself feel it's getting harder and harder to distinguish Ads and genuine results without reading the contents carefully. But isn't that the goal of google? I mean, it's an advertisement company after all. Despite common assumptions, google is not a search company.
• lbriner 5y ago
  One thing I find annoying is that they still return results that are those sites that seem to register a load of terms that all point to the same page. You see this with telephone numbers, song lyrics etc. where the result looks like "Lyrics for Stairway to Heaven" but you click through and there is no content, just a page that says "Upload some lyrics to this song".. etc. These sites should be heavily penalised for click-baiting and they have been doing it for years.
  • amelius 5y ago
    Yes, give me a downvote button on Google results.
    • mcv 5y ago
      The lack of an ability to vote on search results seems like a baffling omission. Normally Google loves to crowdsource their work, but for this one area where we would actually want it, they decide that they know better when they clearly don't.
      • djohnston 5y ago
        It would be abused into the ground by the same people who set up these scam sites in the first place. For most things on the internet, the crappiness of the average person is the limiting factor.
        • amelius 5y ago
          Wouldn't that provide more data on who are the scammers?
          • djohnston 5y ago
            Not really. In these areas there's a general principle that the moment you start using a signal to enforce on bad actors that signal's value decays. It's sad, I actually think web3 could help curb abuse at scale by making it too expensive to scale horizontally. Imagine paying a "stamp" to send an email on the blockchain, spam email would dramatically drop. Maybe similar mechanics could be in play for other things but then you lose democratization of information.
• tempestn 5y ago
  While Google results may well be deteriorating, this example strikes me as a poor one. Unless you're trying to demonstrate poor results, why wouldn't you put quotation marks around "series b"? There's no point in making the algorithm guess what you mean when you can be explicit.
  • echen 5y ago
    Putting "series b" in quotes doesn't actually help! https://imgur.com/a/zNNTK3d https://imgur.com/a/zNNTK3d And "series b" is a common enough phrase that I wouldn't guess you should have to.
• calltrak 5y ago
• daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Remember "Let me google that for you?" Nowadays it's not a joke.
• nathias 5y ago
  This is a very common cycle. People make a good tool, good tool becomes popular, people destroy tool to harvest profit.
• causi 5y ago
  Lately Google has been giving me results that ignore my operators like quotation marks and - signs. I knew it was all downhill from here when Image Search became 50% video results.
  • sexy_seedbox 5y ago
    It was downhill when they allowed that cancer site Pinterest to rank so high up for both text and image search.
  • eitland 5y ago
    You had working doublequotes until recently? For me those disappeared years ago :-/
• dncornholio 5y ago
  I cannot rate any of the results anymore as being good. I want my search engine to search for the keywords i typed in, not what the search engine thinks I want to search for. If Google shows me a different person then the one I'm looking for, I am at fault, not the search engine. I should be more specific. So yes, Google's search quality sucks big time, but not in the way the author thinks. He think Google should know what you are searching for. Which is for me, a really bad factor.
• erikbye 5y ago
  Article forgot to mention censorship. All kinds of results are censored/banned from Google. This detoriation is just as bad, maybe worse, than the one caused by paid for results or simply inaccurate results.
  • Hermel 5y ago
    Yes, this is the reason I resorted to bing a few times in the past week. Google seems to penalize certain news sources to such an extent that vaguely remembering the content of the article does not suffice any more to find it again, whereas the article I have in mind usually shows up in the top results on bing with the same query.
    • notreallyserio 5y ago
      I actually want this in my search engine. I want it to exclude low quality news sources and sites with cloned content. But I want to control the exclusion list myself, like I used to be able to do.
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
• alok-g 5y ago
  >> Is Google Search Deteriorating? To answer this, Google's search results need to be compared as before and after. The OP is talking only about the current search quality and a comparison to Bing.
• anont094h0 5y ago
  What's galling is that they've actively gone out of their way to make it worse, instead of just letting it regress through neglect. For example, a few weeks ago, I image searched for a meme that I created years ago on 4chan. A dozen or so results were returned, none of them relevant. But if you tack on the name of a 4chan archive, for example "4plebs" (not even "site:4plebs..."), all of the sudden it turns up. Google in general seems to penalize 4chan and its archives, which is ironic since it's one of the few places where actual humans post OC. Meanwhile Pinterest spam, AI-generated blog posts, and reddit threads full of bots and shills abound in its results.
  • anont094h0 5y ago
    Speaking of 4chan and google's declining result relevancy, a particular instance of the latter was discussed there (one of the few places it could be discussed, given the amount of censorship that prevails everywhere else these days): https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/76372135/ https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/76372135/ This is still the case today, at least in the US (I just checked). Instead of emphasizing the painting of Beethoven we all know, the one that was actually done during his lifetime, the one featured in the infobox of his Wikipedia page (which is also the top link result), it instead emphasizes a much more obscure painting that was done posthumously, for no obvious reason other than it giving him a noticeably darker skin tone. I'm not even offended by it, I just find it ridiculous that Google actually went out of its way (probably for pc reasons) to train their algorithm to return less relevant results.
• binarymax 5y ago
  Google isn’t a search engine. It’s an ad engine. The top results drive ad revenue for their ad network. You’re not getting good search results because the information you want doesn’t make money for Google.
• aaron695 5y ago
• cromwellian 5y ago
  I’m shocked that the original author didn’t think to put “series b” in quotes instead of as separate words. Doing that returns a table format of every databricks round as the second result. In general, “term” is like the old +term format which we all used to use back when we thought search was good until google killed the +. In reality the Web has gotten worse with far more bad spam actors and our search habits have changed partially because google steered us towards more natural language style queries away from the old style queries many people used to use in this community. In other words, we got used the convenient of free form text without special operators, and when the webspam increased we feel that having to go back and futz with the query using these operators means search has degraded.
  • robin_reala 5y ago
    On the other hand, Bing got it right. I’m the sort of person that would happily see AND and OR back as search operators, but most people aren’t, and they shouldn’t have to be trained to put things in quotes just because.
• Quindecillion 5y ago
  On a slightly different tangent, has anyone noticed that predictive text while typing on a phone (iPhone for me) seems to be getting progressively worse? Like it predicts the most random words that have little connection to what I typed on the screen. I don't know if all my mistakes over the years are being remembered and so the prediction algorithm is accumulating more errors and performing worse, or if something else is at play (clumsy fingers as I get older?).
• rendall 5y ago
  With sincere respect to the author, I stopped reading the article. Even though I found the topic interesting and am definitely inclined to believe that Google's search results are declining in quality, I felt that the search terms and criticisms were distractingly unfair. If someone were evaluating hammers and handed a bunch of hammers to beginners and judged the hammers by those results, I'd tune out there, too, for the same reason. A suggestion for improvement would be to have the users RTFM (read the fine manual) first, and then take a reading a week later on their everyday search results. Google is a tool, like an other. Know your tools. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/134479?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/134479?hl=en And: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 Always put a quote around "exact search" terms that must be grouped together, especially if the term includes something common like the letter b. Indeed `databricks "series b" valuation` does a lot better: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=databricks%20%22series%20b%22%20valuation https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=databricks%20%22series... The 4th result is exactly about Databrick's series B valuation. https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/databricks-series-b--f0c822da https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/databricks-series-b... Always search for a multi-word proper name, especially a common name like tim lee, with quotes. Put "tim lee" into quotes, and wikipedia shows up on the first page: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22tim%20lee%22%20vlogger%20age https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22tim%20lee%22%20vlog... Is vlogger really a common search term? Personally, I'm okay with Google suggesting blogger because I don't think vlogger is all that common. But maybe? Perhaps a better search term would yield better results? In fact, "tim lee blogger age" gives better results than with vlogger! Google was correct to suggest that change. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tim%20lee%20blogger%20age https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tim%20lee%20blogger%20... Anyway, this kind of criticism works best for me when the critic gives the subject the most reasonably charitable chance and then talks about the bad. Expecting great results out of bad search terms isn't reasonable, in my opinion.
  • TrailMixRaisin 5y ago
    I understand your point but I find it reasonable to expect google to do some of this stuff on its own by now. I assume that only a small portion of its users know how to use "advanced" searches such as using quotes or ~ etc. In the same way that google uses search completion, they could try to group important parts together. But I agree with you that the example search strings seems somewhat fabricated or at least especially selected to produce bad results. In my experience the best way to get good results is to use as little relevant search strings as possible. "databricks series b" has the right answer at position 1.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Definitly, I just cannot anything. Worse, when one is polyglot and it will just automatically translate search results or nicely return local results (after automatic translation) when I want the original stuff I am looking for. Then all the shitty url redirects for any kind of document returned by it for analytics.
• tlogan 5y ago
  Google search works exactly as Google wants it to work: highly optimized for whatever makes money for them. Sure it is worse for us but it is so much better for them. And it will get even worse since revenue growth has to go from somewhere. And it will take decades for some other company to displace Google.
• fudgefactorfive 5y ago
  I never understood why they didn't expand the "did you maybe mean" section when they pushed into ML based query interpretation. Let me search what I want to search the way pagerank trained me to. Keywords over sentences. But if you want to start pushing in that direction why not just add a "you may find better results when phrased as" section which these models appear to be preferential towards. From the examples, ngrok for example, search didn't even care to include the keyword in all searches, even if the page is more "popular" the fact you'd (and I have repeatedly had to) quote the term to insist it be included is nuts for a search engine. Finding obscure bug solutions was already barely possible, but has become impossible when even explicit error messages are "interpreted" to 'why won't <unrelated program> do <unrelated keywords>' on StackOverflow because it noticed that the program uses the same library and has had some searches with the same process name in the error line.
• myhikesorg 5y ago
  This reply is based on my own biased experience, but I run a small website to share public trail data and I've found that Google (in my opinion) artificially suppresses my site's results on really basic searches. Within Google's search console you can easily check if a page has been indexed. For example, I've published new trails/hikes in the past where Google's index claims it includes the page.. but when I search "myhikes <name of trail>", it sometimes doesn't show up - even after clicking through multiple pages! If I change my search to "site:myhikes.org <name of trail>" it'll show up... weird? I think so. I understand how keywords can be confused by search engines and "myhikes" is fairly generic as many people might post a blog with the string "my hikes", etc. Now if I search a popular trail that Google likes to serve up regularly (i.e. "myhikes <name of popular-indexed-trail>") it comes up as 1st in the list. Additionally, what pisses me off even more, is that I've searched for "myhikes <name of trail>" and have been served Google's own map / shitty trail tiles ranked as #1, then my site is ranked #2. Doesn't that last bit feel a bit anti-competitive? It does to me, but maybe I'm biased.
  • IndexPointer 5y ago
    Unrelated, but your website is down right now.
    • myhikesorg 5y ago
      Thanks for the reply! It's actually up and running, but if the response says "forbidden" it's likely because I blanket-block a lot of non-US IPs, AWS IP ranges, etc. because of annoying crawlers. This is bad practice, but I do it for several reasons. I've turned off some blanket-blocking for now. If you see this comment, would you mind sharing if you were making a request from a US-based IP, VPN, or outside the US? Just curious - it'll help me understand things a bit better. Try again if you wish :)
• nspattak 5y ago
  Googles search's results are often wrong because of corporate choices. In Greece there is a completely independent news web site which for some reason just isn't registered as a news web site with google. As a result not only is this web site less shown than others (in google feed or in search results) but in the past there have been cases where this web site was the first to publish a story but google search only returned other news sites which reproduced this story even using the original material! In my opinion, google has become too big and has lost focus on actual quality/engineering.
• pcmaffey 5y ago
  Google is the best search engine for searching ads.
• hooande 5y ago
  The methodology in this article is terrible. It makes me doubt that the people at Surge HQ understand even the most basic scientific concepts. This is like doing a taste test between two sodas where one is clearly labeled "Coke" and the other labeled "Pepsi". It will end up measuring branding and public perception instead of anything empirical or even objective. This isn't a measurement of search quality, it's a public opinion poll with a sample size of 250. In fact the whole thing is a poorly disguised advertisement, and I don't think it serves them well.
  • IndexPointer 5y ago
    It's much better than any other article I've seen on hacker news about it.
• tradesurplus 5y ago
  The question should rather be: can vanilla Google Search deteriorate any further?
• gnrlst 5y ago
  One thing that's recently been driving me crazy with Google: how the heck do Github aggregating websites get better SEO than regular Github when I search for a repo?
• yokoprime 5y ago
  I recently changed over to ddg as my primary search engine (for the nth time...) and this time it seems like it sticks. The quality of google search results have been dwindling, that and a lot of ads just pushed me into switching over again. I have to say that ddg have improved their service as well, so hats off to them.
• tailfra 5y ago
  I hate when I receive n sites (where n>5) that point to the same GitHub issue or stackoverflow content with different ui
• rexreed 5y ago
  I've been saying this since 2016! So what can be done about it? There are certainly better search engine alternatives out there. But the market doesn't seem to want it? The average Joe and Jane still go right to Google for search and Chrome for browser. And the truth is that as soon as a solid alternative comes out, the entrenched incumbents will squash it like a bug through acquisition or other means.
• nojvek 5y ago
  Yesterday I was googling for “rub fingers genie magic”. I was looking whether it was a cup, kettle or a vase you “rub fingers” to invoke the magic genie. But google would automatically change to “jenie” and bring up Amazon crap. I tried adding “alladin” and it changed query to bring up alibaba crap. Google had no idea about the famous alladin and genie story. Google not only misunderstood me, they thought I was an idiot for asking a non e-commerce query. The top 5 results above the fold were all ads. It was truly frustrating. I called a friend to ask them that question and get an answer.
  • the_doctah 5y ago
    It might be because it's spelled "Aladdin", it's a lamp, and you don't necessarily rub it with your fingers, you just rub it. Your queries were way off. If you had just Googled "Aladdin Genie" you would have every single result in the first page be relevant.
    • prewett 5y ago
      There's one context I am aware of that "rub" and "genie" go together, and I would certainly expect Google to suggest something with Aladdin pretty high. There is that song with the lyrics "I'm a genie in a bottle, you have to rub me the right way", but I expect Aladdin to overwhelm the results. Not getting Aladdin seems to be a big failure. I tried the query in Firefox icognito, logged in, and in Safari on iOS using the cell network not my wifi, and got identical results: 1: Youtube video from the "Aladdin" movie (didn't watch, so not sure) 2: Quora question about genie not giving three wishes 3: Movie Quotes - Aladdin 4: Etsy lamp product 5: Stock photo of man hand rubbing lamp 6: Amazon product 7: Genies in popular culture - Wikipedia 8: Iconfinder result 9: Genie - Disney Wiki This seems rather different than the poster. It's got way more commercial stuff than I'd like (but how does Google know I'm not looking to buy a stuffed lamp toy or something), but the answer to their question would be in the Wikipedia entry, I expect. It might be hard to find the original story, though, since the search term "Aladdin" is probably overwhelmed by the movie.
• agencies 5y ago
  Please comment with your recent failed searches in this thread. Any new search engine is going to need a niche with lots of users. I haven't seen a comprehensive list of actual failed queries that new search engines could focus on solving.
• ibdf 5y ago
  If we could only give feedback on search results, things would improve. I am tired of finding the same articles over and over again that just update the year every year and gives you a top list of product "reviews" with a link to amazon.
  • jcranberry 5y ago
    Clicking on a link I'm sure is feedback.
• afrcnc 5y ago
  yes, 100% especially in the images and news sections
• nablaone 5y ago
  Youtube gives me a better search results. Esp. for non-IT related searches.
• andrew_ 5y ago
  The most frustrating part of using Google these days (for me anyhow) is Google returning results that don't match terms that I specifically wrap in quotes. If I search for: "gamakatsu octopus hooks" I expect to only receive results for that. Instead I get bombarded by results that match a portion, or when Google thinks I tangentially might have meant something else. There was a time when it respected the quote characters, but those days have long since passed.
• jfoster 5y ago
  Google's primary differentiation used to be that they were by far the best search engine. Since then, they have moved upstream: 1. Android 2. Chrome 3. A deal with Apple Even if a much better search engine were to emerge, without an extremely large delta in search quality, they may struggle to compete against Google because Google controls the entry points. Apple & Microsoft still control the platforms (OSes) upon which Google reaches the majority of consumers, though. Seems likely that Apple will try to displace Google eventually.
• pcdoodle 5y ago
  It's so so bad. I used to be a google master. Now I'm a consumer.
• aantix 5y ago
  I think it's complete BS that when I search for something like Basecamp, they show the paid advertisement before the organic result, even though they're the same. Feels so slimy. The organic result would have sufficed. Nothing but a glorified 1997 Yahoo Index at this point. I never click the advert. I know I'm probably in the minority, but I won't give them the infinitesimal revenue.
• leokennis 5y ago
  Personally I'm at full scale war with ads on the internet and I make sure I see almost none (nowadays this can be achieved in a lot of ways - Pi-hole, NextDNS, uBlock etc.) So when recently my wife and I were searching for a holiday destination online on her laptop (with no blocking as she gets very annoyed if blocking makes even one page unusable - she'd rather drown in ads all day) I was pretty shocked that for almost all search queries, on a 13" laptop with 1280x800 resolution and the browser running full screen at 100% zoom, the >>entire visible Google results page is all ads!<< There is literally no organic search result visible "above the fold"! So, Google could improve their search engine dramatically and the typical searcher would not even see the results of it...
  • baxtr 5y ago
    Would you agree that every business needs to find ways to earn money? If we agree on that, could you agree that using a "free" service might be free only in the sense that you don't pay any money but instead they use your attention to sell ad space which in turn pays for their bills? Me personally, I don't see anything wrong with that.
    • nicbou 5y ago
      It depends on how it makes the money. For instance, I'm perfectly fine with a website earning a commission on the products it reviews. I go out of my way to make sure the website that convinced me gets their commission. However, a lot of the content is now written specifically for the commission, with zero effort spent on the content itself. That's how you get "best products of 2022" lists on January 1 2022, which contain zero useful research about the products. They add no value. This is good: https://tomsbiketrip.com/whats-the-best-camping-cookware-for-cycle-touring-and-bikepacking/ https://tomsbiketrip.com/whats-the-best-camping-cookware-for... This is not good: https://www.thespruceeats.com/best-camping-cookware-5184274 https://www.thespruceeats.com/best-camping-cookware-5184274 I also see more and more websites that just rephrase other websites' content, and replace the affiliate links with their own. In the end, you get a dozens of websites feeding off the same 2-3 original articles.
    • leokennis 5y ago
• darepublic 5y ago
  I hate when I search for tech issues and I get doc pages but the deprecated docs get top billing. Ironically this often happens when looking up google documentation of their own products. Also sometimes I am looking up a term out of curiousity / intellectual interest but the results are dominated by people selling products for that term. I agree that search could use an overhaul, maybe even niche search designed around certain domains could be a target for producing something better.
• joelbondurant1 5y ago
• richardsocher 5y ago
  disclaimer: I started you.com, a private search engine with summarization. I've seen many users complain about Google's quality and wanting to have some control over their sources. That's why we added source preferences as a feature (you have to log in). You can also change the order for a query and similar queries directly within the search results page so that you eg see StackOverflow or Code Completion higher than web results.