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Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
Recently, I notice more and more search results Google are locked behind registration gates, and not only does Google list them at all, they're often the top results (Think Quora, Pinterest). I never had issues accessing the content in the results but recently, it's bad. Does no one at Google care? Are the people in charge investors at Pinterest/Quora?
- pxtail 5y agoThanks to this cursed god forsaken parasite "Pinterest" I just completely stopped using google's image search option. I'm using bing/ddg now and it feels soooo good compared to how awful google search experience became
- ketanip 5y agoBing is best for image search but it suck on mobile.
- stickfigure 5y agohttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefaihkenmchjmcpcbpdijpoknfjpbfe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unpinterested/gefa... You're welcome.
- lwerdna 5y agoAmen.
- cobbaut 5y agoBoth Firefox and Chrome have an 'unpinterested' add-on.
- dilliwal 5y agoAbsolutely agreed + I have got redirecting links as top results and non relevancy results
- capybara_2020 5y agoWeird I feel DDGs search quality has also gone down recently. I find myself jumping between google and DDG and sometimes to Bing when both are broken. It is like search is broken on all the major providers. Not sure if they are copying each other or if SEO spam has become a lot better.
- ketanip 5y agoAs DDG obtains its results from Bing I think Bing is deliberately trying to downgrade quality of search so as to make people use its service and its working I usually find the results that I need on Bing and not on DDG using same query. Google is going in wrong way and just promoting spam sites and ads.
- BridgetJones 5y agoLegally, Google cannot demote sites for having registration gates, otherwise they would be sued.
- account42 5y agoLegally, Google can absolutely only show sites in search results based on what the user will see when visiting those sites. Financially, it may not be worth risking lawsuits, even if they would win.
- Mikho 5y agoInterestingly, Google used to offer own extension "Personal Blocklist" to hide undesirable sites from displaying in search result. But it was removed, I guess not to mess with Google's manipulations with search results. Now the link to the extention in the Google's blog post about it leads to 404. [1] 1. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-block-sites-from.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...
- throwaway81523 5y agoIt's not just pinterest/quora. Bloomberg News is also often up there, and a few others.
- 7373737373 5y agoGoogle should just outright delist these sites, they are incredibly annoying and worthless
- linkjuice4all 5y agoGoogle has "kinda" allowed this to happen for a number of years. They used to push sites to have a "first read free" policy so that their bot can still access semi-gated content. Now they suggest "flexible sampling" [0] to let "users" view a limited amount of content per time period. This is a game Google has been playing for a while that goes beyond SEO and seems to really be some issue with publishers. But to be fair there are a number of instances where publishers want free access to Google's search pages and users while requesting a fee for writing the content they indexed in the first place. [0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/flexible-sampling https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...
- whakim 5y agoThere's a number of ways that you can expose paywalled content to Google without showing it to the user. The obvious one is paywalling content on the client side and hiding it from the user. I actually think this probably explains why client-side paywalling is so prevalent even though it's obviously far less effective. You can also serve your content in structured data that google's bots read (e.g. json+ld). I also think it's a tricky question because people often want to see authoritative sites high up in the search results even if they're paywalled, so "delisting these sites" isn't a solution that satisfies most people.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoHiding content is supposed to be against Google's stated policies.
- kikokikokiko 5y agoTry searching for a news article, using the exact same title, as it's published on let's say... Breitbart. Now tell me that Google do not "hide" sites from it's users.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 202201220101 5y agoAn era has finished, that's all. Google's corpse will be decomposing for quite a while though. Hopefully they will find their Nadella before they get completely IBM'd.
- alphabetting 5y agoThey're leading the field in AI/ML innovation which is the future. Wouldn't count them out when their stock performed best of any FAAMG this past year and revs are growing faster than the rest
- jonathankoren 5y agoIBM made Deep Blue, Watson (the Jeopardy player), two of the 10 most powerful computers in service today, and outperformed the S&P 500 from 2001 to 2014. What's your point? A gigacorp has tons of inertia?
- alphabetting 5y agoMy point was they're leading the field in AI when it is the future. What they're doing goes way beyond what Watson was. IBM also wasn't a trillion dollar company growing at 40% https://twitter.com/JonErlichman/status/1453089818402041857 https://twitter.com/JonErlichman/status/1453089818402041857
- jonathankoren 5y agoAlright fanboi. You’re clearly not serious
- janglezz 5y agoI recently stopped using google and switched my default to DuckDuckGo. So far I haven't needed to go back to google for anything.
- Cupertino95014 5y agoMe too. DDG is still not as good on certain searches, but most of the time it's perfectly adequate.
- iratewizard 5y agoOne day I hope either ddg becomes good, or a good alternative pops up.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alpaca128 5y agoDDG is pretty good, it just requires a bit more context on average. As using a search engine is a lot about knowing the right choice of keywords it takes some time to adjust to the differences. Waiting for another random search engine that works exactly like Google is gonna take a while. I still find what I need, that's all I care about. And I can't remember seeing a pinterest link on the first page.
- iratewizard 5y agoFrequently, I search ddg, fail to find what I'm looking for, and then search Google. Or don't bother searching ddg on a certain kind of search because I know it won't find it. Both Google and DDG are mediocre versions of 2010 Google.
- nafizh 5y agoYou are correct. I tried DDG before but it just isn’t good enough. I have been trying the new you.com search engine for a couple of months and it is really good, more so if you are in tech and your searches are work related.
- chimen 5y agoGolden...for their AMP!
- nerdbaggy 5y agoFor about the past month I feel like I have had a ton of searches that returned irrelevant results. I use to be able to have a typo and other wrong things and it always did a good job until recently.
- Havoc 5y agoThe google scraping bot gets past the pay walls in many cases
- reboog711 5y agoCan I change my mobile browser to use the same user agent?
- sexy_seedbox 5y agoKiwi Browser on Android, then install User Agent Switcher?
- mkl 5y agoWon't work if they care, as there are other verifications: IP addresses https://developers.google.com/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json https://developers.google.com/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot..., domain name https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/verifying-googlebot https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
- account42 5y agoAnd if Google cared then neither of those pages would be public. At some point SEO became something that Google condoned and actively supported instead of seeing it as people trying to game the system.
- Havoc 5y ago>Won't work if they care, Indeed. Many have lazy useragent implementations though
- jhart99 5y agoI have a user-agent switcher and switching to googlebot definitely puts you beyond many paywalls.
- roenxi 5y agoIt isn't so much about whether "Google cares" or otherwise. There are a lot of sites and a lot of vested interests trying to game their search rankings, and a huge number of keywords that the game is playing out in. Sometimes low quality sites will have the advantage and sometimes high quality sites will have the advantage. Google is working with a bias to high quality, but they are fighting a broad fight against persistent opponents. Every so often Google does a big algorithm refactor to try and make life hard for these sort of sites.
- ivxvm 5y agoHow do you know this? Any links to read more?
- roenxi 5y agoI'm mostly recalling the occasional headline news when Google does a big engine revamp [0] then extrapolating to say they probably do a lot of smaller ones that they don't draw attention to. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Google_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Google_Search
- l0b0 5y agoIt's a trend I've noticed with other services, notably Drive and Calendar - they no longer innovate, just get a UI tweak every few years. It's very reminiscent of cash cows, which typically are resourced to just keep going at minimal expense for as long as possible. Another possibility is that the product isn't "sexy" anymore, so they are having trouble finding the great staff they need to stay at the forefront. This would be fine if the rest of the world stood still, but clearly SEO has moved on in the meantime, and so we end up with a quagmire. It's basically another form of bit rot. Unfortunately DDG is much worse in a different way - it seems incapable of dealing with synonyms. I can't recall a specific example since I switched back to Google, but it's on the order of searching for Python and getting results for Java (wrong subtree of the taxonomy), searching for Wellington and getting results for the whole of New Zealand (ignoring specifiers), or searching for double glazed windows and getting results for Microsoft Windows (no understanding of the semantics of the words being related).
- sombremesa 5y agoDDG is also much worse if you Google things like “1 crore inr in usd.”
- kyrra 5y agoGoogler, opinions are my own. For products that are core, large UI changes tend to just annoy a lot of users, unless there's something really amazing about the change. Even then, people are hesitant to like new UIs. Engineers and designers definitely want to try new things, but balancing those against messing with UIs that a billion+ people use is hard. My general take on drive and calendar, if they are trying to improve these cases for enterprise users. There's a lot of very non-sexy work going on to make these improvements, and they aren't always visible.
- taftster 5y agoIt's not "large" UI changes that are needed. (I mean, they are needed, the current google UI for most of their products sucks). But it's small improvements that make the big difference. A small user interface element added or removed to speed up an interaction. An updated user experience so that data can be found or organized in a slightly different way. I could pick on almost everyone of Google's products and have gripes about some UI or UX choice. Missing functionality here, overly complex there, etc. Every product has obvious low hanging fruit that could be improved. That's what parent is referring to (I assume). There's no more micro-innovation happening. If it's not a change that makes 100 bazallion dollars, then it's just not a change worth doing, apparently.
- taftster 5y agoI think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny laugh, go to your favorite comedy website (like facebook.com) and search directly. Want some news, go to CNN or Fox (depending on your persuasion) and fill your echo chamber. Not kidding. I think search as we know it is dead. And there is a new paradigm just sitting out there ready for the next generation to make. A directory of well known lists of websites with specialty search engines available on each.
- eawoifjaiowepfj 5y agoi just use google to search reddit these days.
- rhizome 5y agoFunny, Google search is so cluttered these days I almost automatically append "reddit" to any product or technique search. I think a lot of people are doing this, because the "People also ask" block on search results will often have questions like "best lawnmower reddit?" (a fine example of that Google quality we've all heard so much about)
- mateo1 5y agoWhich is why reddit is starting to flood with spam. It won't last long.
- waynesonfire 5y agoSshh, you're ganna ruin it.
- ravenstine 5y agoI've been coming to a similar conclusion. Increasingly I've had to use `site:<domain name>` syntax with DDG, but DDG has clearly become significantly worse in recent months. This was confirmed by others in another HN thread recently. Even if I use the site-syntax or use quotes to specify exact match (which DDG used to honor), I'll often get nonsense results whereas Yandex somehow manages to find results that aren't on DDG or Google. And yeah, I've been having to use search engines on specific sites like Wikipedia because I know there's gonna be less shenanigans. Sometimes I wonder if I'm living in the past. Do normies actually use search engines anymore?
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y agoIf you can get a beta invite for https://kagi.com https://kagi.com get it. Not only are their defaults really good you also have the option to customize your searches by blacklisting, creating groups with sites like stackoverflow, github, hackernews etc for a dev search and so much more. It feels like google in the 00s with better customization.
- nafizh 5y agoTried getting one. Told me to fill up a survey. Closed.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y agoYou won't be a good beta tester without providing feedback so good for them.
- jodrellblank 5y agoIt's a paid search engine, they're going to get your name, address, credit card details and everything you search for and click on. If a survey puts you off, that's probably a good early warning.
- thematrixturtle 5y agoPsst: https://kagi.com/signup?invite_code=morehumaneweb https://kagi.com/signup?invite_code=morehumaneweb
- vymague 5y agoGot a "The invite you provided is invalid or expired.". I guess it's used up.
- sususu 5y ago> Customize Results I feel like Google could be 10 times better if it allowed the user to block/boost pages.
- harryvederci 5y agoFor those who aren't aware: Google is a lesser-known competitor of the recommended search engine DuckDuckGo. You can Duck for 'google' to find out more about it.
- Minor49er 5y agoDuckDuckGo is just Microsoft's highly successful attempt at getting you to use Bing
- noxer 5y agoI'm p sure my ad-blocker removes these results all. I dont use google that often but never ever without ad-blocker. Whats the point of a page full or ads when I hardly ever search for anything I want to buy.
- tirrex 5y agoI can pay for a search engine service if it blocks paywalls, bloated sites, fake bullshit clickbait contents. It’s time consuming to find what you’re looking for with Google. Unfortuanetely, there is no alternative.
- aserdf 5y agogated results are clearly cloaking right? displaying different content for googlebot vs the search user? https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
- cyounkins 5y agoKind of. When NYTimes or Medium only show the first bit of the article it's because you've exceeded your free allotment. Tracking number of articles read uses cookies, which Googlebot does not send. Still, some sites may condition on User-Agent or otherwise present different content than a clean browser and I think those should be de-listed for cloaking.
- tootie 5y agoI think it's probably tied to the rise in gated content. Especially news. Unless they want to delist every for-profit news site, they can't carte blanche remove walled content. The algo is fundamentally based on popularity. If enough users are logging in to those sites and clicking on them, they'll keep being ranked.
- pupppet 5y agoIt blows my mind that Google penalizes sites for being a fraction of a second slower than they imagine they should be, but a site I can’t actually view- right to the top baby.
- the_biot 5y agoBut is that still the case? I recall reading about this as well, but that was years ago. In the meantime Google throws up a gigantic disclaimer popup every time you want to use any of their services, slowing things down by seconds. (Happens every time because I don't whitelist Google cookies, because are you kidding.)
- Jimmc414 5y agoI just discovered how poor the search results are if you're logged in with your Google account. Have to log out or view in incognito mode just to see what you were searching for. Also I didn't realize how censored Google's results were until I started comparing them side by side with DDG.
- anonymoushn 5y agoCan you search as if you're from a different country? My incognito searches are useless because they are region-specific. Edit: Yes, you can do this if you click on settings -> show more settings -> show more countries and pick the country you want. Which seems like a pain.
- dorkwood 5y agoYou should be able to do this by navigating to google.com/?gl=us, google.com/?gl=sg, etc.
- cat_plus_plus 5y agoIt's also that free sites suck these days. Quora is still free for vast majority of content, just need to register, and has very interesting facts and nuanced opinions. The Economist is a place to read real news rather than talk shows that CNN and Fox have become. Ad supported doesn't seem to work for quality content. So do you want to at least be aware of the quality stuff or just browse junk? Serious question, there should be a search engine to cater to "free only" crowd.
- ziml77 5y agoI certainly wouldn't want Google to exclude or even automatically downrank paid sites for exactly the reason you bring up here. If Google didn't show the paid stuff, I'd be unlikely to know it exists. And there's nothing wrong with having to pay for high quality information. I wonder if a payment model that provides the option to pay per article might make sense to allow people who know they're not going to regularly use the site to still benefit from the information. Or maybe not per article, but instead the option to pay for a day of access instead of a month.
- oceanplexian 5y agoI’m all for paying for high quality information, but wasn’t the point of the Web that anyone could participate? For example, I’d rather pay an independent blogger in Ukraine to tell me about the border crisis from their lens than go through a centralized gatekeeper like NYT to have some office worker in NYC opine on the crisis. Unfortunately Google downranks primary sources and sends secondary sources to the top. Essentially the Web has become cable television instead of a global system for the open exchange of knowledge and information and something about that is super depressing and rubs me the wrong way.
- richardsocher 5y agoThis is one of the many problems we're trying to tackle at you.com (full disclosure, I work there). We felt like it's important that you can select your preferred sources and downvote sources you don't like. For this and other reasons we separate the experience into a private and personalized mode. So you get exactly what you want based on your explicit settings (like StackOverflow code snippets or arxiv papers) and can have hardcore privacy when you want that (where your location isn't used, not even your searches are stored like on DDG).
- gnicholas 5y agoWhat's the business model, currently and in the long run? Also, is this built on top of another search engine's results?
- richardsocher 5y agoHey. We will work on it together with the community this year. Private mode is even more private than DDG so we will likely have to do private ads just like them. But for the personalized experience we have a few ideas that I think are more creative and more aligned with users and privacy but not fully fleshed out yet. We're still a very small team but hoping to ship them this quarter.
- freediver 5y agoCare to explain how is the private mode superior to DDG and what is a purpose of a non-private mode?
- jjulius 5y agoIt's not. When OP first launched his search engine a few months ago, it was pointed out to him multiple times that DDG doesn't seem to communicate with third-parties, but You does even when in private mode. OP avoided that question - and a few others - then and, it appears he's still avoiding it now (he hasn't responded to you in 2 days). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29161545#29194124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29161545#29194124
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- anonymousiam 5y agoBlame the site operators. They probably have specifically allowed the search engine web crawlers to index their sites, while paywalling everybody else. One possible solution would be for you to use the same user-agent string that the search engines are using, thus you will see the same content. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/overview-google-crawlers https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
- gnicholas 5y agoWeird, I never see quora or pinterest in my results anymore. I don't think I'm doing anything special to make this happen.
- stephc_int13 5y agoI stopped using Google search (and most of their services) about three years ago. I used DDG for a while, but I was not convinced. Bing is average, not as good as Google once was, far from it in fact, but more relevant than the duck and less annoying than Google. But yeah, search is in a bad state.
- richardsocher 5y agoWould love to hear your thoughts on you.com We're trying to innovate on various aspects of search, design, UX, AI, etc.
- puregram 5y ago[dead]
- stephc_int13 5y agoNot a huge fan of the domain name. The landing page was not super clear about the usage, crowded. I don't understand the service or the value here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- seaman1921 5y agostop being so entitled and be happy with what you get, or build it yourself. I am not sure what makes you think you can dictate how a company should operate.
- SnowflakeOnIce 5y agoI've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.
- JimDabell 5y agoI’ve noticed that as well. I’ve been finding a lot of queries are now leading me to those awful sites that just dump StackOverflow content onto a page and surround it with ads. The original Stack Overflow page is nowhere to be found on the first page, but if I grab a sentence from the spam page and search again, I can normally find the original.
- now-in-2d 5y agoJust last week I read about these search operators like site:example.com and learned that you can also use them to block certain sites (with -sites:example.com) and combine them. That gave me the idea to build a UI that manages allowed/blocked sites and always adds them as a chain of operators to the query. Today I had some free time so I've build https://my-search.surge.sh/ https://my-search.surge.sh/ as POC. It's a just static site. Everything is stored in localStorage. Works with Google and DuckDuckGo. For now it's just a fun experiment, nothing more. Repo linked in the About page. Feedback welcome! :)
- SnowflakeOnIce 5y agoI've also observed this on duckduckgo, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent. Strange: they either both tweaked their algorithms around the same time, or maybe SEO spam suddenly got a lot better.
- ipaddr 5y agoOr bing is copying google listings still and using some data in it's own search
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- rhizome 5y agoI would like to see a search engine like Google, except without paywalled content, without PDFs, without whitepages.com type results in name searches, and without store product pages for items that are out of stock. A lot of that is repackaged public content, so the fact that they're duplicative should be a very strong negative signal. Relegate those pages to a DMOZ/Yahoo model. I think that would take care of 90% of my frustrations. PDFs are the only questionable item there, I think, but invariably they should be on a research search site or converted to text...or even penalizing the sites that only supply PDF menus for restaurants and PDF manuals for plain consumer items.
- gzer0 5y agoThe bypass paywalls extension might help! It's great for WSJ, economist, and many others. Helps to bypass some of the more common websites at least. https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- paulcole 5y agoWhat’s up with Google? It’s the best search engine that’s available today, in my opinion.
- gandalfgreybeer 5y agoIt may still be the best generally but it's been on a steep decline the past few years.
- paulcole 5y agoReally shows how terrible the alternatives are if Google has been on a steep decline for years and is still the best. I tried DDG for 2 months. Wasn’t worth annoying myself with worse search results for no good reason.
- jonathankoren 5y agoHave you tried another search engine?
- paulcole 5y agoYes. DDG was awful.
- anthropodie 5y agoYou forgot medium which wants you to sign up to read the article.
- KnobbleMcKnees 5y agoI used to read so much medium, especially stuff posted here and on Reddit. Now I feel like I hardly see it at all.
- mrVentures 5y agoCan someone explain to me why the video results are so bad? Half the time I'm looking for YouTube and YouTube never shows up? Was this due to a lawsuit or something? Half the time it's some random website that has a 2minute video before two 30second ad rolls, never what I want.
- fault1 5y agoI always assumed it was because YT and Search were different groups at Google. This tends to happen all the time. The OneGoogle thing (having one Google account everywhere) must have taken an act of god!
- em500 5y agoNot a snark, but why would you search for youtube videos on google, rather than on youtube?
- aero-glide2 5y agoYouTube's search isn't very good.
- no_time 5y agoI think it's the best search google has produced. Probably the most extreme example of how good it is: Search for "reebok or the nike" and "Corona - The Rhythm of the Night (Official Music Video)" is the 3rd result :^) Another suprising example: Search for "ádzseszkó", which is how a hungarian speaker who doesn't speak a lick of english would write "I just called", successfully finds Stevie Wonder - I Just Called To Say I Love You
- wutbrodo 5y agoMy impression is that this was due to some legal constraint. I vaguely remember hearing about some legal pressure that prioritizing YouTube results was abusing monopoly power, and then shortly after that noticing as a user that YouTube became surprisingly uncommon as a result. It still annoys me.
- wanderingmind 5y agoUblock Origin is your friend. Add custom filters to remove these from search results. For example you can remove Pinterest from Google result using filter google.##.g:has(a[href="pinterest.com"]) And DDG using filter duckduckgo.##.results > div:has(a[href="pinterest.com"])
- thematrixturtle 5y agoIf you're looking for an alternative, try Kagi. Much better search results than DDG/Bing, but it supports all the DDG !bangs. No Google-style knowledge graph/instant answers though, and while the beta is free, they plan to eventually start charging. https://kagi.com/signup?invite_code=morehumaneweb https://kagi.com/signup?invite_code=morehumaneweb
- throwaway98700k 5y agoI signed up to the beta but have heard nothing from them since regarding an invite. I’d pay for it now even in beta. Why won’t they take my money!?
- salgernon 5y agoI was terribly frustrated by the google results for "covid test to fly domestic". The "hoisted" response was: "Get tested at least 5 days after your last close contact and make sure your test result is negative and you remain without symptoms before traveling. If you don't get tested, delay travel until a full 10 days after your last close contact with a person with COVID-19." Domestic Travel During COVID-19 | CDC https://www.cdc.gov › coronavirus › 2019-ncov › travelers You need to look closely at this first hit to realize it dates from 2019 - and is therefore completely useless. Clicking through takes you to a 2022 page with somewhat more complete information, but when I first saw that - two hours before I had to leave for an emergency flight, I was in a horrible panic.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> You need to look closely at this first hit to realize it dates from 2019 No, it doesn't. It couldn't, because there were no tests for COVID-19 in the US until Feb 2020, so the CDC could not possibly be recommending testing before domestic travel in 2019. (The 2019-ncov refers to the novel coronavirus identified in 2019, not the date of the article.) It may be outdated (the CDC has changed recommendations frequently), but it's not from 2019.
- salgernon 5y agoThanks for pointing that out, both of you! (If not more by now.) Obvious in hindsight and no snark on being corrected. I'd honestly forgotten the -19 nomenclature. So, I guess I was right to be in a panic about making my flight after all, based on the initial google result. (I don't know when the guidance changed, but the google result is still as I first saw it.)
- watusername 5y agoYou might be confused, because the virus is _named_ 2019-nCoV. The page cannot have been from 2019 because global response didn't begin until early 2020. Edit: Ninja'd
- mjmdavis 5y agoI wonder how much this has to do with do not track and the search engines optimising towards people who don’t enable do not track / limit cookies.
- otherotherchris 5y agoNothing to do with it. Since around 2018, Google is no longer searching for the keywords a user inputted into the search box, it's running them through an AI that rewrites them to maximize ad yield. Google's results for nearly every query are the pages that contain the most Adsense. That's how most results became "Best X in $CurrentYear" and top 10 listicles. Google is going to slowly lose the powerusers first, and then like what happened to Metacrawler, Dogpile and Altavista, the decline will be RAPID as they convert their families and friends.
- account42 5y ago> Google is going to slowly lose the powerusers first, and then like what happened to Metacrawler, Dogpile and Altavista, the decline will be RAPID as they convert their families and friends. For that there needs to be a competitor that is clearly better. Which one do you have in mind?
- browningstreet 5y agoWhat’s up with all the “What’s up with Google?” Ask HNs? Yeah, I know this violates the policies, but sheesh…
- otherotherchris 5y ago>Yeah, I know this violates the policies, but sheesh Polite meta-commentary doesn't violate policy, the rules only apply to jerks. To answer the question, people wouldn't be complaining on HN about Google Search multiple times per day if they could still find what they were searching for on Google. Search has been a revolutionary world changing product for two decades, and now it's completely stopped working for complex queries. Something is up with Google. Something big is up with Google.
- snihalani 5y agoI use duckduckgo
- kderbyma 5y agoI have stopped using Google where possible. DDG and Bing.
- olalonde 5y agoI feel like those discussions occur every few months on HN and here I am not noticing any degradation in search result quality. It would really help if you would at least provide some query examples.
- CGamesPlay 5y agoI noticed this as well, and in addition I got two obvious malware sites for two unrelated searches (one programming, one entertainment). So I switched (back) to DDG. That was about a month ago. DDG isn't as good as the Google I remember, but it's better the Google that shows me obvious spam sites, so it's holding on in my book.
- dilliwal 5y agoAlso talking about SEO it is all so gamified. how can I just write something relevant and not do all the “tricks” and still reach to audience
- phito 5y agoIsn't it just the nature of competition? I've got a wordpress website where I don't really do any SEO, but it is of much better quality (IMHO) than my competitors who are not great with tech, and I am getting a lot of top ranked google/google images results.
- NoSandbox 5y agothat's the beauty of it. You can get massive traffic nowadays without building backlinks like back in the day. by making "better" content. Google really pays attention to user-signals like CTR and bounce rate. Source: I've tested and gamed it a lot.
- dave333 5y agoSoon someone will train an AI that takes google search results and filters out the sites that repost content with ads. And the sites that are paywalled.
- otherotherchris 5y agoGoogle since Page and Brin bailed has become a highly political organization interested only in short term revenue growth, and is no longer an engineering organization focused on product excellence. Anyone that has used their messaging products over the years has noticed this. This type of business attracts a different class of talent and nearly all of the old guard has cashed in their stock and left.
- ur-whale 5y agoSpot on. The really interesting question is whether this is actually avoidable or if all highly successful human organizations that started with high bar ideals and brilliant folks are eventually doomed to rot in place the way Google has.
- peterth3 5y agoI believe this is more or less Christensen’s argument in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” [0]. Google is now the incumbent beholden to shareholders. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
- fuzzfactor 5y agoTo be, or not to be evil . . .
- causality0 5y agoIt's a rather standard tech company model: you build a product so good it becomes indispensable, then you stick the customers in a vice and squeeze until all the money comes out. "Produce the best search results" hasn't been the guiding principle for a good decade now. "Not growing is failing" is the most toxic principle of modern business. There is a finite amount of people, of money to be made. Ever-increasing income is fundamentally impossible. When you can't increase revenue by further improving your product, you increase revenue by making the same product more profitable, which generally means a worse product. In the eyes of the business major, the ideal business is one in which all of your customers hate you not quite enough to stop using you.
- tryauuum 5y agoThat last line is enlightening.
- AndrewSwift 5y agoI would just answer: ad buyers are Google's clients, and users are more like fodder. Not an original thought, I know. I would be interested to know what major users of Google's advertising services think about the quality of their services recently.
- is_true 5y agoIt depends, i don't think anyone is happy having to buy ads for your own brand when you are organically the 1st result. Another thing I saw is that now adsense has full page size ads, like modals. I remember the times, around 2010, when having too many ad units together could get you banned.
- peakaboo 5y agoGo to kagi.com and ask for an invite. I think they have a serious chance to beat Google. Results are really good.
- baby 5y agoOr paid wall content
- Resonance1584 5y agoIts because AI like GPT-3 which can't fool a human, is extremely good at fooling a search engine and now we've effectively lost good search results to spam.
- otherotherchris 5y agoMany aeons ago librarians told Google that sources cannot be trusted equally and that they needed to build a manually reviewed and ranked corpus before their index filled with machine generated shit. But techbros put trust in the algorithm because they knew best...
- sebazzz 5y agoTry Kagi.com while its in free beta, and see if you like it.
- black_puppydog 5y agoI've been using kagi for a few weeks now and it's great! The only issue I have (and reported in their feedback form) is that it sometimes decides to log me out 3 times in an hour, so their session management could be better. But the results are great, with a clean UI and no BS. Definitely sth I'd pay a (small, but nonzero) amount for. Like 5 bucks or so a month.
- is_true 5y agoIn 2016 Google pushed for AI and replaced the guy in charge of the search product (Amit Singhal) by the guy in charge of the AI division. From there it's all been downhill from an user perspectives, I'm sure at first the saw ad revenue increased.