5 ms·

Google's search quality has taken a serious nosedive in the last couple of years - the last 6 months in particular. I think they implemented some new form of s

Google's search quality has taken a serious nosedive in the last couple of years - the last 6 months in particular. I think they implemented some new form of search term widening which is far too strong, so the results you want are often buried among pages and pages of results for the general category of things that you searched for rather than close matches for your keywords. Combined with the recency bias that other people have talked about and you end up with a lot less useful search for precise searching. This coincides with a large increase in the number of surveys that my partner has been getting through the Google Rewards program that ask whether or not a recently used search term gave relevant results. Obviously that's just anecdotal, but it does feel like there are substantial changes in the algorithm, and not necessarily for the better.

skinkestek 5y ago
Has been going on for a decade in my region but it seems recently other people on HN has been hit too. With that said, welcome to the club. I feel sorry for you all who have to go through this now; I've had a decade to adapt.
- visiblink 5y ago
  I've been seeing this too. So after reading your comment and the one above, I did a search to see what operators are still supported by Google and stumbled across this page: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ It's nice to see that AND and OR still work, but from a few tests, it seems that most of us should be prefacing our searches with "allintext:" (without the quotation marks). It works well to dramatically improve the results of my searches. I think I'll write myself a google search page that automatically prepends it to my searches.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Wow! I have been a really advanced Google user and somehow I have missed that particular one! Edit: 1. Reading through it I am fairly certain some of these has been defect too. define: in particular is one that I used to use, but that I was sure was broken. Today it worked again though. 2. At least double quotes still doesn't work (or maybe they include text from links pointing to site or something) 3. How did you find this? I've been looking for something like this recently :-)
    - visiblink 5y ago
      I use duckduckstart.com and I don't recall adding a bang to the search, so it was probably in the startpage.com results when I searched for "Google search operators."
  - jerrre 5y ago
    From that article: > “search term” > > Force an exact-match search. This is no longer working in my experience, at least for full phrases (for example error messages), same in DuckDuckGo
    - visiblink 5y ago
      Agreed. Quotation mark functionality in Google seems to be sadly dysfunctional. I guess I buried the lede. I probably should have just focused on the allintext: operator in my comment. That's the operator that makes a huge difference in my searches and that I wanted to share.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        I got the message loud and clear :-) Now I just wonder if that is Kagis magic trick - and how long it will take before Google "repairs away" this feature too :-(
  - fudged71 5y ago
    Most of these aren't working anymore... extremely frustrating
rc_mob 5y ago
i been messing with other search engines a lot. kagi and marginalia. nothing too good or bad so far. I really want to be done with google. ddg seems like a clone of google so its not much better
AlwaysRock 5y ago
They are optimizing for a certain type of search. It seems to me that type of search favors recency and the broadest results possible. While it seems to be getting worse to me, for most people this is probably what they want. Searching for "Javascript .splice(,) ES5" and "Vermont State Flag" are two pretty different types of searches. It's actually not that hard to get the results you want for a more specific search if you learn the boolean operators and use them effectively.
BizarroLand 5y ago
just the other day I was trying to find general information about how a cuckoo clock works and I had to wade through multiple pages of companies selling cuckoo clocks, companies selling clocks, clock oil, watch sellers... I have ublock origin but the "non-ad but still loaded with commercial results" experience was terrible. Guess I need to add blacklist to my extensions so I can start paring down the BS responses.
primax 5y ago
There are recipes I've been cooking for 15 years that are on forum posts. I've searched for them all this time with google, and now they have disappeared. I can find them by manually navigating around the archives of the forums, but to most modern search engines they do not exist. We are losing a lot with the direction that these search engines are going in.

skinkestek 5y ago

Has been going on for a decade in my region but it seems recently other people on HN has been hit too. With that said, welcome to the club. I feel sorry for you all who have to go through this now; I've had a decade to adapt.

visiblink 5y ago
I've been seeing this too. So after reading your comment and the one above, I did a search to see what operators are still supported by Google and stumbled across this page: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ It's nice to see that AND and OR still work, but from a few tests, it seems that most of us should be prefacing our searches with "allintext:" (without the quotation marks). It works well to dramatically improve the results of my searches. I think I'll write myself a google search page that automatically prepends it to my searches.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Wow! I have been a really advanced Google user and somehow I have missed that particular one! Edit: 1. Reading through it I am fairly certain some of these has been defect too. define: in particular is one that I used to use, but that I was sure was broken. Today it worked again though. 2. At least double quotes still doesn't work (or maybe they include text from links pointing to site or something) 3. How did you find this? I've been looking for something like this recently :-)
  - visiblink 5y ago
    I use duckduckstart.com and I don't recall adding a bang to the search, so it was probably in the startpage.com results when I searched for "Google search operators."
- jerrre 5y ago
  From that article: > “search term” > > Force an exact-match search. This is no longer working in my experience, at least for full phrases (for example error messages), same in DuckDuckGo
  - visiblink 5y ago
    Agreed. Quotation mark functionality in Google seems to be sadly dysfunctional. I guess I buried the lede. I probably should have just focused on the allintext: operator in my comment. That's the operator that makes a huge difference in my searches and that I wanted to share.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      I got the message loud and clear :-) Now I just wonder if that is Kagis magic trick - and how long it will take before Google "repairs away" this feature too :-(
- fudged71 5y ago
  Most of these aren't working anymore... extremely frustrating

rc_mob 5y ago

i been messing with other search engines a lot. kagi and marginalia. nothing too good or bad so far. I really want to be done with google. ddg seems like a clone of google so its not much better

AlwaysRock 5y ago

They are optimizing for a certain type of search. It seems to me that type of search favors recency and the broadest results possible. While it seems to be getting worse to me, for most people this is probably what they want. Searching for "Javascript .splice(,) ES5" and "Vermont State Flag" are two pretty different types of searches. It's actually not that hard to get the results you want for a more specific search if you learn the boolean operators and use them effectively.

BizarroLand 5y ago

just the other day I was trying to find general information about how a cuckoo clock works and I had to wade through multiple pages of companies selling cuckoo clocks, companies selling clocks, clock oil, watch sellers... I have ublock origin but the "non-ad but still loaded with commercial results" experience was terrible. Guess I need to add blacklist to my extensions so I can start paring down the BS responses.

primax 5y ago

There are recipes I've been cooking for 15 years that are on forum posts. I've searched for them all this time with google, and now they have disappeared. I can find them by manually navigating around the archives of the forums, but to most modern search engines they do not exist. We are losing a lot with the direction that these search engines are going in.