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Ah, young whipper snappers, everything old is new again, and clearly the world is always getting worse. Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of ac

Ah, young whipper snappers, everything old is new again, and clearly the world is always getting worse. Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing 'Cached' pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad. Long before Reddit was big, USENET/DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb/UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite owning DejaNews, did not often surface links into USENET content, and a lot of forums, for whatever reason, were not indexed by Google. For example, I used to spend a lot of time reading the latest on PC/3D Hardware stuff on Beyond3D, Overclockers, Rage3D, etc and I almost always had either use site specific search (dejanews.com or say, PHP BB's built in local search), or I had to add site:beyond3d.com for example. And is a large amount of confirmation bias going on in these Google threads that appear. Some people make assumptions that their search patterns are representative of the billions of searchers ("argh, I searched for pytorch k-means and a GitHub wrapper site appeared!") and that their experience is a representative sample, while others focus only on what has gotten worse, and not what has gotten better. What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out, except by luck because perhaps they don't crawl as many sites as often.

shuntress 5y ago
I think this is very important to note and I agree. Whether or not google search right now is as good as it could be should not be the main point of discussion. We have to remember to acknowledge that the web google is indexing now differs drastically from the web it was indexing 20 years ago. Web pages are now less likely than ever to be freely accessible plain text put forth in good faith for public consumption. Google (in addition to dealing with big walled gardens designed explicitly to hide content from google) is trying to sift through basic spam, industrial scale SEO exploitation, and nation-state cyber warfare. Bitching about google search being bad almost feels like yelling at the canary in the coal mine when it passes out.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  I vaguely disagree with this. The issue (at least for me) is that google is no longer actually searching for the thing I ask for, and it's being blatantly disrespectful of users who cared enough to learn how to actually use the search features. Quick example from today? I did a literal two word search - gulp admzip - and while the result are okish, an increasing amount of space is taken up by results with this handy little blob at the bottom: "Missing: gulp ‎| Must include: gulp" "Missing: admzip | Must include: admzip" WTF are they smoking? I asked for two fucking words, and the top result doesn't include one of them. Then the second result doesn't include the other. So then I add quotes around the phrase I want "gulp admzip" because I'd really only like to actually see results that include that EXACT phrase, and... drumroll... IT DOES IT FUCKING AGAIN: "Missing: gulp ‎| Must include: gulp" And that literally has nothing to do with the quality of the items it's searching, and everything to do with Google deciding what I meant - Clearly I meant the npmjs.com package adm-zip, because that item gets vastly more views than any of the real search results. I couldn't have possibly meant to restrict the search to the actual fucking phrase I told it to search for, because there aren't that many results, and they don't get many views.
  - usui 5y ago
    I highly agree that "Missing", "Must include", has to be one of the worst hijacks of search functionality I've ever seen. Please just respect my search terms, as it doesn't fully respect them even when I put them in double quotes! It takes far longer to scan my eyes across the results dump and then retroactively see that my results are absolutely not what I am looking for, than to just see that there aren't many results for my exact query. Decreasing the feedback loop time is essential to modifying my query quickly so that I can eventually find what I am looking for. The "Missing", "Must include" pages have always, always, ALWAYS, in every case, never given me what I am looking for. If it did, then I would have just taken out my search term.
  - shuntress 5y ago
    This is the exact angle of discussion I'm saying we should try to avoid because this behavior from Google is an effect of an underlying problem with the entire web. Most sites that include the exact phrase "gulp admzip" are empty spam of regurgitated word lists of every build tool or dev package designed to attract errant clicks that help boost ad metrics. That is why Google can't "just grep the entire internet". Incidentally, I agree with Google here that whatever problem you're trying to solve is more likely to be an issue with either gulp or admzip and you will be better served by content specifically about one or the other.
_fat_santa 5y ago
> What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out The problem as I see it is Google has created a bunch of perverse incentives to make your page rank higher. One big problem is Google gives higher rank to "comprehensive" articles. On the one hand that would seem like a good thing right? But what you end up getting is endless affiliate articles that don't seem to be written for humans. And they are really easy to spot if you know what to look for. A great example is webhosting reviews. Search "best web hosting" and click any of the 1st page results and you will almost always get an article that just rambles on and on and on with headings like: best web hosting for email, best web hosting for blogs, best web hosting for email marketing. To a human, it's an incredibly disorganized mess, but to Google's bots, its "highly comprehensive and authoritative".
- cromwellian 5y ago
  While that may be true, it’s also true regardless of the ranking algorithm or which web search is the winner. Webspam will seek to game whichever search company has dominant market share and they will structure their spam to overcome the filter and ranking specifics of that engine. Considering tools like GPT-3, one could easily imagine in the limit, a spammer running a large number of searches through a search engine, finding out what ranks high, and the training a generative model on that dataset to produce similar articles. Auxiliary signals like inbound links and DNS records they can also usually work around by purchasing domains or buying inbound links. It will always be a war and there is never going to be a victory over webspam. Even with something like web3 where posting content costs money I can imagine ways spam.
  - joebob42 5y ago
    I guess in the perfect magical world where the algorithm detected "suitability for humans for the given query" then if gpt-3 spat out a bunch of stuff and it ranked highly, it would mean this wasn't really spam, because it was useful to humans, even if it was generated in a spammy way.
    - 5y ago
chaxor 5y ago
I think the biggest sentiment shared with everyone against Google search at the moment is the eagerness to see better competition. While it may be true (and certainly easy) to paint everything with this large brush of 'nothing has changed, we've seen this before' - it misses the point just a tad, which is (imo) aimed at the disdain for constantly being tracked, and wanted to have a much more hacker friendly web experience (like the old days). Things such as https:/serx.cf/ (https://searx.space https://searx.space) or https://github.com/benbusy/whoogle-search https://github.com/benbusy/whoogle-search (https://whoogle.dcs0.hu https://whoogle.dcs0.hu) should prevail on a site such as HN - and furthermore, we should be setting the path with these tools for the future use of internet by non-power users.
girvo 5y ago
> forum search has always been bad Man, that's almost an understatement haha. I always wonder if it's just a "Hard Problem", as I still don't know any forum software that solved it.

shuntress 5y ago

I think this is very important to note and I agree. Whether or not google search right now is as good as it could be should not be the main point of discussion. We have to remember to acknowledge that the web google is indexing now differs drastically from the web it was indexing 20 years ago. Web pages are now less likely than ever to be freely accessible plain text put forth in good faith for public consumption. Google (in addition to dealing with big walled gardens designed explicitly to hide content from google) is trying to sift through basic spam, industrial scale SEO exploitation, and nation-state cyber warfare. Bitching about google search being bad almost feels like yelling at the canary in the coal mine when it passes out.

horsawlarway 5y ago
I vaguely disagree with this. The issue (at least for me) is that google is no longer actually searching for the thing I ask for, and it's being blatantly disrespectful of users who cared enough to learn how to actually use the search features. Quick example from today? I did a literal two word search - gulp admzip - and while the result are okish, an increasing amount of space is taken up by results with this handy little blob at the bottom: "Missing: gulp ‎| Must include: gulp" "Missing: admzip | Must include: admzip" WTF are they smoking? I asked for two fucking words, and the top result doesn't include one of them. Then the second result doesn't include the other. So then I add quotes around the phrase I want "gulp admzip" because I'd really only like to actually see results that include that EXACT phrase, and... drumroll... IT DOES IT FUCKING AGAIN: "Missing: gulp ‎| Must include: gulp" And that literally has nothing to do with the quality of the items it's searching, and everything to do with Google deciding what I meant - Clearly I meant the npmjs.com package adm-zip, because that item gets vastly more views than any of the real search results. I couldn't have possibly meant to restrict the search to the actual fucking phrase I told it to search for, because there aren't that many results, and they don't get many views.
- usui 5y ago
  I highly agree that "Missing", "Must include", has to be one of the worst hijacks of search functionality I've ever seen. Please just respect my search terms, as it doesn't fully respect them even when I put them in double quotes! It takes far longer to scan my eyes across the results dump and then retroactively see that my results are absolutely not what I am looking for, than to just see that there aren't many results for my exact query. Decreasing the feedback loop time is essential to modifying my query quickly so that I can eventually find what I am looking for. The "Missing", "Must include" pages have always, always, ALWAYS, in every case, never given me what I am looking for. If it did, then I would have just taken out my search term.
- shuntress 5y ago
  This is the exact angle of discussion I'm saying we should try to avoid because this behavior from Google is an effect of an underlying problem with the entire web. Most sites that include the exact phrase "gulp admzip" are empty spam of regurgitated word lists of every build tool or dev package designed to attract errant clicks that help boost ad metrics. That is why Google can't "just grep the entire internet". Incidentally, I agree with Google here that whatever problem you're trying to solve is more likely to be an issue with either gulp or admzip and you will be better served by content specifically about one or the other.

_fat_santa 5y ago

> What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out The problem as I see it is Google has created a bunch of perverse incentives to make your page rank higher. One big problem is Google gives higher rank to "comprehensive" articles. On the one hand that would seem like a good thing right? But what you end up getting is endless affiliate articles that don't seem to be written for humans. And they are really easy to spot if you know what to look for. A great example is webhosting reviews. Search "best web hosting" and click any of the 1st page results and you will almost always get an article that just rambles on and on and on with headings like: best web hosting for email, best web hosting for blogs, best web hosting for email marketing. To a human, it's an incredibly disorganized mess, but to Google's bots, its "highly comprehensive and authoritative".

cromwellian 5y ago
While that may be true, it’s also true regardless of the ranking algorithm or which web search is the winner. Webspam will seek to game whichever search company has dominant market share and they will structure their spam to overcome the filter and ranking specifics of that engine. Considering tools like GPT-3, one could easily imagine in the limit, a spammer running a large number of searches through a search engine, finding out what ranks high, and the training a generative model on that dataset to produce similar articles. Auxiliary signals like inbound links and DNS records they can also usually work around by purchasing domains or buying inbound links. It will always be a war and there is never going to be a victory over webspam. Even with something like web3 where posting content costs money I can imagine ways spam.
- joebob42 5y ago
  I guess in the perfect magical world where the algorithm detected "suitability for humans for the given query" then if gpt-3 spat out a bunch of stuff and it ranked highly, it would mean this wasn't really spam, because it was useful to humans, even if it was generated in a spammy way.
  - 5y ago

chaxor 5y ago

I think the biggest sentiment shared with everyone against Google search at the moment is the eagerness to see better competition. While it may be true (and certainly easy) to paint everything with this large brush of 'nothing has changed, we've seen this before' - it misses the point just a tad, which is (imo) aimed at the disdain for constantly being tracked, and wanted to have a much more hacker friendly web experience (like the old days). Things such as https:/serx.cf/ (https://searx.space https://searx.space) or https://github.com/benbusy/whoogle-search https://github.com/benbusy/whoogle-search (https://whoogle.dcs0.hu https://whoogle.dcs0.hu) should prevail on a site such as HN - and furthermore, we should be setting the path with these tools for the future use of internet by non-power users.

girvo 5y ago

> forum search has always been bad Man, that's almost an understatement haha. I always wonder if it's just a "Hard Problem", as I still don't know any forum software that solved it.