11 ms·
Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there ar
by kauguste281 5y ago
Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. It's still vastly superior to the modern alternatives. It doesn't help that almost all alternatives out there are just Bing with different window dressing, so going through alternatives is just annoying as they have all the same holes in the search results.
Another big issue is that everybody just tries to copy Google. I don't need Google in less good, I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever).
I feel there is a lot of untapped potential that gets missed by just trying to be a Google search clone.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoGoogle had a "search only forums" filter. I was devastated when they took it away. You can fake it by searching one forum at a time with "site:whatever.com", but you have to do one at a time and that doesn't help if there are forums you don't know about. Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back.
- aww_dang 5y agoForums were somewhat decentralized. Without attributing motive, platforms are interested in moving in the opposite direction.
- visarga 5y agoYou can make custom search engines by selecting an explicit list of sites on top of Google here https://cse.google.com/all https://cse.google.com/all
- dantyti 5y agoit requires a google account. I like teddit.net's approach of allowing the user to set up preferences and import them as a json.
- vopi 5y agoidk if you know this but kagi has a "discussion" filter (among other filters)
- Melatonic 5y agoI feel this same way about a lot of aspects of Google search.
- sph 5y ago> Google could double its usefulness overnight just by bringing this back. It is now evident Google is not in the business of making its search any better.
- tomxor 5y agoWhich is why we need more competitors in this space. When you are an underdog, making something "better" even for no direct monetisation path, is an obvious win because it all creates more noise and attracts people to your platform. More noise = more business - but Google don't need more noise, they have all the attention they need, they are basically king, they just need to figure out how to milk it, which means the only intrinsic business force is direct monetisation paths... completely different incentives.
- passerby1 5y agoWhere should the profit come from for a search-oriented product/business?
- mescaline 5y agoFrom a business model that doesn't make money off ads.
- garbagetime 5y agoGovernments
- IgorPartola 5y agoBecause indexing the web and organizing all that information is expensive. It’s also a lot of power so we can’t exactly trust that job to a single government or even a group of allied governments. Universities could potentially handle it by pooling a lot of resources, but I can’t really think of who else I would trust to be The Search Engine. Google isn’t ideal but at least it’s priorities are mostly aligned with the average user’s.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
- srcreigh 5y agoBut do those forums run Google ads?
- aww_dang 5y agoYes
- jessriedel 5y agoAre there any wrappers for Google search that try to implement a bag of these sorts of workarounds this with a nice UI?
- wolpoli 5y agoThis could be solved with selectable ranking strategies. Of course Google isn't going to offer that.
- mtgx 5y ago
- pinky1417 5y agoShouldn't there be a way to only search multiple forums through some userscript? Only found out about userscript after messing around with an iOS app called HyperWeb. At least in my limited understanding of userscript's capabilities, you'd still need to explicitly specify the forums you want to search, but I imagine that would solve lots of use cases for search filters.
- skinnymuch 5y agoGoogle has a limit to how long searches can be. So if it’s a complex one, it can’t be too long. I think you can only specify searching one site at a time. With site: search filter. — Google’s custom search engine’s where you can give a whitelisted amount of sites isn’t very good. At least not any more. It didn’t include lots of pages it’s main index does. Or the rankings were all out of sorts rendering not useful.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thrwawy283 5y agoYou mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no complex filtering to do things like removing search results that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to specifically refine your search. Google still has the most useful search, but they've taken away methods to get better results. I remember I was pretty upset when i couldn't search for images by exact dimensions anymore. Bing allows this. Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a decade.
- onetokeoverthe 5y ago
- dlsa 5y agoGoing backwards and standing still often look the same. I think its both in this case to varying degrees. Google is competing against itself, obvious competitors but also obvious refinements that appear so regardless of actually being implemented. The no-login filter is a refinement that would be useful to many. There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.
- mrjin 5y agoGoogles priorities have been long shifted from products to money. They are now deliberately doing evil things for more money. It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation. Google has been came such a monster, even we know it's dying, but its momentum will keep it going for a very long time. And if it can correct its trajectory just a little bit, the collapsing process will be even longer.
- ornornor 5y ago> It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation. Very debatable.
- thereare5lights 5y ago> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. Came here to write exactly that Why are we still using it? There's nothing better out there.
- elevaet 5y agoI've been starting to use kagi for search. I'm still using google by default, but when I get a screen full of ads and clickbait articles I turn to kagi and it's almost always better.
- _yoqn 5y agoMaybe you should try an opposite approach. When kagi gives you useless results switch to Google.
- Gareth321 5y agoThis is what I do. Kagi gets there 95% of the time. Plus I get to down/up rank results. Plus no ads. Plus I feel confident I’m getting the best result for me and not for advertisers. Truth be told I’ve been using “site:reddit.com” for years now already. Google still has the lead with the answer box and older results. They’ve been collecting data for longer and I suspect their indexing heuristics are incredible.
- kuhewa 5y agoI wanted to love kagi, but they still have the same fuzzy search that makes it about impossible to find something odd that shares keywords with commonplace things.
- wyclif 5y agoYou should try Brave search.
- CraigRood 5y agoGoogle is still my default as 9 out of 10 I get the answer I need quickly. Bing does my other 10% where Google provides junk or stale results.... Google Search really is declining. I'm tempted to move my default over to Bing for month or two just to experiment. On the Maps front, I'm really enjoying Apple Maps as it has less junk - I just want a map!!
- bko 5y ago> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.
- supernovae 5y agonone.. it’s all because of paid placement taking priority
- bushbaba 5y agoSearch, "what hotel to stay in san francisco soma". You'll see that every single result above the fold is an Ad. In fact it doesn't even give me a single useful piece of information. #1 result is a link to expedia. #2 is to hotels.com, #3 to the trip advisor. Scroll down Google Hotels widget. Then on the 3rd browser viewpoint page I get actual query results.
- emmelaich 5y agoThe result I got was a list, with maps and prices with an option to refine stay dates. Not sure how that could be improved to be honest. Next entry was a non-ad from Tripadvisor.
- heavyset_go 5y agoWhen weird search results get posted on HN, they're sometimes fixed within minutes. I wouldn't doubt that the search term was "fixed" by someone reading HN.
- bushbaba 5y agoHere's my results: https://ibb.co/cv06gHg https://ibb.co/cv06gHg https://ibb.co/BwZX9FQ https://ibb.co/BwZX9FQ https://ibb.co/NCnBC6b https://ibb.co/NCnBC6b
- 5y ago
- madrox 5y agoI think companies have tried, but it simply hasn't worked. Yahoo tried to do a lot of this, and simply failed. Arguably they could have done it better, but I don't think many will have a better shot than them for a while more to come.
- lmg643 5y agoBrave search is fantastic, haven't noticed a difference since moving
- _yoqn 5y agoI'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search. The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.
- hedora 5y agoHaven't tried Brave, but I'd say DDG results are much better than Google Search. I think it's down to personal preference or something.
- JohnFen 5y agoRight now, DDG gives me the best search results of anything that I've tried. I know people who don't get the same quality results from it as I do, though. I'm 100% convinced that the difference comes down to how searches are formulated. At least, the people who I know that experience poor quality searches seem to enter their queries as natural-language questions rather than search terms.
- 5560675260 5y agoIn my experience Brave is better than DDG for tech topics. But DDG so far is noticeably better for non-english content and image search, so I still use it as a fallback.
- dantyti 5y ago> orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others used brave as my daily search engine for a couple of months and I must say this was not the case for me. Results for global EN topics were indeed better than ddg/bing in some cases (nowhere near an order of magnitude better, though), but results for any non-EN or local queries (think searching for major websites running for 15 yrs) were extremely poor in most cases.
- Barrin92 5y agoAm I the only person on earth who hasn't noticed any decline in Google results that everyone keeps talking about? To me it seems like people conflate the fact that there is now significantly more stuff on the internet (what's the data volume today compared to 2010, 100x? 1000x?) than there was years ago with the performance of search engines. People say they now have to append "reddit" to their search and they didn't in 2008. Which is obvious because in 2008 there was only reddit and like 3 other sites, now there's dozens of relevant ones.
- lazide 5y agoYes. There is massively more spam, and they’ve made it do a lot less direct search matching (many results don’t include the actual word that matters for instance)
- google234123 5y agoI’ve noticed more spam and shit sites but I’m not sure if that’s entirely googles fault. There might just be 1000x more spam sites now then a few years ago.
- firecall 5y agoThis is super useful: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter Removes sites that copy SO answers etc...
- mushyhammer 5y agoYou don’t give Google enough credit: They totally can add a “report spam site” action in the search results, but they don’t, because they don’t care. It would help immensely to have websites disappear from search after 100 trusted Google users complain about them (after manual review). This stuff already exists and works on Google Maps. Even the data collected from a personal blocklist would be useful for them, without explicitly reporting sites, but again they just don’t care. They’ve been in the business of parsing websites for 25 years, surely they can tell ad-infested spam websites apart from good ones.
- mooreds 5y agoI think there's also some inertia. I know how to tweak google. I have also used some competitors. They are fine for most things (finding the hours of a local store, a restaurant's menu). However, when the going gets tough (troubleshooting a technical issue, looking for a recommendation) I fall back to google.
- irrational 5y ago> I want to see something that organize the Internet in a more useful way than just plain text search (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever). Yes, I would love this. I was recently looking for reviews of a certain woodworking tool. The vast majority of websites googled returned were clearly bot created sites. I came away thinking I wanted a curated list of a few sites actually created by humans.
- mrjin 5y agoI really missed those days that I could write URLs I visited frequently on notebook. Unfortunately, we might never be no way back to the good old days. There is literally way too much info on the internet, and thus impossible to index contents manually.
- cupofpython 5y agoI dont think it is as hopeless as you think. There are only so many websites people actually use for human-created content. Those should be prioritized. There is still the issue of differentiating between bot blogs and human blogs but I'm sure I could figure something out at a 200k salary, and google has plenty of people like that
- andi999 5y agoSo you want the search engine to perform a turing test? Nice.
- cloutchaser 5y ago> Youtube-style recommendations for websites Reddit?
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoOnly so long as old Reddit remains intact.
- kauguste281 5y agoReddit is heavily biased towards new content and you have to know what subreddits to look for to find the interesting stuff. The nice thing with Youtube recommendations (after recent updates) is that it pulls out a lot of older content and it also has a pretty good understanding of contexts and topics, even pretty niche stuff. Plain Google search really has no way of exploring the web in the same way you can just do with Youtube recommendations. Also helps that Youtube is extremely low on spam, you get ads and product placement, but not the bot generated filler that is cluttering up Google search.
- y42 5y agoYeah well, that's what you want, and probably a decent couple of power users. And I totally agree. But here is the thing: My mom, dad and even my brother, they don't need that. They need the limitations aka borders, the "simplicity", the synchronisation and the search results. They still stick with Facebook, Google and Amazon because it's easy to use and their gate to the Internet, where all the smart people are living and the "future is real". They do not understand the drawbacks or they just don't care. And I dare to assume that this pictures the vast majority of Internet users.
- jackblemming 5y agoGood thing there's more of a market than your mom, dad, and even your brother, or alternative search competitors like duckduckgo and others would be completely screwed.
- marcinzm 5y agoIs there an alternative search engine right now that is both good and not based heavily on an incumbent by a large tech company (ie: bing)? If not then the argument isn't disproved.
- fxtentacle 5y agoMaybe the market of people that are significantly different from his/her mom is just too small to justify the significant investments needed to build a search engine. Or said another way: If 99% are happy with Google, can the remaining 1% pay enough to finance "Google pro" ?
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoThis is actually what I worry about more. I'm browsing with Firefox on Mac with adblockers, and have some knowledge of what the potential scams are. Is Google actually helping the average user more than a hypothetical alternative? Don't know, tricky question to answer, but whatever the answer is it's likely a society wide change, involving regulation and new business models and ethical consumer choices, not just a new search engine.
- glenstein 5y ago> (e.g. what about Youtube-style recommendations for websites, old-school Yahoo-style dictionaries, AI categorization, Dejanews-style search for webforums, a button to filter out everything that requires a login or whatever). These are all truly excellent and refreshingly imaginative ideas, in a conversation too often starved of critical thinking (elsewhere in this thread commenters, unable to imagine any alternative at all, are incredulously asking "what would you even replace it with?"). I would just say that search in it's traditional form is valuable too, and highly efficient. Or at least it can be when done well. I think millionshort search results are a good example of what traditional search can be.
- hwers 5y agoIt would be funny if some site with youtube-style recommendations got popular because that's basically what I believe google is using under the hood already and it would be so easy for them to pivot to that style and then take over all the momentum the recommendation-style site got.
- mrkramer 5y agoWhy would an average user use such service? I was thinking about creating such "internet recommendation engine" so to speak but as my hypothetical project was progressing I realized that it started looking more and more like internet search engine as and when I started adding more advanced features. But looking from costs point of view it is cheaper to create internet recommendation engine than internet search engine.
- toshk 5y agoGoogle works great for most daily tasks software questions, looking for a service/company etc But when I want to do serious research on things like eczema, diet, backpain, exercise. Google absolutely fails (also Google scholar) I have to buy books, go through Reddit,listen to YouTube lectures etc that point to the correct literature and then you get to know the experts, different opinions etc. All you find is these generic sites with basic advice which is common knowledge lik WebMD. Not bad, but they dominate the entire search. I would think a heavy version of Google focused on in depth/experts would be great.
- Ekaros 5y agoIt generally even fails when you are looking for a product. If you don't know certain brand. I have been hunting reasonably priced stainless steel meat grinder(the grinding parts, not the body), but with google due to all SEO spam it feels like impossible task...
- jstummbillig 5y ago> Google sucks compared to Google from years ago. Sure, in the sense that someone who had their legs broken sucks at running. Compared to yesterdays, Google today has to deal with a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search. It's easy to fetch good water when the well is clean and no one is trying to actively poison it.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago> a whole new level of the entire world trying to game their search I think their #1 problem is their product managers trying to do "something" to add said something to their resume and making the product horrible to use in the process Examples include: - Grid view tab switcher in Chrome Android - Removing dislike count on YouTube
- 542458 5y agoI partially agree with your comment, but it feels like in some/many cases the Google algorithm has large flaws that were not previously there and that (superficially) seem solvable. For example: * If I search for recipes, the Google algorithm seems to heavily favour recipes with a short novel prepended to them. The “novel” does not have to be particularly relevant to the content - I’ve seen recipes with “novels” that I’m not convinced wasn’t partially algorithmically generated. Every human being I’ve ever spoken to hates this. * Google will search for what it believes to be alternatives to terms, even when those terms are placed into quotes (which used to prevent this behaviour). This can be very irritating when Google’s alternative terms are incorrect. Both of these are regressions over earlier behaviour, and don’t seem to have any obvious benefit to them.
- jstummbillig 5y agoDon't know about regressions. Did it maybe just take people some time to figure out that Google Bot is really, really captivated by a riveting story to accompany that pancake recipe?
- SahAssar 5y agoDifferent types of these strategies have been around since before google existed. Hell, even web directories (like early yahoo!) had to deal with spam, early google had to deal with keyword spam. Paid backlinks, spammed comment sections with backlinks, copied content sites as backlink farms, all of this existed at least as early as 2005-ish. For some sites (some of them with legitimate info) the meta keywords tag (even though google stopped using it very early) was the bulk of their size for just this reason. What has so radically changed the last couple of years to make spam take top spots on the SERP?
- CuriouslyC 5y agoHonestly at this point I don't think bing sucks vs google. Bing has less random junk in SERPS for a lot of searches, and seems less gamed by SEO companies, but it isn't really better enough to make a point of switching my chrome url bar over and breaking my habit of just going to google. If things keep going like they have been I wouldn't be surprised if I switch in the near future though.
- Spooky23 5y agoExactly. Google sucks because the internet that we remembered died long ago, hoovered up into social media. The person passionate about beetles who would have a great website in 2002 now posts 38 post Twitter threads (at best) or Instagram/Facebook posts that are lost forever. It’s sad as we had this amazing “long tail” effect where a company like Google could set out to organize the worlds information. Unfortunately the economics drive new behavior, and the next cohort of big web companies sought to monopolize human attention. The more profitable ones like Facebook are masters of psychological manipulation, and the second string cohorts like Reddit who aren’t very smart/manipulative adopt a more hands off approach where undesirable content like porn juices engagement.
- fils 5y agoUntapped potential. exactly. To me the biggest problem isn't the results (even the ads) it's the lack of innovation. The lack of making search an experience and something that generates a value I can store and share. I've been looking at several of the options talked about here. My favorite so far is Neeva (https://neeva.com https://neeva.com) due to their "spaces" concept and how it provides a simple building block I can explore to address many of the use cases I have for search. Search needs innovation and people trying new things.
- masa331 5y agoI wonder what do you mean by "vastly superior". For search i use Kagi, for a browser i use Firefox. For mail you can use Protonmail or i guess there are other alternatives also. Only thing i miss is Gmail message threading. Other than that nothing else. So i think people are only used to Google, that's all. I don't think it's vastly superior in any area anymore
- manx 5y agoYes, please bring web directories back! Today we have more possibilities to manage that than in the early days. Many things can be automatically generated/crawled/MLed or crowdsourced. Browser extensions can help to categorize almost all important websites. Data sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow or Wikipedia already have many websites categorized. We just need to combine the data. I did a few experiments myself trying to drive hierarchies from tag data. It works surprisingly well. There is even some academic work in this direction.
- buywarbonds 5y agoI see the problem with Google search of today vs Google search of 10 years ago being that the first page of search has already become a "Youtube-style recommendations for websites". It's more like a curated list of "approved content" now.
- peter303 5y agoPlus I strongly suspect Google search no longer gives the most accurate answer, but the one most profitable for Google ads.