19 ms·
Google Search results are below the fold
- chrismorgan 5y agoMeta: this isn’t a Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).
- corentin88 5y agoRight. If someone could change the title to "Tell HN:"
- version_five 5y agoTry kagi.com (I have nothing to do with the company) They are similar in feel to google, I think their results come from google as well as others (I say this having tried bing and ddg but going back to google because the results they returned were worse or at least not compatible with how I've learned to use google). They don't have any ads.
- browningstreet 5y agoIs that the one that requires a browser extension to participate in the beta? That's why I don't use them.
- skarz 5y agoBrave Search, Searx, Metager, DDG, Presearch, Swisscows, Starpage... So many to choose from!
- Pooge 5y agoIt doesn't require any special software to get in the beta. You sign up, get invited, log in and search. I quite like it, but the price tag will not be justified if it's just a Google frontend. This is another universe in itself, but I'd much rather have them develop their own indexer.
- zanmat0 5y ago
- Semaphor 5y agoNot sure why the sibling comment is flagged? O.o They actually already use their own index, it’s just tiny. They want to focus mainly on smaller sites with it, but the plan for "the future" is to have their own index be good enough to rely on for most searches.
- junon 5y agoNot flagged, just dead. Presumably the author deleted it.
- Semaphor 5y agoOh wow, thank you. I always thought comments were dead because they are flagged, I did not know deleting your posts turns them dead.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lupire 5y agoIt doesn't. Dead comments are flagged or moderated or posted by a user who has been shadow-banned. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- lupire 5y agoNot true: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- junon 5y agoI stand corrected, thanks.
- tyingq 5y agoThat's not terribly new. Similar view with everything organic below the fold for most lucrative search terms. Try: mesh wifi router hotel in las vegas flights to tahoe leather sectional
- odonnellryan 5y agoI was searching about something to do with fiberglass today. Every article was garbage that seemed like bot spam. Was nuts. Direct quotes stolen from forums etc..
- Cacti 5y agoIt’s become noticeably horrible lately. Half my search results these days are bot sites, just entire sites of copied material or material generated by neural nets that is completely worthless. I don’t know what’s going on at Google but the search engine quality has dropped off a cliff in the past 6 months.
- smolder 5y agoThey just haven't sufficiently escalated the arms race. The "link juice" signals that g search has traditionally dealt with, and it's relevence measurements, etc., have been thoroughly gamed. What they need to improve search quality is the intelligence to identify things as spammy and low value and then drop the rank of all the SEO optimized crap that people hate. I can only imagine that google sees this as politically impossible ("you destroyed my business, Google! I'm gonna sue!") or they have decided the return on investment simply isn't there. They do not need to give you better results to keep getting search queries that help them to show you ads.
- otherotherchris 5y agoGoogle's key problem is that it seems to prioritize "freshness" above all else. Experts on a given topic have no need to continuously spam their sites full of minutely modified "best of x in April 2022" listicles. They were authoritative when they published their views ten years ago, and they're still authoritative today. Google doesn't care. Ten year old information isn't relevant or useful.
- lupire 5y agoWhen everything you learn about the Internet stinks, maybe it's not the messenger's fault.
- aghilmort 5y agodog food is my fave example, adding 409a to the test list! & if we're listing out search engines, here's what it 409a search results look like on Breeze, https://breezethat.com/?q=409a https://breezethat.com/?q=409a
- SamBam 5y agoHuh, but while I want my search results to work as well as the did in 2001, why does the website need to look like it was from then (at least on Firefox on Android)?
- bastawhiz 5y agoOn my phone, I had to scroll down a full screen height to get past the ads. I would not call that a win.
- aghilmort 5y agoyes, we're working on mobile -- it's much better on desktop
- valleyjo 5y agoThere is a description of a 409a above the fold. So I don’t think it’s totally fair to say the results are all below.
- SamBam 5y agoAgree, that's an answer box, not part of the ad. It happens to come from the same domain as the ad (and that may not be coincidental) but they don't always.
- ehsankia 5y agoIt also depends on many factors like your screen resolution. Most site I go to on my small laptop, 80% of the screen is covered with ads.
- naoqj 5y agoYour ad blocker is badly misconfigured. I don't see any ads in Google search.
- kazinator 5y agoThe thing is, even if you block ads with a browser extension, that will not bring the below the fold material above the fold!
- naoqj 5y agoYes it does? If the ads disappear and they leave an empty space, then again this is a case of a misconfigured ad blocker.
- kazinator 5y agoIf Google serves you a page of ten results, but nine of them are ads, how is the blocker supposed block those nine in such a way that you see ten results? I think you'd need a full-blown search scrubbing extension of some sorts that gets all the results and rearranges the entire UI. A compromise is to simply crank up your results per page in the Google Search settings. The maximum value is 100. For most searches, that's well past the short head of useless info and into its long tail.
- user3939382 5y agoI remember when the search engine space was full of cool competitors. AltaVista, Yahoo, GoTo, Dogpile, Northern Light, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Excite, WebCrawler. Now we have Google whose value comes with their incessant privacy abuse, and Bing/Bing front ends (DDG). Cool and exciting are definitely no longer the emotions I associate with web search.
- aeyes 5y agoPeople might be slightly annoyed but I have to say that Yandex Search is pretty good, even for international users. Try it: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=409a&lang=en https://yandex.ru/search/?text=409a&lang=en
- mateo1 5y agoYandex might be good in Russian (I don't know) but it's barely mediocre in English and really bad at other less common languages. The only good thing about it was that it used to give unfiltered results for some queries that google had shadowbanned (such as for piratebay or scihub). However as far as I can tell thats no longer always the case.
- CrispinS 5y agoI've never used their normal search engine, but their image search blows Google out of the water. I highly encourage anyone who frequently uses Google images to try out Yandex. What's really interesting is the differences in the results -- it seems like Yandex is actually filtering for high quality art. I've got a project on the back burner to scrape google and Yandex for the same queries and then do different sorts of analysis on them and see if anything interesting pops up. Going by eye, most photo results on Yandex are higher resolution, and more saturated. It also doesn't pull images from video thumbnails like Google does.
- throwaway0x7E6 5y agoseconded. it's stellar, even better than what google used to be. feed it a cropped frame from a japanese cartoon and it returns links to illegitimate websites containing the full episode. google returns a nonsensical ML suggestion and no results
- haileys 5y agoI find most of the web utterly unusable without uBlock Origin installed.
- hansel_der 5y agoi think this goes for most literate ppl.
- lupire 5y agouBlock Origin doesn't block spam sites from search engines, tho
- jordic 5y agoGoogle is no longer interested in returning good search results, their priority are ads. (Good results are on ads)
- darinf 5y agoThis is why we created Neeva.
- nickreese 5y agoBeen using neeva as my daily driver for at least 6 months. I do use !g somewhat frequently (2-4% of quieres I’d guess) but the results are definitely good enough for most quieres.
- ageitgey 5y agoHere's the same query on Google in 2009 vs now: https://twitter.com/ageitgey/status/1483410675548495874 https://twitter.com/ageitgey/status/1483410675548495874
- ssss11 5y agoOh wow that is ALL ads!
- wodenokoto 5y agoI’m defense of current google results, hardly any of those 2009 results was about toothpaste.
- ricardo81 5y agoIt looks like Google decided the user wanted to search for toothpaste in their 2022 version so showed that version of results, the 2009 version is showing the toothpast results but still thinks the user may have meant toothpaste.
- bpicolo 5y ago“Low prices on toothpast” Ads with text interpolation are hilarious
- axg11 5y agoI’m not sure this is proving the point you want to make. Arguably the 2022 results are more relevant. If you ignore whether the results are ads or not, the top results in 2022 are all toothpaste brands and lead you to toothpaste websites. The way we search has also changed. In 2022, if you’re searching “toothpast”, you’re much more likely to be looking to make an online purchase of toothpaste than in 2009.
- SamBam 5y ago> if you ignore whether the results are ads or not But that *is* the point. They're all they're only because they paid $$$$ to be there, not because they're the best results to be there.
- unmole 5y agoThis is a Tell HN, not a Show HN.
- wodenokoto 5y agoIs the answer thing with source link not a search result?
- phil917 5y agoThe most frustrating thing about Google for me these days is searching for recipes. Every web page that should have an extremely straightforward, straight to the point list of ingredients and instructions now has to use every fucking SEO trick in the book. Because otherwise, the page won't be considered "high quality" enough by Google and won't rank anywhere close to page 1. This of course leads to a huge page with someone's life story interspersed with the actual cooking ingredients/instructions. It's so common to see some something like: "My mother used to make me this dish for me when I was a child and it's my favorite thing to cook in the winter time now, blah blah blah." No one fucking cares! Give me the recipe in one concise, step by step list!
- dang 5y agoPlease don't put "Show HN" on posts like this—that's not what "Show HN" means. You can read about what it means at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Literally every submission shows something to HN, so if we have it on a post like this, it might as well be on every post, which means it might as well not exist. I've taken "Show HN" out of the above title now.