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Does anyone else think Google search quality has gone downhill fast?
- agencies 5y agoHN continues to pay lip service to wanting to make this better but does NOTHING to move the ball forward. Simple things like providing barrier less access to HN content and harder things like crawling all content linked from HN would be a great resource to bootstrap new search engines.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
- coolhoody 5y agoEver since the people of Earth invented Half-Assed Listicles — shallow dumps of 1-hour googling. Now 'site:news.ycombinator.com' and 'site:reddit.com' are sad norms — like condoms. The draft title of this comment was '9 Reasons You Can't Google Expert Feedback', but my cat came and looked at me with immeasurable disappointment.
- colejohnson66 5y agoOr sites that are just SEO/GPT spam made for ad revenue. Say I want to know if a side effect my pet is experiencing is normal for a medicine the vet gave them. I search DuckDuckGo for "cat {medicine} side effects", and half the results are pages where you have headlines like: What is a(n) {issue}? (what you went to the vet for) Should you worry about {issue}? What to do if you see {issue} Is {medicine} safe for your cat? Is {medicine} appropriate for {issue}? ...and more Only after a half dozen or so stupid sections (with ads littered between them) do you get to the actual list: "What are the side effects of {medicine}?" Why don't search engines have a way to report spam sites?
- oscardaum 5y agoThat's the worst. Case in Point https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-use-google-calendar-in-django/ https://quick-adviser.com/how-do-i-use-google-calendar-in-dj...
- thesunkid 5y agoI found You search, especially quick fact app, is an amazing thing for that usecase. No ads, rich content (web results, facts, videos, etc.) and super compact. https://you.com/search?q=cat%20NSAIDs%20side%20effect&fromSearchBar=true https://you.com/search?q=cat%20NSAIDs%20side%20effect&fromSe... https://you.com/search?q=steroids%20side%20effects%20on%20cats&fromSearchBar=true https://you.com/search?q=steroids%20side%20effects%20on%20ca...
- tippytippytango 5y agoGoogle didn't get worse, the internet did and Google just reflects the junk we put in the pile.
- psyc 5y agoIt would be naive to think 100,000 of the most elite practitioners at the company that became the verb for what it does working on the problem for 20 years would be able to keep up.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI built my search engine in part to test this hypothesis, and think the result is that it's wrong. A large chunk of the internet, as it used to be, is still there. You just can't find it in the sea of aggressively search engine optimized (and often machine generated) junk that it has to compete with on Google. You can't find it on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter either, because none of their algorithms favor that sort of content. This creates an illusion that it doesn't exist. But it does.
- vosper 5y agoIf those sites were trying to SEO your search engine, rather than Google, then they’d be the only results you saw, too.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoOh yeah, absolutely. I think a big part of the problem is Google's dominant position essentially puts them in an impossible uphill battle against an entire industry attempting to game their algorithms. The solution to this problem is search engine diversity. If you have multiple search engines with incompatible algorithms and disparate views on quality, then even if you manage to game one of the algorithms effectively, that search engine will just lose popularity and your SEO will be less useful. The winning strategy becomes to attempt to SEO against multiple contradictory algorithms, which is something that will never be as successful as manipulating Google alone.
- dingleberry 5y agoit's only natural to blame advertisers when search result return full of ads
- eimrine 5y agoAt least Goodle has not degraded to nothing and can search at all. Youtube search is working only if you have seen a video where some interesting X have been mentioned which leads a lot of people to search that X - you will find that X from entering 1-2 letters. Otherwise it just gives you random stuff even if you ask him "channelname avesome-video-I-know-precise-naming-of".
- time4tea 5y agoDoes anyone use Google search anymore? I would have thought people had got wise to the tracking and use something else, like e.g. duckduckgo
- psyc 5y agoHardly ever. I switched everything to Bing some time ago. If I feel I’m missing something I try Yandex. I hear Brave is good, and Kagi and Neeva may be interesting newcomers. Even if Google were on par with Bing (which I don’t find it is, but my interests may differ from the average HN case) I’d still want to see the company burn for its betrayal of its own mission, of the internet, and of humanity (I mean why not, while I’m being dramatic). From “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, to “to present a peep-hole sized view of the world, where said view best suits the values and interests of Google and its sponsors.” I hate Google because I stumbled on it in 1998 and it was sheer magic, but now it’s 1997 again. They were a really, really good company and deserved all the success. Too good to survive becoming a public megacorp. It’s like how people are sadder when the bright young student full of promise and dreams falls into drugs and alcohol and ruin, than when it happens to the one who was always a delinquent since they were four.
- FrozenSynapse 5y agowho cares about what you search?
- marginalia_nu 5y agoAdvertisers would love to know what you search.
- fsflover 5y agoAlso, the government, if you are in the opposition.
- askvictor 5y agoI switched to using DDG for the last few months, and unfortunately it's even worse than Google is. I mainly search for technical/programming purposes; as an example, DDG rarely if ever links to anything on docs.python.org (the canonical reference for python), compared to Google where the relevant page is usually in the top 5. For other domains they might be comparable though.
- tintedfireglass 5y agoThis is what happens when Google becomes the gateway to the internet
- bspear 5y agoYa it's horrible, the SEO answers are pretty hilarious sometimes
- fsflover 5y agoYes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21796070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21796070
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoYeah it's ridiculous. You don't have to upvote them even if you want to read the comments and discuss. Stop wasting our time sharing posts from random outside reddits too. They're purely anecdotal nonsense wasting everyone's time. We've got enough similar posts here.
- kgbcia 5y agothe entire Google ecosystem has gone downhill by killing off products or invading people's privacy for advertisers. i heard even your gdrive files are mined for advertisement.
- arinlen 5y agoI'd add that the recent wave of spam plaguing Google Drive, and lack of adequate response from Google to address this massive problem, also contributes to erode confidence in their services.
- Teletio 5y agoI read news/comments about it but I'm not experience it myself
- pcdoodle 5y agoIt's bad. Ignoring quotes around search terms, etc. has brought me from a google master to a consumer of content by the best "pets of google".
- riidom 5y agoNow that's not related to google, or maybe indirectly, but I used to search with qwant for at least a year, roundabout. I read on HN about github clones, riddled with ads, and in the end directing to github, with adding an referer. I never saw one of those myself though. A few weeks ago I decided to switch to search.brave.com, because I read they build there own index. This is what I ultimately want from an alternative search engine, not relying on googles/bings results. It then turned out, that at least their image search is not an own index at all, because the first site of results was 100% similar to googles image search. Also it turned out, when searching with brave, all of a sudden I get to see these github clones in my results. I am not sure about the reasons for all this, but I went back to qwant.
- kurupt213 5y agoDepends on how you look at it. The Google search user isn’t the customer, the advertisers are. I would say that Google has gotten much better at getting search users to click links that generate income for Google.
- SilentM68 5y agoDon't know if it is google but in the last couple of years when I type a phrase like, "Konjac Rice Near Me," half of the search results that state the product is available to pickup today return the following, """ This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ad.doubleclick.net. Try: Running Windows Network Diagnostics Changing DNS over HTTPS settings DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN Check your DNS over HTTPS settings """
- big_blind 5y agoI personally switched search engines and it has made coding, general searches, and overall just browsing the internet 10x smoother. I tried a couple like DDG, Brave Search, and Kagi. I started using You.com and find the search results just better than Google's. Less SEO sites bogging down search results, website filtering, and optimized results layout.
- anime55555 5y agoI also started using you.com. No ads on a search engine is a game-changer.
- foofoo4u 5y agoYes. Google search quality is abysmal today. Results are always content farms, top 10s, click-baity headlines, and sponsored articles. I've tried Duck Duck Go. It's "ok". I like their stance on privacy, but their results always seem to miss the mark. I've ended up using !g more often then just using the engine itself. I've tried Brave search. Similar experience. I most recently have joined https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ . I've been enjoying it the most so far. I enjoy the results enough and its features to pay for a subscription when it eventually comes out.
- dc-programmer 5y agoI agree Google’s quality has declined. But has anyone else noticed the ubiquity of these types of posts? Is this some kind of guerrilla marketing campaign for a stealth startup? If so, can they do iMessage next?
- t0bia_s 5y agoGoogle results are irrelevant (just search for "white couple" in images) and strongly manipulative (look at suggestions of you type "why cens..."). Bad thing is that Google is like ethanol for internet knowledge. What is not googleable, it is like not existing on web.