23 ms·

Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

489 points by ixnus 4y ago

royal10march 4y ago
I'm sorry; but it makes no sense to limit yourself to results form .edu websites. Ideas take way too long from the point they have been conceived to land on .edu websites. We have to find a better solution to Google.
gsatic 4y ago
Good suggestion. I had to look up some govt pdfs and tables recently and the government sites hosting the files hardly ever show up on the first page on Google anymore. It's a sad story.
webmobdev 4y ago
... or use Firefox (Tor Browser after disabling tor) + uBlock Origin, and avoid all the unwanted crap most websites throw at you today. And train yourself not to automatically search for everything on Google. Instead use IMDB, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow / Stackexchange, Reddit etc. etc. by adding their search to your browser ( https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-search-engine-to-firefox https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea... ).
- bobajeff 4y ago
  That still leaves you going to sites who's only purpose is to funnel you through some sales channel and waste your time. Edit: yeah that's good advice too. Though the *.edu trick also seems to be pretty useful so far.
tejohnso 4y ago
Counter example: "what is an iris" when wondering about anatomy brings up Wikipedia as the first link. Perfect. With the .edu trick the first link is about the flower, and there's nothing about the human eye anywhere on the first page of results.
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  what is an iris site:*.edu At least for me... First listing (eye): https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215826/http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002386.htm https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215826/http:/... Second listing (flower): http://www.ladybug.uconn.edu/FactSheets/iris.php http://www.ladybug.uconn.edu/FactSheets/iris.php
- einr 4y ago
  Okay, but iris does have two meanings and sometimes you need to be specific in your queries. Your original query would not have been perfect if you were in fact wondering about the flower. "what is an iris anatomy site:*.edu" is enough to bring up this as the first result: https://www.umkelloggeye.org/conditions-treatments/anatomy-eye https://www.umkelloggeye.org/conditions-treatments/anatomy-e...
  - fotta 4y ago
    but that's not a .edu site though e: ah it looks like it is a .edu that redirects to a .org https://www.kellogg.umich.edu/patientcare/conditions/anatomy.html https://www.kellogg.umich.edu/patientcare/conditions/anatomy...
    - einr 4y ago
      Good catch -- the Google result is actually on an .edu domain but it redirects to the link I pasted above.
      - fotta 4y ago
        yep, Google makes it hard to copy the original link too which is annoying
        einr 4y ago
        Sidetrack, but I can recommend the Firefox/Chrome extension "Don't Track Me Google" which cleans up Google result links to be the actual URL, without Google's tracking redirect.
owlninja 4y ago
I get none of the same results as my top hit?
- martimarkov 4y ago
  That's google's personalisation. I like freaking ppl out when I just ask them to google a famous politician's name and compare the results. Some times they get similar results on WiFi and very different on mobile data afterwards. Bringing awareness
  - nomilk 4y ago
    The number of results can also vary wildly.
  - benstrumental 4y ago
    Any idea why this happens? I don't understand why WiFi vs. mobile data would impact how they want to personalize the results.
    - martimarkov 4y ago
      Because of IP correlation AFAIK. But tbh not quite sure it's just something I've noticed.
- shmde 4y ago
  Depends on the region google is set too. You will find varying results based on your location.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  I get none of the same results as my top hit? Google spends billions of dollars a year to give everyone their own personalized set of bad search results. That's the justification for its invasive tracking. Google: "We to build a dossier about you, your life, your friends, and your family members in order to give you better results!" Us: "So... they could be worse?"
swayvil 4y ago
loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Or just use DuckDuckGo instead of google.
- daneel_w 4y ago
  And Tutanota, Protonmail or Posteo instead of Gmail.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It's not really any better in terms of the results it serves up. If it had a filter to only show pages that didn't have cookie popups then maybe I'd look at it again.
  - dazc 4y ago
    The sooner a critical mass of people start use alternatives then the sooner Google will start changing their behaviour.
    - Gigablah 4y ago
      Don't forget, so will the alternatives :)
      - dazc 4y ago
        Why clean anything because it just gets dirty again?
  - more_corn 4y ago
    It’s not more useful. It’s less annoying.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    Install the 'I Don't Care About Cookies' browser plug-in.
  - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
    Searching for “how to fix a flat tire” gave me good results, at least better than the crap the OP got :)
baggachipz 4y ago
Google is so unbearable because they are no longer interested in you finding the answer to your query; they're interested in selling your query and its context to the highest bidder. That conflict of interest manifests in what Google has become.
- mateo1 4y ago
  If this picks up, google will just start ignoring the modifiers. It's like tv again, but with a lot more channels.
  - pilsetnieks 4y ago
    Not TV. It's almost exactly like Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite and other "search portals" of yore. The thing they swore they would never become, yet here we are now.
- blackhaz 4y ago
  Got me thinking - Google has became what it is - this colorful commercial ooze - by parasiting on the pre-Google web. Is there a search engine that searches sites without any Google code in them?
- Beltiras 4y ago
  I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?
  - baggachipz 4y ago
    I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out. [1] https://kagi.com/faq https://kagi.com/faq
    - Beltiras 4y ago
s-video 4y ago
This is nitpicky but the tire changing page doesn't actually fit your rational for choosing .edu pages >Professors are paid generous salaries to share knowledge with the paying customers of the University (students). So, let’s find some paid unpaid University knowledge on how to change a tire by using our new trick! But the bottom of the page says >Prepared by: [students] For Dr. Bruce Magee's English 303 (Technical Writing) Class, Winter 1997-1998. The professor is actually an English professor and the page was written by students as an assignment. I looked into this because I was wondering, "what would a professor be teaching that he's writing notes on tire changing?". There's probably some professor out there that does that in an academic context, but there's probably a lot of things that no professor actually gets paid to write about. Maybe they would write about something miscellaneous like that anyway and put it online, but they would be doing so out of the culture of web savvy professors having personal pages where they upload stuff they think is helpful.
- taoufix 4y ago
  The real problem for me is that you need to know where to search in ordre to make the search: Car troubles? YouTube chrisfix car_problem Knowlage stuff? Wikipedia query Programming question? Stackoverflow question ... and so on
- CaptainZapp 4y ago
  Does it really matter if it was a writing assignment, or a class in tire changing, provided that the information is correct?
  - bentcorner 4y ago
    Yes, it matters - a writing assignment would be graded on writing quality and style. I would assume the writing professor is not a tire changing expert. You're there because you don't know how to change a tire, so there's no way to know if the information is correct. It's certainly better than nothing but there could be specific gotchas for your situation. Most common would be needing certain tools or techniques for your model of car. It'd probably be best to either look up the manual for your car online or find a youtube video for changing the tires for your model of car.
dandare 4y ago
> Oh, and also, Miller is hiring if you’re interested in joining the team. I want to change my tire! Get off my back, and stop trying to make money off me for one second while I solve this tire crisis. So, you want someone to help you and you are pissed when they don't want to do it for free?
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  The problem is that there are people who have published free, no-bullshit guides on how to change a tire for the sake of spreading knowledge, and these results should be prioritized over businesses who have a profit motive.
- rglullis 4y ago
  No. We are not looking for hire someone to do a job. We just want to be able to search for content online without middlemen interjecting themselves in the hopes of monetizing the interaction.
  - lupire 4y ago
    And who do you expect will provide that content for you, for free?
    - swayvil 4y ago
      The ten-million free content providers. We do it because it's worth doing. If the "business people" were to disappear we'd do just fine. The whine of incessant marketing does tend to disturb the peace.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      The millions of people that write and produce content without being tied to this Protestant mentality that something is only worth doing if it is profitable. In fact, I'd wager that if we had a way to filter for content that is written without the goal of being monetized, we'd have a better web and us consumers would be more inclined to reward and give back to the creators generously.
qgin 4y ago
Just add “Reddit” to the search string Reddit is what the internet used to be back when it was useful.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Sort of, the huge subreddits are just as much a hellhole as the majority of google.
  - diarrhea 4y ago
    Sure, but you wouldn't search site:reddit.com/r/worldnews change a tyre but rather (just an example) site:reddit.com/r/diy change a tyre There are countless small(er) subreddits where a Google 'site:' search works wonderfully. Often, I don't specify a subreddit at all if the query itself is narrow enough.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  Nonfunctional on contemporary cell phones?
  - toqy 4y ago
    Works decent if you both have a powerful phone and sign in and disable the nag to download the app
- flenserboy 4y ago
  Usenet will always reassert itself in one form or another.
- afterburner 4y ago
  I use this especially for any consumer product comparison or "best" search; otherwise you just get monetized BS articles
- drstewart 4y ago
  Reddit has very strong biases and its own bubbles as well. Don't expect to be exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints there, but what appeals to a very narrow demographic (18-30 year old low-income white progressive American males)
Vladimof 4y ago
There's a Firefox add-on that allows you to block specific sites from Google's search results... not every practical for the whole Internet but it is for the worst offenders. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublacklist/)
baisq 4y ago
> I want to change my tire! Get off my back, and stop trying to make money off me for one second while I solve this tire crisis. So you expect them to write an article on how to fix your tyres for free? And what about the hosting costs?
arroz 4y ago
lately when I google I put my query + Reddit xD
camillomiller 4y ago
To be fair my result in Germany is a very good article that even has a video and a good schema. Before the result I even have google's automatically generated summary of the page that's quite good to understand if the page's actually useful. I hate Google Search for many reasons, but this example is really ill-conceived.
thallukrish 4y ago
There is no perfect answer for a query. There can only be contextually meaningful answers. They can be from highly relevant to far off. It is very hard to prove a search engine as bad in general. It may not work for you. But it may still work for a lot more. Google has indexed the entire Web. This is as large a span as one can take.
schnable 4y ago
The cookie popup really kills me when trying to do a quick site preview on my iPhone and all I see is the popup.
planede 4y ago
You don't need to use the asterix after site:, site:.edu or even site:edu works the same.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
It's the aggregate result of the sort of hiring they do in there. Take for example they rejected the guy who created homebrew because he couldn't invert a binary tree to the satisfaction of some jobsworth in there (1). It's jumped the shark and gone full on corporate bs, not because of any changes to what they do, but as a result of who's making the decisions in there these days. (1) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985775
marvinblum 4y ago
I feel like Google could filter out a lot of SEO spam by simply ignoring or downranking heavy sites. Everything that loads more than "n MB" is probably bloated and made to trick you into buying something or generating traffic without providing value. Another method could be to analyze how many external requests a page makes and put that into the calculation. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think this might help.
- einr 4y ago
  Downranking these sites will overwhelmingly mean downranking those who spend money on Google ads. It will not happen because it is exactly contrary to Google making more money. Of course Google has PageSpeed, which supposedly influences rankings by downranking sites that are very heavy to load, so I mean, that's an aspect to take into account, but I still believe the above to be largely true.
- mojuba 4y ago
  Thought the same, but it would be unfair to web sites that are actual web apps and are JS-heavy. Google is hopeless anyway, so here's something for the next search engine that wants to bring back the Web: downrank by the number of 3rd party domain requests, attempts of tracking, and possibly also popups.
  - chii 4y ago
    How would one detect what is a popup and what is an interactive dialog that the user actually desires?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mojuba 4y ago
      If you show an example of something that pops up right after the initial load, and that a user actually desires, we'll think of ways. I can't think of any right now. Things should pop up in response to a click, generally.
FpUser 4y ago
Ok. I bit the bullet and typed exactly those words: "how to fix a flat tire". This is what I got in return: Row 1: 2 buttons marked "on a bike" and "scooter" Row 2: single scrollable row of images of tire fixing kits with the prices. Row 3: step by step recipe on how to fix flat on a car (7 steps long) followed by the link to the corresponding article and small image on the right side. To me it looks straight to the point and one can't bitch about single row of ads of a relevant products.
thesuitonym 4y ago
lol @ musk thinking cookie settings should be in the browser. Does he not know that they used to be until a certain advertising company took it out of their browser, and Mozilla then followed?
dktp 4y ago
The mentioned queries provide quite good search results for me The first link clearly explains how to fix a tire and right underneath the first link, there's a link to Youtube video with described sections which you can click on immediately The sites are full of tracking and ads, but that's hardly Google's fault imo
queuebert 4y ago
I fixed it by leaving for DuckDuckGo.
jeffwask 4y ago
Seems like a long way to go to you know, not just switch search engines. Google's had a nice run so did yahoo, hotbot, excite, alta vista... the question isn't how to fix Google. The question is... what's next?
greybox 4y ago
I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using '!g' most of the time. Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.
- svnpenn 4y ago
  Please stop pushing some site thats still in beta, AND requires a login.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    Why?
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      There’s no way to test without giving your info away and taking a long survey from what I remember. It’s kind of like posting Facebook links I suppose.
      - freediver 4y ago
        Our goal at this stage (invite only beta) was not to get users who just want to try it out, but who actualy wanted to contribute by reporting bugs and suggestions as beta-testers. This is why we have a survey form, as completing it signals wilingness to invest time in the product. Soon (in two weeks) we will move to public beta. Even then we won't have search without an account, among other things because bots would probably kill us. (kagi founder here)
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    I know you are getting downvoted here ... but there are multiple mentions of Kagi in the comments, so it struck me too.
  - 4y ago
AltruisticGapHN 4y ago
`site:` is great. As an aside, anyone knows if you can still find "who links to?". I used to do this to hear how people feel about my site/app. I would do something like `link:foo.bar.com` I don't remember if it was link: or linkto: but it seems it no longer is supported? :(
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I dunno about "who links to" functionality in the search engine itself, but this information can be found if you set up Google Analytics, which is probably what they want you to do anyway because that data is worth a lot to them.
- rpsw 4y ago
  It was link:, and unfortunately Google removed support.
- account42 4y ago
  If you want it for your own domain I think you can still get backlinks in the Google Search Console https://search.google.com/search-console/about https://search.google.com/search-console/about Unlike Analytics at that at least does not require you to give Google any more information about your users - just to verify that you control the domain.
baxuz 4y ago
It's not a Google problem, it's a web problem. Everything is based around SEO spam. If someone has a website, and they're producing content, their point is to monetize the browsing of the website itself, or promote their main product via the website. This incentivizes a certain kind of content, which is marketing content. These days I'm back to searching social networks like Reddit or Hacker News for (at least somewhat) unbiased information. Google is a fuzzy-search address bar at this point for me.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  The other side of the coin is that users are so used to the "free" model (read: ad model) that they refuse to pay for anything directly. Look at youtube. They show ads and there is a non-stop stream of complaints about how long/bad/annoying they are. They offer a paid subscription to remove all ads and people laugh at the audacity youtube has to ask for money. Users DO NOT want to see/watch ads. Users DO NOT want to pay a subscription for "free" content. Just look at the story of Vid.me, a youtube competitor start-up that promised ad-free and sub-free videos. It was a huge hit until it hit bankruptcy.
  - bkobren 4y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure, agree that there is an enormous challenge to convince people to pay for something they think they are getting for free, even when it's really not free ie paying for it with time, attention, privacy. But create enough value, provide truly differentiated and unique experiences that ad-supported models can't, include privacy etc and there is a case to be made that over time a sizable enough segment will pay for that value that you can have a sustainable business. That is certainly our bet at Neeva, and so far we have seen a lot of growth, interest and folks opting for the premium (paid version) over the basic. Even without a full push to encouraging the premium.
  - more_corn 4y ago
    We’re used to free because google decided free was the answer and they had so much clout, no other answer could compete. Now that their time is ending there will be room for other answers.
mrkramer 4y ago
Google is good but it is not good enough because with their resources they can make it so much better.
nathias 4y ago
imagine what it will be in a thousand years, all search will be impossible as all content will be encased in layers upon layers of SEO optimizations and adds ...
chicob 4y ago
I use smart bookmarks most of the time, if not Duckduckgo (which has !bangs). I almost always go to Wikipedia first. If I don't find what I want right away, I usually assume I am not trying hard enough.
- hidden-spyder 4y ago
  What do you mean by smart bookmarks?
  - chicob 4y ago
    Address bar commands that substitute a given argument in a URL when a given search key is used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_bookmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_bookmark For searching in Hacker news, I saved the URL 'https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s' with the search key 'hn'. So when I want to search something around here, I just type hn something which then replaces the %s variable with 'something' https://hn.algolia.com/?query=something There is Javascript code that allows for two or more arguments, but saving that as a bookmarklet isn't as neat.
blitzar 4y ago
> If you simply google: how to fix a flat tire My first result ... How to fix a flat tyre - in simple steps with video - RAC https://www.rac.co.uk https://www.rac.co.uk › drive › advice › repair-a-flat-tyre An excellent first result thank you google.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Mine goes to https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-trucks/how-to-fix-flat-tire/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-trucks/how-t..., with a summary on the Google search results itself. It's probably location dependent, but I wonder if there's a bit of randomness in there as well to give websites with equivalent information similar exposure.
  - tim333 4y ago
    Me too. I think often the complaints against Google expect a bit much from it. I mean use uBlock Origin to block some of the ad nonsense and if the first search term doesn't get it try something a bit different. Also set it to 30 results not 10 and scroll a bit.
    - blitzar 4y ago
      I feel it is everyones duty as a citizen of the internet to spend as much money as possible on the >2nd page of google.
Railsify 4y ago
I was trying to find pre-made hand railing mounting plates, I thought to try and use google shopping because I didn't have an existing part number. I enter my search term hit enter, for a split second I can see the exact products I want to browse but those results are quickly swapped out for a bunch of unrelated products.
darinf 4y ago
This is why I left Google to join Neeva. Check us out. Unlike the alternatives, we are truly investing in our search stack. Unfortunately there’s just too much inertia with the ads-based business model making it too hard for Google to not let itself get this way. Similar challenges with other ads supported businesses.
- fils 4y ago
  I think this is part of the issue with Google. They are almost too afraid to innovate in search (for the user) for fear it would impact advertising.
Beltiras 4y ago
I just realized that the authors suggestion is basically to implement a custom bang (using !g on ddg will send you to the google search, !a to amazon, etc.) for .edu.
frmdstryr 4y ago
I recently found https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/ and started working on my own personal search engine. I'm surprised how easy it is to actually get decent results with just metadata that show up nowhere in Google/DDG.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  What's the license for this? It isn't obvious from the website and I got bored of looking.
  - buo 4y ago
    Not a license, but there are some terms of use: https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use/ https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use/
- closedloop129 4y ago
  Heads up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410042 marginalia_nu, the author of another search engine, is looking for ways to cooperate.
temptemptemp111 4y ago
BEEdwards 4y ago
I think it's more about training your google algorithm, i searched the same things they searched and my results are answers to the question. how to change a tire, nets videos of tire changing and the first 5 results are all different sites explaining how to do it. how are pearls made, gives me an inline box answering the question. half the things I search it offers me a "did you mean (my search) reddit" which I usually did... google isn't great, but it's still the best by far (I like the algorithm that knows what i search and assists me with it), i'm not sure what this person has done to theirs...
verisimi 4y ago
Let's not forget, if there is more that one answer, its a bug!
makecheck 4y ago
Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL. Just thrown into the list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do have business: Google’s business). Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran `ls` in a shell with a glob pattern, it just decided to sort of “add in” a few other files loosely based on your query (or heck, files that aren’t based on it at all)? Oh, now imagine if `rm` did that. Sadly this happens with lots of search tools now. Why the heck is the default state on a new Mac to funnel what you type to everything, e.g. I searched for “Chrome” and hit Return and the FIRST thing it did was throw me into the App Store and call up some not-even-a-web-browser scam app with Chrome in its name, instead of selecting the Chrome already installed on my computer and opening it? More and more it seems that you have to turn off all kinds of poor defaults to put tools into a useful state, or there is simply no way to get them there at all.
- kache_ 4y ago
  Open source alternatives are the cure (in the case of Mac hacking their search results to drive some arbitrary metric so some random PM gets promoted somewhere) A lot harder to track me using linux instead and constantly pushing my company to allow people to use linux machines for dev
- l33t2328 4y ago
  > Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value This is exactly the ridiculous kind of hyperbole I come to HN for. If you honestly can’t find any value in using Google despite its unreliability, you were probably expecting too much of it to begin with.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Your expectations are too low. We all remember google in it's heyday when it returned honest results, so we know what's possible.
hollowdene 4y ago
In this specific case, it's a great example of how Google's attempts to keep people on Google has made search worse. It's showing this result as a featured snippet because it's easy to distil into steps, and Google is hoping you'll just read the result and not leave Google. The real 'no.1 result' is this much better article from a trusted UK-based motoring organization: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/car-maintenance/how-to-change-a-tyre/ https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/car-maintenance/how-to-ch... Of course, Google's attempts to stop you leaving, and hoover up as much of the ad market as possible, also drives publishers to ever more desperate things to make money.
westcort 4y ago
This is a great idea. I tried doing this with all of the .edu domains on the former DMOZ and created this for simple searches: https://locserendipity.com/edu.html?q=astronomy https://locserendipity.com/edu.html?q=astronomy Also, I created a pure JavaScript (no dependency, tracking, or downloads!) bookmarklet that kills all the links in a page and turns it to plain text with a visual optimization algorithm applied to make it easier to read: https://locserendipity.com/Hyper.html https://locserendipity.com/Hyper.html The internet is much better without all the cruft.
bayareabadboy 4y ago
Has anyone else noticed a significant uptick in negative posts about google search lately? Is this because it’s gotten noticeably worse recently or it’s trendy to complain about? Thinking over the last six months or so.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
  We are all frogs who have noticed the water is getting pretty warm.
- rand0mx1 4y ago
  also mention of some closed beta search engine in those post is mandatory.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  An Algolia search for "google search" would suggest that there's more recent traffic amongst the most popular hits, though you can find complaints dating back over a decade. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search
nova22033 4y ago
I got completely different results. The first hit was a pretty good youtube video. It even started at the relevant part when I clicked on it.
BLanen 4y ago
The reason that cookies are not a browser setting is NOT because of a technical limitation. Besides, if it was a browser setting, I would hope most people would have default "no, you can't store cookies except for the functional ones" and not "yes, store a thousand tracking cookies". It is because of a power issue. It would have to be a protocol change. Google owns the largest browser. Google doesn't want it to be a browser setting. End of story. Unless you gather political power to force google and others to have this, it will not change.
- darinf 4y ago
  Check out cookie cutter by Neeva: https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-cookie-cutter-by-neeva-a-free-chrome-browser-extension https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-cookie-cutter-by-neeva-a-...
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Google is no longer fixable.
bsedlm 4y ago
> stop trying to make money off me for one second while I solve this tire crisis. but if they did, they'd be pretty much wasting money! their stock holders could reasonably sue the board for choosing to not make money for a second. /half-joking
quadcore 4y ago
So I will reiterate my little theory, this is not entirely Google's fault, regulations, especially KYC are responsible for this. KYC is incompatible with having a free zone. This is actually the aim of KYC, to remove free zones. If you dont get it, let's take an example. The flat tire mustard-yellow webpage. This page is not KYC'd. Are they laundering money through their website? Are they rallying people for a bloody crusade? A search engine cant know that (basically) but it knows a website that display ads is KYC'd so google can display them more easily. For sure Google is pressed to help make a regulated web and stop the free zone. Knowing it's in their interest anyway (ads), they embrace it. I dont get why the internet dont get that already: it's all KYC :)
- deelly 4y ago
  Sorry, I still don't get it. How exactly KYC is responsible to crappy web search results? Should it be other way around?
  - quadcore 4y ago
    Regulators dont want mustard-yellow webpage anymore. They dont want anything they don't Know.
paco3346 4y ago
Hey, I just came from the company that hosts that dealer website! The amount of money that dealerships pour into SEO and advertising is unreal. They also chase every single thing that Google says with complete abandon. (Remember AMP? ya, that was something we chased because dealers asked us to and then forgot about 12 months later.) I realize this is about Google but I think there will always be a struggle until everyone can boycott playing the game and I just don't see that happening.
redgrange 4y ago
I lol at the paying professors generous salaries part
tut-urut-utut 4y ago
Instead of fighting Google, better "just" stop using it. Leave it for good, even if it feels better than competition right now. Let's face it, Google is not going to improve. We are not their customers, and they are not going to make their product better for us. That boat has sailed long time ago. We need to reset the web. Try out as much of alternative search engines as you can. Use the one, or multiple, that suit you better. Maybe they will get some traction in a couple of years, maybe in a decade, or so. We'll be there where we were before Google, using Yahoos, Altavista, Excite et al. and waiting for the history to repeat in a form of a new incumbent that will again make search usable.
andyjohnson0 4y ago
I've given up on google for search and I'm not going back. I've been beta-testing kagi search [1] for the last couple of months and it does 95% of what I need - accurate and low-distraction and it doesn't try to sell me stuff or sell me to anyone. They're about to go into public beta and announce their pricing, and I'm pretty sure I'm in. [1] kagi.com
- alicesreflexion 4y ago
  Kagi has been fantastic to me. The search results seem better. The option to search by EDU or discussion or by "literally anything that doesn't have 5000 trackers" with a single click is indispensable. Showing results from the internet archive and old blogs is a nice plus. Shoving all the listicles into their own compact section is great. If this is the quality I can expect going forward, I have zero problem paying the $10/mo down the line
StreamBright 4y ago
Search is the only service that I would pay for no matter what. Google never considered this business model.
royal10march 4y ago
I'm sorry but in no way should you limit your results to only those published on .edu websites. There's got to be a better solution to this. Ideas only end up on .edu websites after a long period from the point it was conceived.
mlom 4y ago
"Nothing wrong with that, making money is noble" this right here is why you never make any progress and never fix anything and you never understand why everything sucks, you keep rewarding perverse incentives and greed and then try to work around it as if greed were not the central problem. making money is not noble, making money does not represent increasing value, it only represents cornering tokens of others' labor time, which you have just observed takes the form of profiteers intentionally seeking ways to waste your time. improving the world is noble, and whether you make money or not, you get to live in a better world. linus was awarded a salary because people were EMBARRASSED that they were profiting so much off his free work. you all should be a lot more ashamed.
- tonguez 4y ago
  thank you
- EricE 4y ago
  Making money is the practical reality and the entire foundation of the modern world. Do you really think trading chickens or loafs of bread is more practical than exchanging money for goods and services? How ridiculously naïve! You should be ashamed that you have the utter privilege to hold such utterly ridiculous thoughts without the fear of starving or not having shelter.
  - mlom 4y ago
    get fucked eric, all slavers must be killed, you have no idea how secure food or shelter are for me, motherfucker. you think because i'm able to get here and talk to you that i'm in a situation like yours, and not facing homelessness or starvation? fuck you scum
ricardoplouis 4y ago
Any search engine with a profit motive is inevitably doomed as one value overtakes the other. To have a search engine that works means having one where scaling endlessly in pursuit of profit is discouraged.
Mo3 4y ago
> Oh, and also, Miller is hiring if you’re interested in joining the team. I don't think so.
PainfullyNormal 4y ago
Adam Savage went on a rant about 2 weeks ago about this very thing. He was trying to find a large format laser printer and the typical "best laser printers of 2022" blogspam were all filled with inkjet printers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9lFcduaZPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9lFcduaZPU
amai 4y ago
Better: "site:wikipedia.org how are pearls made" "site:wikipedia.org how to change a tire"
sharno 4y ago
I got surprised recently by more predictable Yandex search is. I started comparing it to TikTok, the algorithm is more predictable and feels that you can direct it into the pathway you want.
mhmmbt 4y ago
Technical solutions are not going to fix a political problem. Sundar has been quoted as saying “they are a business first” and a businesses political obligation is make profit for the owners. These companies and technologies are meant to serve human beings, not a mathematical ideal in programmers heads. While: $makeMoney == $howSocietyWorks; return $getUsedToIt Ooh but politics is boring! Only 13% of adults in the US have an advanced degree. Coddled engineers live in an emotional bubble ignoring the very real world that does not feel an obligation to a minority of coddled engineers.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  They sure use and depend on what that 13% develop/create/literally engineer and maintain, though.
  - mhmmbt 4y ago
    Do they want to or do they have few options? When a brain is trained to follow along from childhood, I don’t really see how it’s an option to avoid it. Also the 13% are not all engineers. Many are historians or similar who babble nonsense. We built many big buildings and bridges before web devs came along. Centralized ledgers used to dictate agency and what effort we must put in (computed by elites with a currency monopoly; which in the US is legally a speech monopoly thanks to SCOTUS) are not really the same thing as a bridge. There’s a big difference between things we need to engineer and TV 2.0. Whole lot of IT is rent seeking.
more_corn 4y ago
This is by far the most useless advice I have ever seen.
kazinator 4y ago
Make up your mind: are you complaining that MillerAutoPlaza is in the Google search results, or that MillerAutoPlaza is asking for your location?
big_blind 4y ago
It's a little sad we have to '.edu' filter searches just to not be directed to SEO sites at this point. Kagi's and You.com's searches are really smooth and painless from this perspective. You.com also has built in site filtering which helps a ton.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
so my takeaway is that the best sites were written in the 90s and still out there with the right search incantation :)
guerrilla 4y ago
How come nobody is doing social search yet? Why can't I up and down vote results and maybe even comment on them or something? I don't want to ever see some of these recipe sites that show up again... I can't imagine I would if people were helping curate. Seems like an "easy" solution to SEO crapola?
- dostojevski1 4y ago
  I don't think there is the need of curating content in a social search way, if the SE itself is just good and alternative SE's that are coming up seem very promising. e.g., you.com lets you pick preferred sources, so that you can tailor your search experience to your needs. They've also done a great job on recipes. https://you.com/search?q=oven%20roasted%20broccoli https://you.com/search?q=oven%20roasted%20broccoli Neeva and Kagi also seem promising, though their both waitlist/invite only still
  - fils 4y ago
    Actually I think Neeva is fully open now for all to try at https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/ I don't work for them, but I have gone the paid route with them and I am very pleased with them as my default search now.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- ryan-duve 4y ago
  I vaguely remember Wiki's search engine doing this; maybe it was called WikiCloud? Anyway, it was just clunky in practice to 1. search something 2. click links until you get your info 3. go back to the search page and upvote/downvote the results based on which ones were useful
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Hmm, I see what you mean and how that could be bad. Maybe something like the old stumbleupon interface could work.
trhoad 4y ago
Err, what? .edu is a TLD for US based educational bodies. So the reason you don't see a cookie banner is because the majority (AFAIK) of US states don't mandate a cookie banner, unlike EU and UK based sites (like the Natural History Museum, based in the UK). Does this mean the Natural History Museum is a less authoritative resource than anywhere else? I'd say the opposite, actually. And for the "change a tire" example using a .edu TLD. That's a fantastic example of how to find search results that are almost completely useless for anyone outside the US. What's a "tire", anyway? Oh, you mean "tyre". What's a "flashlight". OK, you mean a "torch". In summary: there's a world outside the US. It's lovely out here.
- nabakin 4y ago
  You're annoyed with him because his target audience is only the United States? Why stop at British people? I can't believe this guy didn't consider Japanese-speaking people! Why didn't OP make an article for Chinese people?! Wow, can you believe OP didn't make an article for every single possible person on the planet? Honestly, you make a good point at the start but I don't understand your rage at the end there.
pmontra 4y ago
> If you simply google: how to fix a flat tire the first website in the search results is this piece of bloatware, MillerAutoPlaza: I attempted to reproduce the experiment and I got a full page of useful results, all of them videos or numbered lists of the steps as in > Step One: Find the Puncture. Once you're in a safe place, hop out of the car, and find the flat tire. ... etc. Maybe Google read HN and fixed that query but how to replace flat tires yields similar results. Maybe it's because I'm not logged in into Google and they are less aggressive on showing me ads? Maybe it's because I'm not from an English language country and they know from my IP address. Let's try with come cambiare una gomma bucata. Other useful numbered lists and videos. I'm not always happy with Google's results but there seems to be something wrong in the experiment here.
shortformblog 4y ago
This title bothers me because he’s clearly going after the wrong target. It’s not that Google is unbearable. It’s that people with money are more likely to invest on ranking high in Google than those who don’t have money. This would be the case with any commercial service with financial goals, given enough time and the right motivations. If commercial content is your problem, say it. Leave Google out of it.
nonameiguess 4y ago
At least some of the problem here needs to be laid at the feet of users relying too heavily on the web to learn everything. Your vehicle's owner manual has instructions for how to change a tire, with the bonus that it will even know where the tools that come with your car are located and whether you have some extra features like locking lug nuts.
sabujp 4y ago
another trick site:*.reddit.com
ColinHayhurst 4y ago
Excuse the shameless self-promotion, but contrast the results for the same searches: https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+to+fix+a+flat+tire https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+to+fix+a+flat+tire https://bikerepairvideos.com/fix-flat-tire/ https://bikerepairvideos.com/fix-flat-tire/ https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+are+pearls+made%3F https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+are+pearls+made%3F https://www.gemrockauctions.com/learn/did-you-know/how-are-pearls-made https://www.gemrockauctions.com/learn/did-you-know/how-are-p...
richardsocher 4y ago
This is why we have preferred sources on you.com - and a special mode just for coding specific results: code.you.com, eg. https://code.you.com/search?q=onnxruntime+segfault https://code.you.com/search?q=onnxruntime+segfault those you would not necessarily find on .edu domains but it's a similar spirit. (you.com founder here)
- chiken 4y ago
  refreshing layout! Those apps are time saver as I don't have to search across different sources by opening up multiple tabs for every query.
prof_hibschman 4y ago
I noticed the my google results are way worse when using fastdns, as compared to google dns. Not sure why.
redmen 4y ago
A tonne of kagi shilling in this thread. Honestly its alright but not that great to warrant that many comments lol. Sometimes I wonder how many of these comments are real, or fake. I have caught hacker news schillers many times before.

489 points by ixnus 4y ago

I'm sorry; but it makes no sense to limit yourself to results form .edu websites. Ideas take way too long from the point they have been conceived to land on .edu websites. We have to find a better solution to Google.

gsatic 4y ago

Good suggestion. I had to look up some govt pdfs and tables recently and the government sites hosting the files hardly ever show up on the first page on Google anymore. It's a sad story.

webmobdev 4y ago

... or use Firefox (Tor Browser after disabling tor) + uBlock Origin, and avoid all the unwanted crap most websites throw at you today. And train yourself not to automatically search for everything on Google. Instead use IMDB, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow / Stackexchange, Reddit etc. etc. by adding their search to your browser ( https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-search-engine-to-firefox https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea... ).

bobajeff 4y ago
That still leaves you going to sites who's only purpose is to funnel you through some sales channel and waste your time. Edit: yeah that's good advice too. Though the *.edu trick also seems to be pretty useful so far.

tejohnso 4y ago

Counter example: "what is an iris" when wondering about anatomy brings up Wikipedia as the first link. Perfect. With the .edu trick the first link is about the flower, and there's nothing about the human eye anywhere on the first page of results.

SeanLuke 4y ago
what is an iris site:*.edu At least for me... First listing (eye): https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215826/http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002386.htm https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215826/http:/... Second listing (flower): http://www.ladybug.uconn.edu/FactSheets/iris.php http://www.ladybug.uconn.edu/FactSheets/iris.php
einr 4y ago
Okay, but iris does have two meanings and sometimes you need to be specific in your queries. Your original query would not have been perfect if you were in fact wondering about the flower. "what is an iris anatomy site:*.edu" is enough to bring up this as the first result: https://www.umkelloggeye.org/conditions-treatments/anatomy-eye https://www.umkelloggeye.org/conditions-treatments/anatomy-e...
- fotta 4y ago
  but that's not a .edu site though e: ah it looks like it is a .edu that redirects to a .org https://www.kellogg.umich.edu/patientcare/conditions/anatomy.html https://www.kellogg.umich.edu/patientcare/conditions/anatomy...
  - einr 4y ago
    Good catch -- the Google result is actually on an .edu domain but it redirects to the link I pasted above.
    - fotta 4y ago
      yep, Google makes it hard to copy the original link too which is annoying
      - einr 4y ago
        Sidetrack, but I can recommend the Firefox/Chrome extension "Don't Track Me Google" which cleans up Google result links to be the actual URL, without Google's tracking redirect.

owlninja 4y ago

I get none of the same results as my top hit?

martimarkov 4y ago
That's google's personalisation. I like freaking ppl out when I just ask them to google a famous politician's name and compare the results. Some times they get similar results on WiFi and very different on mobile data afterwards. Bringing awareness
- nomilk 4y ago
  The number of results can also vary wildly.
- benstrumental 4y ago
  Any idea why this happens? I don't understand why WiFi vs. mobile data would impact how they want to personalize the results.
  - martimarkov 4y ago
    Because of IP correlation AFAIK. But tbh not quite sure it's just something I've noticed.
shmde 4y ago
Depends on the region google is set too. You will find varying results based on your location.
reaperducer 4y ago
I get none of the same results as my top hit? Google spends billions of dollars a year to give everyone their own personalized set of bad search results. That's the justification for its invasive tracking. Google: "We to build a dossier about you, your life, your friends, and your family members in order to give you better results!" Us: "So... they could be worse?"

swayvil 4y ago

loloquwowndueo 4y ago

Or just use DuckDuckGo instead of google.

daneel_w 4y ago
And Tutanota, Protonmail or Posteo instead of Gmail.
PaulHoule 4y ago
It's not really any better in terms of the results it serves up. If it had a filter to only show pages that didn't have cookie popups then maybe I'd look at it again.
- dazc 4y ago
  The sooner a critical mass of people start use alternatives then the sooner Google will start changing their behaviour.
  - Gigablah 4y ago
    Don't forget, so will the alternatives :)
    - dazc 4y ago
      Why clean anything because it just gets dirty again?
- more_corn 4y ago
  It’s not more useful. It’s less annoying.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Install the 'I Don't Care About Cookies' browser plug-in.
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  Searching for “how to fix a flat tire” gave me good results, at least better than the crap the OP got :)

baggachipz 4y ago

Google is so unbearable because they are no longer interested in you finding the answer to your query; they're interested in selling your query and its context to the highest bidder. That conflict of interest manifests in what Google has become.

mateo1 4y ago
If this picks up, google will just start ignoring the modifiers. It's like tv again, but with a lot more channels.
- pilsetnieks 4y ago
  Not TV. It's almost exactly like Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite and other "search portals" of yore. The thing they swore they would never become, yet here we are now.
blackhaz 4y ago
Got me thinking - Google has became what it is - this colorful commercial ooze - by parasiting on the pre-Google web. Is there a search engine that searches sites without any Google code in them?
Beltiras 4y ago
I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?
- baggachipz 4y ago
  I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out. [1] https://kagi.com/faq https://kagi.com/faq
  - Beltiras 4y ago

s-video 4y ago

This is nitpicky but the tire changing page doesn't actually fit your rational for choosing .edu pages >Professors are paid generous salaries to share knowledge with the paying customers of the University (students). So, let’s find some paid unpaid University knowledge on how to change a tire by using our new trick! But the bottom of the page says >Prepared by: [students] For Dr. Bruce Magee's English 303 (Technical Writing) Class, Winter 1997-1998. The professor is actually an English professor and the page was written by students as an assignment. I looked into this because I was wondering, "what would a professor be teaching that he's writing notes on tire changing?". There's probably some professor out there that does that in an academic context, but there's probably a lot of things that no professor actually gets paid to write about. Maybe they would write about something miscellaneous like that anyway and put it online, but they would be doing so out of the culture of web savvy professors having personal pages where they upload stuff they think is helpful.

taoufix 4y ago
The real problem for me is that you need to know where to search in ordre to make the search: Car troubles? YouTube chrisfix car_problem Knowlage stuff? Wikipedia query Programming question? Stackoverflow question ... and so on
CaptainZapp 4y ago
Does it really matter if it was a writing assignment, or a class in tire changing, provided that the information is correct?
- bentcorner 4y ago
  Yes, it matters - a writing assignment would be graded on writing quality and style. I would assume the writing professor is not a tire changing expert. You're there because you don't know how to change a tire, so there's no way to know if the information is correct. It's certainly better than nothing but there could be specific gotchas for your situation. Most common would be needing certain tools or techniques for your model of car. It'd probably be best to either look up the manual for your car online or find a youtube video for changing the tires for your model of car.

dandare 4y ago

> Oh, and also, Miller is hiring if you’re interested in joining the team. I want to change my tire! Get off my back, and stop trying to make money off me for one second while I solve this tire crisis. So, you want someone to help you and you are pissed when they don't want to do it for free?

welshwelsh 4y ago
The problem is that there are people who have published free, no-bullshit guides on how to change a tire for the sake of spreading knowledge, and these results should be prioritized over businesses who have a profit motive.
rglullis 4y ago
No. We are not looking for hire someone to do a job. We just want to be able to search for content online without middlemen interjecting themselves in the hopes of monetizing the interaction.
- lupire 4y ago
  And who do you expect will provide that content for you, for free?
  - swayvil 4y ago
    The ten-million free content providers. We do it because it's worth doing. If the "business people" were to disappear we'd do just fine. The whine of incessant marketing does tend to disturb the peace.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    The millions of people that write and produce content without being tied to this Protestant mentality that something is only worth doing if it is profitable. In fact, I'd wager that if we had a way to filter for content that is written without the goal of being monetized, we'd have a better web and us consumers would be more inclined to reward and give back to the creators generously.

qgin 4y ago

Just add “Reddit” to the search string Reddit is what the internet used to be back when it was useful.

Aeolun 4y ago
Sort of, the huge subreddits are just as much a hellhole as the majority of google.
- diarrhea 4y ago
  Sure, but you wouldn't search site:reddit.com/r/worldnews change a tyre but rather (just an example) site:reddit.com/r/diy change a tyre There are countless small(er) subreddits where a Google 'site:' search works wonderfully. Often, I don't specify a subreddit at all if the query itself is narrow enough.
InitialLastName 4y ago
Nonfunctional on contemporary cell phones?
- toqy 4y ago
  Works decent if you both have a powerful phone and sign in and disable the nag to download the app
flenserboy 4y ago
Usenet will always reassert itself in one form or another.
afterburner 4y ago
I use this especially for any consumer product comparison or "best" search; otherwise you just get monetized BS articles
drstewart 4y ago
Reddit has very strong biases and its own bubbles as well. Don't expect to be exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints there, but what appeals to a very narrow demographic (18-30 year old low-income white progressive American males)

Vladimof 4y ago

There's a Firefox add-on that allows you to block specific sites from Google's search results... not every practical for the whole Internet but it is for the worst offenders. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublacklist/)

baisq 4y ago

> I want to change my tire! Get off my back, and stop trying to make money off me for one second while I solve this tire crisis. So you expect them to write an article on how to fix your tyres for free? And what about the hosting costs?

arroz 4y ago

lately when I google I put my query + Reddit xD

camillomiller 4y ago

To be fair my result in Germany is a very good article that even has a video and a good schema. Before the result I even have google's automatically generated summary of the page that's quite good to understand if the page's actually useful. I hate Google Search for many reasons, but this example is really ill-conceived.

thallukrish 4y ago

There is no perfect answer for a query. There can only be contextually meaningful answers. They can be from highly relevant to far off. It is very hard to prove a search engine as bad in general. It may not work for you. But it may still work for a lot more. Google has indexed the entire Web. This is as large a span as one can take.

schnable 4y ago

The cookie popup really kills me when trying to do a quick site preview on my iPhone and all I see is the popup.

planede 4y ago

You don't need to use the asterix after site:, site:.edu or even site:edu works the same.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

It's the aggregate result of the sort of hiring they do in there. Take for example they rejected the guy who created homebrew because he couldn't invert a binary tree to the satisfaction of some jobsworth in there (1). It's jumped the shark and gone full on corporate bs, not because of any changes to what they do, but as a result of who's making the decisions in there these days. (1) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15985775

marvinblum 4y ago

I feel like Google could filter out a lot of SEO spam by simply ignoring or downranking heavy sites. Everything that loads more than "n MB" is probably bloated and made to trick you into buying something or generating traffic without providing value. Another method could be to analyze how many external requests a page makes and put that into the calculation. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think this might help.

einr 4y ago
Downranking these sites will overwhelmingly mean downranking those who spend money on Google ads. It will not happen because it is exactly contrary to Google making more money. Of course Google has PageSpeed, which supposedly influences rankings by downranking sites that are very heavy to load, so I mean, that's an aspect to take into account, but I still believe the above to be largely true.
mojuba 4y ago
Thought the same, but it would be unfair to web sites that are actual web apps and are JS-heavy. Google is hopeless anyway, so here's something for the next search engine that wants to bring back the Web: downrank by the number of 3rd party domain requests, attempts of tracking, and possibly also popups.
- chii 4y ago
  How would one detect what is a popup and what is an interactive dialog that the user actually desires?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mojuba 4y ago
    If you show an example of something that pops up right after the initial load, and that a user actually desires, we'll think of ways. I can't think of any right now. Things should pop up in response to a click, generally.

FpUser 4y ago

Ok. I bit the bullet and typed exactly those words: "how to fix a flat tire". This is what I got in return: Row 1: 2 buttons marked "on a bike" and "scooter" Row 2: single scrollable row of images of tire fixing kits with the prices. Row 3: step by step recipe on how to fix flat on a car (7 steps long) followed by the link to the corresponding article and small image on the right side. To me it looks straight to the point and one can't bitch about single row of ads of a relevant products.

thesuitonym 4y ago

lol @ musk thinking cookie settings should be in the browser. Does he not know that they used to be until a certain advertising company took it out of their browser, and Mozilla then followed?

dktp 4y ago

The mentioned queries provide quite good search results for me The first link clearly explains how to fix a tire and right underneath the first link, there's a link to Youtube video with described sections which you can click on immediately The sites are full of tracking and ads, but that's hardly Google's fault imo

queuebert 4y ago

I fixed it by leaving for DuckDuckGo.

jeffwask 4y ago

Seems like a long way to go to you know, not just switch search engines. Google's had a nice run so did yahoo, hotbot, excite, alta vista... the question isn't how to fix Google. The question is... what's next?

greybox 4y ago

I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using '!g' most of the time. Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.

svnpenn 4y ago
Please stop pushing some site thats still in beta, AND requires a login.
- jjulius 4y ago
  Why?
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    There’s no way to test without giving your info away and taking a long survey from what I remember. It’s kind of like posting Facebook links I suppose.
    - freediver 4y ago
      Our goal at this stage (invite only beta) was not to get users who just want to try it out, but who actualy wanted to contribute by reporting bugs and suggestions as beta-testers. This is why we have a survey form, as completing it signals wilingness to invest time in the product. Soon (in two weeks) we will move to public beta. Even then we won't have search without an account, among other things because bots would probably kill us. (kagi founder here)
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  I know you are getting downvoted here ... but there are multiple mentions of Kagi in the comments, so it struck me too.
- 4y ago

AltruisticGapHN 4y ago

`site:` is great. As an aside, anyone knows if you can still find "who links to?". I used to do this to hear how people feel about my site/app. I would do something like `link:foo.bar.com` I don't remember if it was link: or linkto: but it seems it no longer is supported? :(

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I dunno about "who links to" functionality in the search engine itself, but this information can be found if you set up Google Analytics, which is probably what they want you to do anyway because that data is worth a lot to them.
rpsw 4y ago
It was link:, and unfortunately Google removed support.
account42 4y ago
If you want it for your own domain I think you can still get backlinks in the Google Search Console https://search.google.com/search-console/about https://search.google.com/search-console/about Unlike Analytics at that at least does not require you to give Google any more information about your users - just to verify that you control the domain.

baxuz 4y ago

It's not a Google problem, it's a web problem. Everything is based around SEO spam. If someone has a website, and they're producing content, their point is to monetize the browsing of the website itself, or promote their main product via the website. This incentivizes a certain kind of content, which is marketing content. These days I'm back to searching social networks like Reddit or Hacker News for (at least somewhat) unbiased information. Google is a fuzzy-search address bar at this point for me.

Workaccount2 4y ago
The other side of the coin is that users are so used to the "free" model (read: ad model) that they refuse to pay for anything directly. Look at youtube. They show ads and there is a non-stop stream of complaints about how long/bad/annoying they are. They offer a paid subscription to remove all ads and people laugh at the audacity youtube has to ask for money. Users DO NOT want to see/watch ads. Users DO NOT want to pay a subscription for "free" content. Just look at the story of Vid.me, a youtube competitor start-up that promised ad-free and sub-free videos. It was a huge hit until it hit bankruptcy.
- bkobren 4y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure, agree that there is an enormous challenge to convince people to pay for something they think they are getting for free, even when it's really not free ie paying for it with time, attention, privacy. But create enough value, provide truly differentiated and unique experiences that ad-supported models can't, include privacy etc and there is a case to be made that over time a sizable enough segment will pay for that value that you can have a sustainable business. That is certainly our bet at Neeva, and so far we have seen a lot of growth, interest and folks opting for the premium (paid version) over the basic. Even without a full push to encouraging the premium.
- more_corn 4y ago
  We’re used to free because google decided free was the answer and they had so much clout, no other answer could compete. Now that their time is ending there will be room for other answers.

mrkramer 4y ago

Google is good but it is not good enough because with their resources they can make it so much better.

nathias 4y ago

imagine what it will be in a thousand years, all search will be impossible as all content will be encased in layers upon layers of SEO optimizations and adds ...

chicob 4y ago

I use smart bookmarks most of the time, if not Duckduckgo (which has !bangs). I almost always go to Wikipedia first. If I don't find what I want right away, I usually assume I am not trying hard enough.

hidden-spyder 4y ago
What do you mean by smart bookmarks?
- chicob 4y ago
  Address bar commands that substitute a given argument in a URL when a given search key is used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_bookmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_bookmark For searching in Hacker news, I saved the URL 'https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s' with the search key 'hn'. So when I want to search something around here, I just type hn something which then replaces the %s variable with 'something' https://hn.algolia.com/?query=something There is Javascript code that allows for two or more arguments, but saving that as a bookmarklet isn't as neat.

blitzar 4y ago

> If you simply google: how to fix a flat tire My first result ... How to fix a flat tyre - in simple steps with video - RAC https://www.rac.co.uk https://www.rac.co.uk › drive › advice › repair-a-flat-tyre An excellent first result thank you google.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Mine goes to https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-trucks/how-to-fix-flat-tire/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/cars-trucks/how-t..., with a summary on the Google search results itself. It's probably location dependent, but I wonder if there's a bit of randomness in there as well to give websites with equivalent information similar exposure.
- tim333 4y ago
  Me too. I think often the complaints against Google expect a bit much from it. I mean use uBlock Origin to block some of the ad nonsense and if the first search term doesn't get it try something a bit different. Also set it to 30 results not 10 and scroll a bit.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    I feel it is everyones duty as a citizen of the internet to spend as much money as possible on the >2nd page of google.

Railsify 4y ago

I was trying to find pre-made hand railing mounting plates, I thought to try and use google shopping because I didn't have an existing part number. I enter my search term hit enter, for a split second I can see the exact products I want to browse but those results are quickly swapped out for a bunch of unrelated products.

darinf 4y ago

This is why I left Google to join Neeva. Check us out. Unlike the alternatives, we are truly investing in our search stack. Unfortunately there’s just too much inertia with the ads-based business model making it too hard for Google to not let itself get this way. Similar challenges with other ads supported businesses.

fils 4y ago
I think this is part of the issue with Google. They are almost too afraid to innovate in search (for the user) for fear it would impact advertising.

Beltiras 4y ago

I just realized that the authors suggestion is basically to implement a custom bang (using !g on ddg will send you to the google search, !a to amazon, etc.) for .edu.

frmdstryr 4y ago

I recently found https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/ and started working on my own personal search engine. I'm surprised how easy it is to actually get decent results with just metadata that show up nowhere in Google/DDG.

guerrilla 4y ago
What's the license for this? It isn't obvious from the website and I got bored of looking.
- buo 4y ago
  Not a license, but there are some terms of use: https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use/ https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use/
closedloop129 4y ago
Heads up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410042 marginalia_nu, the author of another search engine, is looking for ways to cooperate.

temptemptemp111 4y ago

BEEdwards 4y ago

I think it's more about training your google algorithm, i searched the same things they searched and my results are answers to the question. how to change a tire, nets videos of tire changing and the first 5 results are all different sites explaining how to do it. how are pearls made, gives me an inline box answering the question. half the things I search it offers me a "did you mean (my search) reddit" which I usually did... google isn't great, but it's still the best by far (I like the algorithm that knows what i search and assists me with it), i'm not sure what this person has done to theirs...

verisimi 4y ago

Let's not forget, if there is more that one answer, its a bug!

makecheck 4y ago

Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL. Just thrown into the list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do have business: Google’s business). Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran `ls` in a shell with a glob pattern, it just decided to sort of “add in” a few other files loosely based on your query (or heck, files that aren’t based on it at all)? Oh, now imagine if `rm` did that. Sadly this happens with lots of search tools now. Why the heck is the default state on a new Mac to funnel what you type to everything, e.g. I searched for “Chrome” and hit Return and the FIRST thing it did was throw me into the App Store and call up some not-even-a-web-browser scam app with Chrome in its name, instead of selecting the Chrome already installed on my computer and opening it? More and more it seems that you have to turn off all kinds of poor defaults to put tools into a useful state, or there is simply no way to get them there at all.

kache_ 4y ago
Open source alternatives are the cure (in the case of Mac hacking their search results to drive some arbitrary metric so some random PM gets promoted somewhere) A lot harder to track me using linux instead and constantly pushing my company to allow people to use linux machines for dev
l33t2328 4y ago
> Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value This is exactly the ridiculous kind of hyperbole I come to HN for. If you honestly can’t find any value in using Google despite its unreliability, you were probably expecting too much of it to begin with.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Your expectations are too low. We all remember google in it's heyday when it returned honest results, so we know what's possible.

hollowdene 4y ago

In this specific case, it's a great example of how Google's attempts to keep people on Google has made search worse. It's showing this result as a featured snippet because it's easy to distil into steps, and Google is hoping you'll just read the result and not leave Google. The real 'no.1 result' is this much better article from a trusted UK-based motoring organization: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/car-maintenance/how-to-change-a-tyre/ https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/car-maintenance/how-to-ch... Of course, Google's attempts to stop you leaving, and hoover up as much of the ad market as possible, also drives publishers to ever more desperate things to make money.

westcort 4y ago

This is a great idea. I tried doing this with all of the .edu domains on the former DMOZ and created this for simple searches: https://locserendipity.com/edu.html?q=astronomy https://locserendipity.com/edu.html?q=astronomy Also, I created a pure JavaScript (no dependency, tracking, or downloads!) bookmarklet that kills all the links in a page and turns it to plain text with a visual optimization algorithm applied to make it easier to read: https://locserendipity.com/Hyper.html https://locserendipity.com/Hyper.html The internet is much better without all the cruft.

bayareabadboy 4y ago

Has anyone else noticed a significant uptick in negative posts about google search lately? Is this because it’s gotten noticeably worse recently or it’s trendy to complain about? Thinking over the last six months or so.

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
We are all frogs who have noticed the water is getting pretty warm.
rand0mx1 4y ago
also mention of some closed beta search engine in those post is mandatory.
dredmorbius 4y ago
An Algolia search for "google search" would suggest that there's more recent traffic amongst the most popular hits, though you can find complaints dating back over a decade. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+search

nova22033 4y ago

I got completely different results. The first hit was a pretty good youtube video. It even started at the relevant part when I clicked on it.

BLanen 4y ago

The reason that cookies are not a browser setting is NOT because of a technical limitation. Besides, if it was a browser setting, I would hope most people would have default "no, you can't store cookies except for the functional ones" and not "yes, store a thousand tracking cookies". It is because of a power issue. It would have to be a protocol change. Google owns the largest browser. Google doesn't want it to be a browser setting. End of story. Unless you gather political power to force google and others to have this, it will not change.

darinf 4y ago
Check out cookie cutter by Neeva: https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-cookie-cutter-by-neeva-a-free-chrome-browser-extension https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-cookie-cutter-by-neeva-a-...

bigbacaloa 4y ago

Google is no longer fixable.

bsedlm 4y ago

> stop trying to make money off me for one second while I solve this tire crisis. but if they did, they'd be pretty much wasting money! their stock holders could reasonably sue the board for choosing to not make money for a second. /half-joking

quadcore 4y ago

So I will reiterate my little theory, this is not entirely Google's fault, regulations, especially KYC are responsible for this. KYC is incompatible with having a free zone. This is actually the aim of KYC, to remove free zones. If you dont get it, let's take an example. The flat tire mustard-yellow webpage. This page is not KYC'd. Are they laundering money through their website? Are they rallying people for a bloody crusade? A search engine cant know that (basically) but it knows a website that display ads is KYC'd so google can display them more easily. For sure Google is pressed to help make a regulated web and stop the free zone. Knowing it's in their interest anyway (ads), they embrace it. I dont get why the internet dont get that already: it's all KYC :)

deelly 4y ago
Sorry, I still don't get it. How exactly KYC is responsible to crappy web search results? Should it be other way around?
- quadcore 4y ago
  Regulators dont want mustard-yellow webpage anymore. They dont want anything they don't Know.

paco3346 4y ago

Hey, I just came from the company that hosts that dealer website! The amount of money that dealerships pour into SEO and advertising is unreal. They also chase every single thing that Google says with complete abandon. (Remember AMP? ya, that was something we chased because dealers asked us to and then forgot about 12 months later.) I realize this is about Google but I think there will always be a struggle until everyone can boycott playing the game and I just don't see that happening.

redgrange 4y ago

I lol at the paying professors generous salaries part

tut-urut-utut 4y ago

Instead of fighting Google, better "just" stop using it. Leave it for good, even if it feels better than competition right now. Let's face it, Google is not going to improve. We are not their customers, and they are not going to make their product better for us. That boat has sailed long time ago. We need to reset the web. Try out as much of alternative search engines as you can. Use the one, or multiple, that suit you better. Maybe they will get some traction in a couple of years, maybe in a decade, or so. We'll be there where we were before Google, using Yahoos, Altavista, Excite et al. and waiting for the history to repeat in a form of a new incumbent that will again make search usable.

andyjohnson0 4y ago

I've given up on google for search and I'm not going back. I've been beta-testing kagi search [1] for the last couple of months and it does 95% of what I need - accurate and low-distraction and it doesn't try to sell me stuff or sell me to anyone. They're about to go into public beta and announce their pricing, and I'm pretty sure I'm in. [1] kagi.com

alicesreflexion 4y ago
Kagi has been fantastic to me. The search results seem better. The option to search by EDU or discussion or by "literally anything that doesn't have 5000 trackers" with a single click is indispensable. Showing results from the internet archive and old blogs is a nice plus. Shoving all the listicles into their own compact section is great. If this is the quality I can expect going forward, I have zero problem paying the $10/mo down the line

StreamBright 4y ago

Search is the only service that I would pay for no matter what. Google never considered this business model.

royal10march 4y ago

I'm sorry but in no way should you limit your results to only those published on .edu websites. There's got to be a better solution to this. Ideas only end up on .edu websites after a long period from the point it was conceived.

mlom 4y ago

"Nothing wrong with that, making money is noble" this right here is why you never make any progress and never fix anything and you never understand why everything sucks, you keep rewarding perverse incentives and greed and then try to work around it as if greed were not the central problem. making money is not noble, making money does not represent increasing value, it only represents cornering tokens of others' labor time, which you have just observed takes the form of profiteers intentionally seeking ways to waste your time. improving the world is noble, and whether you make money or not, you get to live in a better world. linus was awarded a salary because people were EMBARRASSED that they were profiting so much off his free work. you all should be a lot more ashamed.

tonguez 4y ago
thank you
EricE 4y ago
Making money is the practical reality and the entire foundation of the modern world. Do you really think trading chickens or loafs of bread is more practical than exchanging money for goods and services? How ridiculously naïve! You should be ashamed that you have the utter privilege to hold such utterly ridiculous thoughts without the fear of starving or not having shelter.
- mlom 4y ago
  get fucked eric, all slavers must be killed, you have no idea how secure food or shelter are for me, motherfucker. you think because i'm able to get here and talk to you that i'm in a situation like yours, and not facing homelessness or starvation? fuck you scum

ricardoplouis 4y ago

Any search engine with a profit motive is inevitably doomed as one value overtakes the other. To have a search engine that works means having one where scaling endlessly in pursuit of profit is discouraged.

Mo3 4y ago

> Oh, and also, Miller is hiring if you’re interested in joining the team. I don't think so.

PainfullyNormal 4y ago

Adam Savage went on a rant about 2 weeks ago about this very thing. He was trying to find a large format laser printer and the typical "best laser printers of 2022" blogspam were all filled with inkjet printers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9lFcduaZPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9lFcduaZPU

amai 4y ago

Better: "site:wikipedia.org how are pearls made" "site:wikipedia.org how to change a tire"

sharno 4y ago

I got surprised recently by more predictable Yandex search is. I started comparing it to TikTok, the algorithm is more predictable and feels that you can direct it into the pathway you want.

mhmmbt 4y ago

Technical solutions are not going to fix a political problem. Sundar has been quoted as saying “they are a business first” and a businesses political obligation is make profit for the owners. These companies and technologies are meant to serve human beings, not a mathematical ideal in programmers heads. While: $makeMoney == $howSocietyWorks; return $getUsedToIt Ooh but politics is boring! Only 13% of adults in the US have an advanced degree. Coddled engineers live in an emotional bubble ignoring the very real world that does not feel an obligation to a minority of coddled engineers.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
They sure use and depend on what that 13% develop/create/literally engineer and maintain, though.
- mhmmbt 4y ago
  Do they want to or do they have few options? When a brain is trained to follow along from childhood, I don’t really see how it’s an option to avoid it. Also the 13% are not all engineers. Many are historians or similar who babble nonsense. We built many big buildings and bridges before web devs came along. Centralized ledgers used to dictate agency and what effort we must put in (computed by elites with a currency monopoly; which in the US is legally a speech monopoly thanks to SCOTUS) are not really the same thing as a bridge. There’s a big difference between things we need to engineer and TV 2.0. Whole lot of IT is rent seeking.

more_corn 4y ago

This is by far the most useless advice I have ever seen.

kazinator 4y ago

Make up your mind: are you complaining that MillerAutoPlaza is in the Google search results, or that MillerAutoPlaza is asking for your location?

big_blind 4y ago

It's a little sad we have to '.edu' filter searches just to not be directed to SEO sites at this point. Kagi's and You.com's searches are really smooth and painless from this perspective. You.com also has built in site filtering which helps a ton.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

so my takeaway is that the best sites were written in the 90s and still out there with the right search incantation :)

guerrilla 4y ago

How come nobody is doing social search yet? Why can't I up and down vote results and maybe even comment on them or something? I don't want to ever see some of these recipe sites that show up again... I can't imagine I would if people were helping curate. Seems like an "easy" solution to SEO crapola?

dostojevski1 4y ago
I don't think there is the need of curating content in a social search way, if the SE itself is just good and alternative SE's that are coming up seem very promising. e.g., you.com lets you pick preferred sources, so that you can tailor your search experience to your needs. They've also done a great job on recipes. https://you.com/search?q=oven%20roasted%20broccoli https://you.com/search?q=oven%20roasted%20broccoli Neeva and Kagi also seem promising, though their both waitlist/invite only still
- fils 4y ago
  Actually I think Neeva is fully open now for all to try at https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/ I don't work for them, but I have gone the paid route with them and I am very pleased with them as my default search now.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
ryan-duve 4y ago
I vaguely remember Wiki's search engine doing this; maybe it was called WikiCloud? Anyway, it was just clunky in practice to 1. search something 2. click links until you get your info 3. go back to the search page and upvote/downvote the results based on which ones were useful
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Hmm, I see what you mean and how that could be bad. Maybe something like the old stumbleupon interface could work.

trhoad 4y ago

Err, what? .edu is a TLD for US based educational bodies. So the reason you don't see a cookie banner is because the majority (AFAIK) of US states don't mandate a cookie banner, unlike EU and UK based sites (like the Natural History Museum, based in the UK). Does this mean the Natural History Museum is a less authoritative resource than anywhere else? I'd say the opposite, actually. And for the "change a tire" example using a .edu TLD. That's a fantastic example of how to find search results that are almost completely useless for anyone outside the US. What's a "tire", anyway? Oh, you mean "tyre". What's a "flashlight". OK, you mean a "torch". In summary: there's a world outside the US. It's lovely out here.

nabakin 4y ago
You're annoyed with him because his target audience is only the United States? Why stop at British people? I can't believe this guy didn't consider Japanese-speaking people! Why didn't OP make an article for Chinese people?! Wow, can you believe OP didn't make an article for every single possible person on the planet? Honestly, you make a good point at the start but I don't understand your rage at the end there.

pmontra 4y ago

> If you simply google: how to fix a flat tire the first website in the search results is this piece of bloatware, MillerAutoPlaza: I attempted to reproduce the experiment and I got a full page of useful results, all of them videos or numbered lists of the steps as in > Step One: Find the Puncture. Once you're in a safe place, hop out of the car, and find the flat tire. ... etc. Maybe Google read HN and fixed that query but how to replace flat tires yields similar results. Maybe it's because I'm not logged in into Google and they are less aggressive on showing me ads? Maybe it's because I'm not from an English language country and they know from my IP address. Let's try with come cambiare una gomma bucata. Other useful numbered lists and videos. I'm not always happy with Google's results but there seems to be something wrong in the experiment here.

shortformblog 4y ago

This title bothers me because he’s clearly going after the wrong target. It’s not that Google is unbearable. It’s that people with money are more likely to invest on ranking high in Google than those who don’t have money. This would be the case with any commercial service with financial goals, given enough time and the right motivations. If commercial content is your problem, say it. Leave Google out of it.

nonameiguess 4y ago

At least some of the problem here needs to be laid at the feet of users relying too heavily on the web to learn everything. Your vehicle's owner manual has instructions for how to change a tire, with the bonus that it will even know where the tools that come with your car are located and whether you have some extra features like locking lug nuts.

sabujp 4y ago

another trick site:*.reddit.com

ColinHayhurst 4y ago

Excuse the shameless self-promotion, but contrast the results for the same searches: https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+to+fix+a+flat+tire https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+to+fix+a+flat+tire https://bikerepairvideos.com/fix-flat-tire/ https://bikerepairvideos.com/fix-flat-tire/ https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+are+pearls+made%3F https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=how+are+pearls+made%3F https://www.gemrockauctions.com/learn/did-you-know/how-are-pearls-made https://www.gemrockauctions.com/learn/did-you-know/how-are-p...

richardsocher 4y ago

This is why we have preferred sources on you.com - and a special mode just for coding specific results: code.you.com, eg. https://code.you.com/search?q=onnxruntime+segfault https://code.you.com/search?q=onnxruntime+segfault those you would not necessarily find on .edu domains but it's a similar spirit. (you.com founder here)

chiken 4y ago
refreshing layout! Those apps are time saver as I don't have to search across different sources by opening up multiple tabs for every query.

prof_hibschman 4y ago

I noticed the my google results are way worse when using fastdns, as compared to google dns. Not sure why.

redmen 4y ago

A tonne of kagi shilling in this thread. Honestly its alright but not that great to warrant that many comments lol. Sometimes I wonder how many of these comments are real, or fake. I have caught hacker news schillers many times before.