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I read comments and articles all the time about the quality of Google's search dropping. I haven't noticed it much in practice, but I'm persistent, use copious

I read comments and articles all the time about the quality of Google's search dropping. I haven't noticed it much in practice, but I'm persistent, use copious ad blocking, and my Google-fu is strong, so I usually find what I'm looking for. Image search is another story. I've been less and less satisfied with Google Image search results, and visual search has been totally neutered. It only returns low res results that rarely match the original as well as it used to. I used to be able to plug in a 400x400 image and find a dozen copies of it at a usable size. No more. Too many copyright complaints, I assume. I've started using Bing for image and visual search now. It's not as good as old Google Images, but marginally better in some cases than the current iteration.

rplnt 4y ago
> my Google-fu is strong The thing is, this doesn't matter anymore. You have very little control as Google tries to be smart. It's very hard if not impossible to find something older, obscure, things from other regions, languages, etc...
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I think "Google-fu" just refers to being able to bend the search engine to your will. In the early days it was with operators and special keywords (inurl, etc) but today most of those are not as useful or actively harmful and so "Google-fu" has progressed. It's knowing which terms to drop from the error you are searching for, it's knowing how to phrase things correctly, it's knowing how to skim the results and separate the wheat from the chaff. Or at least that's what it means to me and how I use it.
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    I don't think they misunderstood and I think their point still stands. The irrelevance of Google's search results are becoming ever more unyielding to the user's intent. The portion of results that are SEO spam for every query is increasing. The amount of your query being dropped and ignored in your search is increasing. Google results are becoming increasingly irrelevant and is on a trajectory to a point of completely ignoring your query where the results are strictly a combination of spam and a random pick of websites. "Google-fu" is not progressing. It's struggling to hang on by the decreasing number of threads before it's utterly ineffective.
    - Swizec 4y ago
      Google-fu is prompt engineering. Where we used to say “rome fall why”, you’d now write “why did the roman empire fall”. Because the AI likes that phrasing and produces better results. Soon you’ll write a 300 word description of what exactly you’re looking for, like you would when asking a trusted expert, and Google will figure something out. The days of keyword searching are long gone.
      - extr 4y ago
        Not to pick on your quick example, but actually testing it, these two terms [1] [2] have nearly identical results. Top result in both cases is history.com, followed by wikipedia, and the next 4-6 results are the same but in slightly different order. I think this is actually an example of the benefit of their AI. Despite the big difference in the "style" of phrasing (simple english vs more formally naming the subject noun), both seem to map to a very similar representation in their embedding space. I've run into frustrations with this myself, but for basic questions like this it seems like the search works Pretty Good. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+rome+fall&oq=why+rome+fall https://www.google.com/search?q=why+rome+fall&oq=why+rome+fa... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+roman+empire+fall&oq=why+did+the+roman+empire+fall https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+roman+empire+fal...
        nerdponx 4y ago
        Consider that "Why did the Roman Empire fall?" consists of 1 word that describes the type of question being asked ("why"), 2 useless junk words ("did the"), and 3 "key words" ("Roman Empire Fall"), of which 2 should really be treated as a single word referring to a single concept/entity ("Roman Empire", for which "Rome" is a synonym in some cases). Humans instinctively know this, so we are able to construct queries like "why rome fall". But that "why rome fall" query, which we think of as a purely mechanical keyword search, already requires quite a bit of sophisticated processing in the search engine. The system has to recognize that "fall" is synonymous for "collapse" or "wane in power" and not synonymous for "autumn". It also has to recognize that "rome" means "the (Western) Roman Empire" and not the modern city of Rome in Italy or "the Holy Roman Empire" or the city of Rome, NY, USA. It furthermore needs to interpret "why" in such a way that it emphasizes results with "reasons" or "explanations", rather than something like a "timeline" or "summary". Personally I find it really weird that Google is interested in pushing users more to interact with its digital librarian / AI assistant, instead of continuing to improve keyword search. I have a few guesses as to why they are going this way: 1. It makes the user interface simpler from an engineering perspective (fewer user-facing buttons and options to implement and test). 2. There is strategic benefit to making search more of a black box. Maybe they are specifically trying to "educate" users to expect and be comfortable with such black boxes. Maybe the plan is to get people so accustomed to "AI assistant" search that they see keyword search as outdated, and thereby secure a competitive advantage for the next several years over other search engines, by having the biggest and best AI models. 3. They are trying to increase the amount of rich "natural language" user search inputs in their data. Making keyword search worse will encourage people to use queries that more closely resemble natural language. I assume that this has strategic benefit related to Guess 2 above.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    These days you need -youtube to get rid of the video results.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    It's the opposite now - you increasingly have to use "Google-fu" to make sure that your query is not creatively reinterpreted in ways that are virtually guaranteed to yield irrelevant results (but more of them) - e.g. substituting words with "synonyms" (which aren't), or removing the most important keyword from the query altogether.
jackdh 4y ago
If you're interested in a comparison, try Yandex image search. Someone here mentioned it a while ago and I now use it as my go to.
- verisimi 4y ago
  Yandex is good. I use presearch, which searches independently, and provides links to other search engines on the side. https://presearch.com/ https://presearch.com/
logicchains 4y ago
Yandex image search is fairly decent.
- jaimex2 4y ago
  Its actually crazy good and does borderline questionable things, like it does facial recognition. you can upload a social media picture of someone and Yandex will find that person elsewhere on the Internet.
3pt14159 4y ago
I've stopped being able to reliably find an animated gif and copy and paste it. One used to be able to just right click on an image and copy it. Now, I only get a still. I try clicking into the website that hosts the image and it's click, click, click just to get anywhere close to the size I want and often times its not even an animated gif anyway because they do some sort of media query and serve me up an uncopyable movie instead. The web sucks now. People work around it with bots and the like on Reddit, but I feel like the economics have been figured out and it's not fun anymore. Instead, we use /giphy in our Slack and hope the algorithm finds something that kinda-sorta was what we were thinking.
- artificial 4y ago
  I use Kagi frequently, and just for giggles give Yandex image search a try, you can actually specify dimensions (like you used to on Google).
  - NAG3LT 4y ago
    Another recommendation to use Yandex Image search as an option. They search differently and also try to find similar images.
    - redeeman 4y ago
      i see putin has his troll army everywhere!!!! (yes, im kidding)
- munk-a 4y ago
  With /giphy I think half the fun is when it falls flat on its face. The original command is always visible and most people just read that for the sentiment and then enjoy when the gif it found misses the mark by a mile.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
Try https://tineye.com/ https://tineye.com/
juujian 4y ago
I just noticed more and more copy and pasted content from stackoverflow intruding on my searches. Word for word the same content. There are so many people out there just creating blogs and stealing content and SEOing their way into traffic, it's not even funny anymore.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And they probably don’t even make any meaningful amount of money off it. But given enough scammers trying this sort of thing at least for a while and the web is polluted even if a given individual has already moved onto their next scam.
- from 4y ago
  On some of them I’ve noticed the text will overall have the same idea but a lot of the words will be different. I think some of these sites will translate it to Chinese and then translate it back to English to give it a lower similarity score. It is truly amazing the amount of effort some people will expend to avoid adding anything useful to the world.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    Not only to avoid adding anything useful, but to actively make it worse.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  And because something might be answered either on stackoverflow or one of the many stackexchange spinoffs, restricting your search to either will remove results from the other.
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
> I read comments and articles all the time about the quality of Google's search dropping. I haven't noticed it much in practice, but I'm persistent, use copious ad blocking, and my Google-fu is strong, so I usually find what I'm looking for. The results quality has gone down and it's noticeable only after you switch to another independent search engine, like Brave Search. For example, search for the term: "javascript undefined vs null" on Google and Brave Search. Brave Search gives way more information in the sidebar and Google doesn't at all. The discussions feature on Brave Search is great, you don't even need to append queries like 'stackoverflow' or 'reddit' for searching discussions. On top of that, let's say you're trying to search for an npm library like 'react-select', if you search that term on Brave Search, it gives you a button to copy `npm install react-select` right below the npmjs.com link. It's crazy how good Brave Search is compared to Google sometimes, haven't used Google Search in a long time because of it.
- judge2020 4y ago
  I thought we were against Google et al. implementing features that keep people on their site instead of directing traffic to other parts of the web?
  - ziml77 4y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. We can't complain about Google doing it but then give other search engines a pass.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    I certainly am. Brave search putting answers in the sidebar is not a point in its favor, IMO.
  - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    It's certainly controversial so all I can give you is a subjective viewpoint but yes, objectively these things make search engines more convenient but cut the traffic to the original websites by a small margin. So far, I've noticed Brave Search only shows sidebar results for Stackoverflow and a few other popular forums that do not advertise on their pages directly, nothing else. So they're not really taking any revenue away. As for npmjs thing, I'm not sure if their revenue is hurt in any way because to view the package documentation you still need to open the link. Brave Search just provides you a copy command button extra for convenience. As for discussions, they do not give full context so you always need to click the link so that's great for website owners as they get more exposure and traffic too. At this point, Brave Search features are more on the UX side of things than anti-competitive so I personally will hold off the tinfoil hat for now.
nabakin 4y ago
Try Yandex. I've found it to work better when trying to find a different, higher res version of certain image and Google to work better when trying to find a related image.
ortusdux 4y ago
I used Tineye.com's reverse image search extensively before google added the feature and baked it into chrome. Google's results have consistently worsened to the point that I've switched back to tineye and installed the chrome extension.
- jasonshaev 4y ago
  Sorry if this is off-topic but does anyone know if "tineye" is a reference to Brandon Sanderson novels? Specifically the Mistborn series? I couldn't find any reference on tineye.com but it seems like it has to be.
  - tempest_ 4y ago
    https://blog.tineye.com/tineye-whats-in-a-name/ https://blog.tineye.com/tineye-whats-in-a-name/
ars 4y ago
I've definitely noticed worse results from Google search. I just get page after page after page of "content" that appears to be either GPT written or written by somebody who has no idea about the topic. They all seem to follow a pattern, they have a table of contents, and they take sentences from real sites regurgitate them and put them together into semi-random paragraphs. If you know nothing about the topic it appears on the surface to be legitimate. And I bet to any quality engineers it all seems totally legitimate, because they're not experts in these fields.
jrochkind1 4y ago
I hadn't realized that Bing image search still lets you link directly to the Image URL, not just the page it's hosted on. Something Google stopped doing a few years ago in response to content platform complaints. OK, I'm definitely switching to Bing Image Search for images. Per OP... they do seem to have a public domain/CC search limit feature too. I don't know how well it works. (I'm not sure how either it or Google identify CC/public domain content. Is there an opengraph tag?) https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dogs&qft=+filterui:license-L1 https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dogs&qft=+filterui:lice...
kingrazor 4y ago
I made my career using google search and it has changed pretty significantly from the early 2010s. There was a point where it would seemingly scour the entire web for whatever string of text I entered, but now it tries so hard to give me what it thinks I'm looking for that I very often get results that are completely irrelevant. I'm still usually able to find what I'm looking for eventually, but it takes a lot more work on my part.
- TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
  It's why I used DDG first, because it does this less in my opinion.
  - jaimex2 4y ago
    DDG is just Bing though.
    - TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
      With a proxy!
- tomcam 4y ago
  Wait how did you make your career using Google search?
  - kingrazor 4y ago
    Google search is how I was able to learn how to do the jobs I've been doing for the past few years. Fixing one problem at a time by googling it.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      Oh, okay. Thought this was some kind of SEO wizardry or YouTuber or something. Thanks!
neither_color 4y ago
The problem is not just google's algorithm but also the fact that people are not sharing useful information the same way they used to. These days when I'm trying to hack smarthome stuff or looking for advice on 3D printing something or software limitation workarounds the best I can hope for is a subreddit, otherwise the knowledge is hidden on a discord server after I "join the community" for the 98343789th time. I can't just read a 10 year old forum thread where people talked each other through solving it, I have to join the discord and figure out which channel to ask my question in and do some dance with frog memes and people react to my question with an emoji of a toothless man laughing before we can talk shop.
- noobermin 4y ago
  I'm sympathetic but this is turning to a get off my lawn rant. Things weren't easy too depending on what it was. Forums and irc were just like discords in that you had to deal with insular culture and often serious verbal abuse for being stupid enough to ask for help in a forum meant to get help in. That said, I do see the sentiment. It would be nice to have the old convience of being able to look up old forum posts (especially with summaries in the OP via edit). Stackoverflow often fits that role now although I dread the answers even worse than old forum posts. I guess what I want is my cake and the ability to eat it too, I dont know why we can't just have the ability to search forums and have the general kinder attitude that modern media tend to have, they shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
  - Phrodo_00 4y ago
    Yes, forums and chat channels have always been cesspools but at least forums (and IRC logs) were _searchable_ cesspools
  - TomSwirly 4y ago
    But you could search them. And still can. If it's in discord, it's a black hole.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    > serious verbal abuse for being stupid enough to ask for help in a forum meant to get help in. in all honesty, isnt this a bit of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", "sticks and stones" etc? yes, you might be called various words, told to RTFM. but seriously here, is it really so bad? do you really want to drag down actual verbal abuse to something so absolutely trivial?
chordalkeyboard 4y ago
https://youtu.be/bWbytHBp0zI https://youtu.be/bWbytHBp0zI Google search is severely broken.
- xaedes 4y ago
  I was feeling this as well, but didn't pay attention _how_ bad it is. I mean it really is... Is there ANY search engine left that returns more than 500 results for any search? Are there any community driven search engines? I mean at this point it can't be hard to build a better alternative...
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    Kagi is great so far!
    - xaedes 4y ago
      Tried it, but returning lots of results doesn't seem to be their focus. Now I installed OpenSearchServer and see how far a local index gets me. The simple query "a" gets me at most 394 results at google, after letting OpenSearchServer crawl/index for just 2h I already get over 900 results for "a". Well.. I guess it really is not hard to beat that meager 394 results.
verisimi 4y ago
Google fu? You are actually trying to hack Google in an unauthorised way. 'More than 1 result is a bug, citizen.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4
ALittleLight 4y ago
Just a couple days ago I was searching for a funny video I had seen. I tried searching on YouTube and Google - typing in descriptions, what I remembered of the title, the excerpts of dialog I could recall, what was going on in the video - couldn't find anything even close to it. Searched on TikTok and got it in the first result. Google search quality is in severe decline in my opinion. I have many experiences where I am searching for stuff that I know exists and that I know Google of yesteryear would have found, and Google comes back with garbage results and spam. Personally, I am hopeful that this means a Google-killer will be coming along soon.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
idatum 4y ago
> my Google-fu is strong Initially read this as, well, "FU Google", and thought "yep, FU to them too". I guess I will acknowledge I have a bias. Then curious about this term, I googled-on-bing "FU Google". Top result was Google-fu, not the expletive. I have no Google-fu.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I just use startpage.com as it doesn't use google's "personalized search" algorithm(s) and well because it's more private.

rplnt 4y ago

> my Google-fu is strong The thing is, this doesn't matter anymore. You have very little control as Google tries to be smart. It's very hard if not impossible to find something older, obscure, things from other regions, languages, etc...

joshstrange 4y ago
I think "Google-fu" just refers to being able to bend the search engine to your will. In the early days it was with operators and special keywords (inurl, etc) but today most of those are not as useful or actively harmful and so "Google-fu" has progressed. It's knowing which terms to drop from the error you are searching for, it's knowing how to phrase things correctly, it's knowing how to skim the results and separate the wheat from the chaff. Or at least that's what it means to me and how I use it.
- nvrspyx 4y ago
  I don't think they misunderstood and I think their point still stands. The irrelevance of Google's search results are becoming ever more unyielding to the user's intent. The portion of results that are SEO spam for every query is increasing. The amount of your query being dropped and ignored in your search is increasing. Google results are becoming increasingly irrelevant and is on a trajectory to a point of completely ignoring your query where the results are strictly a combination of spam and a random pick of websites. "Google-fu" is not progressing. It's struggling to hang on by the decreasing number of threads before it's utterly ineffective.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    Google-fu is prompt engineering. Where we used to say “rome fall why”, you’d now write “why did the roman empire fall”. Because the AI likes that phrasing and produces better results. Soon you’ll write a 300 word description of what exactly you’re looking for, like you would when asking a trusted expert, and Google will figure something out. The days of keyword searching are long gone.
    - extr 4y ago
      Not to pick on your quick example, but actually testing it, these two terms [1] [2] have nearly identical results. Top result in both cases is history.com, followed by wikipedia, and the next 4-6 results are the same but in slightly different order. I think this is actually an example of the benefit of their AI. Despite the big difference in the "style" of phrasing (simple english vs more formally naming the subject noun), both seem to map to a very similar representation in their embedding space. I've run into frustrations with this myself, but for basic questions like this it seems like the search works Pretty Good. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+rome+fall&oq=why+rome+fall https://www.google.com/search?q=why+rome+fall&oq=why+rome+fa... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+roman+empire+fall&oq=why+did+the+roman+empire+fall https://www.google.com/search?q=why+did+the+roman+empire+fal...
      - nerdponx 4y ago
        Consider that "Why did the Roman Empire fall?" consists of 1 word that describes the type of question being asked ("why"), 2 useless junk words ("did the"), and 3 "key words" ("Roman Empire Fall"), of which 2 should really be treated as a single word referring to a single concept/entity ("Roman Empire", for which "Rome" is a synonym in some cases). Humans instinctively know this, so we are able to construct queries like "why rome fall". But that "why rome fall" query, which we think of as a purely mechanical keyword search, already requires quite a bit of sophisticated processing in the search engine. The system has to recognize that "fall" is synonymous for "collapse" or "wane in power" and not synonymous for "autumn". It also has to recognize that "rome" means "the (Western) Roman Empire" and not the modern city of Rome in Italy or "the Holy Roman Empire" or the city of Rome, NY, USA. It furthermore needs to interpret "why" in such a way that it emphasizes results with "reasons" or "explanations", rather than something like a "timeline" or "summary". Personally I find it really weird that Google is interested in pushing users more to interact with its digital librarian / AI assistant, instead of continuing to improve keyword search. I have a few guesses as to why they are going this way: 1. It makes the user interface simpler from an engineering perspective (fewer user-facing buttons and options to implement and test). 2. There is strategic benefit to making search more of a black box. Maybe they are specifically trying to "educate" users to expect and be comfortable with such black boxes. Maybe the plan is to get people so accustomed to "AI assistant" search that they see keyword search as outdated, and thereby secure a competitive advantage for the next several years over other search engines, by having the biggest and best AI models. 3. They are trying to increase the amount of rich "natural language" user search inputs in their data. Making keyword search worse will encourage people to use queries that more closely resemble natural language. I assume that this has strategic benefit related to Guess 2 above.
- skybrian 4y ago
  These days you need -youtube to get rid of the video results.
- int_19h 4y ago
  It's the opposite now - you increasingly have to use "Google-fu" to make sure that your query is not creatively reinterpreted in ways that are virtually guaranteed to yield irrelevant results (but more of them) - e.g. substituting words with "synonyms" (which aren't), or removing the most important keyword from the query altogether.

jackdh 4y ago

If you're interested in a comparison, try Yandex image search. Someone here mentioned it a while ago and I now use it as my go to.

verisimi 4y ago
Yandex is good. I use presearch, which searches independently, and provides links to other search engines on the side. https://presearch.com/ https://presearch.com/

logicchains 4y ago

Yandex image search is fairly decent.

jaimex2 4y ago
Its actually crazy good and does borderline questionable things, like it does facial recognition. you can upload a social media picture of someone and Yandex will find that person elsewhere on the Internet.

3pt14159 4y ago

I've stopped being able to reliably find an animated gif and copy and paste it. One used to be able to just right click on an image and copy it. Now, I only get a still. I try clicking into the website that hosts the image and it's click, click, click just to get anywhere close to the size I want and often times its not even an animated gif anyway because they do some sort of media query and serve me up an uncopyable movie instead. The web sucks now. People work around it with bots and the like on Reddit, but I feel like the economics have been figured out and it's not fun anymore. Instead, we use /giphy in our Slack and hope the algorithm finds something that kinda-sorta was what we were thinking.

artificial 4y ago
I use Kagi frequently, and just for giggles give Yandex image search a try, you can actually specify dimensions (like you used to on Google).
- NAG3LT 4y ago
  Another recommendation to use Yandex Image search as an option. They search differently and also try to find similar images.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    i see putin has his troll army everywhere!!!! (yes, im kidding)
munk-a 4y ago
With /giphy I think half the fun is when it falls flat on its face. The original command is always visible and most people just read that for the sentiment and then enjoy when the gif it found misses the mark by a mile.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

Try https://tineye.com/ https://tineye.com/

juujian 4y ago

I just noticed more and more copy and pasted content from stackoverflow intruding on my searches. Word for word the same content. There are so many people out there just creating blogs and stealing content and SEOing their way into traffic, it's not even funny anymore.

ghaff 4y ago
And they probably don’t even make any meaningful amount of money off it. But given enough scammers trying this sort of thing at least for a while and the web is polluted even if a given individual has already moved onto their next scam.
from 4y ago
On some of them I’ve noticed the text will overall have the same idea but a lot of the words will be different. I think some of these sites will translate it to Chinese and then translate it back to English to give it a lower similarity score. It is truly amazing the amount of effort some people will expend to avoid adding anything useful to the world.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  Not only to avoid adding anything useful, but to actively make it worse.
MereInterest 4y ago
And because something might be answered either on stackoverflow or one of the many stackexchange spinoffs, restricting your search to either will remove results from the other.

NayamAmarshe 4y ago

> I read comments and articles all the time about the quality of Google's search dropping. I haven't noticed it much in practice, but I'm persistent, use copious ad blocking, and my Google-fu is strong, so I usually find what I'm looking for. The results quality has gone down and it's noticeable only after you switch to another independent search engine, like Brave Search. For example, search for the term: "javascript undefined vs null" on Google and Brave Search. Brave Search gives way more information in the sidebar and Google doesn't at all. The discussions feature on Brave Search is great, you don't even need to append queries like 'stackoverflow' or 'reddit' for searching discussions. On top of that, let's say you're trying to search for an npm library like 'react-select', if you search that term on Brave Search, it gives you a button to copy `npm install react-select` right below the npmjs.com link. It's crazy how good Brave Search is compared to Google sometimes, haven't used Google Search in a long time because of it.

judge2020 4y ago
I thought we were against Google et al. implementing features that keep people on their site instead of directing traffic to other parts of the web?
- ziml77 4y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. We can't complain about Google doing it but then give other search engines a pass.
- falcolas 4y ago
  I certainly am. Brave search putting answers in the sidebar is not a point in its favor, IMO.
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  It's certainly controversial so all I can give you is a subjective viewpoint but yes, objectively these things make search engines more convenient but cut the traffic to the original websites by a small margin. So far, I've noticed Brave Search only shows sidebar results for Stackoverflow and a few other popular forums that do not advertise on their pages directly, nothing else. So they're not really taking any revenue away. As for npmjs thing, I'm not sure if their revenue is hurt in any way because to view the package documentation you still need to open the link. Brave Search just provides you a copy command button extra for convenience. As for discussions, they do not give full context so you always need to click the link so that's great for website owners as they get more exposure and traffic too. At this point, Brave Search features are more on the UX side of things than anti-competitive so I personally will hold off the tinfoil hat for now.

nabakin 4y ago

Try Yandex. I've found it to work better when trying to find a different, higher res version of certain image and Google to work better when trying to find a related image.

ortusdux 4y ago

I used Tineye.com's reverse image search extensively before google added the feature and baked it into chrome. Google's results have consistently worsened to the point that I've switched back to tineye and installed the chrome extension.

jasonshaev 4y ago
Sorry if this is off-topic but does anyone know if "tineye" is a reference to Brandon Sanderson novels? Specifically the Mistborn series? I couldn't find any reference on tineye.com but it seems like it has to be.
- tempest_ 4y ago
  https://blog.tineye.com/tineye-whats-in-a-name/ https://blog.tineye.com/tineye-whats-in-a-name/

ars 4y ago

I've definitely noticed worse results from Google search. I just get page after page after page of "content" that appears to be either GPT written or written by somebody who has no idea about the topic. They all seem to follow a pattern, they have a table of contents, and they take sentences from real sites regurgitate them and put them together into semi-random paragraphs. If you know nothing about the topic it appears on the surface to be legitimate. And I bet to any quality engineers it all seems totally legitimate, because they're not experts in these fields.

jrochkind1 4y ago

I hadn't realized that Bing image search still lets you link directly to the Image URL, not just the page it's hosted on. Something Google stopped doing a few years ago in response to content platform complaints. OK, I'm definitely switching to Bing Image Search for images. Per OP... they do seem to have a public domain/CC search limit feature too. I don't know how well it works. (I'm not sure how either it or Google identify CC/public domain content. Is there an opengraph tag?) https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dogs&qft=+filterui:license-L1 https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dogs&qft=+filterui:lice...

kingrazor 4y ago

I made my career using google search and it has changed pretty significantly from the early 2010s. There was a point where it would seemingly scour the entire web for whatever string of text I entered, but now it tries so hard to give me what it thinks I'm looking for that I very often get results that are completely irrelevant. I'm still usually able to find what I'm looking for eventually, but it takes a lot more work on my part.

TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
It's why I used DDG first, because it does this less in my opinion.
- jaimex2 4y ago
  DDG is just Bing though.
  - TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
    With a proxy!
tomcam 4y ago
Wait how did you make your career using Google search?
- kingrazor 4y ago
  Google search is how I was able to learn how to do the jobs I've been doing for the past few years. Fixing one problem at a time by googling it.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Oh, okay. Thought this was some kind of SEO wizardry or YouTuber or something. Thanks!

neither_color 4y ago

The problem is not just google's algorithm but also the fact that people are not sharing useful information the same way they used to. These days when I'm trying to hack smarthome stuff or looking for advice on 3D printing something or software limitation workarounds the best I can hope for is a subreddit, otherwise the knowledge is hidden on a discord server after I "join the community" for the 98343789th time. I can't just read a 10 year old forum thread where people talked each other through solving it, I have to join the discord and figure out which channel to ask my question in and do some dance with frog memes and people react to my question with an emoji of a toothless man laughing before we can talk shop.

noobermin 4y ago
I'm sympathetic but this is turning to a get off my lawn rant. Things weren't easy too depending on what it was. Forums and irc were just like discords in that you had to deal with insular culture and often serious verbal abuse for being stupid enough to ask for help in a forum meant to get help in. That said, I do see the sentiment. It would be nice to have the old convience of being able to look up old forum posts (especially with summaries in the OP via edit). Stackoverflow often fits that role now although I dread the answers even worse than old forum posts. I guess what I want is my cake and the ability to eat it too, I dont know why we can't just have the ability to search forums and have the general kinder attitude that modern media tend to have, they shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
- Phrodo_00 4y ago
  Yes, forums and chat channels have always been cesspools but at least forums (and IRC logs) were _searchable_ cesspools
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  But you could search them. And still can. If it's in discord, it's a black hole.
- redeeman 4y ago
  > serious verbal abuse for being stupid enough to ask for help in a forum meant to get help in. in all honesty, isnt this a bit of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", "sticks and stones" etc? yes, you might be called various words, told to RTFM. but seriously here, is it really so bad? do you really want to drag down actual verbal abuse to something so absolutely trivial?

chordalkeyboard 4y ago

https://youtu.be/bWbytHBp0zI https://youtu.be/bWbytHBp0zI Google search is severely broken.

xaedes 4y ago
I was feeling this as well, but didn't pay attention _how_ bad it is. I mean it really is... Is there ANY search engine left that returns more than 500 results for any search? Are there any community driven search engines? I mean at this point it can't be hard to build a better alternative...
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Kagi is great so far!
  - xaedes 4y ago
    Tried it, but returning lots of results doesn't seem to be their focus. Now I installed OpenSearchServer and see how far a local index gets me. The simple query "a" gets me at most 394 results at google, after letting OpenSearchServer crawl/index for just 2h I already get over 900 results for "a". Well.. I guess it really is not hard to beat that meager 394 results.

verisimi 4y ago

Google fu? You are actually trying to hack Google in an unauthorised way. 'More than 1 result is a bug, citizen.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4

ALittleLight 4y ago

Just a couple days ago I was searching for a funny video I had seen. I tried searching on YouTube and Google - typing in descriptions, what I remembered of the title, the excerpts of dialog I could recall, what was going on in the video - couldn't find anything even close to it. Searched on TikTok and got it in the first result. Google search quality is in severe decline in my opinion. I have many experiences where I am searching for stuff that I know exists and that I know Google of yesteryear would have found, and Google comes back with garbage results and spam. Personally, I am hopeful that this means a Google-killer will be coming along soon.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

idatum 4y ago

> my Google-fu is strong Initially read this as, well, "FU Google", and thought "yep, FU to them too". I guess I will acknowledge I have a bias. Then curious about this term, I googled-on-bing "FU Google". Top result was Google-fu, not the expletive. I have no Google-fu.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I just use startpage.com as it doesn't use google's "personalized search" algorithm(s) and well because it's more private.