11 ms·

Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result

Google's search product has become a shadow of its former self. Every year it seems harder to find what I'm looking for. The top half of the first search result page is now (potentially malicious) ads, and what follows is likely SEO spam. I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days so I'm not served nearly useless results. It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed thought into the search box and I'd get the answer.

realusername 4y ago
They pretty much lost the war against content farms already. I'm not sure the content indexing & crawling model they have is even adapted to the current web.
- beefield 4y ago
  What makes you think they ever waged a war? I never saw any indication.
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    Well, there were algorithm changes like Panda 12 years ago...
    - mc32 4y ago
      12 Years is a long time... fighting "the previous war" doctrine type results. Not to dismiss any non-public changes, but never the less, search results quality has suffered. Maybe search results isn't their funnel to relevant ads but rather they want to serve up ads while skipping the quality results step most people expect.
  - patja 4y ago
    Matt Cutts made it seem like they were serious about it. On reflection, his departure seems like a turning point, albeit perhaps coincidental.
  - realusername 4y ago
    I think they did at the beginning, there's been a lot of algorithm changes before but once they realized they were losing, they just gave up. The incentives are just not aligned anyways, Google Search gets its money from the ad links on the top, they don't really lose anything if the links below are half terrible...
- csdvrx 4y ago
  They will never fight that war again. Just follow the money: google has all the reasons to tolerate SEOs, since these SEO linkfarms are filled to the brim with ads, conveniently sold by google! I'd be surprised if anyone at google would understand that to be a problem, because "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
mmcgaha 4y ago
I was looking for info about an online acquaintance that I used to game with 20+ years ago. His handle is pretty unique but google would not return anything. Bing on the other hand had me finding all of his old post leading to his real name and now I am back in email contact. I get the feeling that google is just filtering out anything over a certain age and below a certain level of popularity.
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  Google heavily favours newness, I am sure of that. It used to be easy to find very old, but relevant results. The content still exists, but even with date filters it’s hard to find now. It’s made supporting very old things (products, code, computers) extremely difficult.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
iggldiggl 4y ago
And some small pages seem to have gone missing entirely – some "humorous" typos that I distinctly remember used to return a small handful of pages now return nothing on Google, even though the page(s) in question still exist(s) and is/are still indexed by Bing.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Bing used to be a joke, but nowadays they actually do a decent job for cases in which Google fails.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Watch them sneak in and steal search. Over the years, Google lost any sort of moral moat that put them above Microsoft. Does anybody think that Microsoft is more intrusive and user-aggressive than Google any more? It's six of one and a half dozen of the other, and if I use Linux or a Mac at home, Microsoft doesn't seem overly interested in me at all aside from trying to sell me Office. Google's probably trying to figure out a way to license my brainwaves.
    - dvngnt_ 4y ago
      yeah. windows is crazy with ads embedded in the OS. they even install tiktok by default
unity1001 4y ago
> It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed thought into the search box and I'd get the answer. Incidentally the first algorithm updates to 'combat spam' came around by then, starting with 'Penguin'. They were supposed to cut the spammy sites from search. All that they did ended up being removing small sites, blogs and ecommerce businesses from search results for the benefit of mega companies at the cost of search quality...
dahdum 4y ago
> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days It feels truly absurd how many queries I need to append "reddit" to get something useful. The web has changed but Google isn't keeping up.
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  Of course, SEO blog spammers are learning to add these terms to their sites.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    The problem is they spam the actual forums themselves. I assume all those posts such as “what did buy (for less than $x) that you find most useful” are spammers so they can reply with their own products. And I am sure they are making posts asking for product/restaurant/etc recommendations and then replying to themselves.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I remember encountering this in LinkedIn groups. I had joined a few (like The Swift Programming Language), and would see questions like "I have this problem <Detailed description of the issue>, how can I solve it?" Since (in at least one case) this was a problem I had easily solved, years before, I would provide a detailed, concise, answer, showing how to deal with it in a few lines of code. My answer would get ignored. Instead all these replies would show up, saying things like "I added the <XXX Library>, and it solved the problem!". These would get voted up, and the original poster would actually engage them. After seeing a few of these, I realized that LI groups are dumpster fires, and quit them all.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    As long as "site:" still works (limiting your search scope to a particular domain), then the SEO'ers can pound sand. Pretty much 100% of my google searches these days are scoped to a particular domain. This is because my search needs in 202x are very different than in 200x. Back then, I wanted to find the right web site for X. Today, I know the best web sites for X, and I always want to search for that exact X on that exact site. I am no longer interested in discovering new web sites. The established ones are known to be good, and any new, unknown one is almost 99.9999% likely to be SEO spam. For example, I'm not interested in Dropshipper 45512's automatically generated web store where he gets a commission to ship you Alibaba goods, and that's really all you get in the long tail of shopping searches. Search engines need to pivot away from helping people find new web sites (since they are mostly crap) and instead help to curate the best content from existing known-good ones. Yes, it sucks if your new site is legitimitely one of the 0.0001% that are human-made and awesome. Sorry, but I'm not going to find you through search. Don't worry, I'll find you through word of mouth if you are actually high quality.
Loughla 4y ago
Every google search has to have either "+reddit" or "+stackoverflow" depending on what I'm trying to accomplish. And EVERY search for products needs to say "-pinterest".
- voytec 4y ago
  Another example: music videos may require "-reaction -reacting". But it's the same or worse with DuckDuckGo.
  - csours 4y ago
    The information landscape is hostile, your attention is valuable, so there is motivation to hijack it.
    - gumby 4y ago
      Sadly there’s disproportionate value. Your attention is only worth a few cents, the criminals' (SEOers, scammer ps etc) cost is miniscule per user, but the cost to each user of the misinformation and wasted time is larger. Like breaking a shop window to steal something small and easily transported/resold.
      - csours 4y ago
        I think this is why there is value in moderated spaces like reddit [complex feelings here], the moderators and team/tribe mentality ensure that there is informational value to at least that group [more complex feelings here].
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    For music, also adding -extended feels necessary. Along with -60fps for anything anime related.
    - OmarAssadi 4y ago
      Oh my GOD. The 60 FPS 4K memescaling shouldn't drive me as insane as it does, but jesus christ, the amount of times I have wanted to show someone some opening, gone on YouTube, and literally everything is some tweened upscale. I usually give up and end up having to go and StackOverflow the ffmpeg filters I'll never remember for burning in subs just to clip it myself -- `ffmpeg -i episode.mkv -vf "subtitles='episode.mkv':si=0" -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 18 -c:a aac_at -b:a 320k -ss start_duration -t opening_duration output.mp4` [1]. I think it bothers me even more given anime is rarely even natively fully 1080P 29.97/30 FPS, let alone 4K 60. I try my best to live and let live, but it's my biggest pet peeve. It drives me nuts that basically all TV manufacturers do this too now by default -- everything I've purchased over the past ~10-12 years or so comes preset with """"smooth""" motion and a billion other video "correction" modes enabled, despite it just artifacting or making everything look straight up worse [2]. I'm genuinely really curious, does anyone here on HN use and enjoy those modes? Maybe there is something I'm missing. Or maybe I'm just hyper-sensitive to that kind of thing. It made me laugh when I moved back to the US after school in Russia; family had gotten a new TV and within like seconds of being home and trying to watch a movie together, I'm immediately sitting there fiddling with the sittings, meanwhile no one else apparently even noticed the frame interpolation was on in the first place. Anyway, sorry for the rant ;-) ‎ [1]: OK, this time it was from memory, so it might not quite be right. But maybe I've finally memorized the correct incantation? [2]: good video on the topic - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1nUCyC8hGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1nUCyC8hGA>
grishka 4y ago
It's gotten so bad that there's now an ad blocker filter list that removes the StackOverflow clones from search results.
- flangola7 4y ago
  Do you have a handy link?
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  I’d love a list of URLs for low quality stuff like GeeksforGeeks so I can block them all.
- Smilliam 4y ago
  I'm not OP, but for those of you who saw this comment and were hoping for a link, the one that I use is https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
  - ben174 4y ago
    Any other external filter lists that are useful?
    - Smilliam 4y ago
      Not software dev specific, but I also use Peter Lowe's ads and trackers blocklist (https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php). Note that this one can be a bit aggressive (blocks url shorteners and clickthroughs on google ads even if they are the correct place you want to visit because, well, tracking), but it is well maintained and generally a fantastic addition to the default ublock origin lists imo
      - ben174 4y ago
        Is this a hosts file only? It doesn't seem to want to import into uBlock.
pessimizer 4y ago
Altavista was better. It would certainly return more than the 5 SEO stained results pages that current search engines are repeating over and over again, pretending that they're bigger than they are.
- egberts1 4y ago
  Too bad that Yahoo! absorbed Altavista then made that site defunct since 2013.
- acdha 4y ago
  Google was better, too. This is because someone decided it was better to sell ads than give people the most relevant results. It’s not like it’s an unsolved problem in computer science to block persistent spam / scraper / cloaking domains — someone at Google told the people who used to do that to stop.
Foobar8568 4y ago
Unfortunately reddit is spammed with promoters
- piva00 4y ago
  Still much easier to parse through reddit's comments and try to identify astroturfing than going through Google's results figuring out what's not SEO-spam or sponsored reviews... It takes me much less effort to do the former than the latter.
  - itchyouch 4y ago
    For products, I'll find suggestions from reddit, signal it with the conversational quality, then corroborate it against other places that reviews may exists like forums, youtube, facebook, instagram, etc. Usually, a great product will have enough activity surrounding it that it's difficult to fake with bots. Especially, Instagram profiles with <1000 followers + non-seo-optimized stories/posts raving about something signals that the the <joy-from-product> is organic rather than manufactured. I think the strongest signal for legitimate IG accounts is the ephemeral nature of the 24-hour IG stories. I suppose someone enterprising could auto-build hundreds of personas that post stories daily, but a random profile with stories posting activism, their morning latte art, a selfie with some friends seems doesn't fit in the ROI of a scalable marketing strategy across a ton of accounts. Maybe I could be wrong?
- SamBam 4y ago
  I think this is truer and truer. Part of the issue is our built-in bias towards thinking of other Reddit users (and HN and whoever) as people just like ourselves. That means we give undue weight to their recommendations. I definitely find myself being more swayed by a single user's recommendation with maybe a few dozen upvotes, over SEO-gamed websites and Amazon reviews. But in reality, that's a ludicrous assumption, since advertisers knows it too, and it only takes 5-10 fake accounts to create that kind of pretend consensus. In many ways, Reddit is far easier to spam.
eino 4y ago
I used DDG which was slightly better; but for a couple of months, I've switched to kagi, and it's been a revelation. It's much better than both, it's google from 15 years ago. Drawback is that unlimited searches needs a subscription (10$/months). But I personally think it worth for the time and focus gains.
- neodymiumphish 4y ago
  Have you done a side by side against Neeva? I've been on Neeva for long enough that it's not worth testing against competitors; it's very good, but I'm always interested in how well others compare.
  - eino 4y ago
    I haven’t but I will a try! In the last years the only that I found equivalent was cliqz, that unfortunately closed 2 or 3 years ago and which I still regret.
MrFoof 4y ago
Which, hilariously, is what got people to use Google in the first place. What made Google take off was not only was it fast, but you also got what you were looking for in the first page of results — if not the top of the first page. No more carefully crafting queries to try to filter out the chaff. What you wanted, fast, and easy enough that someone not versed in how to carefully structure queries could be immediately successful. - - If some search engine or other tool can get us back to that point, that’s not only what will eat Google’s lunch, but devour it - and quickly.
whoisthisguy 4y ago
Kagi is the way to go. Search results are more useful, and I'm rarely faced with spam sites.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
at this point Google is more of a brochure than a search engine "here are some ads that match your search query"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
klyrs 4y ago
> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches... The perversity is that site-local searching used to be better when it existed, but people (users and web devs both) came to rely on google. It's a sorry state that google remains the primary interface to sites that should know their data better them google...
stasge 4y ago
Personalization could be a reason of getting bad results. I'm always using https://google.com/ncr https://google.com/ncr in private mode and I don't think I've noticed any degradation in search quality so far.

realusername 4y ago

They pretty much lost the war against content farms already. I'm not sure the content indexing & crawling model they have is even adapted to the current web.

beefield 4y ago
What makes you think they ever waged a war? I never saw any indication.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Well, there were algorithm changes like Panda 12 years ago...
  - mc32 4y ago
    12 Years is a long time... fighting "the previous war" doctrine type results. Not to dismiss any non-public changes, but never the less, search results quality has suffered. Maybe search results isn't their funnel to relevant ads but rather they want to serve up ads while skipping the quality results step most people expect.
- patja 4y ago
  Matt Cutts made it seem like they were serious about it. On reflection, his departure seems like a turning point, albeit perhaps coincidental.
- realusername 4y ago
  I think they did at the beginning, there's been a lot of algorithm changes before but once they realized they were losing, they just gave up. The incentives are just not aligned anyways, Google Search gets its money from the ad links on the top, they don't really lose anything if the links below are half terrible...
csdvrx 4y ago
They will never fight that war again. Just follow the money: google has all the reasons to tolerate SEOs, since these SEO linkfarms are filled to the brim with ads, conveniently sold by google! I'd be surprised if anyone at google would understand that to be a problem, because "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

mmcgaha 4y ago

I was looking for info about an online acquaintance that I used to game with 20+ years ago. His handle is pretty unique but google would not return anything. Bing on the other hand had me finding all of his old post leading to his real name and now I am back in email contact. I get the feeling that google is just filtering out anything over a certain age and below a certain level of popularity.

BizarreByte 4y ago
Google heavily favours newness, I am sure of that. It used to be easy to find very old, but relevant results. The content still exists, but even with date filters it’s hard to find now. It’s made supporting very old things (products, code, computers) extremely difficult.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

iggldiggl 4y ago

And some small pages seem to have gone missing entirely – some "humorous" typos that I distinctly remember used to return a small handful of pages now return nothing on Google, even though the page(s) in question still exist(s) and is/are still indexed by Bing.

solarkraft 4y ago
Bing used to be a joke, but nowadays they actually do a decent job for cases in which Google fails.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Watch them sneak in and steal search. Over the years, Google lost any sort of moral moat that put them above Microsoft. Does anybody think that Microsoft is more intrusive and user-aggressive than Google any more? It's six of one and a half dozen of the other, and if I use Linux or a Mac at home, Microsoft doesn't seem overly interested in me at all aside from trying to sell me Office. Google's probably trying to figure out a way to license my brainwaves.
  - dvngnt_ 4y ago
    yeah. windows is crazy with ads embedded in the OS. they even install tiktok by default

unity1001 4y ago

> It's a sad decline from 10+ years ago when I'd type a half-formed thought into the search box and I'd get the answer. Incidentally the first algorithm updates to 'combat spam' came around by then, starting with 'Penguin'. They were supposed to cut the spammy sites from search. All that they did ended up being removing small sites, blogs and ecommerce businesses from search results for the benefit of mega companies at the cost of search quality...

dahdum 4y ago

> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days It feels truly absurd how many queries I need to append "reddit" to get something useful. The web has changed but Google isn't keeping up.

i_am_proteus 4y ago
Of course, SEO blog spammers are learning to add these terms to their sites.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  The problem is they spam the actual forums themselves. I assume all those posts such as “what did buy (for less than $x) that you find most useful” are spammers so they can reply with their own products. And I am sure they are making posts asking for product/restaurant/etc recommendations and then replying to themselves.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I remember encountering this in LinkedIn groups. I had joined a few (like The Swift Programming Language), and would see questions like "I have this problem <Detailed description of the issue>, how can I solve it?" Since (in at least one case) this was a problem I had easily solved, years before, I would provide a detailed, concise, answer, showing how to deal with it in a few lines of code. My answer would get ignored. Instead all these replies would show up, saying things like "I added the <XXX Library>, and it solved the problem!". These would get voted up, and the original poster would actually engage them. After seeing a few of these, I realized that LI groups are dumpster fires, and quit them all.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  As long as "site:" still works (limiting your search scope to a particular domain), then the SEO'ers can pound sand. Pretty much 100% of my google searches these days are scoped to a particular domain. This is because my search needs in 202x are very different than in 200x. Back then, I wanted to find the right web site for X. Today, I know the best web sites for X, and I always want to search for that exact X on that exact site. I am no longer interested in discovering new web sites. The established ones are known to be good, and any new, unknown one is almost 99.9999% likely to be SEO spam. For example, I'm not interested in Dropshipper 45512's automatically generated web store where he gets a commission to ship you Alibaba goods, and that's really all you get in the long tail of shopping searches. Search engines need to pivot away from helping people find new web sites (since they are mostly crap) and instead help to curate the best content from existing known-good ones. Yes, it sucks if your new site is legitimitely one of the 0.0001% that are human-made and awesome. Sorry, but I'm not going to find you through search. Don't worry, I'll find you through word of mouth if you are actually high quality.

Loughla 4y ago

Every google search has to have either "+reddit" or "+stackoverflow" depending on what I'm trying to accomplish. And EVERY search for products needs to say "-pinterest".

voytec 4y ago
Another example: music videos may require "-reaction -reacting". But it's the same or worse with DuckDuckGo.
- csours 4y ago
  The information landscape is hostile, your attention is valuable, so there is motivation to hijack it.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Sadly there’s disproportionate value. Your attention is only worth a few cents, the criminals' (SEOers, scammer ps etc) cost is miniscule per user, but the cost to each user of the misinformation and wasted time is larger. Like breaking a shop window to steal something small and easily transported/resold.
    - csours 4y ago
      I think this is why there is value in moderated spaces like reddit [complex feelings here], the moderators and team/tribe mentality ensure that there is informational value to at least that group [more complex feelings here].
- Akronymus 4y ago
  For music, also adding -extended feels necessary. Along with -60fps for anything anime related.
  - OmarAssadi 4y ago
    Oh my GOD. The 60 FPS 4K memescaling shouldn't drive me as insane as it does, but jesus christ, the amount of times I have wanted to show someone some opening, gone on YouTube, and literally everything is some tweened upscale. I usually give up and end up having to go and StackOverflow the ffmpeg filters I'll never remember for burning in subs just to clip it myself -- `ffmpeg -i episode.mkv -vf "subtitles='episode.mkv':si=0" -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 18 -c:a aac_at -b:a 320k -ss start_duration -t opening_duration output.mp4` [1]. I think it bothers me even more given anime is rarely even natively fully 1080P 29.97/30 FPS, let alone 4K 60. I try my best to live and let live, but it's my biggest pet peeve. It drives me nuts that basically all TV manufacturers do this too now by default -- everything I've purchased over the past ~10-12 years or so comes preset with """"smooth""" motion and a billion other video "correction" modes enabled, despite it just artifacting or making everything look straight up worse [2]. I'm genuinely really curious, does anyone here on HN use and enjoy those modes? Maybe there is something I'm missing. Or maybe I'm just hyper-sensitive to that kind of thing. It made me laugh when I moved back to the US after school in Russia; family had gotten a new TV and within like seconds of being home and trying to watch a movie together, I'm immediately sitting there fiddling with the sittings, meanwhile no one else apparently even noticed the frame interpolation was on in the first place. Anyway, sorry for the rant ;-) ‎ [1]: OK, this time it was from memory, so it might not quite be right. But maybe I've finally memorized the correct incantation? [2]: good video on the topic - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1nUCyC8hGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1nUCyC8hGA>

grishka 4y ago

It's gotten so bad that there's now an ad blocker filter list that removes the StackOverflow clones from search results.

flangola7 4y ago
Do you have a handy link?
BizarreByte 4y ago
I’d love a list of URLs for low quality stuff like GeeksforGeeks so I can block them all.
Smilliam 4y ago
I'm not OP, but for those of you who saw this comment and were hoping for a link, the one that I use is https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
- ben174 4y ago
  Any other external filter lists that are useful?
  - Smilliam 4y ago
    Not software dev specific, but I also use Peter Lowe's ads and trackers blocklist (https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php). Note that this one can be a bit aggressive (blocks url shorteners and clickthroughs on google ads even if they are the correct place you want to visit because, well, tracking), but it is well maintained and generally a fantastic addition to the default ublock origin lists imo
    - ben174 4y ago
      Is this a hosts file only? It doesn't seem to want to import into uBlock.

pessimizer 4y ago

Altavista was better. It would certainly return more than the 5 SEO stained results pages that current search engines are repeating over and over again, pretending that they're bigger than they are.

egberts1 4y ago
Too bad that Yahoo! absorbed Altavista then made that site defunct since 2013.
acdha 4y ago
Google was better, too. This is because someone decided it was better to sell ads than give people the most relevant results. It’s not like it’s an unsolved problem in computer science to block persistent spam / scraper / cloaking domains — someone at Google told the people who used to do that to stop.

Foobar8568 4y ago

Unfortunately reddit is spammed with promoters

piva00 4y ago
Still much easier to parse through reddit's comments and try to identify astroturfing than going through Google's results figuring out what's not SEO-spam or sponsored reviews... It takes me much less effort to do the former than the latter.
- itchyouch 4y ago
  For products, I'll find suggestions from reddit, signal it with the conversational quality, then corroborate it against other places that reviews may exists like forums, youtube, facebook, instagram, etc. Usually, a great product will have enough activity surrounding it that it's difficult to fake with bots. Especially, Instagram profiles with <1000 followers + non-seo-optimized stories/posts raving about something signals that the the <joy-from-product> is organic rather than manufactured. I think the strongest signal for legitimate IG accounts is the ephemeral nature of the 24-hour IG stories. I suppose someone enterprising could auto-build hundreds of personas that post stories daily, but a random profile with stories posting activism, their morning latte art, a selfie with some friends seems doesn't fit in the ROI of a scalable marketing strategy across a ton of accounts. Maybe I could be wrong?
SamBam 4y ago
I think this is truer and truer. Part of the issue is our built-in bias towards thinking of other Reddit users (and HN and whoever) as people just like ourselves. That means we give undue weight to their recommendations. I definitely find myself being more swayed by a single user's recommendation with maybe a few dozen upvotes, over SEO-gamed websites and Amazon reviews. But in reality, that's a ludicrous assumption, since advertisers knows it too, and it only takes 5-10 fake accounts to create that kind of pretend consensus. In many ways, Reddit is far easier to spam.

eino 4y ago

I used DDG which was slightly better; but for a couple of months, I've switched to kagi, and it's been a revelation. It's much better than both, it's google from 15 years ago. Drawback is that unlimited searches needs a subscription (10$/months). But I personally think it worth for the time and focus gains.

neodymiumphish 4y ago
Have you done a side by side against Neeva? I've been on Neeva for long enough that it's not worth testing against competitors; it's very good, but I'm always interested in how well others compare.
- eino 4y ago
  I haven’t but I will a try! In the last years the only that I found equivalent was cliqz, that unfortunately closed 2 or 3 years ago and which I still regret.

MrFoof 4y ago

Which, hilariously, is what got people to use Google in the first place. What made Google take off was not only was it fast, but you also got what you were looking for in the first page of results — if not the top of the first page. No more carefully crafting queries to try to filter out the chaff. What you wanted, fast, and easy enough that someone not versed in how to carefully structure queries could be immediately successful. - - If some search engine or other tool can get us back to that point, that’s not only what will eat Google’s lunch, but devour it - and quickly.

whoisthisguy 4y ago

Kagi is the way to go. Search results are more useful, and I'm rarely faced with spam sites.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

at this point Google is more of a brochure than a search engine "here are some ads that match your search query"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

klyrs 4y ago

> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches... The perversity is that site-local searching used to be better when it existed, but people (users and web devs both) came to rely on google. It's a sorry state that google remains the primary interface to sites that should know their data better them google...

stasge 4y ago

Personalization could be a reason of getting bad results. I'm always using https://google.com/ncr https://google.com/ncr in private mode and I don't think I've noticed any degradation in search quality so far.