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> Search [...] is practically unusable today I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find wh

> Search [...] is practically unusable today I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find what I need instantly in 90% of cases, and when I don't, other engines don't really do better. Granted, I use ublock, but even with that turned off I'm not bothered by the ads. Can you provide examples of a query which gives unusable results, but Bing (or whatever) works?

adoxyz 4y ago
From personal experience, Google search on a desktop w/ Adblock is great. And especially when you know what you're searching for, the experience is usually great. On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam. But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.
- eptcyka 4y ago
  ublock won't help with SEO spam - it doesn't filter out native search results, just the ads. So it isn't really SEO spam, it's adword spam.
  - lb4r 4y ago
    It can filter out native search results as well, as long as you tell it what to filter out. It's of course a bit limited since you have to know beforehand what you don't want to see, but it works great if you're looking to, for example, filter out specific websites.
    - eptcyka 4y ago
      It can, but I don't know of any default filters that would do such a thing, and that is besides the point. It certainly doesn't have enough time to classify a particular entry as SEO spam without doing RPC to an external service, IMO.
  - martinald 4y ago
    This is a really good point and something I didn't quite think through. Problem is now you get ~6 ad links for many queries (given some ads have 'secondary links' in them). This now means even on a 4k monitor I only see 3 actual SEO results. It's much worse on mobile.
- jmondi 4y ago
  I'm old enough to remember when the first 5-7 results were the ONLY ones you actually wanted to click on.
  - prepend 4y ago
    Same. I remember actually using “I’m feeling lucky” but now would only do that for some ironic chuckles.
jmondi 4y ago
I don't think you will ever get a 1:1 answer of a query that "works" in DDG/Bing but not Google, search is too curated. From my experience, when I am searching for what seems like a rare - but not completely unheard of errors happening in my code, on my sprinkler system, anything, it seems like the Google results are just crap compared to what the same query 5 years ago would have yielded. I don't know what it is, if their algorithm is getting worse, or there is just too much shit on the internet to accurately index. From my experience, Google Search hasn't even just stagnated, it has gotten consistently and steadily worse for at least the last half decade. Same thing happened to my Google Home, literally got dumber as the days went on, queries that it could answer yesterday, would just stop working the next day. I threw that thing in the garbage.
andromeduck 4y ago
I think the comkon case is if you're looking for anything niche/technical, it'll often just reinterpret your query as if it were a typo even if you quote it. That and searching for product reviews usually just returns SEO'ed trash like 10 10 lists or best vacuum cleaner 2020 that's just a mishmash of press releases as opposed to actul experience or useful information.
- thayne 4y ago
  > That and searching for product reviews usually just returns SEO'ed trash I run into this for a lot of things beyond just product reviews, such as recipes or "what is X?" etc. Granted I don't think that is entirely Google's fault.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In general, it's probably true that the amount (and sophistication) of spam and spammish content has tended to overwhelm whatever technology improvements in search there have been.
    - abakker 4y ago
      It's just that to the HN audience, the spam sure seems unsophisticated. I can imagine being able to filter out most blogspam just by looking at the CSS. like, every blog spam review and restaurant site is so obviously bad it hurts. also, "bestmitersaw.com" or other similar single product review/spam sites filled with affiliate links. Jeez. Kill them all.
- ghaff 4y ago
  How many people and organizations online actually provide real filtered hands-on reviews of things these days? There are exceptions like Wirecutter and sites like Amazon provide some insight assuming you're willing to wade through all the fake reviews, But generally speaking, consumers aren't willing to pay the cost for in-depth reviews. ADDED: There are individuals in some domain niches but you pretty much need to know who they are.
Zanfa 4y ago
Can’t say much about other search engines, but Google has definitely let it slip really bad. For example, organic results being pushed below the fold, with organic-looking paid results taking top spots instead. Another big issue they’ve had for about a year now is in my native language search, the organic results are completely been taken over by Google-translate generated content that actually redirects to random aliexpress items. Their language models seem to prefer Google-translated sites over human generated language for some reason.
johannes1234321 4y ago
For many searches it is quite good. However once you look for very specific narrow results it attempts to outsmart you can be a real annoyance. When it decides to ignore some rare term and correcting your query while that rare term actually is the thing of highest significance. So yeah, for 95% of the searches it is great, but on the 5% it feels like modern advances are in the way.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  If 95% of the Google searches I made were great, I wouldn't have stopped using Google. My experience is more like 10% of the Google searches result in something close to what I'm looking for before the third or fourth page.
dyno12345 4y ago
I find that if I'm looking for a factual topic I just get heavily SEO'ed, heavily ad laden blogspam. The algorithm must be weighting dwell time because if you are looking for recipe for how to cook eggs you'll get articles with 7 pages of ads interspersed with fluff filler copy before any actual recipe. And they probably have no incentive to cut this down because much of those ads might go through google's own ad networks.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The recent yandex leak had dwell time in it, I think. It makes me sad that it means that recipes (a very competitive field) are going to be coming after novels on the top sites.
fidgewidge 4y ago
[flagged]
burnte 4y ago
I agree with you that saying it's unusable is ridiculous but I HAVE noticed a marked decline in results. I still get what I need 98% of the time, but now that 2% has gone from no results to having to figure out how to force Google to search for what I want. I'll search for a phrase and frequently it'll flat out ignore a word I entered, so I'll put it in quotes, and it STILL ignores it. Then I'll result to an entire phrase in quotes and I just get trash results. I feel like advanced search features have been nerfed for some reason.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Search for anything with a mercantile aspect and the first page of results will be all ads and e-commerce sites.
taeric 4y ago
My suspicion is that most of the people that feel it is getting worse either a) hate ads or b) don't realize they do harder searches than what they used to do. I'm fully aligned on hating ads. It is silly how the top results are all sponsored. Curated, I would like. Sponsored? Not so much.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > don't realize they do harder searches than what they used to do. Perhaps, but that's still a good reason to stop using Google, because other search engines do better.
- more_corn 4y ago
  My searches aren’t harder than they used to be. If anything they’re easier because I often know precisely what I’m looking for. I stopped using google because it ignores my search terms and I find that infuriating. I’ll use a lower quality search engine simply for the lack of annoyance. Whenever I open a new chrome profile I’m reminded that I objectively hate google search.

adoxyz 4y ago

From personal experience, Google search on a desktop w/ Adblock is great. And especially when you know what you're searching for, the experience is usually great. On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam. But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.

eptcyka 4y ago
ublock won't help with SEO spam - it doesn't filter out native search results, just the ads. So it isn't really SEO spam, it's adword spam.
- lb4r 4y ago
  It can filter out native search results as well, as long as you tell it what to filter out. It's of course a bit limited since you have to know beforehand what you don't want to see, but it works great if you're looking to, for example, filter out specific websites.
  - eptcyka 4y ago
    It can, but I don't know of any default filters that would do such a thing, and that is besides the point. It certainly doesn't have enough time to classify a particular entry as SEO spam without doing RPC to an external service, IMO.
- martinald 4y ago
  This is a really good point and something I didn't quite think through. Problem is now you get ~6 ad links for many queries (given some ads have 'secondary links' in them). This now means even on a 4k monitor I only see 3 actual SEO results. It's much worse on mobile.
jmondi 4y ago
I'm old enough to remember when the first 5-7 results were the ONLY ones you actually wanted to click on.
- prepend 4y ago
  Same. I remember actually using “I’m feeling lucky” but now would only do that for some ironic chuckles.

jmondi 4y ago

I don't think you will ever get a 1:1 answer of a query that "works" in DDG/Bing but not Google, search is too curated. From my experience, when I am searching for what seems like a rare - but not completely unheard of errors happening in my code, on my sprinkler system, anything, it seems like the Google results are just crap compared to what the same query 5 years ago would have yielded. I don't know what it is, if their algorithm is getting worse, or there is just too much shit on the internet to accurately index. From my experience, Google Search hasn't even just stagnated, it has gotten consistently and steadily worse for at least the last half decade. Same thing happened to my Google Home, literally got dumber as the days went on, queries that it could answer yesterday, would just stop working the next day. I threw that thing in the garbage.

andromeduck 4y ago

I think the comkon case is if you're looking for anything niche/technical, it'll often just reinterpret your query as if it were a typo even if you quote it. That and searching for product reviews usually just returns SEO'ed trash like 10 10 lists or best vacuum cleaner 2020 that's just a mishmash of press releases as opposed to actul experience or useful information.

thayne 4y ago
> That and searching for product reviews usually just returns SEO'ed trash I run into this for a lot of things beyond just product reviews, such as recipes or "what is X?" etc. Granted I don't think that is entirely Google's fault.
- ghaff 4y ago
  In general, it's probably true that the amount (and sophistication) of spam and spammish content has tended to overwhelm whatever technology improvements in search there have been.
  - abakker 4y ago
    It's just that to the HN audience, the spam sure seems unsophisticated. I can imagine being able to filter out most blogspam just by looking at the CSS. like, every blog spam review and restaurant site is so obviously bad it hurts. also, "bestmitersaw.com" or other similar single product review/spam sites filled with affiliate links. Jeez. Kill them all.
ghaff 4y ago
How many people and organizations online actually provide real filtered hands-on reviews of things these days? There are exceptions like Wirecutter and sites like Amazon provide some insight assuming you're willing to wade through all the fake reviews, But generally speaking, consumers aren't willing to pay the cost for in-depth reviews. ADDED: There are individuals in some domain niches but you pretty much need to know who they are.

Zanfa 4y ago

Can’t say much about other search engines, but Google has definitely let it slip really bad. For example, organic results being pushed below the fold, with organic-looking paid results taking top spots instead. Another big issue they’ve had for about a year now is in my native language search, the organic results are completely been taken over by Google-translate generated content that actually redirects to random aliexpress items. Their language models seem to prefer Google-translated sites over human generated language for some reason.

johannes1234321 4y ago

For many searches it is quite good. However once you look for very specific narrow results it attempts to outsmart you can be a real annoyance. When it decides to ignore some rare term and correcting your query while that rare term actually is the thing of highest significance. So yeah, for 95% of the searches it is great, but on the 5% it feels like modern advances are in the way.

JohnFen 4y ago
If 95% of the Google searches I made were great, I wouldn't have stopped using Google. My experience is more like 10% of the Google searches result in something close to what I'm looking for before the third or fourth page.

dyno12345 4y ago

I find that if I'm looking for a factual topic I just get heavily SEO'ed, heavily ad laden blogspam. The algorithm must be weighting dwell time because if you are looking for recipe for how to cook eggs you'll get articles with 7 pages of ads interspersed with fluff filler copy before any actual recipe. And they probably have no incentive to cut this down because much of those ads might go through google's own ad networks.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
The recent yandex leak had dwell time in it, I think. It makes me sad that it means that recipes (a very competitive field) are going to be coming after novels on the top sites.

fidgewidge 4y ago

[flagged]

burnte 4y ago

I agree with you that saying it's unusable is ridiculous but I HAVE noticed a marked decline in results. I still get what I need 98% of the time, but now that 2% has gone from no results to having to figure out how to force Google to search for what I want. I'll search for a phrase and frequently it'll flat out ignore a word I entered, so I'll put it in quotes, and it STILL ignores it. Then I'll result to an entire phrase in quotes and I just get trash results. I feel like advanced search features have been nerfed for some reason.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

Search for anything with a mercantile aspect and the first page of results will be all ads and e-commerce sites.

taeric 4y ago

My suspicion is that most of the people that feel it is getting worse either a) hate ads or b) don't realize they do harder searches than what they used to do. I'm fully aligned on hating ads. It is silly how the top results are all sponsored. Curated, I would like. Sponsored? Not so much.

JohnFen 4y ago
> don't realize they do harder searches than what they used to do. Perhaps, but that's still a good reason to stop using Google, because other search engines do better.
more_corn 4y ago
My searches aren’t harder than they used to be. If anything they’re easier because I often know precisely what I’m looking for. I stopped using google because it ignores my search terms and I find that infuriating. I’ll use a lower quality search engine simply for the lack of annoyance. Whenever I open a new chrome profile I’m reminded that I objectively hate google search.