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Tell HN: Google search is getting worse

• akasakahakada 4y ago
  This is not even new. Ever since Google ditched the old algorithm and turned to semantic algorithm, search result is completely useless. For examlle search for USB, Google will give me result of USA and then ask me back if I need infomation about USB. And it's frequently ditching keywords from the prompt. Sometimes I want to look for specific comments on some product for instance, I try different vocabularies that people might using exactly in the comment. But then all of these returns the same set of results repeated for 20 pages. What is the point of Google search engine? Kind of trash to the point that it is now phenomenal. Last thing is I noticed that image search is not even working recently. The average result is like 100 photos and done. Instead of infinite images in the old days.
  • Apreche 4y ago
    If I search for USB google gives me search results for USB. I think you have a problem.
  • aww_dang 4y ago
    Double quotes are your friend. Not excusing how irrelevant the results have become, but when you anticipate this behavior, use the exact phrase method.
    • akasakahakada 4y ago
      What I can tell is quoting and verbatim is clearly broken. The accuracy is not up to what it was 5 years ago. For example searching for the exact sentence in a news article, you won't find the article.
    • pliny 4y ago
      Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time. It used to be the case that if you search "foo" "bar" it would only return documents that had the words "foo" and "bar". I will frequently search for z foo bar z, get documents that have synonyms of foo and bar (and the synonyms will be highlighted in the snippet), then I will search "foo" "bar" and get the same documents except now it doesn't highlight the synonyms in the snippet. Maybe I am in some awful cohort where this feature is intentionally broken to see if it reduces engagement.
      • marmee 4y ago
        Make sure your quotes are plain quotes and not smart quotes. They used to have a bug with those
      • jmclnx 4y ago
        >Double quotes hasn't worked in a long time Same here, but seems to be 30/70. 30% of the time it works. A while ago I was looking at an odd NetBSD issue and searched using "NetBSD". I got a few results on top, but most of the results on the first page were OpenBSD without any mention of NetBSD.
        • aww_dang 4y ago
          -"OpenBSD" as a negative quoted keyword in these cases. Once you get your query dialed in, prepare to take the Turing test.
    • PKop 4y ago
      They would be, except it ignores them sometimes.
  • imiric 4y ago
    It's not even the change of algorithms. The results are filled with ads and promoted content, SEO spam, related search terms, images, news, and other nonsense. Long gone are the days when the SERP was a plain text list of the most relevant and useful results. Nowadays the page is designed to keep you as long as possible on google.com, or click through an ad. Google Search today is only usable through frontends like SearX, and even then the results are no better than any competitor's.
    • JKCalhoun 4y ago
      When a site I click on immediately puts up a banner/etc. I back out instantly and try the next result. Privacy concerns aside, ha ha, I wish a search site could rank results based on how long the user spends on the site. Most of the crap-sites that seem to get on the front page would disappear instantly from the rankings.
      • sseagull 4y ago
        Using that metric has its own downsides though, depending on the content. If I am searching for some particular piece of information, the best site is the one that has that up front, which means I get in and leave pretty fast. Assuming that a user spending more time on a site is a good thing leads to large amounts of fluff (like with recipes...). But then again, there are some sites where that metric would be helpful.
  • dmvdoug 4y ago
    The repeated results puzzle me, and it happens every single time. Show more results —> literally same results for pages! What’s the explanation for that?
    • akasakahakada 4y ago
      I guess, prompt: Hey ChatGPT! Here is a list of websites. Make a subset of it that looks like they are on the 4th page in the search result!
  • eviks 4y ago
    Searched for USB, not a single USA on the first page of results
    • akasakahakada 4y ago
      It's a mataphor.
      • eviks 4y ago
        It's an "example".
        • vntok 4y ago
          A very bad example.
      • mhh__ 4y ago
        So false?
  • jillesvangurp 4y ago
    This would be fine if they did a good job of semantic search. But they aren't particularly good at that. It's jumping to conclusions, ignoring parts of the query, etc. I find it infuriating when it just ignores part of the query so it can show you some stuff. If I type 3 words, there's a reason for it: they are all important to me. It's gotten very frustrating to use because it tends to drown out good results with generic results from sites doing SEO optimization. There are some tricks around this. E.g. prefix any query related to AWS apis with stackoverflow or include some package names, use some quotes, etc. If you don't do that, you just get a 100 "this is why we believe AWS is so awesome" marketing to filter through. There are ways to mitigate that but they are quite tedious. Bing on the other hand has rolled out gpt 4 based search. I've been using it and it's been pretty amazingly good taking over when Google fails me. Which it does frequently. I particularly like it that I can ask follow up questions. It mixes answering questions and backs up the answers with links. I've been relying on it quite a bit since I got access a week ago. Very annoying that they make you use Edge for that but worth the detour from Firefox when Google is obviously not up to the job. Google is rightly worried about this.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • akasakahakada 4y ago
      But I guess BingGPT only look at the first 3 results and ignore the remainings. Speaking from my experience. It is kind of returning the same 3~4 results when I ask if there exist some paper about ML in the chemistry.
    • rolenthedeep 4y ago
      I remember when we had explicit syntax for what MUST and MUST NOT be in the search results. Now the + and - tokens are just a mild suggestion. Wrapping a word or two in quotes sometimes helps, but more often than not just returns no results. It's funny, in middle school we had a whole unit on constructing search engine queries. It was really quite powerful back then. But I guess it's less profitable for you to actually find what you want without spending 20 minutes sifting through ads
    • 4y ago
• pictur 4y ago
  In the past, it was not easy to influence google results with seo bullshit. But now it seems like it gets easier as you see spam sites in every search result. I don't really care if poor quality sites even show up in results. But the issue of spam sites is a complete disgrace.
  • whatyesaid 4y ago
    Yeah, that's one of the main issues. And it's about to get worse with the newer generative models. I don't think Google ever had a great algorithm and switched to something worse. It's just the SEO actors putting crap out there now, and clickbait. The thing it became worse at was recommending small sites/blogs over big publications/sites. Back in the day, all they had to face was people trying to spread viruses but those results were super obvious. And they weren't even flagged back then, just users were smart enough to instantly spot it from the result.
    • Nextgrid 4y ago
      I don't think it's that hard. It's that spam sites benefit Google so there is no incentive to do anything about it, as the spam websites may contain Google ads/analytics and contribute to Google's bottom line. Spam sites generally try to either show you lots of ads, make you click on affiliate links or outright sell you something. This can all be detected and used as a negative ranking signal, so that all else being equal, a page without advertising/affiliate links/etc would rank higher than a page with those elements. This would allow non-spam content (if it exists and matches the query) to outrank spam content.
      • whatyesaid 4y ago
        Yeah, I think incentives play a part. Similar to YouTube where a cesspool is usually good for them but not for you. Given Bing and DuckDuckGo don't have the same incentives I wonder if their results are any better.
        • Nextgrid 4y ago
• Beaver117 4y ago
  Maybe the internet is just too big now. How can they search over trillions of documents using the same algorithm as before? Probably too expensive. Let alone how are they affording to index and crawl all those pages, which is still only a tiny fraction of the entire internet. Maybe search engines are a dying breed, and we'll have to rely on AI and word of mouth for information soon.
  • tyingq 4y ago
    If I understand it right, it's not exactly the same algorithm. It's Pagerank, with lots more features and weights than in the past, run first. Then quite a lot of bolted on ML passes afterwards, each specialized for something different. One to suss out low quality content, one to identify low quality incoming links, one to boost the effect of brand/authority, and so on...many many more of these. Which apparently worked well for quite a long time, but also dangerous over time because you don't really know why something now ranks well, or doesn't. The best you can do is have human raters score various searches, tweak a bunch of weights/knobs, and try over and over again. Meaning, perhaps it's not that the internet is too big, but that the overall model is too big and disjointed to manage well. Also, if you're on this team, you're competing with the ad side that's continually pushing the organic results down the page, where they matter less. A lot of fussy tuning around "quaint hotel in Paris" seems wasted when the end user is 3 scroll events away from the organic results.
    • PKop 4y ago
      This would be consistent with the internet being "too messy", if not too big generally. There is too much garbage to sift through, and spam trying to game the algorithm.
  • brokenkebaby 4y ago
    I don't think it requires more CPU ops compared to GPT, or bigger bandwidth.
    • Beaver117 4y ago
      GPT was trained on mostly precrawled data and books/code. Go calculate how much bandwidth it takes to crawl the whole internet
• quags 4y ago
  What’s the best alternative? It’s not bing. I have ddg as the default and I many times add !g - intend to end up using wuotes or adding specific sites to get more specific info. Most of the time I am using google to search for error messages in linux as part of debugging as a sysadmin.
  • viraptor 4y ago
    I use Kagi these days and I'm happy to pay for the service. For error messages though GPT is not bad at all.
  • pcdoodle 4y ago
    How about we bust out the CDRW's from 2005 and deploy that version. I could find anything quickly then.
  • arbol 4y ago
    Ddg is getting better. I find myself using !g a lot less than I used to.
    • proto_lambda 4y ago
      In my experience, it's really just getting worse slower than google is. For the kind of queries that google already failed at years ago, DDG has also gotten worse.
• lenkite 4y ago
  I generally have to make extensive use of stuff like "-inurl:DONOTSEARCHHERE". I have a long string that I copy paste into the search location bar.
  • avibhu 4y ago
    Can you share that string please?
  • ditn 4y ago
    You can set a custom filter in uBlock Origin to do this for you - here's an example filtering out Pinterest garbage: google.##.g:has(a[href=".pinterest."]) google.##a[href=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1) https://awesometoast.com/argh-stop-the-pinterest-results/ https://awesometoast.com/argh-stop-the-pinterest-results/
    • Kye 4y ago
      Pinterest is an odd case. It's not quite like usual SEO spam because it's immensely useful for what it is (collecting images and links while planning stuff, art references, etc). But then they use whatever sneaky tactics they use to flood search, so people who aren't Pinterest users think it's garbage. Pinterest probably doesn't need to do this to rank highly since it's actually useful. I don't know what they're thinking.
  • nicbou 4y ago
    uBlocklist does this far more elegantly. It's another one of those tools I forget about until I use a browser without it.
• mrjin 4y ago
  It has been the case for over a decade now. I used to start from page 10 when using other search engines, but Google is not any better now.
• wtk17 4y ago
  I have noticed a decrease in quality results ever since the appearance of SEO. Now that GPT tries to predict what you actually want to search for, and then shows you the websites that have most abused their SEO to beat the algorithm, it is that much harder to find accurate information.
  • winstonprivacy 4y ago
    SEO was a big thing in 2002. I built a nice business using it.
  • cowl 4y ago
    Seo has had it's influence but has really ruined search is the guessing. Google nor respecting the search terms but "trying to be helpful" with symantics that it gets completly wrong. Even when using quotes on full phrases it still tokenises the phrase and doents search for the whole one. The Personalisation is another reason of the declining search relevance. Have to fight the search algorithm everytime to disregard local results or what is popular locally to get to what i really need.
• User23 4y ago
  Google hasn’t been a search engine for about a decade if not longer. It’s been a primitive askjeeves style chatbot. An actual search engine is going to allow crafting queries and so far as I know there’s nothing like that on the market since Altavista or early Google.
• pxtail 4y ago
  It looks like for some reason it really got a lot worse recently - to the point where "regular people" who are far from being proficient with search engines and overall internet usage are starting to notice and complain about it - and it's not a surprise, it's hard to not notice when Google/YT search returns results COMPLETELY unrelated to searched terms.
• xnx 4y ago
  This complaint is frequent here, but nowhere else I know of. Examples given (if the are even given) are vague or different from what other people in the thread get for the same search. The only less interesting meme on hacker news is "I won't use anything by Google because they're going to shut it down".
• VBprogrammer 4y ago
  Slightly tangental, I bought a new laptop last week and I was amazed at how bad windows has gotten. Half of the steps in the setup process appeared to be trying to get me to consent to some kind of tracking or another. Installing Chrome meant dismissing 3 or 4 different scary looking popups.
• Terretta 4y ago
  Please pay for search so ads aren't needed. Kagi is priced for sustainability and has features like lenses (e.g., search your own list of niche community sites) and prioritization preferences (raise arstechnica, lower buzzfeed) deeply helpful for technologist searching. https://kagi.com https://kagi.com Friends don't let friends Google Bing on DuckDuckGo.
  • dvngnt_ 4y ago
    this is worse than Google. I don't want to log into an account to search and have the search terms tied to my account
    • Sjeiti 4y ago
      Kagi doesn't save search terms by default: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/privacy.html Google is a lot better at keeping a profile on you whether you like it or not.
    • Terretta 4y ago
      These are low priority objections. This is a thread about search quality, and neither of your objections lower search quality. Further, neither of the objections makes any difference in the practical world where Google ties the search terms to your account, and you don't have to log in to search, in the same sense that you don't log in to Google to have your search terms tied to you. After using kagi, then you just use kagi, and they don't save your terms. Finally, Google has assertions in the TOS you agreed to about what they can do with your searches. So does Kagi. If you do care about search terms tied to you, you're welcome to read those and understand who has concern or liability for what aspects of your privacy.
      • dvngnt_ 4y ago
        this also means you cannot use incognito mode to quickly search as session details aren't.
  • anotherhue 4y ago
• cpif 4y ago
  I love hating on how bad the modern search experience is -- SEO spam has ruined everything. But I'm a little confused by the exact wording of this post. Google's Bard is in competition with GPT, isn't it? Is it not? Was there a news item I missed about this? I don't use Google often enough to have a strong sense of what might be different and what remains the same, but I've just run a couple of searches and don't notice any drastic interface changes? This is not a complaint -- I just really want to know the new reasons to complain about Google!
  • placatedmayhem 4y ago
    I suspect "GPT" is being used by the poster as a generic term for LLM-based AI. It's becoming a generic trademark, similar to "kleenex" and "google" (search). I've seen it used this way elsewhere.
• theRealMe 4y ago
  This post is low effort virtue signaling for HNers. Don’t get me wrong, I too believe SEO garbage is winning the current search engine arms race. But this post has no new information, not even an interesting take or even a source or proof for the vague complaints. It’s as interesting as a Reddit thread titled “DAE think republicans are the worst?!?”
• sholladay 4y ago
  I have noticed the quality and usefulness of Google results declining for several years. I don’t think it has anything to do with recent AI developments. If anything, this new generation of AI may finally get Google to fix their results or accelerate its death spiral. To me, GPT-4 is a breath of fresh air that directly finds what I am looking for and answers complex questions quite well even if I don’t entirely know how to ask them perfectly. People like to talk about prompt engineering to optimize GPT, but I find I can get good results even with very lazy, sloppy input. On Google, I often have to mess around with quoting certain phrases, using -foo to remove certain types of results, etc. Google is more finicky; you have to adapt to it, because it doesn’t adapt to you. Actually, in many cases Google attempts to adapt to you, but does it poorly, which is worse. Google changes results by location, even if I deny it access to my exact location, and shows barely relevant results from an imprecise location instead of location agnostic results. Google also changes the results based on search history yet it doesn’t really understand how one query is related to the previous query, the way GPT does. There’s also no “New chat” equivalent on Google to start from a fresh slate, short of clearing your browser data. On top of all that, GPT has a paid tier to better align our incentives and avoid ads. Even the free version has no ads for now. It is a better interface by far. The fact that I have to log in to GPT is probably the most annoying thing about it at the moment. It does also hallucinate sometimes and it’s too much of a prude. There are concerns about its power and bias, etc. But it is clearly a step-change in technology. One which seems destined to improve, not get worse, as Google has.
• swayvil 4y ago
  Yes, google is pretty bad. I scroll down a couple pages to find the useful stuff. And even then it often gets weird and stupid. What's the good search engine these days?
• the_third_wave 4y ago
  Good that I'm not using Google or Bing or any of the others directly but through Searx [1] since I have not noticed this downturn in quality. By now the arrangement of tools needed to traverse the 'net in a somewhat sensible manner is starting to resemble a suit of armour. [1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng
• koharski 4y ago
  I worked in SEO for 6 years, from 2014 to 2020. I had a network of about 20 sites doing a little over 1M monthly visitors. During this time I religiously tracked search traffic and page rankings with a cumulative volume of about 150M. IMO, the biggest contributor to the decline in site quality is both SEO spam and the tools that google implemented to combat SEO spam. When I first started the low hanging fruit was these so-called long tail keywords. long, low traffic search terms that represent a specific question within a broader topic. "how to invert a binary tree with recursion in python" would be a long-tail of "how to invert a binary tree". A fairly small blog could rank for these lower-volume keywords without much work or investment. during this time, a low quality spam blog would have a large collection of barely-releated articles targeting very specific searches. Their site structure would be something like: computerlinuxhow2guide.net: - how to invert a binary tree in python - how to quit vim on arch linux - how to make an open world free-to-play video game in fortran - how to install docker on ubuntu 18.04 - how to build a flappy bird clone in react native for samsung phones Webmasters looking to build a more sustainable business would snipe a few longtails when possible, but their overall content would be topical and more cohesive. datastructureslut.com: - queues - build a queue using an array - build a queue using a linked list - binary trees - when to use a binary tree - how to invert a binary tree etc.. Google started to pages from sites with a lot of topical relevancy. Covering all the most popular search terms and interlinking these pages would give you a big boost. Affiliate bloggers responded by creating sites like "fishtankexpert.com" and "lawnmowerguru.com". There are a LOT of these sites. Case in point: the examples above are just the first two things I thought of for $product $authority. and they both exist. It became more common for larger sites to incorporate longtails into existing articles. Instead of writing a separate article, "how to invert a binary tree in python" could just be a subheading in a larger article. Tools like surferSEO became popular, before long it was common to see 10,000 word articles that covered thousands of search terms. 6 years ago, it'd be pretty common to find a forum about fishkeeping or a personal blog about landscaping on the first page of the search results for these kinds of keywords. But even then a lot of these sites would be abandoned or out of date. That made them an easy target for new webmasters to outrank, even with a limited budget. The last major factor is profitability. With top 10 style articles, broad searches such as "best fish tanks" would bring in less sophisticated users. We'd often see purchases come in immediately after clicking on an ad. Most sales were one of the top 3 items on our list. Most visitors would skim the headlines, or read the top 1/3rd of the article. specific Terms like "55 gallon saltwater fishtank" would bring in users who spent more time on your site, were more likely to read multiple articles, and more likely to return to our site at a later date. Overall, longtail traffic was more likely to make a purchase, and they would spend more money. Those sales often came in a day or two later, while broad traffic tended to purchase immediately. Google never seemed to like longtail traffic. Not only because their pagerank algorithm was easier to manipulate, but also because they were less profitable for ad sales. When customers could bid on highly targeted search terms that would reduce the number of people bidding on terms with low commercial value. In fact, if you set up an adwords campaign today you won't even be able to see traffic stats for these terms. They are obfuscated until you meet a certain spending threshold. If you do optimize your bidding to avoid irrelevant searches, you'll get big warnings on your dashboard about "errors" they can "fix" for you so you don't "miss out" on all this "great traffic". Since niche specific forums or blogs were basically dead, and these terms were almost entirely dominated by SEO spam, and larger "trusted" sites had started covering longtails in their broad content, google started to group topics and redirect searches to larger, more popular results. The upside is that spam articles like "how to change the tire on a 1994 corolla" wouldn't easily outrank an article that has more general information about tire changing. There will be many popular articles targeting "how to change a tire", and "1994 corolla" is probably not mentioned on any of them. So google will assume that the uncommon portion is irrelevant. When you have an error code, this strategy falls apart. The most common keywords in that search will be used in many different errors, while the portion specific to your error may only have a few results. While there is still a lot of spam, these are not the low effort traffic grabs from a few years ago. These are sites that have invested heavily in content, back-links, and behavioral optimization. they'll be acceptable to a good chunk of the people that visit, and their advertisers will be more closely aligned with the results. who needs search results anyway. If your question can't be answered by an advertiser or the knowledge graph (https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/features/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/features/) then it's probably not worth knowing.
• pwython 4y ago
  I haven't been past page 1 of Google in the past decade. For those paying for search engines (eg. Kagi), do you have examples of what you're searching for that you can't immediately find on Google?
• tzs 4y ago
  The thing I've really noticed is way worse lately is the "People also ask" section. I'll Google for something and see the results are not very good, but I'll see in "People also ask" a question that is asking about what I'm looking for, in more detail and better expressed than what I asked. It used to be that clicking that would almost always reveal what I was looking for. Now it usually just gives me a result along the lines of all the bad results to my own search.