7 ms·

Google Search is in decline for the users who know how the internet works. For my mother, the internet is still Google (and would remain like that no matter wha

by danwee 3y ago

Google Search is in decline for the users who know how the internet works. For my mother, the internet is still Google (and would remain like that no matter what). For me, for some friends of mine, and for many of my colleagues who know more or less how things work on the web, Google Search is just in free fall: we use it as last resort, but as other search engines (or other tools, like ChatGPT) improve over time, Google Search would just disappear from our bookmarks. I know that many of you would say that it doesn't really matter what "hackers" think about Google Search, that all that matters is that the majority of the non-tech-savvy users still think Internet == Google. Well, let's talk again in 5 years.

okdood64 3y ago
I'm pretty sure you could find doom & gloom talk about Google on HN 5 years ago.
- pil0u 3y ago
  Only 7 years ago, the world was astonished with the release of AlphaGo. This was an algorithm dedicated to one very specific task of winning a game. The most recent game being played is language, a game that Google has played alone, until now. Doom & gloom talk about Google 5 years ago was probably unjustified and rightfully dismissed. Today, I'm not so sure about that.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  That’s because it’s been progressively getting worse for years. For example, when they launched Google+ they stopped supporting the + operator in favour of “quotes” and people complained about that. Of course now the “quotes” don’t work either. Google used to be amazing. If you remembered a set of words that were on a page, you could enter those words and it would find matching pages. It’s been broken for years and keeps getting more broken.
  - okdood64 3y ago
    Broken? https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may+have+been+less+attractive+to+candidates+heavily+focused+on+the+job+title%22&oq=%22may+have+been+less+attractive+to+candidates+heavily+focused+on+the+job+title https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may+have+been+less+attrac... I just took a random snippet from Gergely's blog and using quotes I found it. Look there's many issues with Google Search in 2023, but these nitpicks that aren't neccesarily true aren't productive to the conversation.
    - lazypenguin 3y ago
      Yes it's broken, try searching 'python abs "Return the absolute value of a number"'. That string is directly lifted from the Python docs for the `abs` function. The official Python documentation does not appear for me until the 3rd page and the "featured snippet" is from some random website called flexiple.com
      - rafark 3y ago
        It’s not broken. I use the exact match operator “” all the time and it works pretty much every time. Selecting verbatim works even better. https://i.ibb.co/D8VfKxc/75-FC1-FC6-DFD7-4-E2-A-A717-DBD84630-ECD7.jpg https://i.ibb.co/D8VfKxc/75-FC1-FC6-DFD7-4-E2-A-A717-DBD8463...
        lazypenguin 3y ago
        I didn’t search “python docs” I searched “python abs”
        rafark 3y ago
        Well that’s the problem then. You could say your problem has more to do with the relevancy of the results than the exact match operator (I personally don’t mind in this case since for the few times I’ve had to write python I’ve found the official docs not as useful as I’d expect). As I said, I use that operator all the time and it works. I’d be the first to complain when it doesn’t. For instance, the - operator stopped working in YouTube a while ago, unfortunately.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  it's been declining for longer than 5 years, especially since they've removed discussion result filtering
- _ea1k 3y ago
  It reminds me of when people would talk doom for IE based upon some tiny uptick in Firefox users and the relatively stagnation of IE as a browser. They were obviously wrong. Then Chrome happened. If Google doesn't change some fundamental things, they'll be the next one to fall for similar reasons. I'd be less concerned for them if I didn't see signs of decline with Android as well. It is a key component for them to control.
  - matthewbauer 3y ago
    That reminds me of that quote about bankruptcy from The Sun Also Rises: > “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. > “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” It felt like that’s how IE lost its dominance.
  - genezeta 3y ago
    In 2004 IE had 94% share of the browser market. There were "tiny upticks" but, going slowly and steadily, in August 2008 Firefox had gained about 30-33% and IE was down to about 60%. And then (September 2008) Chrome happened.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      In hindsight Chrome was worse for the internet than IE ever was. A spyware and ads company fooling devs and users alike.
      - account42 3y ago
        Well a lot of those devs seem to like the spying as long as they themselves have access to (some of) the data.
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    Firefox did most of the early damage to IE all it's own. Taking IE down from an insane 90+% marketshare position and steadily eating up 30% marketshare by the time Chrome even really showed up. And it didn't even have to stealth install itself with every adobe flash update to do it. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2009 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...
mjburgess 3y ago
I certainly start with google far less -- I now, very often, stray little from my bookmarks bar. The first of which is "New Chat" (ChatGPT) I needed some somewhat obscure API information recently, and ChatGPT had it -- a testament to how much ChatGPT really is just a compression of "everything ever digitised"
- devjab 3y ago
  Does ChatGPT “have it”? I thought it made stuff up and that the magic it does is being very good at making the stuff up. We’ve had it come up with solutions using entirely made up functions. They had names that sounded like something Microsoft would’ve put into .Net, but they were entirely made up. As in, they had never existed in any version of .Net ever. So as much as I like it, I’m treating it with more caution than google results. Honestly though, most of the time it’s frankly faster to just read the damn manual and figure out things for yourself. I don’t say that as some sort of anti-prompt-programming purist, but wading through GPT responses is as about as hopeless as wading through the gazillion medium, dev.to, stack overflow and whatever else people post their useless stuff on. 10 years ago if I needed to do some obscure Sharepoint programming (waaaaaay out of my field) I could realistically make something work with the help of Google, today the same thing is frankly completely impossible.
  - esperent 3y ago
    > Does ChatGPT “have it”? I thought it made stuff up and that the magic it does is being very good at making the stuff up ChatGPT is just a frontend UI and refers to two different models (and different tunings of these models over time I guess). GPT3.5 is kind of useful but it makes up stuff just enough that you can't really trust it and spend so much time verifying it's hard to say whether you saved time vs the old way. But it still produces mostly not made up stuff. GPT-4, still not perfect, is a game changer though. It's what people generally mean when they talk about ChatGPT. There's far far less hallucination going on (not zero though). There's several ways to access it: phind, bing, ChatGPT. But I still give ChatGPT is the best.
  - lacy_tinpot 3y ago
glenrivard 3y ago
[dead]
jeffbee 3y ago
I think it's actually a "u"-shaped curve. For people with no idea, Google works great. For people with vague and mostly inaccurate knowledge of how to index and search the web, it appears to suck. For people who actually know, it once again seems good.
- nix0n 3y ago
  > For people who actually know, it once again seems good. If the way to make it work is to use "site:", to me that doesn't count as "searching the web" anymore.
evouga 3y ago
There was a magic period of time lasting about a decade when internet search Just Worked. If it was on the public web Google would find it. Search worked so well I took it for granted. Today I avoid Google search at all costs, and use it mainly to find Wikipedia pages or to search Reddit. The Googlers blame SEO and there is some truth to that; but Google has on retainer a huge stable of the world’s best-paid engineers, and still couldn’t be bothered to invest in their flagship service.
- nvarsj 3y ago
  The flagship service is ads not search.
  - MarcellusDrum 3y ago
    Well good luck showing people ads when people start using ChatGPT for all their internet searches.
    - ptmcc 3y ago
      It'll be so easy to inject ads into things like ChatGPT, and it'll even look "natural" to most readers.
    - mattlondon 3y ago
      It would be trivial to insert banner ads, or even "native ads" in the response. LLMs are probably even better suited for monetisation since they have a better understanding of what people want, so a better ad can be shown that is more likely to be clicked. Do you think people were losing their shit when ChatGPT went into bing simply because web search gets better/easier? No - people were losing their shit because it meant the ads in search are going to be turbo-charged and so that is why the share prices are surging (GOOG up 40% over last 6 months): more ad revenue from "better" ads shown to users.
    - survirtual 3y ago
      People still need products to solve problems. When you ask an AI "I have X problem, what products could I use to resolve it?" that is a natural and ethical time to include advertisers into the equation. The LLM can be trained on product specifications, details, and relevant uses, as well as plug in to a review database. Companies can pay to be included in the results of possible solutions and the AI can use the available information to make specific recommendations based on real data. Hopefully, the future will completely prune intrusive, non-consensual advertising completely and any companies that inject thoughts into our minds will fail.
xerxesaa 3y ago
Genuine question: if Google is a last resort, what are your more preferred alternatives? I've tried many search engines and haven't really succeeded in finding a better alternative. Wondering if I'm missing something.
- codalan 3y ago
  Kagi (paid) and Brave search have both been good to me. I never really liked DDG or Bing. They both suffer from the same SEO gaming that Google does. There are also a number of smaller search engines that have been posted to HN that are kind of interesting for certain niches. I think what will happen over the next five years is that instead of Google being the one-stop shop for search, it will be a number of smaller players + the different chatbot engines like ChatGPT and Bard and others.
- rocho 3y ago
  I tried many alternatives, and finally settled on Kagi Search. It's a paid option but it's well worth it. They also have tools like FastGPT which I'm using more and more. It's a GPT model that has access to their search results. You can't use it for conversation like you'd do with ChatGPT, but for searching and summarizing it's amazing.
romusha 3y ago
What search engines would you recommend? I'm having difficulty using google, its just practically useless these days. ChatGPT is much much better but I'd like to know other tools
jesterson 3y ago
> Well, let's talk again in 5 years. Every time new fad appears, I say this. And I say the same about chatgpt. Never failed so far. So yea, let's talk again in 5 years.
gorbachev 3y ago
Google == Internet will continue as long as Google remains the default search engine on the most popular browsers.

by danwee 3y ago

okdood64 3y ago

I'm pretty sure you could find doom & gloom talk about Google on HN 5 years ago.

pil0u 3y ago
Only 7 years ago, the world was astonished with the release of AlphaGo. This was an algorithm dedicated to one very specific task of winning a game. The most recent game being played is language, a game that Google has played alone, until now. Doom & gloom talk about Google 5 years ago was probably unjustified and rightfully dismissed. Today, I'm not so sure about that.
zarzavat 3y ago
That’s because it’s been progressively getting worse for years. For example, when they launched Google+ they stopped supporting the + operator in favour of “quotes” and people complained about that. Of course now the “quotes” don’t work either. Google used to be amazing. If you remembered a set of words that were on a page, you could enter those words and it would find matching pages. It’s been broken for years and keeps getting more broken.
- okdood64 3y ago
  Broken? https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may+have+been+less+attractive+to+candidates+heavily+focused+on+the+job+title%22&oq=%22may+have+been+less+attractive+to+candidates+heavily+focused+on+the+job+title https://www.google.com/search?q=%22may+have+been+less+attrac... I just took a random snippet from Gergely's blog and using quotes I found it. Look there's many issues with Google Search in 2023, but these nitpicks that aren't neccesarily true aren't productive to the conversation.
  - lazypenguin 3y ago
    Yes it's broken, try searching 'python abs "Return the absolute value of a number"'. That string is directly lifted from the Python docs for the `abs` function. The official Python documentation does not appear for me until the 3rd page and the "featured snippet" is from some random website called flexiple.com
    - rafark 3y ago
      It’s not broken. I use the exact match operator “” all the time and it works pretty much every time. Selecting verbatim works even better. https://i.ibb.co/D8VfKxc/75-FC1-FC6-DFD7-4-E2-A-A717-DBD84630-ECD7.jpg https://i.ibb.co/D8VfKxc/75-FC1-FC6-DFD7-4-E2-A-A717-DBD8463...
      - lazypenguin 3y ago
        I didn’t search “python docs” I searched “python abs”
        rafark 3y ago
        Well that’s the problem then. You could say your problem has more to do with the relevancy of the results than the exact match operator (I personally don’t mind in this case since for the few times I’ve had to write python I’ve found the official docs not as useful as I’d expect). As I said, I use that operator all the time and it works. I’d be the first to complain when it doesn’t. For instance, the - operator stopped working in YouTube a while ago, unfortunately.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
it's been declining for longer than 5 years, especially since they've removed discussion result filtering
_ea1k 3y ago
It reminds me of when people would talk doom for IE based upon some tiny uptick in Firefox users and the relatively stagnation of IE as a browser. They were obviously wrong. Then Chrome happened. If Google doesn't change some fundamental things, they'll be the next one to fall for similar reasons. I'd be less concerned for them if I didn't see signs of decline with Android as well. It is a key component for them to control.
- matthewbauer 3y ago
  That reminds me of that quote about bankruptcy from The Sun Also Rises: > “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. > “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” It felt like that’s how IE lost its dominance.
- genezeta 3y ago
  In 2004 IE had 94% share of the browser market. There were "tiny upticks" but, going slowly and steadily, in August 2008 Firefox had gained about 30-33% and IE was down to about 60%. And then (September 2008) Chrome happened.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    In hindsight Chrome was worse for the internet than IE ever was. A spyware and ads company fooling devs and users alike.
    - account42 3y ago
      Well a lot of those devs seem to like the spying as long as they themselves have access to (some of) the data.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  Firefox did most of the early damage to IE all it's own. Taking IE down from an insane 90+% marketshare position and steadily eating up 30% marketshare by the time Chrome even really showed up. And it didn't even have to stealth install itself with every adobe flash update to do it. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2009 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

mjburgess 3y ago

I certainly start with google far less -- I now, very often, stray little from my bookmarks bar. The first of which is "New Chat" (ChatGPT) I needed some somewhat obscure API information recently, and ChatGPT had it -- a testament to how much ChatGPT really is just a compression of "everything ever digitised"

devjab 3y ago
Does ChatGPT “have it”? I thought it made stuff up and that the magic it does is being very good at making the stuff up. We’ve had it come up with solutions using entirely made up functions. They had names that sounded like something Microsoft would’ve put into .Net, but they were entirely made up. As in, they had never existed in any version of .Net ever. So as much as I like it, I’m treating it with more caution than google results. Honestly though, most of the time it’s frankly faster to just read the damn manual and figure out things for yourself. I don’t say that as some sort of anti-prompt-programming purist, but wading through GPT responses is as about as hopeless as wading through the gazillion medium, dev.to, stack overflow and whatever else people post their useless stuff on. 10 years ago if I needed to do some obscure Sharepoint programming (waaaaaay out of my field) I could realistically make something work with the help of Google, today the same thing is frankly completely impossible.
- esperent 3y ago
  > Does ChatGPT “have it”? I thought it made stuff up and that the magic it does is being very good at making the stuff up ChatGPT is just a frontend UI and refers to two different models (and different tunings of these models over time I guess). GPT3.5 is kind of useful but it makes up stuff just enough that you can't really trust it and spend so much time verifying it's hard to say whether you saved time vs the old way. But it still produces mostly not made up stuff. GPT-4, still not perfect, is a game changer though. It's what people generally mean when they talk about ChatGPT. There's far far less hallucination going on (not zero though). There's several ways to access it: phind, bing, ChatGPT. But I still give ChatGPT is the best.
- lacy_tinpot 3y ago

glenrivard 3y ago

[dead]

jeffbee 3y ago

I think it's actually a "u"-shaped curve. For people with no idea, Google works great. For people with vague and mostly inaccurate knowledge of how to index and search the web, it appears to suck. For people who actually know, it once again seems good.

nix0n 3y ago
> For people who actually know, it once again seems good. If the way to make it work is to use "site:", to me that doesn't count as "searching the web" anymore.

evouga 3y ago

There was a magic period of time lasting about a decade when internet search Just Worked. If it was on the public web Google would find it. Search worked so well I took it for granted. Today I avoid Google search at all costs, and use it mainly to find Wikipedia pages or to search Reddit. The Googlers blame SEO and there is some truth to that; but Google has on retainer a huge stable of the world’s best-paid engineers, and still couldn’t be bothered to invest in their flagship service.

nvarsj 3y ago
The flagship service is ads not search.
- MarcellusDrum 3y ago
  Well good luck showing people ads when people start using ChatGPT for all their internet searches.
  - ptmcc 3y ago
    It'll be so easy to inject ads into things like ChatGPT, and it'll even look "natural" to most readers.
  - mattlondon 3y ago
    It would be trivial to insert banner ads, or even "native ads" in the response. LLMs are probably even better suited for monetisation since they have a better understanding of what people want, so a better ad can be shown that is more likely to be clicked. Do you think people were losing their shit when ChatGPT went into bing simply because web search gets better/easier? No - people were losing their shit because it meant the ads in search are going to be turbo-charged and so that is why the share prices are surging (GOOG up 40% over last 6 months): more ad revenue from "better" ads shown to users.
  - survirtual 3y ago
    People still need products to solve problems. When you ask an AI "I have X problem, what products could I use to resolve it?" that is a natural and ethical time to include advertisers into the equation. The LLM can be trained on product specifications, details, and relevant uses, as well as plug in to a review database. Companies can pay to be included in the results of possible solutions and the AI can use the available information to make specific recommendations based on real data. Hopefully, the future will completely prune intrusive, non-consensual advertising completely and any companies that inject thoughts into our minds will fail.

xerxesaa 3y ago

Genuine question: if Google is a last resort, what are your more preferred alternatives? I've tried many search engines and haven't really succeeded in finding a better alternative. Wondering if I'm missing something.

codalan 3y ago
Kagi (paid) and Brave search have both been good to me. I never really liked DDG or Bing. They both suffer from the same SEO gaming that Google does. There are also a number of smaller search engines that have been posted to HN that are kind of interesting for certain niches. I think what will happen over the next five years is that instead of Google being the one-stop shop for search, it will be a number of smaller players + the different chatbot engines like ChatGPT and Bard and others.
rocho 3y ago
I tried many alternatives, and finally settled on Kagi Search. It's a paid option but it's well worth it. They also have tools like FastGPT which I'm using more and more. It's a GPT model that has access to their search results. You can't use it for conversation like you'd do with ChatGPT, but for searching and summarizing it's amazing.

romusha 3y ago

What search engines would you recommend? I'm having difficulty using google, its just practically useless these days. ChatGPT is much much better but I'd like to know other tools

jesterson 3y ago

> Well, let's talk again in 5 years. Every time new fad appears, I say this. And I say the same about chatgpt. Never failed so far. So yea, let's talk again in 5 years.

gorbachev 3y ago

Google == Internet will continue as long as Google remains the default search engine on the most popular browsers.