8 ms·
Another bug I'm noticing lately is it'll flat out ignore things sometimes, even if you put a term in quotes or try to exclude it with a -leadingdash. About 30%
by burnte 3y ago
Another bug I'm noticing lately is it'll flat out ignore things sometimes, even if you put a term in quotes or try to exclude it with a -leadingdash. About 30% of the time if I use those operators, they'll have no effect on the results. I don't understand why they'd make things worse on purpose, but I don't know how it could be just a "mistake" no one noticed.
- cmeacham98 3y agoI notice this happening when the actual query would have returned 0 results, Google ""helpfully"" will modify your query (such as dropping quotes) to generate more results. This is super annoying because it doesn't appear to inform you of this anywhere in the UI, until you click through to page 2 and see what it modified your query to be.
- winternett 3y agoSites like Twitter and Instagram also frequently completely change the search term now to something else for certain queries. This practice is anti-competitive in the highest order. The very foundation of having a text search is to have an exact query match to begin with... The alternate spelling item should only be a suggestion in results at the most, but they've flipped this now, and that's outright deceptive.
- QuantumGood 3y agoOver the years, I've found the frequency of "0 result" queries has gone way up. Subjective anecdata from me, but it's a pretty big difference. There must be some large areas of their index that have been dropped over time. From what Google's hinted at and probably your own experiences (which I reckon are like mine), it's pretty clear that most folks aren't great at Google searches. This might be why Google has leaned on AI to "guess" the best results. They figure their AI can predict what you want better than you are able to specify via your search query.
- morkalork 3y agoAlso 1 page results. Around 10-20 links. Like, that's it? Really? No more? That's not what I see when I try the same query on Bing!
- lispy4 3y agoI've noticed the same. And sometimes you'll get search results showing 10+ pages, but if you actually follow through them, the results die by the second page. Google also omits many domains from search results now.
- voidhorse 3y agoWhich has the really annoying side effect that now you actually need to produce a worse query to get decent results. A few years back I used to scoff at people who wrote searches in the form of literal questions instead of boiling things down to key terms, e.g. the "how do i..., what is the largest..." type searches. Nowadays I not only need to write stupid searches like this to get better results but quite literally find that my brain has adapted the pattern and my past skill at crafting salient key term, operator driven queries is eroding.
- jerf 3y agoIt is located under the search query itself. For instance, see https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22spill%20clean%20big%20search%20stain%22 https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22spill%20clean%20big..., a nonsense query I made up with no hits. You should see No results found for "spill clean big search stain". Results for spill clean big search stain (without quotes): on the page. This isn't new, I've always seen Google doing something like this. It hasn't always been large on the page but it's always been there.
- cmeacham98 3y agoMight be desktop exclusive? For me on mobile (testing another random phrase as now yours hits this post), I don't see that text, or any other indication the query has been modified.
- burnte 3y agoI'm used to that. But this is worse, this is when the search I enter would give the ideal results because I eventually contort the search parameters that I find some results.
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoThere was a Google search engineer on Reddit who claimed the opposite personally, Google is going down the trash but the alternatives aren't any better. Of course I can find it now, thanks Google. I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
- winternett 3y agoI miss AltaVista so much... It was no frills and only based on page content.
- BryantD 3y agoThose of us who worked there thank you!
- mech422 3y agoI loved me the 'near' keyword - thanks!
- masukomi 3y agoI both appreciated Alta Vista, and appreciated its office space in Littleton ( i think ) when i worked in it after its passing. ;)
- lispy4 3y agoLoved everything about Alta Vista, including the logo, and the UI. I miss 90s Internet in general. It wasn't the ugly battleground and desolation planet that the current net has become.
- fragmede 3y agoRemember Guestbooks? you'd visit a website, and volunteer your name and which country you were from and leave comments. And it wouldn't be a cesspool of spam and porn and XSS attacks? How quaint!
- mech422 3y agoI've noticed this with the quotes as well...
- chongli 3y agoSearch engines in general have realized that it's more profitable to show you irrelevant results than to show you nothing. Furthermore, they've realized it's more profitable to show you irrelevant results laden with their ads than show you highly relevant results from ad-free sites. Perverse incentives at work!
- gramie 3y agoI find Amazon really irritating for that. I do a search for a very specific thing, and a ton of results always come back, often having nothing to do with my search request. And sponsored results both at the top and scattered through the results.
- cptskippy 3y agoAmazon is gotten so bad that unless I know an exact part number or model then I don't bother. I'll go somewhere else for any research and only come back to Amazon if I want to price shop what I found.
- user_666 3y agoAmazon is so bad that I shop on Walmart's website now.
- hex4def6 3y agoEven with an exact part number, it will often push related items first. I was searching for a specific thermal printer, literally using the PN (something like C18647585), and it still decided to show me "sponsored" and related thermal printers first. So it somehow knew that part number as a keyword for thermal printers, but just didn't want to show me the one result that actually would be helpful (it was a third party seller, so maybe that penalizes the result?)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xoxxala 3y ago
- flyinghamster 3y agoI'm noticing this with DDG as well. :( I guess the powers that be have decided that information must be hidden.
- pixodaros 3y agoIts even stupider than that. There are only two major, publicly available web indexes in the USA, Google's and Bing's. After 24 February 2022, DuckDuckGo ended their partnership with Yandex, and since then they say "we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing" https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
- HWR_14 3y agoThe web indexes from Google and Bing are available publicly? I can pull it down from somewhere and try to make a search engine?
- pixodaros 3y agoBing at least license their indexes to partners on a commercial basis, as did Yahoo until they gave up indexing the web. I am sure that the NSA, the Chinese government, the ahrefs website, and other organizations have comprehensive indexes of the web which they don't share in this way. Mojeek seems to be the independent, non-paywalled search engine with the biggest index, for an overview see https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
- Der_Einzige 3y agoBe careful! The Google search guys will come on HN and gaslight you about this, claiming that the advanced search functionality works perfectly and it's simply user error. We know it's not, but expect them to try to tell you you're imagining things.
- ransackdev 3y agoFunny that people call these "bugs" as if anything related to google search happens on accident. They don't need to waste the eng resources or infrastructure on rock solid search anymore, they own the market and got all the users into their funnel of products, most locked in for life. Search results still show sponsored listings, they still have all the users, and all the profit, and a lot less of the profit sucking operational costs it took to be good at what made them a household name, search
- passion__desire 3y agoIs google trading "accuracy" for computation cost at the same time inserting junk results into the results?
- ransackdev 3y agoThey aren’t inserting junk, they just don’t do anything to rank quality results above the junk anymore. The junk was always there, on page 2 and beyond, and who would ever need to hit those pages. Nowadays I’ll be 15 pages deep and so far off base of the search term that I could write a better index with curl and regex. The issue isn’t that they are watering down the cream in the milk, it’s that the cream isn’t part of the milk at all now.
- wolpoli 3y agoThis is a good point. Google got to the top by having the best search result back when it mattered. It now no longer matters.
- 13of40 3y agoI think google does OK with the syntax it still supports for text queries, but if you switch to the images tab it just thows all of that stuff out the window. I would love to be able to search for "cat eating watermelon" or whatever and only get results with cats eating watermelon, ordered by the proximity of that text to the image returned. Hopefully AI is going to do something for that, but the state of the art, as embodied by the biggest player (Google) is shamefully deficient.
- b112 3y agoUse verbatim mode, under tools, after your initial search. They broke it, but it still helps.
- akvadrako 3y agoThose operators are no longer supported. You can use Verbatim mode, which is more like the old behavior.
- burnte 3y agoWhat? Are you serious?