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It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become. For so many cases Google actually is only useful as a search interface for Reddit, StackOverflow,

It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become. For so many cases Google actually is only useful as a search interface for Reddit, StackOverflow, and other sites that accumulate (and actually garbage collect) knowledge. Without such a qualifier Google will just give you absolute SEO trash results for many types of searches.

neovialogistics 3y ago
I'd love the following combination: * A search engine that only crawls and searches a whitelist of sites. * Community functionality to vote on the contents of the whitelist.
- jraph 3y ago
  Or have it crawl anything but be able to provide allow lists the way uBlock Origin allows picking block lists. But I'm not sure I would want an allow list approach. How to you run into new interesting websites? How would people find your new website? A block list would be good though.
  - siva7 3y ago
    when was the last time you found a new interesting website over google search? i can’t even remember and i used google daily.
    - jraph 3y ago
      I don't use Google, but I certainly want my search engine to return interesting and relevant stuff I don't know about. I don't keep track of my discoveries, but I found some cool recipes even recently hosted on (sometimes independent) websites I didn't know.
- basch 3y ago
  Ive wondered, with 200,000 employees, how close you could get to something useful, by tasking them all with part time wiki editing/building. Hand build an internal ranking of web quality, keeping in mind that different posts being high quality, don't automatically make all posts at that host domain quality. The surfacing of information could still be very automated.
- slig 3y ago
  Have you seen https://search.brave.com/help/goggles https://search.brave.com/help/goggles ?
  - neovialogistics 3y ago
    Thanks, this seems to be a step in the right direction. I'll use it for a few days and see what I think.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  I think you.com is close to your first bullet point
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tester756 3y ago
  >* A search engine that only crawls and searches a whitelist of sites. Great way to kill neutral, organic web?
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    That’s basically Google already. They optimized for a few sites and let the rest go to shit.
- layer8 3y ago
  > * Community functionality to vote on the contents of the whitelist. This would become a community of mostly SEO spammers very fast.
napsterbr 3y ago
> It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become I just want to be (yet another person) to echo this sentiment. For the first time in my life I had to resort to Bing (!) instead. The lower quality of results must make business sense somehow, I suppose...
- bigdict 3y ago
  People run more queries which leads to more ad inpressions?..
- slig 3y ago
  Before 2020, it was possible to google random phone numbers and figure out who was calling. Nowadays, googling random callers is useless, but Bing somehow still works.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  > The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
birken 3y ago
I'd just like to note the irony of saying how bad Google is while at the same time saying that Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites. Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.
- slig 3y ago
  They are bad now, but they were exceptional few years ago. Same thing with Gmail, now I get obvious spam in my inbox and real email in the spam folder. Looks like they gave up.
  - manmal 3y ago
    I’ve had zero gmail misclassifications in the last 2 months.
  - dvngnt_ 3y ago
    been getting the same obvious CVS spam email message like crazy
- omnicognate 3y ago
  It's not bad because they can't build a decent search engine. Building a decent search engine is a solved problem, which they solved. It's bad because their incentives aren't aligned with their users. The shit results they are giving aren't because they can't give good ones, they are because they don't want to.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 3y ago
  No I disagree, because this simply wasn't the case a few years ago. Back then I could just search something, and Google would give me results, and that was it. It wasn't too long ago when googling was a proper skill to be learned and it felt like that could get you anywhere on the web. Google was exceptional once. Now Google won't even acknowledge "" anymore, and having to hold its hand and guide it towards a single website which I already need to be aware of, is pretty pathetic compared to what Google was once able to do. Also the fact that it gives back so much spam and even puts it at the top of results. > Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites This is only partially true. Google's search engine is definitely better than Reddit, but that is really not hard (I need to emphasize this, as reddit's search is really bad, unless it is old.reddit, then it is at least somewhat OK), but for many other sites the reason to pick Google is just convenience. > Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard. I think the issue is more Google deliberately allowing and pushing all that spam, because users that find what they seek will spend less time on the site. Otherwise I find it hard to explain this drastic drop in quality. Would also explain why they are taking away all the useful search and query tools. Or the people responsible for working on it just don't have the skill anymore, who knows.
vesinisa 3y ago
It would certainly be an interesting next turn of events if Google made an offer to buy out Reddit - just for the user-generated content and to stop the site from self-destructing, i.e. the golden goose offing itself. It's unlikely given current capital interest rates, but at this point this drama has pretty much crossed the borders of plausible fiction anyway.
- dageshi 3y ago
  No major company can buy reddit because it's full of porn and a lot of the user base is there for the porn and will riot if it goes.
  - Y_Y 3y ago
    But Conde Nast did buy them
- sigstoat 3y ago
  > the golden goose offing itself they'd give it some icon indistinguishable from the rest of the google apps, forget about it, and then turn it off in a few years.
qwertyforce 3y ago
Yep. Most of my google queries are prepended with "reddit" or "stackexchange". I particularly like stackexchange, lots of useful information there.
yosito 3y ago
I'll take this opportunity to mention Kagi. I've been paying for Kagi search for a bit over a month now. Not only are the raw search results far better than Google ever was, but the search engine is privacy focused, allows you to easily create your own block lists of sites you don't want to see, and has some fancy AI bells and whistles that allow you to summarize both individual pages and all of the results of your search.
apostacy 3y ago
There's a really good example that someone found in the wild, where Google would omit exact string matches, but could then be coaxed into producing them indirectly. It is disturbing because I thought this was a problem we had solved 20 years ago. If I could remember a few details about something that was indexed by Google, I used to be able to just find it. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/rqzvf3/why_does_google_omit_results_when_searching_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/rqzvf3/why_doe...
pkamb 3y ago
I would love a competing SERP that simply listed the results on Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. Have a major section of the page that ALWAYS lists the Wikipedia result. Don't make me add "reddit" to every search term.

neovialogistics 3y ago

I'd love the following combination: * A search engine that only crawls and searches a whitelist of sites. * Community functionality to vote on the contents of the whitelist.

jraph 3y ago
Or have it crawl anything but be able to provide allow lists the way uBlock Origin allows picking block lists. But I'm not sure I would want an allow list approach. How to you run into new interesting websites? How would people find your new website? A block list would be good though.
- siva7 3y ago
  when was the last time you found a new interesting website over google search? i can’t even remember and i used google daily.
  - jraph 3y ago
    I don't use Google, but I certainly want my search engine to return interesting and relevant stuff I don't know about. I don't keep track of my discoveries, but I found some cool recipes even recently hosted on (sometimes independent) websites I didn't know.
basch 3y ago
Ive wondered, with 200,000 employees, how close you could get to something useful, by tasking them all with part time wiki editing/building. Hand build an internal ranking of web quality, keeping in mind that different posts being high quality, don't automatically make all posts at that host domain quality. The surfacing of information could still be very automated.
slig 3y ago
Have you seen https://search.brave.com/help/goggles https://search.brave.com/help/goggles ?
- neovialogistics 3y ago
  Thanks, this seems to be a step in the right direction. I'll use it for a few days and see what I think.
whiplash451 3y ago
I think you.com is close to your first bullet point
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tester756 3y ago
>* A search engine that only crawls and searches a whitelist of sites. Great way to kill neutral, organic web?
- throw9away6 3y ago
  That’s basically Google already. They optimized for a few sites and let the rest go to shit.
layer8 3y ago
> * Community functionality to vote on the contents of the whitelist. This would become a community of mostly SEO spammers very fast.

napsterbr 3y ago

> It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become I just want to be (yet another person) to echo this sentiment. For the first time in my life I had to resort to Bing (!) instead. The lower quality of results must make business sense somehow, I suppose...

bigdict 3y ago
People run more queries which leads to more ad inpressions?..
slig 3y ago
Before 2020, it was possible to google random phone numbers and figure out who was calling. Nowadays, googling random callers is useless, but Bing somehow still works.
jjoonathan 3y ago
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

birken 3y ago

I'd just like to note the irony of saying how bad Google is while at the same time saying that Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites. Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.

slig 3y ago
They are bad now, but they were exceptional few years ago. Same thing with Gmail, now I get obvious spam in my inbox and real email in the spam folder. Looks like they gave up.
- manmal 3y ago
  I’ve had zero gmail misclassifications in the last 2 months.
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  been getting the same obvious CVS spam email message like crazy
omnicognate 3y ago
It's not bad because they can't build a decent search engine. Building a decent search engine is a solved problem, which they solved. It's bad because their incentives aren't aligned with their users. The shit results they are giving aren't because they can't give good ones, they are because they don't want to.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 3y ago
No I disagree, because this simply wasn't the case a few years ago. Back then I could just search something, and Google would give me results, and that was it. It wasn't too long ago when googling was a proper skill to be learned and it felt like that could get you anywhere on the web. Google was exceptional once. Now Google won't even acknowledge "" anymore, and having to hold its hand and guide it towards a single website which I already need to be aware of, is pretty pathetic compared to what Google was once able to do. Also the fact that it gives back so much spam and even puts it at the top of results. > Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites This is only partially true. Google's search engine is definitely better than Reddit, but that is really not hard (I need to emphasize this, as reddit's search is really bad, unless it is old.reddit, then it is at least somewhat OK), but for many other sites the reason to pick Google is just convenience. > Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard. I think the issue is more Google deliberately allowing and pushing all that spam, because users that find what they seek will spend less time on the site. Otherwise I find it hard to explain this drastic drop in quality. Would also explain why they are taking away all the useful search and query tools. Or the people responsible for working on it just don't have the skill anymore, who knows.

vesinisa 3y ago

It would certainly be an interesting next turn of events if Google made an offer to buy out Reddit - just for the user-generated content and to stop the site from self-destructing, i.e. the golden goose offing itself. It's unlikely given current capital interest rates, but at this point this drama has pretty much crossed the borders of plausible fiction anyway.

dageshi 3y ago
No major company can buy reddit because it's full of porn and a lot of the user base is there for the porn and will riot if it goes.
- Y_Y 3y ago
  But Conde Nast did buy them
sigstoat 3y ago
> the golden goose offing itself they'd give it some icon indistinguishable from the rest of the google apps, forget about it, and then turn it off in a few years.

qwertyforce 3y ago

Yep. Most of my google queries are prepended with "reddit" or "stackexchange". I particularly like stackexchange, lots of useful information there.

yosito 3y ago

I'll take this opportunity to mention Kagi. I've been paying for Kagi search for a bit over a month now. Not only are the raw search results far better than Google ever was, but the search engine is privacy focused, allows you to easily create your own block lists of sites you don't want to see, and has some fancy AI bells and whistles that allow you to summarize both individual pages and all of the results of your search.

apostacy 3y ago

There's a really good example that someone found in the wild, where Google would omit exact string matches, but could then be coaxed into producing them indirectly. It is disturbing because I thought this was a problem we had solved 20 years ago. If I could remember a few details about something that was indexed by Google, I used to be able to just find it. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/rqzvf3/why_does_google_omit_results_when_searching_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/rqzvf3/why_doe...

pkamb 3y ago

I would love a competing SERP that simply listed the results on Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. Have a major section of the page that ALWAYS lists the Wikipedia result. Don't make me add "reddit" to every search term.