22 ms·

The Tragedy of Google Search

128 points by samizdis 3y ago

by_Seeing 3y ago
It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you.
slashtab 3y ago
[flagged]
- Phiwise_ 3y ago
  Soft paywalls aren't, like many nouns that need an introducing qualifier (think homeopathic medicine for the most common example). More specifically, a soft paywall isn't a starving artist trying to get their daily bread from valuable content (If they were I'd be biased to support them, because I'm among the smaller crowd around here that rather likes IP law and procing things, and kind of enjoy poking the gibs me dat for free beehive. I even probably support, horror of horrors, what I heard was Musk hard-paywalling twitter to make it profitable, and he's neither starving nor an artist), it's a malicious trick to hijack when you're trying to find free information on a subject by bait-and-switching a, say, promising quoted section from the middle of the article on a search result. It's like a digital used car salesman who promised a great deal or free benefit in an ad but is all out of non-full-price inventory once you drive all the way out to the lot. Until these sorts of sites stop shipping their whole catalog to be indexed as available while hiding behind ever-more-sophisticated ui barriers (or browser drm soon, maybe?) and firmly take an honest and upfront stance of either freely available to read or benefiting from paying customers I think the right stance is that silver beats gold; You only survive if you do unto others as they do unto you, so for as long as they're putting out bait we should take the worm and skip the hook: https://archive.ph/X3gHI https://archive.ph/X3gHI
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - moritzwarhier 3y ago
    > it's a malicious trick to hijack when you're trying to find free information on a subject by bait-and-switching a, say, promising quoted section from the middle of the article on a search result Already feels that way with login walls like on Xitter or Instagram tbh. Independent of the indexing, just because they are quoted and linked to everwhere, as if they were a public billboard. Especially twitter seems to toggle theirs on/off on a random basis or based on referer, heuristics, etc.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    The Guardian soft paywalls in in that the app will direct you to the website.
lordfrito 3y ago
https://archive.ph/X3gHI https://archive.ph/X3gHI
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Asking for captcha. I nope'd out.
  - LeoPanthera 3y ago
    It only asks for a captcha if you are using Cloudflare for DNS.
    - jcrawfordor 3y ago
      Or Quad 9... or potentially any DNS server that refuses to provide EDNS. I don't think there's an "official list" of DNS services on the archive.today shitlist, but it's been growing lately. These days you have to select recursive DNS on a balance of "archive.* works" vs. privacy preservation.
nuancebydefault 3y ago
> no company or product can grow alongside the internet forever without, eventually, being swallowed up. Even not Google. I wonder if they can still turn things around, but I have the feeling MS caught up finally at high speed and passed them. PS I was reading (sceptically) 'google search is broken' already for a year or so in HN comments and have to admit I believe it now.
- wakeupcall 3y ago
  > PS I was reading (sceptically) 'google search is broken' already for a year or so in HN comments and have to admit I believe it now. Even ignoring results, mainstream started to notice a while ago. Perhaps the biggest social proof at large is when it is shown distilled as comedy and people can laugh about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT7_SxJ3oSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT7_SxJ3oSI
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    The "mainstream" accepts many claims as true that can be objectively demonstrated to be false. Why should I have such confidence they're right about a theory like this that seems to be unfalsifiable?
    - wakeupcall 3y ago
      Did you watch the video, or is this a rhetorical response? Spoiler: it's about the conflict of interests in google search.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  First, results got worse. Then, ads’ started to increase. Then I moved to Kagi. Now, I’m happy.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    He he, can't resist reposting my recent comment from another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37606618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37606618 Also, searching for that quote on HN via Algolia gives many hits.
Jtsummers 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230922115825/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/google-search-size-usefulness-decline/675409/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230922115825/https://www.theat...
grotorea 3y ago
Seems like the complaints that have been showing up here a for a while have reached the mainstream. Any chance of an upstart competitor taking the opportunity?
- thunderbong 3y ago
  Kagi is what others in HN have been suggesting.
- collaborative 3y ago
  aisearch.vip Disclaimer: developer I am bootstrapped, don't advertise, and need no investment
FredPret 3y ago
Good to see non techies start to care about this
jl6 3y ago
It certainly seems like Google Search prefers to return ad-ridden monetized sites rather than more usable sites, with the obvious explanation being that they earn more money from sites that show ads. But this feels like too obvious a conspiracy theory and it’s probably not directly designed to act that way - more likely it is an unintended consequence of something else. Unintended, but tolerated all the way to the bank.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  I guarantee you no experiments that negatively impact revenue but improve the search experience ship
  - babyshake 3y ago
    They must have considered some possibility of a "Subscriber Results" option for Google One subscribers or something along these lines? I'm guessing that would be too risky to make their non-subscriber results look like garbage?
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      They serve such a large number of users who would never pay, I cannot imagine they would ever consider admitting that they could serve better results. That would be a disaster. They make money off of users from surveillance and advertising. They would never make enough from subscriptions to offset the losses in perception from all the people they are surveilling for advertisers.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        I mean at one point that was an argument against Youtube Premium as well. It kind of depends what the ad value per user is, and then charge X% above that. Though maybe it’s so high that it would be an enterprise price level.
        3y ago
xnx 3y ago
As the article mentions, the web has changed. It's very hard to return a list of good results when there are none. I've yet to see side-by-side comparisons where another search engine is doing a better job. I've had "Search Generative Experience" (AI/LLM synthesized result/summary above the standard web results) turned on for awhile. It is definitely the future. To survive the flood of revenue optimized content (recipes being a familiar example), you need an active [software] agent working on your behalf to read content and make one straight thing out of the crooked timber of the web.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  The problem isn't just that the internet has become more SEO-oriented and encumbered with low-value clickbait websites -- it's also that Google doesn't listen to instructions the way it used to. Google started slipping when it began assuming that it knows better than you do. For instance, when the exact search operator (" ") stopped working. I'd take the Google of 2014 over the Google of 2023 without thinking twice, and I think that I'm not alone in this.
  - intalentive 3y ago
    Agree. Also their results are often biased and I sometimes find myself going to Yandex.
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      I think Frank Zappa would chortle with irony that a Russian search engine returns his discographies uncensored in the here and now versus an American one.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      All search engines are inherently biased, since they perform a ranking task (which is a value judgement). They all encode (possibly uncessfully) the values of their creator. This is why having multiple search engines is important, as diversity in search options is the closes you'll get to objectivity. (said the independent search engine creator with the same air of righteousness as when Plato argued philosophers should be kings)
unixhero 3y ago
To read the full story start your free trial today sigh
sprayk 3y ago
I know there are other search engines out there, but I haven't really given any a shot. Do any of them feel like the Google Search of the past?
- pony_sheared 3y ago
  Duck duck go is worth trying, it's like Google from the old days
  - Scoring6931 3y ago
    It's just Bing reskinned. With some other sources for the instant answers.
- wakeupcall 3y ago
  When google first appeared it was a revolution compared to everything else. If you expect this kind of difference, none of the alternative search engines come close. If you are looking for big search engines, there aren't many really, I strongly believe you should give them all a shot and just alternate between them. The biggest takeaway from this is that google isn't massively better than the worst alternative anymore and it sticks mostly due to recognition.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > When google first appeared it was a revolution compared to everything else. At first it wasn't even because their search was that much better than anyone else's. What made google popular was that it wasn't a massive, messy, ad-filled page of things you didn't care about. Other search engines were bloated "portals" that tried to do everything: email, news, shopping mall, weather, etc Google had a simple clean interface that loaded instantly on a typical dial up connection and that's really what got people to make it their homepage. Today, google has slowly turned into exactly what it was created to solve. Ad-filled bloated pages that try to be everything by pushing things you don't care about in your face.
- kilroy123 3y ago
zwieback 3y ago
In case anyone is interested: the RSS feed for The Atlantic is still pretty good, able to read most articles in full text.
- prirai 3y ago
  Same here
starchild_3001 3y ago
Buyer beware: Sensation sells (as is portrayed in this news article). Competitors are one click or one setting away. Last I tried switching to DuckDuckGo things didn't go so well -- just overall subpar experience. Bing arguably is a bit better, but that too didn't satisfy, despite the super cool chat feature (deserves kudos for that!).
Josh613 3y ago
To whom it may concern, We're building a new search engine. Of course it's AI driven, but at its core, it's all about human dignity. When you use it, you'll have a voice. If you'd like to try it, please email me: josh@sirch.org Thanks! Josh PS. If you'd like to join our team, we have 16 people now (mostly Snapchat/Instagram/Twitter folks), and we'd like to go up to 50 before we raise capital. It's going to be a wild ride.
- dronify_us 3y ago
  [dead]
- beggers 3y ago
  When I got to your website I get a Vercel 404 `Code: DEPLOYMENT_NOT_FOUND`. Perhaps not the most confidence-inspiring for potential candidates..
emodendroket 3y ago
I'm a little tired of all these "Google search used to be better" feel-pieces that don't do anything to substantiate the claim beyond relying on the author's vague sentiment.
- hurril 3y ago
  Your tiredness is of course both relevant and substantiated.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    Let me try restating it for the literal-minded: I see many articles making a vague claim that Google search "used to be better." I do not know how one could even measure this and I have a strong suspicion it's based more on the influence of hearing other people parrot it or some vague dissatisfaction with the present than on any real degradation.
    - NegativeK 3y ago
      My dissatisfaction feels much less vague to me. Technical searches on Google have become a pain in my ass. I'm constantly hit with low effort articles about topics that Google has guessed are similar enough but definitely aren't. 10-15 years ago, Google didn't have the same internet to crawl -- but it also didn't fucking _ignore_ what I asked for.
    - hurril 3y ago
      The literal minded of you perhaps were not there when Google arrived at the scene. And as you admit: you don't really know if there is a difference. Yet hearing about others that perceive difference makes you very tired. I was there. We used Altavista and Yahoo and they rocked. Until we tried Google.
      - emodendroket 3y ago
        I was there too and I don't think it was so much better. I find it very useful right now. Have any better arguments? You are also misconstruing what I said. I don't say I "don't really know" if it was better. I don't think it was better and seeing people baldly assert the opposite without proof hasn't convinced me my memory is wrong. I'd like to hear something better than "trust me bro." I'm tired of people getting published with evidence-free arguments (though I guess it beats someone condescending to me based on a wrong guess of how old I am).
danielovichdk 3y ago
I have always speculated, what if Google simply turn off shop. Just turned off its servers and said "we're closing". Then some would realise what a huge impact it serves on a daily basis. Pop culture will never last.
smcin 3y ago
The other day I asked Google "Are US drivers licenses forgery-proof?" and "Can US Real-ID drivers licenses be forged?" The #1 or #2 hit is utterly irrelevant: nothing to do with US or Real-ID (zero mentions), it's about New South Wales, Australia (lots of mentions of "NSW"): > ‘Tough to Forge’ Digital Driver’s Licenses Are—Yep—Easy to Forge. Researchers found a litany of security flaws that allow simple, quick, and cheap forgeries in Australia. https://www.wired.com/story/digital-drivers-license-forgery-identity-theft/ https://www.wired.com/story/digital-drivers-license-forgery-...
- thefourthchime 3y ago
  2nd link on Kagi: https://cis.org/Report/Americas-Identity-Crisis-Document-Fraud-Pervasive-and-Pernicious https://cis.org/Report/Americas-Identity-Crisis-Document-Fra...
  - smcin 3y ago
    That's still a relevance fail: "Real ID" driver's license [0] refers to the 2005 US improved standard in driver's license, which was intended to be harder to forge. Which is the entire point of the Google query. (We all know pre-Real-ID driver's licenses could be forged, that's not at issue.) But that link is a 2002 article at least about the US, but not Real ID. (any random hit for ""real ID" forgery" in the last 18(!) years would be better) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    What were the other links on Kagi? As far as this query goes, neither Google nor Kagi seem to get it right. Google gets the country wrong and Kagi misses the “Real ID” part. The difference is, you’re paying for the second mistake. I will also add that the particular link you showed is a 7300 word document from 2002, most of which has nothing to do with ID cards at all. It’s at a college graduate reading level and would take 26 minutes for someone to read according to wordcounter.net.
itvision 3y ago
I won't even read it. Google remains the best search engine, period. Nothing is even close.
- tim333 3y ago
  I was going to say I don't personally get all this Google is broken stuff. It works ok for me for most things and I like a lot of the extras like integrating with maps. I'm a 'level 4 local guide' on it now for what it's worth. The one thing I have noticed recently though is chatgtp is way better for certain queries. Like I wanted to figure which brand of fillings I'd had in my teeth the other month. Googling "brands of dental fillings" was hopeless - it gives all results like "here are a number of different fillings, including: amalgam, composite fillings". No brands. Chatgtp though, first try listed all the brands. I think it was sonicfill by the way - quite cool tooth tech.
thefourthchime 3y ago
For those who are lazy like me—or maybe you'd call it efficient—here's the key points summary from Kagi: - Google Search has evolved significantly from its early days as a simple list of blue links to becoming an encyclopedia, predictive engine, image repository, shopping mall and more that is overloaded with information. - It has become more difficult to find authoritative answers on Google Search due to an overabundance of sponsored content, prompts, and low-quality keyword-stuffed pages. - Google is currently undergoing an antitrust trial regarding whether it maintains its search engine monopoly through anticompetitive means such as exclusivity deals rather than having truly superior technology. - Access to large amounts of user data is very important for powering search engine algorithms through personalization and improving the user experience. - While Google argues diminishing returns to scale for user data, internal emails show Google engineers acknowledging that scale remains highly important for the company. - Some feel Google has lost its way and become conservative due to its success, with its corporate bureaucracy stifling acquired companies. - Google Search has become bloated with advertisements and prioritization of its own services over organic results. - Search quality may be declining as its algorithms are gamed by low-quality sites and search engine optimization techniques. - Google's trajectory of scaling up its mission to organize the world's information through acquisitions and exclusivity deals has put pressure on it to keep growing. - No company can likely grow indefinitely to keep up with the ever-expanding internet without being overwhelmed, as Google Search now demonstrates.
- brookst 3y ago
  Thanks for the excellent summary. Though I think the article and summary miss the root cause: Google Search has two masters, users and advertisers. These stakeholders’ interests are not aligned, and by taking one middle road after another, Google has deteriorated into near-uselessness for end users, relying on scale rather than quality.
  - lisper 3y ago
    > Google Search has two masters, users and advertisers No, it doesn't. It has one master: advertisers. Advertisers are the customer. Users are the product. Search results are the bait. This is self-evidently true. Your customer is the one who pays for your services. Google's users don't pay, never have, never will, because search is not a product you can sell. User attention, on the other hand, is a very valuable commodity for which people will pay handsomely.
38 3y ago
Kagi needs a free tier. even if its only 10 searches a day, it needs something. I am never going to use it unless I can try it out for a while.
- freediver 3y ago
  This comes to around $5/mo cost per free user. Who would pay for that?
- Scoring6931 3y ago
  It has a free tier.
  - 38 3y ago
    it has a free trial, much different.
    - Scoring6931 3y ago
      That's true.
dlrush 3y ago
The Tragedy of Google Analytics…
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2001-03-12/googles-larry-page-good-ideas-still-get-funded https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2001-03-12/googles-l...
roenxi 3y ago
There is a logical issue here, people are accusing Google with the line of attack that large scale gives them benefits. I've seen variants of this before: > “It’s absolutely not true that scale is not important,” Manber wrote. “We make very good use of everything we get.” I think that is true, but then the obvious conclusion - if one party doesn't have 90% of the market then the quality of search results will be lower. Successful anti-trust prosecutions against the party with 90% of the market will have a likely outcome of: 1) Reducing the quality of service for everyone. 2) Pushing the 90% market company to be one domiciled somewhere with more reasonable monopoly laws. Successfully proving that more data -> more scale -> better results is actually implies that one company with 90% market share is desirable. Although I'm still not going to use Google search, I don't think that argument is correct. But the line of attack is not clever.
- fovc 3y ago
  That’s called a natural monopoly which is a well studied phenomenon. Most commonly they are regulated as utilities with guaranteed low returns on capital and limited ability to set prices.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    That isn't a natural monopoly, that is the quality of the service increasing with market share. The cost of competitors entering the market could be anything (it could easily be quite small, there are a lot of search engines, many small 1-man projects). The issue here is the quality of the product scales with market share. With a natural monopoly, if you built 2 of them in defiance of the economics of the situation they'd have similar quality of service to the single operator.
    - fovc 3y ago
      I think you’re right on a narrow definition of price and quantity like what Wikipedia gives: > A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. Specifically, an industry is a natural monopoly if the total cost of one firm, producing the total output, is lower than the total cost of two or more firms producing the entire production. In theory pricing/output in economics is always “quality adjusted” (which is one of the hard things in inflation series) Yes, traditionally a natural monopoly is one where if you split them, costs go up. With Google, GP is saying if you split them up quality goes down. Either way there’s “consumer harm”. (I guess very directly if the time to search goes up, the economic price of using Google goes up too)
sn_master 3y ago
I wish they had an option for me to always exclude certain sites from the resulrs
Obscurity4340 3y ago
The Orion browser does not seem able to render Kagi as a search engine when something is searched. It straight up doesn't load anything. What do?
jinushaun 3y ago
Anecdote: I’m not sure what changed with Google last week, but search on mobile is almost unusable now. I see maybe six real results and the more I scroll, the more ads and recommendations that I see. The more I scroll, the less relevant the recommendations become to the point of absurdity. It’s ridiculous and feels like pinterest/Facebook/TikTok.
jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y ago
Google search quality started dropping when they dropped the plus operator
nbittich 3y ago
Google became unusable for me. I have to suffix every search by "reddit" in order to get something useful. Same with stack overflow, I now mainly look at GitHub issues to find what I'm looking for. Man I wish we could just ban specific domains in order to get less shitty results from Google. I tried brave Search and duck duck go, they are just as bad imo.
- jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y ago
  There's a firefox addon that allows you to remove specific domains from Google's search results (I forgot its name though).

128 points by samizdis 3y ago

by_Seeing 3y ago

It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you.

slashtab 3y ago

[flagged]

Phiwise_ 3y ago
Soft paywalls aren't, like many nouns that need an introducing qualifier (think homeopathic medicine for the most common example). More specifically, a soft paywall isn't a starving artist trying to get their daily bread from valuable content (If they were I'd be biased to support them, because I'm among the smaller crowd around here that rather likes IP law and procing things, and kind of enjoy poking the gibs me dat for free beehive. I even probably support, horror of horrors, what I heard was Musk hard-paywalling twitter to make it profitable, and he's neither starving nor an artist), it's a malicious trick to hijack when you're trying to find free information on a subject by bait-and-switching a, say, promising quoted section from the middle of the article on a search result. It's like a digital used car salesman who promised a great deal or free benefit in an ad but is all out of non-full-price inventory once you drive all the way out to the lot. Until these sorts of sites stop shipping their whole catalog to be indexed as available while hiding behind ever-more-sophisticated ui barriers (or browser drm soon, maybe?) and firmly take an honest and upfront stance of either freely available to read or benefiting from paying customers I think the right stance is that silver beats gold; You only survive if you do unto others as they do unto you, so for as long as they're putting out bait we should take the worm and skip the hook: https://archive.ph/X3gHI https://archive.ph/X3gHI
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  > it's a malicious trick to hijack when you're trying to find free information on a subject by bait-and-switching a, say, promising quoted section from the middle of the article on a search result Already feels that way with login walls like on Xitter or Instagram tbh. Independent of the indexing, just because they are quoted and linked to everwhere, as if they were a public billboard. Especially twitter seems to toggle theirs on/off on a random basis or based on referer, heuristics, etc.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  The Guardian soft paywalls in in that the app will direct you to the website.

lordfrito 3y ago

https://archive.ph/X3gHI https://archive.ph/X3gHI

mixmastamyk 3y ago
Asking for captcha. I nope'd out.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  It only asks for a captcha if you are using Cloudflare for DNS.
  - jcrawfordor 3y ago
    Or Quad 9... or potentially any DNS server that refuses to provide EDNS. I don't think there's an "official list" of DNS services on the archive.today shitlist, but it's been growing lately. These days you have to select recursive DNS on a balance of "archive.* works" vs. privacy preservation.

nuancebydefault 3y ago

> no company or product can grow alongside the internet forever without, eventually, being swallowed up. Even not Google. I wonder if they can still turn things around, but I have the feeling MS caught up finally at high speed and passed them. PS I was reading (sceptically) 'google search is broken' already for a year or so in HN comments and have to admit I believe it now.

wakeupcall 3y ago
> PS I was reading (sceptically) 'google search is broken' already for a year or so in HN comments and have to admit I believe it now. Even ignoring results, mainstream started to notice a while ago. Perhaps the biggest social proof at large is when it is shown distilled as comedy and people can laugh about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT7_SxJ3oSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT7_SxJ3oSI
- emodendroket 3y ago
  The "mainstream" accepts many claims as true that can be objectively demonstrated to be false. Why should I have such confidence they're right about a theory like this that seems to be unfalsifiable?
  - wakeupcall 3y ago
    Did you watch the video, or is this a rhetorical response? Spoiler: it's about the conflict of interests in google search.
bayindirh 3y ago
First, results got worse. Then, ads’ started to increase. Then I moved to Kagi. Now, I’m happy.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  He he, can't resist reposting my recent comment from another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37606618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37606618 Also, searching for that quote on HN via Algolia gives many hits.

Jtsummers 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230922115825/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/google-search-size-usefulness-decline/675409/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230922115825/https://www.theat...

grotorea 3y ago

Seems like the complaints that have been showing up here a for a while have reached the mainstream. Any chance of an upstart competitor taking the opportunity?

thunderbong 3y ago
Kagi is what others in HN have been suggesting.
collaborative 3y ago
aisearch.vip Disclaimer: developer I am bootstrapped, don't advertise, and need no investment

FredPret 3y ago

Good to see non techies start to care about this

jl6 3y ago

It certainly seems like Google Search prefers to return ad-ridden monetized sites rather than more usable sites, with the obvious explanation being that they earn more money from sites that show ads. But this feels like too obvious a conspiracy theory and it’s probably not directly designed to act that way - more likely it is an unintended consequence of something else. Unintended, but tolerated all the way to the bank.

brigadier132 3y ago
I guarantee you no experiments that negatively impact revenue but improve the search experience ship
- babyshake 3y ago
  They must have considered some possibility of a "Subscriber Results" option for Google One subscribers or something along these lines? I'm guessing that would be too risky to make their non-subscriber results look like garbage?
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    They serve such a large number of users who would never pay, I cannot imagine they would ever consider admitting that they could serve better results. That would be a disaster. They make money off of users from surveillance and advertising. They would never make enough from subscriptions to offset the losses in perception from all the people they are surveilling for advertisers.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      I mean at one point that was an argument against Youtube Premium as well. It kind of depends what the ad value per user is, and then charge X% above that. Though maybe it’s so high that it would be an enterprise price level.
      - 3y ago

xnx 3y ago

As the article mentions, the web has changed. It's very hard to return a list of good results when there are none. I've yet to see side-by-side comparisons where another search engine is doing a better job. I've had "Search Generative Experience" (AI/LLM synthesized result/summary above the standard web results) turned on for awhile. It is definitely the future. To survive the flood of revenue optimized content (recipes being a familiar example), you need an active [software] agent working on your behalf to read content and make one straight thing out of the crooked timber of the web.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
The problem isn't just that the internet has become more SEO-oriented and encumbered with low-value clickbait websites -- it's also that Google doesn't listen to instructions the way it used to. Google started slipping when it began assuming that it knows better than you do. For instance, when the exact search operator (" ") stopped working. I'd take the Google of 2014 over the Google of 2023 without thinking twice, and I think that I'm not alone in this.
- intalentive 3y ago
  Agree. Also their results are often biased and I sometimes find myself going to Yandex.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    I think Frank Zappa would chortle with irony that a Russian search engine returns his discographies uncensored in the here and now versus an American one.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    All search engines are inherently biased, since they perform a ranking task (which is a value judgement). They all encode (possibly uncessfully) the values of their creator. This is why having multiple search engines is important, as diversity in search options is the closes you'll get to objectivity. (said the independent search engine creator with the same air of righteousness as when Plato argued philosophers should be kings)

unixhero 3y ago

To read the full story start your free trial today sigh

sprayk 3y ago

I know there are other search engines out there, but I haven't really given any a shot. Do any of them feel like the Google Search of the past?

pony_sheared 3y ago
Duck duck go is worth trying, it's like Google from the old days
- Scoring6931 3y ago
  It's just Bing reskinned. With some other sources for the instant answers.
wakeupcall 3y ago
When google first appeared it was a revolution compared to everything else. If you expect this kind of difference, none of the alternative search engines come close. If you are looking for big search engines, there aren't many really, I strongly believe you should give them all a shot and just alternate between them. The biggest takeaway from this is that google isn't massively better than the worst alternative anymore and it sticks mostly due to recognition.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > When google first appeared it was a revolution compared to everything else. At first it wasn't even because their search was that much better than anyone else's. What made google popular was that it wasn't a massive, messy, ad-filled page of things you didn't care about. Other search engines were bloated "portals" that tried to do everything: email, news, shopping mall, weather, etc Google had a simple clean interface that loaded instantly on a typical dial up connection and that's really what got people to make it their homepage. Today, google has slowly turned into exactly what it was created to solve. Ad-filled bloated pages that try to be everything by pushing things you don't care about in your face.
kilroy123 3y ago

zwieback 3y ago

In case anyone is interested: the RSS feed for The Atlantic is still pretty good, able to read most articles in full text.

prirai 3y ago
Same here

starchild_3001 3y ago

Buyer beware: Sensation sells (as is portrayed in this news article). Competitors are one click or one setting away. Last I tried switching to DuckDuckGo things didn't go so well -- just overall subpar experience. Bing arguably is a bit better, but that too didn't satisfy, despite the super cool chat feature (deserves kudos for that!).

Josh613 3y ago

To whom it may concern, We're building a new search engine. Of course it's AI driven, but at its core, it's all about human dignity. When you use it, you'll have a voice. If you'd like to try it, please email me: josh@sirch.org Thanks! Josh PS. If you'd like to join our team, we have 16 people now (mostly Snapchat/Instagram/Twitter folks), and we'd like to go up to 50 before we raise capital. It's going to be a wild ride.

dronify_us 3y ago
[dead]
beggers 3y ago
When I got to your website I get a Vercel 404 `Code: DEPLOYMENT_NOT_FOUND`. Perhaps not the most confidence-inspiring for potential candidates..

emodendroket 3y ago

I'm a little tired of all these "Google search used to be better" feel-pieces that don't do anything to substantiate the claim beyond relying on the author's vague sentiment.

hurril 3y ago
Your tiredness is of course both relevant and substantiated.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Let me try restating it for the literal-minded: I see many articles making a vague claim that Google search "used to be better." I do not know how one could even measure this and I have a strong suspicion it's based more on the influence of hearing other people parrot it or some vague dissatisfaction with the present than on any real degradation.
  - NegativeK 3y ago
    My dissatisfaction feels much less vague to me. Technical searches on Google have become a pain in my ass. I'm constantly hit with low effort articles about topics that Google has guessed are similar enough but definitely aren't. 10-15 years ago, Google didn't have the same internet to crawl -- but it also didn't fucking _ignore_ what I asked for.
  - hurril 3y ago
    The literal minded of you perhaps were not there when Google arrived at the scene. And as you admit: you don't really know if there is a difference. Yet hearing about others that perceive difference makes you very tired. I was there. We used Altavista and Yahoo and they rocked. Until we tried Google.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      I was there too and I don't think it was so much better. I find it very useful right now. Have any better arguments? You are also misconstruing what I said. I don't say I "don't really know" if it was better. I don't think it was better and seeing people baldly assert the opposite without proof hasn't convinced me my memory is wrong. I'd like to hear something better than "trust me bro." I'm tired of people getting published with evidence-free arguments (though I guess it beats someone condescending to me based on a wrong guess of how old I am).

danielovichdk 3y ago

I have always speculated, what if Google simply turn off shop. Just turned off its servers and said "we're closing". Then some would realise what a huge impact it serves on a daily basis. Pop culture will never last.

smcin 3y ago

The other day I asked Google "Are US drivers licenses forgery-proof?" and "Can US Real-ID drivers licenses be forged?" The #1 or #2 hit is utterly irrelevant: nothing to do with US or Real-ID (zero mentions), it's about New South Wales, Australia (lots of mentions of "NSW"): > ‘Tough to Forge’ Digital Driver’s Licenses Are—Yep—Easy to Forge. Researchers found a litany of security flaws that allow simple, quick, and cheap forgeries in Australia. https://www.wired.com/story/digital-drivers-license-forgery-identity-theft/ https://www.wired.com/story/digital-drivers-license-forgery-...

thefourthchime 3y ago
2nd link on Kagi: https://cis.org/Report/Americas-Identity-Crisis-Document-Fraud-Pervasive-and-Pernicious https://cis.org/Report/Americas-Identity-Crisis-Document-Fra...
- smcin 3y ago
  That's still a relevance fail: "Real ID" driver's license [0] refers to the 2005 US improved standard in driver's license, which was intended to be harder to forge. Which is the entire point of the Google query. (We all know pre-Real-ID driver's licenses could be forged, that's not at issue.) But that link is a 2002 article at least about the US, but not Real ID. (any random hit for ""real ID" forgery" in the last 18(!) years would be better) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- janalsncm 3y ago
  What were the other links on Kagi? As far as this query goes, neither Google nor Kagi seem to get it right. Google gets the country wrong and Kagi misses the “Real ID” part. The difference is, you’re paying for the second mistake. I will also add that the particular link you showed is a 7300 word document from 2002, most of which has nothing to do with ID cards at all. It’s at a college graduate reading level and would take 26 minutes for someone to read according to wordcounter.net.

itvision 3y ago

I won't even read it. Google remains the best search engine, period. Nothing is even close.

tim333 3y ago
I was going to say I don't personally get all this Google is broken stuff. It works ok for me for most things and I like a lot of the extras like integrating with maps. I'm a 'level 4 local guide' on it now for what it's worth. The one thing I have noticed recently though is chatgtp is way better for certain queries. Like I wanted to figure which brand of fillings I'd had in my teeth the other month. Googling "brands of dental fillings" was hopeless - it gives all results like "here are a number of different fillings, including: amalgam, composite fillings". No brands. Chatgtp though, first try listed all the brands. I think it was sonicfill by the way - quite cool tooth tech.

thefourthchime 3y ago

For those who are lazy like me—or maybe you'd call it efficient—here's the key points summary from Kagi: - Google Search has evolved significantly from its early days as a simple list of blue links to becoming an encyclopedia, predictive engine, image repository, shopping mall and more that is overloaded with information. - It has become more difficult to find authoritative answers on Google Search due to an overabundance of sponsored content, prompts, and low-quality keyword-stuffed pages. - Google is currently undergoing an antitrust trial regarding whether it maintains its search engine monopoly through anticompetitive means such as exclusivity deals rather than having truly superior technology. - Access to large amounts of user data is very important for powering search engine algorithms through personalization and improving the user experience. - While Google argues diminishing returns to scale for user data, internal emails show Google engineers acknowledging that scale remains highly important for the company. - Some feel Google has lost its way and become conservative due to its success, with its corporate bureaucracy stifling acquired companies. - Google Search has become bloated with advertisements and prioritization of its own services over organic results. - Search quality may be declining as its algorithms are gamed by low-quality sites and search engine optimization techniques. - Google's trajectory of scaling up its mission to organize the world's information through acquisitions and exclusivity deals has put pressure on it to keep growing. - No company can likely grow indefinitely to keep up with the ever-expanding internet without being overwhelmed, as Google Search now demonstrates.

brookst 3y ago
Thanks for the excellent summary. Though I think the article and summary miss the root cause: Google Search has two masters, users and advertisers. These stakeholders’ interests are not aligned, and by taking one middle road after another, Google has deteriorated into near-uselessness for end users, relying on scale rather than quality.
- lisper 3y ago
  > Google Search has two masters, users and advertisers No, it doesn't. It has one master: advertisers. Advertisers are the customer. Users are the product. Search results are the bait. This is self-evidently true. Your customer is the one who pays for your services. Google's users don't pay, never have, never will, because search is not a product you can sell. User attention, on the other hand, is a very valuable commodity for which people will pay handsomely.

38 3y ago

Kagi needs a free tier. even if its only 10 searches a day, it needs something. I am never going to use it unless I can try it out for a while.

freediver 3y ago
This comes to around $5/mo cost per free user. Who would pay for that?
Scoring6931 3y ago
It has a free tier.
- 38 3y ago
  it has a free trial, much different.
  - Scoring6931 3y ago
    That's true.

dlrush 3y ago

The Tragedy of Google Analytics…

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2001-03-12/googles-larry-page-good-ideas-still-get-funded https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2001-03-12/googles-l...

roenxi 3y ago

There is a logical issue here, people are accusing Google with the line of attack that large scale gives them benefits. I've seen variants of this before: > “It’s absolutely not true that scale is not important,” Manber wrote. “We make very good use of everything we get.” I think that is true, but then the obvious conclusion - if one party doesn't have 90% of the market then the quality of search results will be lower. Successful anti-trust prosecutions against the party with 90% of the market will have a likely outcome of: 1) Reducing the quality of service for everyone. 2) Pushing the 90% market company to be one domiciled somewhere with more reasonable monopoly laws. Successfully proving that more data -> more scale -> better results is actually implies that one company with 90% market share is desirable. Although I'm still not going to use Google search, I don't think that argument is correct. But the line of attack is not clever.

fovc 3y ago
That’s called a natural monopoly which is a well studied phenomenon. Most commonly they are regulated as utilities with guaranteed low returns on capital and limited ability to set prices.
- roenxi 3y ago
  That isn't a natural monopoly, that is the quality of the service increasing with market share. The cost of competitors entering the market could be anything (it could easily be quite small, there are a lot of search engines, many small 1-man projects). The issue here is the quality of the product scales with market share. With a natural monopoly, if you built 2 of them in defiance of the economics of the situation they'd have similar quality of service to the single operator.
  - fovc 3y ago
    I think you’re right on a narrow definition of price and quantity like what Wikipedia gives: > A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. Specifically, an industry is a natural monopoly if the total cost of one firm, producing the total output, is lower than the total cost of two or more firms producing the entire production. In theory pricing/output in economics is always “quality adjusted” (which is one of the hard things in inflation series) Yes, traditionally a natural monopoly is one where if you split them, costs go up. With Google, GP is saying if you split them up quality goes down. Either way there’s “consumer harm”. (I guess very directly if the time to search goes up, the economic price of using Google goes up too)

sn_master 3y ago

I wish they had an option for me to always exclude certain sites from the resulrs

Obscurity4340 3y ago

The Orion browser does not seem able to render Kagi as a search engine when something is searched. It straight up doesn't load anything. What do?

jinushaun 3y ago

Anecdote: I’m not sure what changed with Google last week, but search on mobile is almost unusable now. I see maybe six real results and the more I scroll, the more ads and recommendations that I see. The more I scroll, the less relevant the recommendations become to the point of absurdity. It’s ridiculous and feels like pinterest/Facebook/TikTok.

jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y ago

Google search quality started dropping when they dropped the plus operator

nbittich 3y ago

Google became unusable for me. I have to suffix every search by "reddit" in order to get something useful. Same with stack overflow, I now mainly look at GitHub issues to find what I'm looking for. Man I wish we could just ban specific domains in order to get less shitty results from Google. I tried brave Search and duck duck go, they are just as bad imo.

jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y ago
There's a firefox addon that allows you to remove specific domains from Google's search results (I forgot its name though).