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I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with: >Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget ho

I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with: >Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results. Web search has, for me, become a nasty twisted hall of mirrors well before generative AI. I almose never get fed relevant results, I alsmost always have to go back and quote all my search terms because the search engine decided it didn't really need to use all of them (usually just one.) The only difference is the poison was human generated. generative AI will simply erase the 5% of results that might give me an answer quickly.

jfengel 3y ago
I experience that when I try to google for technical problems I'm having at work, but otherwise searches still go pretty well for me. I just had to google a bunch of races that I wanted to run. The top result was always the event's own web site. When I google some news, relevant news articles always come up. The last search I did was for how to display a ket vector in LaTeX. The top result was the StackExchange article with the right answer. From what I see, certain domains seem to be targeted for exploitation. Programming questions seem to be high up on the list. I wonder if that skews HN readers' perceptions.
- JSavageOne 3y ago
  Google search to retrieve specific factual information is pretty good. Google search to retrieve anything opinion related has been horrible and infested with blogspam for years (hence people searching Reddit to get that kind of info).
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Google search to retrieve product marketing pages is pretty good. Specific factual information searches lead to product marketing pages. Opinion searches lead to product marketing pages. Google is a giant adware tool that’s been taken over by adware SEO sites. The example given - find the product marketing pages for some races - falls directly in its sweet spot. If you venture outside it’ll do its best to get you back into the product marketing sweet spot, and the SEO companies of the world take care of the rest. Search is a lost cause.
  - jamal-kumar 3y ago
    Really? I've been finding it doesn't even find stuff it used to in certain documentation (I'm talking like things it found maybe a year ago), "searching in quotes for this stuff", things that other search engines (bing, kagi) are indexing just fine - And since I've switched to using these engines more when I'm searching things for programming work, it's definitely been a lot more helpful than google which often just seems to be missing a ton now
  - jfengel 3y ago
    I suppose it never occurs to me to search for opinions. I'm not even sure how I'd got about it, even if search weren't broken. Blogspam is what I'd expect to see. I'm more likely to start at a place that aggregates reviews and try to hallucinate which ones were written by people who know what they're talking about. That usually seems to work. I imagine that somewhere out there is a person who bought the product and reviewed it on their blog or made some enthusiastic social media post about it, and that's what you'd want to locate were it not for the spam. But I don't expect any search engine to be able to find it for me.
heavyset_go 3y ago
Sounds like a success if that means people see more ads while trying to find what they actually searched for.
- __loam 3y ago
  Nationalize Google. Nothing will change as long as search is optimized for revenue over user value.
loupol 3y ago
Agreed that web search quality has been deteriorating since much earlier than LLMs gaining popularity. Interestingly, we are in spot right now where I feel that for certain types of queries LLMs can outperform search engines. But from what is shown in the article, it seems like that state might only be temporary, and that in the same way that shitty content farms mastered SEO and polluted search results, we might see the same happening with LLMs that have access to the Internet.
icyberbullyu 3y ago
As someone who has been using search engines since the 90's, I've found that the "old-school" way of formatting your search almost like a database query has gotten significantly worse. It seems like search engines are geared more towards natural language queries now; probably because the old Google-Fu way of doing things wasn't very friendly for people who didn't use computers regularly.
- klyrs 3y ago
  My understanding is that google went from a more traditional database style which supported such queries, to a newer "n-gram" index with a layer of semantic similarity. Notably, you can no longer put a sentence in quotes to only find pages that contain that exact phrase. Also, the order of words matters more now than it used to (where the old search engines treated a space as AND, so order was irrelevant outside of quotes)
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+no+longer+put+a+sentence+in+quotes+to+only+find+pages+that+contain+that+exact+phrase%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+no+longer+put+a+s...
    - klyrs 3y ago
      Hah, perhaps I should edit that to say "reliably."
- interstice 3y ago
  If someone brought back a search engine like this i'd happily use it
meowface 3y ago
I've had the exact same experience. That said, when I do add all the right quotes and conditions to the query to filter out the blog/newsspam drivel, I still - usually - eventually - get pretty good results. Sometimes I have to switch to Bing or even Yandex, but it's rare. Adding "reddit" to queries can be pretty useful. You're prone to get terrible, inaccurate information since it's just random people on an internet forum, but at least it's (usually) actual humans and not blogs trying to SEO-game. (Though one big caveat is searching for products/services. Lots of threads full of bot accounts writing "[link] has been the best [thing], in my experience". They're usually easy to spot, but sometimes they do seem pretty natural until you check the post history.)
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > You're prone to get terrible, inaccurate information since it's just random people on an internet forum, but at least it's (usually) actual humans and not blogs trying to SEO-game. Less and less so. Reddit has always had a bot problem, but it seems to be getting exponentially worse lately. Not just article reposters, but comment reposters, bots that reverse images and videos just to repost, seems like it's at least 75% bot content now.
bnralt 3y ago
Not only that, but you're also left with the issue of parsing what someone else has written. Even when using answers I find from web searches, I often drop results into ChatGPT so I can get a rough idea of what the person is trying to say first, or check if it agrees with my understanding of what's being said.

jfengel 3y ago

I experience that when I try to google for technical problems I'm having at work, but otherwise searches still go pretty well for me. I just had to google a bunch of races that I wanted to run. The top result was always the event's own web site. When I google some news, relevant news articles always come up. The last search I did was for how to display a ket vector in LaTeX. The top result was the StackExchange article with the right answer. From what I see, certain domains seem to be targeted for exploitation. Programming questions seem to be high up on the list. I wonder if that skews HN readers' perceptions.

JSavageOne 3y ago
Google search to retrieve specific factual information is pretty good. Google search to retrieve anything opinion related has been horrible and infested with blogspam for years (hence people searching Reddit to get that kind of info).
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Google search to retrieve product marketing pages is pretty good. Specific factual information searches lead to product marketing pages. Opinion searches lead to product marketing pages. Google is a giant adware tool that’s been taken over by adware SEO sites. The example given - find the product marketing pages for some races - falls directly in its sweet spot. If you venture outside it’ll do its best to get you back into the product marketing sweet spot, and the SEO companies of the world take care of the rest. Search is a lost cause.
- jamal-kumar 3y ago
  Really? I've been finding it doesn't even find stuff it used to in certain documentation (I'm talking like things it found maybe a year ago), "searching in quotes for this stuff", things that other search engines (bing, kagi) are indexing just fine - And since I've switched to using these engines more when I'm searching things for programming work, it's definitely been a lot more helpful than google which often just seems to be missing a ton now
- jfengel 3y ago
  I suppose it never occurs to me to search for opinions. I'm not even sure how I'd got about it, even if search weren't broken. Blogspam is what I'd expect to see. I'm more likely to start at a place that aggregates reviews and try to hallucinate which ones were written by people who know what they're talking about. That usually seems to work. I imagine that somewhere out there is a person who bought the product and reviewed it on their blog or made some enthusiastic social media post about it, and that's what you'd want to locate were it not for the spam. But I don't expect any search engine to be able to find it for me.

heavyset_go 3y ago

Sounds like a success if that means people see more ads while trying to find what they actually searched for.

__loam 3y ago
Nationalize Google. Nothing will change as long as search is optimized for revenue over user value.

loupol 3y ago

Agreed that web search quality has been deteriorating since much earlier than LLMs gaining popularity. Interestingly, we are in spot right now where I feel that for certain types of queries LLMs can outperform search engines. But from what is shown in the article, it seems like that state might only be temporary, and that in the same way that shitty content farms mastered SEO and polluted search results, we might see the same happening with LLMs that have access to the Internet.

icyberbullyu 3y ago

As someone who has been using search engines since the 90's, I've found that the "old-school" way of formatting your search almost like a database query has gotten significantly worse. It seems like search engines are geared more towards natural language queries now; probably because the old Google-Fu way of doing things wasn't very friendly for people who didn't use computers regularly.

klyrs 3y ago
My understanding is that google went from a more traditional database style which supported such queries, to a newer "n-gram" index with a layer of semantic similarity. Notably, you can no longer put a sentence in quotes to only find pages that contain that exact phrase. Also, the order of words matters more now than it used to (where the old search engines treated a space as AND, so order was irrelevant outside of quotes)
- saalweachter 3y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+no+longer+put+a+sentence+in+quotes+to+only+find+pages+that+contain+that+exact+phrase%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+no+longer+put+a+s...
  - klyrs 3y ago
    Hah, perhaps I should edit that to say "reliably."
interstice 3y ago
If someone brought back a search engine like this i'd happily use it

meowface 3y ago

I've had the exact same experience. That said, when I do add all the right quotes and conditions to the query to filter out the blog/newsspam drivel, I still - usually - eventually - get pretty good results. Sometimes I have to switch to Bing or even Yandex, but it's rare. Adding "reddit" to queries can be pretty useful. You're prone to get terrible, inaccurate information since it's just random people on an internet forum, but at least it's (usually) actual humans and not blogs trying to SEO-game. (Though one big caveat is searching for products/services. Lots of threads full of bot accounts writing "[link] has been the best [thing], in my experience". They're usually easy to spot, but sometimes they do seem pretty natural until you check the post history.)

ryandrake 3y ago
> You're prone to get terrible, inaccurate information since it's just random people on an internet forum, but at least it's (usually) actual humans and not blogs trying to SEO-game. Less and less so. Reddit has always had a bot problem, but it seems to be getting exponentially worse lately. Not just article reposters, but comment reposters, bots that reverse images and videos just to repost, seems like it's at least 75% bot content now.

bnralt 3y ago

Not only that, but you're also left with the issue of parsing what someone else has written. Even when using answers I find from web searches, I often drop results into ChatGPT so I can get a rough idea of what the person is trying to say first, or check if it agrees with my understanding of what's being said.