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You will never, ever, ever, ever convince me that search is "better" now than it ever has been, or even more than a few years ago. This seems completely delusio

You will never, ever, ever, ever convince me that search is "better" now than it ever has been, or even more than a few years ago. This seems completely delusional to me. I define good search as me being able to quickly find what I am looking for. Approximately 1-2 years ago, I forget when it started, I noticed weird instances where no matter what I put into the engine and how long I scrolled or clicked around I absolutely could not find what I was looking for and gave up. I remember vividly the first time it happened, because it startled me. Google had never been like that. At first it was rare, then more often, these days it became so unusable I had to put it down. I think my final breaking point was trying to find the score of a sports game that had just happened a few hours before and being completely unable to. That's unimportant info, but since I frequently used google often in my day-to-day job, the inability to find what I need is a real serious issue. Bing has been great so far.

JohnMakin 3y ago
Good example and fun exercise for anyone to try - input to google search "Migrating off of GCP." You will only find documentation and videos how to migrate TO GCP. Yea, I don't buy that google mysteriously forgot how the english language works, sorry.
- cma 3y ago
  Google never worked well with that kind of language processing task in the heyday of its usefulness either. Searching for "dresses that aren't red" in image search returned almost 100% red dress images (maybe better now). Extremely common words like "off" and "of" were essentially ignored.
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    You can try the same experiment with any combination of words, the results are basically the same.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I think the worse part is that there were tools around this and they also don't work anymore. Try to search "football -American" and you'll still end up with the search for American Football. search "football -nfl" and it will instead try to inject news of local college/high school teams instead of resorting to FIFA or other assossiations for the worldwide term. I never expected such boolean logic to be perfect, but it barely even seems to try anymore.

JohnMakin 3y ago

Good example and fun exercise for anyone to try - input to google search "Migrating off of GCP." You will only find documentation and videos how to migrate TO GCP. Yea, I don't buy that google mysteriously forgot how the english language works, sorry.

cma 3y ago
Google never worked well with that kind of language processing task in the heyday of its usefulness either. Searching for "dresses that aren't red" in image search returned almost 100% red dress images (maybe better now). Extremely common words like "off" and "of" were essentially ignored.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  You can try the same experiment with any combination of words, the results are basically the same.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I think the worse part is that there were tools around this and they also don't work anymore. Try to search "football -American" and you'll still end up with the search for American Football. search "football -nfl" and it will instead try to inject news of local college/high school teams instead of resorting to FIFA or other assossiations for the worldwide term. I never expected such boolean logic to be perfect, but it barely even seems to try anymore.