7 ms·

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want.

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works. The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.

sneed_chucker 3y ago
It all comes back to that "marginal user" blog post
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Chilko 3y ago
Indeed, I've had to force myself to start searching in full sentences much more as the results from the old method of keyword searching have steadily deteriorated.
- Lolaccount 3y ago
  You mean, like how we interact with ChatGPT? ;-)
wslh 3y ago
Google does not work. I can show you with a simple example with a few keywords together that does not find the specific resource. I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1]. I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples. Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  > It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want You could not have chose a more affirming counterpoint of an example.
- granzymes 3y ago
  I think you just proved the parent post’s point.
  - wslh 3y ago
    Seems like we live in parallel worlds but I will show you how I am right except you can really proof I am wrong: At Google, they recommend to go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search https://www.google.com/advanced_search so you can write all the keywords you want. In this case I searched for: kvt reverse exploit [1] you can quickly see that google search results are inaccurate and it shows first my HN post because it was very recent. Also the recent article where it is also mentioned and added after I post it here in HN [2] and the following results doesn't end in some correct previous post. I then try again [3] with a more precise search adding kconsole and only found three results without all the keywords while the advanced search says explicitly that all these keywords should be there. Am I missing something? [1] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&as_filetype=&tbs= https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit&as_ep... [2] https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security [3] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit+kconsole&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&as_filetype=&tbs= https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit+kcons...
    - loveparade 3y ago
      Yes, you're missing the point of the poster above you. He's saying that the kind of technical searches you are trying to do are irrelevant to 99.99% of internet users and Google is optimized to give superficial but relevant-looking results to those kinds of people. For that metric Google does "work well" So it's not that Google doesn't work, it's that you're using the wrong tool for your use case. If you want highly technical content or precise keyword search you shouldn't use Google. It's like you're going on Tinder to find a marriage partner.
LtWorf 3y ago
If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.
- itishappy 3y ago
  I bet more people are looking for blogs than docs.
  - LtWorf 3y ago
    My suspicion is that blogs have ads and documentation doesn't, and that's why the results are like this.
    - itishappy 3y ago
      Totally agree! My point is that they both probably contain the same answer and I bet that's all most people care about. I think most of us here have strong preferences for picking the "most appropriate" source, but frankly, I suspect we're weird.
      - LtWorf 3y ago
        In my experience, blogs are mostly young students trying to build an online presence or something similar, and contain bad advice and wrongness.
- THENATHE 3y ago
  If I wanted the docs, I would get the docs. The blogs are useful because the documentation is largely unhelpful due to being overly simplicity or extremely nondescript. The blogs are where it's at because you can see how someone else used that thing
  - smcin 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
I think perhaps the problem was that when you were growing up, the Internet had a much higher percentage of authoritative writings related to a subject, and today's Internet looks a lot more like ChatGPT-generated drivel. Google's results might has changed, but I suspect less so than the Internet as a whole. Older Internet content was weird, and often wrong, but it wasn't an endless expanse of nothingness camouflaged to resemble human content.
- lolinder 3y ago
  While this is true, Google itself is in large part responsible for the internet turning into this wasteland. Most of that garbage content is produced in the name of SEO.
makeitdouble 3y ago
I think Google Search "works" in the same way local newspapers "worked": they provide easy access to what most people want to know in their daily life, including gossip, the weather, the popular events and discussion topics ("melting houses") If you're a German living in Morocco trying to understand Quebec's immigration policies in the original text you'll be fighting the search engine at every turn.
- mym1990 3y ago
  This feels like a good take. I’ve recently been trying to find more information on caveats of Section 179 of the US tax code, and at almost every turn the consensus is to go to a professional(which is what I should do), but for some nagging off hand questions, I was hoping to find some meaningful discourse on it.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Exactly. Google search is not a knowledge finder for power users, it's a content finder for normal people. The fact that it was good at finding knowledge for 10 years or so is entirely incidental to the goals of modern Google.
neotrope 3y ago
Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/occcfdnjdbgjglcbpolkmjnjillkgbcm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  Recently, I searched "(-)-BPAP" -- with the quotes -- looking for the chemical benzofuranylpropylaminopentane, which is typically referred to as (-)-BPAP. EVERY result was for a BiPAP ventilator. So I tried verbatim. It still didn't work. Verbatim + quotation marks. Still nothing. I guess New Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. But this is characteristic of its recent performance. I can't even count the number of times Google disregarded part of my search term and gave me an inane result.
  - junar 3y ago
    Per the grandparent comment: "Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works." Searching "BPAP chemical", "BPAP chemistry", etc. seems to work fine.
  - smcin 3y ago
    > Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. AFAIK, Google search has always ignored parentheses and most punctuation symbols (other than ones that are special to it, like +require_term -exclude_term "...") https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71287971/does-google-now-use-parentheses-didn-t-use-to-how-different-is-it-from-using-the-or-operator?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71287971/does-go...
MrRolleyes 3y ago
> The trick is that Google actually works great. This would be true if we could exclude commercial results. SEO is absolutely destroying search quality.
loveparade 3y ago
I disagree, but it depends on your definition of "working well". Yes, Google works better for my mom these days if you measure whether she is happy with the results she gets. However, the results she gets are mostly misinformation or spam. She just doesn't realize that's the case and is happy with the results regardless. Measuring whether or not results are relevant to the query is the wrong metric to use. You don't want highly relevant misinformation. You want good information.
CapricornNoble 3y ago
Yeah, gone are the days when you could enter a range of 16-digit numbers that started with "4", filetype:xls, and it would return a bunch of Excel spreadsheets from businesses that were storing credit card numbers in plaintext cells. sighs wistfully
drekipus 3y ago
> Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works. uhh....
7speter 3y ago
We have google bard and chatgpt. We should have old google too.
- charlie0 3y ago
  Kagi? Personally, I use mostly ChatGPT, but if I wasn't using that I'd be using Kagi or something like it.
  - 7speter 3y ago
    You use mostly ChatGPT for finding information? When I use it I still double check it's output with a google or duckduckgo search, if I don't something I know is outright wrong.
underwater 3y ago
No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week: - I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed coherent. - I asked Google Home "How do I make overnight oats". It replied, "I found a result for [...], should I read it?" then "The first ingredient is Nutella". That's it, that's all it said. I tried the same search on the web, and every result Google result was spam that was 20 paragraphs of inane blog content with a recipe tacked on the end. Again, ChatGPT then gave me a sane, baseline, recipe. - I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" and then a suggestion an alternative search for "Q: How much caffeine is in an average cup of coffee? A: between 80 to 100 milligrams". It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee. I'm using Google exactly how their product is training me to use it, but the failure modes are all consistent. Google's AI features has not real understanding of the world, so their instant answers are frequently nonsensical. And Google clearly can't filter out SEO garbage. Even if they could filter out SEO garbage, Google's early success killed the golden goose. 99% of web publishers are publishing content for Google, not for their readers and web publishing has become a cynically commercial affair. Individual publishers have by and large moved on from the web to other creator-focused platforms. So, the quality and experience of web content is absolute rubbish. Results are filled with cookie banners, ads, signup prompts, verbose SEO filler, poor writing, lack of authority, etc.
- reactordev 3y ago
  You are using it right however your bias is evident on the results. A 20-something will just scroll through the blog content to get to the recipe at the end. No huss, no fuss. In fact, they’ll open multiple tabs of search results to compare recipes in the time it takes you to gawk at the fact that you have to scroll to the end. Where is the recipe? Why is there a video? Table of contents? No, a 20-something will just flick their screen wildly until they are at the bottom, and scroll up. Give me the results and backtrack to where I’m at. This I think is a result of their upbringing and everyone’s focus on results rather than process. So you may believe you are doing everything correct but you are just going through the motions. The web today is different than it was even 5 years ago. I wish I could search like I used to but we are where we are.
wayfinder 3y ago
I’m sorry but are you trying to speak for all highly educated and technical people? Because as far as I know, I’m both and I find Google just as good as ever, if not much better. The only place I see people complaining about Google is Hacker News and certain parts of Reddit and by no means are the opinions on these sites anywhere near universally shared by most people. And by all means, I think calling yourself highly educated but not being able to adapt slightly when a tool isn’t working right a little rich…
- permo-w 3y ago
  there's no reason a person can't be educated and inflexible. in fact the two often go hand in hand. also, I'm not sure you're using "by all means" correctly
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Google is shit. It finds the 1 percent of the most commonly searched pages, and totally ignores the 99 percent long tail. They should drop the charade and do a directory listing instead, like the "portal" pages of yore.
reaperman 3y ago
Counterpoint (NSFW): No results: "vector plus phallophile" / "vector plus phallophile reviews" / "vector plus phallophilereviews" / "phallophilereviews.com vector plus" vs. Correct results: "site:phallophilereviews.com vector plus" Yes, I have SafeSearch turned OFF. This is happening to pretty much anything that's remotely NSFW on both google.com and amazon.com -- it's getting completely impossible to search for perfectly legal things that are NSFW.
kristopolous 3y ago
Google does this so people will execute more queries, stay longer on the search results, and see more ads. It's classic monopoly exploitation of abusing a captured user for increased profit. They're perfectly capable of making things better, it's just more profitable if they don't.
coldtea 3y ago
>It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want I don't think so. I've been using the "full sentence questions" and fuzzy questions since forever, and very seldom use "site:" and other such more formal constraints you mention. Despite that Google results have been getting worse for the past 5 years at least.
peoplefromibiza 3y ago
> It works better than before for some definition of better that is not "the results are more relevant than before"
nazka 3y ago
What are your sources for this?
lobocinza 3y ago
It doesn't work like ChatGPT at all.

sneed_chucker 3y ago

It all comes back to that "marginal user" blog post

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Chilko 3y ago

Indeed, I've had to force myself to start searching in full sentences much more as the results from the old method of keyword searching have steadily deteriorated.

Lolaccount 3y ago
You mean, like how we interact with ChatGPT? ;-)

wslh 3y ago

Google does not work. I can show you with a simple example with a few keywords together that does not find the specific resource. I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1]. I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples. Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449

BoorishBears 3y ago
> It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want You could not have chose a more affirming counterpoint of an example.
granzymes 3y ago
I think you just proved the parent post’s point.
- wslh 3y ago
  Seems like we live in parallel worlds but I will show you how I am right except you can really proof I am wrong: At Google, they recommend to go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search https://www.google.com/advanced_search so you can write all the keywords you want. In this case I searched for: kvt reverse exploit [1] you can quickly see that google search results are inaccurate and it shows first my HN post because it was very recent. Also the recent article where it is also mentioned and added after I post it here in HN [2] and the following results doesn't end in some correct previous post. I then try again [3] with a more precise search adding kconsole and only found three results without all the keywords while the advanced search says explicitly that all these keywords should be there. Am I missing something? [1] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&as_filetype=&tbs= https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit&as_ep... [2] https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security [3] https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit+kconsole&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&as_filetype=&tbs= https://www.google.com/search?as_q=kvt+reverse+exploit+kcons...
  - loveparade 3y ago
    Yes, you're missing the point of the poster above you. He's saying that the kind of technical searches you are trying to do are irrelevant to 99.99% of internet users and Google is optimized to give superficial but relevant-looking results to those kinds of people. For that metric Google does "work well" So it's not that Google doesn't work, it's that you're using the wrong tool for your use case. If you want highly technical content or precise keyword search you shouldn't use Google. It's like you're going on Tinder to find a marriage partner.

LtWorf 3y ago

If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.

itishappy 3y ago
I bet more people are looking for blogs than docs.
- LtWorf 3y ago
  My suspicion is that blogs have ads and documentation doesn't, and that's why the results are like this.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    Totally agree! My point is that they both probably contain the same answer and I bet that's all most people care about. I think most of us here have strong preferences for picking the "most appropriate" source, but frankly, I suspect we're weird.
    - LtWorf 3y ago
      In my experience, blogs are mostly young students trying to build an online presence or something similar, and contain bad advice and wrongness.
THENATHE 3y ago
If I wanted the docs, I would get the docs. The blogs are useful because the documentation is largely unhelpful due to being overly simplicity or extremely nondescript. The blogs are where it's at because you can see how someone else used that thing
- smcin 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

I think perhaps the problem was that when you were growing up, the Internet had a much higher percentage of authoritative writings related to a subject, and today's Internet looks a lot more like ChatGPT-generated drivel. Google's results might has changed, but I suspect less so than the Internet as a whole. Older Internet content was weird, and often wrong, but it wasn't an endless expanse of nothingness camouflaged to resemble human content.

lolinder 3y ago
While this is true, Google itself is in large part responsible for the internet turning into this wasteland. Most of that garbage content is produced in the name of SEO.

makeitdouble 3y ago

I think Google Search "works" in the same way local newspapers "worked": they provide easy access to what most people want to know in their daily life, including gossip, the weather, the popular events and discussion topics ("melting houses") If you're a German living in Morocco trying to understand Quebec's immigration policies in the original text you'll be fighting the search engine at every turn.

mym1990 3y ago
This feels like a good take. I’ve recently been trying to find more information on caveats of Section 179 of the US tax code, and at almost every turn the consensus is to go to a professional(which is what I should do), but for some nagging off hand questions, I was hoping to find some meaningful discourse on it.
pclmulqdq 3y ago
Exactly. Google search is not a knowledge finder for power users, it's a content finder for normal people. The fact that it was good at finding knowledge for 10 years or so is entirely incidental to the goals of modern Google.

neotrope 3y ago

Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/occcfdnjdbgjglcbpolkmjnjillkgbcm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
Recently, I searched "(-)-BPAP" -- with the quotes -- looking for the chemical benzofuranylpropylaminopentane, which is typically referred to as (-)-BPAP. EVERY result was for a BiPAP ventilator. So I tried verbatim. It still didn't work. Verbatim + quotation marks. Still nothing. I guess New Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. But this is characteristic of its recent performance. I can't even count the number of times Google disregarded part of my search term and gave me an inane result.
- junar 3y ago
  Per the grandparent comment: "Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works." Searching "BPAP chemical", "BPAP chemistry", etc. seems to work fine.
- smcin 3y ago
  > Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. AFAIK, Google search has always ignored parentheses and most punctuation symbols (other than ones that are special to it, like +require_term -exclude_term "...") https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71287971/does-google-now-use-parentheses-didn-t-use-to-how-different-is-it-from-using-the-or-operator?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71287971/does-go...

MrRolleyes 3y ago

> The trick is that Google actually works great. This would be true if we could exclude commercial results. SEO is absolutely destroying search quality.

loveparade 3y ago

I disagree, but it depends on your definition of "working well". Yes, Google works better for my mom these days if you measure whether she is happy with the results she gets. However, the results she gets are mostly misinformation or spam. She just doesn't realize that's the case and is happy with the results regardless. Measuring whether or not results are relevant to the query is the wrong metric to use. You don't want highly relevant misinformation. You want good information.

CapricornNoble 3y ago

Yeah, gone are the days when you could enter a range of 16-digit numbers that started with "4", filetype:xls, and it would return a bunch of Excel spreadsheets from businesses that were storing credit card numbers in plaintext cells. sighs wistfully

drekipus 3y ago

> Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works. uhh....

7speter 3y ago

We have google bard and chatgpt. We should have old google too.

charlie0 3y ago
Kagi? Personally, I use mostly ChatGPT, but if I wasn't using that I'd be using Kagi or something like it.
- 7speter 3y ago
  You use mostly ChatGPT for finding information? When I use it I still double check it's output with a google or duckduckgo search, if I don't something I know is outright wrong.

underwater 3y ago

No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week: - I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed coherent. - I asked Google Home "How do I make overnight oats". It replied, "I found a result for [...], should I read it?" then "The first ingredient is Nutella". That's it, that's all it said. I tried the same search on the web, and every result Google result was spam that was 20 paragraphs of inane blog content with a recipe tacked on the end. Again, ChatGPT then gave me a sane, baseline, recipe. - I searched Google for "how much caffeine is in coffee". It gave me a calculator that said, "40 mg" and then a suggestion an alternative search for "Q: How much caffeine is in an average cup of coffee? A: between 80 to 100 milligrams". It turns out the calculator was normalizing the caffeine content to caffeine per 100mg of coffee. I'm using Google exactly how their product is training me to use it, but the failure modes are all consistent. Google's AI features has not real understanding of the world, so their instant answers are frequently nonsensical. And Google clearly can't filter out SEO garbage. Even if they could filter out SEO garbage, Google's early success killed the golden goose. 99% of web publishers are publishing content for Google, not for their readers and web publishing has become a cynically commercial affair. Individual publishers have by and large moved on from the web to other creator-focused platforms. So, the quality and experience of web content is absolute rubbish. Results are filled with cookie banners, ads, signup prompts, verbose SEO filler, poor writing, lack of authority, etc.

reactordev 3y ago
You are using it right however your bias is evident on the results. A 20-something will just scroll through the blog content to get to the recipe at the end. No huss, no fuss. In fact, they’ll open multiple tabs of search results to compare recipes in the time it takes you to gawk at the fact that you have to scroll to the end. Where is the recipe? Why is there a video? Table of contents? No, a 20-something will just flick their screen wildly until they are at the bottom, and scroll up. Give me the results and backtrack to where I’m at. This I think is a result of their upbringing and everyone’s focus on results rather than process. So you may believe you are doing everything correct but you are just going through the motions. The web today is different than it was even 5 years ago. I wish I could search like I used to but we are where we are.

wayfinder 3y ago

I’m sorry but are you trying to speak for all highly educated and technical people? Because as far as I know, I’m both and I find Google just as good as ever, if not much better. The only place I see people complaining about Google is Hacker News and certain parts of Reddit and by no means are the opinions on these sites anywhere near universally shared by most people. And by all means, I think calling yourself highly educated but not being able to adapt slightly when a tool isn’t working right a little rich…

permo-w 3y ago
there's no reason a person can't be educated and inflexible. in fact the two often go hand in hand. also, I'm not sure you're using "by all means" correctly

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

Google is shit. It finds the 1 percent of the most commonly searched pages, and totally ignores the 99 percent long tail. They should drop the charade and do a directory listing instead, like the "portal" pages of yore.

reaperman 3y ago

Counterpoint (NSFW): No results: "vector plus phallophile" / "vector plus phallophile reviews" / "vector plus phallophilereviews" / "phallophilereviews.com vector plus" vs. Correct results: "site:phallophilereviews.com vector plus" Yes, I have SafeSearch turned OFF. This is happening to pretty much anything that's remotely NSFW on both google.com and amazon.com -- it's getting completely impossible to search for perfectly legal things that are NSFW.

kristopolous 3y ago

Google does this so people will execute more queries, stay longer on the search results, and see more ads. It's classic monopoly exploitation of abusing a captured user for increased profit. They're perfectly capable of making things better, it's just more profitable if they don't.

coldtea 3y ago

>It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want I don't think so. I've been using the "full sentence questions" and fuzzy questions since forever, and very seldom use "site:" and other such more formal constraints you mention. Despite that Google results have been getting worse for the past 5 years at least.

peoplefromibiza 3y ago

> It works better than before for some definition of better that is not "the results are more relevant than before"

nazka 3y ago

What are your sources for this?

lobocinza 3y ago

It doesn't work like ChatGPT at all.