18 ms·

Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search [pdf]

276 points by DanielleMolloy 3y ago

gniv 3y ago
It seems that the answer from their study is mostly no (reading the conclusion), but they seem reluctant to admit it, so they focus mostly on results being mediocre and spammy.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  [flagged]
- j2kun 3y ago
  If the answer was yes, the title wouldn't be phrased as a question
rickdg 3y ago
Google is a clear case for why you should pick a service because of it's business model.
edpichler 3y ago
I switched to Duckduckgo as a default search engine for a year and I never needed to come back. More diverse results, fewer ads, and less SEO hacking. I think Google dropped the ball. This topic is becoming common in HN.
steve1977 3y ago
[flagged]
- EvanKelly 3y ago
  What is your preferred method of searching the internet? (not asking with snark, but genuine interest in what people find delivers better results)
  - im3w1l 3y ago
    Wikipedia for objective things (except politically charged things). Ask friends etc for everything else.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    I don’t search too often anymore, but as a „classical“ search engine I use Bing. Then I also use DEVONagent from time to time. https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent But often I just follow links from „trustworthy“ sources like HN for example.
barbazoo 3y ago
Kagi allows users to adjust the ranking [0] of certain domains. I'm not sure if that's shared among all users but it would certainly help. [0] https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features
- mplanchard 3y ago
  Fellow kagi user here. I have been very happy with the service so far. Switched over to it when they announced their new pricing model a little while ago. It is more than worth the cost. Even without tweaking, the quality of results is far higher than what I had gotten used to getting from DDG or DDG with !g. The ability to rank domains is amazing though.
  - FergusArgyll 3y ago
    Every time I see someone talk about this feature on HN (almost every day) I get jealous, it's such a good idea. When I'm searching (on google) I'm always thinking; when I get Kagi I'm gonna downrank this site, uprank that one etc.
    - alabhyajindal 3y ago
      I'm curious, why haven't you switched to Kagi yet?
      - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
        For me… I don’t want my search tied to my credit card. I go through lengths to keep my digital and analog domains as separate as possible.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > don’t want my search tied to my credit card Pay with Bitcoin [1]. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
What's Google's incentive to be "good" now? They own the search market anyway, and the more time you waste on their platform searching for what you want to find, the more ads you see and the more money Google makes. What else are those 97% people gonna do, "Google on Bing" instead? So for them, being bad is actually more profitable than being good, meaning there's a conflict of interest between what Google provides and what their users want, but since there's basically no equivalent competition, they get away with it laughing all the way to the bank.
- Topgamer7 3y ago
  You have to balance being good with maximizing profit. If you aren't good, your userbase will go elsewhere.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Where will they go when Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all default to Google and plenty of Edge users also switch to Google? Due to the defaults it's the only search engine most people ever heard of. Think of Plato's cave allegory. If all your life you've only used Google and never anything else, making it the ground truth for you, how would you know it's bad in order to motivate you to look elsewhere?
    - bgirard 3y ago
      > Where will they go when Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all default to Google and plenty of Edge users also switch to Google? LLMs
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        LLMs are still far away from the daily mainstream usage Google gets, and since all devices default to Google, and people never change those, they'll stay on Google and only occasionally switch to LLMs for more advanced tasks.
      - 3y ago
GoToRO 3y ago
Today I searched for a product, google found a local site with the item, I clicked on the link and I was redirected to aliexpress. How they can not catch this?
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Internet-scale web crawlers are hard to hide. You can just set up a bunch of domains, and flag any IPs that repeatedly visit them as likely crawlers; then serve malicious content to the rest.
- saalweachter 3y ago
  Try going to the URL directly, and try curling the URL with a referrer of Google. There's a thing that's been happening the last year or two where compromised web servers serve the intended content unless there's a referrer of Google (and maybe Bing?). The site looks normal to the owner, or to crawlers, but when a user clicks through from Google it redirects them to a spam site. I mostly see it with restaurants getting hijacked by herbal quackery.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  You need to learn more about cloaking. This is a fascinating topic. There are many techniques to show different results to Google and a real web user, like checking the user agent, checking the ASN for the originating IP, checking for indications of a real browser, etc.
pants2 3y ago
> We find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. [...] We further observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns. I think this is an excellent methodology for testing the quality of search results. I would love to see a standard search engine test and scoring system based on this, maybe similar to some of the LLM scoring systems.
- ryanisnan 3y ago
  Forgive my naivety, but wouldn't a simple way for a search engine (like Kagi) to avoid falling victim here to detect affiliate link programs? There's got to be a small handful of patterns for affiliate link tracking: 1. Domain Interception & HTTP redirects 2. Tracking codes embedded in the URL directly
  - pants2 3y ago
    It looks like Kagi does this[1]: > Kagi surfaces shopping results featuring unbiased reviews and no affiliate links to help you identify the best product across categories. Top results include discussions focused on helping you find the best item to purchase - you are not bombarded with affiliate links and ads. Continue to scroll and you will see product comparisons across multiple vendors so you can pick what best suites you. Kagi's shopping search will always return a detailed discussion of which product to buy not a competition amongst advertisers promoting where you should buy. Kagi is focused on providing you the best results to make an informed decision not polluted by affiliate links and advertisements. 1. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
    - MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
      Kagi is better than Google, but just yesterday it returned the top link to Amazon-linking “check the price for this item on Amazon right now” affiliate spam. So it’s not perfect.
jsnell 3y ago
I don't know, feels like a paper titled "Is Google Getting Worse" could have benefited from actually looking at Google results rather than only results of other search engines. Edit: This got downvoted to hell, so let me be more explicit. This study did not look at Google results, the title is pure clickbait. They used Startpage results as a proxy for Google results. I don't think that's a valid assumption, even if Startpage is using Google's index.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- j2kun 3y ago
  Using a reasonable proxy is not "pure clickbait", though it may be misleading. It adds an additional assumption about the Google results not being tampered with by Startpage, but it seems like a reasonable one, compared to the alternative of Google doctoring the search results when detecting a scraper and/or doing personalization. If the authors have done their due diligence and confirmed the results from Startpage are actually Google results, then I don't see why they couldn't claim so in their title.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    The authors did not do any work to establish it as a reasonable proxy. We know that's the case, because they don't describe any of that work in the paper. they just state that they're using this proxy measure, and then seem to be using Startpage and Google interchangably for the rest of the paper. Sure, if they'd actually done the searches on Google, the title would not be outright dishonest. But they didn't, so this defense of yours is just absurd. It's pretty obvious why the results won't be the same: the feature sets of the search engines are different despite being based on the same index. Startpage's own documentation even has a page on how and why the results are different! (Personalization is a part of the Google feature set, and has to be taken into account when considering the results. It's also a part of the Bing feature set. This didn't stop them from reporting the results of their testing on Bing in detail.)
    - 3y ago
miyuru 3y ago
I recently caught myself that I unconsciously retry my google searches by adding more keywords. I also noticed that small sites, blogs, forums are gone from google searches. Now I am using 3 search engines. Bing for Normal searches. Google for local(country) searches. Yandex for small sites, blogs, forums.
- Ckirby 3y ago
  [dead]
- pants2 3y ago
  BTW, Kagi has a dedicated "Forums" toggle at the top of every search result page. It's very useful. Google used to have this but removed it.
  - chikitabanana 3y ago
    I've found adding "forum" to my query on Google works decently
  - miyuru 3y ago
    Unfortunately Kagi seems to have a US based pricing. I will ask them if they plan to add region based pricing. Edit: They aren't likely to add it. https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing
- sandworm101 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - n3storm 3y ago
    Every month I fallback less to Google, from DDG. Google is becoming ABetterSearchForAmazon.
    - le-mark 3y ago
101008 3y ago
Are there stats* of Google Search across the years? I felt I don't use Google as much as I used to. And it isn't because "I know more stuff", but mainly because the way we use internet has changed. I wonder if kids or teens (who most of them don't know how to use an email inbox) would use Google... (I guess yeah?) * Of course, the stats should include the total amount of internet users globally, or normalize the amount of searches based on that...
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Long-term stats are tricky because of how much of the landscape has changed. There's the desktop/mobile split, developing countries increasing their internet use, heavier use of apps, growth and decline of results getting indexed, and change in what we search for.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  Definitely I think the way we use the internet has changed profoundly. There are a lot of apps that provide useful information but they may not be made indexable by search engines. Much less useful information is simply out there on the open web, and much of it are locked behind logins. There were previous deals like Twitter sending a completely copy of all new tweets to Google, but these are basically dying. It's especially interesting since you mentioned normalizing searches by the number of internet users. The country with the largest number of internet users is China, with more than 1 billion of them. And they don't have access to Google. And their local copycat, Baidu, is years behind Google in terms of technological sophistication and simultaneously years ahead of Google in terms of user hostility. So what do Internet users in China do in a post-search world? They simply open various apps and use the full text search feature of different apps. For general knowledge they might open ZhiHu and search there; for something resembling the old-time personal blogs by individual users they might open XiaoHongShu and search there; for short videos they might open Douyin and for long ones Bilibili. For reaching an organization be it a store or a museum or a hospital or a government department they might open WeChat and search there for an official account or mini program (a mini program is a website that uses WeChat APIs and can only be opened in WeChat). I made these observations on a recent trip to China and it's clear to me what a post-search world looks like because China is already there.
charlotte-fyi 3y ago
It's not worse when you append site:reddit.com to every single search but this is only a function of the fact that reddit can't figure out how to build their own search. Outside of maybe programming stuff where I'll still click on links, I don't think google has driven me organically to a new site in years.
- azangru 3y ago
  > It's not worse when you append site:reddit.com to every single search Could you give some examples of search queries that would benefit from filtering by reddit? (My own example: I've been looking for recommendations for a solid Linux laptop. A good result would be a list of reviews written from personal experience of owning such laptops. Reddit was useless for that.)
  - technion 3y ago
    "Armoured core 6 can't beat pca enforcer walton" People actually discussing how they did this is the only real answer, generic websites with pictures and descriptions of his weapons never help.
ben30 3y ago
I've noticed a pattern with 'free' services like Facebook and now Google. With simple tasks like checking emails or finding phone numbers in contacts, there's no friction. However, Facebook lost my trust long ago as it seemed more focused on capturing my attention for ad revenue, leading to time wastage. I initially trusted Google for its efficient and seemingly fair service, where smart ad-targeting was the price for speed. But now, Google feels similar to Facebook; it's harder to switch to alternatives like Kagi on iPhone due to financial ties with Apple. This shift in Google's approach, prioritizing trapping attention over genuine service, is frustrating. I'd rather pay for a search service that values my time and provides real utility, than endure the hidden costs of 'free' services.
- pg_1234 3y ago
  In last 5 years I have noticed a clear decline in the usability of Google Maps as ... a Map. Increasingly you have to pick a destination and blindly follow directions, your ability to use it as an informational tool, but exercise your own judgement seems to have been intentionally crippled.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    I can’t even blindly follow it. The last two or three times I’ve tried to use Google maps for directions, it has redirected me through walking trails and bike paths. Each time I closed it and just used Apple Maps to get where I needed to go.
- cj 3y ago
  > I'd rather pay for a search service that values my time and provides real utility, than endure the hidden costs of 'free' services. How much would you pay for Google search without ads? Or more importantly, how much would the average Google user be willing to pay? If you live in the US and click 3-4 ads per month, you're generating ~$10-20/mo in revenue for Google from advertisers. (Like you, I would also love to pay for an ad free Google, but sadly advertisers are willing to pay Google a lot more money than consumers are willing to)
  - 3y ago
dimitrios1 3y ago
I am not sure if Google has empirically gotten worse or not, but I do know that I very often have to use multiple search engines more often than not now in order to find the information I am looking for.
- ijhuygft776 3y ago
  For me, the biggest quality drop literally happened overnight. It was when they removed the PLUS operator and any other changes that they made that same day. There was many other small changes that made it worst, but that's nothing in comparison. I think that was the day Google became evil.
jeffbee 3y ago
Oh, what a methodology. They ran with the meme of "best pants" having bad results, when the problem with "best pants" is that it's a nonsense query. I personally cannot recall ever doing a "best pants" query, and the results of such queries don't factor into whether I think a search engine is good.
KorematsuFredt 3y ago
Google is better than Bing and anything else for my day today work. Few things I miss though : 1. Spam is more than in past. The outrage porn, clickbait headlines etc. are lot more than in past. 2. Dominance of few domains despite poor quality content. For lot of coding related queries, dev.to, hashnode etc. appear in top results despite being clearly spammy. 3. Paywalled content. Most irritating part is sites like medium which appear in top results, have high value content and yet are behind paywall. Internet is growing and so are Google's problems but I think they are still on top of things.
rmbyrro 3y ago
[flagged]
ElonsNightmare 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
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ado__dev 3y ago
Anecdotally, yes. Google search for topics I'm unfamiliar with/wanting to learn about all lead to low quality, SEO-optimized to hell, clik-baity sites that are just riddled with ads. I have to add "reddit" to most searches just to find semi-relevant content. But Google search for topics i'm super familiar with and just need a transactional search to look something up tend to be much better and generally the fastest way to accomplish a task.
- jansan 3y ago
  Right, adding "discussion", "forum" and even "reddit" to the search term increases quality dramatically. Also, Google is still great to search websites. I gave up on Stackoverflow's own search but add "site:stackoverflow.com" to my searches on google. BTW, maybe someone wants to create a very simple webpage with a search mask that allows adding a few (customizable) terms and options and simply forwards that to Google's search when pressing enter.
- Avamander 3y ago
  I've started using uBlockList to block those sites and it does clean it up quite a bit. I assume those sites also work for some, but they're usually of low quality to me so I block them. The second type of searches you describe seem to be better so far, but I've stumbled upon a bunch of obviously generated garbage recently. So not sure how long it'll hold. I've tried things like DDG, YaCy, Bing and others, but often Google is just significantly better (but not necessarily good).
jsheard 3y ago
Google Images is filling up with AI slop to the point of unusability for some purposes, even content that isn't actively engaging in SEO shenanigans is getting pushed to the top. In some cases even the key image that Google displays first on a normal search is fake, like when searching for the "tank man" prioritized showing a fake AI selfie from the mans perspective. It's still there in fact, just not the first result anymore, but Google might have demoted it manually after the backlash. Looking to browse works by a specific artist? Good luck, Google evidently can't tell the difference between a genuine J. C. Leyendecker piece and anything shat out by a "Leyendecker style" image generation model. Search for "Yoji Shinkawa" and this https://i.imgur.com/RYghaoY.png https://i.imgur.com/RYghaoY.png is currently the first thing you see, which isn't even close to his style, but Google has somehow determined it's the image that best represents him. The full images page shows his actual work but interspersed about half-and-half with AI imitations. My speculation is that Google prioritizes showing recent results, presumed to be the freshest most up-to-date information, but of course for a historical event like Tiananmen Square or an artist who died in 1951, nearly all of the fresh results past a certain point are AI simulacra.
- KomoD 3y ago
  Yeah that is a huge problem. Another search to try is "hand reference", tons of AI garbage
- fouc 3y ago
  I dislike the recency bias so much.
  - guhcampos 3y ago
    I can't count how many times I needed a "until X" button, but it's an ever increasing trend.
- spansoa 3y ago
  I find DuckDuckGo's[0] (DDG) images feature to be a brilliant replacement for Google Images/Lens. Google Images doesn't let you view the actual resource anymore and disabled that feature years ago. DDG's image feature is crucial since it doesn't bring you to the site itself, it just points to the raw URL of where the asset resides and you can easily download it, without hunting the graphics down on the site itself, although DDG does offer a link to the page where the image was found. The important bit is pressing the 'View File' button. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/
Ckirby 3y ago
[dead]
NelsonMinar 3y ago
I wonder if "affiliate links" is a reasonable proxy for page quality? I wouldn't use it directly in a ranking function but it might be a nice automated way to estimate whether results are good.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  In a good way or bad way? Affiliate links might bias reviews, but their presence might mean the review was high enough quality that enough people see it and click on affiliate links.
  - NelsonMinar 3y ago
    I mean the presence of affiliate links indicates the page is likely spam. I bet that's a good heuristic more often than it's a bad one.
pembrook 3y ago
Google created this problem by slurping up all advertising money from open web activity for themselves. The more market share of online display advertising they gained, the worse their results got. Why? Because the only way to have a large volume of authentic content being produced at scale is to have a healthy ecosystem of independent sites that are profitable based on display ads. As much as HN-types hate advertising, it was literally the only thing that made the web of yesteryear so special. Things like Adsense enabled blogs on tons of niche topics to be monetized and thus we had better open web content. When Google decided there was more money to be made off ads before you even clicked on a search result, that ironically was what ended up killing search. Now the only way to monetize content from search is via shill company blogs, affiliate marketing listicles (10 best dog toys), etc. So that’s what we get. For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn’t even crack page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  >For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn’t even crack page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is. So basically the problem of search engines and Google in particular is discovery. All early Google adapters say that they loved Google because it gave them relevant results and because they discovered new websites on Google. Nowadays they "discover" SEO spam, ads and the usual suspects like the most popular sites in that search category. That's why we need "discovery engine" for Web, something like TikTok but adapted to Web. If search engines were the evolution of web directories, we need to think about how we can evolve search engines.
tambourine_man 3y ago
I visited a small country in my last vacation. I ended up bringing a bit of money back because I was in a hurry I thought it would be easy to exchange back at home, even at worse rates. I live in a big city after all. Of course, I was very wrong. I spent an afternoon Googling every possible incantation only to get useless AI generated text, travel agency sites or simply unrelated content. I was about to accept my loss when I tried Kagi. The first page showed an exchange that accepted the currency. Very far from me and with terrible rates, but still. Anecdata and all, but the fact is that I'm using Kagi more and more and it's winning my trust and good will fast.
- odysseus 3y ago
  What many people do in this case is to keep the money for the next time you visit the country. (or as souvenirs)
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    It would have been an expensive souvenir. And I don’t travel all that much. Also, inflation and even outright currency replacements are somewhat common in smaller economies.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  This sounds like an ad for Kagi, though.
  - wiether 3y ago
    Why would Kagi pay someone to promote them on HN when there's already dozens of praise everyday here? Even as a happy customer, I can see how suspect this praise can be, but remember that HN is exactly who Kagi was created for. And I don't remember having spend $10 a month on something that had that much impact on my daily life. It's _just_ a search engine, but I do about 50 search a day, and having great results each time while the other one is giving me more and more garbage results is huge. So I completely understand why people satisfied with Kagi can be noisy about how great they think it is.
summerlight 3y ago
I don't know if the overall search quality has degraded or not, but SEO has been become definitely a much more severe issue than ever before. Google is the main target for this attack for obvious reasons but no other search engines are really immune to this. I'm skeptical if this can be tackled by any technical solutions; the problem is not just a specific type of SEO spamming but the structure where the enemies are constantly optimizing against your fundamental goal.
- d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
  but the structure where the enemies are constantly optimizing against your fundamental goal. Like companies avoiding taxes.
guhcampos 3y ago
We're back to the pre-Google era and suddenly I'm aggressively bookmarking stuff like it's 1995.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  I recommend not just bookmarking, but downloading a copy. Either a webarchive file or manually extract the main content from there (Reader mode in browsers is great help). Link rots happen. More than half of my bookmarks don't work.
  - guhcampos 3y ago
    Yes!!! I've been playing around with SingleFile and other similar software to try and hoard as much useful data as I can. And I've been mocking preppers for all these years.
    - tenebrisalietum 3y ago
      An acquaintance of my second cousin has experimented with SingleFile CLI (https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli) and she reports it works great (it is rather heavyweight because it does invoke headless Chromium or even Firefox if you set it up right).
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    it also never hurts to throw the URL into archive.org. This will archive it for everyone else too
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- renegat0x0 3y ago
  On the other hand it is not 1995. Time has moved on. I wrote a Simple RSS feed, that also serves as search engine for bookmarks. I am able to run it in attick on raspberry pi. We do not have to rely so heavily on google. https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive It is true that it does not serve me as google, or kagi replacement. It is a very nice addition though. With a little bit off determination I do not have to be so dependent on google. Here is also a dump of known domains. Some are personal. https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database ...and my bookmarks https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database Some more years, and google can go to hell.
charlieyu1 3y ago
The worst thing Google allow phishing sites in sponsors. There are many cases of people searching for a website and lands on the phishing site instead, getting credit card details stolen.
nostromo 3y ago
Google search went from critical for me to irrelevant overnight with ChatGPT 4. Like, literally irrelevant. I'm still watching YouTube, using Gmail, and occasionally checking out something on Google Shopping if I want to find something locally instead of on Amazon. But I use Google search about 90% less now than I did a year ago.
araes 3y ago
This paper does not make sense to me. They used Startpage (https://www.startpage.com https://www.startpage.com) as a proxy for Google results ("result pages of Google (by proxy of Startpage)" in a discussion of Google results? Except, if you put the same search in Startpage and Google, you get different results. Image results especially are quite different. Text results were mostly just a reorganization on my quick tests. (Tried the title of the paper as its own search "Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search") Edit: One other notable result is from Figure 3, that a huge percentage of the results now are Amazon and Youtube. Many orders of magnitude in most cases. Amazon (3000-4000), NYTimes (1000), Walmart (~500?), Insider/PCMag/Tomsguide (~50?)
- yellow_lead 3y ago
  Since google search is highly personalized and localized, this may not matter, and may be why you see different results. > Startpage delivers Google search results via our proprietary personal data protection technology.
vlark 3y ago
The TL;DR = Not really, according to our methods & analysis. But maybe.
ricardo81 3y ago
Quite likely underreporting affiliate links due to obfuscation like cloaking, hiding redirects behind javascript (they mention in the paper not rendering the page), using JS and a POST, other URL minifiers etc. One interesting solution to the problem is to have more than one dominant search engine and its algorithmic choices, having half a dozen web-scale engines with some variation at least gives the user a choice into other avenues of information discovery. (There isn't really much point in using Startpage and DDG here since they're effectively meta search engines of Google and Bing). For SEOs in English speaking countries there is not much point in thinking beyond pleasing Google. Clearly AI and whack-a-mole spam sites have been a problem for a while due to the prevalance of people tacking on 'reddit' to their query to find other humans talking about stuff.
skymast 3y ago
[dead]
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
Consider using ublacklist[1]. I don't see SEO junk like Pinterest, Tutorialspoint, Javatpoint, geeksforgeeks, etc at all in my searches. [1]: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
- agubelu 3y ago
  I didn't know this exists, thanks. Every time I google anything programming-related looking for the docs, and the official docs are buried under a pile of SEO shit, I die inside a little. This is particularly egregious with Python, and I suppose it must be just as bad or worse in the JS ecosystem.
  - bluish29 3y ago
    And here are some lists for ublacklist that can help you use it easily [1] [1] https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
hotep99 3y ago
One of my biggest complaints about Google is the prioritization of pop culture slop over everything else. I feel like I'm frequently getting auto-corrected because some Netflix show is titled with a pun of a phrase or there is a dramatization of some historical figure that Google considers more relevant than the real person.
- foofoo4u 3y ago
  Google "Queen Cleopatra" is a good example for me. 95% of the results are about the Netflix documentary. There is bodies of work dedicated to the history and legacy of this queen. Quality content, produced by leading academics, historians and universities. And yet Google insists I should know everything about this poor production (a bit of an understatement) and nothing else, except for a wiki article as one of the results (Good job Google, you at least got this bit right). Google knows so much about me. And yet it continues to act as though it doesn't.
  - linehedonist 3y ago
    I think it’s the word ”Queen” (which is not normally used to refer to the ancient ruler). If I just google “Cleopatra” I only see results about the historical figure.
- deleted 3y ago
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AlienRobot 3y ago
>The study finds an inverse relationship between a page’s optimization level and its perceived expertise What if Google flipped its SEO weights from positive to negative?
maxglute 3y ago
I wonder what percent of wiki entries are being taken over by AI writing. I feel like I wouldn't know with wiki style language. There was at least a few TV tropes entries that I suspected, only because the humor and observation felt off.
Gud 3y ago
Yes. Google used to be amazing, then it turned into an advertisement company. Slowly at first, then about a decade ago the pace increased. But the worst part is, Google SEO has infected the entire web and made it into complete garbage. Hopefully, this last decade or so will just be a blip before we return to baseline, where it can be wild and free again.
andai 3y ago
Tried using Google Bard. It gave me complete nonsense. It cited the sources for the nonsense, so I checked them: AI generated SEO spam pages. Gave me a good laugh. (By comparison, Phind gave the correct answer, and high quality sources.)
frantic2821 3y ago
I knew I wasn't the only one thinking this lol - glad it's proven by an investigation How does one think Google is planning to change it's ranking system?
gumballindie 3y ago
It is. My suspicion is that they are using ai for search results considering how inreliable it's become. That's why searching for "sinus inflammation" used to yield results for penis inflammation for a while. That one seems to have been resolved. However I am still getting completely unrelated results every now and then, indicating they are having serious unresolved search engine issues.
foofoo4u 3y ago
Google, YouTube, etc., they're all getting worse. I'm finding it ever more difficult to learn anything anymore from the internet. Whether it's learning how to play the guitar, how to fish, weight lifting or how to do mostly anything, I get trash results. Google results are exclusively shallow content, most of which are trying to sell me on something. YouTube is full of short videos with click baity subjects entirely irrelevant to what I actually entered: "Don't make this {topic} mistake!", "This one trick will make you better at {topic}!", "Top 10 ways to become a pro at {topic} in two weeks!". Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding me, which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-down of society, I've naturally gravitated towards books. Books are leagues better in terms of quality of content. They are more detailed and thorough. It's a richer experience so far.
- robotnikman 3y ago
  >Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding me, which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-down of society This part really worries me right here. We don't know the long term ramifications of the modern day internet, but so far they do not look good.
  - toss1 3y ago
    And the people making the algorithms & internet interfaces could not give a flying fork less about those long term external consequences . . .
- digitalsushi 3y ago
  Steel that was formed before we started making nuclear contamination, known as low-background steel or pre-war steel, often in the form of old naval vessels and other large, old, steel infrastructure, has a special value to us. It can be used for building instruments with high sensitivity to radiation, as the steel made since becomes polluted with what is now part of the world. I see a strong metaphor for literature authored before a specific time, roughly when the web came to be, or certainly when two way discourse on a page, or aggregation, became prevalent. And certainly far before bespoke communications targeted at us, as individuals or interest groups. If the modern web were air it would taste of metal; I have a fear that I will become biased that older texts are superior for the sole reason that modern texts can be assumed inferior.
drawkward 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bunsenhoneydew 3y ago
I gave up on Google a couple of years ago. I used DDG for a while but often had to jump back (!g) to Google for some things. Now I pay for Kagi (been a year or two) and there’s no going back for me. I hardly ever even need to scroll down to find what I need, it’s just there. Saves me so much time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
iancmceachern 3y ago
It's AI, people using it vs not. And the AI is ever changing, trained on the internet, so it will be a self fulfilling constructive interference thing. If people keep using AI to write articles based on their competitors websites, eventually it will just be ai talking to ai.
iteratethis 3y ago
I don't understand Google anymore. Surely people can relate to the situation where you end up on an article based on some technical query you have. The article repeats your question 7 times, has endless casually-related filler text that still does not answer the question and then ends with: try to unplug it. It is so freaking obvious that it's a malicious content farm, but Google with all of its technical might seem unable or unwilling to detect it. If tech can't do it, organize some type of curation or feedback? Same for image search. You search for "red flower Thailand" and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. The idea that Google is spectacularly good at subject detection from imagery does not seem to actually work out in practice. Most people's search queries consist of just 2-3 words. Nowadays Google consistently just drops the last word as if it knows better than I do what I need. High value elaborate articles on various topics do not rank. Instead, dated articles do. You have to manually bookmark high quality content as you see it, because you'll never find it back via search. Is everybody asleep at Google? This is not a small thing, this is your bread and butter. Teens are using Tiktok for search, you're in real trouble and better start cleaning up your act.
- tomcam 3y ago
  Their bread and butter is advertising, not search
  - sph 3y ago
    Also, malicious content farms pay Google (to show their ads), you don't. So for Google, they are the customer they need to serve, not you.
- urbandw311er 3y ago
  Well done on putting this far more succinctly than I could have. You’ve absolutely nailed the top three issues with Google search in a nutshell.
  - iteratethis 3y ago
    Thanks, I might as well keep going then :) Google has commercialized a huge amount of search terms. I'll use biology as an example. You search for particular species and search results prioritize products that kill the species. You search for a particular plant and you'll have a hard time learning about the species as it only shows cultivated versions and products related to how to care for them. Pure information/knowledge for the sake of learning and curiosity is de-prioritized. Back to image search, it's unable to figure out original sources or doesn't care. Pinterest is the well known manifestation of that. Google shopping results: completely broken. Click through on the products and half the time the price, availability, discounts and stock do not match. Everything is so goddamn broken, and nobody at Google seems to care. I can't explain it, but it's been going on for a good 6-7 years or so.
fuzztester 3y ago
Yes, Google is getting worse, and was already abysmal, from some years back. In longitude, latitude, and by many other measures :) Plenty of earlier posts and comments about that on HN, for many years now. What's so surprising or new about that, then? As the saying goes, it's news if a man bites a dog, but not the other way around - doggone it if I know why, man ...
nhggfu 3y ago
well Google NEWS certainly seems to be absolutely OWNED by spammers of late. eg just yesterday - a search for the NYSE listed company "betmgm" on google news [US] yielded 100 spam results [affiliate offers + bonus codes for BETMGM sportsbook]- and not one real non-commercial, non-spam news post concerning the company. [data: https://gamblingindustrynews.com/news/affiliates/google-news-100-percent-gambling-spam/ https://gamblingindustrynews.com/news/affiliates/google-news... ]
animanoir 3y ago
Yes.
animanoir 3y ago
I’ m worried about Gmail.
alfiedotwtf 3y ago
As long as Pinterest keeps coming up on my search results, the answer is yes!
jay_kyburz 3y ago
I have a few questions for Google employees.. Are you allowed to search the internet with an ad blocker installed? Do you use a special search interface that doesn't return results with ads?
webworker 3y ago
Okay. That's it. I've f'n had it with search sucking. Reading these comments is just demoralizing. We don't have to live like this, and we won't. Stay tuned here on HN.
Alifatisk 3y ago
I wish I could access old Google again, where the results made sense and searching wasn’t infiltrated with AI.
wkjagt 3y ago
To me it feels like they prepend every search query with “where to buy”. Or when I ask for more specific things, like “cheap used Linux laptop”, it goes like naaaah, surely you mean “best laptops you can buy in 2024”.
synthc 3y ago
Google's search quality has been going down the drain for years. I get more and more fake wikipedia and stack overflow SEO results and I use it less and less. Can't wait until some search oriented LLM company replaces it.

gniv 3y ago

It seems that the answer from their study is mostly no (reading the conclusion), but they seem reluctant to admit it, so they focus mostly on results being mediocre and spammy.

saalweachter 3y ago
[flagged]
j2kun 3y ago
If the answer was yes, the title wouldn't be phrased as a question

rickdg 3y ago

Google is a clear case for why you should pick a service because of it's business model.

edpichler 3y ago

I switched to Duckduckgo as a default search engine for a year and I never needed to come back. More diverse results, fewer ads, and less SEO hacking. I think Google dropped the ball. This topic is becoming common in HN.

steve1977 3y ago

[flagged]

EvanKelly 3y ago
What is your preferred method of searching the internet? (not asking with snark, but genuine interest in what people find delivers better results)
- im3w1l 3y ago
  Wikipedia for objective things (except politically charged things). Ask friends etc for everything else.
- steve1977 3y ago
  I don’t search too often anymore, but as a „classical“ search engine I use Bing. Then I also use DEVONagent from time to time. https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent But often I just follow links from „trustworthy“ sources like HN for example.

barbazoo 3y ago

Kagi allows users to adjust the ranking [0] of certain domains. I'm not sure if that's shared among all users but it would certainly help. [0] https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features

mplanchard 3y ago
Fellow kagi user here. I have been very happy with the service so far. Switched over to it when they announced their new pricing model a little while ago. It is more than worth the cost. Even without tweaking, the quality of results is far higher than what I had gotten used to getting from DDG or DDG with !g. The ability to rank domains is amazing though.
- FergusArgyll 3y ago
  Every time I see someone talk about this feature on HN (almost every day) I get jealous, it's such a good idea. When I'm searching (on google) I'm always thinking; when I get Kagi I'm gonna downrank this site, uprank that one etc.
  - alabhyajindal 3y ago
    I'm curious, why haven't you switched to Kagi yet?
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      For me… I don’t want my search tied to my credit card. I go through lengths to keep my digital and analog domains as separate as possible.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > don’t want my search tied to my credit card Pay with Bitcoin [1]. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

What's Google's incentive to be "good" now? They own the search market anyway, and the more time you waste on their platform searching for what you want to find, the more ads you see and the more money Google makes. What else are those 97% people gonna do, "Google on Bing" instead? So for them, being bad is actually more profitable than being good, meaning there's a conflict of interest between what Google provides and what their users want, but since there's basically no equivalent competition, they get away with it laughing all the way to the bank.

Topgamer7 3y ago
You have to balance being good with maximizing profit. If you aren't good, your userbase will go elsewhere.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Where will they go when Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all default to Google and plenty of Edge users also switch to Google? Due to the defaults it's the only search engine most people ever heard of. Think of Plato's cave allegory. If all your life you've only used Google and never anything else, making it the ground truth for you, how would you know it's bad in order to motivate you to look elsewhere?
  - bgirard 3y ago
    > Where will they go when Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all default to Google and plenty of Edge users also switch to Google? LLMs
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      LLMs are still far away from the daily mainstream usage Google gets, and since all devices default to Google, and people never change those, they'll stay on Google and only occasionally switch to LLMs for more advanced tasks.
    - 3y ago

GoToRO 3y ago

Today I searched for a product, google found a local site with the item, I clicked on the link and I was redirected to aliexpress. How they can not catch this?

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Internet-scale web crawlers are hard to hide. You can just set up a bunch of domains, and flag any IPs that repeatedly visit them as likely crawlers; then serve malicious content to the rest.
saalweachter 3y ago
Try going to the URL directly, and try curling the URL with a referrer of Google. There's a thing that's been happening the last year or two where compromised web servers serve the intended content unless there's a referrer of Google (and maybe Bing?). The site looks normal to the owner, or to crawlers, but when a user clicks through from Google it redirects them to a spam site. I mostly see it with restaurants getting hijacked by herbal quackery.
kccqzy 3y ago
You need to learn more about cloaking. This is a fascinating topic. There are many techniques to show different results to Google and a real web user, like checking the user agent, checking the ASN for the originating IP, checking for indications of a real browser, etc.

pants2 3y ago

> We find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. [...] We further observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns. I think this is an excellent methodology for testing the quality of search results. I would love to see a standard search engine test and scoring system based on this, maybe similar to some of the LLM scoring systems.

ryanisnan 3y ago
Forgive my naivety, but wouldn't a simple way for a search engine (like Kagi) to avoid falling victim here to detect affiliate link programs? There's got to be a small handful of patterns for affiliate link tracking: 1. Domain Interception & HTTP redirects 2. Tracking codes embedded in the URL directly
- pants2 3y ago
  It looks like Kagi does this[1]: > Kagi surfaces shopping results featuring unbiased reviews and no affiliate links to help you identify the best product across categories. Top results include discussions focused on helping you find the best item to purchase - you are not bombarded with affiliate links and ads. Continue to scroll and you will see product comparisons across multiple vendors so you can pick what best suites you. Kagi's shopping search will always return a detailed discussion of which product to buy not a competition amongst advertisers promoting where you should buy. Kagi is focused on providing you the best results to make an informed decision not polluted by affiliate links and advertisements. 1. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
    Kagi is better than Google, but just yesterday it returned the top link to Amazon-linking “check the price for this item on Amazon right now” affiliate spam. So it’s not perfect.

jsnell 3y ago

I don't know, feels like a paper titled "Is Google Getting Worse" could have benefited from actually looking at Google results rather than only results of other search engines. Edit: This got downvoted to hell, so let me be more explicit. This study did not look at Google results, the title is pure clickbait. They used Startpage results as a proxy for Google results. I don't think that's a valid assumption, even if Startpage is using Google's index.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
j2kun 3y ago
Using a reasonable proxy is not "pure clickbait", though it may be misleading. It adds an additional assumption about the Google results not being tampered with by Startpage, but it seems like a reasonable one, compared to the alternative of Google doctoring the search results when detecting a scraper and/or doing personalization. If the authors have done their due diligence and confirmed the results from Startpage are actually Google results, then I don't see why they couldn't claim so in their title.
- jsnell 3y ago
  The authors did not do any work to establish it as a reasonable proxy. We know that's the case, because they don't describe any of that work in the paper. they just state that they're using this proxy measure, and then seem to be using Startpage and Google interchangably for the rest of the paper. Sure, if they'd actually done the searches on Google, the title would not be outright dishonest. But they didn't, so this defense of yours is just absurd. It's pretty obvious why the results won't be the same: the feature sets of the search engines are different despite being based on the same index. Startpage's own documentation even has a page on how and why the results are different! (Personalization is a part of the Google feature set, and has to be taken into account when considering the results. It's also a part of the Bing feature set. This didn't stop them from reporting the results of their testing on Bing in detail.)
  - 3y ago

miyuru 3y ago

I recently caught myself that I unconsciously retry my google searches by adding more keywords. I also noticed that small sites, blogs, forums are gone from google searches. Now I am using 3 search engines. Bing for Normal searches. Google for local(country) searches. Yandex for small sites, blogs, forums.

Ckirby 3y ago
[dead]
pants2 3y ago
BTW, Kagi has a dedicated "Forums" toggle at the top of every search result page. It's very useful. Google used to have this but removed it.
- chikitabanana 3y ago
  I've found adding "forum" to my query on Google works decently
- miyuru 3y ago
  Unfortunately Kagi seems to have a US based pricing. I will ask them if they plan to add region based pricing. Edit: They aren't likely to add it. https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing
sandworm101 3y ago
[flagged]
- n3storm 3y ago
  Every month I fallback less to Google, from DDG. Google is becoming ABetterSearchForAmazon.
  - le-mark 3y ago

101008 3y ago

Are there stats* of Google Search across the years? I felt I don't use Google as much as I used to. And it isn't because "I know more stuff", but mainly because the way we use internet has changed. I wonder if kids or teens (who most of them don't know how to use an email inbox) would use Google... (I guess yeah?) * Of course, the stats should include the total amount of internet users globally, or normalize the amount of searches based on that...

dehrmann 3y ago
Long-term stats are tricky because of how much of the landscape has changed. There's the desktop/mobile split, developing countries increasing their internet use, heavier use of apps, growth and decline of results getting indexed, and change in what we search for.
kccqzy 3y ago
Definitely I think the way we use the internet has changed profoundly. There are a lot of apps that provide useful information but they may not be made indexable by search engines. Much less useful information is simply out there on the open web, and much of it are locked behind logins. There were previous deals like Twitter sending a completely copy of all new tweets to Google, but these are basically dying. It's especially interesting since you mentioned normalizing searches by the number of internet users. The country with the largest number of internet users is China, with more than 1 billion of them. And they don't have access to Google. And their local copycat, Baidu, is years behind Google in terms of technological sophistication and simultaneously years ahead of Google in terms of user hostility. So what do Internet users in China do in a post-search world? They simply open various apps and use the full text search feature of different apps. For general knowledge they might open ZhiHu and search there; for something resembling the old-time personal blogs by individual users they might open XiaoHongShu and search there; for short videos they might open Douyin and for long ones Bilibili. For reaching an organization be it a store or a museum or a hospital or a government department they might open WeChat and search there for an official account or mini program (a mini program is a website that uses WeChat APIs and can only be opened in WeChat). I made these observations on a recent trip to China and it's clear to me what a post-search world looks like because China is already there.

charlotte-fyi 3y ago

It's not worse when you append site:reddit.com to every single search but this is only a function of the fact that reddit can't figure out how to build their own search. Outside of maybe programming stuff where I'll still click on links, I don't think google has driven me organically to a new site in years.

azangru 3y ago
> It's not worse when you append site:reddit.com to every single search Could you give some examples of search queries that would benefit from filtering by reddit? (My own example: I've been looking for recommendations for a solid Linux laptop. A good result would be a list of reviews written from personal experience of owning such laptops. Reddit was useless for that.)
- technion 3y ago
  "Armoured core 6 can't beat pca enforcer walton" People actually discussing how they did this is the only real answer, generic websites with pictures and descriptions of his weapons never help.

ben30 3y ago

I've noticed a pattern with 'free' services like Facebook and now Google. With simple tasks like checking emails or finding phone numbers in contacts, there's no friction. However, Facebook lost my trust long ago as it seemed more focused on capturing my attention for ad revenue, leading to time wastage. I initially trusted Google for its efficient and seemingly fair service, where smart ad-targeting was the price for speed. But now, Google feels similar to Facebook; it's harder to switch to alternatives like Kagi on iPhone due to financial ties with Apple. This shift in Google's approach, prioritizing trapping attention over genuine service, is frustrating. I'd rather pay for a search service that values my time and provides real utility, than endure the hidden costs of 'free' services.

pg_1234 3y ago
In last 5 years I have noticed a clear decline in the usability of Google Maps as ... a Map. Increasingly you have to pick a destination and blindly follow directions, your ability to use it as an informational tool, but exercise your own judgement seems to have been intentionally crippled.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  I can’t even blindly follow it. The last two or three times I’ve tried to use Google maps for directions, it has redirected me through walking trails and bike paths. Each time I closed it and just used Apple Maps to get where I needed to go.
cj 3y ago
> I'd rather pay for a search service that values my time and provides real utility, than endure the hidden costs of 'free' services. How much would you pay for Google search without ads? Or more importantly, how much would the average Google user be willing to pay? If you live in the US and click 3-4 ads per month, you're generating ~$10-20/mo in revenue for Google from advertisers. (Like you, I would also love to pay for an ad free Google, but sadly advertisers are willing to pay Google a lot more money than consumers are willing to)
- 3y ago

dimitrios1 3y ago

I am not sure if Google has empirically gotten worse or not, but I do know that I very often have to use multiple search engines more often than not now in order to find the information I am looking for.

ijhuygft776 3y ago
For me, the biggest quality drop literally happened overnight. It was when they removed the PLUS operator and any other changes that they made that same day. There was many other small changes that made it worst, but that's nothing in comparison. I think that was the day Google became evil.

jeffbee 3y ago

Oh, what a methodology. They ran with the meme of "best pants" having bad results, when the problem with "best pants" is that it's a nonsense query. I personally cannot recall ever doing a "best pants" query, and the results of such queries don't factor into whether I think a search engine is good.

KorematsuFredt 3y ago

Google is better than Bing and anything else for my day today work. Few things I miss though : 1. Spam is more than in past. The outrage porn, clickbait headlines etc. are lot more than in past. 2. Dominance of few domains despite poor quality content. For lot of coding related queries, dev.to, hashnode etc. appear in top results despite being clearly spammy. 3. Paywalled content. Most irritating part is sites like medium which appear in top results, have high value content and yet are behind paywall. Internet is growing and so are Google's problems but I think they are still on top of things.

rmbyrro 3y ago

[flagged]

ElonsNightmare 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ado__dev 3y ago

Anecdotally, yes. Google search for topics I'm unfamiliar with/wanting to learn about all lead to low quality, SEO-optimized to hell, clik-baity sites that are just riddled with ads. I have to add "reddit" to most searches just to find semi-relevant content. But Google search for topics i'm super familiar with and just need a transactional search to look something up tend to be much better and generally the fastest way to accomplish a task.

jansan 3y ago
Right, adding "discussion", "forum" and even "reddit" to the search term increases quality dramatically. Also, Google is still great to search websites. I gave up on Stackoverflow's own search but add "site:stackoverflow.com" to my searches on google. BTW, maybe someone wants to create a very simple webpage with a search mask that allows adding a few (customizable) terms and options and simply forwards that to Google's search when pressing enter.
Avamander 3y ago
I've started using uBlockList to block those sites and it does clean it up quite a bit. I assume those sites also work for some, but they're usually of low quality to me so I block them. The second type of searches you describe seem to be better so far, but I've stumbled upon a bunch of obviously generated garbage recently. So not sure how long it'll hold. I've tried things like DDG, YaCy, Bing and others, but often Google is just significantly better (but not necessarily good).

jsheard 3y ago

Google Images is filling up with AI slop to the point of unusability for some purposes, even content that isn't actively engaging in SEO shenanigans is getting pushed to the top. In some cases even the key image that Google displays first on a normal search is fake, like when searching for the "tank man" prioritized showing a fake AI selfie from the mans perspective. It's still there in fact, just not the first result anymore, but Google might have demoted it manually after the backlash. Looking to browse works by a specific artist? Good luck, Google evidently can't tell the difference between a genuine J. C. Leyendecker piece and anything shat out by a "Leyendecker style" image generation model. Search for "Yoji Shinkawa" and this https://i.imgur.com/RYghaoY.png https://i.imgur.com/RYghaoY.png is currently the first thing you see, which isn't even close to his style, but Google has somehow determined it's the image that best represents him. The full images page shows his actual work but interspersed about half-and-half with AI imitations. My speculation is that Google prioritizes showing recent results, presumed to be the freshest most up-to-date information, but of course for a historical event like Tiananmen Square or an artist who died in 1951, nearly all of the fresh results past a certain point are AI simulacra.

KomoD 3y ago
Yeah that is a huge problem. Another search to try is "hand reference", tons of AI garbage
fouc 3y ago
I dislike the recency bias so much.
- guhcampos 3y ago
  I can't count how many times I needed a "until X" button, but it's an ever increasing trend.
spansoa 3y ago
I find DuckDuckGo's[0] (DDG) images feature to be a brilliant replacement for Google Images/Lens. Google Images doesn't let you view the actual resource anymore and disabled that feature years ago. DDG's image feature is crucial since it doesn't bring you to the site itself, it just points to the raw URL of where the asset resides and you can easily download it, without hunting the graphics down on the site itself, although DDG does offer a link to the page where the image was found. The important bit is pressing the 'View File' button. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/

Ckirby 3y ago

[dead]

NelsonMinar 3y ago

I wonder if "affiliate links" is a reasonable proxy for page quality? I wouldn't use it directly in a ranking function but it might be a nice automated way to estimate whether results are good.

dehrmann 3y ago
In a good way or bad way? Affiliate links might bias reviews, but their presence might mean the review was high enough quality that enough people see it and click on affiliate links.
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  I mean the presence of affiliate links indicates the page is likely spam. I bet that's a good heuristic more often than it's a bad one.

pembrook 3y ago

Google created this problem by slurping up all advertising money from open web activity for themselves. The more market share of online display advertising they gained, the worse their results got. Why? Because the only way to have a large volume of authentic content being produced at scale is to have a healthy ecosystem of independent sites that are profitable based on display ads. As much as HN-types hate advertising, it was literally the only thing that made the web of yesteryear so special. Things like Adsense enabled blogs on tons of niche topics to be monetized and thus we had better open web content. When Google decided there was more money to be made off ads before you even clicked on a search result, that ironically was what ended up killing search. Now the only way to monetize content from search is via shill company blogs, affiliate marketing listicles (10 best dog toys), etc. So that’s what we get. For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn’t even crack page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is.

mrkramer 3y ago
>For example, if there was a passionate person creating authentic, amazing content about dogs, they wouldn’t even crack page 1 on any search for dog toys no matter how good their content is. So basically the problem of search engines and Google in particular is discovery. All early Google adapters say that they loved Google because it gave them relevant results and because they discovered new websites on Google. Nowadays they "discover" SEO spam, ads and the usual suspects like the most popular sites in that search category. That's why we need "discovery engine" for Web, something like TikTok but adapted to Web. If search engines were the evolution of web directories, we need to think about how we can evolve search engines.

tambourine_man 3y ago

I visited a small country in my last vacation. I ended up bringing a bit of money back because I was in a hurry I thought it would be easy to exchange back at home, even at worse rates. I live in a big city after all. Of course, I was very wrong. I spent an afternoon Googling every possible incantation only to get useless AI generated text, travel agency sites or simply unrelated content. I was about to accept my loss when I tried Kagi. The first page showed an exchange that accepted the currency. Very far from me and with terrible rates, but still. Anecdata and all, but the fact is that I'm using Kagi more and more and it's winning my trust and good will fast.

odysseus 3y ago
What many people do in this case is to keep the money for the next time you visit the country. (or as souvenirs)
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  It would have been an expensive souvenir. And I don’t travel all that much. Also, inflation and even outright currency replacements are somewhat common in smaller economies.
mike_hock 3y ago
This sounds like an ad for Kagi, though.
- wiether 3y ago
  Why would Kagi pay someone to promote them on HN when there's already dozens of praise everyday here? Even as a happy customer, I can see how suspect this praise can be, but remember that HN is exactly who Kagi was created for. And I don't remember having spend $10 a month on something that had that much impact on my daily life. It's _just_ a search engine, but I do about 50 search a day, and having great results each time while the other one is giving me more and more garbage results is huge. So I completely understand why people satisfied with Kagi can be noisy about how great they think it is.

summerlight 3y ago

I don't know if the overall search quality has degraded or not, but SEO has been become definitely a much more severe issue than ever before. Google is the main target for this attack for obvious reasons but no other search engines are really immune to this. I'm skeptical if this can be tackled by any technical solutions; the problem is not just a specific type of SEO spamming but the structure where the enemies are constantly optimizing against your fundamental goal.

d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
but the structure where the enemies are constantly optimizing against your fundamental goal. Like companies avoiding taxes.

guhcampos 3y ago

We're back to the pre-Google era and suddenly I'm aggressively bookmarking stuff like it's 1995.

kccqzy 3y ago
I recommend not just bookmarking, but downloading a copy. Either a webarchive file or manually extract the main content from there (Reader mode in browsers is great help). Link rots happen. More than half of my bookmarks don't work.
- guhcampos 3y ago
  Yes!!! I've been playing around with SingleFile and other similar software to try and hoard as much useful data as I can. And I've been mocking preppers for all these years.
  - tenebrisalietum 3y ago
    An acquaintance of my second cousin has experimented with SingleFile CLI (https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli) and she reports it works great (it is rather heavyweight because it does invoke headless Chromium or even Firefox if you set it up right).
- no_wizard 3y ago
  it also never hurts to throw the URL into archive.org. This will archive it for everyone else too
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renegat0x0 3y ago
On the other hand it is not 1995. Time has moved on. I wrote a Simple RSS feed, that also serves as search engine for bookmarks. I am able to run it in attick on raspberry pi. We do not have to rely so heavily on google. https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive It is true that it does not serve me as google, or kagi replacement. It is a very nice addition though. With a little bit off determination I do not have to be so dependent on google. Here is also a dump of known domains. Some are personal. https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database ...and my bookmarks https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database Some more years, and google can go to hell.

charlieyu1 3y ago

The worst thing Google allow phishing sites in sponsors. There are many cases of people searching for a website and lands on the phishing site instead, getting credit card details stolen.

nostromo 3y ago

Google search went from critical for me to irrelevant overnight with ChatGPT 4. Like, literally irrelevant. I'm still watching YouTube, using Gmail, and occasionally checking out something on Google Shopping if I want to find something locally instead of on Amazon. But I use Google search about 90% less now than I did a year ago.

araes 3y ago

This paper does not make sense to me. They used Startpage (https://www.startpage.com https://www.startpage.com) as a proxy for Google results ("result pages of Google (by proxy of Startpage)" in a discussion of Google results? Except, if you put the same search in Startpage and Google, you get different results. Image results especially are quite different. Text results were mostly just a reorganization on my quick tests. (Tried the title of the paper as its own search "Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search") Edit: One other notable result is from Figure 3, that a huge percentage of the results now are Amazon and Youtube. Many orders of magnitude in most cases. Amazon (3000-4000), NYTimes (1000), Walmart (~500?), Insider/PCMag/Tomsguide (~50?)

yellow_lead 3y ago
Since google search is highly personalized and localized, this may not matter, and may be why you see different results. > Startpage delivers Google search results via our proprietary personal data protection technology.

vlark 3y ago

The TL;DR = Not really, according to our methods & analysis. But maybe.

ricardo81 3y ago

Quite likely underreporting affiliate links due to obfuscation like cloaking, hiding redirects behind javascript (they mention in the paper not rendering the page), using JS and a POST, other URL minifiers etc. One interesting solution to the problem is to have more than one dominant search engine and its algorithmic choices, having half a dozen web-scale engines with some variation at least gives the user a choice into other avenues of information discovery. (There isn't really much point in using Startpage and DDG here since they're effectively meta search engines of Google and Bing). For SEOs in English speaking countries there is not much point in thinking beyond pleasing Google. Clearly AI and whack-a-mole spam sites have been a problem for a while due to the prevalance of people tacking on 'reddit' to their query to find other humans talking about stuff.

skymast 3y ago

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delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

Consider using ublacklist[1]. I don't see SEO junk like Pinterest, Tutorialspoint, Javatpoint, geeksforgeeks, etc at all in my searches. [1]: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

agubelu 3y ago
I didn't know this exists, thanks. Every time I google anything programming-related looking for the docs, and the official docs are buried under a pile of SEO shit, I die inside a little. This is particularly egregious with Python, and I suppose it must be just as bad or worse in the JS ecosystem.
- bluish29 3y ago
  And here are some lists for ublacklist that can help you use it easily [1] [1] https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

hotep99 3y ago

One of my biggest complaints about Google is the prioritization of pop culture slop over everything else. I feel like I'm frequently getting auto-corrected because some Netflix show is titled with a pun of a phrase or there is a dramatization of some historical figure that Google considers more relevant than the real person.

foofoo4u 3y ago
Google "Queen Cleopatra" is a good example for me. 95% of the results are about the Netflix documentary. There is bodies of work dedicated to the history and legacy of this queen. Quality content, produced by leading academics, historians and universities. And yet Google insists I should know everything about this poor production (a bit of an understatement) and nothing else, except for a wiki article as one of the results (Good job Google, you at least got this bit right). Google knows so much about me. And yet it continues to act as though it doesn't.
- linehedonist 3y ago
  I think it’s the word ”Queen” (which is not normally used to refer to the ancient ruler). If I just google “Cleopatra” I only see results about the historical figure.
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AlienRobot 3y ago

>The study finds an inverse relationship between a page’s optimization level and its perceived expertise What if Google flipped its SEO weights from positive to negative?

maxglute 3y ago

I wonder what percent of wiki entries are being taken over by AI writing. I feel like I wouldn't know with wiki style language. There was at least a few TV tropes entries that I suspected, only because the humor and observation felt off.

Gud 3y ago

Yes. Google used to be amazing, then it turned into an advertisement company. Slowly at first, then about a decade ago the pace increased. But the worst part is, Google SEO has infected the entire web and made it into complete garbage. Hopefully, this last decade or so will just be a blip before we return to baseline, where it can be wild and free again.

andai 3y ago

Tried using Google Bard. It gave me complete nonsense. It cited the sources for the nonsense, so I checked them: AI generated SEO spam pages. Gave me a good laugh. (By comparison, Phind gave the correct answer, and high quality sources.)

frantic2821 3y ago

I knew I wasn't the only one thinking this lol - glad it's proven by an investigation How does one think Google is planning to change it's ranking system?

gumballindie 3y ago

It is. My suspicion is that they are using ai for search results considering how inreliable it's become. That's why searching for "sinus inflammation" used to yield results for penis inflammation for a while. That one seems to have been resolved. However I am still getting completely unrelated results every now and then, indicating they are having serious unresolved search engine issues.

foofoo4u 3y ago

Google, YouTube, etc., they're all getting worse. I'm finding it ever more difficult to learn anything anymore from the internet. Whether it's learning how to play the guitar, how to fish, weight lifting or how to do mostly anything, I get trash results. Google results are exclusively shallow content, most of which are trying to sell me on something. YouTube is full of short videos with click baity subjects entirely irrelevant to what I actually entered: "Don't make this {topic} mistake!", "This one trick will make you better at {topic}!", "Top 10 ways to become a pro at {topic} in two weeks!". Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding me, which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-down of society, I've naturally gravitated towards books. Books are leagues better in terms of quality of content. They are more detailed and thorough. It's a richer experience so far.

robotnikman 3y ago
>Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding me, which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-down of society This part really worries me right here. We don't know the long term ramifications of the modern day internet, but so far they do not look good.
- toss1 3y ago
  And the people making the algorithms & internet interfaces could not give a flying fork less about those long term external consequences . . .
digitalsushi 3y ago
Steel that was formed before we started making nuclear contamination, known as low-background steel or pre-war steel, often in the form of old naval vessels and other large, old, steel infrastructure, has a special value to us. It can be used for building instruments with high sensitivity to radiation, as the steel made since becomes polluted with what is now part of the world. I see a strong metaphor for literature authored before a specific time, roughly when the web came to be, or certainly when two way discourse on a page, or aggregation, became prevalent. And certainly far before bespoke communications targeted at us, as individuals or interest groups. If the modern web were air it would taste of metal; I have a fear that I will become biased that older texts are superior for the sole reason that modern texts can be assumed inferior.

drawkward 3y ago

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bunsenhoneydew 3y ago

I gave up on Google a couple of years ago. I used DDG for a while but often had to jump back (!g) to Google for some things. Now I pay for Kagi (been a year or two) and there’s no going back for me. I hardly ever even need to scroll down to find what I need, it’s just there. Saves me so much time.

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iancmceachern 3y ago

It's AI, people using it vs not. And the AI is ever changing, trained on the internet, so it will be a self fulfilling constructive interference thing. If people keep using AI to write articles based on their competitors websites, eventually it will just be ai talking to ai.

iteratethis 3y ago

I don't understand Google anymore. Surely people can relate to the situation where you end up on an article based on some technical query you have. The article repeats your question 7 times, has endless casually-related filler text that still does not answer the question and then ends with: try to unplug it. It is so freaking obvious that it's a malicious content farm, but Google with all of its technical might seem unable or unwilling to detect it. If tech can't do it, organize some type of curation or feedback? Same for image search. You search for "red flower Thailand" and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. The idea that Google is spectacularly good at subject detection from imagery does not seem to actually work out in practice. Most people's search queries consist of just 2-3 words. Nowadays Google consistently just drops the last word as if it knows better than I do what I need. High value elaborate articles on various topics do not rank. Instead, dated articles do. You have to manually bookmark high quality content as you see it, because you'll never find it back via search. Is everybody asleep at Google? This is not a small thing, this is your bread and butter. Teens are using Tiktok for search, you're in real trouble and better start cleaning up your act.

tomcam 3y ago
Their bread and butter is advertising, not search
- sph 3y ago
  Also, malicious content farms pay Google (to show their ads), you don't. So for Google, they are the customer they need to serve, not you.
urbandw311er 3y ago
Well done on putting this far more succinctly than I could have. You’ve absolutely nailed the top three issues with Google search in a nutshell.
- iteratethis 3y ago
  Thanks, I might as well keep going then :) Google has commercialized a huge amount of search terms. I'll use biology as an example. You search for particular species and search results prioritize products that kill the species. You search for a particular plant and you'll have a hard time learning about the species as it only shows cultivated versions and products related to how to care for them. Pure information/knowledge for the sake of learning and curiosity is de-prioritized. Back to image search, it's unable to figure out original sources or doesn't care. Pinterest is the well known manifestation of that. Google shopping results: completely broken. Click through on the products and half the time the price, availability, discounts and stock do not match. Everything is so goddamn broken, and nobody at Google seems to care. I can't explain it, but it's been going on for a good 6-7 years or so.

fuzztester 3y ago

Yes, Google is getting worse, and was already abysmal, from some years back. In longitude, latitude, and by many other measures :) Plenty of earlier posts and comments about that on HN, for many years now. What's so surprising or new about that, then? As the saying goes, it's news if a man bites a dog, but not the other way around - doggone it if I know why, man ...

nhggfu 3y ago

well Google NEWS certainly seems to be absolutely OWNED by spammers of late. eg just yesterday - a search for the NYSE listed company "betmgm" on google news [US] yielded 100 spam results [affiliate offers + bonus codes for BETMGM sportsbook]- and not one real non-commercial, non-spam news post concerning the company. [data: https://gamblingindustrynews.com/news/affiliates/google-news-100-percent-gambling-spam/ https://gamblingindustrynews.com/news/affiliates/google-news... ]

animanoir 3y ago

Yes.

animanoir 3y ago

I’ m worried about Gmail.

alfiedotwtf 3y ago

As long as Pinterest keeps coming up on my search results, the answer is yes!

jay_kyburz 3y ago

I have a few questions for Google employees.. Are you allowed to search the internet with an ad blocker installed? Do you use a special search interface that doesn't return results with ads?

webworker 3y ago

Okay. That's it. I've f'n had it with search sucking. Reading these comments is just demoralizing. We don't have to live like this, and we won't. Stay tuned here on HN.

Alifatisk 3y ago

I wish I could access old Google again, where the results made sense and searching wasn’t infiltrated with AI.

wkjagt 3y ago

To me it feels like they prepend every search query with “where to buy”. Or when I ask for more specific things, like “cheap used Linux laptop”, it goes like naaaah, surely you mean “best laptops you can buy in 2024”.

synthc 3y ago

Google's search quality has been going down the drain for years. I get more and more fake wikipedia and stack overflow SEO results and I use it less and less. Can't wait until some search oriented LLM company replaces it.