11 ms·

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow

I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well. These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page. Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, Google, whenever I search for something detailed that's not in StackOverflow, your results are increasingly crap, once again. Pages and pages full of very spammy results. Some time ago -- perhaps a few years ago or a bit more -- I became accustomed to fairly quickly paging several pages into the search results, where the heaviest, highly ranked spam would start to filter out and I could start to recognize more legitimate sources of information. These days... the spam results just go on and one. If there's quality somewhere in the search results, it's beyond the limit of my patience to continue paging forward and scanning. Not that I'm using Yahoo, in preference. That part... all I can think of is measuring by byte counts, and buttloads of banner ads. Probably not the right explanation, but... -- P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. Being able to tell the query engine that I definitely don't want to see results that don't include term x frequently proved quite useful. Now... the damned thing shows me "whatever it feels like", whether I quote terms, beg,.... any other suggestions?

espeed 13y ago
P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. +1 to that. At the least Google should have added a ++ operator to replace the co-opted +.
- codex 13y ago
  "Quote" the search term. That's the replacement for +.
  - espeed 13y ago
    Yes, but it's a PITA.
  - fsckin 13y ago
    Yep. That adds more keystrokes to optimize a query that didn't give the best results the first time. It'd be nice if there were an option to revert the behavior.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmpk2k 13y ago
    I'm not sure if my memory is playing tricks on my, but I've found quotes unreliable. Google will spit out "close" suggestions that have nothing to do with what I requested, despite using quotes. Google also happily returns results which do not fulfill even the "close" suggestions: e.g. I ask for three words, Google searches for those three words, and returns a bunch of pages that contain only two or one of those words. Google, that's not what I asked for. Google's attempts to tweak my queries and also return results that don't fulfill all requirements makes it much less useful to me, because they usually backfire. I don't want my queries tweaked -- I want exactly what I asked for, and only what I asked for. If I made a mistake, I can figure it out and fix it myself.
    - m_ram 13y ago
      > I'm not sure if my memory is playing tricks on my, but I've found quotes unreliable. Google will spit out "close" suggestions that have nothing to do with what I requested, despite using quotes. I noticed the same a few months ago. If you want an exact match you have to click on "Search tools" >> "All results" >> "Verbatim".
    - thisisnotatest 13y ago
      For what it's worth, I assure you that putting a "query" "term" in "quotes" is identical to the retired +plus +sign +operator. I would be very curious, if you set up Verbatim search as your default search engine in your browser, how often you have to "fix" it, and if you ever find it easier to see what Google makes of your non-verbatim query. I'd especially be interested in how often the thing you're searching for doesn't really exist on the web, and so Google is replacing "no results" with "off-topic results."
abhiv 13y ago
I actually find Google's higher weighting of StackOverflow results annoying. I've recently been experimenting with a new iOS project, and whenever I search for something Objective-C or iOS SDK related, the first few results are SO questions. In some cases this is useful, but for many queries you really just want the canonical explanation from Apple's docs, not a bunch of people discussing an issue that happens to include those keywords. SO is more useful when you have a problem that you're trying to debug, and official docs are more useful when you're trying to understand new concepts. Unfortunately Google doesn't allow any way to differentiate between these modes.
- uniclaude 13y ago
  Well that's a very simple problem to fix, the "-" operator still works, so you can exclude stackoverflow easily, or use the "site:" operator to force the result to come from apple. You can even setup those parameters as custom search engines in Chrome so you don't have to repeat yourself every time.
  - abhiv 13y ago
    True, although I think this is something that I shouldn't have to manually specify.
    - mistermann 13y ago
      How would you propose they should differentiate?
      - abhiv 13y ago
        Interesting question. One possibility is a heuristic to determine whether the user is looking for a broad overview or trying to solve a specific problem. For example, "2d arrays in Objective C" should bring up a doc page or a tutorial page that provides an overview of the concept; but "How to initialize a 2D array in Objective C" could provide an SO page where someone has asked exactly that. In general, the narrower the query, the more likely it should be that a forum or other UGC site will provide a better answer than an overview page, because someone else has likely run into the problem before.
uniclaude 13y ago
I felt a bit like you until I added a "goodgle" search engine in my chrome, basically forcing Verbatim at each Google search (appending &tbs=li:1), and forcing English to be the base language, instead of whatever country I am finding myself in at the moment. Then, I tweaked the results by manually ignoring a couple domains, and now, Google is sort of usable again for my personal taste. Unlike you though, spam (at least recently) has not been a very strong issue of mine. If I had to name one, I'd say that "personalization" of the results was the worst offender to the quality my search results, and the positive thing is that we can turn that one off. As crazy as it sounds, I wish another good search engine comes, as Google feels more and more like the "least bad" option, rather than the "good" one to me, and I'm just talking about search results, voluntarily excluding privacy & other topics from the debate.
- uniclaude 13y ago
  Oops, I can't edit my post anymore, but I wanted to add a little tip for Firefox users (as it is very good now), this addon[1] adds a search engine that does exactly what I do with my custom engine in Chrome. Funny thing, I did not make this myself, which shows me clearly that I am not the only one feeling this way. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/?src...
  - sigkill 13y ago
    Good lord, this is perfect. I had no idea about the verbatim setting. All I'd do was use the hl=en and q=%s. This new parameter is practically god-sent. Thanks.
- jfoster 13y ago
  Last time I recall using a "least bad" search engine was when I was using Altavista. (before I started considering Google "least bad", I mean) To some extent, I hope they're able to maintain their position. If Google were unseated, I would miss the big, audacious side-projects that they undertake.
Dn_Ab 13y ago
Very true, glad I'm not the only one to have noticed this. And I've got a suggestion for a search engine so intelligent - well relatively - it took google back to school and enrolled it in kindergarten. I find myself using it whenever Google gets stumped; it consistently gives better results in the sense that I feel it has a better understanding of my query. Take this example that prompted my above semi-hyperbole. Background: Four days ago, while walking around outside I saw an insect. Normally this is nothing to write home about except that I had originally mistaken this insect for an assorted clump of debris. So you can imagine my surprise when not only did it start moving, it did so with gusto, scaling walls and what not. Strangest thing I've ever seen. So I thought I'd check Google to find out what manner of sorcery this was. I expected nothing of course - I had no clue where to start. Search term: "insect with a bunch of junk attached to it". Google Result: http://i.imgur.com/FGIInog.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/FGIInog.png?1 vs. Other Search Engine Result: http://i.imgur.com/t8ei8dX.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/t8ei8dX.png?1 What I sought was the debris carrying lacewing larvae. Result 2 is far off but I was so happy to put a name to the entity I did not even register that result. The first thing you will notice is Google trying way too hard and ending up with idiotic suggestions as a result. It seems to use the words and their synonyms without accounting for context. That is the only way it could possibly give PHP, email and bugzilla reports as possible answers to that query [1]. It's a common recent pattern I've been noticing, unless I can model how I think people will write about what I'm searching for and more importantly it is not something the SEO people have motive to polish so vigorously, the content is accidently removed; I won't get good results. That SEO bit is annoying because I remember when my previous searches in the genre (e.g. game related) used to be far more fruitful. The new behavior of adding synonyms is particularly not worth it since the fails are much more spectacular than it wins. Final stuff: I also compare bing, duck duck go and blekko results whenever I hit queries I think are complicated, none do much better than google. Sometimes they are worse. This result is the first time Samuru blew everyone out of the water, usually it is modestly better [2] (answer in second half vs not so for others [3]). The reason I still use google is force of habit, it took over chrome and most importantly: its incredible and unmatched indexing ability. But I use samuru enough that it's one of my most visited pages. I have absolutely no affiliation with them, don't know who it's by and found out about it here on HN. According to Paul Graham, Google can be tackled if they can get 10,000 hackers on their side. Time to put the hypothesis to the test, +1 here. [1] Here is the same search with quotes: http://imgur.com/qiGDnqr&t8ei8dX#0 http://imgur.com/qiGDnqr&t8ei8dX#0 [3] I only sometimes check page 2 for the others. This might seem unfair but a key UX concept is to minimize latency. Clicking to page 2 seems minor but the EV for that action is so low I skip it. But scrolling just a bit more since I'm already here is much cheaper. UX should absolutely count as much as tech (UX/process + human + algorithms > all). [2] My annoyance with such vague anecdotes is why I decided to start taking screenshots. And also because results are not stable. For example, search terms that bing once did well on are now embarrassing.
smegel 13y ago
> I "Google" less and less for search results Google is absolutely unusable for some search terms that are not part of the primary association of the term. Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan). If I don't mention the word "buy" or "holiday" I would not expect to see either.
- mortehu 13y ago
  > Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan) http://m.bitraf.no/~mortehu/skrot/caravan_book.png http://m.bitraf.no/~mortehu/skrot/caravan_book.png It even shows the cover of several books featuring a caravan.
thisisnotatest 13y ago
Google engineer here. We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on improvements. We also added "Verbatim Mode" to save you the trouble of putting "each" "query" "term" in "quotes" when you want to exactly match all your query words.
- kaeawc 13y ago
  Thanks ^_^ personally I like the results I get.
- mistermann 13y ago
  I would very much like an expandable section below the search text where I could turn very specific portions of the google magic on and off. I also wish you would remove the multitude of sites that scrape content from the original sites and SEO the hell out of it to get to the top of search results. I assume the advertising revenue is too lucrative to do so.
  - heurist 13y ago
    I haven't had too many issues with Google guessing what I mean but the sites that scrape other sites are a real pain. find the oldest page with that text and show it to me, then exclude the rest from the results. Or something like that. If it has the exact same information then it's useless to me.
  - thisisnotatest 13y ago
    We're working on the scraped sites. Also, advertising revenue has nothing to do with it. We don't even talk about revenue in our search quality meetings, just the utility and speed of our search results page.
  - thisisnotatest 13y ago
    Personally I would be a fan of giving users more "knobs" to turn in their search results. For example, we have the toggle switch to include personal results and personalized ranking, vs. showing un-personalized search results. However, it's a complicated product design problem whenever you want to add complexity to something used by a billion people. Remember that the thing that made Google so popular and iconic originally was the plain search box.
kevinh 13y ago
I switched to DuckDuckGo for search for one of the reasons you listed - Google felt the need to guess what I was thinking and it felt like, most of the time, it was getting it wrong (especially with synonym search). One of DuckDuckGo's stated policies is not to modify what you search[0]. The fact that DDG doesn't collect information about me is just a plus. [0] http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215637-autocorrect http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215637-autoco...
- Ecio78 13y ago
  I tried to do the same after upgrading my Linux Mint but I couldn't resist more than a couple of days, maybe I'm too used to Google UI.. but I agree with some of the comments, sometimes I know I should search something on Amazon, Wikipedia, iMDB, Tripadvisor etc.. and I just use Google to go there (because typically if you search a movie iMDB is one of the first results, if you search "hotel xyz review" you got Tripadvisor etc..)
  - dalek_cannes 13y ago
    It's almost as if we're going back to directories.
nostromo 13y ago
I remember when the web was still about the long tail -- it made Google extremely useful. Today I usually know where the information is before I Google it (StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.) which means their value add has diminished. It's less "search" and more "navigational aid."
- polynomial 13y ago
  The web still is about long tail, just that the signal:noise ratio has dropped precipitously.
bsullivan01 13y ago
A conspiracy theorist looking at Google's ad clicks numbers might say that better results equal less clicks on ads. Mind you, that on commercial searches essentially all you see is ads. This works up to a point, a tipping point that is. I think Google is unusable now for commercial searches, all you see is ads and eBay, Amazon and other megacorps. Up to a few years ago, I would have never believed that Google crafted results to increase ad clicks but now I do. Looks like MBAs from fancy colleges have taken over everything. Their ad clicks are increasing by a suspiciously large percentage each quarter. They are back at page one: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results." http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
- cousin_it 13y ago
  Sometime ago I had an idea of making a non-commercial search engine that would only search the non-commercial web. All pages that accept payments or show ads would be out.
  - ImprovedSilence 13y ago
    That would be fantastically interesting to see/use. My only concern is, well, how would you fund it?
    - cousin_it 13y ago
      Yeah, that's a hard question. But maybe we can mitigate the need for funding by being open source, P2P, or getting donations.
kbart 13y ago
Heh, I find myself in the same situation. Recently I use Google mainly as a shortcut to Wiki, Ebay, Amazon, SO etc. For a "real" search I prefer DuckDuckGo (that doesn't modify search results based on my browsing, search history and big names) and symbolhound.com (that is very useful for programming related searches as it includes symbols).
wahsd 13y ago
You should always look on page 386,549 of the 8 million search results. That's where the best results can be found.
freyr 13y ago
I also pretty much use Google's search as a proxy for Wikipedia search or StackOverflow search at this point. But I highly doubt much Yahoo's traffic is coming from search. They've got Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, omg! (which is huge), Flickr, Tumblr, etc. Yahoo is in the content business. Plus, I know of some people (especially older people) who have Yahoo set as their homepage, and they'll freak out if it gets set to anything else. And besides, Yahoo is a much better homepage than iGoogle for most people, particularly if they use Yahoo mail.
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  Oh shit, you bring up a good point. Nobody else seemed to mention it, but I bet Tumblr is helping push them over the edge in terms of traffic.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  Same here, Google has become `readline in a browser` somehow. About * Mail, after everything Google did to be more social and whatnot, there's still no integration with Gmail, only Google Plus. A mail counter in Google's black bar would have been more useful.
- samspenc 13y ago
  Actually, Tumblr isn't included in the comScore report - its listed separately at #28.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
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darasen 13y ago
Given that there is an entire industry centered around gaming search (primarily Google) is anyone surprised search has suffered?
powertower 13y ago
> ...another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. What's amazing here is the obviousness of the fact that Google is only going to do what either a) maintains or b) increases its profits... Giving you good and relevant search results was the bootstrap. Now (that they've dominated the market and passed the bellcurve) it's nothing more than a hindrance to CTR (click through rates) on paid search ads. That is, the better (more relevant) the results, the less someone is going to look at the ads.

espeed 13y ago

P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. +1 to that. At the least Google should have added a ++ operator to replace the co-opted +.

codex 13y ago
"Quote" the search term. That's the replacement for +.
- espeed 13y ago
  Yes, but it's a PITA.
- fsckin 13y ago
  Yep. That adds more keystrokes to optimize a query that didn't give the best results the first time. It'd be nice if there were an option to revert the behavior.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dmpk2k 13y ago
  I'm not sure if my memory is playing tricks on my, but I've found quotes unreliable. Google will spit out "close" suggestions that have nothing to do with what I requested, despite using quotes. Google also happily returns results which do not fulfill even the "close" suggestions: e.g. I ask for three words, Google searches for those three words, and returns a bunch of pages that contain only two or one of those words. Google, that's not what I asked for. Google's attempts to tweak my queries and also return results that don't fulfill all requirements makes it much less useful to me, because they usually backfire. I don't want my queries tweaked -- I want exactly what I asked for, and only what I asked for. If I made a mistake, I can figure it out and fix it myself.
  - m_ram 13y ago
    > I'm not sure if my memory is playing tricks on my, but I've found quotes unreliable. Google will spit out "close" suggestions that have nothing to do with what I requested, despite using quotes. I noticed the same a few months ago. If you want an exact match you have to click on "Search tools" >> "All results" >> "Verbatim".
  - thisisnotatest 13y ago
    For what it's worth, I assure you that putting a "query" "term" in "quotes" is identical to the retired +plus +sign +operator. I would be very curious, if you set up Verbatim search as your default search engine in your browser, how often you have to "fix" it, and if you ever find it easier to see what Google makes of your non-verbatim query. I'd especially be interested in how often the thing you're searching for doesn't really exist on the web, and so Google is replacing "no results" with "off-topic results."

abhiv 13y ago

I actually find Google's higher weighting of StackOverflow results annoying. I've recently been experimenting with a new iOS project, and whenever I search for something Objective-C or iOS SDK related, the first few results are SO questions. In some cases this is useful, but for many queries you really just want the canonical explanation from Apple's docs, not a bunch of people discussing an issue that happens to include those keywords. SO is more useful when you have a problem that you're trying to debug, and official docs are more useful when you're trying to understand new concepts. Unfortunately Google doesn't allow any way to differentiate between these modes.

uniclaude 13y ago
Well that's a very simple problem to fix, the "-" operator still works, so you can exclude stackoverflow easily, or use the "site:" operator to force the result to come from apple. You can even setup those parameters as custom search engines in Chrome so you don't have to repeat yourself every time.
- abhiv 13y ago
  True, although I think this is something that I shouldn't have to manually specify.
  - mistermann 13y ago
    How would you propose they should differentiate?
    - abhiv 13y ago
      Interesting question. One possibility is a heuristic to determine whether the user is looking for a broad overview or trying to solve a specific problem. For example, "2d arrays in Objective C" should bring up a doc page or a tutorial page that provides an overview of the concept; but "How to initialize a 2D array in Objective C" could provide an SO page where someone has asked exactly that. In general, the narrower the query, the more likely it should be that a forum or other UGC site will provide a better answer than an overview page, because someone else has likely run into the problem before.

uniclaude 13y ago

I felt a bit like you until I added a "goodgle" search engine in my chrome, basically forcing Verbatim at each Google search (appending &tbs=li:1), and forcing English to be the base language, instead of whatever country I am finding myself in at the moment. Then, I tweaked the results by manually ignoring a couple domains, and now, Google is sort of usable again for my personal taste. Unlike you though, spam (at least recently) has not been a very strong issue of mine. If I had to name one, I'd say that "personalization" of the results was the worst offender to the quality my search results, and the positive thing is that we can turn that one off. As crazy as it sounds, I wish another good search engine comes, as Google feels more and more like the "least bad" option, rather than the "good" one to me, and I'm just talking about search results, voluntarily excluding privacy & other topics from the debate.

uniclaude 13y ago
Oops, I can't edit my post anymore, but I wanted to add a little tip for Firefox users (as it is very good now), this addon[1] adds a search engine that does exactly what I do with my custom engine in Chrome. Funny thing, I did not make this myself, which shows me clearly that I am not the only one feeling this way. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/?src...
- sigkill 13y ago
  Good lord, this is perfect. I had no idea about the verbatim setting. All I'd do was use the hl=en and q=%s. This new parameter is practically god-sent. Thanks.
jfoster 13y ago
Last time I recall using a "least bad" search engine was when I was using Altavista. (before I started considering Google "least bad", I mean) To some extent, I hope they're able to maintain their position. If Google were unseated, I would miss the big, audacious side-projects that they undertake.

Dn_Ab 13y ago

Very true, glad I'm not the only one to have noticed this. And I've got a suggestion for a search engine so intelligent - well relatively - it took google back to school and enrolled it in kindergarten. I find myself using it whenever Google gets stumped; it consistently gives better results in the sense that I feel it has a better understanding of my query. Take this example that prompted my above semi-hyperbole. Background: Four days ago, while walking around outside I saw an insect. Normally this is nothing to write home about except that I had originally mistaken this insect for an assorted clump of debris. So you can imagine my surprise when not only did it start moving, it did so with gusto, scaling walls and what not. Strangest thing I've ever seen. So I thought I'd check Google to find out what manner of sorcery this was. I expected nothing of course - I had no clue where to start. Search term: "insect with a bunch of junk attached to it". Google Result: http://i.imgur.com/FGIInog.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/FGIInog.png?1 vs. Other Search Engine Result: http://i.imgur.com/t8ei8dX.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/t8ei8dX.png?1 What I sought was the debris carrying lacewing larvae. Result 2 is far off but I was so happy to put a name to the entity I did not even register that result. The first thing you will notice is Google trying way too hard and ending up with idiotic suggestions as a result. It seems to use the words and their synonyms without accounting for context. That is the only way it could possibly give PHP, email and bugzilla reports as possible answers to that query [1]. It's a common recent pattern I've been noticing, unless I can model how I think people will write about what I'm searching for and more importantly it is not something the SEO people have motive to polish so vigorously, the content is accidently removed; I won't get good results. That SEO bit is annoying because I remember when my previous searches in the genre (e.g. game related) used to be far more fruitful. The new behavior of adding synonyms is particularly not worth it since the fails are much more spectacular than it wins. Final stuff: I also compare bing, duck duck go and blekko results whenever I hit queries I think are complicated, none do much better than google. Sometimes they are worse. This result is the first time Samuru blew everyone out of the water, usually it is modestly better [2] (answer in second half vs not so for others [3]). The reason I still use google is force of habit, it took over chrome and most importantly: its incredible and unmatched indexing ability. But I use samuru enough that it's one of my most visited pages. I have absolutely no affiliation with them, don't know who it's by and found out about it here on HN. According to Paul Graham, Google can be tackled if they can get 10,000 hackers on their side. Time to put the hypothesis to the test, +1 here. [1] Here is the same search with quotes: http://imgur.com/qiGDnqr&t8ei8dX#0 http://imgur.com/qiGDnqr&t8ei8dX#0 [3] I only sometimes check page 2 for the others. This might seem unfair but a key UX concept is to minimize latency. Clicking to page 2 seems minor but the EV for that action is so low I skip it. But scrolling just a bit more since I'm already here is much cheaper. UX should absolutely count as much as tech (UX/process + human + algorithms > all). [2] My annoyance with such vague anecdotes is why I decided to start taking screenshots. And also because results are not stable. For example, search terms that bing once did well on are now embarrassing.

smegel 13y ago

> I "Google" less and less for search results Google is absolutely unusable for some search terms that are not part of the primary association of the term. Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan). If I don't mention the word "buy" or "holiday" I would not expect to see either.

mortehu 13y ago
> Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan) http://m.bitraf.no/~mortehu/skrot/caravan_book.png http://m.bitraf.no/~mortehu/skrot/caravan_book.png It even shows the cover of several books featuring a caravan.

thisisnotatest 13y ago

Google engineer here. We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on improvements. We also added "Verbatim Mode" to save you the trouble of putting "each" "query" "term" in "quotes" when you want to exactly match all your query words.

kaeawc 13y ago
Thanks ^_^ personally I like the results I get.
mistermann 13y ago
I would very much like an expandable section below the search text where I could turn very specific portions of the google magic on and off. I also wish you would remove the multitude of sites that scrape content from the original sites and SEO the hell out of it to get to the top of search results. I assume the advertising revenue is too lucrative to do so.
- heurist 13y ago
  I haven't had too many issues with Google guessing what I mean but the sites that scrape other sites are a real pain. find the oldest page with that text and show it to me, then exclude the rest from the results. Or something like that. If it has the exact same information then it's useless to me.
- thisisnotatest 13y ago
  We're working on the scraped sites. Also, advertising revenue has nothing to do with it. We don't even talk about revenue in our search quality meetings, just the utility and speed of our search results page.
- thisisnotatest 13y ago
  Personally I would be a fan of giving users more "knobs" to turn in their search results. For example, we have the toggle switch to include personal results and personalized ranking, vs. showing un-personalized search results. However, it's a complicated product design problem whenever you want to add complexity to something used by a billion people. Remember that the thing that made Google so popular and iconic originally was the plain search box.

kevinh 13y ago

I switched to DuckDuckGo for search for one of the reasons you listed - Google felt the need to guess what I was thinking and it felt like, most of the time, it was getting it wrong (especially with synonym search). One of DuckDuckGo's stated policies is not to modify what you search[0]. The fact that DDG doesn't collect information about me is just a plus. [0] http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215637-autocorrect http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215637-autoco...

Ecio78 13y ago
I tried to do the same after upgrading my Linux Mint but I couldn't resist more than a couple of days, maybe I'm too used to Google UI.. but I agree with some of the comments, sometimes I know I should search something on Amazon, Wikipedia, iMDB, Tripadvisor etc.. and I just use Google to go there (because typically if you search a movie iMDB is one of the first results, if you search "hotel xyz review" you got Tripadvisor etc..)
- dalek_cannes 13y ago
  It's almost as if we're going back to directories.

nostromo 13y ago

I remember when the web was still about the long tail -- it made Google extremely useful. Today I usually know where the information is before I Google it (StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.) which means their value add has diminished. It's less "search" and more "navigational aid."

polynomial 13y ago
The web still is about long tail, just that the signal:noise ratio has dropped precipitously.

bsullivan01 13y ago

A conspiracy theorist looking at Google's ad clicks numbers might say that better results equal less clicks on ads. Mind you, that on commercial searches essentially all you see is ads. This works up to a point, a tipping point that is. I think Google is unusable now for commercial searches, all you see is ads and eBay, Amazon and other megacorps. Up to a few years ago, I would have never believed that Google crafted results to increase ad clicks but now I do. Looks like MBAs from fancy colleges have taken over everything. Their ad clicks are increasing by a suspiciously large percentage each quarter. They are back at page one: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results." http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

cousin_it 13y ago
Sometime ago I had an idea of making a non-commercial search engine that would only search the non-commercial web. All pages that accept payments or show ads would be out.
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  That would be fantastically interesting to see/use. My only concern is, well, how would you fund it?
  - cousin_it 13y ago
    Yeah, that's a hard question. But maybe we can mitigate the need for funding by being open source, P2P, or getting donations.

kbart 13y ago

Heh, I find myself in the same situation. Recently I use Google mainly as a shortcut to Wiki, Ebay, Amazon, SO etc. For a "real" search I prefer DuckDuckGo (that doesn't modify search results based on my browsing, search history and big names) and symbolhound.com (that is very useful for programming related searches as it includes symbols).

wahsd 13y ago

You should always look on page 386,549 of the 8 million search results. That's where the best results can be found.

freyr 13y ago

I also pretty much use Google's search as a proxy for Wikipedia search or StackOverflow search at this point. But I highly doubt much Yahoo's traffic is coming from search. They've got Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, omg! (which is huge), Flickr, Tumblr, etc. Yahoo is in the content business. Plus, I know of some people (especially older people) who have Yahoo set as their homepage, and they'll freak out if it gets set to anything else. And besides, Yahoo is a much better homepage than iGoogle for most people, particularly if they use Yahoo mail.

ImprovedSilence 13y ago
Oh shit, you bring up a good point. Nobody else seemed to mention it, but I bet Tumblr is helping push them over the edge in terms of traffic.
agumonkey 13y ago
Same here, Google has become `readline in a browser` somehow. About * Mail, after everything Google did to be more social and whatnot, there's still no integration with Gmail, only Google Plus. A mail counter in Google's black bar would have been more useful.
samspenc 13y ago
Actually, Tumblr isn't included in the comScore report - its listed separately at #28.

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darasen 13y ago

Given that there is an entire industry centered around gaming search (primarily Google) is anyone surprised search has suffered?

powertower 13y ago

> ...another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. What's amazing here is the obviousness of the fact that Google is only going to do what either a) maintains or b) increases its profits... Giving you good and relevant search results was the bootstrap. Now (that they've dominated the market and passed the bellcurve) it's nothing more than a hindrance to CTR (click through rates) on paid search ads. That is, the better (more relevant) the results, the less someone is going to look at the ads.