What's the business model of it anyway?
Is it providing you good search results?
Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
11–20 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#12The "must include" functionality makes zero sense to me and I'm dumbfounded as to why it was ever added. If I didn't want my results to include a particular word, I wouldn't have included it in the search. Boggles my mind how Google could mess up something so simple.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#13It definitely did. As a complete outsider (albeit one who has done a bit of contract work at Google a few years ago), it seems that they are going all in on ML-driven personalisation, rather than an "objective best match" approach.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#14It's trash now. I noticed this a few months back:
The final straw for me is that it now "helpfully" drops
search terms on my behalf. I was already using DDG for a third
of my searches. I'm going all-in now. For people who don't spend
much time online, maybe what Google is doing works for them.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#15No, good as always :) But seriously, yesterday I wanted to deploy my beta to a fresh server install and I did like 10 google searches of various server and tool issues. I got it all resolved and the beta is running but I didn't stop at how bad these results are.
What are you searching for when you see a decrease in quality?
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#16I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube.
For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested.
My recommendations also getting less and less relevant.
They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working system.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#17The "must include" functionality makes zero sense to me and I'm dumbfounded as to why it was ever added. If I didn't want my results to include a particular word, I wouldn't have included it in the search. Boggles my mind how Google could mess up something so simple.
Because people are dumb and type in entire questions or sentences, so google tries to be "smart" and remove words that hold no real meaning.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#18Similar. I can't quantify, but I seem to be getting less useful results, certainly on the first page, and often beyond. I'm not sure it's not just perception though because I've not kept any log and it's also possible there are genuinely no matches to the searches I've been doing.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#19It feels like the philosophy has become "return lots of results at any cost".
For instance I just now searched for a specific e-mail address that ends with "@hotmail.co.jp" -- since it didn't find any hits with the full address, it decided to strike out the username part and return thousands of results for just "hotmail.co.jp". This is literally useless and they should know better.
It just gets worse and worse for technical searches too, I find. Searching for stuff like datasheets for chips and vintage obscure computer programs and peripherals rarely returns anything useful without "wrapping" "everything" "in" "quotes".
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#20I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube. For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested. My recommendations also getting less and less relevant. They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working s…
It seems likely that people would search for videos they've previously watched. Must consider that these products are made for "normies", not power users.