Several days ago Google Search slowed down significantly for some of the queries I was making.
Several search queries took 2-4 seconds to return results.
Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
101–109 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#102Google search has gotten worse and DuckDuckGo has simultaneously gotten better! I have (again) been using DDG for the past few weeks and I type "!g" once a day at most. Very exciting if this seeming trend holds.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#103What really, really bugs me is what they did with the image search at some point. I always used image search to try and find the original source of an Image. It's super useful to determine the authenticity of a news article, identify the author of a photo for licensing and a million other uses. Then at some point, search by image started to simply return results based on the image classification tag on the image: so…
I've also noticed this and this is a big loss of utility.
There aren't many tools that find exact/slightly transformed matches of an image. That was very valuable, especially with the power of Google's webcrawling. Imaged get shared, stretched, watermarked, and artifacts build up. This was the single best way to find a source image.
Now the image is converted back into text and it searches for images using the text. We could search for images using text before. This is not new. The unique thing about reverse image search was killed and turned into just a fancy input for the same old image search.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#104Interestingly enough, I was JUST today thinking to myself, has google auto-suggest been consistently degrading or is it just me?! Now my thinking is there is some over-engineering going on (for lack of better articulation) as type auto-suggest as well as speech-to-text are just plain "off base" + your observation of search results, I'm sure they're all on a common, core "function" ; )
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#105It feels like maybe Google had a changing of the guard and a new batch of engineers are making decisions and missed out on a transfer of knowledge from the previous engineers with both search and SEO. I'm seeing my search results show less and less of what I'm looking for, it's like google search is forgetting how it used to work. The same with SEO, I'm seeing sites ranking again on the first page that have useless c…
Don’t forget that the web is changing. There is more junk produced every day and Google needs to combat search engine spam and blackhat practices. This means changes and not seeing search results you are used to.
That's a key missing thread. The web is increasingly dumb, and the types of people who produced great content are now in the FB/Twitter skinnerbox, liking things like drunken monkeys.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#106It feels like maybe Google had a changing of the guard and a new batch of engineers are making decisions and missed out on a transfer of knowledge from the previous engineers with both search and SEO. I'm seeing my search results show less and less of what I'm looking for, it's like google search is forgetting how it used to work. The same with SEO, I'm seeing sites ranking again on the first page that have useless c…
Don’t forget that the web is changing. There is more junk produced every day and Google needs to combat search engine spam and blackhat practices. This means changes and not seeing search results you are used to.
Double True, but I'm expecting to start seeing thousands of keywords in the footer of sites white text on a white background. It's like SEO is coming full circle. Just surprised Google is allowing ancient SEO tricks to work again.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm dumbfounded as to how you don't see the usefulness of this feature. Sometimes there exists more than one word for a situation, and you might miss a forum thread, for example, that is relevant to you, but you're saying to Google "only use these exact words" and not accounting for differences in dialect etc
I search for "suicide" (for my work) very often. It _fucking sucks_ that Google seems to think "death", "died", "murdered" etc are all valid synonyms. It means that for every single search I do I need to do extra work. I miss the days of +forced +terms.
Surely using quotes around the term does the trick?
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#108I'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…
Is DuckDuckGo good now? When I first tried it out a couple of years back, I found it didn't give me enough (relevant) results on my searches, so I stayed with Google. I assume it must have improved in that time; maybe I should try it again.
it's pretty good, when it's not i put a g! before the query
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#109Are there any alternatives? I am ok with indie, slow, paid, not-super-accurate options.