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Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

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Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#101

Post by siproprio »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #26

It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…

Specifically for search, my experience today when I search something on google:

- captcha (because vpn)

- spam results (based on location, my location was never very good for technical content)

- paywalls

- no pictures cause photos is now paid (i've signed up for unlimited forever)

And on bing basically I get shopping coupons, games and, well, and microsoft's "anything's valid, except customer sat" approach.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#102

Post by dazc »

fullstackchris wrote: post #94
flacebo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "people also searched for" box is not just useless, but also very much messing with usability for me. Every time I click on a link, go back, then trying to click on the next link, this box shows up and I accidentally click on that (because it shows up with a little delay and an animation). This filter takes care of that box completely: www.google.com##.exp-outline www.google.com##[style="display: block; opacity:…

This is particularly hilarious and ironic when considering they are really punishing for cumulative layout shift in their Lighthouse tool - to prevent exactly what you are describing from happening! Seems like Google hasn't used lighthouse on their own site!

Because google doesn't need to worry about such things. For most people DDG would be a much better experience - if only they knew?

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#103

Post by jonathanstrange »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #35
alangibson wrote: post #12

Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.

I want a curated search engine so badly. I feel like some enterprising developer could craft one specifically geared towards developers. Imagine a search that doesn't ignore operators like '?.' and where you can set persistent conditions on every single query without having to type it out. This would help prevent you from needing to type in the language you are searching for in every query. Oh, and the cherry on top…

Content curation doesn't scale, so I believe it's out of question for the modern web. The best you can hope for is to have someone throw some quality AI at it, plus a lot of manual tweaking.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#104

Post by wmil »

alangibson wrote: post #12

Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.

It's analogous to predatory pricing. Google has all the necessary tech to go back to doing good searches. They can easily pivot back in a few months.

A new startup would need to dump loads of money into servers and building their own tech.

So there's just no way to recoup the cost of building a competitor.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#105

Post by alecco »

vgeek wrote: post #9

The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testi…

> The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries

Google is simply maximizing profits by giving users results that would cause either more clicks on ads or show more ads. It's mission is to make money this quarter/year. If you believe any of their Silicon Valley-style new age talking points you probably don't have critical thinking skills.

If their products are getting worse for you perhaps you are not part of a profitable segment for them.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#106

Post by fxtentacle »

fxtentacle wrote: post #89
vgeek wrote: post #9

The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testi…

Yes, that is also my observation. They will show content that completely does not contain your query words if that content is just popular enough. The result is that niche technical topics get drowned out by related popular discussions. Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't…

(same poster) BTW, amazon.com is in my opinion even more infuriating. I just searched for "Odense Marzipan" (which is a 100+ years old brand serving the royal danish court) and they show me pictures of gamepads made out of chocolate along with a note: Your search "odense marzipan" was automatically translated into "odicht marzipan".

Then searching for "odicht" out of curiousity, they auto-correct it to "olight". So I start with almond-based sugar sweets, follow their auto-correct twice and now I'm staring at headlamps. And even Google has no idea what "odicht" might have been, so I really wonder how Amazon decided to auto-correct from an existing product into a non-word.

Searching for "odense marzipan" including the quotes then works, but it yields the cringe-worthy message:

Your search ""odense marzipan"" was automatically translated into "„odense marzipan“".

(where the only difference between the first and the second thing is that they converted the ascii quotes to up and down sentence quotes)

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#107

Post by jrm4 »

Man, great anecdote I discovered yesterday: So "Cyrus" and "Joseph" are part of my grandfathers full name.

If you Duck Duck Go his full name, no quotes, the front page is all him and relatives; ancestry dot com and whatever.

If you Google it, no quotes? The front page is ENTIRELY "Miley Cyrus on Joe Rogan." Moreover, with quotes? Only 2 links total on the front page.

So I'd say YES.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#108

Post by piaste »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #26

It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…

"Thread" is a good keyword to include to find discussions, even though it's a bit overloaded.

Eg.

'good cheap mountain bike' -> 10 results out of the first 10 are commercial spam and listicles.

'thread good cheap mountain bike' -> 5 human discussions on entry-level MBs, 1 link to a MB forum home page (not a specific thread), 2 commercial spam, 1 paywalled magazine article testing MBs, and 1 online shop product page for a MB that happened to mention a "73mm Threaded BB shell" multiple times.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#109

Post by bluedino »

I can't believe how much straight up spam/malware sites get into the first and second page of results. Sites that go to something like chickenaffairs.com, they seem to scrape content from other sites that happens to contain your search terms, get indexed in google, and then stay there somehow

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#110

Post by vgeek »

fxtentacle wrote: post #106
fxtentacle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is also my observation. They will show content that completely does not contain your query words if that content is just popular enough. The result is that niche technical topics get drowned out by related popular discussions. Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't…

(same poster) BTW, amazon.com is in my opinion even more infuriating. I just searched for "Odense Marzipan" (which is a 100+ years old brand serving the royal danish court) and they show me pictures of gamepads made out of chocolate along with a note: Your search "odense marzipan" was automatically translated into "odicht marzipan". Then searching for "odicht" out of curiousity, they auto-correct it to "olight". So I…

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