Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#131

Post by islon » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

Sakos wrote: post #53

zbuf wrote: post #39

Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine... I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like. For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.

Oh, that reminds me. How long has Youtube's search been so utterly useless and downright terrible? Whatever I enter, it interrupts the search results with recommendations THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY QUERY every 5 results. What the fuck, Google. Are you doing this on purpose? Did somebody piss in your cereal and you decided to collectively punish all of us? If that's not the case, who's responsible so I can go ove…

Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, I have no idea what the actual reason is.

I think the problem is not malice nor stupidity.

Most youtube users are non-technical/layman people who don't really know what they want. They type "fun cat videos" or "minecraft" or whatever and want suggestions of popular things to see.

The technical people who know what they want are the minority so it's not profitable to create a separate search mode just for them, because they are tech-literate enough to figure out the idiosyncrasies.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#132

Post by d4rkp4ttern » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

dmingod666 wrote: post #69

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #36

I sometimes see surprisingly good results from this gpt3 based search engine, if I take a bit of time to write out a sentence or two: https://metaphor.systems/

I get surprised by so many AI startups using discord as their product interface. First time I saw it used, I was like, don't you have enough funds to build your own interface? Still find it jarring to go from a slick looking site to a discord login. They probably don't want to reimplement chat, but I'm sure there's got to be a couple of opensource chat projects out there.. I don't know - haven't used discord too much…

I think with discord they can easily collect lots of examples of prompts + results to feed to their model to improve it.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#133

Post by MockObject » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #95

torben-friis wrote: post #44

this is everything you need to know for the current state: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/gen-bypassing-google-tikto... I personally do something similar, pretty much all my searches have 'reddit' as an extra keyword.

I wish I could replace "reddit" with "forum" or some other type of category as opposed to reddit itself, especially with how much of reddit is already bought for (marketing, bots, enforced echo-chambers, etc.)

Reddit is replacing fora, unfortunately.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#134

Post by bryan_w » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #71

This discussion repeats, with a lot of comments, roughly once per month. Here's a sample: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31093439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31427996 https://…

What's weird is that there was a freakanomics episode that basically mirrors this comment section: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#135

Post by hiidrew » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

I agree! The top 7 links are usually all ads anyway, or low quality content like you mentioned. I tend to use Bing (not much better) but only switch to Google for getting scores, e.g. 'world cup' to see the current games.

Seems like search could go in two directions (away from Google): Personally curated search results, not sure of a good example on this but thinking of something that takes the best reddit comments on a query, something like that. Or search with the GPT-3 models, a recent demo that's cool is: https://metaphor.systems/

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#136

Post by mkbkn » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

Since last 6+ years, my default search engine is either Ecosia or DuckDuckGo. F*ck Google.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#137

Post by Rudism » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 6:42 PM UTC

It's not just you. Feels like unless I'm searching a specific quoted error message all I get are what read like vague non-insightful AI-generated articles that were fed whatever keywords I searched on. Usually from a very generic almost humorously content-farm-sounding domain.

I've recently spun up a self-hosted SearXNG instance which, while it doesn't really solve that problem, pulls and collates top results from a bunch of different search engines on the back-end, so the page 1 ratio of actually useful results to SEO garbage feels a little better to me in most cases.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#138

Post by pcdoodle » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 6:55 PM UTC

It's bad. I used to be the guy who could find anything. Now it's a "2022 here's what you need to know from my sponsored links!"

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#139

Post by MattDemers » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

It's surprising how often I'm just adding "site:reddit.com" to get some semblance of a human answer to questions.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

#140

Post by MattDemers » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 7:24 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #117

ergonaught wrote: post #24

Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There m…

Part of it is trying to intake everything. Maybe google needs a "search the entire web" mode and a "search not garbage." As naïve as it may be, I believe that crowd sourcing and metamoderation is probably the answer. Instead of full time employees, they should be offering some kind of kickbacks to their couple hundred thousand most trusted users, in exchange for upvotes and downvotes of content quality.

I mean, that just introduces another level of crap as sites clamour to be on the "not garbage" list; it'll end up like the issues Twitter has/had with verification.