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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?

#161

Post by elondaits »

Recently (last few months) Google results got REALLY BAD for me due to its attempts to provide region-specific results.

I live in Argentina, and sometimes I search for Argentinian things, but also more often I search in English for things related to work, travel, hobbies, etc. It's reasonable and OK that when I search for certain things Google provides region-specific results (e.g. "servicio meteorológico nacional" [National meteorological service] brings up the Argentinian agency and other local results instead of any from other Spanish speaking countries). This has been like that for many years now, and is OK.

The new thing is that more and more often I've been getting results that include argentine or Spanish-language results that have NO relevance to the search, and are a super big stretch.

I haven't saved examples, but I tested for 3 minutes and just came up with one... trust me that I've seen much worse than this.

Let's say I search for "french tv cat puppet" (I watched an old show called Telechat when I was a kid). I get the following results:

1 & 2 - Kitty Cats - Wikipedia (a French Canadian TV show... OK...)

3 - Pacha et les chats @ imdb (the same show)

4 - YouTube (???? "Missing: french ‎cat ‎puppet", warns Google)

5 - "Carmel: Who Killed Maria Marta?" @ Netflix (this is a true crime show based on a very famous murder in my country)

None of those results were ads. I have no idea why Google would show results 4 and 5 except to think that their index for my country is very very broken/corrupt.

Another "not as bad but still very bad" example: If I search for "mccartney bear song" (see Rupert and the Frog Song, and the "We all stand together" song) the first two results are spot on, but the third one is a Spanish language result from a local paper titled "These is the full list of songs that The Beatles played in the Get Back documentary by Peter Jackson", the snippet has McCartney and the word "song" from "Song Of Love" in bold.

Final one. I search for "retro toys with water inside"... the search terms are super poor, but the image results show me that Google got me (e.g. the Tomy Waterful toys).

Image results - OK

Video results - OK

1 - Handheld water game @ Amazon (OK...)

2 - Pinterest results (groan...)

3 - A hacked home decor Argentine site that redirects me to a page that sells a doll, no water.

4 & 5 - Relevant retro toy pages

6 - A hacked Argentinian government page (under the .gov.ar TLD, which is for government site) with the "classic fashion CHATHAM ELECTRONICS JAN-CAHG-1Z2" title. Apparently has been fixed so now it has a 404 error.

I rest my case. It's a disaster.

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

#162

Post by WORMS_EAT_WORMS »

necovek wrote: post #156
WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's kind of funny is there was a time where Google used to stand for --literally anything-- and would punish a site like reddit on search results for having such a user hostile interface. For some reason though (probably because they used AMP) they basically allow them to do anything they want. Multiple popups, hijacking click events for login modals, and hiding the content with no impact to search results. So now…

GP was saying how reddit is actually more useful than whatever Google returns today: that's the "hobbyist-only" shortcut for today. Because that blog post is long gone from Google's indexes, since replaced with SEO-optimized or "influencer" driven sales/content marketing. I like to compare with search.marginalia.nu results from time to time, but the restrictions it puts on the content it traverses do not make for a g…

We are saying the same thing. I reiterated it poorly.

Just also poking fun of how Google both killed the "real" blog industry and forced all the good content on reddit (which ironically does every anti-SEO thing ever and where people are trying to go).

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

#163

Post by pixelgeek »

mmaunder wrote: post #74

The problem isn’t solvable by modifying search queries. The fundamental issue is that the web has filled up with content designed to trick Google into sending it visitors and to maximize ad revenue. So you have content that is thick with ranking signals and thin on useful and new data. You also have to scroll past many ads and filler to get to the answer to your search query. The fundamental problem is that Google an…

This pretty much sums it up. The amount of crap and plagiarized content in most searches is what is killing most search results.

Google makes money regardless of the quality or 'originality' of the content your search comes up with so they currently have no motive to change things.

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

#164

Post by barbazoo »

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…

I've also completely switched over to DDG and I'm seeing similar things that infuriate me about Google. Most of all the fact that ignores my "literal" searches using double quotes. The documentation [0] says

> Results for exact term [...]. If no results are found, we'll try to show related results.

But very regularly it fails to find results I know exist in not so unpopular places.

[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...

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

#166

Post by i-ning »

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.

This site can help: http://teclis.com

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

#167

Post by mrweasel »

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…

> Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail.

Rather weird if true, but I can't really disagree with your observation. It seems like large parts of the web have disappeared in the last five to ten years.

Google do most likely index the sites, but their current algorithm just don't use them, because it as much a promotion algorithm at it is search.

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

#168

Post by simplExpanation »

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…

Shocking that tight emotional connection is more valuable to most people than throwing spaghetti at the wall.

It’s almost as if the government and big companies have spent a lot of effort understanding human biology, cognitive function and applying what was learned.

While selling the masses on a contrived story keeps them believing there’s a universe of infinite life available to humanity if you just follow these steps…

Things like human colonization of space, and political memes about wealth are taking advantage of the same biological quirks as religion. It’s just now we can quantify the effects rather than wave it off as mysticism.

But the human story is already set on a path of building a bridge to nowhere.

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

#169

Post by pixelgeek »

Akronymus wrote: post #139
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #99

I've found that double-quotes are basically mandatory in any search now. (this is Google shorthand for "results MUST include this term", you probably know that.) I might be looking for some sort of broad topic, like how do a I do a particular thing in SwiftUI , and it will return a bunch of stuff about SwiftUI that sort of skirts the topic. A search for do "a particular thing" "SwiftUI" is more likely to succeed.

For me, even double quotes get synonymized/get unrelated, but similar results

Me too. Some search results are just filled with junk not matter how you qualify your search

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

#170

Post by jpadkins »

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.

what's the business model? Those verticals are probably not great for search ads. Do you think there is a large enough population of people willing to pay $X per month for a better technical + research search engine?
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