I think Google just seems to be trying their best against an army of SEO/content marketing parasites constantly trying to game their algorithm, look up a recipe website for an example of what the internet will look like if those guys win.
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
181–190 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#182Yes. It’s broken. I’d pay $20/month for search that worked at least as well as Google used to back in the day.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#183It 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 f…
Until the spammers figure that one out. It would be nice if google had a keyword for this.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#184Everytime 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…
It can be solved without centralized server: every content site, page, or paper, will publish Bloom filter for their content discoverable via sitemap, to which you subscribe via RSS/Atom. When you need to search, you will make hashes for words in your query, then will check each Bloom filter for potential matches. When potential match is found, full page source can be downloaded and checked more carefully for ranking.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#185The topic here says "quantitatively". Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results? All of these threads devolve into anecdotes and reminisces about the "good old days" and complaining about Pinterest. None of which is in the least quantitative. I'd be interested to see some actual data or research on the subject, if it exists. Or maybe it's not Google that's got…
My thoughts exactly, until we have actual dat but not "feelings" this whole argument is moot.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#186The topic here says "quantitatively". Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results? All of these threads devolve into anecdotes and reminisces about the "good old days" and complaining about Pinterest. None of which is in the least quantitative. I'd be interested to see some actual data or research on the subject, if it exists. Or maybe it's not Google that's got…
To be able to quantitatively compare Google-of-old with Google-of-today on the web content today, we'd have to have access to both. And we'd have to assume that Google-of-old's algorithms have not been figured-out and abused by the content that's there today. And certainly the content has changed: I wonder if you can look into archive.org by-date and run a search engine on it for comparison (I'd like to test if proportion of commercial content has grown up).
Without access to both Googles, the best you can do is compare across different search engines: special-cased ones like search.marginalia.nu can net you a quantitative feel for what exists out there that's less likely to be content marketing, but I am not sure if you can figure out where those pages rank in Google search results for the same terms programmatically?
You can also prepare for the future: record some data today, and compare in 10 years time.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm using DDG for almost a year, and I'd say that DDG is slightly better because I have a bit more control. It's important when you're multilingual (common in Europe) to be able to de-localize results chose language etc.
But it isn't MUCH better. DDG is just slightly better than Google, that has become infuriating.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
ddg is bing. So why would I bother with it?
1. It hides personal information from Bing. 2. DDG has its own search crawler (and it's getting larger, the more people use it). You can also try SearX.
Main search is powered by bing, lets not kid ourselves. ddg is not answering complex queries by using its own crawled index.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#189It 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…
I don't get the appending reddit thing. I don't see why reddit is considered trustworthy, marketers have been planting "organic discussion" on reddit for years.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#190There are plenty of good comments in this thread about how Google search results aren't as good because of SEO and companies like Pinterest, "gaming the system". However Google itself is not blameless in making their search quantitatively worse through their injection of censorship and politics into their searches. Google manipulates searches on a whole variety of subjects - current, political and historical - on a regular basis. For example, Google, "Syria gas attack" and compare the top 10 results you get when you go to Duck Duck Go and search for the exact same term. Google will tell you its because it ranks "authoritative" sources higher. What metrics Google uses to determine how "authoritative" a source are not revealed. Unsurprisingly, Google's choice of "authoritative" sources always aligns exactly with the DC/Pentagon/State Department blob. Ironically, these attempts at censorship by Google just serve to further undermine what little trust many people have in "authoritative" sources all together (aside from making their search function much less useful).