Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by rc_mob » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

cwojno wrote: post #113

Google seems to also have a heavy recency bias. I've tried to search for news articles that were even a month old and have had trouble locating links to stories I know happened. I don't know any tricks to working around this. And if I don't recall specifically when the article came out (say, somewhere around 6 months ago), I'll usually give up. Any tips on finding "historical" results?

I agree. I hate that any search I do will show CNN articles from this week. Dude google, if I wanted recent news I would use the news tab.

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

#192

Post by marginalia_nu » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

I do think it's a bit of a mixed bag of causes.

Google has mixed incentives since their main income is the ads they sell both on the search results page and in the pages linked from the search results. Looking after the interests of the users is a tricky balancing act, and it would be really easy for them to start cannibalizing themselves to eke out a bigger profit margin. In the absence of serious competition to keep them honest, it is in their economic interest to show mediocre search results with a painful amount of ads.

Google also appears to have pivoted toward a few particular use cases of search engines, finding where to buy things, and answering questions. I think a few uses fall in the cracks between those patterns.

They seem to be optimizing for the results that most people will click, which is fine if you are most people, but will worsen the experience for the long tail consisting of all the users looking for something specific off the beaten track. The algorithms seem to actively resist attempts at refining the query away from the most popular results, which is a peculiar behavior that I don't understand the motivation behind. I think this is a big mistake, as it makes what was already easy easier to find, and what's already difficult even more difficult to find.

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

#193

Post by ksec » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

That is why you are seeing way more Search Engine startup. No one at Googles understand anything about quality, nor the intuition to understand what is good and what is bad. So they decide to AB test the heck out of everything.

It is a lot like Microsoft in the 90s.

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

#194

Post by j45 » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

Google has probably gotten better at its business, better search results in the ads than the search results themselves.

By owning demand for search the attention can be guided.

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

#195

Post by Accujack » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

nucleardog wrote: post #136

fxtentacle wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available. A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variatio…

>Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available

This is exactly it. Amazon isn't a shopping site, they're a corporation using third party sellers to offload the risk and cost of providing a wide array of goods. They let customers experiment with product offerings, find products that sell using their web site, then cherry pick the most lucrative ones to produce and stock to compete with their own "customers".

They're not a service for anyone but themselves.

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

#196

Post by kingcharles » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

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…

Amazon.com search is probably the worst offender of all the awful search engines. You can spend hours trying to find something you know is on there.

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

#197

Post by fsflover » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

mda wrote: post #188

fsflover wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, not yet. I hope it will, when it has enough resources.

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

#198

Post by kingcharles » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

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…

Yes, I actually find Bing is now better for the long tail.

Most of my searches are for really old pages or really long tail stuff and Google just simply doesn't bubble them up, if it has them at all. I keep finding web sites lately from links on other sites and find myself asking "Why the fuck did Google not find this?" .. then I go back to Google and try to find it with keywords from the site, and nothing...

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

#199

Post by kingcharles » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

Why is it that all the biggest search engines on the planet are now practically useless?

Google, Amazon, eBay... practically worthless.

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

#200

Post by spaniard89277 » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

nucleardog wrote: post #136

fxtentacle wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available. A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variatio…

I just gave up on Amazon Spain about 2 years ago already. It's just completely impossible to filter and rank stuff properly, just loads of crap you don't want. I heard it's worse in Amazon US.

What I don't get about this companies (because this seems a problem shared between google, YT and Amazon) is when they optimize for clicks or whatever their KPI, what are they thinking is the outcome in the mid term?

I mean, IDK around you, but I'm the prosumer regular folks ask for recommendations. They may be safe for the time being but of course I'm going to contribute for their competitors getting klout.

I don't have an alternative for YT, but people watches me using DDG and whe they ask for recommendations for buying stuff I don't even bother with Amazon.

I'm not the type who pushes his decisions onto others, but I already got asked why I don't use google and amazon.