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

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

#201

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

photon-torpedo wrote: post #132

shadowgovt wrote: post #10

> google seems to want full sentences instead of just keywords now. "How do I do X?" seems to get me better(?) results then "X + some relevant keyword" Correct. Google will give you better results with full-sentence-like input. After several years of refining results, Google concluded that there's more benefit in teaching the machines to understand how humans ask questions than to teach humanity how to keyword like a…

> Correct. Google will give you better results with full-sentence-like input. Please show how to use a full-sentence natural-language query to search for images of a shirt without stripes. Thanks.

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by winddude » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

empirically yes, for a number of things. But it's still better than the rest.

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

#203

Post by mrweasel » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

mda wrote: post #153

fsflover wrote: post #2

Yes, since a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 . > Any pro tips on how to google Pro tip: try DuckDuckGo, https://ddg.gg .

ddg is bing. So why would I bother with it?

It's not "just Bing", but that also doesn't matter if people are happy with the search results. Honestly Bing has gotten pretty good, and nobody really noticed.

It comes up every time DDG is mentioned that it's "Just Bing". It could be made using an early beta version of AltaVista and rejected NetBSD patches for all I care. The results are pretty good regardless of how they're produced.

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

#204

Post by pkamb » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

There's clearly a new form of highly ranking SEO "blogspam" that I'm now seeing in the top results for many searches.

It's a long article, with multiple headings and short paragraphs for each. Your search terms will be a near-match for one of the headings. The problem is that heading is 3/4 of the way down the page, so you have to scroll past pages of introductory paragraphs and basic info about whatever you're searching for.

For example, for the search term:

> how long does icloud photo upload take

Included in the top results are the pages:

- https://9to5mac.com/2018/12/31/upload-icloud-photos-iphone-i...

- https://www.blog.motifphotos.com/using-icloud-for-your-photo...

- https://backlightblog.com/how-to-upload-photos-to-icloud-fro...

Which all fit the mold of blog post I'm describing. General, multi-heading pages about a particular topic that rank highly for a specific contained within.

The content, once you get to it, isn't necessarily bad. But what I want from the results is a single page / blog post with only the specific heading and paragraph. Or even better, the best Stack Exchange question and/or Reddit thread that fits the term.

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

#205

Post by awinter-py » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

tips: do prompt engineering like you're programming VQGAN

GAN image generators can be tricked into giving results with phrases like 'unreal engine', 'artstation', 'junjo ito', 'van gogh' https://minimaxir.com/2021/08/vqgan-clip/

same for google. 'gist' gives you a specific category of technical results. seems like the default is some combination of medium, SO + github issues

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

#206

Post by peanut_worm » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

yes but competition is even worse

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

#207

Post by mda » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

aceazzameen wrote: post #22

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.

Not only that, we just need one that works the way Google used to work. You know, something like the old algorithm that made Google famous and made competitors obsolete.

Old algorithm with todays internet content would be utterly garbage.

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

#208

Post by agentdrtran » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

zinxq wrote: post #171

There's a whole class of searches that no longer have value because of SEO. Try "best exercise bike" or anything that can be similarly monetized and you will of course end up at a well-crafted page designed to monetize you. My deepest apologies for saying this, but for any type of query that has a monetization angle, I now add "site:www.reddit.com" to the query to find actual discussion about it. Normal Reddit discla…

It's staggering how much the results for any product query that isn't from Reddit or a site like Wirecutter is just unusable. I was recently looking for thin winter gloves and literally every page was an SEO referral scam.

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

#209

Post by rob_c » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

From a freedom of speech perspective unfortunately. Google does a very good job of crushing wrong think.

I'm not even talking about the last 2 years when they've been openly policing I mean stuff that's critical of employees that google has had to fire for committing felonies on their infrastructure.

This constant "refinement" is getting to the point that I regularly end up hitting page 4 or 5 on technical matters because google introduced a broken system to counter abuse from people claiming to be best friends with bigfoot in his UFO...

I with they'd trust tech blogs more than they do... Esp from authors sticking to the subject matter not conspiracies or opinion pieces. A decent tech blog is worth 1000x more than musk has ever tweeted for instance imo.

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

#210

Post by mrweasel » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #118

There are so many clones of Stack Exchange. Or how GeeksForGeeks shows up higher than the pages for the official Python docs. Or how searching for anything seemes to find an auto-generated page with that phrase that outranks any useful info. The authentic source of the content should be the first hit, not someone talking about it, or a clone, or an SEO page linking to the authentic content. That is a colossal failure…

It's actually surprising that for all Googles talents, they can't tell that site X is just cloning StackExchange or that official documentation should probably rank higher than some random site. Either they can't or they don't care.