I submitted a post about this some time ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113007
It's not just an issue of refining results to fit a majority of the population. Something is seriously wrong with it.
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
231–240 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#232Who cares. Stop using their spy machine and use duckduckgo
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#233It 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…
When I searched it "warmest winter coats", I get: first result is a list from a blog by some "Emergency prep guy" it basically lists 27 coats with information. Second result is RT online with black Friday recommendations Third is oprah daily with recommendations and shop links So, reddit is also, as you said, full of false information + astroturfing as well. Besides not everyone is interested in diving into reddit ra…
> first result is a list from a blog by some "Emergency prep guy" it basically lists 27 coats with information.
Most of the time, this is just a list of coats someone googled and copy-pasted info from the marketing pages. This page is an affiliate-marketing site masquerading as a review site.
Not sure if specifically that page is, but that's what the majority of "product review" results in Google are nowadays.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#234The 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 don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but when I also look for technical stuff I see a lot of Stackoverflow copy-cats on the first page.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#235The 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…
> hashbang
Maybe it's just me but those always seem vastly gratuitous. Like shouldn't the engine figure that out automatically? It's like half its job.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's analogous to predatory pricing. Google has all the necessary tech to go back to doing good searches. They can easily pivot back in a few months. A new startup would need to dump loads of money into servers and building their own tech. So there's just no way to recoup the cost of building a competitor.
You might be surprised how much compute it takes. Not the same thing but, entire SO website runs on like 2 door sized racks. Search engine might be a different thing but if you have funding to get started, hardware costs aren’t going to be impossibly huge. Most is labor (engineering). I’m curious, how much compute power it takes to index the whole web? I presume queries are super fast.
The monthly snapshots of CommonCrawl contains around 64k files of HTML, metadata and text only. The text only and metadata are around 250MB each, so in total the corpus would be around 16TB of text and 16TB of metadata. I don't know how much it costs to them, but when I used my own crawler I was able to download 500k webpages in around 4 hours (using the $80/month basic DigitalOcean server... let's say a total of $1/1M web pages, just the crawling process).
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#237Earlier 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…
Yeah, Amazon search results are often infuriating. Most searches are flooded with similar items that need better filters and some notes on product differentiation. Amazon feels like a bazaar set up inside a Walmart where everyone is yelling at you to buy from them and you don't really know what you're going to get. I know it's a hard problem, but I can often look at the results and imagine some easy UX improvements.…
I wish shopping for consumer goods was as nice as faceted search on Octopart or Digikey. It seems that even for Amazon-sold products, either the products don't have relevant data listed accurately and consistently, or the faceted search doesn't let you query it.
(And that leaves aside the issue of the product page of a really nice wastebasket I bought years ago being hijacked by a meat slicer.)
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this just a defect in the corpus? There is likely no quantitative, objective information about the warmth of winter coats in articles that would include the phrase "warmest winter coat" because someone who undertook an objective analysis would be uncomfortable using that phrase, which has no real meaning. With your refinement, adding "reddit" to the end of the search, you just get a bunch of randos holding fort…
The first results used to be blog posts, forum discussions, etc... I'm not expecting scientific accuracy (it's a bonus if I find it)... I'm expecting personal investigations and opinions. I'm ok with that. I'm not ok with content marketing supplanting it. The entire front page of a search is often some "blogs" listing products with affiliate links and no actual experience. The information is outrageously shallow and…
Social media killed forums so there's no surprise that they don't surface in search results since they are no longer active. The discussions you're looking for are now happening pretty much exclusively on Facebook and Reddit and only Reddit is well indexed.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#239The 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…
DDG works great for ~90% of my queries. I do fall back on Google every now and then, but DDG honestly delivers results that are just fine.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#240Google is no longer a search engine - it's a behavioral management software. Stop using it unless you like being manipulated.