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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?

#281

Post by flenserboy »

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.

The spooks will take over that one, too.

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

#282

Post by JohnWhigham »

cmaggiulli wrote: post #275

My father has been saying this for years. I find Google to be useful by using search operators. I know for a fact that the YouTube recommendations algorithm is “worse” than before. It’s infuriating

YouTube is fucking horrible. I can't fucking stand the "People also watched" results 5 results into your search results. I don't give a fuck what other people watch, I want what I searched for (which is already fucking bad)!!!

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

#283

Post by finite_jest »

akvadrako wrote: post #51
sumtechguy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many searches like that I use 'tools->all results->verbatim'. Seems to help.

I've been using the verbatim mode by default for a couple years. It does improve the results substantially.

Interesting, is it any different than putting the query in quotes?

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

#284

Post by clukic »

elliekelly wrote: post #255
micromacrofoot wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a reply to myself... but does anyone have ideas about how this can go away? Have we lost the internet to eternal marketing and data-mining arms races? Is this why people are flocking to search-opaque places like Discord? Sometimes I feel like that internet isn't for me anymore, and that's a little distressing.

The more I think about it the more I just don’t think it’s possible to have an internet that is supported by ad-revenue and isn’t user-hostile. The incentives are diametrically opposed. We need a PBS/NPR of search engines.

I wonder if an argument could be made that this would actually pay for itself. Given that productive use of search is at odds with commercial use of search, maybe a publicly funded search engine could increase GWP by 0.01% which would be about $87B a year.

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

#285

Post by gambiting »

mrweasel wrote: post #167
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…

> 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.

I have a public repo on GitHub that just doesn't show up on Google.

Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.

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

#288

Post by VRay »

majkinetor wrote: post #148
trulyme wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is infuriating on all UIs, but I haven't seen one that would implement a very obvious solution: if the area around click has changed in 100ms before the event, disregard the click. Either a webpage or a browser could do that. I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of it, so there must be some reason why it isn't done - does anyone know why?

Yes, because it sux, in general. Maybe as an option.

If something changes within ~300ms before your click, the only way you'd be intentionally clicking whatever's there now is if you're amped up playing some online game

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

#289

Post by willwhitney »

Would it be bad if we made advertising... illegal? In small part because it would reduce the principal-agent disparity between what you want to do and what Google wants you to do, but more importantly because it would remove the incentive to create blogspam and game the results.

Advertising serves a positive purpose by informing people about products that they will like and otherwise would not find. It also serves a negative purpose by attempting to cause people to make decisions which are not in their best interests.

I am genuinely curious what proportion of ads seen serve each of those two purposes.

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

#290

Post by mda »

notJim wrote: post #233
mda wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know these review pages are usually affiliate links, but the problem is, when the subject is something like this (commercial interest), it is extremely hard to find anything that is objective.

Emergency prep guy seems like at least owns or knows about the products he lists, however he also discloses his site is owned by a company which is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program.

So maybe Google should stop feeding this affiliate spam loop and try to create algorithms that try to actually understand which information is based on personal experiences and not created by financial interest. This is a very hard task to do and also prone to manipulation as well. In the end maybe Google needs some real competition for this to happen.

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