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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?

#291

Post by Trufa »

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…

I really don't get what people are talking about, first three results for best exercise bikes:

https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/best-exercise-bikes https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/best-exercise-bikes-40742... https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/g23064646/best-exercise-b...

Not sure if they are amazing results but it's decent for such a generic query.

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

#292

Post by Reuzel »

mrweasel wrote: post #210
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.

These sites are easily detected as clones. How Google reacts is part of the adversarial game theory.

For StackExchange clones, their tactic seems to be to push them to a secondary index. Hellban them, but keep them visible to the creators. You never start over, and try again with smarter duplicate evasion. You just see your site wither to insignificance, with sometimes a temporary bump to confuse you/annoy you/keep you uncertain about which changes helped. But sometimes this strategy can make it seem Google can't detect this, especially when using very specific keywords only found on StackExchange, there just may not be a better 18 pages than a duplicate page with a different "related questions" section.

Official documentation underranking some random site is nearly always a temporary anomaly (or makes some sense, in the case of very verbose documentation, like W3C docs). If structural, nudge Google along with some reports. If malicious, these are the sites that Google is likely to completely nuke. All authority and investment gone. Any part of the spammer's link network contributing to artificial authority also exposed. Makes more economic sense to pick softer targets and spend more energy on staying hidden/not overdoing it, never sure of the threshold.

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

#293

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

atarian wrote: post #234
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…

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.

And a lot of them have stolen content from other sites.

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

#295

Post by sharikous »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #126
micromacrofoot wrote: post #26

It 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…

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.

I think so, actually. New environments are refreshing until power structures form - and that's what happened with the internet.

But it is still not so dire. I went back to bookmarks, reading lists and keeping note of writers I check out. It's not bad at all as long as I keep in my interest bubble. Google or not, I still would prefer today's internet world to the decades before the internet.

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

#296

Post by bserge »

azalemeth wrote: post #130
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…

Thanks for introducing me to Odense marzipan (I have a job in Aarhus!) I very much get the feeling that amazon and eBay "Don't like" Denmark – the former redirects amazon.dk to amazon.de saying "we deliver!" and the latter doesn't exist (but it does wholly-own a local alternative). Going to Denmark always makes me aware of how good the local Danish things are, and how inflexible and annoying the "global" options usua…

They "don't like" many small countries. Perhaps based on population or GDP, who the fuck knows.

They just redirect you to the nearest bigger country website and call it a job well done.

Tbf, there are no issues buying from German or French versions. UK was the best choice but now customs is a pain in the ass so...

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

#297

Post by alok-g »

jeremyjh wrote: post #149
aceazzameen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That old algorithm would just hand you a bunch of SEO spam.

I am not sure. It may be me lacking in understanding.

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

#299

Post by bserge »

gambiting wrote: post #285
mrweasel wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually, that might be because of their antispam filters. They were always fighting websites with countless subdirectories or subdomains, having completely wiped them off their SERPs in the past.

GitHub does fit the "huge website with lots of duplicate content" description very well.

Then again, Twitter seems to be doing fine. But I have a suspicion that they have some sort of agreement (and GitHub doesn't), because I have to regularly "report as spam" (note how that implies Google decides what's spam and what isn't) Twitter emails and they still pop up in the inbox after a while.

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