Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#31

Post by the_other_guy » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:30 AM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #29

the_other_guy wrote: post #24

I know that this post is about bashing Google since it's the big _evil_ boy and then slowly promoting DuckDuckGo since we are used to at least a weekly DDG shilling thread here in HN, but let me tell you the honest truth that Google is still the best search engine by far (e.g. indexing javascript content, accuracy based on your history for instance try searching "Prometheus" if you're a developer and again on not log…

If google works for you, great. > 99% users of this website are software engineers Citation Needed

>Citation Needed

nice way to invalidate my whole argument

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#32

Post by saiya-jin » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:32 AM UTC

Timucin wrote: post #16

I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube. For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested. My recommendations also getting less and less relevant. They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working s…

its even worse with youtube - if I leave the TV, it will continue playing videos youtube considers somehow related to original one. But it often forgets what it already played in a row, so sometimes plays the same video multiple times. Like 1 2 3 4 2 5 1 6 5 3 etc.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#33

Post by icebraining » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:32 AM UTC

einr wrote: post #19

It feels like the philosophy has become "return lots of results at any cost". For instance I just now searched for a specific e-mail address that ends with "@hotmail.co.jp" -- since it didn't find any hits with the full address, it decided to strike out the username part and return thousands of results for just "hotmail.co.jp". This is literally useless and they should know better. It just gets worse and worse for te…

They have a Verbatim mode which doesn't do that (as much?), but you have to click on Tools → All Results → Verbatim every time.

Alternatively, if you can edit the URL used by your browser, you can just add "tbs=li:1" to it; for Firefox, you can add it as an alternative Search engine by running this on the Console:

  window.external.AddSearchProvider("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/popthestack/1530165/raw/c99a1c5e6e783aecffa432397a527f557944926d/google-ssl-verbatim.xml")

This doesn't invalidate the overall point, of course, it's just a personal tip.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#34

Post by brazzledazzle » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

nihil75 wrote: post #21

Timucin wrote: post #16

I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube. For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested. My recommendations also getting less and less relevant. They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working s…

Second.YouTube keeps showing me the same (promoted?) videos on the right-hand bar, so I keep navigating back to the home page to get half-decent recommendations.

I’ve noticed that as well. Also noticed that sometimes I’ll watch a video and if I watch it again the timestamp it resumes at is somewhere near the beginning liked I’d only watched a few seconds. Perhaps a problem with the system that keeps track of how much you’ve watched or not is breaking other things.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#35

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

Timucin wrote: post #16

I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube. For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested. My recommendations also getting less and less relevant. They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working s…

Searching for stuff you've already seen is reasonable. But reccomendation really needs to have a simple partition into two categories: watched and not watched. Both are valid but they are very different use cases.

Also they need to stop reccomending flat earth, anti-vax and other toxic nonsense without prompting.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#36

Post by PostThisTooFast » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

einr wrote: post #19

It feels like the philosophy has become "return lots of results at any cost". For instance I just now searched for a specific e-mail address that ends with "@hotmail.co.jp" -- since it didn't find any hits with the full address, it decided to strike out the username part and return thousands of results for just "hotmail.co.jp". This is literally useless and they should know better. It just gets worse and worse for te…

Google stupidly eliminated the + operator, which used to require the presence of words marked with it. Their excuse was that it somehow "interfered" with Google Plus. Now that Google Plus is defunct, do you think they'll restore it? HA HA no.

So now we're stuck with prefixing searches with "allintext:" and then quoting everything.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#37

Post by samwhiteUK » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #12

The "must include" functionality makes zero sense to me and I'm dumbfounded as to why it was ever added. If I didn't want my results to include a particular word, I wouldn't have included it in the search. Boggles my mind how Google could mess up something so simple.

I'm dumbfounded as to how you don't see the usefulness of this feature. Sometimes there exists more than one word for a situation, and you might miss a forum thread, for example, that is relevant to you, but you're saying to Google "only use these exact words" and not accounting for differences in dialect etc

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#38

Post by brazzledazzle » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:36 AM UTC

TomMarius wrote: post #27

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people are dumb and type in entire questions or sentences, so google tries to be "smart" and remove words that hold no real meaning.

Actually I think it's useful to google whole questions - for forum thread titles. The problem of course is that Google does not search for the whole thing and wrapping it in quotes makes it useless as well.

Asterisks within quotes still seem to work. I use those when I have a good idea of what string I’m looking for but I’m not sure about some words or want to find posts where someone (for whatever weird reason) apparently typed in or pasted an error in chunks.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#39

Post by ur-whale » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:40 AM UTC

The quality has indeed declined drastically for pointed technical queries versus "where's the nearest hot dog stand" type queries.

Two possible explanations:

1. The latter is much more of a moneymaker.

2. I don't think there is anyone left at Google that actually understands how the search engine works these days.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#40

Post by guhcampos » Mon, Feb 11, 2019, 10:41 AM UTC

What really, really bugs me is what they did with the image search at some point.

I always used image search to try and find the original source of an Image. It's super useful to determine the authenticity of a news article, identify the author of a photo for licensing and a million other uses.

Then at some point, search by image started to simply return results based on the image classification tag on the image: so instead of similar images, or other instances of a photo, I get results like "beach" or "bicycle" or "city". This is so frustrating and completely useless. I'm sure anyone is capable of typing "mountain" in the search field to find generic photos os mountains.

So that got me back to tineye.com - I just with they had a larger coverage of the web =[