Yeah, it's getting increasingly riddled with spam. I use kagi.com and DuckDuckGo and pay for the former.
Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
31–40 of 158 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#32I recently wanted to learn more about the python match operator and was hoping to find some good blog posts explaining them and I only found low effort, practically useless SEO sites that are probably all hyperoptimised for any searches containing python... At some point I just gave up.
In contrast, I also do SwiftUI development, and here you often find tons of useful, beautiful blogs from people where you can see that they really care about this and dont just do it for SEO.
SwiftUI example: - Google search "SwiftUI in app purchases" -> https://blckbirds.com/post/how-to-use-in-app-purchases-in-sw... (extremely helpful article, and they are only at the very bottom briefly advertising their book)
So in conclusion, I do agree, Google search is becoming useless as for popular searches, i just brings up trash.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#33No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#34Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There m…
Google bet the farm on their ability to do just that though. PageRank and other technologies where suppose to suppress content farms that just aggregate the same content over multiple sites for ad revenue,
I have not done SEO in a long time but back in the day (early 00's) that was a sure fire way to get your site demoted in the google ranking was to have content 90+% similar to another site. It was a big problem for ecommerce sites that sold the same products as the larger sites because often they would just use the same product description from the manufacturer
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#35Pretty much all useful areas are being spammed ad nauseam. Humans are being overwhelmed with information overload and increasingly that information is AI generated or in some way misleading. If someone can implement the online version of Heinlein’s honest witness idea that would make the world a much better place.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#36I sometimes see surprisingly good results from this gpt3 based search engine, if I take a bit of time to write out a sentence or two:
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#37[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#38Google started with nerds; nerd learned to write good queries. Then normies appropriated Google and wrote dumb queries in massive volume; Google optimized for handling dumb queries. To get good results today, you have to write dumb queries. For example, a nerd would never write a question as a search input – nerds would write a series of hyperrelevant keywords. Normies don’t understand keywords – they ask questions o…
Google Search switched to transformers (NLP) to understand search queries, which led to a certain boomer-isation of Google search. Full English questions work much better now. https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understa...
HN is a very techy crowd that probably has muscle-memorised all the Google search tricks (possibly made obsolete by these transformers), I wonder how the 50+ non-tech crowd sees Google these days - perhaps it got better for them?
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#39Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine...
I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like.
For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#40If Google wants to improve it needs to place bans on domains using automatically generated content and threaten lawsuits if the webmasters try to evade the ban. The bigger problem is that most content is no longer on the public world wide web, it is on private chats in Discord and on closed Facebook groups.