Yes. It’s broken. I’d pay $20/month for search that worked at least as well as Google used to back in the day.
Looked at https://neeva.com/?
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
301–310 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#302Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#303There's a whole legion of (underpaid) Search Engine Results Analysts out there that can tell you horror stories of why this is happening.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#304Earlier 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.
Same here. However, comparing what verbatim mode was before and is now, it has gone much worse.
I just want barebones keywords search, with just the caveat to index just the words on the main part of a web page, not the surrounding ads, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot stress enough how infuriating it is when a page loads content under my mouse cursor at such a delay that I can manage to point at a link and click on it _before_ the new content is loaded so that I click/tap an unexpected link. This happens _all_ the time on the Twitter app search bar.
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?
FWIW, I've seen that suggestion a few times over the past 2--5 years or so.
You're likely not the first, but it's an excellent suggestion.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#306Not only that, the alternatives have vanished and have also become worse as they adopt the same algorithmic changes google has made over the years (or just outright scrape google behind the scenes).
This is shocking given the existence (now) of publicly available, open source indexing databases. You can literally build a search engine without indexing infrastructure, but everything out there is still crap.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#307Yandex is the most entertaining search engine. Not always the best results but it reminds me of Google from 2003. Just look at these insane results, not a single DMCA takedown or SEO spam result to be found https://yandex.com/search/?text=free+movies
Damn! This search gave me the fun. I felt again like in 2003 when searching for free movies give me an actual movie rather than "WHERE I CAN WATCH THIS MOVIE?"-site
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
GP was saying how reddit is actually more useful than whatever Google returns today: that's the "hobbyist-only" shortcut for today. Because that blog post is long gone from Google's indexes, since replaced with SEO-optimized or "influencer" driven sales/content marketing. I like to compare with search.marginalia.nu results from time to time, but the restrictions it puts on the content it traverses do not make for a g…
We are saying the same thing. I reiterated it poorly. Just also poking fun of how Google both killed the "real" blog industry and forced all the good content on reddit (which ironically does every anti-SEO thing ever and where people are trying to go).
Because most people who use Reddit on a semi-regular basis use their old desktop UI (old.reddit.com), which doesn’t have the dark patterns found on their newer / mobile site. It’s a much more usable site for the few communities I still have left on Reddit. It’s also much better supported by the individual subreddits via style sheets (most didn’t bother updating layouts when Reddit introduced a new UI because all the power users who would have updated them kept using the old interface).
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get the appending reddit thing. I don't see why reddit is considered trustworthy, marketers have been planting "organic discussion" on reddit for years .
In my experience reddit comments are less likely to be marketing than Google results are. Still not entirely trustworthy, absolutely.
The trick is to find an active community where they know their stuff and will downvote/delete spam. Unfortunately those needs to be extremist for their hobby and so they will look down on perfectly fine for normal use low budget things.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#310The 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…
> The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries.
The fundamental, unavoidable problem is that the cost of providing high-quality results on the long-tail of possible searches tends to grow faster than the revenues that can be earned from those increasingly rare, obscure, long-tail searches. Any search service seeking to maximize profit, like Google or DDG, ultimately always evolves to perform less and less well on the long tail of possible searches.
The search service we all wish we could have -- a service seeking to maximize the quality of individual searches, no matter how obscure -- may not be feasible as a profit-maximizing business.