My take: Github Copilot and similar products will replace many google queries in the near future, for code, but also for other specific domains. When I type a query, I'm essentially trying to summarize my context, and I can't compete with an advanced deep learning model that reduces my code to a 300-dimensional context vector. The same is true for a lawyer writing a legal document or a scientist writing an academic paper. Very curious to see the developments in the next few years.
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
321–330 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#322This seems like much more of a qualitative statement than a quantitative one.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#323There'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…
Most of those "real opinions" are not real opinions. I've been on both sides of paid reviews on Reddit. I still do the same thing because in some subs you'll get actual conversation in the comments, but it's definitely being manipulated.
You mean you've been paid to put fake comments about products on Reddit?
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#324Earlier 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.
profit optimized is the inevitable result of any system that has profit motivation banning advertising would help for awhile, but other profit streams would be optimised and expand to fill void, such as data collection/mining
If ads would be banned, data collection would be unprofitable.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#325It 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…
What's kind of funny is there was a time where Google used to stand for --literally anything-- and would punish a site like reddit on search results for having such a user hostile interface. For some reason though (probably because they used AMP) they basically allow them to do anything they want. Multiple popups, hijacking click events for login modals, and hiding the content with no impact to search results. So now…
GPT3 got your back:
warmest winter coat --hobbyist-only
Top 10: 1. Canada Goose Parka 2. Patagonia Down Jacket 3. Marmot Precip Jacket 4. Columbia Winter Jacket 5. North Face Thermoball Jacket 6. The North Face Nuptse Jacket 7. Rab Neutrino Endurance Jacket 8. Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer Jacket 9. Black Diamond Fineline Hoodie 10. Outdoor Research Cathode Hoody
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#326The 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.
A lot of sites that just scrape github too end up high in the results. The actual github page isn't even on the first page if anywhere at all. The spam sites do a better job at crawling code than google does.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#327The 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…
This combined with the fact that programmers have went from highly specific names like "winamp" to just capitalizing a random english word to name their tool makes it very hard to find relevant information.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web. About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, but there are a huge number of contributing factors to that.…
> This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web. > About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, ... I remember double quotes being infinitely more useful…
This is a decent point, I never search google for literal code samples
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#329There'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.
These are all monetized results. Brands send bikes to these places to review. It's an advertisement. If you want an organic result like a personal blog post from someone or a niche interest forum like you might have found on google search 15 years ago or so, it's just not really there. Everything you see has been paid for to be seen by you. Once you realize that, a lot of the web feel like this uncanny potemkin internet because that's all it really is these days.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "people also searched for" box is not just useless, but also very much messing with usability for me. Every time I click on a link, go back, then trying to click on the next link, this box shows up and I accidentally click on that (because it shows up with a little delay and an animation). This filter takes care of that box completely: www.google.com##.exp-outline www.google.com##[style="display: block; opacity:…
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.
Lazy loading is the absolute bane of usability in web UIs. The fact that this is the default/most common behavior in modern web frameworks seems simply idiotic to me.