Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by jareklupinski » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

nucleardog wrote: post #136

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…

Amazon also really seems to push what they _want_ to sell over what they have available. A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variatio…

my favorite is when i see exactly what I want for a millisecond...

only to have it disappear somewhere to page 2 or 3 (if even!)

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

#332

Post by marginalia_nu » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

alangibson wrote: post #152

jeffbee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Known-good" sources have a serious habit of getting owned by malware and replaced by organized crime schemes. Anti-abuse can't be handled by whitelists, it needs to be an online system.

Garbage sources have a serious habit of getting taken over. It's not that common with quality sites, but also not impossible. A simple downvoting system would be good enough.

The problem is that even quality sites die. And when they do, their domain gets poached and suddenly it's not a quality site anymore. But according to the ranking algorithms it's the same site, since its quality is measured by how many links it gets.

Coopting quality sites is a bit of a cottage industry. There is also a significant amount of hacked wordpress sites. Their domain may be quite reputable, but they're unknowingly host to a ton of spam.

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

#333

Post by amai » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #246

I see others have mentioned DuckDuckGo. Allow me to suggest swisscows: https://swisscows.com/ I've been using it as my default search engine the last couple of months and it seems to do a pretty good job.

Seems to be based on Bing, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swisscows

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

#334

Post by coffeecat » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

kingcharles wrote: post #198

fxtentacle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is also my observation. They will show content that completely does not contain your query words if that content is just popular enough. The result is that niche technical topics get drowned out by related popular discussions. Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't…

Yes, I actually find Bing is now better for the long tail. Most of my searches are for really old pages or really long tail stuff and Google just simply doesn't bubble them up, if it has them at all. I keep finding web sites lately from links on other sites and find myself asking "Why the fuck did Google not find this?" .. then I go back to Google and try to find it with keywords from the site, and nothing...

I also recommend switching to Bing. It shows me the results I'm looking for pretty consistently, whereas Google/Duck will sometimes give me Google's home page or the Washington Post's home page instead of anything even resembling the query I'm searching for.

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

#335

Post by fxtentacle » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

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.

Haha I just tried and guess what? Your comment was the only result.

Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? https://news.ycombinator.com › item 4 hours ago — But of course, it's still on GitHub. ... Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.

DuckDuckGo works fine, though.

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

#336

Post by Nanplune » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

I find it so offensive, the search engine is a fountain of knowledge and any small mod has such a profound impact on our well being

Who are these people at google that feel entitled to deprive the human race of it's most precious resource? DDG has worked well for me

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

#337

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#338

Post by Nanplune » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

Philadelphia wrote: post #129

mabbo wrote: post #122

The goals of Google have changed. Or rather, they haven't. At one time, the premise was that good results would bring people back. Getting the exact right answer every time was the go-to means to get customers to return, and see more Ads. More ads meant more income, which meant a successful company. But now, Google has the dominant market power. Customers are going to Google by default, never considering an alternati…

People used to call that kind of stuff “being evil”

Haha yes! From pagerank to the "attention direction engine." Google's starting to resemble that fictional company in the Silicon Valley show, Hooli.

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

#339

Post by Volker_W » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

sam0x17 wrote: post #306

Not 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.

> publicly available, open source indexing databases

Where?

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

#340

Post by bsanr2 » Tue, Nov 30, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

Reuzel wrote: post #180

wffurr wrote: post #43

The topic here says "quantitatively". Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results? All of these threads devolve into anecdotes and reminisces about the "good old days" and complaining about Pinterest. None of which is in the least quantitative. I'd be interested to see some actual data or research on the subject, if it exists. Or maybe it's not Google that's got…

> Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results? Google has. They use this data expertly to improve search. Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions. And likely, exactly because it has become better for all its users in aggregate, it has t…

I don't think this is necessarily true. Your standard desktop computer has gotten much easier for a casual user to navigate over time, but not any less robust for power users. This is because powerful tools for customization and building are still exposed to power users. Google has slowly stripped away many of these tools. One has to wonder why, and my guess would be that it's because they would expose either the unethical ways Google deals with results, or the failure of its search model.