It may be worse for some of us but is it getting better for the average/common person?
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
361–370 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need a new protocol that will not allow that, such as gemini, which is not that good IMO and severely limited (you can't even add pics ffs). And of course, new search engine, something distributed and in the GNU domain.
You can link to images in gemtext. It's up to the browser whether to display them inline.
Terrible UX. What if I just want to give links without wanting to have them as images?
Besides, all that can be done with img HTML tag (browsers do have 'disable images' thing already).
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#363Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
I want a curated search engine so badly. I feel like some enterprising developer could craft one specifically geared towards developers. Imagine a search that doesn't ignore operators like '?.' and where you can set persistent conditions on every single query without having to type it out. This would help prevent you from needing to type in the language you are searching for in every query. Oh, and the cherry on top…
The fact that DMOZ closed, after 19 years, was rough. It was the original 'starting point' of the Google search engine, back in the day being in DMOZ meant your page rank was high.
There is definitely plenty of new spaces for a community effort that is similar, or at least hand-held with help from an algorithm.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#364Google will frequently try to sell me something unrelated when I do a specific query. It'll throw up links to local stores that match the text somehow. It's obviously about getting me to spend money.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#365I have stopped exclusively using Google search for 95/100 queries. Duckduckgo does the job and sometimes I bang to Google.
Yeah, exactly what I did. I find that duckduckgo is much more similar to the google of the early 2000s much more than the current google.
It doesn't work too well for ambiguous keywords or vague questions, but you can always add '!g' for those queries.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#366The 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…
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…
You can test this- find a site you think is not indexed, search for the URL of Google, and then look at the cache and the date. I bet it’s been cached more recently than you expect.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#367Query: "Jeans"
Result: Lots of "Best quality/value jeans for 2021" SEO optimised pages with Amazon/affiliate links and not a lot of useful information.
Search engines seem to have become entirely online retail focussed. Even things like searching a location is now productised in "Top 10 hotels in location for 2021".
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Actually, that might be because of their antispam filters. They were always fighting websites with countless subdirectories or subdomains, having completely wiped them off their SERPs in the past. GitHub does fit the "huge website with lots of duplicate content" description very well. Then again, Twitter seems to be doing fine. But I have a suspicion that they have some sort of agreement (and GitHub doesn't), because…
Maybe, but then you get all the GitHub issue clone sites and all the Stackoverflow clone sites showing up at the top of the results with the original no where to be seen.
It might be anti-spam, but how is it this shit?
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#369Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#370Earlier 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?
> Either a webpage or a browser could do that.
The browser should do it. Websites often do this intentionally in order to trick users into clicking ads. The only way to stop these abuses is for the browser itself to stop enabling them.