Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 109 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#41

Post by the_other_guy »

Timucin wrote: post #16

I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube. For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested. My recommendations also getting less and less relevant. They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working s…

>I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo

here we go, the entire post was made just for this to derail the entire discussion into a free marketing/shilling for an even much worse search engine with aggressive online marketing techniques

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#42

Post by pure-awesome »

Timucin wrote: post #16

I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube. For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested. My recommendations also getting less and less relevant. They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working s…

Is DuckDuckGo good now? When I first tried it out a couple of years back, I found it didn't give me enough (relevant) results on my searches, so I stayed with Google.

I assume it must have improved in that time; maybe I should try it again.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#43

Post by hexmiles »

pjc50 wrote: post #35
Timucin wrote: post #16

I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube. For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested. My recommendations also getting less and less relevant. They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working s…

Searching for stuff you've already seen is reasonable. But reccomendation really needs to have a simple partition into two categories: watched and not watched. Both are valid but they are very different use cases. Also they need to stop reccomending flat earth, anti-vax and other toxic nonsense without prompting.

Also they need to stop reccomending flat earth, anti-vax and other toxic nonsense without prompting.

There are trying to at least that: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/01/continuing-our-work-t...

also this post (and the related discussion) provide some additional context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19128259

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#44

Post by pure-awesome »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #30

I think Google is focusing on the friendlier natural “human” queries. I noticed this some time ago when I’d ask it in a “lazy” way because I’m tired or distracted. E.g. “What day is Mother’s Day?”, or “What time is it in London?” I’ve noticed it seems to be more and more optimized for this sort of query as time goes on, to the point that I use the quote modifiers in many (most?) of my searches and the other modifiers…

I remember the days when I had to include "AND" and "OR" between words in the queries.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#45

Post by keiferski »

samwhiteUK wrote: post #37
keiferski wrote: post #12

The "must include" functionality makes zero sense to me and I'm dumbfounded as to why it was ever added. If I didn't want my results to include a particular word, I wouldn't have included it in the search. Boggles my mind how Google could mess up something so simple.

I'm dumbfounded as to how you don't see the usefulness of this feature. Sometimes there exists more than one word for a situation, and you might miss a forum thread, for example, that is relevant to you, but you're saying to Google "only use these exact words" and not accounting for differences in dialect etc

Because often the key word is the one being dropped by Google. If I search for "Einstein quotes about social democracy" and it drops "Einstein" it defeats the entire purpose of the search.

A single button that says "try searching without word for more results" would be far less frustrating.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#46

Post by Timucin »

pure-awesome wrote: post #42
Timucin wrote: post #16

I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube. For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested. My recommendations also getting less and less relevant. They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working s…

Is DuckDuckGo good now? When I first tried it out a couple of years back, I found it didn't give me enough (relevant) results on my searches, so I stayed with Google. I assume it must have improved in that time; maybe I should try it again.

It requires a bit time to get used to it but not more than couple of days I think. The interface is quite similar to what google provides and I quite liked seeing the answer I am looking for as a part of the search.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#47

Post by natch »

keiferski wrote: post #12

The "must include" functionality makes zero sense to me and I'm dumbfounded as to why it was ever added. If I didn't want my results to include a particular word, I wouldn't have included it in the search. Boggles my mind how Google could mess up something so simple.

They have definitely messed up in many ways, but having a must-include operator was not one of the ways.

It allows (allowed?) you to tell the search that the other words can be used for ranking and are nice-to-have words, while the must-include words are treated differently and must be present and match exactly.

If all search terms were automatically must-include with no override, search results would be garbage because as a user you aren’t going to predict the perfect inflected forms of words used in documents every time.

Being dumbfounded should not lead you to think other people are wrong. It should lead you to wonder what you are missing.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#48

Post by einr »

icebraining wrote: post #33
einr wrote: post #19

It feels like the philosophy has become "return lots of results at any cost". For instance I just now searched for a specific e-mail address that ends with "@hotmail.co.jp" -- since it didn't find any hits with the full address, it decided to strike out the username part and return thousands of results for just "hotmail.co.jp". This is literally useless and they should know better. It just gets worse and worse for te…

They have a Verbatim mode which doesn't do that (as much?), but you have to click on Tools → All Results → Verbatim every time. Alternatively, if you can edit the URL used by your browser, you can just add "tbs=li:1" to it; for Firefox, you can add it as an alternative Search engine by running this on the Console: window.external.AddSearchProvider("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/popthestack/1530165/raw/c99a1c5e6e…

Yeah, I used to have verbatim mode as a separate and default search provider in Firefox, but I had to stop using it as my default -- I find sometimes it's just too verbatim and it's like using Altavista in 1996 all over again.

I feel like Google a few years ago had struck a decent balance between trying to be smart (sometimes automatically including synonyms to your search terms, etc.) while still respecting your actual search terms. Now it's way too far gone in the "assume user is a total idiot and doesn't know what he wants" direction.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#49

Post by nullandvoid »

I have encountered this with YouTube which prefers to offer me garbage results back rather than searching all my keywords. E.g I was searching on a react topic and all I got back was 'x reacts to this'. It looks like it weighed the word 'react' much heavier than the others even though the other words were essential to getting a useful result..

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?

#50

Post by apatters »

I commented on a different post a few days ago with my thoughts about why this is happening, in my opinion it is a problem that has evolved over several years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19111306

A Search Quality engineer at Google responded to me but I didn't find their arguments very convincing (nor did a number of repliers).

I have switched over completely to Searx on most of my devices, and by telling it to weight results from Bing, DDG and Google I feel I get better results than from any of those search engines alone.

Post reply on HN