Not really, but I notice anything health related, official sources now are in the #1 spot, while Wikipedia is now on the second page of results. In years past, Wikipedia was often #1.
Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#42Google's search engine market share does not appear to be flagging as ads have become more intrusive:
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Given that, from a shareholder point of view they may be committing mismanagement if they don't monetize it even more -- at least until their market share at least reacts. Until they titrate enough ads into the solution for something to precipitate, they won't know if it's saturated yet.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#43What I am finding is more and more results appearing based on sites I have visited in the past. This makes it exceedingly difficult when I have an extraordinarily specific technical issue and all the results I receive are the same things I got last time I searched. I have found when switching to a different computer my search results for the same thing are wildly different.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#44As a sort of related question, what do people use search engines for? I find that 99% of my searches fall under the "I know exactly what site I want to search" ie: docs websites, github, wikipedia, etc, which I can search trivially in my browser's url bar. For the last 1%, I use duckduckgo, which almost always ends up just proxying me to one of those other sites. Search feels very "solved" to me, I don't see the poin…
It's because you don't know what you don't know and living in the Google bubble isn't helping with discovering those things.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#45For sure. Google's ability to surface useful pages above SEO gamed "articles" has been dropping for years. I've had to start adding '-best' and '-top' to searches in an attempt to stop getting blogspam stuff like "december 2020 best X" with no substance when searching for X. It used to be possible to, for some topics, limit the search period to pre 2010 to help improve the relevancy of results. But I've started to no…
Not only that. Suddenly some corporation learns to "game the SEO", and keeps their spam on the first page of results for months, without users having a choice to block or report it, like Pinterest.
IMO it looks more like advertising deal than SEO gaming.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#46I noticed Google returning waaay too few and somewhat inaccurate results for common tech search terms about two years ago. I noticed searching for specific strings on google did not find hits on stackfault that could easily be found by searching directly on the site.
Though not the biggest microsoft fan, I've started using bing more often than google and the results seem marginally better.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#47Same here.
I realize I've gotten used to employ my memory as a sort of index, retaining only pieces of past reads, and typing that pieces on Google to find that document again whenever I needed. It used to work better, but I've been noticing that this method is getting less and less reliable.
As websites look for sources of revenue other than Google-backed ads, Google might indeed be favoring the ones providing the best return for them. But those are not necessarily the best ones in terms of quality for the user.
Paul Graham talks in at least one of his essays of how he tried to convince Yahoo folks about the importance of having a good search engine. Only to hear a "we are in Portals Business, not in the Search Engines one" as reply...
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#48Absolutely! The top hits are often SEO’d to death and so devoid of quality I often find myself appending “Reddit” to a lot search queries just to get any sort of relevant results. “best espresso grinders reddit” -> good, relatively unbrigaded discussions of pros and cons from r/coffee “Best espresso grinder” -> plenty of “best of 2021” type articles that are patently paid for and gamed, often by publications that hav…
I feel like asking a heavily commercialised consumption-driven machine what the "best" or "recommended" anything is, is just asking to be manipulated. I share your distrust of sites with "best", other superlatives, or the current year in their name. The proliferation of new and strange TLDs like "xyz" and similar have only added to the confusion.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#49I'm struggling with recentism. Google appears to strongly prefer new content.
I wish there were some options to exclude certain domains.
I find myself using "" or inurl a lot.
I often find myself trying to ask a natural language question, and then trying again by putting most important search terms first, in "quotes", to see if I get better results.
I feel that Google is very good at search, but it's now a lot less predictable. In the past we all knew the tricks and tips, but today those don't seem to be as important as asking a question.
I use DDG or Bing when I can. I use Yandex for images.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#50I feel like this quite frequently. Just yesterday I had a problem where I was getting an error message trying to install kivy. The message was about not having a specific required package installed (pyramid), even though I actually did have that package installed on my system and I had the correct version installed too.
I tried googling things like "kivy requires pyramid but pyramid is installed" and variations on that phrase including the exact error message and subsections of it and variations of the phrase - but all the search responses were about unrelated things, like just installing pyramid by itself. Incidentally, I solved the problem by just removing "pyramid" from the requirements.txt file and then it installed and worked just fine - but I was frustrated that Google wasn't really getting what my problem was. I feel like past-Google would have been capable of understanding the problem.