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Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

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

#431

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

Reuzel wrote: post #312
willhinsa wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions. lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"? what if i told you that search is an adversarial problem,…

> lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"? Yes. If that sounds so unacceptable or strange to you, I suggest you try it. Works really well when reasoning about unavailable data, or researching a field with slow peer-review process. > what if i told you that search is an…

> So webcontent-spammers still are on the first 2 pages of Google, but with content not classifiable as spam/content farm.

The exact clones of StackOverflow and Wikipedia are all over the first two pages of Google.

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

#432

Post by richardsocher »

kawfey wrote: post #260
micromacrofoot wrote: post #26

It 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…

Gotta use "site:reddit.com" If I'm asking google or DDG for advice on a product, it's either going to be a reddit or Wirecutter for me. 99% of results on "best *" results in _*literally hundreds*_ of domains like "best*for2021.com" "buybest*.com" "top10*reviews.com" that are all generated by bots containing only the worst knockoff / counterfeit / Chinesium products and tons and tons of Amazon affiliate links. E.g. I…

You can set that once on you.com and then it will keep that preference and show you reddit results whenever relevant.

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

#433

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #251
zinxq wrote: post #171

There'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 use this so often that I have it bound to a keyboard text replacement on all my devices. Recently Google has started inserting non-reddit posts to the top of my results even when I include this. Weirdly I’d be less upset if they were ads, but they aren’t. Just some articles that Google thought I wanted to see more than the website I specified. It’s infuriating.

Do you know what infuriates me most about this? It's that Google hasn't addressed it when it's clear as fucking day that their search results have gone in the tank.

But now that I've typed that, I can see exactly why they haven't responded: a search company telling the world that its search results are f**ed. That would do wonders for the stock

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

#434

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

Reuzel wrote: post #312
willhinsa wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions. lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"? what if i told you that search is an adversarial problem,…

> lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"? Yes. If that sounds so unacceptable or strange to you, I suggest you try it. Works really well when reasoning about unavailable data, or researching a field with slow peer-review process. > what if i told you that search is an…

I'm not buying the tribal argument, that I'm the wrong user for Google. The results are shite across the board regardless of tribe.

I think they've accepted that SEO has killed past ranking algorithms and are rebuilding rank from the ground up using ML with the entire internet as guinea pig. All of the crap results we're weeding through now is grist for the ML mill.

I am literally typing exact phrases for content I know is there and not getting the results I should.

I think they've cut the cord with past algorithms, not an incremental update, a major one.

My thinking so doesn't make it so, however, so just my two cents.

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

#435

Post by onionisafruit »

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.

It seems like a lot of github.com pages were removed from google’s index about six months ago.

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

#436

Post by throwitawayfam »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #26

It 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…

Sadly this no longer works either. Reddit is now doing some SEO work to mark stuff as a later date than posted.

You can search "warmest winter coat site:reddit.com" and filter by past year, only to get a result from 7 years ago.

I really don't know how to search the web anymore.

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

#437

Post by cwojno »

mda wrote: post #154
cwojno wrote: post #113

Google seems to also have a heavy recency bias. I've tried to search for news articles that were even a month old and have had trouble locating links to stories I know happened. I don't know any tricks to working around this. And if I don't recall specifically when the article came out (say, somewhere around 6 months ago), I'll usually give up. Any tips on finding "historical" results?

Search tools -> Any time -> Custom range

Nice. Last I looked into this, I couldn't select a custom range, it was limited to set times like, last 6 months or something. Thanks

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

#438

Post by mleonhard »

seoaeu wrote: post #409
superasn wrote: post #134

There was a very good thread on HN about this not long ago(1). Google search is getting worse because it is letting companies like Pinterest game it. Instead of fixing the spam they are instead encouraging companies to spend more and more time on SEO and coming up with their own shenanigans like better ranking for using AMP (defunct now). People who generally make great content (think a researcher or a great software…

I don't understand this narrative that Google is making the search results get worse or "letting" companies game it. Search result ranking is adversarial! If the results are worse than they once were, that just means that Google is less far ahead in the arms race than they used to be

An alternative explanation is that Google stopped caring about UX.

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

#439

Post by bradlys »

fxtentacle wrote: post #106
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…

(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 search is horrendous garbage. I was trying to buy replacement ear tips for my earbuds. I knew exactly what to search for. Yet, Amazon search only returned the Large size and none of the others. (Clicking on the large listing only had the large size available. No drop down selection or anything) I go to Google and type in the same search and put Amazon in the search too. Immediately shows up as first result and I was able to buy them. I figured they were out of stock and that’s why I couldn’t get them. Nope - Amazon search is just that bad.

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

#440

Post by systemBuilder »

grangerg wrote: post #360
Clockface12 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Absolutely infuriating if you specifically use quotes and you get all sorts of dross not containing what you're looking for. Clearly they have figured out in some way that giving the end user what they want does not maximise income. Google News too has become flaky. Often does not find stuff you know is there, or finds it one day, but not another. Hrmph.

I'm in a similar boat with the "Google Now" feed on Android. When I say "not interested", it fails to note that as expected, and I see the same news "story" pop up (usually different sites, but occasionally the exact same site!). It's likely related to the fact that it almost NEVER gets the subject/topic correct, so I can never use that option. There was a time I thought I'd trained it to stop telling me about what c…

YouTube has started showing me the same videos over and over again! I keep telling it I don't want to see this content because I've seen it before and it keeps forgetting!

I absolutely hate the Google has changed the semantics of search so that it doesn't really pay attention to your keywords unless you quote them. In Google's mind you're not serious about a keyword until you quote it! Garbage!

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