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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?

#441

Post by systemBuilder »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #264
micromacrofoot wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a reply to myself... but does anyone have ideas about how this can go away? Have we lost the internet to eternal marketing and data-mining arms races? Is this why people are flocking to search-opaque places like Discord? Sometimes I feel like that internet isn't for me anymore, and that's a little distressing.

This is the consequence of arranging a society around infinite financial corporate growth; everything is optimized to squeeze out every dollar for the balance sheet. Ironically we’re watching this play out now with products and techs that market themselves as “decentralized.” Maybe after this phase the tech community will consider this isn’t something we can tech our way out of.

No. It's Google squeezing money out of search to subsidize the CEO's flavor of the month money-losing AI project, that's what it is ... Ex-Search-Engineer

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

#442

Post by AwaAwa »

hotpotamus wrote: post #421
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…

You know, I cleaned out my grandparent's old house recently and came across a Schwin exercise bike from probably the 70's. It has some sort of speedometer/dynomometer thing, a resistance adjustment, and a mechanical timer. You know what? I got up on it and went for 10 minutes and my heart was beating faster and my legs felt like they were getting a workout. What more do you need in a bike? Especially now - I had my p…

Phone home what your heart rate was, what you smell like, and how old you were when your first born was conceived.

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

#443

Post by AwaAwa »

mleonhard wrote: post #438
seoaeu wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A doodle a day, is the UX way.

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

#444

Post by systemBuilder »

piaste wrote: post #108
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…

"Thread" is a good keyword to include to find discussions, even though it's a bit overloaded. Eg. 'good cheap mountain bike' -> 10 results out of the first 10 are commercial spam and listicles. 'thread good cheap mountain bike' -> 5 human discussions on entry-level MBs, 1 link to a MB forum home page (not a specific thread), 2 commercial spam, 1 paywalled magazine article testing MBs, and 1 online shop product page f…

I also use "forum" to skip the link farms and content farms that Google so often serves up.

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

#445

Post by systemBuilder »

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…

The rest of you guys are too young to remember but I remember something called yellow pages and white pages. Google has certainly forgotten. White pages Were a search index that could never be monetized in the phone book! Google offers only yellow pages!

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

#446

Post by blindmute »

mmaunder wrote: post #74

The problem isn’t solvable by modifying search queries. The fundamental issue is that the web has filled up with content designed to trick Google into sending it visitors and to maximize ad revenue. So you have content that is thick with ranking signals and thin on useful and new data. You also have to scroll past many ads and filler to get to the answer to your search query. The fundamental problem is that Google an…

But the search isn't profitable without the ads. What is the competitor's motivation to build a search engine?

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

#448

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

vgeek wrote: post #9

The 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…

Specialised search engines are getting better. i use github search for code search, and sometimes stackoverflow search for technical questions.

i have a directory of duckduckgo !bang operators, for easy access https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html

This helps to find the specialised search engine, if you need one. (it scans duckduckgo for any new !bang operators, in a nightly built, here is the script: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang )

I suspect, that most of these specialised search engines are powered by elasticsearch. It may be, that elastic is starting to cut into google search, from the low end.

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

#450

Post by ddtaylor »

vankessel wrote: post #354
root_axis wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the appending reddit thing. I don't see why reddit is considered trustworthy, marketers have been planting "organic discussion" on reddit for years .

Yeah, I can't confirm it, but the weirdest I think I've seen is in r/science about research that was funded by the meat industry saying that a diet with meat is healthier than vegetarianism or veganism. The study was poorly done and there were tons of comments pushing the same message: "vegetarians/vegans are annoying hipsters who will lecture you for eating meat and they'll be so deservedly upset by this." Found it…

It's actually very common for subreddits to eventually get owned or controlled by the industry leaders and then begin censorship campaigns. One of the most blatant examples of this is /r/bitcoin where any discussion of alternative scaling strategies except 1MB blocks with Layer 2 on top will earn you a ban.
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