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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?

#461

Post by rileymat2 »

systemBuilder wrote: post #445
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!

https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec00003/?s...

I do not think this is true, some businesses got special stuff in the white pages.

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

#462

Post by CRConrad »

nickelpro wrote: post #114
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #99

I've found that double-quotes are basically mandatory in any search now. (this is Google shorthand for "results MUST include this term", you probably know that.) I might be looking for some sort of broad topic, like how do a I do a particular thing in SwiftUI , and it will return a bunch of stuff about SwiftUI that sort of skirts the topic. A search for do "a particular thing" "SwiftUI" is more likely to succeed.

This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web. About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, but there are a huge number of contributing factors to that.…

> Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago

Yeah, me too.

25 years ago Google didn't exist.

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

#463

Post by jaykk »

kristintynski wrote: post #325
WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's kind of funny is there was a time where Google used to stand for --literally anything-- and would punish a site like reddit on search results for having such a user hostile interface. For some reason though (probably because they used AMP) they basically allow them to do anything they want. Multiple popups, hijacking click events for login modals, and hiding the content with no impact to search results. So now…

GPT3 got your back: warmest winter coat --hobbyist-only Top 10: 1. Canada Goose Parka 2. Patagonia Down Jacket 3. Marmot Precip Jacket 4. Columbia Winter Jacket 5. North Face Thermoball Jacket 6. The North Face Nuptse Jacket 7. Rab Neutrino Endurance Jacket 8. Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer Jacket 9. Black Diamond Fineline Hoodie 10. Outdoor Research Cathode Hoody

How can you search with GTP3?

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

#464

Post by ycuser2 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #100
alangibson wrote: post #12

Everytime 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 did just that. Well not specifically aimed at research, but the types of websites I'm interested in, written by humans, blogs and such. It's got some quality issues right now because I fucked up some of the keyword extraction logic and it's taken a while to identify just what's gone wrong. Even though it's a bit broken, it has some lucid moments. Just compare: https://www.google.com/search?q=mechanical+keyboards ht…

"random websites" is a great rabbit whole!

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

#465

Post by tim333 »

asdff wrote: post #329
Trufa wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get what people are talking about, first three results for best exercise bikes: https://www.tomsguide.com/best-picks/best-exercise-bikes https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/best-exercise-bikes-40742... https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/g23064646/best-exercise-b... Not sure if they are amazing results but it's decent for such a generic query.

These are all monetized results. Brands send bikes to these places to review. It's an advertisement. If you want an organic result like a personal blog post from someone or a niche interest forum like you might have found on google search 15 years ago or so, it's just not really there. Everything you see has been paid for to be seen by you. Once you realize that, a lot of the web feel like this uncanny potemkin inter…

Yeah if you ask a real person with experience they'd probably say check used sites like ebay or gumtree as people buy the machines, get bored, use them as coat racks for a couple of years and then sell them second hand for 10% of the new price.

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

#466

Post by Darkskiez »

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.

Weird, is this it? https://github.com/WojTechnical/drv8830pico

Maybe there's no links to it from other places, or somewhere on github thats crawled / indexed frequently enough.

Considering this comment thread is seemingly quickly indexed, just posting this link might be enough!

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

#467

Post by gambiting »

Darkskiez wrote: post #466
gambiting wrote: post #285

Earlier 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.

Weird, is this it? https://github.com/WojTechnical/drv8830pico Maybe there's no links to it from other places, or somewhere on github thats crawled / indexed frequently enough. Considering this comment thread is seemingly quickly indexed, just posting this link might be enough!

Yep, that's it - and indeed, HN comment got indexed pretty much instantly by google, but for some reason that repo has been up for a few months and just doesn't show up at all(and it's not like google never shows any results from github either, so no idea what's going on - as someone else pointed out, it comes up first on DuckDuckGo just fine)

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

#468

Post by skinkestek »

This fall I have found better results for some queries using search.marginalia.nu

For day to day work I use a mainstream engine like DDG first but they are insanely bad when it comes to respecting my queries. Earlier I used to fall back to Google who are equally bad but sometimes have slightly different results.

Now I also fall back to search.marginalia.nu for certain types of queries since if it knows about the topic at all the pages it ranks on top are often far better than what Google and DDG comes up with.

Another important thing is that with marginalia I know within a second if it had results. With DDG and Google I have to peek into every result to see if it is spam or ham. (There used to be that the preview snippets on front of Google showed where in the text the result came from but that probably was too useful and led to fewer ad impressions so they removed it.)

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

#469

Post by astrange »

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.

Tech companies like G/FB don't have to care about infinite growth. It's nice to see your RSUs go up, but the shareholders don't have voting rights.

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

#470

Post by astrange »

Volker_W wrote: post #324
njharman wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

profit optimized is the inevitable result of any system that has profit motivation banning advertising would help for awhile, but other profit streams would be optimised and expand to fill void, such as data collection/mining

If ads would be banned, data collection would be unprofitable.

It's already not that profitable. Twitter's ad targeting is useless and they have tons of data on you.

If surveillance capitalism is super-profitable, "making cell phones" capitalism must be even better since Apple is bigger than those companies.

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