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

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

#51

Post by DanBC »

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

I search for "suicide" (for my work) very often. It _fucking sucks_ that Google seems to think "death", "died", "murdered" etc are all valid synonyms. It means that for every single search I do I need to do extra work.

I miss the days of +forced +terms.

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

#52

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

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's OK. It works well for me for common things that are easy to find. Restaurants, wiki entries, etc. But for example a new paper published today in Nature? Even searching for the whole title in quotes with DDG will not return it. Gotta go to Google for that.

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

#53

Post by r_singh »

This question has been on my mind too and I'm glad someone thought of asking on HN.

Google has been returning really obvious results that one expects to get based on search history, other internet usage, etc (much like Netflix's matching). So much so that in order to find really unexpected gems of info I need to really spend a great amount of time searching a lot of different websites (hacker news, reddit, linkedin, corporate affairs data, marketplaces, truecaller, etc etc).

I feel like we need a new search engine now that there are so many different types of search results (blogs / media, aggregators / marketplaces, directories, social profiles, company websites, etc). One that lets us take more control over the type of results one can expect and more importantly one that doesn't show you what you expect to see (after being heavily influenced by your previous activities).

Also, Google may have millions of results for every keyword, but the quality of those links deteriorates quite fast, post 3rd page results are just crap.

I genuinely believe that Google worked and innovated when other search cos were wasting users' time by not rendering results quickly, but today we need something that better suits the complexity of the web and doesn't heavily rely on usage histories, etc.

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

#54

Post by Yetanfou »

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.

Search engines - Google amongst them - are moving from using the search term as (possibly stemmed) literal words to search for to attempting to interpret the 'meaning' of the term. This interpretation can be somewhat... lacking, with the observed result of nonsensical answers.

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

#55

Post by tannhaeuser »

the_other_guy wrote: post #24

I know that this post is about bashing Google since it's the big _evil_ boy and then slowly promoting DuckDuckGo since we are used to at least a weekly DDG shilling thread here in HN, but let me tell you the honest truth that Google is still the best search engine by far (e.g. indexing javascript content, accuracy based on your history for instance try searching "Prometheus" if you're a developer and again on not log…

Google search superiority is a myth IMHO. If you're a SW engineer, you're better of searching StackOverflow and using an old-school curated list of links for on-topic sites. Basic thinking tells you that Google Search are incentivized to show you pages with the most ads, rather than relevancy. There aren't that many good resources for any given topic anyway; creating a simple search index over those isn't rocket science. Certainly, "searched 130.000.000 sites in 0.13 ms" style info isn't helpful, unless you find Google giving you random crap sites entertaining.

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

#56

Post by zython »

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 had a similar experience with youtube lately: I was looking for a song that I knew the tune and a related artist and for the love of god could not find it with the current youtube recommendations. Most of the videos I'd get recommended when searching related songs, were not even music-related. So I went to archive.org and within a couple of results found what I was looking for.

Youtube's recommendation has really changed for the worse.

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

#57

Post by matthewmacleod »

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

Honestly, you're both kind of right.

It's totally correct that often we want search results that don't include the exact word which was specified in the search request. We often want close synonyms, stems, elimination of redundant words etc. and flexibility on this helps to retrieve much better search results.

On the other hand, Google has a particularly frustrating habit of dropping words which are absolutely key to a particular search. You know, those cases where you are searching for details about a very specific set of explicit keywords, and 90% of the results exclude one of them, making them totally useless.

It's like an "uncanny valley" in some ways. When it says "You probably don't need the word 'and' in your search, and also 'video games' is the same as 'computer games' so I'll just include both" then the process makes sense, feels helpful, and indeed you probably don't notice. When you search for two explicit technologies and one of them is ignored, it feels like you're fighting a system that's trying to second-guess what you mean.

Ultimately the search engine is tuned for common queries, and the majority of users aren't likely to have the required technical skill to express exactly what they want to find without some help. This results in mismatch between the expectations of different users.

Verbatim search helps with this, in that it allows advanced users to better control their results. I'd be super happy if I could just toggle this "on" all the time.

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

#58

Post by alpaca128 »

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.

My impression is that DDG requires a slightly different choice of keywords. But you'll get used to it and in my experience it currently delivers better results than Google.

When I started using DuckDuckGo I often switched to Google for certain queries, now I do that very rarely because Google's results get more disappointing every year.

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

#59

Post by Timucin »

the_other_guy wrote: post #41
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

Not really.

Put X instead DuckDuckGo, the meaning and the intent of my post doesn't change. You just choose to see it in that way.

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

#60

Post by Yetanfou »

A good solution to all this $search_engine misery is to use something like Searx [1] as an in-between. This gets rid of most of the profiling - especially when using a shared instance run by someone you trust (to avoid being profiled by the Searx instance, self-host and have family members and friends use it) - and gives results from a whole host of search engines. Configure all your devices to use that instance and you no longer have to cope with any single $search_engine's 'new and improved' algorithms, instead being treated to a search salad with ingredients of your own choosing.

[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

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