Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by mohanmcgeek » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

gausswho wrote: post #387

zerd wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google now also has an extreme recency bias. Most things I search for will give top results for recent SEO optimized blog posts/Youtube videos instead of established authoritative resources. If you search for something that happens to overlap with a recent movie name, good luck, it'll drown. And I constantly "have" "to" "search" "like" "this" because Google thinks it knows better than me.

While I also am annoyed how much I need to enquoten to refine search, in most cases I wish it upped the bias further. My default search applies the 'Past year' filter because otherwise I get lots of outdated answers.

For some cases where I know that the recent results are going to be verbose spam, I set the filter to before:2015

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

#512

Post by passerby1 » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 3:30 AM UTC

Volker_W wrote: post #355

passerby1 wrote: post #91

They are. I've solved the problem for myself by setting the "Verbatim" option to true in search engines' settings google url of browser.

Where can I find the "Verbatim" option?

Search tools > "all results" change to Verbatim

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

#513

Post by asdff » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 6:39 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #465

asdff wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah, and that's why a handful of subreddits are still good resources. You go in and ask "what's the best exercise bike" and the top comment will say "just buy used locally."

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

#514

Post by asdff » Mon, Dec 06, 2021, 6:47 AM UTC

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…

>what else does a bike need to do?

I feel like this exact question was asked in a meeting then peloton appeared. It turns out a bike also needs to have an ipad strapped to the front with a fitness instructor reading your name off a list of connected users and offering personalized praise. That'll be $1500 up front then $40 a month please.

I slightly worry when I have some product I rely on in my daily life that just does its job well. How long until the corporate race to the bottom hits this industry too?

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

#515

Post by xnx » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:42 PM UTC

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…

Google does a pretty good or better job of searching amazon.com than Amazon does, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22odense+marzipan%22+site%3...