Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 109 posts

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

#61

Post by brazzledazzle »

pure-awesome wrote: post #44
brazzledazzle wrote: post #30

I think Google is focusing on the friendlier natural “human” queries. I noticed this some time ago when I’d ask it in a “lazy” way because I’m tired or distracted. E.g. “What day is Mother’s Day?”, or “What time is it in London?” I’ve noticed it seems to be more and more optimized for this sort of query as time goes on, to the point that I use the quote modifiers in many (most?) of my searches and the other modifiers…

I remember the days when I had to include "AND" and "OR" between words in the queries.

Nice! I remember when they finally added spellcheck. Probably a (welcome) contributor to my decreased ability to remember how to spell many words.

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

#62

Post by aembleton »

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #52
pure-awesome wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DDG index is not as fresh as Google's. That and local, location specific searches are what I use Google for these days.

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

#63

Post by pindab0ter »

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.

As pointed out by the other commenters you need a slightly different approach to search terms since they don't build a profile of what is and isn't relevant to you.

That said, it's definitely a lot better than a few years ago. I'm the same in having tried it back then and I couldn't get many useful results. I've been using it for half a year again now and only occasionally do I use the "!g"-bang to revert to a Google search.

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

#65

Post by kirb »

saiya-jin wrote: post #32
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…

its even worse with youtube - if I leave the TV, it will continue playing videos youtube considers somehow related to original one. But it often forgets what it already played in a row, so sometimes plays the same video multiple times. Like 1 2 3 4 2 5 1 6 5 3 etc.

A few months ago I found that if I played music on YouTube and let it go on autoplay, it would eventually play a specific song. It’ll play something else next as per usual, but the Up Next for this video would almost always be that same specific song. I can’t fathom how this worked so well for years and is now totally broken. Or how the algorithm chokes as soon as it reaches that one specific video.

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

#66

Post by shash7 »

I've noticed a lot of crappy youtube videos being inserted in the search results. These videos are far from relevant from the search query.

Unfortunately, duckduckgo and the like aren't still as good as google else I would've shifted to those search engines a long time ago.

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

#67

Post by palerdot »

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…

Youtube search quality is horribly bad in recent weeks. I'm being suggested videos that are minimum 2 years older continously in the home page. There are more recent videos from the same channels, but all I see is 2-3 year old video suggestions as if my phone/computer clock is reset to a date few years back. I'm not even sure if they are running some kind of experiment or is it a bug.

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by kowdermeister »

kowdermeister wrote: post #15

No, good as always :) But seriously, yesterday I wanted to deploy my beta to a fresh server install and I did like 10 google searches of various server and tool issues. I got it all resolved and the beta is running but I didn't stop at how bad these results are. What are you searching for when you see a decrease in quality?

Keep the downvotes coming, how dare I share my null result.
Post reply on HN