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

71–80 of 109 posts

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

#71

Post by NeedMoreTea »

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…

It's frustrating in its simplicity. I don't need 5 more versions of the same track. They're showing far fewer of the same genre and era but a lot more conspiracy theory garbage that I will never, ever intentionally click, yet their algo has never noticed the total lack of clicks on those "Proof of alien life", "brexit is great" or "lizards are running the show really" videos.

"recommended for you", yeah right. How do they arrive here from say 1 from CGP Grey, 2 from ACDC and 1 from Iron Maiden?

Last.fm used to have my music taste well nailed and followed up with a lot of unknown stuff that I ended up loving and buying. YT had more data for longer yet has no clue at all. Now I just search and play direct from DDG.

YT never worked that well for me, but now it's rarely worth even checking the other videos column.

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

#72

Post by isostatic »

the_other_guy wrote: post #31
isostatic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If google works for you, great. > 99% users of this website are software engineers Citation Needed

>Citation Needed nice way to invalidate my whole argument

If you want to present an extreme figure and are unwilling to back it up with even anecdotes, you don't have an argument

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

#73

Post by hallihax »

I agree. Google has consistently gotten worse imo - I believe the general move towards third-party 'trust' verifiers, and Google's obsession with 'relevance' (as in, relevance to me) has destroyed the entire point of a search engine. I rarely use Google these days except to quickly re-find something I discovered somewhere else. I never really use it for finding information these days - just getting a link to something I already know exists. If I had a better way to search my bookmarks, I'd probably use that instead.

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

#74

Post by RyanUnited »

I'm all for global inclusion and community. Except for when learning new, difficult concepts or subjects.

Searching YouTube (via Google) for anything to do with programming, coding, etc. returns videos with only Indian presenters. Being a native English speaker, it would be nice to learn without having to parse through thick accents speaking in British English.

Sorry, but I had to suffer through this in college because universities want discount professors to fit their "multicultural" check box.

Considering who Google's CEO is, this is concerning on a Big Brother level.

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

#77

Post by EForEndeavour »

guhcampos wrote: post #40

What really, really bugs me is what they did with the image search at some point. I always used image search to try and find the original source of an Image. It's super useful to determine the authenticity of a news article, identify the author of a photo for licensing and a million other uses. Then at some point, search by image started to simply return results based on the image classification tag on the image: so…

I see that particular un-feature as a consequence of undue focus on ML that automatically generates image tags. While it's impressive for a system to be able to auto-tag billions of images at high accuracy, these generic tags are almost always useless as search terms.

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

#78

Post by WhooisWhoo »

List of privacy-focused search engines to choose from:

> https://www.unbubble.eu/info/terms

> https://searx.me/

> https://about.qwant.com/legal/privacy/

> https://hulbee.com/privacy

> https://metager.de/en/datenschutz

> https://duckduckgo.com/

> https://yioop.com/

> https://anonymousengine.com/privacy.php

> https://new.startpage.com/

> https://www.ixquick.com/

> https://www.searchencrypt.com/about/

> https://www.gigablast.com/

> https://www.mojeek.com/about/

> https://www.oscobo.com/ctnt.php?c=aboutus

> https://disconnect.me/privacy

> https://privatelee.com/docs/privatelee/privacy.htm

> https://peekier.com/privacy

> https://swisscows.com/privacy

> https://www.lilo.org/en/privacy/

> https://epicsearch.in/

> http://yippy.com/privacy-policy.html

> http://gibiru.com/

> https://www.xaphir.com/

> http://www.faroo.com/

> http://search.yacy.net/ (fully decentralized)

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

#79

Post by buboard »

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…

most frustrating when you re watching a series of lectures and it recommends the previous one , or breaks the series

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

#80

Post by buboard »

palerdot wrote: post #67
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.

They should give more tools to creators to organize their content. The default channel video listings is a mess with no rhyme or reason.
Post reply on HN