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Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

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Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#71

Post by iJohnDoe »

It’s funny that a lot of the comments here about the top results are the SEO crap. Remember when it was difficult to game Google and you had to learn the right methods? Well, it seems like Google has officially failed miserably as a search engine. Google only displays all the crap results an inexperienced search engine would return.

Back in the 90s and 2000s everyone would have just moved over to another search engine that provided better results. Google would already have been long forgotten if we had more options. It just means Google is primed to fail and another alternative can take its place. I’m surprised a new search engine hasn’t taken over. Google has been in a weak position for a few years now.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#72

Post by californical »

diegocg wrote: post #55

For whatever reason, some times I search for (lots of) emails in public oss mailing lists. In the last 1-2 years I have found some emails that Google just won't find. Bing does. So yeah, my impression is that Google is getting worse. And it's not just search. I'm planning to abandon gmail, and it's not just because of privacy.

Yep, I was there! Switched to fully use DDG (mostly bing backend), Fastmail, iOS, Apple Maps & document suite, and Bitwarden, which used to all be Google products for me.

Due to both privacy concerns and the general decline in quality of the Google versions. I just don’t use their products anymore. The only one I can’t get rid of is YouTube!

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#73

Post by 2rsf »

userbinator wrote: post #35

It's been getting worse for years, and I'm starting to find Bing is sometimes more useful these days. The irony is that it's getting worse at the sort of detailed, niche topics (electronics, automotive, and related fields) that one would really want a search engine for, while I suspect more popular and trendy information which is far easier to discover is going to be easier to find with it. The fact that it randomly…

I was also surprised to get better results using Bing in more than one use case

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#74

Post by mclightning »

duckfruit wrote: post #36

Absolutely! The top hits are often SEO’d to death and so devoid of quality I often find myself appending “Reddit” to a lot search queries just to get any sort of relevant results. “best espresso grinders reddit” -> good, relatively unbrigaded discussions of pros and cons from r/coffee “Best espresso grinder” -> plenty of “best of 2021” type articles that are patently paid for and gamed, often by publications that hav…

hahaha I do the same! Especially for any product/consumer goods, there is no alternative really.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#75

Post by aaron695 »

In the past 10 years the amount of news stories on the web is probably 10 times bigger. Similar other things, like video and images and journal articles. (Random article says way more than 10 times)

The original stories have also been repeated and mutated. Plus content farms are literally mixing it all up.

I have thought Google is getting overwhelmed with content and it feels like they are pulling back.

But without a metric who knows?

The information available is better than ever, but are we talking it must be in the top 30 returns? Long tail is failing? Worse for grandparents or the computer literate?

We just old people complaining about the past if we are talking the information Google is a portal too. It's amazing what Google returns now.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#77

Post by majewsky »

asmos7 wrote: post #26
eplanit wrote: post #14

Google search over the past 5+ years: result quality getting worse overall; relevant results pushed further and further below ads/sponsored (now on page 2); privacy issues wider and deeper. I recall being amazed at the seeming clairvoyance of their search results up to about 2014. It seems like when they reorganized under Alphabet, the division of responsibility became sharper. Alphabet to Google: you are an _Adverti…

You mean you can't just fix the problem by writing better product requirements - "Google search results shall give me more relevant results."

The problem is that "relevant" is a frustratingly vague word. Google probably even believes that this is their mission. But when you talk to marketers, "relevant" is almost always going to mean "most relevant ads".

It's like with "engaging", which sounds good on paper, but by now we all know that "engaging" just means "addicting".

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#78

Post by zabouti »

mikewarot wrote: post #9

Between the search engine getting worse over the past few years, and the failings of the history/search built into Chrome, and the loss of RSS and Delicio.us a while ago, the web seems to be less and less useful as time progresses.

There's still a tremendous amount of information available via RSS. I pay for Feedly so that I can annotate and save interesting articles.

Of course, this is not a way to search for things.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#79

Post by zabouti »

baybal2 wrote: post #31

I believe the worst degradation happened around 2013-2014 when it enabled its first "AI" search engine core. I always felt that it "tries to think for me" since then.

It seems to me that Google once had wonderful regular expression searches. That all got blown up when they introduced "Google+", thereby destroying REs.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#80

Post by autarchprinceps »

Significantly, but not recently. Quite a few years ago it started to change to accomodate more sentence based searches, and giving it a traditional set of keywords only ever returned like the main page of one of the things you mentioned, even if you explicitly tell it to search for all of the terms, etc.
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