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Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

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

#81

Post by jazzyjackson »

danuker wrote: post #24
sydbarrett74 wrote: post #3

Filter out any Pinterest links. Those will pollute your results.

I have a feeling Pinterest results replaced the original pictures in results. They must have been pinned from somewhere, and similar image search won't show me where.

pinterest is practically made to hack pagerank: get a thousand people to add a pin to their own board and now you have a thousand links pointing to that pin. I would think same domain linking would be downranked but what do i know

sometimes i have good luck with tineye.com, but sometimes no dice. instagram for instance doesn’t get crawled - I found a good source of info once because someone had made an entire clone of all of instagram, with all the same usernames so it was easy to find the original after finding the clone via google image search

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

#82

Post by almog »

I think that another reason not mentioned here for missing on organic results, is that many such results have moved from forums to closed garden facebook groups (and of course facebook's own search is even worse, possibly to encourage people to ""engage"" rather than find what they're looking for).

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

#83

Post by usmannk »

Reuzel wrote: post #73

- There is way more content to sift through, including video. - There are way more Google users, including grandmas. - Conversations have moved from discussion boards to walled gardens and chats. - Google relies more on neural network embeddings, so does a better job when you type full sentences and semantic similarity. - Google relies on authority signals and incoming links to a website, so non-commercial, hobbyist,…

> Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit.

Do you find this better? In my experience it’s nicer to just put stackoverflow, reddit, or (often, in my case) seriouseats in my google query. Reddit search in particular is pretty miserable.

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

#84

Post by ichydkrsrnae »

Reuzel wrote: post #73

- There is way more content to sift through, including video. - There are way more Google users, including grandmas. - Conversations have moved from discussion boards to walled gardens and chats. - Google relies more on neural network embeddings, so does a better job when you type full sentences and semantic similarity. - Google relies on authority signals and incoming links to a website, so non-commercial, hobbyist,…

Exact keyword match does not work as well as it once did. I question whether it's working at all on YouTube.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

alangibson wrote: post #50
BitwiseFool wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want a curated search engine so badly. I feel like some enterprising developer could craft one specifically geared towards developers. Imagine a search that doesn't ignore operators like '?.' and where you can set persistent conditions on every single query without having to type it out. This would help prevent you from needing to type in the language you are searching for in every query. Oh, and the cherry on top…

I've considered taking a stab at it, but I didn't for likely the same reason no one else has: no idea how to monetize it. Sure you can run ads, but your conversion rates will likely stink because you'd be selecting for non-suckers.

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by WORMS_EAT_WORMS »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #26

It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…

What's kind of funny is there was a time where Google used to stand for --literally anything-- and would punish a site like reddit on search results for having such a user hostile interface.

For some reason though (probably because they used AMP) they basically allow them to do anything they want. Multiple popups, hijacking click events for login modals, and hiding the content with no impact to search results.

So now, in all the glory of the Internet, the person who genuinely wrote the best blog post on the "warmest winter coat" is completely unfindable on normal Google search or you force yourself via a reddit query to a completely hostile user experience unless you login.

It would be cool to just be able to do something like this "warmest winter coat --hobbyist-only".

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

#88

Post by softwaredoug »

I can't tell you quantitatively

But googling programming language problems, there's way more blogspam. A lot of crappy websites that seem auto-generated often rank higher than useful stackoverflow results. There spammy sites often have my search verbatem in the title, so they get clicked on...

It's pretty sad as IMO this is harming developers, blogging, and Google. I hope Google can fix the issue and reward useful content, not just content that's made itself look useful to generate clicks.

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

#89

Post by fxtentacle »

vgeek wrote: post #9

The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testi…

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 find it. But of course, it's still on GitHub.

Similarly, Google will sometimes not find a single result for some Windows API function names, despite them being publicly documented on docs.microsoft.com.

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