It seems to be weighting recent web pages a lot more since a year or more. It's annoying to search something and get 10 pages of recent pages rather than something from a year ago mixed in somewhere.
Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
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Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#92It's just worse in different ways (and better in different ways as well). As Google's index grows it shards across more machines. The odds that latency will affect the result of a particular query increase simply because more machines and network connections are involved. So there's caching.
Because no one wants to wait forever (delay is indistinguishable from failure), Google returns the best results it can obtain within some time threshold. Unfortunately, the utility of a search term is often its rarity relative to other search terms and the rarity of a search term makes it less likely to be cached nearby. If "nobody ever searches by that term" it is more likely not to be indexed or on a far away partition. Think of adding a Korean character to a string of English search terms : In Korea : In the US.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to present an extreme figure and are unwilling to back it up with even anecdotes, you don't have an argument
I already stated my argument, you're the one who's trying to invalidate it without offering any counter argument
You have claimed 99% users of this website are software engineers
That is an extraordinary claim, and thus requires extraordinary evidence
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#94It seems only a matter of time until Google is just an interactive yellow pages. Why would you spend millions trying to index peoples personal blogs etc. when companies will pay thousands for the spot in the results and give you the link to put up? All they need to do is maintain their position as the default internet portal.
People advertise on Google because of the massive audience, and that audience exists because of quality organic search results. They are not going to mess with that.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#95It feels like maybe Google had a changing of the guard and a new batch of engineers are making decisions and missed out on a transfer of knowledge from the previous engineers with both search and SEO. I'm seeing my search results show less and less of what I'm looking for, it's like google search is forgetting how it used to work. The same with SEO, I'm seeing sites ranking again on the first page that have useless c…
Don’t forget that the web is changing. There is more junk produced every day and Google needs to combat search engine spam and blackhat practices. This means changes and not seeing search results you are used to.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#96I had an issue this morning where I wanted to download some youtube videos for offline viewing and they were already deleted. I used google to try to find other copies and it found nothing. I used bing and was able to find all copies.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#97pretty much garbage at this point, I honestly don't know what to do anymore. I tried Duck Duck Go and Start Pages but they are not as good. I am testing Yandex, so far it's really good and performs like old Google but I don't know what are the implications of me using Russian search engine :/
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#98I'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.
It seems dramatically better. I think the reality is that this is only relative to Google today, not Google long ago. Lots of us have been like the mythical frog in the slowly-heated pot, failing to notice that Google is getting worse. For business reasons, or because executives have an agenda, Google now refuses to prioritize what users want.
So yes, you should try it again.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I already stated my argument, you're the one who's trying to invalidate it without offering any counter argument
You have claimed 99% users of this website are software engineers That is an extraordinary claim, and thus requires extraordinary evidence
that wasn't even the point of my comment, you're insisting on derailing my argument and reducing it to something I cannot verify, and seriosuly, wtf do you think HN users are? housewives or wall street bankers? HN is an online community for tech workers especially software engineers, insisting on giving the evidence that 99% exactly of the users are software engineers is childish to say the least
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or did Google search recently get a lot worse?
#100It feels like the philosophy has become "return lots of results at any cost". For instance I just now searched for a specific e-mail address that ends with "@hotmail.co.jp" -- since it didn't find any hits with the full address, it decided to strike out the username part and return thousands of results for just "hotmail.co.jp". This is literally useless and they should know better. It just gets worse and worse for te…
The principle is probably more like: return such approximate results that, among them, advertising doesn't look out of place.