They are. I've solved the problem for myself by setting the "Verbatim" option to true in search engines' settings google url of browser.
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
91–100 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#92Google has gone downhill since they started pushing searches towards approved sources.
Sadly your best bet when google is failing is to try Bing or other search engines.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#93I search using DDG by default. Sometimes by habit I'll throw a !g on the search to tell it to use Google, but more and more often I have to think twice. If my search touches politics at all, Google is a no-go. Joe Rogan mentioned this phenomenon recently. Searching for a specific event, he explained, it was easily found on non-Google search engines, but Google hid it behind dozens of Ministry of Truth results.
This is not exactly what you're asking, I know. My point is, if they're willing to screw around with some results, I have lost confidence in all of their results. Long gone are the days where the contract with Google was that you would provide some words, and that it would provide a list of pages with those words in them.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#94The 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…
The "people also searched for" box is not just useless, but also very much messing with usability for me. Every time I click on a link, go back, then trying to click on the next link, this box shows up and I accidentally click on that (because it shows up with a little delay and an animation). This filter takes care of that box completely: www.google.com##.exp-outline www.google.com##[style="display: block; opacity:…
This is particularly hilarious and ironic when considering they are really punishing for cumulative layout shift in their Lighthouse tool - to prevent exactly what you are describing from happening! Seems like Google hasn't used lighthouse on their own site!
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#95For me it has, not probably Google's fault but especially coding related searches usually give me a lot of sites that just copies content from Stack Overflow. It's amazing that Google can't filter and punish those sites in the rank.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#96Search results for products have become worse, they are basically useless. I don't think that's primarily Google's fault, though, aggregation blogs and "list sites" have basically outsmarted Google's algorithms.
I still find what I want - honest opinions and unpaid reviews - by adding "reddit" to the query. But without that the normal results on the first page are complete rubbish.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#97- 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 academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit
This is a completely miserable experience, and walls off useful information into classes of people who "are in the know" about where the most relevant information exists.
And if you're that grandma searching for a birthday present for your grandson? Good luck. She's likely to be devoured by ads, if not an outright scam.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#98Any product search now is to a list of Amazon referral links, product search on Google has become horrible
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#99I've found that double-quotes are basically mandatory in any search now. (this is Google shorthand for "results MUST include this term", you probably know that.)
I might be looking for some sort of broad topic, like how do a I do a particular thing in SwiftUI, and it will return a bunch of stuff about SwiftUI that sort of skirts the topic. A search for do "a particular thing" "SwiftUI" is more likely to succeed.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#100Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
I did just that. Well not specifically aimed at research, but the types of websites I'm interested in, written by humans, blogs and such. It's got some quality issues right now because I fucked up some of the keyword extraction logic and it's taken a while to identify just what's gone wrong.
Even though it's a bit broken, it has some lucid moments. Just compare:
https://www.google.com/search?q=mechanical+keyboards
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=mechanical+keyboar...
The take-away I want to drive home is that it's absolutely possible to build something the scale of Google c.a. 2003 and run it on consumer hardware. I think, due to general difficulties in making these things profitable, the ideal approach is to make the operation so absurdly cheap it can be run non-profit instead. I'll gladly pay out of my own pocket to have a good search alternative.