Yes. It's great for finding commercial products and absolutely terrible for anything else.
It's making my research for technical translation a lot harder recently.
Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
11–20 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#12To head off any misunderstandings, what time period do you mean by "lately"? Past few hours? Days? Years?
It feels like maybe the past year.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#13Its been pretty bad for me for the past year or two.
Sometimes I have moments it only gives me Google books results for certain queries. Luckily I havent had that one in a while.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#14Google 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 _Advertisement_ company. Your goal is to get as much info as possible on all people so to target and sell ads for maximum profit. The search engine, and other Google products, are to focus on that goal. The other innovation stuff may be done some by you, but we'll shift a lot to the other subsidiaries. I think the clarity and narrowing of purpose is wise, from a business perspective.
As a consumer, though, I've switched to DDG.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#15The worse now is email search in gmail. It used to be very efficient, but now, if you don't type the exact word in full with the exact spelling, it will not find it. The most annoying is sometimes when you only remember half of a name or first name that you are looking for. (Note: assuming that it is not in your contact list already)
Google Docs is also exceptionally bad at finding things too I find.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#16Do you have the same experience when logged in and when logged out in an incognito window?
Google search isn't the same for everyone. It varies based on your location, language, profile, and recent search history (i.e. if you do 3 searches in a row about items in a video game, it will assume you are looking things up while playing and continue favoring results about that game for a while).
If things have really gone of the rails to the point you are dissatisfied, try clearing your entire search history here: https://myactivity.google.com/privacyadvisor/search
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#17More than anything, I've noticed that Google prefers to offer search results that are from advertisers. This isn't surprising. Another commenter mentioned that context has gotten worse, and I'd agree with that. It's still a "good" search engine. I say "good" in quotes because I have yet to try a search engine that's as effective, but the "good" aspect of Google is now debatable in many contexts. For example it's "good" if your compare it to Yahoo. I think I might be trying duckduckgo more often (despite the ridiculous name) and even gasp Bing.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#18You don't complain when it works, so I'd want some hard data here.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#19For sure. Google's ability to surface useful pages above SEO gamed "articles" has been dropping for years. I've had to start adding '-best' and '-top' to searches in an attempt to stop getting blogspam stuff like "december 2020 best X" with no substance when searching for X.
It used to be possible to, for some topics, limit the search period to pre 2010 to help improve the relevancy of results. But I've started to notice that their index seems to be forgetting about the past as time moves on.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#20Yes, over the last six weeks the results you would normally find in the first page are now on page two or three.
Search results for previous searches where I know the response corpus are significantly degraded.
Search quality has been falling pretty steadily over the last couple years.