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.
Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#32I've been struggling with context. I fight for Google to know I'm talking about Rust the language and not the game or the oxidization. "Rust Vector Drain" really struggled today. I'm a bit surprised that Google isn't prepared to remember context. "User has been looking at a lot of Rust Lang so let's promote those kinds of results"
I would love the ability to add "domain:programming" to my searches like that - just let me tell google what area I'm interested in, it would so make life simpler.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#33It sure feels like it. It feels like no matter what I search for, most of the top 10 results are like some crappy lifewire page with no useful information and written 7 years ago but “updated” only last week....
And everything else got “recipiefied”, where u get a life story before your answer. Both of these things are sites gaming their rankings. Sometimes i just want pure info, and google wont ever show pure info/data sites in their results unless its their own parsing of it..
That said, google still beats ddg. Ddg just doenst pull in the answers from fourms and stackoverflow like sites as well as google.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#34For 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 no…
> But I've started to notice that their index seems to be forgetting about the past as time moves on.
A few months ago I was trying to find an old mailing list post using Google. I tried every combination of search terms I could think of, but it didn't show up. Later, I managed to find a direct link to the post in my notes. It turns out Google just wasn't indexing it at all -- searching literal excerpts from the post in quotation marks didn't give any results either. I just tried it again (I believe the post was https://www.mail-archive.com/fonc@vpri.org/msg01802.html), and it still doesn't seem to be indexed, though now there's another archive of the same mailing list which does show up in the results.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#35It'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 ignores words in the search query is the most infuriating part (what the fuck did you think I put that word in the search query for?)
Less than a week ago I got hit with the CAPTCHA hellban for using inurl: and going more than 3 pages into the results, which must be a record time as I have triggered that in the past but only after many many intense searches. I switched to Bing and found what I was looking for on the first page.
I also have a high suspicion sometimes that it is actively trying to hide relevant results from me.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#36Absolutely! 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 have nothing to do with coffee or by some kind of purpose built “www.bestcoffeegrinder2021.com” sites that don’t exactly engender trust. Most of these are so obviously written by low quality contractors or bots that it’s somewhat worrisome that they cant be filtered out by google.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#37Between 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.
But more and more effective at sucking up my time....
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#38As a sort of related question, what do people use search engines for? I find that 99% of my searches fall under the "I know exactly what site I want to search" ie: docs websites, github, wikipedia, etc, which I can search trivially in my browser's url bar.
For the last 1%, I use duckduckgo, which almost always ends up just proxying me to one of those other sites.
Search feels very "solved" to me, I don't see the point in using Google.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#39For 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 no…
> But I've started to notice that their index seems to be forgetting about the past as time moves on. A few months ago I was trying to find an old mailing list post using Google. I tried every combination of search terms I could think of, but it didn't show up. Later, I managed to find a direct link to the post in my notes. It turns out Google just wasn't indexing it at all -- searching literal excerpts from the post…
Google Memory Loss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?
#40Still gets the job done. Compare that to Facebook and Messenger where the UI is a total torture.