Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

news.ycombinator.com

81–89 of 89 posts

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#81

I've ditched Google Search for DuckDuckGo a while back: first for privacy, but the more I used the more I realized that for some reason the results of DDG are just better than the ones of Google. I still use Google for super-specific things that I know DDG might now have indexed

The same here, the inflection point was about six months ago to me. And it is not that ddg results got that much better, but google worsening is going faster.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#83
post #24

Trying to not be a pure Google hater here but I can expect a lot of their products will become shittier (in terms of U X) in the next few years. It’s what happens to every web property after they have their insane period of growth. Now in order to continue growing without naturally adding users, they will have to get more $$$ per user. In order to do that, they will need better/more ads. In order to do that the UI/se…

This is the sad truth. We are lucky that we have alternatives for search engines. Too bad there isn't any real alternative to youtube.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#84
post #24

Trying to not be a pure Google hater here but I can expect a lot of their products will become shittier (in terms of U X) in the next few years. It’s what happens to every web property after they have their insane period of growth. Now in order to continue growing without naturally adding users, they will have to get more $$$ per user. In order to do that, they will need better/more ads. In order to do that the UI/se…

This is the sad truth. We are lucky that we have alternatives for search engines. Too bad there isn't any real alternative to youtube.

But on YouTube you could pay for it and it's actually worth it in terms of time. Think about how much time you waste watching ads. Just my opinion. I would pay for a search engine that is useful and ad free.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#85
post #20

Yes, 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.

I'm starting to think that their intentionally doing that in order for you to spend more time on their search engine therefore increasing the likelihood that you'll click on an ad whether it's intentional or not. It would be so messed up if the data came back that people were just clicking on the ads because they think they're relevant since they're on the first page but the reality is they're not they're just doing it to monetize. The only way that you would find this out is if the people who are paying for the ads noticed that they're ROI was actually better which would be interesting because I'm not sure how it works now but in the past it was all based off of clicks not based off of whether or not they converted. I think the values have to be realigned so that it's only paid whether or not the ad was useful versus just a click. I cannot tell you how many times I've just accidentally clicked on ads without mean to do so. Hopefully that's built into the price but I doubt it.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sad truth. We are lucky that we have alternatives for search engines. Too bad there isn't any real alternative to youtube.

But on YouTube you could pay for it and it's actually worth it in terms of time. Think about how much time you waste watching ads. Just my opinion. I would pay for a search engine that is useful and ad free.

Thank you I no longer need to be a pure pessimist anymore. I also think though that there will still be a time where they need to get more $$ and will raise prices or introduce ads at lower price tiers. However I would happily pay to not have ads.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#87
post #40

Still gets the job done. Compare that to Facebook and Messenger where the UI is a total torture.

Why would you compare a search engine to a social network? And to the single worst social network at that? If you set your standards as low as possible, just about everything "gets the job done."

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#88
I actually had a curious experience with this personally. About 2 or 3 years ago I started using DuckDuckGo on all my devices as the default search engine. And DDG has this feature where if your results aren't very good, you can add "g!" at the end of the query to be redirected to Google.

So initially, 2 or 3 years ago, I'd regularly use this feature and get better results. But over the years I came to realize that often then Google results were no better and even sometimes worse than the DDG results.

Still, for some things like longer quotes (error msgs) out of obscure forum pages or queries that are questions, Google does better, but almost everything else, DDG is at least just as good.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

#89
post #14

Google 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 _Adverti…

I would 100% agree with this. In 2014 and before if I go to previous Page(> 1). I would see old articles. Nowadays it's the same articles repeating. During 2008-2010 there was a issue like, when you search, there would be always page in the top for all search results. That issue is there now in news section.

Bing is not upto mark but my office browser default is edge and Bing. Well somebody has to feed that MS machine learning search bot....

Quality of Google search been dropping...

Post reply on HN