Yes, recently looking for "stackoverflow like" stuff has in the first results clones of SO mixed with the original source. And they speak us about the "algorithm".
IME Bing does a much better job of filtering out SO and GH clones.
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
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Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#12Everytime 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.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#13Yes, it seems to come up on HN every week.
I like to append "reddit" to many queries, for example "best bicycle for under $500 reddit", where you can read some interesting discussions, rather than a random SEO website with affiliate links.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#14Yes, recently looking for "stackoverflow like" stuff has in the first results clones of SO mixed with the original source. And they speak us about the "algorithm".
Those things are a curse. But Google had a long history of killing that kind of junk off eventually. See 'spun content' for example.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#15Way, way worse. There was a time you could force Google to only return pages with a specific term by wrapping it in double quotes (or further back, prefixing with a plus). This was useful when trying to learn about a specific error message/code. Now, it's a total crapshoot, and you may not get a single useful result at all.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#16Google is a recommendation engine, not search. It recommends what you will click on, not necessarily what you want.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#17Yes, it seems like google (and search in general) has slowly been losing the war with SEO as more and more queries return pages of SEO affiliate blogspam and less and less organic, actually useful content.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#18I have stopped exclusively using Google search for 95/100 queries. Duckduckgo does the job and sometimes I bang to Google.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#19Or when I use the date filter for just the past year, and it's still pages from 2013 on the first page of results.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#20Filter out any Pinterest links. Those will pollute your results.
… and terribly so.