It's really bad if you don't use uBlock Origin, that's for sure. The amount of ad
and sponsored results has gotten really bad in recent years for a lot of queries.
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
21–30 of 515 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#22Everytime 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.
Not only that, we just need one that works the way Google used to work. You know, something like the old algorithm that made Google famous and made competitors obsolete.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#23The 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: 1;"]
www.google.com##[data-hveid]>div:style(height: auto !important)Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#24Filter out any Pinterest links. Those will pollute your results.
I have a feeling Pinterest results replaced the original pictures in results.
They must have been pinned from somewhere, and similar image search won't show me where.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#25It's really bad if you don't use uBlock Origin, that's for sure. The amount of ad and sponsored results has gotten really bad in recent years for a lot of queries.
Even if you use it, "organic" results seem to be just links to e-commerce websites.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#26It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results.
Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit"
Unfortunately I prefer to avoid reddit (which also has a fair amount of astroturfing), but I haven't found a good alternative. I severely miss Google's old "discussions" (or was it forums?) filter.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#27Yes, 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.
That's what I do too, but one should be aware that marketers are gaming reddit.
I recently tried looking in the Buy It For Life subreddit for a specific type of product, and it appeared to me that one company was taking advantage of that sub to promote their product.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#28Everytime 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.
Not only that, we just need one that works the way Google used to work. You know, something like the old algorithm that made Google famous and made competitors obsolete.
The hard part of what Google does is spam and abuse prevention. If you only indexed known-good sources I think the hard part would basically be done. Providing good search results, rich queries, sentiment analysis etc is all old hat by now.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#29It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…
That's probably my default search query for now to avoid all the marketing crap. But if this becomes the norm we will definitely see robots discussing their winter coat preferences.
Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
#30Everytime 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've pondered this, too. Why not a DMOZ 2.0 type concept, where you seed the index with high quality sites and grow from there. Freshness won't matter as much for most topics, so crawling X times per day probably won't be necessary. Maybe have user defined flags to indicate the types of results they want (large sites, small sites, high authority, technical sites-- maybe different sort by features) with backlinks/domain prominence as a small factor, but also using NLP to determine authoritativeness of said content so as to facilitate less-linked site discovery.