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Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

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Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#451

Post by seniorivn »

ichydkrsrnae wrote: post #433
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use this so often that I have it bound to a keyboard text replacement on all my devices. Recently Google has started inserting non-reddit posts to the top of my results even when I include this. Weirdly I’d be less upset if they were ads, but they aren’t. Just some articles that Google thought I wanted to see more than the website I specified. It’s infuriating.

Do you know what infuriates me most about this? It's that Google hasn't addressed it when it's clear as fucking day that their search results have gone in the tank. But now that I've typed that, I can see exactly why they haven't responded: a search company telling the world that its search results are f**ed. That would do wonders for the stock

if they are so bad, why competitors don't get a bigger market share? And if you think there are no competitors, you should know that there are bing, duckduckgo, that are basically the same engine and foreign search engines that successfully compete with Google is their domestic markets(yandex in Russia, Baidu in China and a few less successful others) all of them would be able to get at least some US market share in case google slipped

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#452

Post by yc12340 »

awinter-py wrote: post #205

tips: do prompt engineering like you're programming VQGAN GAN image generators can be tricked into giving results with phrases like 'unreal engine', 'artstation', 'junjo ito', 'van gogh' https://minimaxir.com/2021/08/vqgan-clip/ same for google. 'gist' gives you a specific category of technical results. seems like the default is some combination of medium, SO + github issues

> do prompt engineering

Prompt engineering has always been a useful tool and still is. But a lot of problem, discussed here, can't be solved by any amount of fiddling. When Google does not even search long tail results, and there is nothing relevant in any of their "caches", doing prompt engineering only wastes one's time.

It appears, that there is some sort of fallback (?), that brings results of unfulfilled queries into a cache, but it isn't fast enough to respond to the user in real-time. Maybe Google should openly admit, that their resources aren't infinite, and offer to e-mail a better results once they are ready. Seriously.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#453

Post by justfortechnews »

fsflover wrote: post #2

Yes, since a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 . > Any pro tips on how to google Pro tip: try DuckDuckGo, https://ddg.gg .

Another pro tip: try Brave Search instead (search.brave.com).

Still being refined, and it will take a while to be fully-competitive with Google, but the text search results are strong and, unlike DDG, it's an independent search index that doesn't rely on Bing.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#454

Post by dogleash »

I've been using bing at least once a week for a few months.

It's gone from "haha who uses bing?" to the thing I turn to when I need to pull something obscure out of the web and it's always in the first page or two. It feels like google of 10 years ago - in a good way.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#455

Post by divmain »

freediver wrote: post #59

If you email me, I will send an invite to Kagi Search beta which deals with the problems you mentioned, namely: - A ranking algorithm that penalizes commercial and ad/tracking bloated pages - Ability to "mute" or "prefer" domains - Ability to search for discussions - Customize type and appearance of search results Kagi Search is a new startup in the search space and we are currently in the closed beta. https://kagi.c…

After having used DuckDuckGo for a couple of years and habitually using g!, I switched to Kagi recently. Much better experience, I like that I’m a customer and not the product, great search results. I have been surprised and impressed.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#456

Post by bagacrap »

rhines wrote: post #428
asdff wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all monetized results. Brands send bikes to these places to review. It's an advertisement. If you want an organic result like a personal blog post from someone or a niche interest forum like you might have found on google search 15 years ago or so, it's just not really there. Everything you see has been paid for to be seen by you. Once you realize that, a lot of the web feel like this uncanny potemkin inter…

You're not going to find people doing unpaid work reviewing the best exercise bikes, or other expensive items. Very few people can afford to go out and buy 10-20 exercise bikes, and fewer still people can afford to do so every time a new bike is released. And yet fewer will then go and write up their experiences and keep their list updated over time. For stuff like this you will only get spec comparison articles or c…

it doesn't have to be a single person that reviews all bikes. We can crowdsource this a la IMDb. But it does seem like a myth that there was ever, in history, a good way to answer the question of "best exercise bike". Google's current inability to answer the question isn't new.

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#457

Post by psadri »

fxtentacle wrote: post #89
vgeek wrote: post #9

The 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…

Yes, that is also my observation. They will show content that completely does not contain your query words if that content is just popular enough. The result is that niche technical topics get drowned out by related popular discussions. Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't…

Is there a market for a focused, specialized search engine, for example, relatively speaking -- google circa 2010 with all the specialized search operators etc... focused on technical content?

What does the business model look like? Ads (it would be in front of a very valuable audience of technical folks)? Or paid subscriptions (perhaps the community votes which resources get crawled / indexed)

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#459

Post by CRConrad »

alangibson wrote: post #212
i-ning wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site can help: http://teclis.com

I just searched 'what is energy' and is see posts from Quora and Medium on the first page. Definitely not what someone doing real research would be looking for

Depends on how you define "real research". Would someone doing real research ask that question?

Re: Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?

#460

Post by kf6nux »

Reuzel wrote: post #73

- There is way more content to sift through, including video. - There are way more Google users, including grandmas. - Conversations have moved from discussion boards to walled gardens and chats. - Google relies more on neural network embeddings, so does a better job when you type full sentences and semantic similarity. - Google relies on authority signals and incoming links to a website, so non-commercial, hobbyist,…

There's an interesting juxtaposition between your last point (people aren't keeping up with the times and instead blaming Google) and the commonality in your tips (don't use Google Search, use special communities).

That said, your tips are good. Thank you.

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