For about the past month I feel like I have had a ton of searches that returned irrelevant results. I use to be able to have a typo and other wrong things and it always did a good job until recently.
Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
11–20 of 221 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#12Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#13The google scraping bot gets past the pay walls in many cases
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#14It isn't so much about whether "Google cares" or otherwise. There are a lot of sites and a lot of vested interests trying to game their search rankings, and a huge number of keywords that the game is playing out in.
Sometimes low quality sites will have the advantage and sometimes high quality sites will have the advantage. Google is working with a bias to high quality, but they are fighting a broad fight against persistent opponents. Every so often Google does a big algorithm refactor to try and make life hard for these sort of sites.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#15I recently stopped using google and switched my default to DuckDuckGo. So far I haven't needed to go back to google for anything.
So DDG (bing) doesn't list these sites OP mentioned?
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#16It's a trend I've noticed with other services, notably Drive and Calendar - they no longer innovate, just get a UI tweak every few years. It's very reminiscent of cash cows, which typically are resourced to just keep going at minimal expense for as long as possible. Another possibility is that the product isn't "sexy" anymore, so they are having trouble finding the great staff they need to stay at the forefront. This would be fine if the rest of the world stood still, but clearly SEO has moved on in the meantime, and so we end up with a quagmire. It's basically another form of bit rot.
Unfortunately DDG is much worse in a different way - it seems incapable of dealing with synonyms. I can't recall a specific example since I switched back to Google, but it's on the order of searching for Python and getting results for Java (wrong subtree of the taxonomy), searching for Wellington and getting results for the whole of New Zealand (ignoring specifiers), or searching for double glazed windows and getting results for Microsoft Windows (no understanding of the semantics of the words being related).
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#17Google should just outright delist these sites, they are incredibly annoying and worthless
Google has "kinda" allowed this to happen for a number of years. They used to push sites to have a "first read free" policy so that their bot can still access semi-gated content. Now they suggest "flexible sampling" [0] to let "users" view a limited amount of content per time period. This is a game Google has been playing for a while that goes beyond SEO and seems to really be some issue with publishers. But to be fa…
There's a number of ways that you can expose paywalled content to Google without showing it to the user. The obvious one is paywalling content on the client side and hiding it from the user. I actually think this probably explains why client-side paywalling is so prevalent even though it's obviously far less effective. You can also serve your content in structured data that google's bots read (e.g. json+ld). I also think it's a tricky question because people often want to see authoritative sites high up in the search results even if they're paywalled, so "delisting these sites" isn't a solution that satisfies most people.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#18Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#19I recently stopped using google and switched my default to DuckDuckGo. So far I haven't needed to go back to google for anything.
DDG is a necessarily inferior product.
Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?
#20Google should just outright delist these sites, they are incredibly annoying and worthless
Indexing flexible sampling makes no sense to me. I realize GoogleBot sees Quora differently than a human sees it, but they could easily make back end penalties. Your site loads too slowly? Organic search penalty. Broken rendering on mobile? Penalty. So why is human inaccessible content OK?
If content is blocked to me 70% of the time, shouldn’t there be a commensurate penalty? These publishers are shitting up Google results while harvesting free traffic to goose their new user acquisition numbers.
It’s the degradation of the organic Google product experience, I’ve always been baffled why they allow it.