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Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

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Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#91

Post by SnowflakeOnIce »

SnowflakeOnIce wrote: post #74

I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.

I've also observed this on duckduckgo, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent. Strange: they either both tweaked their algorithms around the same time, or maybe SEO spam suddenly got a lot better.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#92

Post by nmstoker »

taftster wrote: post #23

I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…

But is this driven by the supply side or demand side?

Seems to me that users would still benefit from a cross-site search capability (eg to follow your example, what if you want something funny not from a specific site or you don't know which sites offer something)

It's subjective but most of the pressure seems to be because the search quality has dropped off recently, not that I'm no longer willing/eager to search.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#93

Post by 0x0000000 »

SnowflakeOnIce wrote: post #74

I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.

It was a long time since I had to append "wikipedia" to my search results, but within the last year or so, I find myself doing it more and more.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#94

Post by Barrin92 »

taftster wrote: post #23

I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…

isn't that pretty much what you.com tries to do? Sort of a combination of both ordinary search results and categories based on sources.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#95

Post by exdsq »

0x0000000 wrote: post #93
SnowflakeOnIce wrote: post #74

I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.

It was a long time since I had to append "wikipedia" to my search results, but within the last year or so, I find myself doing it more and more.

Hadn’t actively thought it that but I’ve been doing the same

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#96

Post by joshbode »

0x0000000 wrote: post #93
SnowflakeOnIce wrote: post #74

I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.

It was a long time since I had to append "wikipedia" to my search results, but within the last year or so, I find myself doing it more and more.

I've started going straight to Wikipedia and searching there if I know I'm going to end up there anyway for the same reason, plus I deny Google the search data and ad-serve

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#97

Post by greatpostman »

0x0000000 wrote: post #93
SnowflakeOnIce wrote: post #74

I've noticed in the past 2-3 months that results from StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and official programming language documentation sites seem to have been abruptly downranked. They used to typically be in the top 3 results for me for appropriate queries, but now they frequently aren't even on the first page.

It was a long time since I had to append "wikipedia" to my search results, but within the last year or so, I find myself doing it more and more.

Yeah I’ve noticed this as well

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#98

Post by ikiris »

kyrra wrote: post #50
l0b0 wrote: post #16

It'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…

Googler, opinions are my own. For products that are core, large UI changes tend to just annoy a lot of users, unless there's something really amazing about the change. Even then, people are hesitant to like new UIs. Engineers and designers definitely want to try new things, but balancing those against messing with UIs that a billion+ people use is hard. My general take on drive and calendar, if they are trying to imp…

Plus it's more fun to make a new chat / meet or payment app. Apparently.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#99

Post by narrator »

ravenstine wrote: post #27
taftster wrote: post #23

I think the utility of generic search engines is coming to an end. Services like Google, Bing and DDG are numbered in usefulness. Instead, I am guessing (maybe hoping) that we see a return of the moderated directories, like Yahoo or DMOZ of old. A 2.0 spin on these directories, with lessons learned from all the years. Imagine that you just go to StackOverflow and search there directly for your answer. Want a funny la…

I've been coming to a similar conclusion. Increasingly I've had to use `site: ` syntax with DDG, but DDG has clearly become significantly worse in recent months. This was confirmed by others in another HN thread recently. Even if I use the site-syntax or use quotes to specify exact match (which DDG used to honor), I'll often get nonsense results whereas Yandex somehow manages to find results that aren't on DDG or Goo…

Yandex searches the long tail better and doesn't have really awful politicized censorship like Google does for some searches.

Re: Ask HN: What's Up with Google?

#100

Post by mkl »

reboog711 wrote: post #21
Havoc wrote: post #13

The google scraping bot gets past the pay walls in many cases

Can I change my mobile browser to use the same user agent?

Won't work if they care, as there are other verifications: IP addresses https://developers.google.com/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot..., domain name https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
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