Reminds me of googlewhack days.. those were fun
Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
41–50 of 113 posts
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#42This (shitty NLP) has been bad for a while, but I did notice it get worse recently in a way that feels crippling to me. I don't have a functional search engine anymore.
Does anyone have insight into _why_ google search has deteriorated so rapidly over the last ~6-12 months? Optimizing for NLP or websites learning SEO don't seem like they would have this big of an impact. Everyone seems to agree [0] [1] [2] that this is a problem yet it keeps getting worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27379083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…
My guess is bad regression testing based on subjective qualifiers at best or incentivize poor results that promote as revenue at worst.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#43This (shitty NLP) has been bad for a while, but I did notice it get worse recently in a way that feels crippling to me. I don't have a functional search engine anymore.
Does anyone have insight into _why_ google search has deteriorated so rapidly over the last ~6-12 months? Optimizing for NLP or websites learning SEO don't seem like they would have this big of an impact. Everyone seems to agree [0] [1] [2] that this is a problem yet it keeps getting worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27379083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…
The best explanation I’ve seen is that Google only cares about the quality of the results when using completely natural language sentences (which I guess is how most non-technical people try to use it?) rather than the specialized search engine syntax with keywords, quotes, +/-, etc. we learned to use in 90s/00s.
It may optimize for the common case, but unlike the old system, leaves you completely helpless when it fails to “Just Work.”
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#44Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#45I was looking for a specific person recently and searched: Canada I guess they were pretty obscure so Google in all their wisdom displayed the results for Canada, with the entire name struck through. Fantastic. Defaulting to the most generic term in a query to the point of absolute uselessness.
Yep, same thing happening to me... three keywords to define what i need, and it randomly chooses to ignore one of them, and show me irrelevant results.
The only worse search is probably on aliexpress, where you search for "red led", get a bunch of red LEDs, then you sort by the number of orders, and the top results are for other random "red" stuff (it seems as if it searches every keyword separately, but I haven't verified it).
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#46Am I crazy or is there room for a good early 2000s-style link aggregator in today's content discovery landscape? It seems like the primary reasons the likes of delicious failed is because they sold out for money. I wonder if an open source federated solution could work.
I would love an alta-vista rebirth..I have yet to see a search engine that allowed you do target searches so specifically. I also loved the 'near' keyword for dealing names - "john near smith" would match "john smith", "smith john", "smith, john" etc.
Search engines have been 'simplified' to the point they're useless if you actually want to _search_ and not 'discover' :-p
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#47I stopped using Google entirely. I honestly feel violated every time it strips out words that I asked it to search for on the very first page. NO, I said search for this, do not do something ELSE you piece of shit. I actually use DuckDuckGo exclusively now, not because it got better (it did a tiny bit), but because Google got so absolutely horrible that DDG is now actually better! I have the habit of trying Google if…
Only problem I had with DDG is search results not displaying a create/publish date, that info is so useful to me to filtering relevant things
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#48This (shitty NLP) has been bad for a while, but I did notice it get worse recently in a way that feels crippling to me. I don't have a functional search engine anymore.
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Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#49I created a Google custom search engine for the text of about 40,000 out-of-copyright books: https://www.locserendipity.com/Google.html and noticed that exact text matches don’t always show up. A RegEx search of the same repository yields many more matches for specific phrases than the Google custom search does. About a year and a half ago, the quality of results went down a lot. I agree something has changed for the worse.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#50I recall when YouTube used to refine the "best answer" to a question based on distributed popularity. Ask it, "How do I screw in a lightbulb?" and the video at the top would be one which had received numerous views and likes, crowdsourcing its usefulness in answering the question. Then the algorithm was changed to prioritize more recent videos. This gave rise to the churn of the novel and new over the time tested and approved. This was better for ads, but worse for users. One cannot expect the ad driven model NOT to have an impact on usability.