For a few months now google search has been basically useless. The only thing that you get nowadays is just SEO spam and mainstream sites. At this point even bing/ddg is better.
Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
51–60 of 113 posts
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#52I've had several frustrating experiences recently with search engines, Google included. The most notable: I have tried to find a video clip of Merkel joking about the German city of Bielefeld not existing. There are plenty of articles, but the clip, which I know exists, doesn't come up. Not on YT, not on Google, not on Bing. Maybe I've lost my Google-fu somewhere along the way, I don't know anymore.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#53DDG does much better with quotes for required/exact matches.
Better, yes, but even they have recently gone down the path of not completely honoring quotes.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#54> Can someone do a magic call and find this page on Google?
I just pasted this unquoted into Google and found the site:
> David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born
Why would you quote this?
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#55I 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
That's true but I've found in recent years that the date given is wrong. e.g. you see something listed as 2021, but it's actually from 2016 and old.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#56DuckDuckGo finds the quote on a Tripod site as its top and only result for this search.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22David%2C+we+have+been+expecting...
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#57I 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.
Just today I wondered how many people have first name Mickey and middle name Mouse. I couldn't find anything - it just goes to generic Disney websites.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#58I 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…
So many bot-authored and SEO-tweaked garbage listicles and advertiser-funded “reviews” and poorly-written “TIL”/“learn from me” blogs bloated by advertising. In a few ways the web is better now than it was a few decades ago, and in very many ways it is much worse. Advertising has basically leeched almost all the value out of the web.
I’ve transitioned to a list of manually bookmarked sites.
Search gets unreliable fast for rare topics. We live in an advertising based economy of poor incentives. If good paid search engines existed I would use them.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#59I have full faith in Google's ability to return the most profitable results.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#60I have an Intel Realsense camera, which sometimes reports the error "Failed to recconect" (there being a typo in the drivers) [1] - that's a pretty unique error, so in combination with the product name that should be a very easy keyword search, right? Especially if I throw in some quotation marks, to make it clear I want a literal match?
Yet when I search for realsense "failed to recconect" Google, in its infinite wisdom, returns pages that contain neither realsense nor recconect [2]. They offer me a supreme court opinion, a review of a car dealership, and a facebook church service.
Correcting the spelling of a query is one thing - but also completely ignoring other keywords? Even when there are pages available that match the query? [1]
[1] https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/blob/5ff27fca... [2] https://imgur.com/a/okYV5V2