81–90 of 113 posts
I 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 wi…
I agree with your general point that the search quality has gone down, quotes doesn't even always work anymore to get exact results. Looking into your suggested example: That turned out to be interesting and unexpected. So, the exact string you put here was "David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born", which is what you get when you copy…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No amount of searching for this video on google could find this video. 20 minutes. I was infuriated. My brain started going to dark places. Is this censorship?
No. Google sucks now. Somehow. They killed the golden goose.
I fired up Bing. Typed the title of the video and found 100 copies instantly.
I now use Bing. And it’s not bad. Generally I can find what I’m looking for. It’s like a slightly worse version of what Google used to be. But it’s an infinitely better version of what google is now.
I also use Brave search engine but that’s worse than bing still.
If you’re looking for interesting party conversation, try opening with “I recently switched my search engine to Bing.” The conversation goes to fun places and most people will agree that Google has gotten much worse.
Google results are low quality unless you enable verbatim. Tools, all results, verbatim. It blows my mind this isn't the default. I can only assume they've adopted the opinion of search engines before them that they could benefit from showing lower quality results to keep the users on their site longer.
Is this something accessible through the Settings, bottom right? I cannot find it.
This (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=…
I was just thinking about this earlier today when I was searching for something specific and getting very irrelevant results. It used to be that the first page of results was very high quality and somewhat relevant at the bottom and page two+ was pretty much don’t even bother. Now it’s like if you are lucky the first 3-4 results might be relevant, middle is some spam with similar keywords that appear to match your se…
On the other hand, I used to trawl through all of the pages Google would let me go through, and regularly found what I was looking for back there, mixed in with the usual SEO spam. Now the first page is awful, and the rest of the pages are entirely SEO spam.
Google has broken amy search with the name Kim as Kim Kardashian, no matter how you wildcard the search.
I feel truly sorry for anyone trying to get any traction with Kim as a name.
As others have noted, DDG magically gets this right.
Guess that's what happens when a search company becomes an ad company.
I 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.
I’ve always found “lemming” ridiculous, especially in all software that copied Google despite not being generalist. “We’ve seen you are searching for ‘Phillips screw 24x17’, I won’t tell you that we don’t have any but here are results for ‘Screwdrivers’, just in case you want to use a screwdriver instead of a screw. Also here are a few Phillips TVs, in case this might help you fix your car.”