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Google Search Is Dying

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Re: Google Search Is Dying

#31

Post by saurik »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #20
causi wrote: post #8

Just the way Chrome insists on auto-completing searches has seriously damaged the efficiency of my Googling. I'll search something like "Type-97 whatsit making funny noises", get no results, go to search just for "type-97 whatsit" and it adds the rest back on by itself and I get the same useless results from the first time. I don't make the mistake often enough to remember not to make it, and every time I wonder what…

In the category of features that think they know better than the user, I hate whoever decided they should start using word embeddings in searches. For example, you get the same results for "expand" and "extend" with both words highlighted in results when you search for either. This makes google entirely useless for complex technical topics with decades/centuries of established jargon. Searching for mathematics has be…

Put the word you actually want in quotation marks. (It used to be "prefix it with +" but then Google+ happened and they changed it.)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#32

Post by m348e912 »

I add reddit to a lot of google search terms because I want to find discussion on the topic I am searching for. Most of the time I find an opinion, perspective, or more information on the topic I am looking for. Reddit is a lot of things, including hot garbage, but it's also a wealth of information.

Here's a billion dollar idea if anyone has the time and ability. Build a search interface that indexes tiktok videos and makes them searchable. To do it really well you might have to transcribe the videos.

Here's my VC pitch. Tiktok answers questions you never thought to ask, but if you can find a way for it to answer questions you do have, you have provided access to an obscene amount of interesting information.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#33

Post by kkoncevicius »

On one hand I totally agree - Google is becoming unusable for any refined specific searches, if you use any SEO-enhanced keyword you mostly get nonsense.

But on the other hand I am thinking - Google is not stupid, they know what they doing. Maybe this kind of search is a good fit for the majority of the less-tech-savvy people, and only audience here on HN think it's bad.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#34

Post by discreditable »

brimble wrote: post #5

The other day I was searching for a specific kind of jewelry and realized I don't know of a search engine that can do what I needed, which is to just find good results for my search. Searches for jewelry-related keywords triggered Google to go 90+% ads, and their results (and other search engines' results) were so junked up with spam and the same couple sites over and over that they were useless. We're back to the We…

I know normal people would never use it but I sorely wish there was a way for me to just grep the web instead of using "search" as offered by Google et al.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#35

Post by listmaking »

Many of these articles/complaints don't compare Google Search to alternatives (Bing / DuckDuckGo / ...), so it's not clear whether web search itself is getting "worse" (in the ways mentioned), or whether the issues are with Google Search specifically.

(For example, the article proposes the explanation that "The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust", which is about the web itself, not specific to Google.)

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#36

Post by csee »

This is all so true. I append reddit to most of my google searches because I don't trust google anymore, and I don't do it in reddit only because their search sucks.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#38

Post by valdiorn »

Google used to be really, really good at finding exactly what I told it to find. Nowadays, it's turned into the yellow pages; sponsored content from businesses trying to sell me goods and services.

Can people suggest good alternatives or search patterns for certain categories of information or search types?

Some of the search patterns I currently I use:

* Youtube for product reviews and demos, entertainment, music and educational material.

* Google with site:reddit.com at the start for questions best answered by other humans; crowd-sourced answers, authentic replies from mostly real people.

* Google with site:news.ycombinator.com if I want to find "forum-like" discussion on topics I'm interested in.

* Google Image search with site:amazon.co.uk when looking for niche products I need to buy, because Amazon's search is so incredibly broken and game-ified.

What I'm having a heck of a time finding is technical content; long-form programming tutorials, deep dives into academic concepts (I do a lot of signal/audio processing and search for blog posts related to these topics), circuit schematics, electronic engineering content. These used to exist on enthusiast forums 10-15 years ago, but Google often no longer surfaces hits from these forums, both because the content is old and the forum model is dying. Reddit is the "replacement" but it plagued with low-effort "look at my thing" posts that help nobody.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#39

Post by cosheaf »

imglorp wrote: post #25

The passive voice in the headline buries the lede. What's really happening: Google is strangling the golden search goose for a quick meal.

They did that right when they chose the advertising model. It was never going to work in the long run and the founders knew it. They just thought they could build an AI system before that happened and it turned out they were wrong. Useful AI that could distinguish real knowledge from SEO optimized spam was much further away than they thought/imagined.
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