Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

Most of my searches lately have either revolved around a couple of medical issues (my wife's slightly complex pregnancy, and my own neck injury) or technical problems.

The medical results are absolutely hopeless. Almost all the top pages are the same article written in five different ways, and each only has the most basic, broad information. You can tell from a glance that the article wasn't written by a subject matter expert. You can also tell that the article is trying its best to "play it safe" and list out only the broadest possible range of results.

It's the same problem with technical searches. Outside of Stackoverflow results (which, thankfully, are at the top of the page), most articles are written for a broad, beginner audience (like a React article starting with a tutorial on installing React). Most content, again, feels like it wasn't written by subject matter experts but article writers copy-pasting solutions from multiple different articles.

I don't know if I'm the only one, but as a long time Google power user, I find using the search increasingly frustrating.

Or is that just me?

First, I wish you & your wife all the best.

For me it's the same. The search has been made more easy for everyone by Google. But that implied the reduction of some Poweruser functions.

In the early times, one could use "+" and "-" to define the search in detail. Nowadays, no +/- anymore accepted in the search, but... There is a link somewhere for "advanced search ".

If you get onto that page, you can define the search in detail. I, for me, automatically use the advanced search, with exclusion of certain terms within the search results.

May be this is not be known to you - if it's already used by you, then:

Yes. The SEO-Cancer has brought us link farming. The reason for existence of such sites is just to raise the "creditability" of certain domains and having a lot of Backlinks & clicks - thus, being listed by Google at the foremost top.

I usually skip the first page and start my search with the 2nd page of results.

Or, I start the search and whilst not getting good results, I use the very same search page, and type in different/further search terms for my topic. The results become more refined in the second run..

Goog is still the best, but one needs to adapt to the search workflow of theirs.

Alternatively, you can try www.startpage.com..

Meanwhile the real experts, who don't have any SEO skills at all, are disappearing down the results. It's a tragedy.