Too many Ads. I usually scroll down half screen for the first page. And then still more to avoid the "aggregate-sites" (sites that aggregate info from other places).
Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
21–30 of 158 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#22Been using ddg for years and my use of !g has reduced considerably because it doesn’t result in better (but often worse) results.
Google stopped being an innovative company many years ago.
They’re in their Ballmer era. They’ll hopefully get a Nadella soon but not before it gets worse.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#23Hey you can search for ads with it. I find their ads relevant - sometimes.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#24Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There may not be great ways to filter this. GPT3/etc will exacerbate horrifically.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#25It's not just you. 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 c…
- still works. I just used it yesterday. Enclosing terms in quotes also mostly works as an alternative to + although it’s not quite the same. The biggest difference is that I find myself having to use both far more often than before to get non-spam results and now often have to go beyond the first page as well.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#26I find myself turning on "Verbatim Mode" for almost all of my searches. Seemingly Google is being "helpful" by removing large chunks of my search query, so as I can more specific, Google just throws all of that out and I get the same junk SEO results. You can go back to Old Google, but going Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. This is NOT the same thing as quoting your entire query, it just doesn't let Google simply dr…
It boggles that someone thought that dropping a keyword from a search was a good idea.
"You are looking for product x in relation to situation y"
"Here are the results for product x!"
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#27It's not just you. 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 c…
startpage.com, IIRC, uses google results. You're better off with something else if you're looking for non-googly results (I do not have any suggestions)
maybe you.com or neeva.com?
never really explored then on a daily basis, but they seem really good.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#28Google is increasingly useless, but there is a Garbage In Garbage Out aspect given that the vast bulk of what they're indexing today is junk. Most of the problems appear, superficially at least, to be consequences of advertising. There seems to be a growing chunk of automated site propagation as well (90% identical content but with keywords/names/etc tweaked), perhaps for scams, perhaps again for advertising. There m…
Bing is much more useful. yandex.ru is more useful for anything that might have political connotations. I suspect it's the new focus on content policing versus search quality and corresponding resource allocation, that did Google search in
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#29Google started with nerds; nerd learned to write good queries. Then normies appropriated Google and wrote dumb queries in massive volume; Google optimized for handling dumb queries. To get good results today, you have to write dumb queries. For example, a nerd would never write a question as a search input – nerds would write a series of hyperrelevant keywords. Normies don’t understand keywords – they ask questions of Google, like it’s a person. So, only way to get good results for most queries is to reform them as questions.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#30DDG is my default but I regularly switch back to Google if the result I want doesn't appear in the first or second search.