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

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

#51

Post by jeffbee »

It's just you. Google is an extremely useful search engine. As a demonstration of its abilities, note that searching for "Is Google becoming useless as a search engine" with our without the quote marks turns up this obscure article that's only 1 hour old.

I use Google hundreds of times every day. I use it to search C++ STL documentation, where I generally get an exact hit in the first slot. I use it to find out whether some cafe is open or closed right now. I use it to find city records.

Your actually complaint appears to be about the web itself. Yes, the web contains a lot of junk and often does not contain the article you believe should exist, which is annoying. But no search engine can make good articles spring into existence.

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

#52

Post by Filligree »

paleotrope wrote: post #26
Someone1234 wrote: post #13

I 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!"

It isn’t a keyword search in the first place. Your query gets fed through a NLP AI, so you need to use English.

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

#53

Post by Sakos »

zbuf wrote: post #39

Google is now a "recommendation engine" not a search engine... I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like. For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.

Oh, that reminds me. How long has Youtube's search been so utterly useless and downright terrible? Whatever I enter, it interrupts the search results with recommendations THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY QUERY every 5 results. What the fuck, Google. Are you doing this on purpose? Did somebody piss in your cereal and you decided to collectively punish all of us? If that's not the case, who's responsible so I can go over to him and piss in his cereal?

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

#54

Post by ergonaught »

cft wrote: post #28
ergonaught wrote: post #24

Google 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

I almost never get relevant searches out of Bing. It's bad enough I have (seriously) wondered how much Google pays them to operate in order to avoid antitrust prosecution.

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

#55

Post by tbnat »

The quality has dropped massively, even compared to 5 years ago.

Partly it is an input issue. Interesting conversations are increasingly happening in walled gardens like Telegram.

Academic websites rarely show up any longer. Even for simple keywords the number of search results is sometimes only 8 pages. If you read all of them or your queries get too specific, you are classified as a bot and get the "unusual activity" nag screen.

It was good while it lasted. I think Google could be disrupted now.

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

#57

Post by 10729287 »

leandot wrote: post #19

I recently switched to Kagi (and pay so they can sustain it) and I have to say it's very good, I rarely have to use g!, maybe for maps only. It also previews code snippets nicely.

Same here, in french language. Kagi is awesome (paying user too).

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

#58

Post by agnostic-one »

Speaking of software engineering related searches, the quality of the results have gone off the cliff. Now instead of seeing the original github issue, pull request or discussion, the first search results point to some crappy websites that mirror the original content. The UI/UX of those websites is awful: part of the content is hidden behind a registered account, they are slow, I get popups and other garbage.

Google Search needs to be disrupted and, while I've tried using DuckDuckGo, I don't think that's it. However, my concern is that so much of the really good user content is hidden behind walled gardens, such as FB groups, discord, slack etc.

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

#59

Post by Sakos »

sidlls wrote: post #14

"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)." This is the result of a confluence of two issues that plague (yes, plague) our industry: the disinterest/dismissive attitude towards documentation and the infection of celebrity status/hero worship as having im…

It doesn't help that increasingly communities are migrating to closed-box tools like Discord. A generation's worth of information is being sucked up and lost forever.
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