Google results are way too political and censored nowadays, if I wanted to get some uncensored results I have to go to Yandex, Brave, maybe Kagi, but I agree Reddit is good option as well.
Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
111–120 of 158 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#112It's not just you. The quality of Google search results has been declining for a long time. It reached the point of being no better than alternatives a while back for me. These days, it's worse than several of them.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#113I 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.
Yup, I've started to really appreciate the pay-to-not-be-the-product business model in general. Kagi is great, the easy domain blocking feature alone is worth the $10 per month. The results in general are also good. They do suffer somewhat from the same SEO optimization problem as Google, where auto-generated crap turns up in search results, but once you block the majority of those domains the search results I get are very good.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
What types of political content policing is Google engaged in on the search engine?
None on their search engine. The claim is likely specious.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I suspect the use of NLP AI is the primary reason for Google's decline.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#116Google is an advertising engine, not a search engine. Someone has to pay for Google search and users don't. Advertisers pay. And what is advertising? It is a way to convince you to spend your money unnecessarily.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#117Google 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…
Part of it is trying to intake everything. Maybe google needs a "search the entire web" mode and a "search not garbage."
As naïve as it may be, I believe that crowd sourcing and metamoderation is probably the answer. Instead of full time employees, they should be offering some kind of kickbacks to their couple hundred thousand most trusted users, in exchange for upvotes and downvotes of content quality.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#118I 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.
+1 for Kagi
Googled ‘Python queue’ the other day and the official python docs for queue was on page 4 of results.
(Page 1-3 were filled with examples websites, so query intent was well understood)
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#119Interesting. I use brave search on a daily basis and when I can't find what I'm looking for, I use !g as q last resort. For dev inquiries google is still king (Brave search is getting better and they're focusing on crawling SO posts).
Google is focusing on ads and it's really hurting them.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#120I 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.
+1 for Kagi Googled ‘Python queue’ the other day and the official python docs for queue was on page 4 of results. (Page 1-3 were filled with examples websites, so query intent was well understood)
God, there's something uniquely bad about searching for Python standard library stuff. I swear every time I search `python len` or something and w3schools, geeksforgeeks, programiz, and all sorts of other annoying useless SHIT appears I want to scream. Just show me the Python docs!