Judging by the "related searches" and supposed questions that people apparently ask, Google assumes the average user to be an imbecile and generates search results that cater to them most accurately. Unfortunately on the other hand it also seems that individually catering search results poses its own issues. Some folks are concerned that this could be used by bad actors to influence certain people (like targeting specific ads to specific groups of people) which is already commonplace.
Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
151–158 of 158 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#152Yes indeed. The SEO industry has finally worked out how to beat Google and get their stuff pushed to the top. Meanwhile the real experts, who don't have any SEO skills at all, are disappearing down the results. It's a tragedy.
I actually find that the SEO industry follows Google's advice on how to structure and optimize pages and they are rewarded by showing their shitty pages in top results.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#153Yes indeed. The SEO industry has finally worked out how to beat Google and get their stuff pushed to the top. Meanwhile the real experts, who don't have any SEO skills at all, are disappearing down the results. It's a tragedy.
I actually find that the SEO industry follows Google's advice on how to structure and optimize pages and they are rewarded by showing their shitty pages in top results.
So true. Search results now represent the best gamers on the planet, not valuable information. It sucks.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#154Google 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 ove…
NSFL example when I tried to search for "reply girl" videos because I wanted to know what they were: (seriously NSFW and definitely not appropriate for HN) https://i.imgur.com/gaOSfbd.png
Google. I want compensation for emotional damage. What is this crap? Those aren't even the worst recommendations in those results. IT GETS WORSE.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#155I find myself having to add `site:reddit.com` to an increasingly large of queries to have any useful result. I wonder if I should make a little userscript that can add it for me with a hotkey/text combination..
In Chrome, right-click the address bar and select "Manage search engines" and you can add shortcuts like "r " to search reddit, stackoverflow and wherever.
Thank you, in Firefox it seems a bit more complicated, cannot seem to find a way to add a search engine..
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#156No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#157Oh well. I stopped using Google entirely around 2006-2008-ish and I never looked back. I do not know the exact time I stopped, but it was way before the company was called "Alphabet" and before smartphones really took off. Back then Google was a Search Engine with an advertising company, but I was getting annoyed by what I thought was mixed interest (ads/information) as reflected by the increase in their analytics ta…
What do you use now?
Re: Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean, that just introduces another level of crap as sites clamour to be on the "not garbage" list; it'll end up like the issues Twitter has/had with verification.
That's why you need the right screeners, and the right metamoderation tools that when people start making a mistake, a more authoritative trusted person can invalidate the lower bad input.