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Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

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Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

#1

Post by cauliflower99 »

What's your search experience been like over the last couple of months?

I can no longer use Google, DuckDuckGo or any other search engine to find reliable information. Absolutely everything is click-bait, repeated information that provides absolutely no value to me.

To get anything of value, I have to append every search with keywords like reddit/medium/stackoverflow to get quick, useful, to the point information. Either that or I'm forced to spend all my time in the AI's like Bing or ChatGPT.

As far as I can tell though, search isn't dying - I think it's dead.

Re: Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

#3

Post by arromatic »

It has gotten really terrible , some examples :

1. Site diversity is non existant . Nearly every term results same handful sites. Proof [0]

2. Actual blogs are not shown in serps . I have to use blogger and wordpress in search term to find blogs but it exculdes all the blogs that are not blogger or wordpress .

3. Way too much focus on reddit compared to all other forums. Its like both people and google both forgot forums other than reddit exist.

4. Too many non related articles .

5. Got too many seo optimized junk ? Just go to page ten or twenty . Turns out google now capped search results to a few hundred . And bing ? The pages become irrelevant at the later pages.

Workarounds I use :

1. Adding hackernews does improve my serp that are related to to tech .

2. limiting my search results to a old date/month improves the serp .

3. Marginalia [1] and kagi occasionally helps .

4. Sometimes I use absurdly long keywords .

5. Sometimes i use a search engine from here [2] to see if it gives better results or not which usually turn out to be not .

6. Yandex sometimes work but not always .

In short : The current search quality is terrible and finding smallweb ,forums and blogs are even more difficult .

[0] https://detailed.com/google-control/

[1] https://search.marginalia.nu/

[2] https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

Re: Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

#4

Post by cauliflower99 »

arromatic wrote: post #3

It has gotten really terrible , some examples : 1. Site diversity is non existant . Nearly every term results same handful sites. Proof [0] 2. Actual blogs are not shown in serps . I have to use blogger and wordpress in search term to find blogs but it exculdes all the blogs that are not blogger or wordpress . 3. Way too much focus on reddit compared to all other forums. Its like both people and google both forgot fo…

Thanks for the response! I'm going to try some of your workarounds, particularly the search results date.

It would be cool to have a search engine that folks specifically on public forum results.

Re: Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

#6

Post by solardev »

I almost never use Google Search for real queries anymore. ChatGPT is where I get most info these days. For businesses it's Google Maps. For everything else it's usually Wikipedia or reddit. A generic query on Google with no qualifiers is just going to get you SEO spam -- and that's after I manually blacklisted many sites (quora, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

#8

Post by manuelmagic »

DDG started to ignore the country preference (the slide button) I set.

I keep it in the off position, that should mean "all countries" but it still shows me results in Italian language, even if I search in English.

Google started doing that years ago, and it's quite annoying since I usually want international results.

Re: Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

#9

Post by [deleted] »

cauliflower99 wrote: post #4
arromatic wrote: post #3

It has gotten really terrible , some examples : 1. Site diversity is non existant . Nearly every term results same handful sites. Proof [0] 2. Actual blogs are not shown in serps . I have to use blogger and wordpress in search term to find blogs but it exculdes all the blogs that are not blogger or wordpress . 3. Way too much focus on reddit compared to all other forums. Its like both people and google both forgot fo…

Thanks for the response! I'm going to try some of your workarounds, particularly the search results date. It would be cool to have a search engine that folks specifically on public forum results.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?

#10

Post by cauliflower99 »

arromatic wrote: post #3

It has gotten really terrible , some examples : 1. Site diversity is non existant . Nearly every term results same handful sites. Proof [0] 2. Actual blogs are not shown in serps . I have to use blogger and wordpress in search term to find blogs but it exculdes all the blogs that are not blogger or wordpress . 3. Way too much focus on reddit compared to all other forums. Its like both people and google both forgot fo…

That google-control article shines a big light on the problem. If all the companies are own by the same parent, they'll naturally follow the same strategy to maximise clicks.

Have I finally found the reason this why all recipe sites operate the same dysfunctional way??

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