I tried Bing the other day out of curiosity, and the results where incredibly dissapointing compared to Google's.
I thought so too, Bing seemed very poor for the technical related searches I made.
Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
21–30 of 113 posts
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#22Unfortunately yes. Most result sites are built solely to drive search traffic.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#23vldtr is now a couple of months old. Google has about 22 pages in their index, Bing 8. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Avldt... http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Avldtr.com As long as the Google has the most up to date index there is no good alternative for me. You mention trying Yahoo. Did it give you better results?
Where did you get that weird google.com/#hl... link from? It broke in my browser (the redirect from google.com didn't take it in to account when it bounced me to google.co.uk), but I've not seen URLs like that for google.com before.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#24There was a comment on LessWrong where a poster suggested using Yahoo over Google for non-quoted search. I tried it myself (I need to find an article based on several words mentioned in it) -- and was pleasantly surprised. Yahoo seems to be doing much better job than Google for non-quoted search requests.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#25I wish there were a search engine that was not optimized for the mass-market, but weighs technical oriented stuff a bit higher. So if I search iPhone view, I do not get results like "View all iphone features" but something related to the iphone uiview.
I think in future search engines should lean a particular way depending on your profession - "Google for Medical Personell", "Google for Architects", "Google for Programmers".
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#26I've actually noticed the inverse problem with some non-tech-related searches. Politics is a fine example: try and find an article about a 2002 House vote on Social Security and there's no chance you'll find it; the results are all present day.
Strange that with regard to current events the web seems to have little historical memory, and yet with regard to current technology it has too much.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#27I think it's hard with a generic search page to get good results. Like other people commented if it appears in Wikipedia, MySpace, or Facebook those results will be first almost everytime. I built a page in javascript (http://www.bygsearch.com/) to aggregate & combine the results from Yahoo, Bing and Google which is sometimes better because of the quirks in each search engine. I was going to add some specific search verticals like /programming or /travel and combine results from different sources. Like maybe use github and google code in programming and combine with certain sites like stackoverflow while specifically blocking any result from experts exchange or a list of other crappy forums.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#28tech has always been hard for me, even with plusses and quotes. searches like "uboot arm cross-compile error xyz" always turned up miles of mailing lists that never amounted to anything.
on a similar note - http://guillaume-nargeot.blogspot.com/2009/08/think-twice-be... (probably saw this on HN)
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#29Quote from Google employee:
It does work as described! - which may very well not be as desired. If you want a more mathmatical-logical use of operators then you need to go find another search engine.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=...
I am afraid that Google is now more of a 'social search engine' than a 'hacker search engine'.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#30Not overall, but I have found Google frustrating for things that are very recent. For instance I wanted to watch Obama's speech to the schoolkids on YouTube (the day after he'd given it), but the only videos Google would bring back were from his race speech in Philadelphia. I tried all the operators and keywords I could think of, and couldn't get what I wanted.
FWIW, Bing nailed it on the first query.