I tried Bing the other day out of curiosity, and the results where incredibly dissapointing compared to Google's.
Did you try their image search or product search? I've almost completely dropped those two parts of Google due to Bing.
Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
41–50 of 113 posts
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#42Yes. It's changed a lot recently, to the point that I made a whingey blog post about it:
http://www.cederman.com/2009/09/google-continues-to-disappoi...
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
They'd probably do well to have a seperate 'technical search' for searching for things related to technical matters, eg programming languages, physics, chemistry, medicine, engineering, etc. And remove the casual stuff (facebook, myspace, pages that are clearly not about a technical subject, etc) from that index. It would probably be a highly praised feature to seperate off a second index like that, as specifically s…
Having separate indexes and separate searches for sub-domains of knowledge is an interesting idea. The original idea of PageRank was that each link constituted a 'vote' for a page. Perhaps different epistemic communities on the internet use links to mean different things. So, the meaning of links on technical webpages is slightly different from the meaning of links on social websites. Interesting idea to play around…
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Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#44vldtr 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?
Don't use this as a metric. The site:www.example.com syntax does NOT return all the pages in a site indexed by the search engine.
Google returns 20-26 pages (no idea where the variation comes from), but no matter what I do, I never find more than 9 pages in Bing's index with any query. Sure it's not exact science, but the difference is large enough to indicate a quality difference.
Another example: when I search for "vldtr is now a couple of months old" (from my post up there) Google returns this thread, Bing returns nothing.
Different metric, same result.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#45Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and other regexy stuff. Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member" was the personal M…
Wait until they integrate twitter. It will be 99% real-time crap and 1% historical results... Google should just stay away from real time frenzy, or maybe fork the search engine to avoid disrupting the good results it has.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#46I've used google since it was google.stanford.edu, and it's clear to me the results have suffered. My feeling is that two of the problems are SEO and feedback effects of google's own popularity. SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less good match come first. And it works (sorta). Just consider crap sites like Experts Exchange that we've only learned about because they pollute many…
So, do you think it's time to start adding a top links and help them out? I have started tailoring my searches in odd ways to help them out. Ex: Adding a the year when I want current results. But, without useful links it's all GIGO.
I think Google knows about this exact problem. They know that the links people are sharing on Facebook and Twitter have supplanted the site-site links, and are therefore much more important to search quality. To this end, the agreement to include 'real-time' search data from Twitter is partially a misdirection, since the importance of having the data about shared links far exceeds the value of someones 140-character blurb.
A related point: whoever first owns the data from all link aggregators (digg, reddit, mixx, etc) and all URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl, ad nauseum), and weighs those results more heavily is going to have an awesome search engine... albeit better for entertainment than productivity.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#47Yes, and this is why I started Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/ . Thanks for posting specific cases--they help me immensely. Anyone else have more?
I was searching for a way to enable/find the chat logs for Microsoft Communicator which we've recently switched to at work.
Google was basically filled with dead end forum postings and SEO spam.
DuckDuckGo was more helpful and brought me to the MS TechNet article with full documentation on MS Communicator Policy configuration.
Bing was surprisingly the most helpful and brought me to the Communicator Team posting from 2008 which shows me where I should have been able to find the logs.
It looks like my work has blocked/disabled this feature on a global setting even though I haven it enabled locally.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#48Absolutely-- especially when you drift out of the world of technology. Google is based on the "linkerati" (hat tip to SEOmoz) - geeks and bloggers who link to stuff aggressively. That works great in the worlds where people link (social media) but poorly if you're searching for non-geeky stuff.
I've been doing home remodeling a bit lately, and it's clear to me that there are NO home remodeling linkerati. But there are plenty of SEO guys out there and it only takes a few low quality links to top a lot of searches. So search for home remodeling stuff and you see plenty of adsense spam.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#49I tried Bing the other day out of curiosity, and the results where incredibly dissapointing compared to Google's.
Did you try their image search or product search? I've almost completely dropped those two parts of Google due to Bing.
I definitely agree with the image search. It's lightyears ahead of Google.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#50Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and other regexy stuff. Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member" was the personal M…
It's also aggravating that quotes don't allow matching of specific symbols within the quotes. And, yes, the results are different. I'd agree with you they seem enhanced (eg., classified results) and fresher for popular culture, but somewhat worse for domain specific queries.
Which is dangerous, since it seems like the biggest threat to Google has always been the 'vertical' search market. If they don't have a better way to narrow search results to a specific domain, they're going to run into issues from competitors.