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Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

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Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#71

Post by nkurz »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #36

Yes, 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?

There is one change that gets me often. Using a hyphenated-word used to require that the two words occur in order, although it would also match the two words joined together. It also used to turn off stemming.

Previously it was equivalent to ("hyphenated word" OR +hyphenatedword). But now it seems to behave almost the same as the unquoted (hyphenated word).

Just to make matter worse, when I tried out my example just now I found that the first result (a wikipedia page) for "hyphenated word" doesn't even include the phrase!

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#72

Post by thaumaturgy »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #36

Yes, 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?

Wow, that's amazing. I think I'll be using this a little more often.

Notably, you return a result for a specific osCommerce error message that I wrote about a while back (!); Google doesn't even know I exist.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#73

Post by jsz0 »

I think the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet has simply taken a big dive since the advent of blogging. I'm sick of seeing the mindless duplication of content in search results from a re-blogger who copy & pastes a summary and link. It's frustrating because there's no easy way to spot it until you've actually clicked the link. Once you see it enough times you can spot the duplication on the Google search summary and skip it. The risk is you might miss the 1% of people who can be bothered to spend a few minutes to add some useful information.

One thing I have noticed is YouTube's search is dreadful. It's embarrassing for a company like Google to not offer an adequate search engine on their own site. The grace period of the YouTube purchase is long over. I shouldn't have to retype my search 5 different ways to find what I'm looking for. These days I've just given up and search for simple terms and look through 10 pages of results or try related videos until I find what I'm looking for. Not super impressed with Gmail's search functions either. My mailbox is mirrored on Gmail and my local mail client (Apple Mail) Mail will almost always find what I want when Gmail gets confused. Apple isn't even a search company. Google can do a lot better.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#74

Post by protomyth »

Erf wrote: post #3

Yes. One thing I noticed is that searches no longer require that all words in the query be present in the search results. Adding a + before a word is now required to ensure that it's present in results. That frequently results in me having to do 2-3 searches to find something that could previously be found with one.

Even with the +, google makes some interesting "interpretations". I notice when I search on one of the BSDs (e.g. OpenBSD) it seems to pick pages that just have BSD on it.

Plus, google's handling of punctuation (e.g. f-script) is a pain since (even with the +) it will do weird substitutions and consider blanks good enough.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#75

Post by deyan »

In my experience, Yahoo really excels in image search and whenever there are structural changes made to websites (for some reason, Google doesn't really handle moved websites / pages well - there was even an article about that a few months back). But overall, there is around 90% overlap between the major search engines as demonstrated by multiple studies.

That being said, I do feel often like Google's search result quality is decreasing. Bias due to using it exclusively perhaps?

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#76

Post by rg »

It's eye-opening to try "Blind Search", which submits your query to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing simultaneously, and displays to you the three sets of results without (at first) identifying which is which:

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

I was amazed to discover that I was consistently choosing the blind results from Yahoo! as best for my own searches.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#77

Post by alecco »

Erf wrote: post #3

Yes. One thing I noticed is that searches no longer require that all words in the query be present in the search results. Adding a + before a word is now required to ensure that it's present in results. That frequently results in me having to do 2-3 searches to find something that could previously be found with one.

Also the - minus comes handy to exclude similar terms or phrases. Yeah, this feel just like Altavista.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#79

Post by aarongough »

mojonixon wrote: post #59

The autocorrect is maddening. I've been researching Riak recently. It's new so there isn't a lot available. Paired with another search term I frequently get results only for "risk." Let me know if I might have made a typo, but don't assume I'm an idiot and do something different than what I told you to do. Dropping keywords also annoys me. If the keywords don't exist then tell me that so I can adjust my search. Don't…

If you're using a Mac you might find it interesting to know that the spotlight search bar can be used as a calculator almost exactly the same way as Google can... Unfortunately it can't do conversions (at least not on Leopard). Also, the shortcut for spotlight is CMD + Space.

Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?

#80

Post by aarongough »

indiejade wrote: post #17

Did you try http://www.google.com/linux ? Although I alternate search engines regularly, I do think the way Google indexes for specialized searches is pretty smart.

Is there a list somewhere of all the specialized searches?
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